Every week Grant Reeher, Political Science Professor and Senior Research Associate at the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at Syracuse University, leads a conversation with a notable guest. Guests include people from central New York — writers, politicians, activists, public officials, and business professionals whose work affects the public life of the community — as well as nationally prominent figures visiting the region to talk about their work.
Nina Jankowicz on the Campbell Conversations
Oct 04, 2025
Nina Jankowicz
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Nina Jankowicz. Ms. Jankowicz is an expert on disinformation and democratization, and she headed up the Disinformation Advisory Board during the Biden administration. She's also the author of two recent books, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict” and “How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back”. Ms. Jankowicz will be on the Syracuse University campus to give a free public talk on October 27th. It's titled, “War on Reality: How Autocrats Are Silencing Truth Tellers Around the World”. Ms. Jankowicz, welcome to the program. Thanks for making the time to talk with me, really appreciate it.
Nina Jankowicz: Glad to be here.
GR: So let's start with the first of the books I mentioned, “How to Lose the Information War”. I'm going to start with what probably seems like an overly basic question, but what is the information war? Briefly.
NJ: Yeah, not overly basic and an important question. So when I wrote this book, I originally conceived of the idea when I was living in Ukraine where information war is very real and so is the kinetic war, right? And for me, I thought at that point in time, which was 2016-2017, the United States was not taking seriously the information war. We thought, oh, surely our systems are resilient enough, our democratic infrastructure is resilient enough that we can deal with this, right? That, you know, people will be able to suss out fact from fiction. And here we are, you know, eight years later, nine years later, and I think the problem has only gotten worse. We have adversaries like Russia, China, Iran, and many more using the Russian playbook now online to influence Americans, to influence our political discourse, to influence decision makers. And now we've also got political decision makers in the United States using disinformation as well. So I think it's important to characterize it as a war, because it can have very real costs, and we tend to discount what goes on online as just, oh, words that people say on the internet. But really, it does have impact in the offline world, in real life, as the kids like to say, IRL.
GR: (laughter) Okay, well, so, a question about that. I mean, you mentioned these other countries and some of the things that they've been doing in recent years. I would assume, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I would assume that the United States does similar things and has done similar things to other countries. What at least can you say about that?
NJ: Well, this is a question that I get a lot from people who think that U.S. imperialism is a bad thing, as do I. And, you know, there's certainly been, particularly in the 70's and 80's, instances of covert U.S. operations that have been attempting to influence publics all over the world, places like Venezuela, Cuba, certainly in Asia and in Russia as well. The difference is that in the modern era, since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have stuck to overt influence operations, right? They are labeled very proudly with 'paid for by the U.S. government', 'paid for by the U.S. taxpayer'. And I'm thinking of institutions like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, you know, programming that went through the National Endowment for Democracy or the National Democratic Institute, these sorts of programs, right? You would not be able to do that programming if you didn't have a big U.S.A. or State Department stamp on that. And what we're talking about when we talk about what Russia has done since 2016 and in fact, before, is covert operations. They are operations where Russian individuals are masquerading as American citizens, talking to us, influencing us, advertising us and attempting to change our political outcomes. I think the overt realm is defensible, the covert realm is not. And I hope that any American would be upset to learn about some of the hi-jinx that Russia and others have gotten away with in their covert operations, masquerading as American citizens and attempting to influence us from the inside.
GR: Well, interesting the way you ended that response, because I did want to ask, what I would assume also that we do covert operations, too. I mean, the point of this interview, by the way, is not to get into all of this, but I would assume that the United States has got to be doing that. I mean, in some ways, I almost hope they are.
NJ: Yeah, so it's interesting. I think certainly there is the realm of military psy-ops, psychological operations and that's in a whole different kettle of fish, right? We're not really discussing that, I don't have as much experience with that. There have been a couple of instances of U.S. information or disinformation campaigns, including one during the pandemic where the US military was targeting audiences in, I'm forgetting which Southeast Asian country at the moment, but were targeting them and encouraging them not to take the Sinovac Chinese COVID vaccine there, which I think was just absolutely malicious. I would have condemned that, I have condemned that publicly, and probably caused some people to get ill and maybe even die. Like, I think that's morally reprehensible. One of the things that I had hoped to do in my time in government was learn more about the ways that we were doing that and hopefully influence it so that it was curving more toward the, you know, the moral arc that I would hope the United States would follow. But the Russian government of course is doing this, in a way that I think, you know, is only aided by the technology that we have at our disposal today, the way that you can target the most vulnerable audiences with, you know, a single credit card payment, very easily. I think they really seized on that and the United States is not doing that same sort of targeting, to change political fortunes. It might be trying to plump up its own image, but it's not as pernicious. And we're certainly not spending the amount of money that the Russians are on this, unfortunately.
GR: Okay. So it's a difference in kind and a difference in intensity it sounds like. So I'm just curious, you don't have to spend a lot of time on this question, but I am curious. When you were serving in the Biden administration, what did you spend, sas there was there one thing that you spent more of your time worrying about than anything else? Because you listed all the different threats at the beginning, but was there something that got you up at 3 in the morning, like, oh, those people or, you know, that kind of thing?
NJ: Well, I will preface this without going into a long aside that, you know, my time in the administration was quite short. I was there for three months because my position and the work that I was hired to do, ironically came under attack by disinformation itself. And so a lot of my time, even prior to those attacks began, was spent thinking about the way that the administration could communicate most proactively and transparently about its intentions for the Disinformation Board. Unfortunately, my warnings to my supervisors at DHS were not heeded, and that's why we ended up in the pickle that we were in with my family being threatened. And to this day, you know, more than three years later, I still receive threats and am the subject of conspiracy theories because of that short time in the board. So I thought a lot about basically the responsibility of government to communicate to its citizens, again, proactively, transparently, respectfully, and instead, I think, you know, I will criticize the Biden administration. It wasn't just this effort, but many others where, that administration operated as if the internet wasn't a thing they had to worry about. And it very much is now, you know, we went from, one influencer with, you know, over a million followers targeting me to being on Fox News every hour on the hour the next day. And it got very ugly very quickly. And, you know, I had hoped they would think about that, but unfortunately they discounted the disinformation experts' opinion. Aside from that, I started right as the full scale invasion of Ukraine had started, in March 2022. And so we were looking a lot at the ways that Russia might be influencing American publics, particularly as we were headed toward a midterm election and the end of the year, how they might be targeting cyber infrastructure or even other critical infrastructure like financial infrastructure in order to try to influence the American public to support the Russian's cause in the war. None of that really ended up happening because, you know, I just criticized the Biden administration, I'll give them kudos, the coalition that they built and the way that they were able to declassify intelligence to show the American people what was going on in Ukraine and what Russia was up to, I think was very, very compelling for at least the first 18 months of the war. And I'm glad that none of those, you know, nightmare scenarios came to pass.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, the author of, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict”. A little bit later in our conversation, I want to come back to something you mentioned there about your own personal experience, but let me stick with this for a second. Who's the bigger threat down the road do you think, in this area, is it Russia or is it China?
NJ: It's a hard question because Russia is certainly committed. We have sanctioned them, we've kicked them out of the global clubs. You know, they until recently were pariahs because of, in part, because of the disinformation campaigns and influence campaigns they had run. But we've never really seen the full force of Beijing's influence campaigns trained on the United States before. Your listeners may be aware that Beijing has its Tencent Army, which is essentially a massive troll army called the Tencent Army because they're paid ten cents, I think, per post or something like that. But, you know, they've never trained that army on the United States. They use it in particular for domestic propaganda. And they're wildly successful within China itself, including by creating kind of controlled opposition postings that make it look like there is dissent in Chinese society to keep people kind of quelled. But we've never seen that really trained on the U.S. in a way that I think has been effective. We've seen a couple campaigns around the Uighur genocide and things like that. But, I don't think if China really tried hard, I'd be pretty scared because of the resources, the sheer number of people and frankly, the ability that they've shown to control the conversation at home. The one thing that they don't really have going for them, which I think is actually solved by the advent of accessible artificial intelligence, is typically these posts that China has used against the United States have been easy to spot because they're in poor English or they're just like rote copy-pasted. With AI, you can easily generate perfectly grammatical, idiomatically correct English posts, and you can generate lots of different variations of them. it won't be that same rote copy paste. So I think we're we're in for a rude awakening. And unfortunately, over the last nine months or so, the U.S. government has entirely stood down its counter foreign propaganda apparatus throughout the government. So, I'm a little worried about that, Grant. I'm not gonna lie.
GR: Well, I've got the student papers to prove your point about how you can use AI to (laughter) write it well and write it differently each time. But on that point, the very last point you said, I was going to ask you, what's the most important thing America should be doing at present, which it is not doing? And it sounds like the most important thing is get back on this and not ignore it, is that what's going on right now?
NJ: Well, certainly the U.S. government under the Trump administration has unfortunately shut down things like the Global Engagement Center, which was the State Department's nerve center for Countering foreign propaganda. They shut down the Foreign Malign Influence Center within the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Foreign Influence Task Force at the FBI. So, like all of these different nodes of our response to foreign influence have now been terminated because of the politicization of this topic. And I think that that is quite disturbing, because it's democracy that suffers when we allow our adversaries to influence our political systems. It's not a political issue one way or the other. Disinformation, Russia, China might be angling for President Trump today, but that could turn on a dime, depending on what President Trump does in negotiating a peace in Ukraine or, you know, trade negotiations he might strike with China, right? Like these things are like the winds. And I think it's very silly to have put down our defenses entirely. But I also make the point in my book that one of the things we've never invested in, at the level that I would have liked to have seen, and something that has worked for a number of the countries that I profile in my book, is information literacy. And I'm sure you see this with your students as I do mine, you know, students at Syracuse are wonderful and smart and, you know, they also are influenced by the media that they consume. We're in an environment where, unfortunately, the media that we consume is put toward us entirely passively. We're consuming it passively, we're not seeking it out, it's all algorithmically, you know, served to us. And so I think people need just a little bit of heuristics for how to navigate this increasingly complex, polluted information environment and we haven't invested in that as a country. Some states are doing it, but, we haven't done it at a national level. And that wouldn't be saying, you know, this outlet is good, this outlet is bad. Again, it would be just giving people those skills of how to understand the information that's being presented to them on all of these apps and services that we use today.
GR: Just a quick follow up on that. So when you said a little bit earlier the politicization of these efforts, I want to make sure I understood to you, what you're getting out there, because I can think of two ways in which that might make sense. Are you saying that there is a pushback on saying, hey, look, we've got to counter this Russian disinformation because the impression is it's Democrats that are emphasizing Russia right now, is that it?
NJ: Yes. That's been primarily the narrative that Republicans have used to shut down these efforts. There's also been a long campaign that ties in with some of the stuff I experienced against disinformation researchers, government employees, tech employees. That the narrative, and I will just preface this by saying it is not borne out by any of the evidence or data, is that, you know, researchers colluded with government to pressure the tech platforms to censor conservative content online, and that's just not true, right? So it's the two prongs there, the Russia, Russia, Russia thing and then this censorship lie, which has unfortunately left us almost defenseless in the face of continued foreign assaults on our information space.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Nina Jankowicz. The disinformation expert has served in the Biden administration and she's also the author of, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict”, and, “How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back” and we've been discussing her two books. So I want to get into your second book about how to be a woman online here in a second, but I have a question I wanted to ask first. Strange question, and I don't mean it to sound like a hostile one, given that you served in the Biden administration, you've already been critical of it in some way. But it does seem to me pretty clear that we, we meaning the American people, were exposed to a premeditated disinformation campaign during the Biden administration about Joe Biden himself.
NJ: (laughter)
GR: And the leaders of the party, for example, all told us nothing to worry about, Bill Clinton said this, Barack Obama said this. Some good journalists have since explained to us that this was otherwise and people knew. So what should we make of this?
NJ: Yeah. You know, Grant, I think that really comports with my experience of the Biden administration, unfortunately and the hope that, you know, they were able to bury bad news, bad press, or twist the narrative in some way. I don't necessarily think it was disinformation, I think it was electioneering, right? I don't think it was with a malign intent, which is the distinctive factor around disinformation, but I don't think it was excusable. And I'm reading Kamala Harris's book right now, and she's quite harsh with them as well, but I think she'd bears some responsibility for not coming out and saying it and not trying to influence a little bit more. But yeah, I would agree with you. And I think, unfortunately, you know, we're left with the consequences today.
GR: Yeah, I think, just a quick comment, I think the bind for Harris is she's either got to say that she was so far out of the loop that she didn't know and that indicates something or that she was in the loop and she did know and didn't say anything, and that's at issue too. Well, let's move to your other book, “How to Be a Woman Online”. First of all, again, I don't mean this to be a hostile question, but men get a lot of abuse online too. Is the problem fundamentally different for women?
NJ: Yes it is and the data show this. There were a couple of studies that were done early in 2020 looking at the way that male politicians were abused online, and the tone and tenor of the abuse that women in politics received and women receive more gendered abuse, it's more toxic and it's more often violent than the abuse that men receive. It also is more numerous. The only male politician whose abuse in 2020 exceeded that of any female politician, I think, was Mitch McConnell and at the time, of course, he was Senate Majority leader, and then again, the tone and tenor issues still apply. I will also say from my personal experience, the abuse that we receive as women often, very much brings into account sexuality in a way that I don't think we see with men. It it also brings into our families into the conversation. So, when I was receiving a lot of abuse, when I was pregnant, my unborn child was frequently threatened as well. And you don't want to get between a mom and her baby, right?
GR: (laughter)
NJ: So it's it becomes very visceral, very quickly.
GR: Yeah, interesting. So what are the biggest pitfalls online for women who are taking on more of a public role? What are the, are there some things that you have to watch out for more than others?
NJ: You know, I think it is something that so many people just assume is part of the cost of being in public life and I want to say it doesn't have to be that way. The reason I wrote, “How to Be a Woman Online”, which is basically a handbook for how to deal with the abuse that is so common for so many of us, is because I want people to be equipped and to be able to hold their digital ground. And this book is helpful for men too, by the way, I think particularly in this day and age of kind of mass digital surveillance, but...
GR: I thought it was, yeah.
NJ: Thank you, thank you. I mean, I think we received trolling, but there's also a lot of invasions into our personal privacy, our, you know, home addresses, phone numbers, things like that being leaked. Individuals have tried to hack me before, but little did they know, I have been a target of the Russian government for the more than ten years, so I'm pretty, I've got pretty good security on my end.
GR: Is that all you got, is that what you're saying? (laughter)
NJ: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I think there's a number of things to be worried about, but also in the age of, of geolocation and kind of, hobby open source investigators and kind of the same era where we're all sharing parts of our lives online, you know, a single photograph can give away your location, it can give away your pattern and life and make it more easy to stalk you and threaten and harass you in real life, right? So I just try to bring these things up because, unfortunately, again, the response is, if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen and I don't think it needs to be that way. I don't think we'll see a response from the platforms very quickly, you know, putting in a good faith effort to protect women and minorities. But, you know, we can protect ourselves in the interim.
GR: So what would be, to boil it down, your most important piece of advice for women, the most, maybe the most important thing they should do or the most important thing they shouldn't do when managing their online presence? Is it like to be really careful and sort of rethink the things that you're going to be putting out there, or is it something else?
NJ: Well, I wouldn't want people to censor themselves, right? And when you have dealt with, you know, extensive online abuse, as I have, it does get to be that way that you rethink everything and you think things through too much almost, it can be kind of stifling. But the point that I make in the book is that most of these tips that I give, you know, getting a private information service that removes your information from the internet, using middleware like this tool Block Party to block trolls without having to be exposed to the stuff that they're sending you. These things are kind of set it and forget it, and they make your experience a lot more pleasant. So I think it's just to be in control, to think about these things ahead of time so that you don't find yourselves in a moment where things are bad. You are the subject of an online hate campaign or worse, and you're scrambling to get it all set up. And in fact, that is, I was lucky in that when I had the worst abuse that I dealt with in my life, a private, kind of security consultant that I had hired to help me make sure that my family was safe, told me that if I hadn't been me, you know, things would have been much worse, right? So doing that set it and forget it is really important. But the other kind of single most important tip I would give is just don't, I wouldn't say don't feed the trolls, don't be afraid to block people, right? You don't need to give people your time, your energy. Taylor Swift recently put it like, your energy is currency and it's very expensive, you don't need to spend it on everyone. And that is something I am trying to, as a good millennial Taylor Swift listener, I'm really trying to embody lately. You don't owe people a response if they're not engaging in good faith.
GR: I bet her energy is probably extremely expensive right now. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz. We have about five minutes left or so, and I have basically two more questions for you, but one of them, I think you'll want to take some time with, the first one. It's a personal question, you've alluded to it already several times, but is part of the motivation for this book, “How to Be a Woman Online” autobiographical? You've kind of hinted that it is. And then the bigger question is, tell us a bit about how you have had to deal with the threats and the challenges that you discuss in the book.
NJ: Yeah. So the book came into being after I had dealt with some online abuse as most women in public life do. And after I had done a big piece of research around the 2020 election that looked at the ways that women political candidates were abused online. And I thought, this is so endemic to our society and it doesn't seem like the platforms, as I mentioned before, are going to do anything about it. But I don't want to see women shrinking from expressing themselves in our democratic discourse. And so many of the focus groups and things that I had done, particularly with young women, showed me that that was the case. One young woman told me, I don't want a lifestyle that public anymore, like it was really heartbreaking to me. Ironically, just a couple of days before the Disinformation Governance Board at DHS was announced and my appointment to it was announced, was when my book came out, the second book, “How to Be a Woman Online”. And so the book came out, and then I was hit with this wave of online abuse, which has now lasted for for three and a half years. And essentially it was based on a conspiracy theory about the board that I was going to be censoring people. I'm a granddaughter of somebody who was put in a Soviet gulag. The thought of me censoring people is just so anathema to every fiber of my being. And frankly, it just goes against all of my public scholarship over time. It was shocking to see it take such root, but it was it was not just something that was happening online. It was happening on the airwaves of the most powerful cable stations in the world, like Fox. And that translated into threats against me and my family very quickly. I was in the third trimester of my pregnancy, my son was just a few weeks away from being born. As I mentioned before, he was threatened, we were doxed, which means that our home address was leaked. We received mail at our house. I was advised to leave my house by that consultant that I mentioned before, and I just, I couldn't figure out how to make that happen as, you know, a 36 week pregnant woman with a dog, a cat, and a bunch of stuff. And like, I wanted to be near my doctor and my hospital. I had to go to my prenatal appointments in a disguise, basically. I like, wore a hat and a COVID mask, it was still during COVID, and sunglasses because my face was on TV so much that I didn't know who I would meet on the street would wish me harm. And I've been recognized on the street before as well. And you know, this stuff just changes how you move around in the world. And when so much of your work is online, not even your work, but, you know, dealing, trying to be in touch with family and friends around the world, around the country, when you're dealing with online abuse and you're receiving that level of vitriol so much, it really cuts you off, it isolates you, which is the point, right? The point is to make you withdraw and say, well, this isn't worth it, this level of engagement isn't worth it. And that is something I've really tried to stand against. And, you know, I'm glad that the book is out there so that I can, equip other women to fight back and to hold their digital ground.
GR: We only have a couple seconds left, literally. But give us just a taste of what you'll be discussing in your talk at Syracuse.
NJ: In part, I'm going to be discussing my experience but my experience is not the only one of, you know, autocrats that are targeting truth tellers. It's happened around the world and in order to control the society and the outcomes in society, you need to control the narrative. And that's why journalists, civil society activists, researchers are being targeted right now.
GR: All right. We'll have to leave it there. That was Nina Jankowicz. Again, she's giving a free public talk on the Syracuse University campus on October 27th. It's titled, “War on Reality: How Autocrats Are Silencing Truth Tellers Around the World”. More information on the talk can be found at the Maxwell School of Citizenship Public Affairs website. Ms. Jankowicz, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I learned a lot, and I'm sorry that you went through what you did, but it sounds like you've come out stronger.
NJ: Thank you so much, Grant. A pleasure to be with you.
GR: Thank you. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Tim Rudd on the Campbell Conversations
Sep 27, 2025
Tim Rudd
A Note to Our Listeners:
I mention this in the introduction to the interview with Tim Rudd, but you may notice that missing from the group of interviews with the Syracuse mayoral candidates is Alfonso Davis, who, like Rudd, is running on an independent line. In all regional races where there are multiple candidates, I make an assessment of the candidates’ basic viability. This is not a fine-tuned effort to gauge a candidate’s likelihood of winning, but rather an assessment of whether there is an active campaign of basic viability. That determination is based on party backing, funding, both secured and likely, polling when available, past performance when available, and the background and experience of the candidate, among other factors. Because our political system in the U.S. is overwhelmingly based on the two-party system, candidates from the two major parties are automatically included.
The context for needing to do all this is the fact that the Campbell Conversations is a once-a-week program, of only 30 minutes duration. If we had more airtime, we could be more inclusive regardless.
In this instance, regarding Mr. Rudd and Mr. Davis, I made the determination to give them time, but to put them together into a single half-hour program. I invited both of them to appear on the program, and while Mr. Rudd accepted the invitation, Mr. Davis refused, stating that he didn’t want to have his time shared with Mr. Rudd. When that happens, it is the policy of this program, consistent with that of most other programs, to go forward with the candidate who accepted the invitation. That is what I did with Mr. Rudd, and that is why Mr. Davis is missing from the interviews. -Grant Reeher
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Today we're bringing you the second of our series of interviews with the mayoral candidates for the city of Syracuse. My guest is Tim Rudd, the former Syracuse City budget director and city councilor-at-large, who's running as an independent on a line named Transparency and Accountability. I'd like our listeners to note that we made an effort to invite Alfonso Davis, the other independent candidate, to join this conversation, but he declined to be interviewed in a joint fashion. I do plan to conduct an interview with the Democratic nominee, Sharon Owens, in the coming months. But today, it's Mr. Rudd's turn, welcome to the program.
Tim Rudd: Thank you for having me.
GR: Well, thanks for making the time, we do appreciate it. So let me just start with kind of what may have been the start of your campaign. You've been in the media, you were in the media with some pretty deep criticisms of the Walsh administration. Just, if you could, I know you could speak the entire time about this, but in a nutshell, what are your main criticisms of the way the Walsh administration has used the past eight years?
TR: Well, I think there's, the Walsh administration prioritizes their narrative over telling the truth, over acknowledging things that are problems and trying to improve them. And I think there's a steep cost for that. And I think we see it in many ways.
GR: So give me some of the most important ways in which they've not told the truth.
TR: Well, I mean, I think it's, we're getting to the point where enough time has passed where it's starting to be interesting to look at my announcement and all this. Like just the other day, the Walsh administration went before the city council, I was the budget director, but I also got elected citywide to the city council eight years ago, so I was the finance chair on the council for the first three years of the Walsh administration before I became his budget director, and just this week, the council brought an item for $900,000 to buy and get a new consultant and a new software company for an IT project for payroll modernization, which, ironically, was initially funded through a grant that I helped write the request to the Financial Review Board as the finance chair on the council. And one of the options was to have a new timekeeping system because we use paper time sheets. And that project, over many years, that got delayed at first because of COVID and just slow state funding and then it had a consultant, they spent $2.5 million of New York State money and got nothing for it. They had a launch, a product launch that failed. This is a few years back. And then instead of acknowledging the problems with the implementation, the problems with the product, the problems with which they went about it, they really, like, doubled down, said nothing wrong here, misrepresented a bunch of things to the council, in my opinion, in order to secure additional money. They eventually spent like $8 million on this project. This is really what led to my separation with the Walsh administration, primarily because in November of last year, a whistleblower showed up with a 200 page document that I read, and it corroborated a lot of what I had already thought about the project and made me understand it in many new ways. And that snowballed into me resigning, declaring for mayor, and then the Walsh administration, in my opinion, needing to discredit me and doing so in a racial way that I also feel was inaccurate. But the irony of them going to the council after $900,000 for a new product with a new consultant, to my eyes it shows that their 8 million literally bought nothing, right? Which is basically what I was saying, which was a very controversial statement at that time and nobody wanted me to say. And time passes and truth kind of becomes more evident, but it's still a complex story. And I think that applies to a lot of things in Syracuse. So I just think there is a desire to say all is well with, like the way in which crime is reported, crime is down, right? They celebrate crime being down. They don't discuss the people who call 911, who don't get the response they need for what they perceive to be a very serious thing. They don't talk about the criminality that exists in the corner stores that caused drug stores to, like, ride out leases and leave. Such that like intersections of the city and private business corridors are totally vacant, right? Because there's no crime? No. It's because there's been normalized criminality where the stores just get pilfered all the time and don't want to deal with trying to stop it. So in my perception, there is a problem where they have a narrative that tells a story of rising above all kinds of stuff, but they don't actually engage with the reality on Syracuse. And in many ways, I feel like I'm connected to the reality in a way different than Walsh in particular, mainly because I grew up in Syracuse my whole life. My dad still lives in the house I grew up in. That's where I launched my campaign, was on my dad's steps with my wife. Ironically, they will crop my wife out of the pictures when they want to insinuate that I'm somehow racist, which my wife laughs at and I cringe. And then I went to Syracuse University through the Syracuse Challenge. I went to the Maxwell School eventually. I lived in New York City for seven years, where I really got to see an urban space and imagine how Syracuse could be different. I even bought my house on the south side while I was living in New York and renovated it on weekends. It's in a qualified census tract, so my neighborhood has more than 20% poverty, and it shows. Eight years ago I took like reporters on walks on my block and there were vacant houses, drug houses, all kinds of stuff. And it was really at that time when I left my job in New York, officially to run, to be on the city council, I cashed out my 401K and I brought the two family in front of mine, and I fixed it up. That was like my side gig while I was on the council the first six months, was fixing up the house in front of mine. And over the last eight years I've bought five other houses on my block and fixed them up. So, I think I know I have this unique set of experiences where I'm from here born, raised, educated, understand the value of the large nonprofits like Syracuse University. Had outside, professional experience in the New York City mayor's office doing public finance stuff. Then I worked for a national nonprofit, where I did cost benefit analysis of anti-poverty programs. I really wrote quite extensively in syracuse.com, probably more extensively than the mayor himself or any other public official over the last ten years. I've run for different things, I've lost, I've won, I've lost. We'll see. But I'm definitely a scrappy Syracuseon who believes that our community and who's worked to have, like, success professionally and I'm still committed to this. Everything I own is on my block. Like, I'd take, like, side yards that were, the vacant houses and make them to beautiful family garden, right? Like the people on my block know what I do, that's hard to necessarily communicate to 143,000 people all at once. And, in many ways, I've witnessed Ben Walsh and kind of his approach. So, I think that may have, I initially declared that I was going to be a RINO, so I didn't have an independent line. I actually think in many ways Ben and I learned to get along for a period of time, but we were never really like, friends to say. We were always pretty like, I would push for things, and I was rough and willing to be that guy who disagreed. And, that went the way it did. But I think he soured me on the independent approach because I was like, rise above politics, I've been this loyal, in theory, loyal Democrat, right? Like, I do the work, I carry the petitions, I help the slate. When my candidate loses, I eventually endorse the other person when they win the primary. And in other ways, I feel like the party has moved left, too far left for me. So like I do believe in home ownership, I definitely believe in free speech and all these other things. And in some ways, the Republican Party had things like Make America Healthy. That resonates with me. Like, I wake up every day to go to the gym with my wife at 4 a.m., to be there at 5 a.m., but like, and stop the wars. Like the whole time I was at Maxwell, I thought the wars were very bad and a bad thing and all of a sudden the Republicans were saying that. So I really thought there was this opportunity to, and they didn't have a candidate. So I kind of thought, I was being sincere, saying I was going to be a RINO and I was transparent about that, like, hey, I want to be a Republican in name only. Unfortunately, I think because of my political history as a Democrat, I didn't realize that RINO to me sounded like a good thing, right?
GR: (laughter)
TR: So in my experience, RINO meant like moderate or like person willing to compromise, person willing to work. But it turns out it's like a slur within the current Republican Party.
GR: Yeah, they don't see it that way.
TR: I ended up alienating myself to them, even though I really was trying to be sincere in my, like, hey, I think we have mutual agreement here. And I also think it's not really, given the numbers, the 18% enrollment for the Republican Party in the city of Syracuse, I didn't think it was feasible for any Republican to win. So I thought being a RINO was like a reasonable compromise. But I didn't do it in a way that signaled compromise to any of them. So that, ironically caused me to be literally, like, thrown out of the Republican Party. Well, at least my father and my wife got thrown out for being RINOs and I chose to re-enroll at that time as a Democrat because I was being threatened with all kinds of legal lawsuits. And I just thought, this is not the right path. So in a way, I got forced into an independent ballot line, right?
GR: I see. Let me ask you though, a question about something you mentioned earlier. Which is that, you being tagged as a racist because, you know, and I'm sure you knew I was going to ask you this question at some point, so I might as well do it now. But some of the criticisms that you were making of the Walsh administration in the past, at least as they were related in media outlets such as the Post-Standard, you know, veered into what appeared to be bizarre or or even offensive, invoking plantation's slaves to make your point. And, you know, you mentioned you resigned. I mean, there was controversy, were you fired? Did you resign? They say they fired you over those comments. So, if you can briefly, what should voters make of all that? I mean, what is the bottom line here of the reality of all that?
TR: Well, I mean, the reality is that I went through what was a very stressful period with a fraud, what I perceived as a fraud at City Hall. And I still believe it to be a fraud.
GR: And that was the example related earlier.
TR: The whistleblower, all of that, right? So there was a period of November and December last year where I figured all this out, and it really, the process where I eventually like leak the whistleblower report to the city council and the city auditor, ruins my relationship with both the mayor and the deputy mayor, who is now the favorite to become the next mayor. So I was like, well, I'm done. I'm going to run for mayor because I don't want to work, I don't really I don't have a place here and I think I could do a better job. So at that time, I meet with a mentor and I record a conversation. And I recorded it because I didn't have the emotional capacity to have that conversation with thousands of people. And it's a 2.5 hour conversation, and I go through the whole of the fraud and like, the first half is like talking about this, like learning of the fraud. And I use all types of language, like I call all kinds of swearwords, all kinds of stuff. The mayor, I clearly don't like the mayor. I'm loyal to the people I'm loyal to. And then toward the end, when I'm talking about political strategy, the person who I'm talking to asked me a question about like, different demographics, like, I don't know, maybe the black vote or something. And when I was on the council, I was probably closest aligned to Khalid Bey, right?
GR: Okay. He's been on the program before and I know him, yes.
TR: Khalid and I vibed on many levels. Like I would often read all this stuff about math being the guiding, like, the explanation of the universe. And we would just talk about like that kind of stuff. And we got along. And Khalid is an author, so I've read all of Khalid's books. And one of Khalid's books is called, “The African American Dilemma” and in it he talks about Willie Lynch. And after the mayor got reelected, I mean, I supported, I didn't support Mayor Walsh at that time. I worked for Ben Walsh, and I told him I couldn't support him. I decided I will stay out of it, but I can't help you because Khalid is like my big brother, right?
GR: Got it.
TR: And, as a reward, not a reward, but I think in a way, when I was asking for numerous like additional responsibilities as the budget and procurement director, the deputy mayor and the mayor said, hey, we want to give you minority affairs. So they literally move minority affairs into the budget suite. And I do all this stuff to do it legally, which hardly anyone does in the Walsh administration. Like I changed the city charter, I moved it under the budget department, I renamed it Equity, Compliance and Social Impact. And then through that, I kind of had to deal with some staff that weren't great, which I think was part of the reason they were willing to give it to me because they thought I was a manager who would actually be able to handle the situation. Like they literally entrusted me with minority affairs, right?
GR: Wait a minute, let me stop there because we got to take a break. But then I want to get to the other side of that story, on the other side. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and we'll continue the conversation after a short break. Welcome back to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Tim Rudd. He's running for mayor of Syracuse on an independent line in this November's election. So go ahead and pick up on this story now, because I'd asked you about these comments that you had made that became quite controversial and generated a lot of media attention. So take me from where you were to that point.
TR: Long story long, I feel like I was one of the few white managers in the city who was comfortable talking about race. Like in many ways, I was always in those conversations in college. I was in that in the places I worked, I would be on the diversity council. Literally last summer I drove to Boston for racial equity in municipal finance with Sharon Owens in my car. Like, I think if anything, I became too trusting of being comfortable talking about it. And I talked about an element of this Willie Lynch concept at the end of the recording. So you'd have to listen to two hours of absolute like, if your takeaway from this two hour plus conversation is Rudd is racist, then like, I can't, I don't know what to tell you. There were many other things and at that point I decided, like when I was still, I had announced the resignation, I had announced the candidacy for mayor and then I shared the tape, I shared the majority of the tape. Like you, there are space constraints so I couldn't share 2.5 hours because nobody would listen to it, so I shared like the first 70 minutes. And then it was that that I think it was just too much of a disobedience to be tolerated. So even though I had resigned and all this other stuff, then I think they really needed to discredit me. So they decide to have me discredited through a racial lens where the headline on the syracuse.com article that really did all the damage, it said, “Rudd compares to slave breaker”, (editor's note: actual headline reads, "Rudd compares Syracuse mayoral opponent to a slave breaker: ‘I can say it with a dog whistle’" -ML) and many people don't even have a subscription and read it. And like social media spreads lies eight times faster than any other medium in history, so like, it goes crazy. But I never even used the word slave breaker. So like if you had phrased it in 19 other ways or any other point from that conversation, I don't think it would have had the same effect. But they chose to use the word slave breaker. That's Jeremy Boyer's word, or whoever wrote the headline, not mine. And from there, it just takes a life of its own. And they were probably pretty successful in discrediting me, even though I think people who had really been paying attention realized that I was poking a bear, and I basically got attacked by a bear.
GR: And just to make something clear here, from what I heard you say, the other thing is, you were using, at least as far as you understood it, a metaphor that you had gotten from Khalid Bey's book. So, you know, you were drawing on that.
TR: Oh, definitely. Like, does the Walsh administration use race as a factor in their management assignments, decisions and their general approach? And then should they or not? I don't know, those are questions that other people could ask or answer or pontificate on, but I spoke about it through a historical lens, which is really how I have learned to engage the world is you read about it, you're thoughtful about it, you're open and honest about it, and you realize that we've all passed through this collective history, and we share it to some extent, even if we're unaware of it. And you got to be open to talk about it, to not perpetuate it. And that's how I've lived. So the irony is being portrayed as a racist, and I've been on, like, I've seen enough to know that once charged with such an allegation, there's nothing I can say, do, to prove that I'm not a racist. So I have largely stuck to my, I have not apologized because I do not feel that there was any ill intent. Like, I kind of think of racism as like hatred toward a group or like really like judgment toward a group or an expression of superiority over a group. And if you listen to that tape, I'm literally expressing an affinity with the group, like a shared identity in many ways. Like, it may sound strange to people for a big white guy to identify with, quote unquote, like the slave in the master slave relationship, but in some ways I do, like that's the hero of the story in the narrative, even though they're intertwined. So like, I think it's a complex understanding that social media and so much of the narrative and much of the population isn't ready to talk about, and that's been very hard. And one of the reasons why I was like, excited to try to speak with you because you at least have a longer form and like, set up to talk. It's a very hard thing to talk about in any thirty second segment.
GR: No kidding. So let me jump to another topic, and this is one probably you already expected. So you know, your campaign lacks an organized party to help with all the components of what we normally would consider a successful campaign. My understanding is you're almost unfunded and, you know, it's kind of one man band or a one family band. So, you know, it's unlikely that you're going to win. You already said that Sharon Owens is the favorite. Sometimes campaigns that are in this category, that I just put you in, are in it to try to move the public dial or raise awareness about a particular issue and change something very specific in particular. Does that describe your campaign in a way, and if so, what is that issue? Is it the transparency and accountability in government for the next administration?
TR: Well, I think yes, I would agree with that sentiment. Like at this point, I'm fighting for principle, right? And in many ways I feel like I'm fighting to restore my name, but in the way I've been a thoughtful advocate for all things Syracuse and how we can be different over the last ten years and really the whole of my life. So I'm trying to make it that way as well. And I do think that we have cowardly leadership, in particular with Ben Walsh, and that he is not honest. I don't think he's honest with himself or his staff or anyone else. So he kind of believes the delusion. And I think we have to be honest and until we're honest, we're not going to have any kind of progress. And even if that has to do with crime or if that has to do with the trash carts, and it doesn't mean like the trash, just as an example, I think there's a need for the leadership to, you can deal to praise or celebrate an achievement while still acknowledging it may be imperfect and you need to work to improve it. So, like the trash carts I view as an improvement but they created new externalities, unintended things. So I think people stack trash on the sides, front and rear of their house, especially in qualified census tracts that have more than 20% poverty, more than they used to because they can't fit it, and they don't have the wherewithal to follow the rules to get rid of it. And it's kind of cumbersome because you only set one up. Anyways, so like, I think if we were honest about that, then we could build a solution that would get rid of the trash and we wouldn't have this problem. And I think that environment creates all type of disorderly-ness. So like in my life and in my approach to a landlord and even at work, I think details matter a lot. So, and you have to be honest about all the details. So, and you have to address them in order to get the solutions. And if you're lying about whether they work, whether there's trash on the side of the house or not, then you're not going to get rid of it.
GR: So let me ask you this then, it sounds like, and again, tell me if I've got this right or wrong, but it sounds like to me then the core nugget of the point of your campaign is not so much about policies that are wrong, but rather about the way that policies have been discussed, the way they've been evaluated, the way they have been publicly held accountable or not held accountable.
TR: Or not discussed, yeah.
GR: Yeah, and sort of the way that government is working rather than this administration has the wrong aim here or the wrong...
TR: The government rolls out a narrative, I think this is true of the Walsh administration and of probably many other layers of our current structure in government, then they want everybody to stick to the narrative. Don't think critically, don't push back. Even if you're an ally and you're on board, you're not allowed to publicly dissent. You got to be on board all the time, any dissent is total dissent. And I think that's a very unhealthy environment and it doesn't allow for you to be thoughtful and get the type of response you need. And like I would say, Syracuse does have a moment, right? The highway coming down took a lot of people pushing to get it, it's the right decision, it's a huge opportunity. The university and downtown are not properly connected. I think this administration has built a strategy that really, the energy of the highway coming down is focused around the housing authority. And I think that's not a good strategy because it requires so many public dollars that it doesn't, it's not going to be very successful. Because, one, the dollars aren't there with the current federal partners, and two, it's not using the limited dollars we have to activate private investment where it might actually go. So, like, I really do think if we maintained the housing authority and invested in that housing stock and the people who live there and make it a better place to live, which I think is a good place for affordable housing, right, because it's right next to the universities, it's right next to the downtown. There's lots of economic opportunity there, it's a good place for permanent affordable housing. So we don't need to be dedicating massive, destroy, rebuild and all that it takes to support that, right? We could be using those same monies to get denser developments along East Genesee Street, where they are happening already, to ignite it faster and to have plans with like, and even getting to the point where you could have new art at the center of Syracuse at Almond and East Genesee Street to really like connect the university to downtown, make it feel like one urban core. I think that could spark a desire for living in the inner ring neighborhoods which have the most divestment. All of that is like a nexus of money creation, right? Like money gets injected into the economy through housing and in real estate investment and through the universities, through higher ed, through students taking out loans there. So it's really this opportunity to get more money in the community. And that's the way we're going to reduce poverty. We have a poverty problem, we need more people getting higher incomes and this is a way to do it.
GR: Okay. So we've only got a couple of minutes left and I want to squeeze two questions in related to what you've just been talking about, or at least one is. So the first question is and again, just about a minute on each one. So regarding Micron, which we haven't talked about yet, obviously that's going to add to the level of opportunity that you just described, potentially. Do you have one big concern about the Micron development and what would it be? But you have to be brief.
TR: I think that the idea that Micron is a sincere opportunity, like as an employment center for the average citizen in Syracuse is not true. And I think that's almost like a, illusion that's damaging. We would be better to focus on home ownership and like, just general, security, right? Like the schools, if security, we have a poverty problem, which then creates instability, violence, a whole bunch of problems, we need to deal with the security, that's like a higher level human need. And then when we do that, people can begin to be prepared to start making better decisions about their health, about their, like, academic and professional trajectories. And there's lots of people with a regular job who could afford to own a home. And that's really the permanent, afford, like the best housing affordability in the long term is the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. I think that is clear in most of the country, and we don't have enough of that in Syracuse. And that could be true for affordable home ownership as well. And the housing authority can do a role, they would be well served to facilitate people to become more, better tenants who are eventually capable of owning a home.
GR: Okay, I get the point you're making about priorities. Finally, thirty seconds, hate to do it to you, but, if you can, thirty seconds just encapsulate, what is your view about the recent uptick in ICE raids and the aggressiveness of some of those raids? If they were to come to Syracuse, where are you going to be on that?
TR: Well, largely, I think we're seeing that ICE is run by the federal government. I'm pro following the rules until it creates the demand for a solution. I think Mayor Walsh is pro if the rules are not great, ignore the rules. I think that's arbitrary and capricious and it's a disservice. I would say enforce the rules until there's a political will to get an adjustment in the rules to like, make them reasonable. That's the way I approach like things less controversial, like the sidewalk program. There wasn't will for municipal sidewalk program. So I went around and condemned a whole bunch of sidewalks because that's how it used to work.
GR: We won't have time to get into that.
TR: And that creates the will. Sometimes you to follow the rules in order to change the rules.
GR: I see, yeah. Okay, thank you. That was Tim Rudd and again, please keep your eye out for a future conversation with the Democratic Party candidate, Sharon Owens. You can also find my previous conversation with Republican nominee Tom Babilon on the Campbell Conversations web page. Mr. Rudd, Tim, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, I appreciate it.
TR: Thank you, appreciate it.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Tom Babilon on the Campbell Conversations
Sep 20, 2025
Tom Babilon
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. This November, Syracuse will elect a new mayor. Joining me today is the Republican candidate for the position, Tom Babilon. Mr. Babilon is a senior attorney at Hiscock Legal Aid, and he also has experience as Assistant Corporation Counsel for the city, where he worked with housing, neighborhood and business development, and labor and employment. I want to note that I also plan to have the other three mayoral candidates on the program in the coming weeks. So, Mr. Babilon, welcome to the program, you’re first, and thank you for doing that, and thank you for making the time to talk with me.
Tom Babilon: Well, thanks for having me on, Grant, I appreciate it.
GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. And so let me just start right in with the core question. You know, you have painted Sharon Owens, the Democratic nominee as kind of a continuation of the Walsh administration, so I wanted to ask you about the Walsh (administration). What are your main criticisms of the Ben Walsh administration?
TB: Well, I've got several. I don't know if we've got time for all of them. Primarily my biggest concern with Walsh has been his disregard for balancing the budget. It seems like every year he's increased the budget. I think the city operations budget increased over $100 million alone under his watch. And, you know, because of that, we've had three tax increases that were implemented in, you know, six 1% tax increases. You know, we've got a new sidewalks tax, water rates have increased. So really, you know, there hasn't been very much transparency. You know, he's been caught numerous times not telling the truth or his administration has to the Common Council. So that things like that and then also, you know, I think, he's really decimated our police force and not been very good with public safety, which is another concern of mine.
GR: Okay, we'll get into all those then. Let's start with the budget, which is obviously a big part of what the mayor is going to have to manage. You said, and you've got on your website I think too, that you're going to look through the entire budget for efficiencies and try to eliminate the waste and, you know, fraud that you can find in there. Historically that doesn't generate big savings when people try to do that. So if you really want to rein in the spending, tell me a little bit about what areas you'd be looking to cut into, because I think that's the only way that that is going to happen.
TB: There's a lot of things just for working at the city that a lot of people don't know, that actually happen. Like, for instance, the DPW workers, the trash workers go home at noon, regardless of how long they've worked, as long as they've completed their routes, things like that. You know, we’re supposed to reduce the number of men on the truck, I believe when we got the new carts and that never happened. So there's certainly things like that that can be looked at. Maybe doing more than one route. There's also issues in the Codes Department, you know, we've got like eight guys that are doing rental registry inspections and, you know, not very many guys doing other things, things like that we can look at. But also there's a lot of spending that, just doesn't, like the, you know, the mayor's office to reduce gun violence. I think that was a $1.5 million expense that really hasn't produced any kind of results. There's all kinds of things like that that get spent. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I was sitting in my office and I would get a call from someone telling me not to collect money that's owed to the city or just to not file judgments You know, and other people, you know, t it depends on who you know, which is is another thing that I really don't like about city politics and I want to change. There's really a lot more money than you would expect with waste and fraud and part of that is, you know, the kinds of things we do with that money, not just money that's wasted on a program, there's a lot of programs that don't present any kind of results at all.
GR: Well, what would be your top priorities? It sounds like, you know, the police force would be one, but where is it most important to you to maintain the effort that the city's making or even increase it?
TB: Well, with regards to the police, I mean, the problem we have with the police is, you know, we've got 200 less officers than we did when I moved here in 2003. We've lost over 100 since 2017, 80 of them I think in 2021 alone, 30 people resigned. So we need to bring up the ranks back up to around 550 people is the first thing we need to do, because simply, the police don't answer calls. I mean, you can talk, I mean, I don't know where you live, Grant,I don't live in the greatest neighborhood. I've had to call 911, I can't tell you how many times in the last 20 years, and I can't tell you how many times, you know, they don't even show up, or they'll call you, we’ll show up when we can, or they don't show up at all. I mean, I had someone tell me about a home invasion where they didn't show up until several hours later a few weeks ago. It's just we're so understaffed, it's the biggest problem. You can't really blame police for it because we're just so understaffed. And part of that is because of things that happened under this administration, including residency requirement for police officers, because that limits the pool of, you know, of new officers that are going to work for us. And, you know, basically, there hasn't been a lot of support from the mayor's office historically under this last administration. You know, from calling the police department an institution of, you know, having institutional racism to, you know, basically, you know, defunding them to a certain extent, telling them not to answer certain calls, telling them not to enforce certain things, cutting ShotSpotter, which is a very important tool for them, I believe they cut license plate readers at one point. There's all kinds of things that they haven't really had the support from the mayor's office that I think they deserve. You know, and the other thing is, you know, we've got other departments, like particularly the mayor's office, I think that spends a lot of money that really is unwarranted.
GR: Well, are you running on, any pledges or promises regarding taxes, especially new taxes? Are you sort of making a public stand on that?
TB: Yes. I think, you know, I would love to reduce the tax burden of the citizens of Syracuse. I don't know if that's going to be possible right off the bat. Certainly I would pledge to no new tax increases because I think that, we've had more taxes in this last seven years than I think any mayor in recent history, you know, and he wanted to taxes more. I mean, the Common Council has now cut him off twice on tax, I mean, he wanted to tax another 2% tax increase this year. And I believe in 2019 he wanted a 4% tax increase and they cut him down to 2%. So I mean, he just says this, you know, he wants to spend a lot of money, but you need money to spend money and he's taking that from the people that live here, and it's caused a lot of people to leave the city. I think the tax and the crime has really caused us to lose a lot of people from living here.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with the city of Syracuse Republican mayoral candidate Tom Babilon. So there's two big things I want to ask you about, and I'm going to ask all candidates about this. Whoever the next mayor is, they're going to have to manage two really difficult things that provide opportunities, but also challenges. And the first one is the taking down of I-81 and the redevelopment of the East Adams Street area, which kind of is close to where you live. So the taking down is already happening. But what are your biggest priorities and also concerns about where this project goes from here?
TB: Well, I mean, it’s certainly going to be a mess when they're doing the construction. And, you know, we've got to have, you know, make sure that the DPW controls the traffic properly, that's going to be the immediate concern. But my biggest concern about the project is, you know, what are we going to do with the land when the highway comes down, which is, you know, some of my, other people that are running for mayor have, you know, come forth with their ideas. I think that we need to use that land for its highest and best use. I really think it's going to be very valuable property, probably some of the most valuable property in the city of Syracuse. And I think that it needs to be used for, you know, uses that are going to create income, create for the city, revenue for the city, taxes for the city, sales tax for the city, property taxes for the city, things that are going to make people stop in the city and spend money. You know, some of the other plans have called for public housing there, which I think is the worst possible use. You know, it's going to create a tax exempt property, most likely, and it's also it's not really going to be a suitable place for housing I don't think. It's going to be some of the most heavy traffic in the city, because I've been to these projects in other cities and people, historically, a lot of people do not take the route that they're supposed to take. They'll take the straight route through the city, they'll drive through Almond Street and continue on I-81 south on the other side of the city. So it's going to be a very, very high traffic area and I think the last thing we need to do there is add in a component of residential housing.
GR: Well, the people that are going to be displaced, there are, a lot of them are in public housing and those public housing areas have kind of run their course of useful life. So what happens to those folks then if we don't put public housing back in that East Adams neighborhood?
TB: Well, there is, I mean there is public housing proposed, where McKinney Manor is now, they’re putting in proposals to renovate that. I don't know if it's going to replace all the housing that's, you know, all the people have been displaced. I know in the interim that the Syracuse Housing Authority is having a problem placing those displaced residents. I don't know what the final numbers are going to be. And I'm fine with, you know, housing on that area where we already have residential housing. I think the plan is to increase density, where the, McKinney manor is. So I'm fine with that plan. My problem is, on both sides of Almond Street, where there’s going to be the this vacant lots now on one side and there's a highway on the other where there's soon to be vacant lots, I think that needs to be developed, commercially, you know, that's my position.
GR: Okay. And then the other big thing, of course, is Micron coming in, that's not in the city, but it's going to certainly affect the city, the mega microchip facility and Clay. What are your biggest priorities for how that affects the city, and again, concerns as well?
TB: Initially I think it's, what I've read, I think it’s going to take several years before their even operational. So it's going to be the construction of the plant that's probably going to happen under my first term, at least start. And of course, you know, making sure that city residents are available, make sure they get part of that construction work, that's certainly a concern. You know, I don't really have a lot of concerns about the project in particular because, frankly, it's outside my jurisdiction or any mayor's jurisdiction. You know, we've got to make sure we have the people that are available for the jobs and maybe encourage people that are going to be working there or working on the construction to live in the city. You know, one of my main things I want to do is I want to make the city of Syracuse a place where people want to live, not where they want to leave. And it's too often right now you talk to people and they say, I can't wait to get out of here, why am I still living here, why do you live there? And I want people to say, no, I want to live in Syracuse, I want to live in the city.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Tom Babilon. The Republican attorney is running for mayor of the city of Syracuse in this November's election. So I wanted to talk to you a bit about something that's been in the news a lot lately, and you were also in the Syracuse Post-Standard talking about this. And it has to do with the enforcement of immigration law by ICE and the relationship between the federal government and local governments, regarding that. You said in the paper, if I understood you correctly, that you would not enter into any kind of formal agreement with the federal government to help with immigration law enforcement, because, first of all, it violates state law, which forbids those kinds of agreements, and then, more importantly, you said, because the Syracuse Police Department doesn't have the extra bandwidth to deal with that rather than more pressing problems. I think you've already spoken to the concerns you have about the police department. So am I relating your position about right on that?
TB: That's, you're absolutely right on my position on that.
GR: Okay. So I have some hypotheticals here though if I could press you on this. So what would you do as mayor though, if ICE made a particularly heavy thrust in Syracuse? I mean, we saw this set of arrests up in Cato, you know, with those workers. What if we had in the city of Syracuse a much heavier ICE presence, how would you deal with that?
TB: What can the mayor do, really? I mean, you saw the Oswego mayor come out and say, oh, I don't agree with this, I'm a Republican, please don't do it. It's not going to stop ICE from going and doing whatever operation that they want to do. I don't really think that the mayor can do anything. If there's some kind of egregious raid that I feel that I need to speak out on, of course I'll make a statement. But in reality, I'm not going to stop Donald Trump from doing anything that Donald Trump wants to do.
GR: Okay. And then what would you do if there were significant street protests that erupted? If something like you say, particularly egregious happened, you know, and those folks started to try to interfere with the work of ICE, we've seen that in other cities. So what happens then?
TB: Well, I mean, I think I’ve talked a little bit about public safety before. Public safety is always a priority of mine. And, you know, if there's some huge protests, then I think we need to have a police presence just to make sure that they don't get out of control. I mean, we all lived through the George Floyd protests, and we saw what happened in many cities where, you know, businesses were looted or there there were set on fire, and you know, some police really didn't have things under control. So I think that we definitely need to have a police presence to make sure that everything is fine, that people are not going to have their businesses looted, the people are not going to have their homes or businesses set on fire, you know, or anything, any kind of property crime or, you know, could be even a violent crime, you don't know what's going to happen at these things. So I think that, certainly we need to have a police presence to monitor to make sure that everything's okay. But, you know, people have a right to protest, if people want to come out and protest and they abide by all the rules that are in place, I welcome that. I'm a very big person on free speech, and I think everyone should have their opinion and have their opinion heard. And if you disagree with that, you can have your opinion heard. That's how America works.
GR: Okay. And that topic, and you already, I think, spoke to this in one way, but it invites another set of questions that has to do with the fact that, you know, you're running under the Republican Party banner. So one obvious question that I would want to ask you is how you view the Trump administration so far. You mentioned that you know, there’s nothing a mayor can do to stop Donald Trump, what Donald Trump wants to do. But how would you assess what this administration has done so far?
TB: Well, I mean, I agree with some of the things that Donald Trump does, other things I don't agree with him. You know, it's a mix, almost like any other president. You know, I think that if you're going to put me on the spot, I think we're in better hands then we were last year. The other thing that happens with Donald Trump is he proves me wrong. I think that he's wrong on something and then, you know, six months later, I'm like, wow, okay. This whole thing, like tariffs for instance. Everyone thought it was going to be a nightmare, I was not in favor of tariffs, I thought was a terrible idea. And here we are several months later and we don't have the crazy inflation everyone thought was going to happen. And apparently our revenues have gone up, and we're talking about paying down the deficit with those money. So, I mean, I can't, there's certainly things I disagree with Donald Trump on. I'm not, you know, I always was a, I'm a kind of person that was always for more open immigration. I was never a, you know, a close the border type kind of guy. But I think his, you know, when you look at his immigration actions, what's going on now, it's kind of sorta in response to what happened last four years when we basically had an open door policy. We said everyone come in, we will house you we’ll feed you. You know, we put a huge strain on our public safety nets to such a point where even like the mayor of New York City was complaining about it, you know, the most liberal place, probably on the planet. So I think, you know, what he's doing as far as a mass deportations is in direct response to, you know, what happened to the Biden administration and I think probably both of them went a little too far.
GR: Do you think that you, being a Republican, might give you some kind of ability to distance the city or distance yourself from him without incurring kind of the wrath of Trump? I mean, he seems to be very antagonistic toward Democratic mayors, that's for sure.
TB: Well, I'm not going to fight with him. You know, I think I've said this a few by events before. One of the things, the city is very dependent on federal funding. You know, we just we lost $30 million on the 81 project. We're supposed to possibly lose several million dollars a year in HUD funding. I'm not the kind of guy that's going to say, oh, Donald Trump's horrible, Donald Trump is evil, because that just kind of brings on his wrath exactly as you say. I'm not going to upset the president. If he does something horrible, I'll let him, I'll say something about it. But I'm not the kind of person that thinks everything that he does is horrible, which unfortunately, is the position of a lot of people these days. You know, you talk to them and they can't do anything, you say something that everyone should agree on. Hey, Donald Trump, you know, negotiated a peace deal in the Congo. Oh, he's terrible, you know, I mean, there's people that that have that position, and I'm certainly not one of them. I think that I could facilitate a better, you know, relationship with the president than maybe Sharon Owens can and I think that's going to result in higher federal funding for us.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the Syracuse mayoral candidate, Tom Babilon. So this to me, the next question I wanted to ask you seems to be something that has really, I've been here for 35 years, and it seems like it has been haunting the city the entire time. It has to do with the responsibility of the surrounding towns and villages for the city's success and welfare and I wanted to know how you see that. Do you think that the towns and villages do have some responsibility for the city, because people who live in those places often work in the city? And then are they meeting that, or do you have thoughts about how that relationship might change?
TB: Well, I think that we have, you know, responsibilities towards each other. I know it's not a one sided deal, you know, it's definitely not a one sided deal. And this is something we talk about often is, when I talk about public safety is, if there's a problem in the city of Syracuse there’s a problem in Solvay, there’s a problem in East Syracuse. We are all, all are interconnected. I don't necessarily think that the city, you know, that the people, in the towns and villages have an obligation to make sure that the city succeeds. But I think that we all have a mutual obligation to make sure that, you know, when we're working together or we need to work together to make sure that we have, you know, better cooperation, especially with public safety, with public works, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of things we could work with the county, with them on. And I think that, you know, the county, I'm sorry I'm off a little bit, but I think, you know, the county has a responsibility to the city, the city has responsibility to the towns of villages. We all have to work together in the next four years.
GR: Okay, now, one of the things you mentioned right at the beginning was one of your priorities would be increased transparency. And I wanted to give you a few minutes to lay out what you see as the problem there, and then what plans that you would put into place to make the city’s government more transparent.
TB: The the biggest problem I see, and this is from working with the three different mayors and working in the core counsel's office, is that, the city, the Common Council doesn't have their own attorney, they don't have their own representation. And that makes it very uneven. Such to the point where, you know, the mayor can literally tell things to the Common Council that are untrue. And it has happened lots of times in the past, and there's nobody to come back and say, well, that's not accurate, you know, and the Common Council relies on this. I mean, there's numbers of times when the mayor has has lied to the Common Council.
GR: Well give me a couple examples of the worst ones, okay?
TB: Well, they told the Common Council that the Payroll Modernization project had been bid out when it was a no bid contract, and they were asking for the contract to be renewed. So, I mean, that was a huge, you know, the council flat out asked administration is this bid bid out? They said yes, it was bid out previously. Okay, we just want to re-award the contract that was bid out. That was never bid out. You know, those kinds of things happen all the time. And there's instances where, you know, for instance, if you look at City Hall commons, City Hall Commons has been vacant for two years now. It was sold by the Walsh administration, supposedly they got the contract to sale and they moved all their people over to rental, and they're renting it in a commercial building now. So, you know, the anticipation was that this property was going to sell and it was going to be redeveloped and it would be put back on the tax rolls. Now here we are two years later and it still hasn't been sold. I mean, there's, and the reason because of that is, is because what happens is the Corp Council, they come, the mayor says I want to do this, and the Corp Council says, ask the Common Council for authority for the mayor to do something, whatever that may be, authority to sell City Hall Commons. And the Common Council says, sure, you have authority to do that. Now, what should happen is, the contract should be negotiated between the mayor's office and the buyer, and that contract should be presented to the Common Council for approval. And then that way, they would know exactly what kind of deal they're getting into. This has never been done. And I will, first of all, I'm not going to lie to the Common Council. I'm probably the most honest person you ever going to meet. I hate lying, it's terrible, so that's that's number one. Number two, I want the council to know what they're approving. I'm not going to try and hide anything from them. So, and I think that we need a tracker from how our money's actually spent because when you see the budget and you see like, okay, $1.5 million for that, $2 million for that, you don't know how it's actually spent and there's no good tool that says this is how we spent the money. So I think that we also need to know how the money is spent, and I think that needs to be public.
GR: So, we've got about three minutes or a little more left. I wanted to now get into a little more about you as a person. In some ways, it seems, if I just look at you on paper, you kind of go against type. I mean, you're a Republican running as a Republican, but here you are, you're devoting your legal expertise and your legal work to helping those who need help and to those who can't afford it. So that's not, you're not being sort of a lawyer in a market based system, so to speak, you know? So, what explains that? What is it about Tom Babilon that makes him want to do that?
TB: I've dedicated my entire legal career to public service. I really enjoy helping people. You know, some people, enjoy making money, you know, I kind of said, I'm not going to do that. I, when I can help somebody that needs my help, that makes me feel good. And that's kind of why I got into the mayor's race in the first place, because I would see the kind of things that would happen at City Hall that would make me crazy. I used to do criminal defense work before I worked at City Hall, and no matter what kind of case I had, and I didn't have the worst cases, but no matter what kind of case I had, I never felt bad about representing my client. Some of the things that City Hall made me do when I was there made my stomach turn. They made me not feel right. And that's not the kind of thing I thought that city government should be doing to its citizens. So that’s part of the reason why I decided to run as mayor. And that's that's kind of how I've run my whole life is, you know, I do something that I like, which is helping people, so I get a reward that I actually like my job. I get to go to work every day and happy about that. And, you know, I’ll worry about the money thing when I retire, you know?
GR: (laughter)
TB: I don't need a big mansion on the beach. I'm just happy hanging out with my family, so I'm not too concerned about that.
GR: Okay. Tell me something about the city. What's your favorite place to go in the city when you want to kind of recharge your batteries? Where's your sort of power spot in the city?
TB: My favorite spot to go probably is the creek walk between the inner harbor and the lake. And, I can't tell you how many times my fiancé and I have made that walk or bike ride. Just, you know, it's great when you get down to the lake and you can spot eagles or giant carp swimming in there or, you know, and just the whole walk is nice. And we like to kayak too so we've kayaked that before.
GR: Okay. And then what about, buildings in Syracuse, what are your favorite buildings in Syracuse?
TB: Oh, you know, there's so many beautiful buildings in Syracuse. You know, we were lucky to keep all these historic buildings. City Hall is a great, great example, (it) looks like a castle. You know, I thought I was working in a castle for ten years every day I walked there. And then I worked at the City Hall Commons for a while, you know, it's like a flat iron building, and my office was right in the point of the flat iron so I had like a 180 degree view of the city. It was amazing. There's so many buildings that are beautiful downtown Syracuse.
GR: One last quick question, we just have a couple seconds left. Is there any particular book or anything else you can point to that inspired you to want to do the kind of public service work that you've done?
TB: You know, I can't point to a book. I can only point to some of the, you know, some of the instructors I had when I went to undergrad law school that were very, you know, service oriented, that made me feel like this is something I wanted to do. Originally. I wanted to do criminal defense, I wanted to work at the public defender's office. I did work at public defender's office in Florida for a small period of time. That's what I initially thought I wanted to do. And then, I started working for the city. And then I just ended up, you know, doing family court appeals for people who can't afford lawyers. So, I mean, it's just really I've always enjoyed helping people, and I think it's myself and probably service oriented professors that I had in school.
GR: Okay, we'll have to leave it there. That was Tom Babilon, he's a candidate for Syracuse mayor this November. Again, keep your eye out for future conversations with the three other candidates. Mr. Babilon, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I enjoyed it.
TB: You're welcome. Thanks for having me on, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Richard Sexton on the Campbell Conversations
Sep 06, 2025
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Are we on a path towards significant unmet hunger, problems in food supply and conflicts regarding food? My guest today is Richard Sexton. He's a professor of Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, and he's recently published a new book, it's titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World". Professor Sexton, welcome to the program.
Richard Sexton: Thank you, Grant. Thank you for having me.
GR: We really appreciate you making the time. So I want to start, as I often do with books, with just sort of laying out some of the basics of the context before we get into the arguments that you make about some of these issues that the title brings up. And I want to just get a brief and basic sense of sort of where things currently stand regarding food and hunger. So first, let me ask you a very, very basic question. How do we figure out or how do we know when a person or a group or an entire people, even a country, is suffering from a hunger problem? Is there some commonly used marker for that? RS: Well, that's actually a great question and the United Nations is the official body that measures that. And you know, they just released their most recent estimates for 2024 and so they, according to the U.N., there's about 700 million people that face hunger and malnutrition routinely and then in excess of 2 billion that are what the U.N. calls food insecure. And, you know, I honestly don't know all the means that they use to estimate that. I'm thinking they're piecing together, you know, various pieces of information, there's no single survey or anything like that. And so I think they're, you know, doing their best to compile data and come up with that. But, yeah, it's probably subject to some kind of error. But the, you know, there's quite a bit of consistency in the numbers across the years. It went up higher during COVID and really stayed disturbingly higher, came down a little bit this past year, but it's those are the numbers we're seeing routinely.
GR: And that's a big, those are big numbers. I mean, that's a decent sized chunk of the world's population.
RS: Yeah, no, there's, you know, about 8.2 billion of us. So, you know, 700 million is what, about 8% of the world that's facing hunger and yeah, malnutrition, stunting, those are routine outcomes in, you know, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. And so, yeah, by no means have we solved the problem as a global society of adequately feeding our population.
GR: You mentioned sub-Saharan Africa. Are there general areas of the world that are more heavily hit by this than others? I mean, I would assume it's the poorer countries.
RS: Yeah, no, absolutely it is the poorer countries. And yeah, the biggest concentration is certainly in sub-Saharan Africa. There's some parts of Southeast Asia where there's a significant hunger problem and, you know, less so obviously in this country and, you know, Europe and so forth. And so the, you know, the real heart of the problem is in sub-Saharan Africa.
GR: And you mentioned less so in the United States. Is this a problem inside the United States, though, nonetheless?
RS: Oh, sure, but an isolated basis. But you know what the United States has that most other countries don't have, is we have very significant feeding programs. So we have, you know, the SNAP or the food stamp program, WIC, Women's, Infants and Children's program, and then the school lunch program. So, you know, we're very unique in countries across the world that we put in place these programs to take care of hunger and malnutrition. Do they work perfectly? No, they don't. And then, you know, there was quite a bit of controversy with the most recent congressional session about cutting back some of these things. And so it's a difficult question but yeah, we've uniquely addressed that problem in this country with those programs, you know, dedicated to putting food in the hands of the right people. Most other places in the world do not have that.
GR: And I hope this question isn't too abstract. And I'm going to unpack this, obviously, as we go on our conversation, but are the are the food problems in the world primarily in food production and food supply or are they more like social distribution and economic fairness issues? In other words, we have the food, it's just not getting to those people for whatever reason.
RS: Yeah, I think that's certainly a big part of the problem. And so, for example, tariffs are a bad thing in terms of distributing food to where it needs to be consumed. And so, yeah, it's a big income problem, right? There needs to be more food going to sub-Saharan Africa, but those are very poor countries. And so, you know, it's not an attractive export destination for a lot of companies that that specialize in those types of things. And so, yeah, it's at least partly a distribution problem that we're not getting to the food to where people need it the most. But then, you know, a very premise of the book, Grant, is that it's probably going to become a more significant problem over time unless we mend our ways in terms of the actual food production itself.
GR: Yeah. And I wanted to get into that with you. Before I do that, though, there was something in your book that really struck me. You've got a couple of sections on it, and I wanted to ask it directly early on. How much of the problem right now comes from wasting food and who are the biggest waste culprits?
RS: Yeah, great, great question and based on the official statistics, which is largely coming from the U.N., about 31% or close to a third of the potential food supply is lost or wasted. And those are terms that the U.N. distinguishes. So they say food loss is everything that occurs from harvest to retail, and then food waste is everything that occurs at retail or in the households. And so that's a big number. And the interesting thing is it's kind of similar across both rich and poor countries. We might think to ourselves that, well, in the poor countries, they'll certainly waste less food, but then they have less means of preserving food. For example, refrigeration is rare in some parts of the world, so food is wasted because it's spoiled. Probably in the rich countries we're wasting it because it's just, you know, simpler and easier to buy a little bit too much than a little bit too little and so, yes, we can reduce that. And the UN, the U.S., the European Union, they all say we're going to cut it in half. I don't think for a second that that's going to happen, but certainly we can improve on that. I mean, one way, the low hanging fruit for that, as far as I'm concerned, is freshness, dates on packages, right? So that we need to, you know, have better understanding of what those dates mean and so that we're not throwing things out just because you know, there's a date on it. Maybe it's a sell by date and not a use by date, but we see a date and it's expired and we toss it, right? So we can do better on that. But I do not think that wasting or losing less food is a real answer to the food production challenges that lie at lie ahead of us. But of course, as it becomes more expensive, there'll be less waste and less loss. But, you know, I think it's a pipe dream to say we're going to cut it in half, which is the goal of, you know, a lot of the main governmental bodies in the world right now.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Richard Sexton, the author of a new book titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World". Yeah, so let's get into that part of the book. First of all, you mentioned something earlier, you said it's going to get worse, these problems are going to get worse. So it's going to get worse if we don't do something different. Why? That may seem like an obvious question, but what are the biggest reasons why it's going to get worse?
RS: Well, one big reason why is climate change itself, right? I mean, the climate has warmed in recent decades, but it hasn't warmed that much. And so based upon all of the forecasts, all the models, the greatest warming is yet to come. And there are a myriad, hundreds of studies across wide ranges of crops, all parts of the world that say that a warming climate is going to be detrimental to food production. I mean, I've got a basic statistic in the book that basically compiles all of this scientific information and then adds in the warmth that our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA is projecting without mitigation, which is 2.8 degrees Celsius or roughly five degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century and I come up with a 14% yield loss. Some of that can be mitigated by adaptation, but not all of it. And so, you know, that's a challenge we haven't faced in in previous centuries. I mean, another great challenge is pest resistance to traditional treatments, and that's happening right now as we speak. And the dramatic thing that's happening, Grant, is that the next generation to replace things like glyphosate or Roundup, as we more commonly know it, it's not in the pipeline. And so when plants achieve resistance to glyphosate, people are going back and using the previous generation of those pesticides which are harmful in and of themselves. Those are the pesticides that we used when I was a youth on the farm all these many, many years ago. So that's just another example of a challenge. And I'll mention one more, it's very, very important because, through the centuries, what saved us from hunger and malnutrition that a lot of people like Malthus and so forth were predicting has been technological advancements. And I'm blessed to have a faculty colleague here at UC Davis, who's the world's leader on research on productivity advancements in agriculture. And what their work showed is that through the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, the productivity growth was about 2% a year, which means essentially we can get 2% more output for a given amount of inputs, land and labor and fertilizer and so forth. But then it basically has been cut in half in the most recent decades, and there's no real evidence that the tide is turning. And that's a dramatic effect, right? Because we can't count on technological advancements to save us as they have in the past, right? A 1% rate of growth isn't sufficient to keep up with the growth rate in demand. And so that's a big, big factor that a lot of people don't understand and know. But then, yeah, so kind of the blithe response to concerns raised by people like myself, oh, yeah, the technology will advance and we'll be fine. That's not true anymore.
GR: Yeah, we'll figure our way out of it.
RS: Yeah.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Richard Sexton. He's a professor at the University of California, Davis and the author of a new book on food and food supply. It's titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World". So, a lot of what your book is about is debunking, like, myths that are popular and are held by policymakers or sometimes deliberately put forward by others and then also spread by the media. What are some of the biggest myths out there right now about food production and supply?
RS: Yeah, a lot of the myths pertain to, you know, different ways of producing food beyond the conventional means that people think are better for the environment and maybe somehow result in better foods being produced and so forth. And all of these, the thing all of these methods have in common and certainly the list includes organic, non-GMOs, production by of local food, small farms and so forth, is that they're all associated with significantly lower yields, right? And so those are examples of, you know, inefficient ways of producing food that nonetheless, as a society we've embraced and in many cases subsidized. And, you know, the consequence, of course, is less food produced off a given land base in agriculture. And then the really unfortunate thing that results when we're either taking land out of agricultural production completely, which is something we do with what we call the Conservation Reserve Program or moving land into less productive means of producing food, is that we cause the land base in agriculture to expand, and that's what they call indirect land use change and we've come to understand that much, much better in the recent decades. And so if the U.S. produces less food, if the Europeans produce less food, people are going to try to produce more elsewhere. And that results in deforestation of the Amazon, of the forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, in sub-Saharan Africa. And there's no dispute that's about the worst thing we can do for the environment. These virgin forests are great sources of carbon sinks, they remove carbon from the atmosphere. You burn them down and clear cut them, you fill up the soil, all its carbon is released. It's, you know, it's horrible for carbon emissions, biodiversity and so on and so forth. But we're causing that. We're undeniably causing that with our policies in the Western countries, the US, Europe, all of our strategies to produce less food. So, you know, frankly, Grant, I don't get it in the sense that the Europeans want to take 10% of their ag-lands out by 2030. The U.S. has 7% of its ag-lands in conservation reserve and we're proud of it. Well, what do we think is going to happen? If we take land out, it's going in somewhere else in the world where it'll probably be less productive and more environmentally damaging. And that's really, you know, the elephant in the room for all of these policies that we're enacting in the name of the environment. If they cause us to produce less food on a given land base, they are going to cause this indirect land use change and they're going to cause deforestation in some of the most environmentally sensitive places in the world.
GR: Yeah, that's a fascinating connection you're drawing. But let me just back up a minute and say organic food, return to small farms, you're skewering some pretty sacred cows there that you know, among a constituency that is not necessarily entirely on the left, but a lot of it is on the left and that's the group that usually voices concerns for things like the rainforest and international concerns about, you know, less wealthy parts of the world. So there's quite a contradiction built in there.
RS: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's and it's quite ironic indeed, yes. Because we might associate those groups of people with the support for these types of food production systems. But then, yes, those people would, you know, tend to be advocates for the poor and so forth. But yeah, there's no basis to deny the fact that if you put into place production methods that are less efficient or if you simply take the land out of production completely, A: you're raising food prices and those that are harmed the most by that are, of course, the poor in some parts of the world to this day, upwards of half or more of people's incomes go for food. And so when we make it more expensive, we really hurt the poorest among us unequivocally. And then yeah, the response to less food availability and higher prices is to, you know, anywhere in the world =to try to produce more food and then it's now it's resulting in deforestation then we cause, you know, great environmental harms. And so again, the ironic thing is a lot of these policies are enacted in the name of the environment, but probably ultimately end up hurting the environment.
GR: Interesting. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is UC Davis Professor Richard Sexton. Okay, so what are the policies and programs that you would recommend that we should pursue and start pursuing now?
RS: Yeah, well, the nice thing is my policy prescription is one sentence, and so it's not very complicated. And that one sentence is, we need to produce food in the places of the world where it's most efficient to do so and using the most efficient means of production. And then, the thing is, of course, that will maximize the amount of food that we're able to produce, but it will also be the best thing for the environment and that's the thing that gets missed, right? Because then we will stop the deforestation, we'll, efficient production, you know, by its very definition means the least resource use, right? And so it's not only that we're stopping the deforestation, but, you know, as we economize on inputs, the fertilizers, the pesticides and all of those types of things, those yield environmental benefits as well. So that’s the answer. That's the simple answer because it addresses both the food production problem and the environmental problem.
GR: Right. So on the ground, what does that mean? Does that mean the United States produces more food, Europe produces more food? Do we do more things in Asia? What would it look like?
RS: Well, it would look like the US stopping, you know, subsidizing people, taking land out of production. The Europeans have the goal for 2030 to take 10% of their ag-lands out of production. So, you know, for most crops, the most efficient producer in the world is the US. The Europeans are pretty good themselves for most crops. So for example, they're more efficient at producing wheat than the US, but corn and soybeans, that's our big strength. But yeah, the most efficient places, you know, that list, I mean, Brazil now has become a very powerful producer of soybeans and corn and so forth. But yeah, we want the most efficient producers to be doing it. That's going to stop the deforestation, that's going to make food most plentiful. And so any of these policies that we're enacting in this country, I mean, we subsidize organic production in this country in various ways, but every time we convert an acre from its conventional form into its organic variant, depending upon the crop and the location, we're going to give up between 30% and 45% of the available yield. So every, say, three or four acres we convert from conventional to organic, we got to put one more acre into production, you know, in order to maintain food production. So the, you know, the idea of land use change applies to things like organic, it applies to things like non-GMO. In this country we're quite receptive and open to GM foods, but they're largely banned in Europe, they're banned in parts of Africa, they're banned in Russia. And so that's been a significant impediment to food production as well because those GM variants are associated with significantly higher yields.
GR: So I'm a political scientist, I want to come back and hit you again with this politics question as I was listening to what you were just saying. There are going to be people, political figures, media people in particular, who are going to hear that and they're going to say, ah, this guy is basically just making an argument for big agriculture. And, you know, he's against organic food, he’s against the small farms, and they're going to just switch it off right away. Do you have a response or a counter argument to try to penetrate that?
RS: Yeah, I mean, coming from psychology or behavioral economics, that's called the disconfirmatory bias, right? We don't we don't want to hear about things that challenge our or beliefs. And so, yeah, I agree that this book challenges a lot of these traditional beliefs, but there's really no denying it, right? I mean, the book itself is meant to be, you know, accessible to a broad audience, it's not laden with a lot of jargon and so forth. But the footnotes are there, you don't have to read the footnotes if you don't want to, but the footnotes document what I'm saying in terms of a vast scientific literature, are there. But Grant, you're right that we don't turn on a dime. And so one thing we haven't talked about is biofuels in this country. But it is a fact that based on productivity potential, we're probably using about 25% of our ag-lands to produce fuel, not food, corn ethanol and soybean oil for diesel fuel. If you back up to the beginning of the century, we were doing almost none of that, right? And so, are we going to phase out biofuels? No way, right? That's ,you know, you're the political scientist and that's built in to the economies of big parts of the Midwestern U.S., where there's powerful senators and congresspeople and they're not satisfied with the status quo. We're all burning E-10, 10% ethanol in our cars but they want E-15, they want E-20, they want corn ethanol to qualify as a sustainable aviation fuel. So it's not less, it's more and we need to draw the line someplace because, yeah, since we enacted that policy in 2005, that's when we passed the Renewable Fuel Standard, there's been lots of research that demonstrates once you factor in these land use changes, the environmental impacts of biofuels are more harmful than fossil fuels. And so yeah, we're not going to get rid of it, but we can at least put the brakes on expanding it.
GR: Yeah, that's a good observation and it's probably not unrelated to the fact that Iowa is the first primary. I even think there was a West Wing episode on that. We've just got about a couple of minutes left and I want to squeeze in one, maybe two more questions, we'll see, but, well, I'll leave it with these two things. So that's from the production standpoint, that's sort of big level policy. What about myself as a consumer? Is there anything I should be doing differently to help you, or to help all of us with this big problem you've identified? Do I give up beef, for example? I mean, give me some pointers here.
RS: Well, I mean, we haven't talked about it, and it would probably take more than a couple of minutes we have left. But, yeah, I mean, meat consumption is an inefficient way of converting land resources into production for foods, right? So that if we did eat less meat, it would take some of the pressure off of the food, the food production systems. But the problem is going to be that as we move forward, as some of the poorer places in the world become wealthier, they're going to want to diversify their diets and that includes eating more meats and dairy products. And so, yeah, for a lot of people, the answer is, oh, yeah, we just need to eat less meats. And yeah, that's not a bad answer, but it's not going to happen, right? People are going to want to eat more, not less. And then, you know, another thing I say in the preface to the book is that if you read with an open mind, if you don't let your biases really take hold, you can save a lot of money in your food budget because things that you're paying maybe double what you'd need to pay for, probably aren't doing what you think they're doing. And so if you, you know, if you read the book with an open mind, you might say, hey, I can spend a lot less on food than I'm spending right now.
GR: Well, you've convinced me on a lot of things. I think the one thing I'm going to hang on to is my beef from my small farm because I like the way that tastes and it seems to taste different now. Maybe we could have those other cows eat the same feed, but you've got me part of the way, not all the way, yeah.
RS: Well, I'll consider that a victory, right? And so, yeah, and I know we're running out of time, and so it's not so much the small farms in in this country because they're not that small, but in a lot of parts of the world, they're just a couple of hectares or two, three acres. And those farms condemn people to a life of poverty, and they're not very good ways of producing food. And so that's the bigger problem, not the smaller farms in this country because they're not that small.
GR: Okay, we'll have to leave it there. Richard Sexton's new book is titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World”. As you've just seen from our conversation or heard, it's a very provocative book and make some very interesting arguments. Richard, thanks again for making the time to talk with me, very illuminating.
RS: My pleasure, thank you, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Christopher White on the Campbell Conversations
Aug 30, 2025
Christopher White( catholicsocialthought.georgetown.edu)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is a scholar of Catholic thought. Christopher White is associate director of Georgetown University's Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. Prior to that he was an award winning reporter for the National Catholic Reporter. He's with me today because he's written a new book. It's a new book on the new pope, it's titled, "Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy". Christopher, welcome to the program, congratulations on this book.
Christopher White: Thank you, Grant. It's good to be with you.
GR: I appreciate you making the time, so. Well, I want to start actually not with Pope Leo, but with the person who preceded him and that's Pope Francis, obviously. You've spent a lot of time following him, watching him, reporting on him. But if you could answer this question briefly, what do you think Pope Francis’ legacy is, at least at an early reading?
CW: Yeah, I think Pope Francis will be remembered as a pope who really saw it as his mission to open the Catholic Church up to the modern world. And he did so in large part by shifting some of the church's major priorities. You had two popes back to back John Paul and Benedict, whose focus (was) primarily on issues of sexual morality, family ethics. And Francis pivoted away from those issues. He didn't disagree with them, but he really focused primarily on issues concerning the poor, the marginalized, the environment and reshifting some of the Catholic Church's global priorities. And in doing so, bringing it I think into a perhaps a more engaged conversation with the world around it.
GR: Okay, thanks. And so let's talk about this process that chose Cardinal Robert Prevost as the new pope last May. As you note in your book, most people with any real impression of the process probably have their knowledge from the movie, “Conclave”. But my first question is, comparing it to that I guess at least, was there that much intrigue and behind the scenes maneuvering, even in a process that is itself behind the scenes?
CW: Yeah. I mean, conclaves always get a tremendous amount of attention because they are, in fact, the most secretive election process on earth. And so there's just a lot of palace intrigue. This year, it felt particularly, the stakes were heightened by the fact that this Hollywood film had come out a few months prior and everyone seemed to have seen the film and had something to say about the process and wanted to follow it closely. The film, I have to say, got a lot right about the actual process. They got the rubrics of the conclave correct. I think it was overhyped in terms of the backroom politicking that's involved. But what it did get right is the fact that it is both the spiritual process where the electors are engaged in prayer and discernment, but yet it is also a deeply political process. And there are serious conversations taking place. And, you know, money isn't being traded or anything of that sort, but there is a sense of you're assessing candidates. And that's where the film absolutely got correct.
GR: So what were the major fault lines or were there major fault lines that emerged in the process that chose Pope Leo?
CW: Well, in a sense, every conclave is a referendum on the pope who came before. And so what the cardinals were doing in the roughly two weeks between the time of Pope Francis's death and the time they enter the Sistine Chapel they were having, you know, honest conversations behind closed doors about what the last pope did well and what is needed in the new pope. And what I argue in the book is that this conclave was really a referendum on Francis's reform efforts to shift the Catholic Church's priorities away, as I mentioned earlier, to a more outward focus and also his overall efforts to make the church more welcoming, more participatory, so less concerned with just the role of the priest or bishops. But where all the Catholics can have a say in the life of their church. And that excited a lot of people under the 12 years of Francis's pontificate, but it certainly alarmed others. And that's what the 133 men who went into the Sistine Chapel were effectively asked to do is say, do we want to continue on this path that he initiated, or is it time for a course correction?
GR: Okay, and I want to talk to you a little bit later about whether you anticipate that there will be some kind of course correction. But let me ask you this different question. You already mentioned that there are politics necessarily in this process. One thing that we have seen in recent decades when it comes to the selection process for Supreme Court justices is a desire among presidents to try to nominate relatively younger candidates if possible. And the reason for that is they want to extend the time of their influence on the court and therefore public policy. And that trend well predates President Trump. I mean, Justice Clarence Thomas is a great example of this, for instance. Were there any similar desires among the conclave regarding that? Let's find a pope who's going to live a long time, in kind of a, relatively speaking, younger pope. I mean, you've got people in there well past 80 that are voting.
CW: Yeah, it's one of those things where there's, no one says this out loud, but there's effectively a sweet spot they're looking for. They want someone young enough to do the job that can keep up with the demands of the office, which in the modern era has included a lot of travel. Popes tend to become jet setters after they take office. They're managing a huge bureaucracy, a 1.4 billion member institution. But as you know, it's a lifetime appointment. I mean, when Pope Benedict resigned in 2013, he was the first pope to voluntarily do so in 600 years. So for the most part you're looking to name someone who's going to be in there till they die. And so, most popes though, most cardinals who vote for popes are reluctant to give that assignment, that job to someone that's going to be in the position for too long because it's hard to have a regime change when you know someone's going to be there for life. And you know Pope John Paul II, who was pope for almost 30 years. And for many people they say perhaps that was a bit too long. So you're trying to look at someone who can, where is that sweet spot? And in the election of Cardinal Robert Prevost, who is 69 years old, they certainly aired younger. So you're looking at probably, you know, if he remains healthy at least a 20 year papacy. So they certainly didn't allow his youth to be held against him.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Georgetown University religion scholar Christopher White. He's the author of, "Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy". So with the relationship between popes and politics more generally is a complicated one, but it's inherent because of the things you've already said. You know, it’s 1.4 billion members, you have this high profile. Were there any concerns in the conclave about choosing an American as pope, given that many parts of the world right now have a problematic impression of America? And it's only that whole concern, I imagine, would have only been underlined by the fact that President Trump entered into the process of this decision making through his social media messaging. So were there concerns that you would detect about choosing an American?
CW: Yeah, I'd say for a long time the conventional wisdom has been that no American is going to be elected pope, you know, and that was for a few reasons. One, there was a sense that among the College of Cardinals, which is a diverse body of over 70 countries of, you know, men from over 70 countries, that America already has enough power in the world as it is. You know, it's a superpower, and they don't need the papacy and the presidency that's just too much, that would be a bridge too far. And I think there's a concern and has been a longstanding concern that in an institution like the Catholic Church that is vastly diverse, where it's growing most successfully is in the global south, that a pope from the United States would, in a sense diminish that the diversity of the global church. And that is why, you know, Cardinal Robert Prevost was in a sense the only American that would have been taken seriously because of his resume. He's a man who spent, he was born and raised in Chicago, but most of his adult life he's lived outside of the United States. The Italian papers referred to him as the ‘least American of the Americans’.
GR: (laughter)
CW: And so I think, you know, it goes to show you, there was some suspicion about an American, but because of his particular resumé, many cardinals chose to overlook that or geography wasn't really the major factor.
GR: And you've met Pope Leo when he was a cardinal, you write about that in your book. What are your impressions of him just as a person?
CW: Yeah, he's an interesting figure, I'd say. The very first time I met him, it was soon after he arrived in Rome to head up this very important office that Pope Francis had asked him to lead. I went in for a meeting with him, and I was just struck by this man who was kind but very, very determined and very serious about the work ahead of him. He asked very detailed questions and he just struck me as someone who walks into any room, any meeting, having done all of his homework and using that particular meeting to do more of it. I went in as a reporter with a list of particular questions and issues that I wanted to discuss. And I was struck how quickly he turned the conversation around and put me in the hot seat to ask me questions. And that really holds true, you know, with many people that I've interviewed that worked alongside him both in Rome and elsewhere, that he's a man of government, a man of governance. He's a real sort of manager. And in that sense, he's quite different from Pope Francis, who was an extrovert and the governance was secondary.
GR: Ah, I see, yeah, that's interesting. So, going back to our earlier conversation and your comments about perhaps a course correction or concerns or referendum on the previous pope, what does Leo's choice signify regarding those fault lines that you discussed?
CW: Yeah, I think it's fair to say that the Cardinals in electing Robert Prevost now, Pope Leo, chose to continue on the same path of reform as Pope Francis. Pope Leo is someone who shares Pope Francis’s same pastoral priorities and instincts. He was deeply shaped by his experience of Latin, you know, serving 20 years in Latin America. And I think his sort of vision of church is one similar to Francis where, you know, he sees the church's role as walking alongside the least of these, the most marginalized in society. So I think it's fair to say that he was fully supportive of Francis’s vision of opening the church up to the world around it, becoming a more dialogical institution. But where the major differences is in personality and approach to management. And I think that's why many of the people who were fully supportive of Pope Francis's vision said, okay, we have this pope that in a sense, opened everything up for us and he started all these new processes, but now we need someone who has the real skill set of a manager to come in and institutionalize these reforms for an unwieldy, complicated, I would say often, you know, archaic, antiquated institution. And let's now elect someone with a different skill set. And that's why they chose Robert Prevost, because they thought he blended those two worlds of the same sort of outlook on church life and the world around as Francis, but with a particular skill set geared toward management.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Christopher White. He's associate director of Georgetown University's Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, and he's the author of a new book on the new pope. It's titled, "Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy". So I wanted to ask you, Chris, you know, each pope comes in, they choose a name, they rename themselves. And so what's the significance of Pope Leo's choice of Leo as a name given perhaps maybe previous Pope Leo's?
CW: Yeah. So he's Leo the 14th and taking Leo is a nod most recently to Leo the 13th, who was the pope, who really had quite a significant reign at the height of the industrial revolution. And he wrote this, you know, what the Catholics call an encyclical. It's a fancy, you know, clunky word for a letter that really said, you know, this was at the height of the revolution saying the church has to stand with workers to be on the side of the workers, in the face of, you know, real dehumanization. And it was, it cemented in a sense, this new era of thought in church life, not as sort of modern Catholic social teaching, saying that the church stands with particularly the marginalized, the poor. And it's more complicated than that but that's the bird's eye view of it all. And Leo the 14th said he's taking that name because in this age, we are seeing a new revolution with technology, particularly artificial intelligence. And the Catholic Church is neither anti A.I. or pro A.I., but the Catholic Church's main concern is that the human person be at the center of conversations about technological development. And I think he sees a particular duty in this as we're seeing just, you know, massive technological change to sort of have a moral voice.
GR: Yeah, that's interesting. And probably something is going to tap a nerve as we go on and continue on with this change. You know, I wanted to ask you this question based on some recent experiences I've had. I was traveling in Eastern Europe, and I like to go to Catholic churches. I'm not Catholic, but I find them very interesting and beautiful. And one of the things that I was reminded of is the pride that people feel when a pope is chosen from their country or even just from their region of the world. I mean, I saw portraits of Pope John Paul II in Hungary and Slovakia for instance. Pope Francis obviously very important to Argentineans and South America more generally, he'll be remembered for a very long time. And as I just said, you know, I'm not Catholic, but I wanted to share with you, I don't get quite the same sense that here in the United States, something similar is going on regarding this new pope. There was a lot of excitement about it at first, but I just don't feel the same kind of, I don't know, what it is like almost like a soccer kind of thing that you that I got in Europe. Am I missing something? And if I'm not missing something, why is there a difference in the United States?
CW: I say yes and no. So on one hand, the Pope Leo story is an afterthought for most Americans, I think, because of Donald Trump, who sucks up all of the oxygen in the room, whether you're for or against the president, he is the biggest news story and he is leaves little room for anything else. So I think you're right that we don't detect the same sort of fervor or enthusiasm. That being said, in July, I spent some time out in Chicago launching the book. And there in his hometown, the excitement was quite palpable. You go down the street and gift shops, you know, that sell Chicago merch are now selling Pope Leo gear. You know, I did a number of events where, you know, just people, they're almost giddy at the prospect of his hometown, his homecoming. He's a White Sox fan, so just this week, they had a moment where they inaugurated this chair at the stadium where he once sat and they had a big sort of, you know, hometown celebration in June where I think that 20-30,000 people came out. So in his hometown, you do get the sense of that in the way that you might in Poland, where there's still sort of such energy and almost a cult around Pope John Paul II. Not the same degree here in Chicago, but it's more detectable there than I'd say in New York or Washington.
GR: Yeah, okay, interesting. So he's early in, but what changes have you noted so far, the biggest ones? And what changes do you anticipate from this new pope? Is it going to be this sort of institutional backfilling of Francis? What else might we expect?
CW: Yeah, I think it's fair to say we just passed the hundred day mark. And, you know, the hundred day mark is not anything that's a useful sort of category when it comes to the papacy, because, as we said, popes are elected for life. You know, if presidents are eager to, you know, show that they're capable of getting things done in the first hundred days, popes have for the most part, a fairly different approach to this and Leo certainly is following suit. He's keeping his cards very close to his chest. I monitor his schedule every morning to see who he's meeting with. And he's meeting with everyone from heads of state to heads of Vatican offices, people that would be seen as, you know, natural allies of him and Pope Francis and also those that perhaps were antagonistic to Francis. So he's showing early on that he wants to listen to everyone, but he hasn't made any consequential decisions. We don't know who his team is yet. He's effectively, you know, a president names a cabinet, his cabinet are effectively the holdovers from Pope Francis. He's reconfirmed everyone to their posts for the time being. And so in the coming months, we'll see him start forming his own team. One of the first big jobs he has to name is he has to decide who's going to replace him at the office that is responsible for identifying and vetting potential Catholic bishops around the world. It's a very powerful job. That will be the first real indicator of what he wants in a leader. And we'll see what he chooses, the profile of that person. So, so far, all we're really left to read are his public speeches. He speaks every Wednesday and then Sunday at the Vatican and then he gives addresses throughout the week. And I'd say the persistent theme so far has been peace. He's spoken more about Ukraine and Gaza than anything else. And that seems to be his front burner issue at the moment.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is Georgetown University's Christopher White. So you just made a comparison a few minutes ago to the presidency in talking about the pope. And one thing that strikes me as a political scientist in that similarity is that the person immediately becomes an institution, right? You've been talking about this person, Robert Prevost, but now he's got a different name. That actually speaks to what I'm talking about, you physically rename yourself. Former presidents often speak of their very first security briefing as the moment when this fact hits them: I am not just a person, I'm an institution. There's a wonderful video of President Obama when he travels for the first time on Air Force One. And you can see this just, you know, this just coming together in his head. I was just wondering if you have any reflections on that as it relates to the papacy, because I would think in some ways the hit of, now I'm this thing, is probably even bigger for a pope.
CW: Yeah. I'd say there are two moments that I'll point to. The first we've already seen, it's the moment when the pope appears on the balcony. That happens typically after about an hour after their election. So they don't have a lot of time to prepare. I mean, you know, this conclave was 24 hours and I think it's fair to say from my own reporting in the book that Robert Prevost probably went to bed on the evening of May 7th with the good sense that he might wake up and be elected pope the next day. His chances on that very first ballot were quite strong. Even so, you know, from the time you're elected to the time you're introduced to the public, it's really 60 minutes, 70 minutes. He gave a short speech, it was about 500 words that he quickly wrote himself but there's no chance to talk to advisers. And so you get a sense of the man and his priorities in that first public appearance. He said the word peace nine times. You could just tell that's kind of what was keeping him up at night and that's his chance to introduce himself to the world. We certainly saw that with Francis in 2013 as well. You know, those initial speeches are moments where you make a first impression. But then I would say related to your anecdote of Obama, papal travel, it's just a chance where you see a pope being forced to have these often unscripted moments. You see them with people at every turn and hopefully he will have his first international trip later this year. It looks like it'll be at the end of November to Turkey and possibly Lebanon. And those are the first moments where he will have a press conference, typically on the way back to Rome. Where, you know, he's put in the hot seat and that's when you get another sense of the man and his priorities and how comfortable he is sort of being unscripted and what he's willing to say. So I'm just saying, you know, for now, stay tuned.
GR: Well, one of the things that that struck me as you were talking and the difference between presidents and popes is they haven't had a year or more of a campaign and a team, it's just this guy. And so it's not like he's, yeah, it's interesting that he doesn't have advisers and he's got 60 minutes to come up with what he wants to say. Yeah, that's quite something.
CW: Including, you know, he's asked, you know, do you accept the election? And then the second question is by which name would you like to be called?
GR: Oh, wow.
CW: And so, you know, even a name which has tremendous weight to it, it’s not a tremendous amount of time to give that consideration.
GR: And then you say, let me think about it, I'll get back to you? (laughter)
CW: (laughter)
GR: That's not going to work in that instance. Okay, so we've got about 2 minutes left. I wanted to put one, perhaps two questions to you, depending on how long you spend on the first one. This first one, you may not be comfortable answering, but I really want to ask it. Were you personally pleased with the choice or were you in a sense rooting for somebody else?
CW: I think I was one of the few journalists that was making the case that Robert Prevost was a real contender. And I have to say I took a lot of flak for that from a number of colleagues, those that thought that I was, in a sense, playing up the idea of an American pope for an American audience. And what I had detected in the ten days or so leading up to the election is that people just didn't see him as an American and geography wasn't going to be a strike against him. And if you remove that from the equation, he ticked all the boxes. And so in that sense, I felt vindicated. I think he has tremendous assets and gifts, and I think he has the potential to be a great leader. So in that sense, yes, I was pleased. As an American, I'm delighted as well. I think at a moment in which we see increased isolationism and sort of resistance to sort of the multilateralism that sort of defined the post-World War II era, to have an American as pope who believes in those things, I think is a very necessary counterweight at the moment.
GR: That's a really interesting observation, I hadn't thought of that at all so I think that's a good place to leave the conversation. That was Christopher White and again, his new book is titled, "Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy". I'd say it's very informative and it's also a very good read. Chris, thanks again for making time to talk to me. I really enjoyed this, really learned a lot.
CW: A real pleasure. Thank you, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Chris Berdik on the Campbell Conversations
Aug 16, 2025
Chris Berdik(Mark Lavonier)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today has written a book that's very near and dear to my heart. It is a screed against noise. Chris Berdik is a reporter and a writer who has a new book out, it's titled, “Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back.” Chris, welcome to the program and thank you very much for writing this book.
Chris Berdik: Well, thank you. Grant, thanks for having me on.
GR: We really appreciate it. So I have to say right off the bat, in recent weeks, I don't know, maybe it's because I'm looking for it, paying more attention, but I've heard or I've read a few stories about the problems with noise. So I was wondering, is the concern about this a new emerging issue? Is it something that the media and the public is now looking at more, or am I just looking at it more, you know, looking for it?
CB: Yeah. I mean, some of it may be that you're keeping your eye out for it now. You know, noise has been around us, you know, for as long as we've been around. And it's been a thing that we complain about for nearly that long. You know, but the thing that's been happening and why I feel like, you know, I felt like this was a book to write now is, you know, we are in a growing planet with more and more people producing more and more noise, living closer together, more roads, cutting through our rural areas. And while there is more planes overhead, there's just a math equation going on here. And then the other part is that, you know, as we've been doing this, we've been sort of sonically shortsighted about how we plan our cities, how we build our buildings and create our spaces. We haven't thought about the sonic implications of all of this. So, you know, it's not a new problem. I do think it's a growing problem.
GR: Sonically short sighted, I love that phrase, I'm going to remember that. Thinking back, was there a historical turning point or inflection point in the problem with noise, you know, where you can go back and say, okay, now it starts to become a problem?
CB: Yeah, I would say that's a complicated question, actually, because, you know, we don't have a global decibel meter or anything like that to sort of say, okay, this is when, you know, we went up ten decibels worldwide. You know, there are plenty of places that are probably quieter now than they were a hundred years ago. You know, I'm from Pittsburgh, and we used to have steel mills up and down the rivers there, and they've all disappeared, you know, but what we e do have, you know, like I said, we have a diminishment of quiet areas, a diminishment of places where we are not set upon by noise. And we also have, I think, now some sort of digital noise to go with our audible noise. I think this is something that is important to keep in mind that this is not just a metaphor when we talk about, you know, the online cacophony that we're dealing with now. Our brains have to sort through all of that, all of those signals and it is an exhausting thing. I think they kind of accumulate.
GR: Yeah, that's an interesting point. I hadn't really thought about that aspect of it. I mean, I have sometimes kind of feel like I have many traumatic reactions when my cell phone goes off because it just kind of just startle(s) me. Well, let's, you know, let's get into some of the problems that that you deeply dive into in your book. First of all, what are the problems with noisy environments for people? You know, what does it do to us?
CB: Yeah. You know, there are a few things that it does to us. And I'll sort of start as I do, you know, with the inner ear. And this is where decibels, which is how we commonly understand noise which I think is kind of overly narrow, but this is where decibels really matter a whole lot. At this point, noise is just brute force acoustic intensity that can damage your inner ears, whether you like the sound or don't like the sound. If there are enough decibels, what starts to happen is that the connections, the nerve endings between your inner ear anatomy and your brain, they basically explode. They're filled with too much glutamate, which is kind of the signal, the neurotransmitter that is, you know, taking what is a vibration coming through the air and turning it into a signal to your brain. It's too much of that, those nerve endings can't handle it. And then what do you start to do is you lose the fine grained pieces of being able to hear, to be able to distinguish your friend's voice from another voice, to be able to hear a noise. You know, when people say that they can hear you but they can't understand you, this is what starts to happen. And then after that, you start to really lose your hearing and you start to need hearing assistance. So the World Health Organization estimates that about 2.5 billion people on the planet will have hearing loss through noise and aging by 2050. So that's the hearing part. But then at a lower decibel level, you start to have disturbances of sleep and chronic stress building up from noise exposure. You don't even need to wake up for your hearing to pay attention to noise in your sleeping environment, because hearing is a defensive mechanism, a defensive sensory system, your eyes are closed, but you're hearing is still awake. And you know, at around 45 decibels worth of say, transportation noise, you start to lose the restorative piece of sleep so when you're sleeping your heart rate goes down, your blood pressure drops. But those perk up again when noise comes into play and over time in a chronic way, that builds up has impacts on increasing cardiovascular disease risk, increasing hypertension, a range of issues that go well beyond hearing.
GR: It's interesting now that you say that, and I'm thinking back again on my own experiences, but there was a time when I was working temporarily but regularly in a city environment which was different for me in my life. And I would always be about two weeks in, you know, it would just sort of hit me like a wall of stress. And I think it might have been having to do with the noise. It's very, very interesting to think about that. So there's levels of problem here for humans. It's psychological, it's the health that comes from some of those things. And then it's actually your ear and your hearing itself. So it gets you on all these different dimensions.
CB: Yeah. It really infiltrates, you know, it starts in your ear, then starts to, you know, cause a whole lot of distraction issues, which we haven't really discussed, but that's a big one. Distraction and being cut off from people create stress. And then, of course, the sleep deprivations that contribute to a number of health problems.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with the reporter and writer Chris Berdik and we're discussing his new book, it's titled, “Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back”. So in your research on this, did you find that some kinds of noises are worse than other kinds of noises? I mean, I understand what you're saying about decibel level and the destructive effects it has, but I guess I'm thinking more psychological, you know, any kind of any kind of patterns there?
CB: There are a couple of patterns. You know, I would dig into these noises, as some people have, talking about their acoustic properties like, are they tonal noises? Now, what tonal noises means is that there's a single frequency band that has the most energy to it. So if you think about a high frequency whine or buzz or a low frequency rumble, research has shown that those types of noises, you know, are very disturbing to most people, that they, you know, can't ignore them, that, you know, especially the low frequency tonal sounds can penetrate walls and travel far distances and you feel them in your chest, you know, that kind of a thing. And, you know, that is a big piece of it. You know, the, how long do these sounds go on for and what is the timing of them if they are at night versus during the day? You know, context is a huge deal. We love to listen to bird songs when we're walking in the woods and it's all part of the experience there with the leaves under your feet and the greenery that you can see and the smell of the fresh air. But some people that have tried to use biosphere like nature inspired sounds in indoor spaces like workspaces have found that birdsong, people can't stand it. They get distracted by it. You know, they don't want to have to hear birds chirping when they're facing a deadline and they're sweating an important project so, you know, it's not just the sound, it's the sound in a particular context that matters a lot.
GR: Yeah, that's interesting. And I don't want to turn this into a half hour of a therapy session for me about noise with you. But, this feeds directly into this as I'm thinking about it, one of my pet peeves in life is noises that I can't control, which kind of relates to your birdsong in the workplace kind of thing. I mean, if it were up to me, I'm speaking, you know, tongue in cheek here, but I'd make wind chimes, I think, a felony. And playing music at a beach or a campground or while you're hiking along a trail, I think I might make that a capital offense. But I'm thinking about this, there's an aspect to this I want to ask you about. I'm fortunate to live where it's pretty quiet, relatively speaking, except in some of my neighbors, you know, break out their power tools for working on the yard. And then I also spend a lot of time in another place that's super quiet, but that's a luxury that a lot of people don't have. Is there a social justice element to this problem with noise do you think?
CB: There is. You know, the research is new on this. They have looked at it in the aggregate, which is looked at census track data, you know, demographics, and compare that to noise exposure based on transportation noise. There's been a big national study of transportation noise exposure. A lot of it is model based on, you know, how many airplanes are going over what the flight routes are, where the highways are, etc. And the research on that level shows that when you are in a wealthier and whiter census tract, you have less exposure to that noise. On a more kind of granular level at the city scale, people have done a lot of research into communities that were previously redlined, which was the practice in the 30’s and 40’s to assign risk for investment into certain areas. And it was, you know, often based basically on, you know, the ethnicity and the racial background of the people living there. And those studies, city after city, have found that in formerly redlined communities, they have more noise pollution in addition to other pollution.
GR: Yeah, I would think it might even extend to how the buildings are built. You know, someone has the money to live in a much more expensive apartment complex. I'm guessing the walls are thicker, the soundproofing is better.
CB: Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's the other part of it. You know, there's an issue of exposure and then there's this vulnerability side. So, you know, if you are in a more affluent neighborhood or just have the means, you will have better windows and walls and soundproofing, you'll have more green space around you to block the sound and also to give you a kind of an acoustic respite.
GR: Yeah, yeah. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Chris Berdik. He's a reporter and writer and the author of, “Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back” and we've been discussing the book and the issues that it raises. So before the break, we were talking about humans, the impact on humans, but there's also a lot of impact on animals that are important. And tell us a little bit about some of the ways that noise has a negative effect on animals.
CB: Sure. So there is some research into how very loud sound can cause a certain amount of hearing damage to animals, but that is somewhat limited. The sort of larger issue is how noise that humans bring into the environment, in particular, say, shipping noise in the oceans, that sort of constant noise shrinks their sensory worlds. That is something that, you know, we don't think about because we're not under the water very long, typically, as long as our breath lasts, I guess. But down there, especially when you're in the depths where the light doesn't penetrate the sounds of those places are very important to aquatic species that need to hear one another to communicate, to find their way when they're navigating, migrating, I should say, to find food, to avoid predators. Animals have to listen. We up here, if we're bothered by noise, we put on our noise canceling headphones where we get in the car and drive somewhere quieter, but animals don't have that luxury. And so the big problem a lot of people, the conservationists have talked about is, they term it sensory smog. So this is both from our noise and our artificial light, just making the world that these animals navigate smaller. And that's a big problem.
GR: Yeah, sensory smog, okay, I'm going to add that to sonically short sighted, this is great. I had read somewhere too that that kind of background noise like you were talking about with shipping in the ocean, but also above ground, really interferes with animals’ abilities to mate because they use sound, and the one thing I think I remember reading about this was frogs, you know, that they use sound in order to mate, the calls that they put out. But for animals, that are living close to traffic, you know, they just can't find each other anymore.
CB: Yeah. I mean, they will, the research has shown that the birds near roads will try to sing louder and similar with the whales, when the shipping goes by, they'll try to call out louder and stay above the background din. But there's a limit. The whales can only shout so much, the birds, likewise. And some species, will just go quiet because they're waiting it out. Like, you know, we might when an airplane flies over too close when we’re in the middle of our conversation, we just stop.
GR: And what about plant life and the planet more generally? Because you've got this argument that it's, you know, it's affecting everything. I mean, I don't want to be again too cheeky, but in the 70’s and the 80’s there was this big concern about you have to talk to your plants, you know, but don't yell at your plants, you talk to your plants. So tell us what you found in that realm.
CB: Sure. I know that there is research directly into how sound directly impacts plants. My research really looked at how sound it affects plants in an ecosystem sort of way in as much as, you know, nothing changes in isolation when we're in nature. There was a study in New Mexico at these natural gas wells where some of them had noisy air compressors to kind of keep the pressure in the gas lines, and some of them didn’t. And the researchers had noticed that at the noisy wells, these two birds, there was a jay bird and another bird, I can't remember the species of it, but these two birds were steering clear of these particular noisy wells. And then they thought, well, these two birds are really important for spreading the seeds of the plants in this area, these trees. So then they put out about a hundred or so plots they demarcated around the noisy wells and the quieter wells and they watched them for 12 years. And over those 12 years, they found that at the noisy wells, you know, there was something like 80% or 90% fewer tree seedlings because the birds had stayed away, they hadn’t spread the seeds. So these things ripple out in ecosystems.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Chris Berdik, and we've been talking about his new book. It's titled, “Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back”. So we can't turn back the clock on everything, we kind of have the world we have now. We can't shut all of these things down, we can't shut shipping down. So I guess I wanted to ask you to talk a bit in the last part of our conversation here about what we can do to manage it and to make it better. How can we be more, you know, to go back to, sonically sophisticated? And let's take this at the individual level first, and then we'll take it out to, you know, in terms of planning and building and the social level. But first of all, how as we as individuals can do a better job of not making ourselves crazy?
CB: Yeah, well, I always say that the first thing we could do, and this is very easy, is to take better care of our ears. Before I started researching this book, I didn't protect my ears whatsoever, using power tools, going out to loud concerts and things like that. Now, I am much more careful following the advice of all the audiologists I’ve been talking to, all the hearing researchers. You know, you start with the little foamy ear protection you can buy them by the bag at CVS. But there's also even a little bit of a step up there. Musicians earplugs, these cost about $30 a pair, but what they do is they block about ten decibels worth of sound at every frequency level so you can hear the music, let's say you're going to show, just as clearly as you would without them, but just a little they take the edge off of it. So I use those a lot and I think you know, the research shows that outside of work environments where hearing protection is sort of required in the loudest environments, Americans use hearing protection about 8% of the time when going out to do loud things. This is a study I think a 2018, a nationwide survey. And so, you know, there's a lot of room for improvement there. And I think we're seeing some of it with a lot of the new devices that are focused on hearing, you know, like the AirPods, Apple AirPods Pro 2. These things kind of have some hearing protection built into them. But yes, we could do a lot better job there. That's the first part.
GR: What about just, I just think also making it important to be in quiet spaces. I mean, is that, is just something like an awareness of that important here too?
CB: Yeah, I think so. I think taking the time to be in those quiet spaces. And, you know, I had to chuckle when you were talking about the folks who now are hiking with the Bluetooth speakers. Because it seems to me to be sort of beside the point where when you're out there, you should take the time to enjoy that quiet. Have a moment to give your ears and your brain that peace of restoration.
GR: So let's bring it out. What can we do more societal and more in terms of how we construct our world to make this better?
CB: We can do a lot more to be sound aware when we are designing our products and our spaces. One great example is with restaurants. These became much noisier in the last 20 years or so because restauranteurs decided they wanted to prioritize kind of a modern industrial look. They took away all of the upholstery and drapes and they put the kitchens in the middle of the dining areas and jacked up the music. And you know, the result was that, you know, people can't talk to one another when they're having a meal. And this has been noticed more and more in reviews and people have elevated it in the Zagat surveys, you know, noise is the number one complaint, it's not bad food or high prices. So what can we do about it? Well, you know, there are now tools that allow people to simulate these spaces before they're built, before they're all put together and dealing with the noise is a bigger problem. To actually, you know, put in the parameters. You have certain materials, a certain number of people and you're going to have your music at this level. What's that going to sound like? And you simulate it and if it's a problem, if people can't have a conversation then you can add sound absorption bit by bit. So you still have the buzz of a kind of a nice, lively atmosphere but it's not the kind of thing that's going to, you know, make you have to sit there in silence while you eat. And so these kinds of tools can be used for restaurants for office spaces, you know, all these places where noise is a problem. It's just part of thinking proactively is kind of how I put it.
GR: Yeah. That's fascinating about the restaurants and the construction of them, the interior, because I have noticed in my life and I thought maybe I was, you know, losing my hearing, but I don't think I am yet, I'm sure it's not what it was when I was young but it's become impossible in many restaurants if there's a table of ten to have a conversation with someone who's not directly in front of you, you just give up. You pretend you hear them when they're talking and you just, you know, go ahead with what you're doing. Well, let me ask you this, are there any countries that are kind of ahead of the curve on this and are doing more than other countries or maybe thinking about the United States? Are there any states that are doing innovative things or is this just something that's in its infancy, this kind of sound awareness?
CB: Well, it is in its infancy. And I would say that in Europe, they have started to focus a lot more, they've already been focused on noise, you know, in a comprehensive way that, you know, they are, they require cities of a certain size throughout the European Union to create these five year noise reports that kind of track where the noise hotspots are in their cities, typically based on transportation noise sources. And they also, if they're a big enough city, ask these places to designate quiet areas, places that have, you know, much lower decibels and to protect those places from noise encroachment. So that is, you know, been a great source of awareness. The question is, what do these cities actually do beyond putting these noise maps together on paper? You know, and when it comes to quiet areas, what is the purpose of a quiet area if all you have is a handful of them in the sort of deepest parts of the largest park on the outskirts of your city? Maybe there's more that you could find that, you know, places that are not just based on decibels but are based on, you know, the greenery of the place there or that people have reported that they find it relaxing in different ways. And there's been some effort to kind of make them more accessible. So there's you know, some places have started to recognize that soundscapes are important and not just decibel levels. The question is, what are the tools that can be used to improve and assess these soundscapes? Those are all very much in their infancy. Those things, you know, the decibel is easy, it's just one number. A soundscape is much more complicated.
GR: Yeah, well, it is complicated. And it is something that I think we're going to need to keep thinking about. That was Chris Berdik and again, his new book is titled, “Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back”, very important book on a very important topic. Chris, thanks again for making the time to talk with me, I learned a lot and again, thank you for writing a book like this.
CB: Grant, I appreciate it. Thanks so much.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Nancy Rosenblum on the Campbell Conversations
Aug 09, 2025
Nancy Rosenblum(Robert Adam Mayer www.robertadammayer.com)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today appears to be something of a political soothsayer. Nancy Rosenblum is a Professor of Ethics in Government and Politics at Harvard University, and the coauthor with Russell Muirhead of a book called, “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos”. Professor Rosenblum, welcome to the program and congratulations on this obviously timely new book.
Nancy Rosenblum: Thank you, Grant. I'm happy to be here.
GR: Well, we're glad you made the time. So let's just start with some basic term definitions. What exactly is ‘ungoverning’ and where does its recent form get its start in our political history?
NR: Well, I think that is, it really is unique to Trump's first term. That is, there are many ways of governing democracy well and many ways of failing to govern democracy well, uncompromising this and, you know, people who are clients not representing their people and so on, we can all think of failings of government. But ‘ungoverning’ is literally the attempt to destroy the capacity for governing. It's vandalizing the machinery of government, and it's unprecedented. And it's so unfamiliar, that we gave it this name and it's literal. ‘Ungoverning’ is not evocative, it's a term designed to say that you can have elected representatives who are out to destroy the capacity to govern.
GR: I love that phrase, vandalizing the machinery, I’ll have to remember that. You know, I kind of thought, you surprised me there, because I kind of thought you were going to say Ronald Reagan, because some people have looked at that administration and said, you know, although Reagan wasn't as aggressive as he might have sounded as a candidate there, I know there are people in the civil service that still will talk about that time as one of the, sounds a little bit like ‘ungoverning’ the way you've defined it.
NR: Yes, we do talk about the prehistory of assaults on the depth and width of what government does. I mean, conservatism has always tried to constrain the business of government. And Reagan, you know, didn't develop that famous sentence that said, you know, somebody knocks on your door and says, I'm from the government, I’m here to help. And so he and other Republican presidents along the way have tried to go backwards, right? To undo certain kinds of regulations, to undo certain kinds of policies and ways of doing things. But they still remained essentially conservative, right? They were not Trumpist-like attempts to destroy the administrative state and to stay so vividly and to have a populist army behind them to do it. Don't forget, you know, Trump, is not a normal Democratic candidate, he is the representative of a radical social movement that he helped to create and that supports what he does. So in all of those ways, previous Republicans and conservatives, no matter how much they wanted to take apart this or that from Roosevelt's administration, didn't begin to make the kind of dent that we're seeing today.
GR: Well, President Trump has been compared to a lot of other leaders around the world, particularly some of them in Europe. So one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, is this a distinctly United States phenomenon or do you see ‘ungoverning’ elsewhere where you could identify it?
NR: Yes and no. And that's a hard question to do in just a few sentences. But I'll say this, there are in other places successful populist presidents or heads of state, right, that rode populist anger into a position of some sort of autocracy where they basically started to take away the elements of democracy, right, and some are still trying and some have succeeded very well. None of them have wanted to destroy the state. Because all of them had some sort of understanding that apparently Trump and his people do not, that you have to be able to govern if you want to be a successful autocrat. You have to be giving your people enough things, right, that there's stability in the society that you're not overthrown. And also because you want to rule, right? You can't rule by fiat in the modern state. So Trump is unusual in his declaration and his carrying out of the declaration to deconstruct the administrative state and to want to have personal rule without the apparatus of a government.
GR: Okay, I'm getting the distinction you're making there. And so, is the main, this may seem like a dumb question but I'm going to put it out there, is the main problem for this then the politics of chaos? How would you identify what the deepest problems are with someone who wants to do this?
NR: Well, I think one problem is that you have the politics of chaos. And let me say upfront why that's so difficult for people, which is that we all have in our lives run by security of expectations. And when all of our security of expectation about our economic well-being, about our health, about the security of our nation from other strong nations, about our work, about whether somebody is going to take away our citizenship, when all of these expectations are violated, or we fear that they're being violated, what happens is you lose your sense of political agency, and that's the end of democracy, when people lose their sense of agency. But I think the first part of what you said, you asked, is it chaos or is it, what was the second choice?
GR: I was throwing it up for you. I mean, you know, is there something else there?
NR: Yes, there is. And I think that what is responsible for this insecurity of expectation and what is clearly chaos is the desire for personal rule. Disrespect for the requirements of any office, whether it's Congress or the administrative state, the secretary of state or the presidency, is a desire for personal rule. That's really a very unusual thing and certainly unusual in the United States, where presidents, no matter how radical they might have been, or a conservative they might have been, understood that they occupied an office and that this office had a certain constitutional status, right? And that they had to (a) very great extent, operate within the limits of this thing called an office. And Trump has no interest in the office and no respect for it. As everybody said, what he wants is personal command, personal rule. And the interesting story here is how he managed to get it and why it's getting worse.
GR: Yeah, we'll come back to that. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Harvard University government and politics professor Nancy Rosenblum, and we're discussing her new book titled, “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos”. You've kind of already answered this, so I guess I'll frame it maybe as a potential general pushback on what you're saying. I'm wondering, is this phenomenon really, ungoverning in a general sense, or would it be better thought of as, for lack of a better term, selective ungoverning, meaning the undermining of certain government functions that are previously supported and maybe bolstering some others like, you know, immigration enforcement? So it's a really, it's more about what government is doing or not doing, and not just government doing things generally.
NR: Well, by our definition and understanding and I think it's sort of generally accepted now, it's ungoverning. It's not that this president who wants to personally rule doesn't do things, he does things right? He raises tariffs, he goes to meetings with world powers, he drops bombs on people, he tries a major effort to militarize deportation and immigration, he does do things. We say that is not governing because it's not through any of the apparatus or within any of the rules or constraints that make a government. What we have is a ruler. What we have in discussion of, the ancients would say, what we have is a tyrant. And the evidence of what I'm saying is if we look at what he has done to the people and the institutions that do the business of governing and always have, that is the Department of Defense or the attorney general of the United States or the Social Security office or any area of policy is dedicated, is made by Congress in a general way, and then enacted by the agencies of our government. And all of that depends upon that apparatus of the Congress making a law and the independent, and the agencies deciding how you actually implement this law with open hearings and so on. All of this has been eliminated.
GR: Now, obviously, Donald Trump is going to be the big culprit in your story and has been in our conversation so far. Are there other culprits here who are culpable and how we've got to this spot?
NR: Well, you know, that's a difficult question to answer. You could say the people who voted for him. It's unclear, especially now in his second term, how many of his, except for very core MAGA followers, imagined that he would be doing what he's doing now, by taking away Medicaid or deporting their neighbors without finding, you know, without any rule of law and without determining that they're criminal, which had been his promise and so on. So we don't know whether, what kind of support he has for what and the polling is very variable. And so do you blame voters when their representatives act in ways that they did not expect them to act? So that's one question. But clearly, there has been leaving the electorate aside, an enormous amount of support for Trump from various quarters. The most important being a long and developed history of wanting to undo the Roosevelt administrative state on the part of conservatives. The Heritage Foundation and the person who now runs the Office of Management and Budget that put out this Project 2025 and so on. And these people wanted to deconstruct the administrative state. They wanted to do it, some of them from money, right? Because if you can raise the money by eliminating programs, you can give them tax breaks. Some of it because they wanted different kinds of technology and so on involved. Some of them because they wanted Christian nationalism. But you had various very powerful social and economic forces out there that thought they stood to gain from the Trump administration. And some of them are now nervous that they're not going to gain and some of them clearly feel that they are. But I say this to say that this this idea of deconstructing the administrative state, shrinking government, giving the president what's called the power of a unitary executive has been advanced for probably 20 some odd years by important factions of conservatism, but shouldn't be called conservatism, but what was called conservatism in this country.
GR: Yeah, I remember during George W. Bush's administration, we heard a lot about the unitary state. You didn't mention members of Congress, and that surprised me in sort of identifying who might be culpable in this. I mean, they're not standing up for the institution.
NR: I could name two other major sources and they were elected by Trumpist populists. They have at this very slim majority, they are completely obeisant. They go along even if they disagree and we know that because they'll say so. Because they're afraid, because they're afraid for their positions, that if they deviate from Trump, he will have the power with voters to get them dis-elected, unelected. So clearly, the Republican Party, as it stands now, which is no longer a conservative party, it is a party in thrall to Trump, is part of this. Now, what's interesting, if I can just say one more word about the Congress, is that he has really emasculated Congress. Many of the measures that he's taken have been refusing, impounding, refusing to spend money that Congress authorized, destroying whole departments like the Department of Education, the Congress made, right? Making appointments, all kinds of interim appointments so that he doesn't have to go through the business of congressional approval. Congressional approval for people no one in the world would have approved, like Hegseth as Secretary of Defense or Robert K. Junior as Secretary of Health and Welfare. I mean, so Congress is culpable, the republican Congress is culpable. And then the Supreme Court did something in 2020 that has been very important. They gave Trump and presumably other presidents immunity for prosecution from any act that they did, any official act that they did as president. And Trump now has this immunity. He can do anything he wants as President. And I can show you some instances of how he's done this, but maybe you want to move to something else.
GR: Well, we'll come back to some of those things in the second half of the program. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Nancy Rosenblum. She's a Harvard University government and politics professor and the coauthor of a new book titled, “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos”. I wanted to come back to what we were talking about before the break there in terms of who you see as most to blame in this regard. And I guess the way I want to frame this question is, are Democrats blame free? Do they have any culpability in where we are today?
NR: Well, they certainly didn't win the election to that extent. That's the requirement for getting Trump in power. I don't think that there are any Democrats who approve of or want what's going on now. So can you say that that a party that was crippled by the fact that their president had to, you know, leave office under the gun very shortly before election, that probably made a terrible miscalculation in the candidate that they ended up with, that was actually delivered to them. But when we say blame, we usually mean something about intentional or moral blame. I don't think the Democrats intentionally lost or have any moral culpability for what we may think of as extremely destructive, anti-democratic, anti-liberal actions on the part of this regime. What the Democrats do now is going to be, you know, hard to watch, and I would doubt whether it will be very successful for quite a while.
GR: Well, yeah, I wanted to ask you about that, because it struck me as I was thinking about the arguments in your book, if they take on what you're talking about directly, they're almost going to have to put themselves forward as, or at least be vulnerable to the characterization I'm about to make, as the party of government, the party of the state. And I don't know whether that's a label they want to put on themselves at the moment, given the current political climate. I mean, how do they get out of that box? They tried being the party of democracy in 2024, and that didn't seem to resonate with enough people. So if they become the party of government and the party of the state, I don't know if that's going to do it much better.
NR: Well, I think that's right. So I think the problem for the Democrats will be how to identify those areas in which people want government and that they want government, not the way it's always been before Trump, they want government that's reformed and more responsive and doesn't try to do too much and does a lot of deregulation that, you know, they would have to do to identify what kind of governing, who wants, where. And that's why I think that this next, the elections coming up, this one in the next and so on are going to have to be mainly talking to people in the states. And that the presidential candidate, you know, has got to depend on their success to win. But I would not be surprised if the Democrats are brought back to office, because, you're right, they're identified with a government that people rejected for different reasons. Some because they were too liberal, some because they weren't really terribly conservative or Christian. I mean, there are all kinds of reasons. And even if Trump, they're abused of their infatuation with Trump, it's not clear that they will vote for the Democrats. So this is, I'm not an election person, but I think this is a hard row and I won't be surprised if the Democrats don't. Of course, it will also depend on what happens to Trump if indeed he has an election and there are many political scientists who think that he may very well obstruct another election. If he dies in the meantime, he's an elderly man, will the Republican, will Vance be able to compete with an attractive Democratic candidate? There's no way to answer your question, but it will be a rough road. And your initial skepticism is well put.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the Harvard professor, Nancy Rosenblum. So, you know, you track the origins of this in Trump's first term, we're seven months into a second term that has just seen a whole flurry of different kinds of activity and you've been describing different aspects of it. Is this just something that's been turned up two or three notches, or are we seeing something in recent months that's different and new? What's changed?
NR: Well, I think his capacity to really deconstruct the administrative state and evolve things has changed dramatically for political reasons and then for others. So some of these things I've mentioned, I think there have been three developments that make this a whole different landscape than it was four years ago and one has to do with the appointments he's made. And, you know, we always say that what he wants is loyalty, what he wants is loyalty, people who are submissive. Well, yes, he wants that, but he wants something much more. He has picked people for his administration who incarnate ungoverning, that is, who hate the institutions that they've been assigned to lead. RFK Jr., as I say, is the best example of that. You really want someone there who is an anti-vaccine person or anti-science to put federal money away from the sciences and health? Or an attorney general who's hostile to the Constitution? Or somebody in charge of national security and intelligence, who doesn't want intelligence, who looks at things ideologically? So Trump is announcing by his appointments and the Congress, by going along with his appointments, that he is out to destroy these things. He appointed someone to head the Department of Education, whose philosophy was get rid of the Department of Education, I mean, so that's one thing. The appointments that we've watched have told us an important story, that this is about wreckage, not about governing. I think there's a second and probably a third real change. And that there's been a real change in the law since he was first there. I mean, I mentioned before that the Supreme Court granted presidential immunity of a kind of blanket kind if a president is fulfilling his official duties as president. And many, many people from these associations like Heritage and so on, have spent the last four years looking at the law and figuring out how he could get around things. I'm going to give you one example, all right, the president is in charge of foreign policy. That’s where the imperial presidency has always lodged its authority. So Trump has translated a lot of things that are domestic into foreign policy things, right? That's clearest with his deportation business, he's no longer just saying that he's getting rid of criminals and immigrants and then going at the border. He's saying that this is a foreign invasion. When he goes after demonstrators in Los Angeles, he says this is an alien, the Alien and Sedition Act applies. So one of the clever things he's done and so far done successfully is to say, well, they say I can do anything I want as president and this is what presidents do. So I think the legal doctrines combined with the courts have allowed him to sweep things away. And he has said, he says and I have in article to power, that means I can do anything I want as president. He thinks that and he's proceeding on that path. They've also, by the way, developed legal strategies for bringing these cases to court, even where they think they don't have good advocacy, you know, position, constitutional or legislative positions, but they have figured out, and we know that Trump himself is an expert at this, figured out how to how to appeal and appeal and appeal and these cases go on forever. And by the time the case and the Department of Education gets resolved, finally, there will be no Department of Education. And when you’re deconstructing, you can't go backwards. But what's done is done. And I think that's the saddest thing of all.
GR: Well, one of the things that also struck me that might fit your characterization there regarding foreign policy is tariffs, too, and the way that they're done. We only have about a minute and a half left. I wanted to make sure I got this last question in because it relates to something you said right at the end there. After these things are unraveled, you know, it's harder to, it's hard to build Humpty Dumpty back together again. Setting aside the partisan politics, if we could, just how does the administrative state recover? I mean, what needs to happen? It would take I guess, a president and a Congress that are really engaged in building things if all you're saying is correct. So how do you see that happening? Is that is that a generational effort?
NR: Well, I think you're right, I think that you're right. You know, I've talked to a lot of people who have been either fired from administrative agencies of one kind or another or are still working there, but working under fear. And it's unclear how you would reconstitute the tens of thousands of people who have left and are going to leave government, people who know how things work, how to make things work, right? How to obey the law in making things work. And you're losing these people in a massive way. If he has his way, it's going to be hundreds of thousands of federal workers. And some of them are relatives or relatives of mine. And it's so, how do you get them back? Is a younger generation actually want to go in government? I mean, I think but even if they do, even if you can reconstitute a population, you know, a population of federal workers who are knowledgeable and who understand the processes it's going to be hard to repair.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it on that depressing note. That was Nancy Rosenbloom. And again, her new book is titled, “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos”. She wrote it with her coauthor and colleague, Russell Muirhead. Professor Rosenblum, thanks again for making time to talk with me. Very interesting topic, thank you.
NR: Thanks for asking such great questions.
GR: I appreciate that. You're listening to Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Alan Dershowitz on the Campbell Conversations
Aug 02, 2025
Alan Dershowitz(<a href="https://alan-dershowitz.com/">alan-dershowitz.com</a>)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I’m Grant Reeher. My guest today is the lawyer, law professor and writer Alan Dershowitz. He’s with me to discuss his new book, decades in the making, titled, “The Preventive State: The Challenge of Preventing Serious Harm while Preserving Essential Liberty”. Professor Dershowitz, welcome to the program and congratulations on this new book. It's your 56th, I believe?
Alan Dershowitz: It is, thank you so much. I've already written my 57th, so I'm on the way to hopefully to 60, that's my goal.
GR: All right, you're within shouting distance. So this is what I would call a big book, even though it's concise. And I wanted to start our conversation by quoting something from Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's forward to the book, just to set the context so that our listeners will have a good understanding of what you're doing here. He says the book provides new ways of looking at an old problem, which is this: how without sacrificing too much or too many of the values that society seeks to protect, for example, individual liberty, can society prevent the occurrence of events, behaviors, activities that will harm components say members of the society? And indeed, this sounds to me like the problem that James Madison is wrestling with and his famous Federalist Paper Number Ten. So it's a question of giving government enough but not too much power and of giving it the right kinds of power in the right moments. So you begin your book with a discussion of prediction and prevention, and I wanted you to tell us about those concepts and how they structure your argument.
AD: Sure. Governments are always trying to anticipate the future. This goes back to the beginning of time. The Bible talks about how you anticipate violence by young children and prevent it. So we've always done that. The problem is we haven't had a jurisprudence or a framework for analyzing whether we're doing it correctly. It's the essence of human lawmaking that we will always make mistakes. In this case, we will make some mistakes by predicting things that will not happen or by failing to predict things that will happen, both are bad. Failing to predict what Nazi Germany did in the 1930’s cost 50 million lives. Over-predicting what Japanese-Americans might do in the 1940’s resulted in 110,000 Japanese-Americans being falsely confined in camps for things they would never have done. So we constantly make mistakes and the question is, do we error on the side of protecting liberty, do we are on the side of safety? These are hard questions and we have to address them.
GR: And it reminded me a bit of what I see often in the medical field about tests and screenings where you have false positives, false negatives and you're weighing those two things. Are you for all on that at all?
AD: Exactly right. Take, you know, for example, colon tests, you know, you can take your colon test and some doctors recommend them telling you there are a lot of false positives that you might be told you have colon cancer and then the second exam will show you don't. But if you fail to do it, then maybe you'll have colon cancer and you won't know about it. And so there are always the tradeoffs and the balances. I fight with my grandson all the time, my grandson is a cardiologist fellow at a major university, and he thinks I'm over medicalized and I think I'm under medicalized. So, you know, at age 86, I want to make sure it all goes right. But he is in favor of fewer tests and I'm in favor of more tests. He doesn't think, for example, old guys like me should have a PSI test of the kind that, PSA that President Biden didn't have and failed to pick up his cancer. I say, yeah, tell me false, I'm happy to live with that. And so, you know, these are reasonable disagreements. Now that involves cancer, but what about if it involves nuclear attacks? What if it involves terrorism? What if it involves keeping people in jail, denying them bail for something they didn't do? These are all very, very, very difficult questions.
GR: Yeah. And just those examples that you gave me, it reflects the variety of things that we might want to prevent that you take up in your book and is really quite striking. It runs the gamut from presidential assassinations to global environmental catastrophe. So what I wanted to do for a good chunk of our conversation here together was to take a few of these and have you tell us how your framework leads you to conclusions on them.
AD: Sure.
GR: And so I wanted to start actually with the presidential assassinations and you discuss attempts on the life of Andrew Jackson, you take that all the way through to Donald Trump. So how do we think about the balance there? What's the right place to strike?
AD: Well, here we have a situation where a presidential assassination is cataclysmic. It can change the world. Look, Lincoln's assassination changed the history of our country. We've had more attempted assassinations that almost any other Western democracy, starting with Andrew Jackson. And, you know, that was a failed attempt. Franklin Roosevelt, 100 years later was a failed attempt. Harry Truman was a failed attempt. They tried to kill Gerald Ford. But there have been too many successful attempts, you know, Garfield and obviously Kennedy and Kennedy's brother and the thankfully unsuccessful attempts on President Ford. How much power would you give the Secret Service? Certainly, they messed up a year ago when they failed to anticipate somebody going on the roof in firing range of Donald Trump. That was an easy one to the stop, but many others are far more difficult and would involve intrusions into the lives of people. We have are called red flag laws which take away guns from people, guns that are protected by the Second Amendment based on predictions that maybe they will misuse those guns. So these are decisions we make all the time and what we lack is the jurisprudential framework analyzing the cost of one kind of error versus the cost of another kind of error. And in my book, “The Preventive State”, I try very hard to suggest for the first time really in history, literally for the first time in history, a book that presents a jurisprudential framework for what we've been doing for thousands of years, making predictive decisions, locking people up, killing them, doing things that deprive people of freedom based on uncertain predictions.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and we're speaking with law professor and writer Alan Dershowitz, and we're discussing his new book. It's titled, “The Preventive State: The Challenge of Preventing Serious Harms while Preserving Essential Liberties”. So you talk about creating this jurisprudence framework and I wanted to push you a little bit on that and tease out what, so, I understand that this is you know, we're looking at estimating risks of bad things and then estimating the risks of bad things that might happen from trying to prevent those bad things, but how do we go about measuring this stuff? I mean, it seems to me that the devil is going to be in the details here. How do we measure the cost?
AD: Well, the question about crimes that have already been committed, we don't always get the right people. And so we have to ask ourselves, what if we make a mistake? What kind of mistakes do we prefer? And we've come up with this aphorism, better ten guilty go free than one innocent to be wrongly confined because we know life is probabilities. It's interesting, I had an interesting insight the other day. My wife and I were, believe it or not, in Monte Carlo. And so what do you do if you're in Monte Carlo, you gamble. And you know, I ended up losing $30 at the table. I found myself being a card counter. How was I card counter? When I saw them hand out a lot of, you know, a lot of face cards with pictures on them kings, jacks and the queens, I would say, oh my God, you know, there are fewer left in the deck let me bet this way. Life is card counting. We're constantly making decisions based on what we see happening around us. It's called, you know, Bayesian Analysis in mathematics. And so we're always making these probabilistic decisions. We're never completely certain about almost anything and we're always going to be making mistakes. And law is the science of how we assess our mistakes and where we balance mistakes of one kind versus mistakes of another kind. But we tend not to think of it in terms of probabilistic considerations and that's what I try to do. I used to teach a class at Harvard College and law school class on mathematics in the law probabilities in the law. And, you know, we introduced all kinds of mathematical formulas and conceptions into things like probable cause, proof beyond a reasonable doubt and other obviously probabilistic determinations.
GR: I wanted to ask you a question about a couple of the things that you write about where recent examples have been in the news. And one that struck me was that your discussion of harmful police interventions and you include police shootings in that. And it reminded me of the shooting of Breonna Taylor, the 26 year old African-American woman who was killed by police in Louisville. It was recently in the news due to the sentencing of one of the officers involved in the shooting. And so how do you go about weighing some kind of balance like that?
AD: Well, it's very hard. You know, it's the middle of the night, it's dark, people are shooting at you, you value your own life more than the life of somebody who might be a criminal. And you(‘re) going to err on the side of protecting yourself and your colleagues over protecting the lives of somebody who might be firing at you. And so the law has to make a decision as to how to treat it if it goes wrong. There's a leading Supreme Court decision on that, which was right in that decision. A young man robbed or burgled a house and he was running away and he was climbing a fence and he would have escaped had he climbed the fence, but he didn't have a gun and the police shot him in the back and killed him. And the Supreme Court said, no, that was in violation of the Fourth Amendment. It's better to allow some people to escape than to kill somebody who was not going to harm anybody else, even though he had committed a previous crime. So the court has struggled with that on an ad hoc basis without coming up with a complete jurisprudence for it. And, you know, we're at a stage in our development where maybe we're not ready for a complete, thorough final jurisprudence. But in my book, “The Preventive State”, I at least lay out what I think is the beginning of a jurisprudence and let's continue to have debates over time.
GR: Yeah, it reminds me, the way you just described that, it also reminds me of the breaking off of police chases and cars, yeah. When do you stop that and under what conditions…
AD: Yeah, and do you do more harm than good when you try to chase down a car and you're going 110 miles an hour and the risks to civilians and citizens. Look, the book, “The Preventive State” deals with the widest range of actions that governments take, ranging from, you know, inoculating people against communicable diseases to doing what the United States did in Iran a couple of weeks ago, a preventive bombing of nuclear sites. That's why this is the most important book I've written of my, you know, 58 books. But interestingly enough, the New York Times refuses to review it. They have never reviewed a single one of my book since I defended Donald Trump. They reviewed almost all of my books before that. But once I defended Donald Trump on constitutional grounds, I have been censored and canceled by the New York Times and by other institutions, which is why I'm so pleased to be able to be on your show and get directly to readers who can then buy the book directly from Amazon instead of having to go through the filter of the New York Times, which censors and decides which books it wants people to read. I'm on Chilmark in Massachusetts now on Martha's Vineyard and the Martha's Vineyard book Fair starts next week. They won't have my book because I defended Donald Trump before I defended Donald Trump, every one of my books, I was the most popular speaker at the book fair, but now they won't allow me to speak about my book. That's why I have to go directly to sources and directly to readers out there to urge them to read the book and not allow institutions that are against Donald Trump, by the way, I'm not a political supporter of Donald Trump, I'm a constitutional supporter, but I have to be able to get directly to the readers. So thank you for having me.
GR: Well, the book really is about other things than this. And so I'm kind of surprised to hear your stories about getting shut out of those. You’re listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with the lawyer, law professor and writer Alan Dershowitz. We've been discussing his new book, it's titled, “The Preventive State: The Challenge of Preventing Serious Harms while Preserving Essential Liberties”. So you mentioned before the break about getting shut out of certain venues here on this book. And that kind of leads directly into something I wanted to ask you about, which concerns the institution where you where you taught for so many years, Harvard. And so you also examine problems of offensive or dangerous speech. And again, that's been in the news recently as Harvard has argued its case against the Trump administration for cutting off its federal research funding. And it seems to me, I'm thinking about that through the lens of your book, you've got two different free speech claims that are running up against each other in that instance. I mean you’ve got, in a sense, you've got the concerns of Jewish students who are at Harvard, but then you've got Harvard's concern about telling the faculty what they're going to teach or are going to act or what they're going to do with their DEI program. So any insights there about how we go about balancing that and thinking about that one?
AD: Sure. The key is to have a single standard, not to have a different standard for Jewish students and for black students and gay students. If you can say things negatively about gays and blacks, then you can say it about Jews. But if you can't say negative things about certain groups, but you can say about others, that's a clear violation of the spirit of the first amendment. Look, Harvard has not done a particularly good job, particularly some of the schools, the divinity school, the public health school, the Carr program on human rights have all become very, very biased. The divinity school, worst of all, it not only tolerates hate speech against Jews, it actually teaches it. The dean of the divinity school at graduation compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and they gave the valedictorian speech to a man who was arrested and prosecuted for attacking Jewish students physically. So you know, there are limits to what universities should do. But for me, the greatest limit is the single standard. You have to have one standard for everybody, you can’t have double standards that invidiously discriminate against certain groups. But DEI and intersectionality, which are taught at places like Harvard say you should have a double standard. Intersectionality says there are two groups in the world, the oppressed and the oppressors and the oppressed have no rights, the oppressed have all the rights, the oppressed ones have no rights. So they justify a double standard, but universities can't do that. And we learned that lesson in the 50’s when the federal government did intrude against University of Mississippi, University of Alabama that were teaching white supremacy and segregation and academic freedom didn't prevent the university from saying no, that violates civil rights laws. And what's being done at some universities today violates civil rights laws. So an appropriate balance has to be struck.
GR: So I wanted to have you kind of zoom out from these specific examples and tell me whether there is, in your view, some kind of, I don't know, rules of thumb or some kind of hunches that we can follow when we're trying to actually weigh these things. Because, again, the devil is in the details in a lot of these. And so, do you have any sort of places where you start, you just gave me one what the single standard sort of that's a way to guide our thinking there. Are there are other ones that you’ve put forward?
AD: Yeah. The other is always err on the side of freedom against safety. You have to give weight to safety, but as Benjamin Franklin said, those who would give up essential freedoms for a little bit of safety deserve neither. And so we always err on the side of, we should always err on the side of freedom, we generally err on the side of safety. And then the other thing is we have to articulate everything, nothing should be done in secret. Transparency is the key to everything. Let me give you an example, in the book I talk about, would you ever use torture to prevent a mass terrorist attack, say, attack on New York City with a nuclear bomb that would kill 100,000 people? Would you ever use torture? And the answer, of course, is they would, but they would do it secretly. They would never expose it. And so in my book, I talk about maybe having to get a torture warrant, having to go to the chief justice and having to get approval of all three branches of Congress before you do it. I'm against torture, but it would be used if it could prevent mass casualty attacks. We already did use it following 9/11. 9/11 was a failure of prevention. And as a result of the failure of prevention, we overreacted and gave government too much power. The same thing was true, Pearl Harbor was a failure of prevention. And after that we overreacted and put 110,000 Americans of Japanese origin into camps. So one of the virtues of prevention is it stops us from overreacting if we fail to prevent.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. So when I was looking at your writing and the chapter on global catastrophe or global warming, one of the things that struck me in thinking about how difficult that would be is that, and I think it, you know, affects all these categories is, oftentimes the very terms of the debate are subject to debate. We don't even agree on whether something is a problem and for whom it is a problem of what qualifies to think of it in certain ways. And so what do we do there when we can't even really, you know, you and I might weigh things differently, but we may not even be able to agree on what we're talking about in the first place. How do you get a shared language in your jurisprudence that way?
AD: Oh, you're absolutely right. There are people who don't believe in global warming, there are people who think that these are just natural phenomenon that have occurred over the last millennia. So it's hard to get a conversation like that. All I want to do, and in my chapter I say we have to, again, balance, you know, the extremists on both sides are wrong. We can't do everything in the world to prevent global warming if it causes massive unemployment in this country and if it raises prices to an extent that we can't afford. So we have to strike appropriate balances. And you’re right, it's very hard to do if we can't even agree if there is global warming, and so that's probably the most difficult chapter. There are other areas where we definitely can agree on the harms. The question is how much are we prepared to sacrifice in order to stop those harms? And there's a big difference between a single crime and a mass terrorist attack or between inoculation and preventing the spread of COVID. There, there was great disagreement also about the science. And all it was necessary to do is have a transparent debate and reasonable people could disagree. I'm not in favor of compelled vaccinations except in the most extreme cases. And in my book, I quote George Washington's letter to his troops in which he said, we might not lose the war to Great Britain, but we might lose it to smallpox if we don't get inoculated. But that's not a paradigm because presidents can't tell us what to do. They are commanders in chief of the army, they're not commanders in chief of the citizens.
GR: Well, I did want to ask you a question, you mentioned earlier about the fallout that you've had from some of your, you know, legal dealings regarding the president. I wanted to ask you about President Trump more generally. You know, many people see him as currently as a threat to democracy. They're quite worried about it, particularly this second administration, the one that we're in the middle of. What do you make of this concern? Are we in a constitutional crisis?
AD: We're not, we're in a constitutional conflict. President Trump has pushed the envelope further than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, I'm not old enough to remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, but Republicans thought we were in a constitutional crisis then. He was expanding the power of the federal government dramatically, expanding the power of (the) executive branch of the government with administrative agencies and working with very brilliant lawyers to try to constrain Congress and constrain the courts. He wanted to pack the courts. People thought that was a constitutional crisis. We survived that, we'll survive this. We have the flexibility in our Constitution to resolve these issues. Now, this president, unlike two prior presidents, this president has never said that he would disregard the definitive ruling of the Supreme Court. Andrew Jackson did, and so did Abraham Lincoln and maybe Thomas Jefferson, there's a dispute about that. But we're not in a crisis, we're in a conflict. And so far, the framers of the Constitution get the best of it and gave us the mechanisms to be able to avoid turning the conflict into a crisis.
GR: You know, I want to squeeze in one last question. We've just got a couple of minutes left, but I wanted to say very briefly to that, I just got done teaching this summer course with high school students that are getting college credit. And I asked them that question, are we in a constitutional crisis? And the whole class said yes. The only no votes were myself and my graduate assistant teacher (laughter). So I don't know if there's a generational thing there about that, but I just, I think the guardrails are still holding up, but it is a source of concern.
AD: I think there is a generational dispute. People who are old enough to remember that we've been through this before. Segregation, Brown versus Board of Education, people thought of that as a constitutional crisis. Our Constitution is the longest enduring constitution in the history of humankind. And I think it will endure even longer and we’ll make sure that this conflict does not turn into a crisis, at least that's my great hope.
GR: So in about a minute left, I have to ask you this question, because you end on a very, with a very intriguing sort of post chapter where you write about the ancient rabbinic approach to prevention. And I wanted to hear what we can learn from that.
AD: Well, you know, the rabbis almost always ask the right questions and very frequently came up with the wrong answers because they had different values. But back during the rabbinic times and even in the Bible, we thought about prevention. The Bible talks about how you treat a recalcitrant child who may turn out to be a criminal. And the answer was terrible, stone him to death. No, no, don't stone him to death, teach him. So the Bible, the rabbis, the priests have always come up with brilliant questions, and we ought to take those questions very seriously. But with experience, we have learned that we have better answers. It's always a work in progress. And my book, “The Preventive State” is designed not to end conversation, but to start conversation and hopefully conversation through the generations. If there's one book for which I will be remembered, you know, over the next hundred years, I've written, you know, close to 60 of them, this is that book because it asks the most important questions.
GR: Well, I'm glad I had a chance to talk to you about it. That was Alan Dershowitz, and again, his new book is titled, “The Preventive State: The Challenge of Preventing Serious Harms while Preserving Essential Liberties”. It's an important book, a deep book, but it's also an interesting read. Professor Dershowitz, thanks again for making time to talk with me, I really enjoyed this.
AD: I enjoyed it, too. Thank you so much for having me on.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations and the public interest.
John Mannion on the Campbell Conversations
Jul 26, 2025
State Sen. John Mannion (D-Geddes) is planning to run for New York's 22nd Congressional District. (Ciara Feltham / Mannion for NY)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I’m Grant Reeher. We're just over six months into John Mannion’s first term in Congress, so it's a good time to check in with him. A lot has happened in Washington since that time. He represents New York's 22nd congressional district, which contains all of Onondaga and Madison counties and portions of Oneida, Cortland and Cayuga counties, including the cities of Syracuse, Utica and Auburn. Congressman Mannion, welcome back to the program. How are you holding up?
John Mannion: I'm holding up, absolutely. You know, I signed up for this, I couldn't be prouder to represent the place that I love and the place that I've called home for a very long time. So it is, I would say, my classroom experience and my state legislative experience and having good people around me have all been essential to, you know, us getting off the ground. And, you know, my line is that being in the classroom for almost 30 years, I know how to work with juvenile behavior.
GR: (laughter)
JM: And participate in it apparently also.
GR: Yeah, I’ve got to ask you about that. But first, as someone who grew up in Washington, D.C. area, before the advent of universal air conditioning, I have to ask you, how are you adjusting to a D.C. summer?
JM: Well, listen, I loved winter because I would walk around with just my suit coat on and I would get a lot of attention. People would be like, oh, that's the guy from Syracuse, right there. So I've lost a little bit of that attention and now I'm just resigned to the fact that my blood's a little bit thicker than most of the folks that I serve with. And when I walk from one place to another in between buildings, I'm probably going to have some sweat on me by the end. So I remember to bring a handkerchief or some Kleenex and towel myself off, but it is, I will take an upstate New York level of heat and humidity any day of the week now, I can tell you that.
GR: (laughter) Well, we've had a bit here, too. So let me ask you, you just alluded to this when you first started speaking, you appear to have found your voice or I guess maybe your yell in recent weeks on the floor of the House of Representatives and also at an anti-Trump rally that was up here in the district. It does seem a departure from your style as a state senator. So I'm just curious, where is the change coming from?
JM: Well, we're in a different space in this country right now, you know, so, you know, as far as the audio being caught on C-SPAN, you know, I mean, that was not my intent at all. But what we're watching are a series of unprecedented acts and the following and checking off the boxes of Project 2025, which is all extremely concerning, I think, to the vast majority of people in the 22nd District. Now, Trump is going to have his true believers, and certainly many of those will believe that these are part of the targeted attacks against him. But when we talk about, you know, the release of January 6th insurrectionists, the blanket pardoning or the defiance of court orders, also the demonizing of the judges, many of whom were appointed and approved by a Republican president, Republican legislature. So all of these things are unprecedented. And I served in Albany in the majority, and I just didn't cede my power to the governor and allow for executive actions to rue the day. So I did a lot of back door and front facing negotiations because there were certain things that absolutely did not work for New York 22. Now, that's the state level, this is the federal level. People are terrified and they continue to be. And the feedback that I have received over and over again has been very positive in my pushback. Did you stand up for the Constitution and stand up for the institution of the House of Representatives, like, you know, when it comes to appropriated dollars? Initially, what the president did was throw out these executive orders that are beyond his powers to be able to do so, to stop appropriated dollars. Now, what I would give the legislature credit here, even though I disagreed and voted no, is they did put through a rescissions package where they did follow, you know, in a narrow way they can do that. That's what that's what should be done and that's what our democracy has done in limited instances. So I reference Albany because they didn't just stand there and go along I wasn't just a team player to be a team player. And I expect that of my Republican colleagues. I expect them to do the right thing, stand up for the institution and stand up for the co-equal branches of government.
GR: Have you had a chance to actually meet face to face with President Trump yet?
JM: I have not. I've been in the same room with him of a couple of times, but I have not met face to face with him.
GR: Okay, all right. This is still very early days, you know, as I said, we're just past six months, and you are in the minority party, but have you been able to push forward and get any traction on legislation so far? Any progress there?
JM: So, per our previous question, you know, I'm doing two things. I'm doing my, you know, standard operating procedure here of co-sponsorship of bills, submitting bills through committee. And then I'm also doing what I said I was doing, which is when things are unprecedented and unlawful, un-American, violate our norms, I'm calling those out. So we have, you know, I voted against the bill, the reconciliation bill for a number of reasons, increasing the debt, you know, passing tax cuts to the wealthiest, cutting SNAP and cutting Medicaid, which is going to have a massive impact and we can talk about that. But I've submitted multiple pieces of legislation or co-sponsored them. One of the most recent ones that I'll be submitting is a local journalism grant. We actually passed something similar in the state to make sure that our smaller local journalistic institutions can survive. It's just essential to make sure that there's reporting and truth on really, you know, issues that are that are local and beyond. I did it in the, I co-sponsored something that ended up in that bill was the reason I mentioned it, which was an enhanced tax credit for semiconductor chip manufacturers. I am not the lead sponsor on that, I was a co-sponsor on it. But it is going to help to make sure that we do onshore semiconductor chip manufacturing in this country and that we do it, you know, as we know here in Clay, New York. So, I’ve got another piece of legislation that is similar to John Katko legislation that didn't ever get over the line related to employment of our veterans, the name of it is Onward to Opportunity Act. It's along the lines of the Great Veterans Program at Syracuse University to enhance, you know, career development, post military service as our veterans, our heroes, enter civilian life, so I keep doing those things. As I mentioned, one piece of that legislation ended up in the larger bill. And that's a good thing for central New York. And that's what I'm committed to is to be a good representation of the district.
GR: You’re listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Congressman John Mannion. The freshman representative is in New York's 22nd congressional district. So you mentioned John Katko there just a second ago. So, is one of the approaches you're taking in the legislative efforts is to try to get Republican people on these bills as well as Democrats?
JM: Absolutely. It's going to be you know, existing in the minority conference here, that's absolutely going to be essential. And I just referenced that veterans bill, that's exactly what we're doing. We're going, moving, you know, building alliances with Republican colleagues, particularly those who served in the military, some of whom that we have connections to, either because they're members of the freshman class or they represent a similar district. So that's what you've got to do. And I know, living here my whole life is that's what the people of this district expect. I did not expect the level of unprecedented actions coming out of the executive office. So therefore, I've had to push back a little bit more. But I got in this to make sure that I was a good reflection of the district, like I said, but also to get us to a point where we are working together more frequently and we, and in a district like mine, I've got a history of doing so, and I believe a future of doing so with my Republican representatives that represent the vast majority of the municipalities. So, listen, I've got to build those alliances, and I do feel a duty to push back and call out the truth and speak the truth as we know that there's a lot out there that is untruthful and being perpetuated. And unfortunately, what I've seen here is we're actually building policy, not me, but others building policy based on some of those pieces of misinformation and disinformation.
GR: So I wanted to ask you a question about fundraising. Obviously, as a state senator, you had to do a lot of fundraising, but it's a whole different level here in Congress. Have the differences and the scale regarding that given you a bit of sticker shock or phone fatigue dialing for contributions so far?
JM: So it is certainly an unfortunate part of this, it's beyond unfortunate. Part of the dysfunction of this is that you have to raise money to get into office, stay in office. It's the one data point that, no offense, the media frequently focuses on at this point. And it's not the media's fault, it's the system's fault and we have to fix it. And I do believe that, you know, the Citizens United case has now put us in a better spot. I hope that when I do get back into the majority in the next term or future term that we can do something aggressive around campaign finance because it's absolutely essential. The dark money that comes in is, we just saw it in this presidential election, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars coming in. And then what happens after, the really the billionaire class comes in to a race like that aggressively is that we end up passing legislation or executive orders that benefit them at a time where, you know, people are really struggling in this country. I will say Albany versus DC, you know, some of my colleagues advised me not to do this just because of the calendar. You know, it's nice to be, to do your legislative work from January to June and then really be able to go around your district, meet people, hear their concerns, deliver on some promises. DC it's all year long, but I'm used to the travel and, you know, my wife and my team are fantastic in supporting me. There's not as much legislation that goes through, there's not as much as in Albany. And I do think in some ways that's preferred because you can focus on it. The other difference which may not fascinate people is the committee work, at least historically and hopefully in the future and to a degree still now, is really where a lot of positive things happen. It is true committee work and holding hearings and markups they call them down here to amend that legislation. So there is a thorough process of getting a bill to the floor. And that is one difference, lower volume, but more intensive in the actual work in the development of that legislation.
GR: That's interesting. That corresponds with what I have observed in the state legislature in Albany, that the committees are not as important as working units as they could be. So it's interesting to hear that, hear you corroborate that. Let me ask you this, too. This is a kind of a more personal question, but have you had any kind of positive chill-running-down-your-spine moments so far being in Congress? I mean, it's pretty heady stuff. Any time when it particularly hit you, like, wow, I'm really here?
JM: Yeah, I will reference one thing early on, which was, I had spoken to a lot of these folks on the phone, of course, and some I had met in person but between Election Day and swearing in day, I went into the Democratic Caucus meeting. It's a morning meeting and, you know, the newly elected, the Congress members elect her there. But 200 Democratic members of Congress are there. And you know who keeps coming out with a cup of coffee out the door into the main room? You know, here comes the Hakim Jefferies, here comes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, here comes Nancy Pelosi. And that was a moment where you're like, you know, I'm here, I'm here, and that was significant. And then, you know, there was some other moments that, again, were unexpected, the passing of President Carter and being able to attend his funeral and hearing particularly what some of his family members said about him, which was just a great experience. And then, you know, I'll finish off by saying we got to take a White House tour before we get sworn in and who's there but Flavor Flav.
GR: (laughter)
JM: So, you know, not on my bingo card.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Congressman John Mannion, he represents New York's 22nd district. So I wanted to ask you about this new development for the Democrats, the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. It seems to have really set the Democratic Party in a frenzy and also created some division within it. What's your take on his campaign? Are there things for the Democratic Party to learn from it?
JM: So a few things here. As I think many of us would agree, New York City is a world away, but certainly in our state. And I worked in Albany with people who would, you know, defined themselves by certain titles like a Democratic Socialist. So I worked with people with that title. I think what we saw from candidate Mamdani is that he delivered messages that resonated with people and he did the work. And the message that resonated was an economic message. People are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. They don't see their wages increasing at the same level that costs are going up. So he delivered a message and, you know, if he becomes mayor, some of those promises are going to be a challenge to deliver. But for me, you know, listen, I understand New York 22, I got elected in New York 22, I know some of my predecessors who did, and I know not just, I know the core values and beliefs and priorities of the people here, I believe that I do. If you drop me in Asoria, Queens, I don't think I'm going to probably be the perfect fit. So, you know, this is what democracy does. And this was a Democratic primary, we'll see what happens in the general election. But I think there's great consensus that the message that delivered was effective and also authentic and genuine. And that's the reason why the support was there. If if wasn't authentic and genuine, we wouldn't be talking about it. So you know, again, are there shared values there? Absolutely. Do I want to make sure people have accessibility to health care and they're not in food deserts and there's transportation available so that they can get to their work and their doctor's appointments and their kids’ schools? Absolutely. And I'm fighting for the people who have barriers in place where they can't access those things.
GR: Yeah. I think your observation that it was very economically focused is right on point. You mentioned this earlier, I wanted to come back to it. It does seem likely, at least to me as a political scientist, that Democrats will be able to retake the House of Representatives in the midterms. Both past history and what I'm seeing and some of the current reactions to many of the Trump administration's moves suggests this to me. I wanted to get your sense of the probability of that outcome. You spoke about it as if it would happen. And what do you think, though, more importantly, what would it mean for the final two years of Trump's term?
JM: Well, those are great questions. First of all, you know, I think what we've seen, even on an issue that this presidency was above water on immigration is, you know, the lack of due process, the detainment camps, people actually having a connection to individuals who have been treated unfairly, mass gang of federal agents, all these things are not popular. And that's just in one area that people, you know, found compelling from the Trump candidacy and have asked, for many, is stronger immigration policy. That's just immigration, but when we talk about the economic policy, our standing in the world, the tariff dynamics and the lack of predictability the treatment of President Zelenskyy in the White House, you know, listen, I said there are true believers that will probably never break from the president, but independent voters, younger voters, they are not buying this. People do not, you know, can't get behind some of these actions and policies and the defiance of court orders. What does that mean if we take back the House? I am expecting to and that will certainly, you know, if we take back the house, we'll see what happens in the Senate. That is a heavier lift. But I think what's necessary is a check on the executive office. And we are right now expecting, I certainly was expecting more of a check from my Republican colleagues where it was a bridge too far. We haven't seen that. You know, you don't see hearings frequently, House hearings where individuals are being called to testify. You know, one thing I've neglected to mention was the creation of a meme coin and a crypto coin, you know, cryptocurrency that is benefiting, stable coin that is benefiting the president's family. You know, there's no hearings, there's no pushback, there's no acknowledgment even that this is corrupt or illegal. So we've got to provide that check. And, you know, time flies and we're already almost through July here. Before you know it, it will be November of 2026 and then January of 2027. And people are asking for that oversight and that you know, that transparency and House Democrats are here to provide it. And we were hoping and believing we could work with our colleagues on the other side to stand up for the institution of the House but we're not seeing that happening to the level that it needs to. So we're going to provide that check when the time comes.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is Congressman John Mannion. So, I had two questions related to what you just got into there in the last couple of minutes. The first one kind of quick, the second one, I think we’ll take a little more time on, but one possibility, it seems to me that if the Democrats take the majority in the House is, obviously things in Congress regarding legislative production are going to stalemate. You know, you'll have a likely divided Congress plus the Republican president, he's not going to sign anything that House Democrats are going to put forward, likely. And so one possibility is the president will just keep turning to executive orders and really just push out even more on those because that's the option that would be available. So any quick thoughts on that?
JM: Well, the first thing I will say is, it is unfortunate. And beyond that, that that's where we all are, that the majority party can't work with the minority party and I have seen that here, you know? You have Secretary Vought talking about ending the appropriations process, which is a very bipartisan action. We just saw some of that statements as we went through this rescissions legislation process. So I do agree that when we get to that point, it is going to be a challenge. This is where it is essential, in a bipartisan way, that not just because there might be a Democrat president in the future that could go rattle off a bunch of executive orders that could go unchecked, but this is how our democracy is functioning effectively, is that there are those checks. And that, you know, what we've seen by and large with these executive orders, not entirely, not unanimously, but attorney generals in the ACLU and labor unions have filed lawsuits and effectively stopped or paused many of these executive orders because it's been found to be beyond the bounds of the president. That's going to continue. Is the legislature involved in that? They are to a degree. I've signed on to multiple amicus briefs that have gone before the courts. And, you know, we have a rapid response team here in the Democratic conference that works on those things in partnership with some of those groups. So we can't leave it entirely up to the courts, but we also have to be respectful of the courts. When this administration wins a court case, I may disagree with it, but that is what makes us unique from many of the other countries of the world, is that we follow the rule of law, we stand up for the rule of law. Even if we disagree, we follow the process of an appeals process, if that is an appropriate pathway. But other ways, as President Obama said, when I listen to him at Hamilton College, you know, we've all agreed that these three branches of government are going to be a check on each other and we're going to respect all of those. So if those executive orders happen, if they are unlawful or unconstitutional, I expect the courts to do their job and I expect Congress to do our job in holding hearings and passing legislation to make sure that we keep the executive in check, regardless of party.
GR: I want to just push that out a little bit. I asked you previously on one of our earlier conversations whether you'd vote for articles of impeachment if the Democrats took the House and you said you would if those came up. If the Democrats retake the House, do you think that they'll be putting forward articles of impeachment?
JM: I'm going to take a couple steps back here. First of all, impeachment is not a not a popular process. Even in the second impeachment post, the insurrection, the second impeachment trial of President Trump found to be very unpopular with people in New York 22 and around the country. So this is serious business, the impeachment of president. And one of my colleagues did submit articles of impeachment, put them on the floor, they were voted to be tabled. And I voted yes on tabling and as you can imagine, I got some talking to about that from some of my constituents. What I have seen are actions that are clearly impeachable, acts like the creation of the stable coin and the meme coin and the president providing elevated levels of access when those are purchased or used as currency. That's unprecedented. That alone is troubling. So I'm going to take another step back, which is to remind that this president has been investigated in his previous term and indicted and impeached and gone to trial in the Senate unsuccessfully, twice, which means what is going to have to happen if there is a Democratic House, there's going to have to be investigations, there's going to have to be hearings, there's going to have to be a building of evidence. And only then will there be the potential to proceed. And I will do my job and listen to that testimony and listen to that debate and read the investigations and go from there. But at face value, I just mentioned one instance of the creation of this cryptocurrency by the Trump family that happened to be launched on Inauguration Day, of all things. It's that kind of actions that are beyond concerning. I believe they're unlawful and impeachable.
GR: Okay, just about 30 seconds left. I want to just to quickly give you a final chance. Looking forward to the next year and a half, can you just give me the topics of the areas you're going to be pushing on, what you're going to be trying to do?
JM: Sure. You know you don't want to always be responding. But listen, I was a public educator. I'm afraid that what could be coming next is another rescissions package to strip dollars away from what is still the Department of Education. I'm afraid that these title one and title nine grants that are essential to some of our most impoverished schools are coming. I'm going to push back against that and always fight for public education. And of course, we got a lot of other things to worry about as well. But thank you for having me on, Grant. I appreciate it. And I will always focus on the great equalizer: education.
GR: Well, I appreciate that. We'll have to leave it there, that was Congressman John Mannion. And again, Congressman Mannion, thanks for taking the time to talk with me, I know you're very busy.
JM: Thank you, Grant. Have a great day.
GR: You, too. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Mary Jumbelic on the Campbell Conversations
Jul 19, 2025
Mary Jumbelic(Marc Safran)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. If you're a fan of true crime, you're in for a treat. My guest today is Dr. Mary Jumbelic. She's a forensic pathologist and the former chief medical examiner of Onondaga County. She's just published a new book, it's titled, “Speak Her Name: Stories from A Life from True Crime”. Dr. Jumbelic, welcome back to the program and congratulations on this new book.
Mary Jumbelic: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
GR: Well, we're really glad you made the time. So let me just start, the structure of the book, it's a blend of, I guess what I would call sort of vignettes, sometimes extended vignettes of a personal memoir type. And then you have your, the theme of those is your experiences related to being a girl, a woman, a female doctor. And then you mix that in with different cases involving women victims that you've been involved in working on the cases for. So I was just wondering how you arrived at that structure, at that style, it's very interesting.
MJ: Well, my first book had a similar structure in that it blended personal and professional stories about my life and the life of my patients. And I guess I kept to that script, if you will, even though the lens of the second book is different than the first. The lens on the second book is related to being a woman and violence against women.
GR: Right, right. Now, you just did something very interesting there in your answer, you used the word patients. We need to make it clear that these patients are not alive. So in just one or two sentences, what is forensic pathology?
MJ: Well, forensic pathology is what medical examiners do. And so it's the study of death, what causes people to die, how they die, accidents, suicides, the investigation of sudden and suspicious death. And then relaying that information to doctors, the public, the law, whoever needs it, really.
GR: And I was surprised to learn in reading your book that there are only about 500 certified forensic pathologists.
MJ: Yes.
GR: That just seems really few to me thinking about all the people that are killed and die in various ways. Why is that the case, how come only 500?
MJ: Well, that's a really hard question to answer probably for, you know, brains larger than mine or analysis greater than I can give. But a pathologist in general is not a super popular specialty like primary care, surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics. People think it's not a social, you know, profession, but it really is. We are the doctors’ doctor, the pathologist. And then forensics is a special branch of that, so an even smaller group. And again, I think what we're dealing with is a sensitive issue, death and trauma and violence. And so not everyone wants to go into that. They want to be in the healing profession, so that's true as well. And death investigation in this country is not all medical examiners. It's coroners, and then they might hire a regular pathologist to do the autopsy and come to a determination. So forensic pathology is a special branch.
GR: Well, in your career, and this is obviously one of the themes of your book in different ways, but in your career you operated in a very male dominated environment, and that would be law enforcement and criminal justice that are related to being a medical examiner and the things that you worked with. Did you develop any, I don't know what to call them, tricks or hacks for dealing with that kind of environment?
MJ: Well, I think that I grew tougher, as anyone who might in a challenged situation where you're facing it again and again, you develop a thicker skin, you learn ways around the system. You learn to push ahead and not ask for permission beforehand and then say sorry afterwards. You learn who your supporters are and your mentors and you lean on them to gather that extra person who has your back. So all of those things.
GR: And one of the other things that I didn't realize when I was reading your book is that this explosion of all of these true crime, you know, the interest in true crime and true crime drama and a lot of the series that are dramatic series that are on TV, how many of those kind of got their start with the O.J. Simpson trial and how that was kind of the spark for all of that. I'm going back to the question I asked you just a little bit before but, do you know whether that has caused an uptick in the interest for people becoming forensic pathologists? You know that they see that and are like, hey, that's, I'd like to do that.
MJ: Well, it absolutely has had an uptick in interest in forensic sciences and so at the university level, even at the high school level and the university level, people going to get their criminal justice degrees, that sort of thing. Forensic pathology, not as much. You still have to become a doctor to get there and that's a bit of a barrier for some people. It's a long road to go to become a medical examiner. And so I do think it has glamorized my profession more, and I've enjoyed the popularity of it just from people appreciating what I do and what I did. So I'm grateful for that aspect.
GR: I remember you mentioned the barrier, I remember when I was in college myself and my classmates who were planning on going to med school, it was always, what was that class? Organic chemistry that kind of sorted them out. If they could make it through that, they could kind of go (laughter).
MJ: Right, right, everyone says that that's the breaking point for undergraduates is the organic chemistry. Which is ironic because I'm not really sure organic chemistry is necessary in most fields of medicine, but...
GR: That's the one. Well, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with the forensic pathologist and writer Dr. Mary Jumbelic, and we're discussing her new book. It's titled, “Speak Her Name: Stories from a Life and True Crime”. So before we get to the Robert Neulander case, which is, you know, a big case that you worked on, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, which of the cases other than that one that you relate in your book, stays the most in your head and why?
MJ: Well, all of the women in my book, in some form or fashion were ghosts in my mind. And I started the book focusing on Leslie Neulander, but so many other women were in line saying, but what about me and what about me? And so therefore, I gave them space to grow and to exist on the page. I think one of the ones that stays with me is Carol Ryan, and I think for many reasons that local people will understand. But the length of time it's taken and no one has been charged or found responsible for one of the most heinous acts of violence that I have seen in my long career, and so she stays with me.
GR: And remind us, as I recall, her body was discovered in Jamesville, is that right?
MJ: Yes, she was the subject of a podcast called ‘Firecracker’ that was done maybe a year and a half ago and so it was discussed at length. But I met Carol while she was alive at the hospital. She was unconscious. she did not speak to me, but I was called in to give my opinion on what was the source of her injury and trauma and, you know, with the head of Trauma there. And so then I again examined her later when she died. So it stays in my mind very, very deeply for that reason.
GR: Well, you know, you mentioned this earlier, your book, I thought this was a nice little technique that, you know, it starts with the Neulander case and then you kind of leave it and then you come back to it at the end, and that got me going. And so your book leads up to this Neulander case. The Neulander case is arguably the highest profile murder case that we've seen in the Syracuse area, probably in all of central New York for several decades at least. Neulander was a very prominent and popular OBGYN physician in the area, and the couple very highly respected, well-liked. Just remind us, if you could, of the basic facts as they were understood before you first looked at the case. What were the basic facts as they were understood?
MJ: Well, Leslie had purportedly fallen in the shower and died. And this was on the morning of Rosh Hashanah, one of the holiest days in the Jewish year. And that was what was known for several months to the community. It was sudden death, sudden collapse, and over time, and after I got involved, I uncovered that it was a homicide. And it wasn't just my opinion, other experts were brought in, like, can we review this and see, you know, what happened here? And they concurred, yes, it's a homicide. And because of the gap in time and the lag, I think it took time to accumulate everything, all the evidence, so it could be handled in a proper fashion. So he didn't go to trial until maybe a little over two years after the actual death of his wife. And he was found guilty, but then there was a complication with a juror misconduct. And so he went to prison, but then he was granted a new trial, as is appropriate in that circumstance. But then COVID happened, and then so a decade goes by after her death when finally the second trial occurs and again, he's found guilty and is in prison.
GR: Well, I don't want to delve too much into gossip, but I think it's important here that my understanding is that his career and his marriage both had taken difficult turns before this event and that that was known and that that was one of the things that got a lot of people suspicious. Am I right about that?
MJ: I think the community and those close to Leslie were concerned. There certainly were people that were close to her that weren't concerned, but there were others that were concerned and, you know, there were financial difficulties. There were, she was going to move out and get an apartment and all of this came out much later, you know, in bits and pieces and was verified. But at the time I reviewed the case, I didn't know any of that, it was not even on my radar, frankly. It only was in retrospect that there's all this behind the scene, you know, murmuring of what was going on.
GR: Well, we'll dove deeper into this in a minute. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Dr. Mary Jumbelic. She's a forensic pathologist, the former chief medical examiner of Onondaga County and the author of a new book. It's titled, “Speak Her Name: Stories from My Life and True Crime”. So as you intimated before the break, you personally knew this couple. And then also you were retired as a medical examiner by the time this murder took place. So how did you come to get involved in it?
MJ: Well, in a quick synopsis, Grant, it was a rather lengthy process, but a friend of Leslie's was concerned that Leslie had been murdered by her husband and she wound up talking to me and asking me what I thought. And I said, well, you should go to the police, I'm not official, I'm not anything, I can't interpret what you're telling me, just go to the police and talk to them. And the long and short of it is she did and the end result was she called me back and said, they're bringing him in for questioning again and thank you for telling me to do that. And then he called that night, the house, and I knew he was leaving for Israel. And I got concerned that here was someone that was about to leave the country and I knew there was something going on in the background with an investigation or the police wouldn't be bringing him in for questioning. So I called, you know, Bill Fitzpatrick of the district attorney's office to talk with him.
GR: And you also mentioned, I think, in the book that Israel doesn't have extradition arrangements with the United States, that would have been a good place to go if you were worried about something like that. So, I mean, you must have had this, and you do write about this, this swirl of emotions in being involved in this, especially early on. I mean, the case sounds like it divided the synagogue that both of you went to. Can you describe your feelings when you first started considering the evidence, before we get into the evidence itself, just how are you feeling about all this?
MJ: I think it was complicated. I think that, you know, people ask me questions all the time. My uncle died and I think this, and my sister, this happened to her nephew, and, you know, people like to ask me and use my expertise to try to sort things out. And I like to try to answer questions and help if I can. But not usually on an official, you know, basis of any sort. And so when I was asked to look over the case, I thought, you know, maybe with my knowledge base and my expertise, I can sort out, like, whatever question exists about it, and I'll be able to just answer it easily and why are people worried about it? You know, I'll be able to just put everybody's mind at rest. That was my mindset as I went into it. And so I was a bit unprepared when I looked at the images on my computer of the scene and of her trauma and the autopsy to the level of violence that was there. And so that was probably the moment for me when I had to decide if I would go forward or not. That I would just say, no, I can't do this, or I would go forward. And I guess my nature is to see the trouble and see the challenge and then steal myself for it and move in a forward direction. So that's what I did. And I felt like my whole career had been speaking for my patients, speaking for women. And so I did it for my friend too.
GR: You mentioned the level of violence. And I have seen the district attorney's presentation of this case, he's got like a slideshow presentation. And that's one of the things that just the, in what you talk about in the book here in greater detail, but the, the apparent violence of the injury was quite arresting. I mean, it really suggests an extreme rage. And I guess my question to you is, you knew this guy a little bit. Did that fit the Robert Neulander that you knew?
MJ: I mean, I know that there are the people we meet on the surface and then there's whatever going on behind the surface of people. People are complicated and they're nuanced and they're not black and white and you know, I have seen enough people sitting in a chair being, you know, being accused of homicide and I'm in the witness stand and you look at the person, you know, they could not possibly have done this. You know, your mind tells you that. So I don't really hold to that. I think anyone is capable of, you know, extreme emotion in in a particular circumstance, you know? And I would say I was closer to Leslie than Bob. I didn't have any ill feelings toward him at all. You know, but he was more a shadow to me to Leslie's, you know, vivacity and energy. So I didn't know him the way other people in the community have come forward and described him.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Dr. Mary Jumbelic. So, thinking about what evidence that you were considering, what you were looking at, what were the questions and the inconsistencies that most leaped out to you?
MJ: To try to say it succinctly, the number of injuries, the location of injuries on the head, on all sides, on the neck on the arms, on the hands. So it was the patterning of the injury and also the head wounds and the devastating skull fractures and trauma there. Secondarily, the scene itself didn't make a lot of sense with the blood spatter and the location of the body and whether there was CPR and the shower being 60 feet away from the bedroom. So there were these secondary scene considerations that didn't fit the original story.
GR: And you witnessed the trial. In your view, was there one thing or a few things that more than anything else, did Neuander in both as a suspect and then as a defendant?
MJ: I felt like the playing of the 911 tape that the daughter called in was, I don't know if it was pivotal, but it was quite emotional and quite impactful. And it does seem to have not gone in the direction that I think the defense had hoped.
GR: Yeah. When I saw that presentation, that tape was played and it really, it kind of just puts a chill right down your spine, really. One of the things actually that I guess leads to this question is, it's puzzled me the way that the children stayed supportive of Dr. Neulander throughout the process. I remember a picture in the newspaper about them walking to the trial arm in arm, three of them. Do you know if they are still supportive of him? And I guess if they are, why do you think they have stuck by him in the face of what seems to me to be pretty damning evidence?
MJ: Well, you know, I can't really be inside their minds, but I would, I think they still support him. They certainly did after the second trial still, and that was only three years ago. But I think the gap of time from the death to the trial was quite long. And to my knowledge, they didn't have access to looking at the photos of their dead mother and the, you know, scene and all of that. So the information they had was probably filtered through the attorney and whatever their father was telling them. And so I think by the time the trial came up and they're actually hearing it in the courtroom and there's exhibits being put up and, you know, seen, I think there is a disconnect at that point. It's just a complete cognitive dissonance that happened. And I don't think there's any going back from that. You know, it's very, it’s sad.
GR: Yeah. Well, I mean, but social scientists would probably put this in the category of what they would call confirmation bias. You know, the way you take in information that conflicts with what you have kind of already sunk your mind into.
MJ: Right.
GR: This question here I'm about to ask you, it's very sensitive, but I just feel the need to ask because you say in your book that he is going to be eligible for release at a certain date. He seems like a pretty healthy guy. Do you worry, given your role, that if he is somehow released, maybe that because of old age, they'll release him, you or your family will be in danger? Will that be, you know, do you think about that?
MJ: No. I mean, I've had other cases where I've played some pivotal role or at least had maybe a lot of public acknowledgment of my role. And I'd be naive to say it's never a potential threat but I don't worry about that. I mean, I just did my job to speak for Leslie. I wasn't the jury, I wasn't the judge, I wasn't the prosecutor. I just spoke for what happened to Leslie and I just hold on to that.
GR: Now that makes sense, you know, that makes sense. Well, we've got about 3 minutes left or so, and I want to give you that time to kind of change the tone a bit. This has not been the most uplifting conversation that we've had. And so the final question I think would allow you to do that if you wanted to, is that, is there an overarching message here in this book, particularly for women? Is there an overarching message here that you want to convey?
MJ: Well, I think that my book is more than just a detailing of sort of heinous crimes that have occurred against women. I do want the reader to witness, to see what happens, but to take from that some lessons and learn and educate about the situations and to remember the women that have gone before. One of the ending stories in my book is one of the most hopeful ones, which is someone who actually changed her life based on Leslie's situation.
GR: Say a little bit about that.
MJ: And I think, you know, that is part of the goal here is to, let's not shy away from looking at the reality of what happens to women and let's do something about it.
GR: Yeah, I think, you know, as I was reading through the different stories and, you know, you tell a couple stories about yourself.
MJ: Yeah.
GR: Particularly one when you were a little kid that, you know, like that was like a very, very close call. I don't know if you want to relate that here, but, you know, they kind of all add up to look, all right, you know, pay attention, keep your eyes open.
MJ: Well, it's like, we are vulnerable as women, just on a sheer strength, you know, physical strength, access, okay? But we are smart and we can learn and we can be aware and we can help other women. And part of my goal in my career was to find justice for women. Sometimes I was successful, as in Leslie's case, other times not. But that doesn't deter us, we go forward.
GR: Well, that's a good place to leave it. That was Mary Jumbelic, and again, her new book is titled, “Speak Her Name: Stories from My Life and True Crime”. And I can attest from reading it that it's a real page turner, it's intense. But I say nonetheless, I think it's a great summer read. So, Dr. Jumbelic, Mary, again, thanks for making the time to talk with me, I really appreciate it.
MJ: Thank you. I'm honored, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Oneya Fennell Okuwobi on the Campbell Conversations
Jul 12, 2025
Oneya Fennell Okuwobi
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. The Trump administration has declared war on DEI programs, and it has had reverberating effects throughout higher education, government and industry. My guest today has written a new provocative book on the topic of diversity efforts, and it's titled, "Who Pays for Diversity?: Why Programs Fail at Racial Equity and What to Do about It". Oneya Fennell Okuwobi is a sociology professor at the University of Cincinnati. Professor Okuwobi, welcome to the program and congratulations on this new book.
Oneya Fennell Okuwobi: Thank you. And thanks so much for having me.
GR: Well, we really appreciate that you made the time. So let me just start with a very basic question. I presume, unless you work at the speed of light, that you did the research and writing for this book before the Trump administration's current war on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, especially on higher education. So I guess what I want to know first, is how and why did you get the idea to write this book when you did?
OFO: Oh, that's a fantastic question. Yes, I've been working on this book for many years, as authors do. And honestly, this book came out of some of my experiences. I talk in the book about how even though I'm studying diversity in churches, in universities and in corporations, I have experiences in all of those realms. And so this book really began when I was talking to pastors of color, working at churches who were newly diverse. And those churches were attempting to bring in staffs that more accurately reflected the populations that they were hoping to attract as congregants. But these pastors were having curious issues in terms of feeling like they were being brought in to display a black or brown face, but not really being listened to. Some were experiencing health issues or issues with their family because of the hostile environments that they were encountering. And hearing their stories, I started to discover there's something really wrong with, not the idea that these churches want to be racially diverse, but the ways that they were going about it, especially in reference to their employees. And it made me wonder, is the same thing pervasive? Is it happening in other venues? Which is why I added the venues of corporations and universities to get a more holistic picture.
GR: Okay, very interesting. And specifically, how did you go about researching it? You just said, you know, where you were looking. Was this was this based on talking to a particular sets of people? How did you go about getting your information?
OFO: Yeah, so this was an interview study, I talked to 60 employees across 53 different workplaces. Again, examining basically the equivalent of entry level managers within the church as universities and corporations. So in the university setting, that would be the assistant professor level and churches that would be anybody who wasn't, had clergy. So getting an equivalent understanding of what it is like to be an entry level management employee of color in these venues.
GR: And so let's get right to the core of at least the first part of your book, which is diagnosing the problem. I mean, what are the main things that you think that the diversity efforts as you looked at them, have been getting wrong? What are they not doing right?
OFO: Yes, so the issue has been, most diversity efforts have focused on benefiting the workplaces. And in order for those benefits to accrue to the workplaces, employees of color have been paying a cost in order for workplaces to get the benefits of being able to say that they are diverse. And there are three main costs that I outline in that first section of the book. The first is heavy work burdens. So anybody listening has probably had that experience of seeing a diversity photo where you basically got one of everyone in the photo. But then imagine you are working at a hospital and you are the one black doctor at that hospital. That means every time there is a photo, a video, something else, you are being dragged in to be able to represent diversity. And that was one of the real stories of somebody that I talked to. So those heavy work burdens can be being brought into photos, being brought to meetings, being placed on committees, any additional work that is required for the workplace to be able to benefit from saying that it's diverse. So that's the first. The second cost of diversity that I talked about comes in two flavors. The idea is threatened legitimacy, and there's threatened organizational legitimacy, which basically means you're questioning the rightness of your employer's actions. We often talk about diversity as window dressing, but somebody has to dress those windows and the people dressing those windows can see the difference between what's being portrayed on the outside and what's happening on the inside and that creates feelings of guilt and conflict in them. The second flavor of this threatened legitimacy is threatened personal legitimacy, where employees of color who are being brought into workplaces proclaiming themselves as diverse, are being questioned about their own qualifications. Being called with that barbed insult, ‘diversity hire’. Because the real reasons why diversity is important are not being talked about. And then finally, there's something I call subjugated identity, where employers of color are being forced to put their identity into such a way that their workplace can market it as part of their diversity package. Think of this as being identifiably non-white enough so that the workplace can benefit from seeming diverse, but not so non-white that you make your white colleagues uncomfortable. And the employees I talked to dealt with these costs day in and day out for years and years.
GR: Well, I've got a couple of questions for you that come right out of that I have to say, just on what you've said. You know, I work in an academic environment like you do and one of the things I've noticed over the years, and my university at least up until a few months ago, I don't know what language it's using now, but we have used the language of diversity hires and diversity hiring initiatives. But when I see colleagues come in who are, particularly African-American, most specifically, but also just non-white more generally, they get a very heavy student advising load from the students. You know, and so, because our student body is much more diverse than our faculty. And so I can see the dynamic that you're talking about, that's very interesting. You're listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with the sociology professor Oneya Fennell Okuwobi and we're discussing her new book, it's titled, "Who Pays for Diversity?: Why Programs Fail at Racial Equity and What to Do about It". So I want to stick with, maybe I'll stick with higher education, but I'm curious if this is something you encountered in the other areas that you looked at as well. And I'm going to quote a former colleague here, not a white male, by the way, but this person used to refer to DEI as, and this is their words, the ‘DEI industrial complex’. And it does seem at least that in higher education, when we look at the level above the faculty in particular, we look at administration, it does seem like it did spawn almost like a new category of administration and infrastructure in the administration. I don't know if that's an element that you look at or how this is going to affect things in any way.
OFO: It's not a pervasive element that I look at. But one of the things that I did find is that the faculty members I talked to, in fact, the employees more generally that I talked to who had a diversity office or diversity officer above them, saw often that those offices didn't necessarily focus on what the employees needed, that that open line of communication wasn't there. And so even though these offices and these officers existed and were important, their impact wasn't necessarily felt by the employees and they felt like more open lines of communication could be important. At the same time, the employees recognize the constraints that those officers and offices were working under, that they were not necessarily empowered to make the changes that would have to be made in order for the employees to be having an equitable work experience.
GR: I see. So the bottom line then, it sounds like what you're saying is the people who end up paying, to use the title of your book, “Who Pays for Diversity?”, is the employees, the diverse employees.
OFO: That's exactly right.
GR: Okay. So one of the issues that also has struck me, at least from my experience in higher education and I wanted to get your thoughts about this, is that, and again, it depends on sort of what element of diversity the initiative or the new hire is supposed to speak to, but especially ones that I think have come from outside the United States more than others fit this, is that those folks can often be from quite elite backgrounds, if we're just looking at economics. You know, that they're not, that we associate these efforts I think oftentimes with, you know, speaking to historical disadvantage and current disadvantage and current discrimination. Is that any kind of common pattern that you saw in what you were looking at? That there could be, kind of if you looked at it through one lens, there's diversity in one way, but then if you look at it through a more pure economic lens, it becomes a lot murkier. I don’t know if that question is making sense.
OFO: It is, and let me know if I'm answering it. But even as I look at race and racism, which is the focus of this book, even folks from elite backgrounds can experience racial discrimination and can experience the shadow and the costs that get put on them because of diversity. So even having an elite economic background does not exempt you from that. And so it's important to understand that these costs continue and have been pervasive because of the ways diversity has been structured. It's also true that the majority of folks that I talk to in my book were born in the U.S., even though I do talk to some employees that were 1.5 generation. And we see that there's a lot of advantage and recognition of racism that happens by the second generation, even if somebody is from an international background.
GR: This may be more of a feature, I guess, perhaps in academia. Well, tell me more about the way that that works, though. I'm curious to hear more about, you know, someone who is elite in some ways, but then is being treated as less than in other ways. Is there is there a particular way that that dynamic feels or works?
OFO: Yes. And I don't want to go too far into this because it's not necessarily the main idea here. But basically, when somebody, what I argue in the book basically is that the ways that diversity is framed is creating a level of disadvantage. So let's say that you are from another country, but you were brought in to a workplace that focuses on diversity. You may still encounter these heavy work burdens of having more students to advise than your counterparts, of being brought into specific photos or specific dinners or specific meetings in order to paint that picture. You may still encounter people who say that you don't belong here, despite your qualifications, you may still feel like you cannot be your entire self at work. So those things can still happen to you regardless of socio-economic status in which you grew up.
GR: Yeah, and now that I think about it as I'm thinking about our conversation in the moment, I think we're sort of headed toward a heated agreement here because your whole point is that these hires are brought in to help somebody else.
OFO: Yes.
GR: And to help the institution. And so therefore, they can experience these differences even. Okay, all right, I'm with you now.
OFO: When you talk about paying for diversity, the costs are pretty steep. When I looked at the experiences, again of these employees I spoke to, fully nine out of ten of the pastors and the professors I talked to were experiencing emotional and physical signs of stress. And that can be anywhere from having symptoms that mimic strokes to having anxiety attacks, insomnia, headaches. And they attributed these things to what I call the costs of diversity. For corporate employees it was a little bit better, more like three out of four. But still, that's a steep cost for these employees to pay in order to make their workplaces appear diverse.
GR: Yeah, it sure is. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Oneya Fennell Okuwobi. She's a sociology professor at the University of Cincinnati and the author of a new book titled, "Who Pays for Diversity?: Why Programs Fail at Racial Equity and What to Do about It" and we've been discussing the book. So as you said before, at the beginning of our conversation, you looked at universities, churches, corporations. First of all, does one of those sectors do better than the other, and is one worse? Or are there patterns, shared patterns of the ones that do better than others?
OFO: Yes, absolutely. So when I looked at the employees that were reporting the fewest adverse effects, surprisingly in some ways it was the corporate employees. But it's not necessarily for a great reason. The reason being is that corporate employees don't often see their work as a calling in the same way maybe a professor or a pastor might. And so they didn't necessarily expect to be respected as people. And so they maybe had some defenses up against what they were experiencing. For pastors, this idea of calling really loomed large. In addition to the fact that when you are working in a ministry profession, your entire family is involved. So not only do you work at a church, but probably your family attends the church, probably your social networks are connected. And so if you are being commodified for your presence, that commodification extends throughout all the aspects of your life rather than 9 to 5. For professors, I think the reason why the costs of diversity were higher is similar because assistant professors are often across the country away from their family, and their social networks are having to build new social networks. And that can be difficult when you are being commodified for the purpose of displaying diversity.
GR: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So I don't know if this is pushing you too far, but you're talking about commodification and the institution kind of thinking of these folks almost as a selling point or a product. Am I going too far to say it kind of smacks in some strange way of slavery in a way? I mean, one can see a line of connection, at least in an abstract level here.
OFO: I don't think it's going too far. Of course, we don't want to minimize in any way the horrors of slavery, but the idea that there is a profit, a capital that exists in certain bodies that can be used by others, and in this case, predominantly white people and white institutions is a direct line from thinking about chattel slavery till today. I'd also love to extend that in a way to say that, you know, even though this is a special case of commodification, in some ways all workers are subject to commodification. And so I want this to be a spotlight on a particular sort of costs that workers pay for benefits to their workplaces that is not fairly compensated. But I hope it as a starting point to look at other ways in which that happens to all workers. So I would both narrow it and make it more historical and wide net and bring that idea into the future.
GR: That's an important point. So, okay, so how do we make this better? What recommendations do you have for institutions that are saying, look, we want to have some kind of DEI effort, maybe we'll call it something different now, but, you know, we'll get to that in a minute. But how can it be done better?
OFO: Yes. So what I talk about in the last chapter of my book is making these things more employee focused. Honestly, a lot of the diversity efforts have said if we focus on diversity, if we play the numbers game and get enough representation, eventually we'll get to racial equity. And I argue that the only real way to get to racial equity is to focus on racial equity. So instead of saying, let's get up the numbers of, you know, black professors at the university, let’s instead listen to the black professors at the university and see what is it that they need to have an equitable experience to their white counterparts. Part of that is support with students, which could in part be solved by numbers, but it could also be solved by perhaps giving additional credit for service work when it comes to tenure files, which is something perfectly in universities’ control. It might come down to looking at rates of receiving grants and understanding the racial disparities in receiving grants and making sure that faculty of color have what they need to be able to execute their work. It might look like if you're going to have to drag folks into pictures or videos, A, don't, but to the extent that you do, make sure that they get other time in order to continue to pursue their work so their time for research is not eaten up. So looking at those very real disparities and then doing things to correct them.
GR: Well, what you just said makes sense, but it leads directly into the next couple of questions. That I wanted to ask you. And the first one is, okay, so how do you do what you just said without incurring backlash along the lines of, well, this is just more affirmative action extended throughout the entire evaluation process. I mean, we've got a current presidential administration that's declared pretty much open warfare on this whole notion. It sounds almost like you're saying we need to really almost double down on it in some ways. How do you deal with that?
OFO: I am saying we need to double down on that in some ways. I also recognize that it's not legally possible in all places, but it is legally possible in some places. And I believe a key to limiting the level of backlash is to change the sort of messaging we've done around diversity. With diversity, the messaging has been, there's a benefit to all people by having people from diverse backgrounds, different viewpoints come together and talk about things. And if that's the real benefit, then it's no wonder that there's a backlash against that now, because you might decide, I don't want that benefit, I actually don't want any folks who disagree with my viewpoint around, I don't need that. But the real reason why these programs were put in place in the first place was to correct past and continuing discrimination and disparities. And so getting back to the messaging of let's educate all of the employees about the past and continuing disparities and our specific workplaces role in those disparities and how the things that we're doing corrects for those things. And by the way, I do believe that as we are assessing what employees of color need, we should be assessing what all employees need because there are lots of good ways to put in place corrections that don't just help employers of color, that help everyone, again, have a more equitable experience at work.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is a sociology professor, Oneya Fennell Okuwobi. So what do you, I'm going to put you on the spot here if you don't mind, but, so what do you make of the Trump administration's efforts to battle DEI and all of these really high profile conflicts that we've seen, particularly in higher education, but we've also seen very large corporations make significant changes in what they're doing in response to perceptions of concerns about the Trump administration, I mean, there's a lot going on here in this field, what do you make of it?
OFO: Well, quite frankly, nothing positive do I make of it. It is an effort, not just at eliminating DEI, but at rolling back civil rights altogether. But I do want to recognize the ways that this effort has been enabled by the ways that we have not continued to speak about continuing racism that exists in our society. The idea that, for example, hiring discrimination has not gotten any better since 1989. If the majority of people knew that, perhaps they wouldn't care. But we at least need to give them a chance to know what is going on and not cover it up. And so that people have a chance to look at these policies, look at this rhetoric and reject it wholesale.
GR: Well, we've got about two or three minutes left and I wanted to ask you a question that I'm sure I'll have a follow up or two on, but I want to make sure that we get a chance to talk about it. And it's more personal, I hope I can ask this, but you know, you are a faculty member of color and you've got this book out, and there it is in the flesh, in paper that somebody could hold up if they wanted to say, oh, here's another, you know. How, I mean, you've sort of put yourself out there right now and how are you experiencing that? Do you have any concerns, do you have any worries that, you know, the University of Cincinnati is going to be, oh, no, we've got this person that's got this book out right when it's under attack, you know, that kind of thing?
OFO: Yeah. You know, it is true. I have put myself out there. I will say my university has been nothing but supportive of me and my scholarship and I hope that will continue. But I think it is a message to all of us in academia, all folks who are involved in activism, if we don't stand up for what is right now, who will? And so that might involve and entail some personal risk. But if I take personal risk to make sure that employees of color can hear the message that you're not alone and we see the cost that you are paying and you are not responsible to pay them any longer, I have to, now that I know what I know take that risk because that message needs to get out.
GR: And lastly, and just about a minute left so I have to really ask you to give a very concise answer here, but there's been a lot of difficult conversations between faculty and students in the last few years. I imagine you've had some, too. What do you say to your students who are concerned about these kinds of things and looking at, I mean, this is really all they've known politically, I mean, they're that young, this is all they've known.
OFO: I have a lot of hope for our students. I have conversations in the classroom every year, honestly, that make me hopeful for what we will see. And I think that there are enough sources of information and understanding out there that students are gravitating towards that will allow them to make, hopefully, more informed decisions in the future that will lead us away from the path that we're on now.
GR: Okay, well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Oneya Fennell Okuwobi and again, her new book is titled, “Who Pays for Diversity?: Why Programs Fail at Racial Equity and What to Do about It". If you become frustrated or exhausted by the current debates over DEI and are looking for a new framework and a new way to see this, this would be an interesting read for you. And if you are looking for this book, on Amazon, I want to just say that professor Okuwobi’s last name is spelled o k u w o b i. Professor Okuwobi, again, thanks for making the time to talk with me. I really learned a lot from this conversation.
OFO: Glad to do it.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
David Lay Williams on the Campbell Conversations
Jul 11, 2025
David Lay Williams(Mark Lavonier)
David Lay Williams, professor of political science at DePaul University, talks about his book, "The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx."
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Economic inequality has been a perennial issue in political campaigns and we are said to be living right now in another Gilded Age of extreme inequality. My guest today is David Lay Williams. He's a professor of political science at DePaul University and the author of a new book titled, “The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shapes Political Thought from Plato to Marx.” Professor Williams, welcome to the program and congratulations on this new book.
David Lay Williams: Thanks so much for inviting me. Grant, I'm looking forward to our conversation.
GR: Well, me too. So let me just start with something really basic. It's right there in the title “The Greatest of All Plagues.” It's kind of a provocative phrase there. Where does that come from? What's its significance?
DLW: So it's actually a phrase from the first figure I treat in my book, Plato, who would be familiar, I'm sure, to many. Plato was probably, you know, the first systematic thinker on politics in Western political tradition. But he's also the first one to seriously engage the question of inequality. And he introduces this phrase in his last dialogue, called The Laws. And he has a character speaking, a character he calls the Athenian stranger who says that whenever you have a wealth divided, extremely to the rich on one hand and the poor on the other, and not very much in the middle, it leads to serious problems, including strife, civil strife and even civil war, which he calls the greatest of all plagues. So technically, he says it's still as civil strife and civil war that's the greatest of all plagues. But what brings that about is economic inequality.
GR: And that sort of reminds me a little bit of what I remember from Aristotle, too, about the, you know, this idea of sort of a basic balance, and it can't get too far out of balance. Was there a way that the ancient thinkers as a whole tended to think about inequality? I mean, obviously, the societies they lived in were very heavily layered and different ways. But is there sort of an ancient way of thinking about this or were they all over the place?
DLW: A bit all over the place. Right. They're certainly very serious critics of inequality in the ancient world. Plato being one. Aristotle's certainly talks about inequality as being very problematic for managing a polis. But there are others who seem more comfortable with it that there's a figure known as old oligarch to ancient scholars who unsurprisingly likes being an oligarch and talks about how all political power needs to be concentrated in the hands of the rich few. So but but I will say that it's not unusual to find opposition to inequality, not just in ancient Greece, but you can certainly find it in Rome, and you can certainly find it, as I discuss in chapter two of my book in Rome and Palestine, or, you know, what some people now call Israel. Right. So there was I, we can sort of say there was widespread opposition to our concern about inequality in the ancient world.
GR: Hmm. And one of your central arguments is that the problem of inequality, the issue of inequality, drives much of the thought of political philosophy over the centuries. It's one of the main through lines. And I just wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on that idea, that notion.
DLW: Through lines, I'm sorry, in the ancient world or through lines?
GR: Throughout.
DLW: Yes. Yes, sure. Yeah.
GR: Throughout Western political thought.
DLW: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So there's several threads that I kind of pull through, I used to connect, like many of the thinkers in the book, right. One of those through lines is the role of what the Greeks call pleonexia. And that's, it's an ancient Greek word, which means greed, but kind of greed on steroids, as it were. It's a greed incapable of being satiated. Plato called…
GR: Gee, cause we never see that now.
DLW: No! So Plato, in his dialogue, The Gorgias, compares pleonectic souls with a leaky jug. He says, you know, you can they can spend all day pouring more water into a leaky jug, and will never be satisfied with the amount of water that you give it. In fact, the more water you give it, the more it wants. And he says many souls are like this. The souls that he characterized characterizes as as disease or pathological. And there are typically three things that pleonectic souls want, and this includes power, adulation, and especially money. And that's, of course, the connection to inequality. And it's why societies tend unless, you know, checked by policy, societies tend to revert to inequality because they're just going to be people out there who will never be satisfied with the amount of money that they have and will do practically anything to get it. So that starts in the ancient world. But interestingly, that really weaves its way through the tradition. Right. Certainly, we find lots of condemnations of greed. And specifically, you know, they the Greek New Testament uses the word pleonexia to condemn greed. But it's also found in the Old Testament. The book of Ecclesiastes is full of condemnations of pleonexia. Right. But this goes all the way through. It's in Thomas Hobbes. It's in John Stuart Mill. And even in Karl Marx. Yeah. So that's one thread that works its way through. Another thread, and maybe I'll stop it at two, for now, to leave time for questions, right. But another thread is kind of the damage that concentrated wealth inflicts upon the faculty, our human capacity for empathy. Right. And this really starts in the Bible. This is in the New Testament account, in the book of, in the Gospel of Luke and the story of Lazarus. Not the one risen from the dead. There's actually two Lazaruses in the Bible. It's the Lazarus, the beggar who asks a rich man for money, just asking for crumbs, actually, from his table. The rich man refuses. And then Jesus intervenes at that point to say, well, let me tell you how this ends up. Lazarus goes to heaven. The rich guy goes to hell because he had no capacity for empathy, for feeling for the poor and much less doing anything about it. And this inability to feel for the plight of the poor on the part of the rich is, again, a theme that we see throughout Western civilization, most notably, and maybe surprisingly for some, in the figure of Adam Smith, often cited as a godfather of capitalism. Adam Smith on page two of “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” his second most famous book, after “Wealth of Nations,” provides an evocative account of a begging man who was ignored, that nobody feels any sympathy for. So those are two examples of themes that connected to inequality that really worked their way from the ancient world to the modern.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with the political science professor David Lay Williams, and we're discussing his new book, “The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx.” So, you know, you've got a you've got a big handful of but it's still just a handful of philosophers here that you treat in your book. You obviously have to make some difficult choices to narrow it down. I'm just curious how did you pick the people that you did, you don’t have to go through each one. I'm going to ask you a couple of specific questions about individuals, but just what were your methods like or how did you go about deciding this person versus another person?
DLW: Yeah. Well, you know, I should begin with some honesty, right? I mean, I certainly included some people because I just really love reading and thinking about them, right.
GR: That's OK.
DLW: I've written a couple of books on Rousseau. You know, I certainly wanted to make room for him. And I do really love reading Plato. But beyond that, right, the more, you know, maybe justifiable explanation is that I really wanted to draw on very well known canonical figures to kind of make a point to say, look, if if people care about the Western canon and we hear this from from a lot of people on the political right these days, for that matter. Right. You know, why aren't we reading more of the Western canon? You know, why are we reading all the DEI stuff? Right. Well, you know, I want to take these people seriously because I you know, although maybe not a person of the right, I share their passion for these texts. Right. And I want to say to them, well, you know, if we take these texts seriously, you know, they say some pretty interesting things about inequality. Right. And if we're going to, you know, and certainly we're all engaged in the question of inequality today. Right. It's coming up this week with the budget. And, you know, if we're going to look to figures like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and, you know, Plato and the Bible. Right. Among other sources. Right. I think, you know, these canonical texts have a lot to say about this issue and can be the source of some, you know, stimulating and perhaps important discussions.
GR: Mm hmm. And it was you've already mentioned this a bit earlier in our conversation, but I found it very intriguing, maybe a little surprising. I don't know. But when I first opened the book and I saw that the New Testament was one of your chapters right there, along with Plato and Marx and Rousseau.
DLW: Yeah.
GR: And it makes sense, you know, when you think about the Gospels and you've talked a little bit about the view of inequality that the New Testament offers, maybe this is a time to work in your third through line that you didn't that you left out before. But, you know, there's this theme of greed. There's this interesting theme of empathy being damaged or destroyed. Is there an overarching lesson about inequality that you think the New Testament is teaching us?
DLW: Sure. Right. And the New Testament is really unique, obviously, in this book. Right. You know, Jesus is not typically taught as a political thinker in political science departments at universities, whether that's Syracuse or DePaul or Harvard or wherever. Right. I and I didn't even intend to write one on the New Testament. That wasn't my intention. My problem was that I had a big gap between Plato and Thomas Hobbes and I and I started reading some Christian thinkers a little bit later than the Bible, of course. And the more I read them, the more I thought, well, I should really go back and look at the Bible. And I realized that that's what I had to write about, because the Bible has so much to say about this. And, you know, interesting things, you know, that come from the Bible. Right. I'll focus on two important laws. These are in the Hebrew Bible. Actually, they're in the books of Moses, the you know, the Pentateuch. Right. And it's that they're very important laws, according to Moses. Right. And they're laws that Jesus draws our attention to again, in the Gospels. And these two laws are the laws of sabbatical and jubilee and the law of sabbatical and again, an ancient Hebrew law that says all debts should be forgiven once every seven years. Right. Among other things. Right. A jubilee is the seventh of every sabbatical years. Right. So once every fortnight or 50 years. Right. It's kind of gotten rounded up to 50. And in a jubilee year, you do you forgive all the debts and these other things as well. But you also have to return all property that's that's changed hands over the last five decades back to the original equitable distribution. Right. And when Jesus is setting up his ministry, he's preaching, he announces very specifically, it is the year, it is the year of the Lord, which is a Jubilee year. Right. And when you think about the context in which Jesus is, you know, ministering to the poor. Right. This is a very powerful and appealing message. Right. You know, “Hey, you know, we would like our land back. We would like our debts forgiven.” And there was a significant debt crisis in Roman Palestine at that time. And this message was extremely appealing.
GR: Hmm. Also, cueing a student loan forgiveness.
DLW: Yes. And people have made that connection.
GR: You're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with David Lay Williams. He's a political science professor at DePaul University and the author of a new book titled “The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx.” And we've been discussing his book. So I, I've read in my past all the writers that you treat, including the Gospels, spent, you know, two months slogging through Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” I've done my duty there, too. But I find Rousseau the most intriguing of the political philosophers that you cover. So I'm going to take a personal indulgence here. Tell us a little bit about his views on inequality.
DLW: Sure. Rousseau is obviously a really important thinker when it comes to inequality. I famously he wrote a book called the “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.” And he's certainly the first modern thinker to think about inequality in a very systematic way, gives an account of where it comes from and why it's problematic in that discourse. And then and in other writings beyond his discourse, inequality talks about what he thinks could be done about it, has some a variety of interesting proposals. But I think what's really distinctive among the many things that Rousseau says about inequality is it is in the context of his enlightenment culture, of emerging meritocracy. I think this is where Rousseau really speaks to us. Right? Again, meritocracy is a word in the contemporary discourse about politics right there. Politicians are saying you know, universities need to be more meritocratic. Corporations should hire on a meritocratic basis. Right. But Rizzo's kind of he's and he's Rousseau was well aware of this emerging culture of meritocracy, because that's what's happening in the Enlightenment. And there are lots of good things, of course, about encouraging, you know, people to cultivate and develop their talent and use that for the public good. But Rousseau also thought there were problems with that. Right. So and it's maybe useful to think about, you know, kind of a capitalist economy versus a feudal economy. Right. And nobody wants to go back to feudalism. But Rousseau says, imagine, Rousseau invites us to think, you know, about, you know, the moral psychology of people under feudalism. Right? If you're poor in a futile economy, you're you don't have to, like, spend time thinking about why you're poor. You know why you're poor. It's because your parents were poor. And it's no reflection on you, you know, or your talents or your efforts or any of that. And the same thing if you're rich, right? If you're rich, it's not like you deserved it. You know that. You just you know that you're rich because you inherited your money. Right. And you're you're estate. Right. You know, in the case of the nobles. Right. But you move to a market economy, and there's a very significant psychological shift. Right. Because now if you're poor, it's because you're not smart like the rich people, or you didn't try hard. Right. Like the rich people. Right. In, you know, more colloquial terms, it's because you're lazy and stupid. Right. And if you're rich, by contrast, it means, boy, are you smart. Boy, are you a hard worker, and you deserve all the money you can get. Right. And the richer you are, that just means that you're all the better a person. Right. And Rousseau thinks, honestly, that this is this is dangerous, maybe even perverse, because he wants people to focus on their moral character. Right. Not focusing about how great they are. Right. Or focusing, by contrast, on how terrible they are for the reason that they're poor, which has nothing to do with their character as far as Rousseau is concerned. In fact, probably is a point in their favor. So Rousseau points out just how pathological he thinks this is, and he really wants us to kind of get our get our values back in order in an unequal world, which he thinks could be best achieved by reducing that inequality. Right. Because, you know, that's how we can reduce, you know, kind of the demoralizing effect on the poor and this kind of entitled effect among the rich.
GR: Now, very very prescient psychologically. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher. And my guest is the political science professor David Lay Williams. So, thinking about Rousseau, but I want to ask a more general point. But thinking about Rousseau, there's obviously a lot of contradictions and hypocrisies between a lot of Rousseau’s writings and Rousseau’s actual life. I've read a couple of biographies of him, and I think that makes him more interesting, actually. But in writing this book, did you come to any general conclusions about the relationship between the life experiences of these thinkers and then what they have to say? Any sense of influence?
DLW: Yeah. You know, I it's interesting to reflect on that. I certainly one thing I do in the book is I try to put each thinker in a historical context. Right. To explain why they might have been interested in inequality. Right. But I think your question is even more specific than that. What about the specific life experiences and maybe the background of each thinker? Right. And you mentioned even the possibility of hypocrisies. Right. And on this account, we might look to the first figure in the book, again, Plato, who has all kinds of problems with rich people and says, you know, it's impossible to be both rich and virtuous at the same time. Plato, it turns out, was rich (overlapping laughter). He was very rich. And, you know, it's interesting to reflect on that. Right. Was Plato saying I'm a bad person? Was Plato saying I'm the exception? Right. He doesn't tell us. Right. I mean, I think what we you know, you people are free to, you know, draw from these facts however they want. I think maybe kind of the most you know, I think what I'm comfortable in drawing on from this is that Plato did spend a lot of time around a lot of other rich people. Right. And, you know, and many of them, of course, were relatives like his Uncle Critias was one of the tyrants of Athens imposed on Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, a brutal murderer. Right. So it's not unreasonable to think that. Well, maybe Plato's experience growing up around a lot of rich people actually informed his understanding of rich people. And maybe he had a better angle on that than some others who maybe didn't grow up under those circumstances.
GR: Hmm. So you've obviously thought deeply about all of these thinkers that are in your book. Is there one that you think has it most right when it comes to inequality? Can you pick one that way?
DLW: Right. That's a real tough question to answer. Right. And might be taking the cheap way out, because I think every one of them has some handle on an important truth in the way they approach this. So I'm not going to pick a single one. But what I can point to is that there's you know, there's certainly a pattern among some of the thinkers who say you kind of draw distinction. And this is true, I think, in Plato very expressly and Rousseau more implicitly, that for them, this kind of a radical opposition, a radical a path of radical reform and a path of moderate reform. Right. Right. They both say, look, ideally we should be, you know, a very equal and not completely equal. Nobody argues for perfect equality, not even Marx, for that matter. Should make that clear. And Plato says, ideally, the rich people should have no more than four times the wealth of the poorest, for example. But he says, look, you know, that's that's if you're creating a new society from scratch, I guess. And he's saying that in the context of establishing a colony in a territory that's never been occupied before, he said do it this way. But he says, look, if you're writing laws for, you know, a political entity that already exists and already has that's distributed a lot of property is like, no, you can't do that. Without killing a lot of people. Right. And maybe some people are open to that solution. Right. But Plato doesn't love that and says, look, you know, you still have to get more equal than you are and you need to work on it consistently. But he also says that ideally, what you want to do is try to get buy-in if at least some people find some people who are rich and feel guilty about it. Right. And have them do some of the hard work of persuading their friends and colleagues and business partners to realize, you know, it's not the worst thing to have their taxes raised and to build schools and, you know, and other public entities for people who are less fortunate than them. Right. And to kind of work toward a greater equality. Right. And I, you know, I, I like, you know, contemplating the idea that there are moderate paths forward. Right. Because, you know, the other path, you know, at the polar opposite end of the book is Marx. Right. And Marx, you know, fundamentally just kind of concludes that, you know, rich people aren’t going to give up their money without a fight. Right. And you just need to come prepared to fight. And, you know and, you know, I can't you know, I don't, maybe Marx is right. I don't know. There are scholars who certainly think that Marx is. I'd like to hope there's another path available. I'd like to hope that people are persuadable. Yeah.
GR: So we only have about a minute left, and I wanted to squeeze this last question in, and I think you kind of are already answering it, but I'll give you another few seconds to add on to it. And that is obviously, you have thought a lot about inequality as a social issue and a social problem very deeply. What would you do if you were one of Plato's philosopher kings, or to use a phrase that's out there, maybe dictator for a day, to address inequality through policy change? What policy changes would you recommend? In about a minute. I'm sorry. I'm sure that's a more complicated question.
DLW: Yeah. So I'll try to do this quickly with a reference I think I haven't mentioned before, but John Stuart Mill has a wonderful range of policy proposals for addressing this. Things like having more co-ops, like worker co-ops, you know, businesses owned by workers, will lead to a more equal distribution. Honestly, you know, estate or inheritance taxes, you know, on fortunes over X amount of money. Right. These things should be politically doable. Right. In a democracy. Right. The will is, you know, I think there for things like that, and we just need to find politicians with enough courage, I think, to seriously pursue them.
GR: Hmm. We'll have to leave it there. That was David Lay Williams and again, his new book is titled “The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx.” If you've heard of some of those guys and you want to learn a bit more about what they have to say, or if you have concerns about economic inequality and want some deeper grounding, this book is a great choice for you. I want to emphasize that it is not an arcane work of political philosophy. It's extremely readable and it's an enjoyable read. David, thanks again for making the time to talk. Great book. Thanks a lot.
DLW: My pleasure.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
John Sanbonmatsu on the Campbell Conversations
Jun 28, 2025
John Sanbonmatsu
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I’m Grant Reeher. Last week I spoke with a writer who had a new book out on the foods of upstate New York. Today, we stay with food, but we move very far from that in many respects. My guest is John Sanbonmatsu. He's a philosophy professor of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and the author of a new book titled, “The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves”. Professor Sanbonmatsu, welcome to the program and congratulations on this new book.
John Sanbonmatsu: Thanks so much, I'm delighted to be here.
GR: Well, we're glad you could make the time. So, as our listeners are about to discover, this book is very provocative, I think it's fair to say and it has an intriguing title. So, “The Omnivore's Deception…”, break that down for me, what is the omnivore's deception?
JS: Sure. Well, my book is really about our exploitation of animals and the food economy. And the three modes of deception, really, that I talk about in the book are, well, first, the fact that the meat, eggs, dairy and fish industries hide from consumers, the incredible mass violence that undergirds this system to get food on our plate. The second mode of deception really is the, a kind of whole discourse that's been developed in the last 20 years for so-called humane meat. The enlightened omnivore, kind of dating back to Michael Pollan's book, “The Omnivore's Dilemma”, which we might talk about. And that is simply a myth, you can't have these animal products without causing enormous suffering to animals, no matter how small scale the agriculture is. And then the third mode of deception is simply self-deception. We engage in what the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called bad faith, which is to say we deceive ourselves and we want to believe we can have our meat and our conscience, too. And I make clear, I hope to my reader, that we can't.
GR: Well, you anticipated one of the questions I wanted to ask you when you talked about smaller scale, sort of, you know, local sourcing kind of things. Well, I'll ask you that right away, I mean, what is the problem with paying attention to the scale, if you’re an eater paying attention to the scale and the method of raising animals? You know, you focus on locally sourced, smaller, non-industrial scale animal growing operations, where's the problem there?
JS: Yeah. You know, it's thanks largely to animal advocates that the public is aware of what we call factory farming or intensive industrialized animal agriculture. And the animals in that system, which by the way, that's 99% of where our products come from, food animal products, 99%. And it's horrible, it's horrific the way animals are treated in that system. But what people don't realize is that the critique of our violence against the animals for use in food dates back 3000 years. They'd been ethical vegetarians during that whole period. You know, Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist wrote, he was an ethical vegetarian, he wrote an incredible critique about a slaughterhouse. So, really, my book is examining the underlying relations of domination and violence in all forms of animal agriculture, including smaller scale, which is, by the way, not scalable. You can't feed 10 billion human beings, you know, with pasture raised animals, we’d need several additional earths. But my focus, so I do talk about the environmental problems at lengths in my book, but really the focus is on the ethical question of what gives us the right to subject defenseless, sensitive beings to violence.
GR: Well, and you also talk about, I believe, some of the health implications for humans and the way that our diets are currently constructed. Just give us a quick overview, and others have written about this, obviously, what are the health problems with how we currently eat animals?
JS: Yeah, well, it's interesting. When I talk about these issues in class, because I teach ethics at the college level, you know, students, naturally, they think, well, we can't live without animal products, we can't live without the protein from animals and so forth. And what's ironic about that is that practically every scientific study, and I'm talking about studies in The Lancet and JAMA and you know, top medical journals, show that in a plant based diet is actually superior in like every category compared to an animal based one. I mean, in terms of lower rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, even longevity, vegans live longer than so-called omnivores. And so there's just these sort of scientific facts. But leaving that aside there, I mean, there's just a whole slew of problems for us health-wise and epidemiologically. For example, 75% of all emerging diseases are zoonotic in origin. That means that the diseases that are afflicting our species and that have in the past have come from other animals. Most of those diseases historically have come from exploited animals, smallpox, cholera, Spanish flu, even AIDS. These all developed out of human food exploitation, exploitation of animals for food. So it's, and now of course we have the H5N1 virus, avian flu and the WHO, well, 20 years ago, excuse me, warned that if that thing becomes transmissible between and among humans, it could kill 150 million of us. So that's just an example of why it's even in our own interests, and again that's not the basis of my book but I do talk about this, it's in our interest to stop this too.
GR: And what about the impact on the environment? That's another concern that drives a lot of people to vegetarianism. You'll meet a lot of vegetarians that say, I am this way because I'm concerned about the environment. I have a colleague, I think, who's primarily driven by that.
JS: Yeah. You know, the first sentence of my book in my introduction, I talk about that, that, you know, occasionally you'll hear people say, well, I've cut back on meat or I tried vegetarianism once for the environment. And I'll tell you, I don't like that (laughter), I don't like that at all. As I explain, because it's like the person who says that they, in my experience, they often say, well, I don't do it for the animals, you know. It's like, well, if you care about the animals, you must be some kind of nutcase, right? The fact that we're killing, conservatively, 80 billion land animals every year, mostly birds and mammals, and up to 2.7 trillion marine animals every single year, each animal of which, you know, is an individual with thoughts and experiences, emotions and so forth. The idea that we should want to spare them a violent death at our hands, that just drives people crazy, right? So the environmental issue is crucial because what people don't understand is that this confluence, as I discuss it in the book, between capitalist development on the one hand and human supremacism or speciesism on the other, the confluence of these systems in the food economy is the greatest ecologically destructive force on the earth, right? So people are familiar with global warming. Well, global warming is not the biggest environmental problem on the Earth today. That would be mass species extinction, right? So, we're experiencing the greatest mass species extinction event in 65 million years. Global warming is part of that problem, but it isn't the only thing driving it. So we're talking about the death of all the animals on the earth. Birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, even invertebrates, like insects, scientists refer to it as the insect apocalypse. You know, honeybees are being devastated. Crustaceans, horseshoe crabs, who are on the earth hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs are being wiped out. This is the 50th anniversary of the movie Jaws, which I saw when it came out as a boy.
GR: So did I.
JS: Yeah. And I'll tell you, when I asked my students how many humans are killed by sharks every year, they always get that right, which is about ten to 20 globally. And when I asked them how many sharks are being killed by humans, they say, well, I don't know, 2000, 500? It's actually 100 million every single year. And all of that violence is put out of sight and out of mind. But it's literally tearing up the web of life on our planet. So, yeah, I could go on and on about it, but it's, it's something that people have got to start paying attention to because we're dooming our own species because of this system.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with the philosophy professor, John Sanbonmatsu. And we're discussing his new book, it's called, “The Omnivores Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves” and it argues for the total abolition of the animal economy. So let's get to what I think is probably the heart of your argument and where your passion most lies and that is the moral concerns. And you've already spoken to them in several different ways, but the moral concerns about raising an animal to kill and eat it. How would you crystallize that that argument that you want to make?
JS: Well, you know, there's, any system of power or dominance has to be continually reinforced. It's not like it's one and done. You know, you don't just set up a system for, whether it's human slavery or, you know, racism, a kind of racial hierarchy or gender hierarchy. You don't just set that up and then it just goes on, on its own, it has to be continually reinforced. So all of us are raised from birth to, with the idea that there are these classes of animals who simply don't matter and it doesn't matter morally how many of them we kill. It just, they're irrelevant, you know what I mean? Which is why, as I said, we can kill billions and indeed trillions of animals every year without it even disturbing anybody. But here's the thing, most people listening to your show probably have lived with a cat or dog. I mean, that's statistically the case. And if you live with a cat or dog, you know that they are unique individuals. They have personalities and temperaments and emotions. They have different relationships with different people. You know, they have different quirks, they have a kind of biography and you can see them go through the stages of life that we do, the playful kitten and then the kind of, you know, the limping elder cat who you know, tolerates the juvenile you've just introduced into the house and so on. So we know that our cats and dogs are individuals whose lives matter and who deserve our respect and are worthy of our love. Well, let me tell you, everyone should be disturbed by the fact that chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, oxen all these animals that we think of as stupid, irrational, dirty, they are no different than our cats and dogs at all. I mean, scientifically, ecologically there's just a ton of research on this. Scientific American has published articles on chicken intelligence, there's empathy in pigs and so forth. So if you think that every time you sit down to a meal, you are eating the body of some, you know, richly endowed creature like a cat or dog with sentience, with subjectivity, then you might begin to understand why this is a moral issue of the first order.
GR: And at the risk of sorting out my animals, anthropomorphically, I can readily see the appeal of the argument that you're making for cattle, sheep, pigs and chicken. But what about something like fish? I have a friend who's very tuned in to the kind of concerns you're talking about. He describes himself as a pescatarian. So what's the problem with fish?
JS: Yeah, it's funny. You know, I remember like, many years ago, I'd go to someone's wedding or something, and the caterer would put chicken in front of me after having heard I'm an ethical vegetarian and think, well, if you eat chicken, though, right? So the idea that chickens are animals would not compute. And similarly, I've met a number of people over the years who call themselves vegetarians but they eat fish. It's very bizarre because the signs that we're finding with fish, it's just fascinating. Fish do better at some forms of cognitive reasoning than primates, including the great apes, including humans. They have memories, they have emotions. Now, the thing is, as mammals, we're just not equipped well to perceive the feelings or thoughts of fish, right? Because they don't have the facial muscles that we have. So we think of them as silent, gaping, animate objects, I guess, right? I mean, I went fishing as a kid and you bring the, oh, and now the fish is flapping on the dock. It doesn't occur to us, well, that fish is now suffocating to death and is experiencing the same trauma and stress hormones that we would as mammals if we were drowning. But that is the case. And this is just, now certainly there's still a lot we don't understand about fish cognition. And the fishing industry is always funding studies to prove that fish don't feel pain and so forth. But I mean, it's just a silly argument because evolutionarily, how can you have a sophisticated organism that's going to survive, like the Greenland shark lives up to 400 years, I mean, there are fish that live a really long time, who can't experience pain? So, yeah, so I think we've got to stop writing off entire classes of beings as worthless because they aren't worthless.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I’m talking with John Sanbonmatsu. He's a philosophy professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and the author of a new book titled, “The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves” and we've been discussing his book. Well, you lay it out in the first half of the program, I think very well, your main arguments for why we need to eliminate the animal economy. Who are some of the main sort of voices out there that you are trying to correct or take issue with?
JS: Well, you know, I go after a number of different folks in a certain sense, but centrally I'm concerned to refute arguments developed by the very popular food writer Michael Pollan. In his book, for example, “The Omnivore's Dilemma”, that book had an enormous cultural influence over the way Americans view our relations with animals, particularly in food. It's still, just took a look the other day, it's like 20 years later, it's still in the top ten bestsellers on food policy, it's part of the state mandated curriculum in middle and high schools in different states around the country. I couldn’t possibly exaggerate the influence that book. And, you know, without taking too much time, Pollan's arguments ended up creating kind of intellectual scaffolding for this myth of the enlightened omnivore, you know, locavorism and so forth. All this idea that we can raise animals, quote, humanely, kill them with compassion and so forth. And so I show the problems with those arguments as well as similar arguments by Temple Grandin, another very popular apologist for the animal system, Barbara Kingsolver, the acclaimed writer. And if you examine their arguments, they're not only wrong, but they are intellectually dishonest and sadistic. There's this undertow of violence and sadism against animals in those works.
GR: So let me throw out some potential challenges or problems with this that I thought of and see what you have to say about them. And the first one is very Syracuse oriented, I don't expect you to be an expert on Syracuse, but we have in Syracuse a real overpopulation problem with deer. And it creates a whole lot of problems, creates problems on the roads, it creates problems in people's properties and the ticks and so on. If we stopped all hunting, for example, that would probably make those problems just worse. So how would we deal with an overpopulation of deer and Syracuse if John Sanbonmatsu was running the program?
JS: Yeah, well, first, I just want to note that the one species that is causing the greatest damage on this planet is actually us and no one talks about culling us. No one talks about culling real estate developers and capitalists and all the folks who are…
GR: Fair enough, fair enough.
JS: I mean, if you look at the ecosystem of Syracuse and you compare human impacts on the environment in terms of consumption of goods from China and blah, blah, blah, with what the deer are doing, it's, you know, no contest. So it's very interesting to me that communities, the first thing they do is reach for the gun. Like, okay, this, first of all, this is a problem for whom? It's for motorists? Well, don't forget the highways and the roadways were put through the living habitats, the living spaces and homes of all of thousands of different species and then they are supposed to get out of the way. So that's number one, there's structural violence against animals built in and the starting point is always, let's assume that all these animals lives are disposable, interchangeable, what do we do with this problem? That's number one. Now, in terms of the Syracuse issue, it's true. I don't know the specifics, but I've looked into this in other cases, there are alternatives, okay? First of all, one reason that deer and other populations are increasing is because humans have, through hunting, just killed all the predators, right? So there is no ecological balance to be restored. Secondly, there are nonviolent alternatives. There's birth control, there's relocation. And I'm not saying that those are easy alternatives either but in my having examined the planning process at the local level in some communities, there's a big hunting lobby and these folks want to kill the animals. And so they bring in experts from, you know, the NRA or hunting lobbies in order to promote their agenda. And the problem is that state wildlife officials are hunters. And, you know, it's run by these agencies are actually not ideologically neutral. They're run by the same constituency. So I think that if we start, in my book, I say, look, why don't we have a different mode of address with the other beings we share the planet with? Let's approach them nonviolently for a change. You know, we've tried this other approach which is to treat their lives as so much disposable garbage. Why don't we instead view them with respect and go from there? And so that's what I would say is like, what if we have a paradigm shift and we say, okay, those deer are as important to us as our own cats and dogs or even, you know, other humans and how can we live with them in harmony, you know, without violence? That's what I would say.
GR: Yeah. I just, not to sound snarky, but I'm thinking of when you mentioned predators, you know, if I were a deer, if that makes sense, I'm not sure I'd rather be killed by a pack of coyotes taking me down or a hunter killing me quickly, but I get your point. It's a different way to think about this. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the philosophy professor John Sanbonmatsu. So I want to get to some how do we get there type of questions, because I've had many guests on this program who make arguments that are, you know, hard to imagine becoming completely successful politically, policy-wise. And as a political scientist, you know, I am sympathetic to much of what you are saying, but I also really can't see what you are arguing here getting much traction in contemporary America or the world. Do you have a political strategy attached to this argument that you could briefly put forward? Or is that is that sort of outside of your lane?
JS: You know, it's a fair question and a really important one. The short answer is, I don't have a concrete you know, I don't have a blueprint for social change. In my first book, “The Postmodern Prince” I talked about some of the obstacles to thinking about strategy and long term change on the political left. And there are a lot of reasons why it's hard to imagine an alternative to this system that we're living in. But, you know, as a philosopher and thinker, I'm really trying to first of all, you know, before we can get to the question of strategy, in a sense, we have to understand what the problem is, A, B, we have to understand and agree that this is a problem like morally. And so if we want to survive on this planet, let me put it this way, if we want to survive on this planet and if we want to be able to look ourselves in the mirror and not see a kind of monster there, then we have to rethink our relations with the other natural beings, you know, of the Earth. Certainly I'm promoting veganism but I'm not, I don't, but, you know, I've been a vegan for over 30 years and things and animals are being killed in greater and greater numbers. Per capita, meat consumption is up. There's been a whole kind of political reaction against animal advocacy, just as there's been political reaction against women's rights and civil rights. So the thing is, and you know this, that historically slavery existed, persisted for thousands of years in human culture. It was accepted almost everywhere. No one thought that that system would ever be ended. And then, of course, there was racial slavery, you know, European racial slavery that began, you know, five centuries ago. No one thought that would ever end and it has ended. And maybe now not to get into, you know, there still existing slavery, but at least not legally. Women into the 1970’s, that was the first time it became illegal, thanks to feminist efforts, illegal for men to rape their wives in the home, conjugal right was simply part of standard English law for a thousand years or more. So change is possible and I think that there's a way in which by, when we say, oh well it's impossible for everyone to give up the animal economy, it becomes a self-confirming prophecy, clearly. And so I wrote this book to try to intervene against that self-serving fatalism, that, which again I call self-deception where we say, oh, well, there's no real, we can't do anything about it, it's too big a problem. But the problems we face are really kind of out of hand, right? I mean, global warming and species extinction, not to mention fascism rising everywhere around the world and the liberal capitalist democracy waning. You know what I'm saying? So these, that's a cop out, though, to say, well, these are very big problems and what can we do?
GR: Well, we've got about 2 minutes left or so and I want to try to squeeze two questions in. So this will be kind of your lightning round, if you will, a couple of quick answers to these and they're both tough questions, so I apologize for that. But you already mentioned something about the political moment we're in that there's a lot of backlash against different things right now. And I'm wondering about whether given the layers of backlash that we're seeing, that what you are saying right now is going to be heard by a lot of people as kind of an instance of political correctness on steroids, is there a way that you've thought about diffusing that in terms of how people are going to hear this? Quickly, if you could.
JS: Yeah, I mean, people think that the question of animals and meat is at best a trivial one, right? Or at worst, it's political correctness on steroids. But this is, it's always been the case historically that any challenge to an established system of power and authority, you know, the people who are questioning it, whether it's slavery or women's subordination to men, are viewed as zealots and crazy people and so forth. And what I argue in my book is that this is the most important issue of our time, if you look at it. And I think that if people give my book a chance, they will, by the end of it, they'll agree with me. So, yeah, just ask people to keep an open mind and read the book.
GR: Okay, and my last question, just a few seconds left, I want to be very honest with you, I want to tell you something you probably already knew about me. I'm not going to do what you're telling me to do (laughter). I'm not going to become a vegan. I recognize the arguments for it, but it's probably not going to happen. But if I were to do just one thing short of that, what would it be? Would it be to avoid highly tortured processed animals of a certain kind of meat? What would be the one thing you'd want me to do?
JS: One thing I'd ask you to do is to recognize that what you're doing is wrong. The argument in the book is that you can't get humane meat or better sourced or, that's the whole point of the book. And if you can live with yourself knowing that what you're doing is causing horrific suffering and violence to helpless beings who deserve better, that, you know, that's a personal choice that you or I or whoever make. Not you, but, you know I'm saying, if we choose that.
GR: I get you.
JS: But that is the situation, it is all or nothing.
GR: Okay, well, I will tell you this, you have got me thinking about something I wasn't thinking about before. So that was John Sanbonmatsu and again, his new book is titled, “The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves”. And it may not change your habits, but it will challenge them and it will certainly maybe change some of your assumptions. John, a very provocative book, to say the least and I can agree that (this is a) very important argument that you're making.
JS: Thanks for having me.
GR: You bet. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
June Hersh on the Campbell Conversations
Jun 21, 2025
June Hersh
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is June Hersh. She's a writer and a speaker who has in the past written about the Holocaust and food history. And she has a new book out now on the food of Upstate New York. It's titled, “The Flavor of Upstate New York: Iconic Dishes, Delicious History and Reinvented Recipes”. June, welcome to the program and congratulations on this new book.
June Hersh: Thank you so much, Grant. And thank you for having me.
GR: Well, it's a pleasure having you. So I want to start with a very basic question, because I'm sure, just as I said that, our listeners are starting to think about specific foods. And so what would you say, if you were just giving a list, what would you say are the four or five greatest hits of the dishes and flavors of upstate New York, just rattling them off?
JH: Well, you know what, what I love about the food of upstate New York is it's very representative of the different immigrants and the groups that inhabit that region. I love that because food history is really what drives me. I love to know the why to what we're eating. And I think that the food of upstate New York is really very illustrative of that aspect of food. So I love a dish like chicken riggies because it represents the best of Italian culture and the resourcefulness of how they brought, you know, their flavors to New York and made it pretty simple and was good for a budget. I think salt potatoes is genius. It's basically creating a mashed potato in a fabulous salty covering. And again, it came out of the ingenuity of Irish immigrants who needed to stretch a dollar and we're digging up salt anyway and kind of make it work. The college influences in upstate New York are everywhere. And I don't think it's seen any more clearly than in the garbage plate, the best antidote to a frat party hangover. And so I think that is definitely one of those dishes that define the region. And then I would say one of my favorites represents the German influences, and that would be beef on weck. I love a French dip, but when you add that pungent, fruity caraway seed to the roll, you've added such extra deliciousness to it. So those are among my four favorite upstate hits that I think represent the culture of upstate New York.
GR: That's great. I want to come back to at least one of those later. So, but let me ask you this, maybe a tougher question. If you were forced to pick the most emblematic, the most iconic dish of upstate, what would it be and why?
JH: I would probably say if I was to pick one, it would probably be the garbage plate.
GR: Wow.
JH: And that would be because it represents, even though it is by no means the most popular and for some, it's completely off putting, but because it has so many different elements in it, I think it really represents the confluence of, you know, ingredients that represent the region. So you have hot dogs in it and you have beans and you have macaroni salad and you have French fries and you have all of these different elements coming together. Isn't that really what Upstate New York is all about? It's really bringing together all these very different cultures and backgrounds and heritage and somehow making something interesting, inventive, a tad quirky, you know I call it a culinary curiosity. But that, to me is what I discovered about upstate New York. It's not what you always expect. And so I think the garbage plate is it is very unexpected dish of food.
GR: And so you mentioned that that one has perhaps a more limited appeal beyond the area, let's flip it around. What is the upstate dish that you think has been taken up and become the most popular elsewhere, across the country, maybe even around the world? Is there an upstate dish that, you know, you can find almost anywhere?
JH: Sure. Well, without question, and you know, a lot of food history is really food law. And you don't know where that boundary is between fact and slight exaggeration. So, of course, we have the hamburger, which many take claim that it took place at the county fair and that's where they ran out of a certain meat and they made ground beef and they made a hamburger and certainly that is a ubiquitous food. But I would have to ere on the side of two dishes because I'm torn. One, my sweet tooth would tell me the sundae, the ice cream sundae, which really did very likely originate in upstate New York when a pastor went to a local drugstore and they wanted to make something special for him on Sunday after church and they added some cherries and some whipped cream and a little bit of syrup, and they created the ice cream sundae. They changed the spelling because they did not want to offend church goers on Sunday to come up with such a frivolous name of a dessert and somehow watered down the message of the importance of that day of rest. The other one is I love the foods that have come out of Saratoga and the club sandwich, which again, is reported to have come from that region and definitely the potato chip. Who doesn't like a good crispy potato chip? So I think the club sandwich with a side order of potato chips is pretty much a mainstay. Anywhere you go, you can order a club sandwich with a side order of chips. And that's going to represent food of upstate New York.
GR: So you're really blowing my mind here because you've selected all these things that are extremely well known. When I was thinking of that question myself, I was not thinking big enough because I thought you were going to tell me Buffalo wings, because you can find those anywhere. But these are much more you know, standard dishes. So, it's fascinating.
JH: Yes. And I what I like about them is people don't realize their provenance, they don't realize where these foods originally came from. That's what I love discovering and finding out. Oh, what was the origin of that dish? Really? The potato chip in Saratoga really was an invention of an African-American chef who worked at a hotel there at a hotel restaurant. And supposedly Vanderbilt did not like the potatoes he was served with and out of frustration, they very thinly shaved the potatoes and just threw it in a vat of hot oil and served these to him and they became a hit. And so, you know, you look at something like that and you say, look how that just came about, that's just, it's fascinating. And it's again, like you said, it's something that everyone eats everywhere. It was immediately embraced and it definitely came out of Saratoga.
GR: And then you also have, you know, pleasing this uber-wealthy person and then creating something that is totally, you know, plebian in its attraction.
JH: Correct, yeah.
GR: I like that piece too. Well, you may have already sort of hinted at this, but, and I don't know whether this question really has an answer, but is it possible to say what drives the nature of upstate cuisine? It sounds like ethnicity is a big piece of it. I was just wondering, is there anything about the place itself? You know, like the, I don't know, the snow the cold or anything that you think would have an influence on the nature of the food that's been produced here?
JH: Sure, without question. Because the food originated, if you go back to the first New Yorkers, you had the three sisters. You had the beans that were so very important because they thrived on the land where the Native Americans, where the Iroquois tribe, you know, planted its roots. And so those foods were indigenous to the indigenous people. And that's really, I think a hallmark of the food of upstate. A lot of places take New York City, I wrote a book called, “Iconic New York Jewish Food”, it's got fabulous food in it. It has all of the wonderful things that we love about New York food but they are not necessarily in New York because of anything New York City contributes to them other than the people. So a knish, it's not grown in New York.
GR: (laughter)
JH: Smoked salmon, it doesn't swim necessarily in our waters. And so it was derived by the people, whereas the food of upstate New York was derived from the resourcefulness of the people using the land, using what they had to work with. So you start with the Iroquois and they had the three sisters and the beautiful beans and then you go to the Finger Lakes and we have these fabulous wines. You go to Albany that had an abundance of sturgeon and you look at the land and you look at the trout fishing that takes place, and you look at grape pie, which came from the Concord grapes, and you say, what drove those dishes? Well, it was the resourcefulness of the people who were there who had the wherewithal to take what the land was giving them and turn them into delectable, iconic foods. Very different than most other regions. Chicago Pizza has nothing really to do with the ingredients that come from Chicago, but the foods of upstate New York are driven by the ingredients that are grown in that region.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with June Hersh, and we're discussing her new book titled, “The Flavor of Upstate New York: Iconic Dishes, Delicious History and Reinvented Recipes”. So the question I just asked about what drives the upstate cuisine is related in a way to a different topic of your other writing and speaking about food that I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about. And as I mentioned at the outset of the program, you've written and you've spoken very widely about the Holocaust and food history. And one thing struck me right away is that that combination seems very paradoxical in some ways, in that food is often considered a lighter and a happier topic. I mean, you're obviously very happy talking to me about food right here in this program. But the Holocaust is about as serious and as heavy as it gets. So I just wonder if you could reflect on how those two fit together. Do they, you know, is it an awkward fit? How do you how do you manage that?
JH: No, it's actually a seamless fit. And it fit in so many different ways in the context of the food with connection to the Holocaust, but more specifically with Holocaust survivors, really helped shape their ability to survive because food became a link, whether they were partisans fighting in the woods, whether they were unfortunately interned in a concentration or in a death camp, or whether they were refugees in another region. The food was their link to their best and happiest times. I heard from every Holocaust survivor I spoke to, most specifically the men even more than the women, that food was the connection to the mother that they lost in the Holocaust. And so their ability to preserve that food memory and to continue that thread that wove through their childhoods and carried them through this awfully traumatic time, but brought them forward into survival, becomes so very strong. It's not a fragile, tenuous thread, It is an incredibly strong thread. And so food in the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors is a link and it takes them from tragedy to triumph. And so talking about food is just, it's a way to bring them to happy times, it's a way to get them through the difficult ones and it's a way to ensure that their legacy and their family's history and culture and that the Jewish people, what we've been imbued with for centuries continues. And so food is a perfect vehicle for that.
GR: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. So you must, you obviously have collected some very powerful stories on this topic. And I was just wondering, when it comes to the food connection, that you have one favorite one that you could tell us briefly, I mean, I'm sure you could take the rest of the program talking about it, but is there one you can pick?
JH: You know, I wrote the book originally in 2011. At the time it was called, “Recipes Remembered: A Celebration of Survival”. It's been reinvented and rebranded as, “Food, Hope and Resilience”. And what remains is that every recipe in that book represents somebody’s the best version of a dish and not the dishes that you expect, not the typical Ashkenazi dishes, the matzo ball soup, although they're in there, and brisket and kugel and all of those, of course they're in there. But what's represented, which is what I love, is the cooking traditions of the diaspora and how a Dominican, a Jew who found themselves in the Dominican Republic made arroz con pollo, and that was her iconic Jewish dish. Or one who found herself in Milan because she wanted to gain passage to Palestine, Israel, as it was called at the time, that she gave me a recipe for semolina gnocchi. And you just say, how is that a Jewish dish? Well, it was a Jewish dish because it was prepared by a Jewish Holocaust survivor as she was waiting to make aliyah to Israel. So when I think of what is my favorite dish from that, every one of the dishes is connected to one of my survivors, and it would be like choosing my favorite child. But I will say that there are dishes that I make again and again. And whether they're my favorites or not, they seem to represent, for me, the stories in the book. There is a lentil soup recipe from a Sephardic survivor, part of my culture is Sephardic. My grandfather's family was expelled from Spain and they ended in Greece and so that represents that part of my heritage. And I think it's one of my favorite recipes for that reason. And it is so easy and so delicious and so practical. And I think it has every factor in it that represents the Sephardic community and the Greek community during the Holocaust, because it's inexpensive, it's fast, it's nutritious, it's hearty, it's sturdy and it's a very practical dish and they are very practical people, so I'll go with that.
GR: You're listening to the casual conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with June Hersh. She's a food writer and speaker and the author of a new book titled, “The Flavor of Upstate New York: Iconic Dishes, Delicious History and Reinvented Recipes” and we've been discussing her book. Well, I want to leave the topic of food and Holocaust and come back now to upstate. And I intimated this before when I was talking about the potato chip, but it seems to me that the iconic dishes of upstate New York seem on the whole to be very accessible, unpretentious, one could even say working class. And I was just wondering, does upstate boast any signature dishes that would be considered high cuisine that you might find in a top restaurant in New York City, for example?
JH: Well, I would say that if you look at the dishes that were made like Chicken French, which is really, you know, chicken française, it was a riff on veal française, but it was, became a very iconic dish in upstate New York. So much so that the chef that I guess innovated it, he didn't invent it, he actually wrote an entire book about ‘Frenching’ food and how to turn it into that. And that's definitely something that you would find in an upscale restaurant, probably one that actually has a tablecloth on the table as opposed to most upstate dishes, which I think are best eaten on a slightly worn wooden table that maybe has a nice little wobble to it. I also think when you go back to some of the restaurants in New York like Delmonico's and the Waldorf and some of the really high end New York restaurants, they co-opted some of the upstate inventions, one of them being Thousand Island dressing. And you know, when you think about it, you say, oh, well, Thousand Island dressing, that's not a big deal. But believe it or not, it became a real taste sensation at the high end New York hotels. And they, it was the dressing and the condiment of the day. And so you look at something is as simple as that. And actually, it elevates a lot of foods and you found it in the very best restaurants. It was considered haute cuisine.
GR: Okay, so the other thing that seems to me when I sort of add them all up is a lot of the dishes also seem pretty heavy. You know, like chicken riggies, salt potatoes.
JH: Yep.
GR: Are there any signature dishes of upstate that we might say, this is on the lighter side, this is a light dish?
JH: Well, if you can consider Utica greens as being kind of good for you and a little lighter, I'll go with maybe. (laughter) But for the most part, these are, as you said and I agree and not that they are still today, but their origins were for working class people, they were very practical foods. These were resourceful people who took their backgrounds and interpreted it in dishes that were accessible and easy and also encouraged beer drinking because they were very salty foods. And the tavern and the barkeeps they were very shrewd. They knew that if you were going to serve food at your bar, you want to make sure that they are not thirst quenching but they really make you want to buy a beer or two. And so I'm going to say, no, they are not for the most part. A lot of them are light on the wallet, but they are definitely not light on your waistline. I would not look to upstate New York food as health food, although you can certainly prepare some of them in more healthy ways. You know, you take spiedies for example, that's really just a wonderful skewer of grilled chicken, nothing too heavy about that. And, you know, put that with a salad or some of the fabulous cheese and apples and you pair that together. I mean, that's just lovely and light and delicious, wash it down with a Riesling, I think you have a pretty perfect Sunday lunch. But yeah, I'm going to say they’re stick-to-your-ribs food for the most part.
GR: So you mentioned Utica greens, that's probably my favorite upstate dish. I mean, maybe if calories and fat weren't an issue, I might say Buffalo wings. But anyway, I have a confession here, this is an upstate confession.
JH: Okay.
GR: You mentioned small potatoes at the beginning. I have to say, I am not getting those. I mean, just explain briefly if you could, what I'm missing there because I like a good mashed potato, I like, you know, a golden potato, baked. But I've never quite understood the hype over those.
JH: Really? See, and the first time I made them, I said to myself, well, how is that so different? I usually toss a little salt in the water when I boil a potato. But the product of salt potatoes, it really is completely different. And I think what happens is, is that when you put this copious amount of salt, I mean, it's like half a cup of salt to a pound and a half of potatoes. I mean, that's a lot of salt when you put that in it chemically, you know, from a scientific standpoint, changes the way the water boils and so what it really does is it cooks the potato from the inside out rather than the outside in. So instead of the outside getting soft in the inside staying firm, the inside gets creamy and the outside, and I think the trick to salt potatoes is when you take them out of the water, you have to let them sit because you have to let the salt complete its destiny and you have to let it dry out the skin, leave it's salty crust outside. So that when you, and I almost eat them not piping hot because I really like them to sit and I have a recipe in the book for salt potatoes. And again, I'm looking at the recipe and it looks like, well, that's pretty easy, it's salt and water, potatoes. But then you put butter on it and you pour this melted butter on it. I think it's everything that I love about a good potato. It's got the crust like a baked potato, it's got the interior like a mashed potato. I don't know, I think it's luscious, try it again.
GR: Yeah, I'm doing it wrong. You've given me the key here, okay, and I understand the concept now, so I will try it again.
JH: And listen, you're in Syracuse. It was the Salt City! I mean, for goodness sakes, you’ve got to make a salt potato.
GR: So we have about 3 minutes left, and I want to squeeze in two questions, if I could. So, the second one is longer, so we'll be really quick on the first one, just a few seconds on this. Just out of curiosity, you're obviously an expert cook. When you were trying to make an upstate dish, what's your biggest flop you've ever had?
JH: So my flop was baking grape pie because the first time I did it, I didn't, you've got to pinch them and slip the grapes out of their skins and I mistakenly threw the skins away. I didn't follow my own directions. And I read about it again and again and again, the skins is what gives it the fabulous texture. So I now made these and I boiled down the grapes, but I didn't have enough skins in there. I wasn't going to pull them out of my garbage, so I had to make it again and this time I was very careful. I added the skins and it gave the jam the perfect texture, so it all held together, happens to be delicious. If you have never made it, try it. It's like eating Manischewitz jam. That's what it is.
GR: And my last question is, if I'm lucky enough to be coming over to your house for dinner and you were making me a complete upstate meal of your own personal favorites, what would that menu look like?
JH: All right. So I'm going to offer you quickly two options. I love doing breakfast for dinner. I think breakfast for dinner is one of my most fun things to eat.
GR: Okay, I'm going to interrupt real quick and connect you back to your Holocaust discussion. You just connected me to my mother because she would occasionally make us breakfast for dinner when she ran out of ideas.
JH: Oh, exactly. It is definitely a mom hack, there’s no question, breakfast for dinner.
GR: So what would it be?
JH: So, my breakfast for dinner would come from the Borscht Belt because I grew up going to the Catskills on a very regular basis. Proceeds from the sale of the book benefit the Catskills Borscht Belt Museum, so it has a very special place in my heart. And I would make you a plate of cheese blintzes with sour cream on the side. You would have lox in the cream sauce and pickled herring in the cream sauce. You would absolutely have thinly, perfectly sliced smoked salmon. And I would probably then bring in maybe like a lovely champagne similar to what used to be grown because we were the, New York was the champagne capital of the world. And I would make us a fabulous mimosa with champagne from there. I would absolutely have to have cheese from the Hudson Valley because that's perfect. I'd get foie gras from the Hudson Valley and I would make like almost like a chop liver paté with it. And we would spread that on some crackers and we would have ourselves a little feast.
GR: Yeah. And it sounds like that is a breakfast that leads directly to a nap (laughter). Well that sounds wonderful, we'll have to leave it there. That was June Hersh. And again, her new book is titled, “The Flavor of Upstate New York: Iconic Dishes, Delicious History and Reinvented Recipes”. June, this is a fascinating book, it's got so many different components to it. The history, the stories, the actual recipes, really nice work. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me about it.
JH: Thank you, have a delicious day. It's my absolute pleasure.
GR: You’ve been listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Pat Hogan on the Campbell Conversations
Jun 14, 2025
Pat Hogan(syr.gov)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. The Democratic Party primary for Syracuse City Mayor is Tuesday, June 24th, with early voting starting on June 14th. Concluding our interviews with all three of the candidates in that primary, my guest today is Syracuse Common Councilor Pat Hogan, he's also its President Pro Tempore. Councilor Hogan represents the Second District and was first elected to the council back in 2005. He is also chairman of the Greater Syracuse Land Bank and he's board chairman of the Onondaga Industrial Development Agency. Previous interviews with Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens and common councilor Chol Majok can be found on WRVO ‘swebsite on the Campbell Conversations page under the local programing tab. But today, it's Councilor Hogan’s turn, and Councilor Hogan, welcome to the program.
Pat Hogan: Thank you, Grant.
GR: Well, it's great to have you here. We really appreciate you making the time. So, let me just start with a couple of questions I think you could answer super quickly just to give our listeners a full sense of the other positions that you hold outside the council. What's the, or the first one inside the council, what's the significance of being the president pro tempore of the council, what does that mean?
PH: Well, right now, the significance is, as I’m the acting president the council, but I'm an elected member that has a vote. President Hudson, unfortunately, has been ill and I've taken over running the council.
GR: Okay, all right. So essentially that reflects that you are the leader of the council, is that fair to say?
PH: Yes.
GR: Okay, all right. And then equally quick, what does the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency do? What's your role there?
PH: Well, spur economic development, and I think we've been very successful for it. I’m the board chairman, you know, along with some other members of the board, we review proposals from different developments asking for economic benefits that the IDA can give them.
GR: Okay. And obviously, I think it's fair to say that the county executive, the mayor, you folks on the agency, you know the state hit a home run with Micron. We'll come back to that, but yeah, okay, great. So let's get into the questions about the mayor's race. So first of all, could you just briefly give us your overall vision of the city that you have for the next four and possibly eight years?
PH: Well, I think it's a city full of great opportunities and we just have to seize upon them, you know, and recognize what our virtues are and what we're facing as far as issues. I think we have a great city, as far as it's still an affordable city. It's a walkable, accessible city. It has a lot of great neighborhoods in it and I think we should play upon those virtues. On the other hand, we have issues. We have an aging infrastructure, we have a lack of housing, it's a real issue and we have poverty. I think we have to act aggressively to mitigate all those issues, to be a city like we were once, the foremost tier two city, probably in the country.
GR: Yeah. I want to come back to a couple of those things you just mentioned a little bit later, but let me stick with these other questions for now. So how do you think your policy emphasis as a mayor and the initiatives that you would take would be significantly different from what we've seen with the Walsh administration? What would be the shift that people could anticipate?
PH: I have a way more active and aggressive stance on almost every issue. I think this, the last seven years have been sort of in limbo a lot. A lot of times that council and some of the, I'm sure some of our citizens are not sure where the policies were. I'll have definitive policies that will take the city forward. One, for instance, we're going to address the bureaucracy that exists in zoning and codes that prevents people from starting businesses, especially folks who are new to this country, our immigrant folks. It's a maze, it's worthy of Czarist Russia. It's very, very difficult in order to generate tax revenue that, as a city, we have to generate tax revenue and businesses do that.
GR: Well, on that point, you know, I have heard that in many different mayors’ races over the time that I've been in Syracuse, I've been here a little over 30 years, so I've heard different candidates say that. So I gather from that that it is a long standing, perennial problem. But how would you go about streamlining the coding in the zoning?
PH: Well, you know what? We did rezone, it came through my committee, first time since 1967. But, zoning is one thing, but the implementation of zoning and codes, that's the issue. I have a definitive idea how I would handle that, I've been involved in it for many years. I've been on the other side advocating for business folks all the way through the city and citizens too. I would make it, I'd be a hands-on mayor and I would directly run the codes and zoning the first three or four months until we get things straightened out.
GR: Interesting, okay. And then you mentioned that you would be more aggressive, you think, than Mayor Walsh. But more generally, how would you characterize this in terms of both policy and leadership style? What are the most important differences between you and the other two Democratic candidates in the race? What are the most important differences between you and Chol Majok and Sharon Owens?
PH: Well, Chol has been on one side, you know, he's been a legislator. I benefit from my experience, you know, I was a deputy commissioner of a city department for 34 years there. I also worked in the school district, working with kids who had behavioral and academic issues. I have direct experience on many of the issues that are facing the city. For instance, when we talk about education, you know, education is one of the tripods of, you could say, legs of a chair that we have to address as far as poverty goes. You have education, you have jobs, and you have to have housing. As far as the education goes, I have a community school strategy. I would like to extend the hours of the city schools, probably one in each council district. They have a community school program where we not only would provide safe spaces for the children to play in, but also be plugged into the school district. And we did this before, find out what their weaknesses are and bring volunteers, tutors and mitigate those great weaknesses.
GR: On the schools, you know, there's been conversation over the years about the mayor's office kind of taking over the school district, and you obviously have some experience in the schools. Do you have any thoughts about that going forward?
PH: I think we have to look at everything. That was a discussion that took place a lot under Mayor Miner. I wouldn't advocate that. And so obviously I would want this to be like sort of a public thing that we would have, make sure that everybody be involved in it. Our neighborhood organizations and of course, the teachers union and present school board and the superintendent. But I think we have great schools, we have terrific schools. Our issue with the schools is we’ve only got 50% of the kids going, we have an absenteeism rate of 50%. We have to find a way to energize kids to get to school. And I think there's all sorts of social issues that obviously you have older kids taking care of younger kids, we have people working two jobs, especially in challenged neighborhoods. But I would put together a task force and look at that. I'm up to Fowler quite a bit, I'm up to, I've been in Corcoran. We have great programs. We have we still have an issue with discipline, I'll be frank with that. But I think we have to realize that a lot of kids don't go to schools to avail themselves of these programs.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with city of Syracuse Democratic mayoral candidate Pat Hogan. Well, a couple of questions now, maybe a little more sensitive, a little less pleasant. But I want to ask you to respond to some of the criticisms that I have read about you and your campaign in recent months. And first one, you probably know where I'm going with this one, concerns the city's budget, and it got quite controversial. I want to ask you a question or two about that. And I want to go through a quick background if our listeners have heard the previous two programs they’ve heard this before, but just to bring everybody up to speed on this. So, Mayor Ben Walsh proposed a $348 million budget. It involved a 2.2% spending increase and a rise of about 2% in the property tax rate. It also drew on the city's general fund, which was essentially the city's savings account to cover the remaining deficit. The council rejected that proposed raise in taxes, lowered the budgeted spending by about 2.4% or $16 million, and the mayor vetoed some of those changes. The council overrode those vetoes in unanimous votes. All right, you were leading the charge from the council, I think, on the budget, fair to say you were the leading negotiator there. Looking at it from a distance, it's hard to believe that the mayor's race didn't factor somehow into this back and forth between you and the mayor on the budget. Why, first of all, why was the council so concerned about the increases this year? Previous years, they seemed to be okay with similar increases, what was the difference?
PH: Well, we live in a fluid part of American history right now. We have a person in Washington who isn’t a fan of cities. One of the things that remains for us is we always have a structural deficit where, for your listeners, we just don't have enough revenue in order to pay our bills, basically. We do have a cash fund balance and this budget would have withdrawn $27 million, which we all thought was way too much money to draw, especially as we look into the future. As far as being part of the mayor's race, is the vote was 9 – 0, there’s not 9 people running for mayor. This budget was dead almost on arrival. The mayor had a conversation with me about the budget, a two minute conversation the day before he dropped it on us. It was one of the most fiscally irresponsible budgets I've seen in 14 years. I don't think you could raise, it comes from the culture of raising taxes rather than managing departments. I was part of the department, so the councilors put together a plan and implemented the plan that basically cut the departments across the board by 7% except for the police and fire, and that was 5%. Some of the departments actually are going to get more money next year, are going to get more money next year than they'll spend this year. It's part of that where, every budget is a projection. We looked at everything solidly and we were disciplined about it and we passed a budget that benefits the city of Syracuse and their citizens, and they won’t have a tax hike.
GR: I wanted to ask you a question, too, about the process. You mentioned the mayor not really fully consulting prior to proposing, formally delivering the budget to the council. There was some criticism that I have read about the council and your lack of openness and time frame with your changes in terms of the mayor's office not reaching out, trying to find compromise. Tell me a little bit more about the process from your end.
PH: Procedurally, it remained the same. We get the budget on April 8th, we have to make a decision by May 8th. We interview every bureau, every department. We had 27, I think it was 28 department head meetings. These are all open meetings to the public, people could view them. We asked our questions, we went over the budget. We decided to bring in Bonadio, which is an accounting firm that actually does the audit at the end of the year every year in the city budget. We brought them in in the beginning to give us a little more clarity. I thought that worked out great. They pointed out some things that we had already considered and then we, procedurally, it was the same thing we've gone through before. We're in a very compressed amount of time and all of us agreed on what we needed to do in order to save a tax hike and also to put us in a good fiscal standing for the future.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Pat Hogan. The Syracuse City Common counselor is running for mayor and he'll appear on the ballot in the Democratic primary on June 24th. All right, well, just to continue with the theme of the questions before the break, some of the criticisms that I read, get your responses to those. Also, I think the Post-Standard dinged you a little bit in your capacity as chair of the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency on Micron's Draft Environmental Impact Statement and it connects to my question about the budget in that it has to do with process. And the criticism was sort of the timing, apparent lack of openness. The report had not been released to the public, despite being submitted last December. My understanding is that report is now set to be released on June 25th, which, looking at the calendar is the day after the primary. So I can see, you know people looking at this might be like why aren't we seeing this a bit earlier? It's such an important issue. It is part of Micron's calendar of trying to get the operation going. Why the timing on this?
PH: Well, we wanted to make sure it was done. And I sit in, those meetings, the environmental assessment, and it wasn't done. And in a situation like that where you're dealing with state regulations and federal regulations, a big project like that, you certainly have to cross every T and dot every I. Because if there was a mistake, that could really delay things down the road. That was impressed upon us and everybody who was in those rooms. It was released prematurely. My understanding there's some things that will be different in the final releasing of the report. And it was, you know, sort of an unfortunate thing, it was sort of leaked to the press. But I think we're going to be all set to go and this is a big project and we wanted to make sure we’d done everything right.
GR: Okay, all right. So I want to come back to some of the things that you mentioned at the outset of our conversation. And you talked about one of the things that you want to focus on is, of course, the problem of poverty and concentrated poverty in the city of Syracuse. And it's concentrated in a lot different ways geographically, racially. What are some of the ways that you plan to really get at that, that's such a big problem? You mentioned the three legs on the stool, the education, the housing and the job opportunities. But can you speak a little bit more about how you could really try to chip away at that?
PH: You know, it’s almost a person to person basis, family by family basis. I mean, we talk about childhood poverty, but it’s essentially family poverty. I found that out when I worked in the city schools. You know, housing is a big issue and housing we have to, you know, I think we have to really go to the state and like ask them to release, sort of soften the rules as far as the extension of LIHTC tax credits to municipalities. Right now, you only get about two per locale. This helps financing affordable housing. I have a big project that’s going up just a five minute walk from my house is a former Syracuse developmental center area. We're going to 550 units of affordable housing up there. The costs are enormous to build housing now, not only labor and material, and we need help from the state government. If we can get help from the federal government, that's great. But we have to advocate and I'm a politician, we have to get a coalition together to advocate for more housing. As far as the educational part, we have to transition to more what jobs are available. I think the city school district is starting to do that very well. We have a career academy at Fowler, we have a welding program at Corcoran, showing kids that there are other ways, obviously, to support their families down the road. But we have to get the kids in school. To be an electrician, right now, I know a lot of people in IBEW 43, they’re figuring that they’re going to need a thousand electricians to build Micron. And you're probably going to need 300, 400 when it gets up and running. But you have to, in order for our kids to qualify for these jobs, to be an electrician, you have a fundamental understanding of algebra and you have to be to school at least 9th grade, 10th grade. You’ve got to know what you're doing. And I think we have to have a total emphasis on that, to train these kids. I know Micron is going to help us out on that. They're definitely looking to, they don't need kids with the college degree, they need kids who are trained in the proper things. And then, you know, the jobs will be available. I know people, we'll get calls from all over the country, people looking to move here. And as part of that, I believe there's five to six neighborhoods in the city of Syracuse that will be looking at the demographics of Micron that will be especially attracted to some of the people coming in. And I think we have to like, promote them. We have to promote, we want to build the population of the city.
GR: And one of the things that you do here, you did not mention, but I wanted to get your thoughts on it, was on the issue of poverty and opportunity is transportation and the importance of being able to get to these places, to get to the educational opportunities, to get to the jobs. What are your thoughts about that?
PH: You know, Grant, that's great you mentioned that because that’s part of the environmental assessments, is how are we going to get people there? You know, we were successful with the Amazon project. My understanding is the busiest bus route in Central New York is from downtown Syracuse to Amazon. They’re all entry level jobs, but they're also, you know, you got insurance, you know, you make like $35, $40,000 and they're good about promoting people I know it's a tough work environment sometimes, but you're absolutely right. There will be part of getting people to the jobs, through public transportation, Centro is already on board about that. But that is a great question because, you know, where I grew up on the near West Side and South Side, I mean, my grandfather worked at the car plant in south Fowler, I can't think of the name of it now, but, you know, people walked to work in those days, now we have to get them to work.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, I’m Grant Reeher.
PH: Grant, that was the Franklin Motor Company.
GR: Oh, Franklin Motor Company, okay.
PH: That's right. I know I’d come up with it.
GR: It was okay, it was a little bit delayed, that’s all (laughter). I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Syracuse mayoral candidate Pat Hogan. So a couple of questions here at the end, and they get at, again, some of the things we've already been talking about but I want to put them in a very specific context. That the taking down of I-81 and the redevelopment of the East Adams Street area, prior to the Micron announcement that was going to be the biggest development opportunity for the city. What at this point are your biggest priorities for that effort and also your biggest concerns? I'm wondering maybe whether that would be not following through at the federal government level with some of the assistance, but anyway, go ahead.
PH: I think it'll put more than a little pressure probably our Syracuse police department, doesn't really have a traffic division. I think we got to manage that properly inside the city when everything's down. A lot of the folks, unlike me, a lot of the folks who advocated for the 81 to come down, never drove through Syracuse without 81 being up. My father always showed me how to get around the city without using 81. I think the big thing for the city is to maintain control of the 14 acres of property that 81 stands on right now. The state has been not really good at peddling public property. We have been good, making good use of it. Those 14 acres, I look to knit the university finally together with downtown, you know, we properly develop them. I look for affordable housing basically there and maybe some retail shops and things like that that are allowed under our zoning. But that is going to be a transformative thing. But once again we're going to have to manage it right and I plan to manage it so it benefits all the neighborhoods in the city.
GR: Well, briefly if you could on this next question, follow up on that. One of the things that I always have been worried about, and I've said this to multiple people from different backgrounds who come on the program talking about the city, is the actual transition process in terms of transportation. We're already seeing some of the fallout from this. But my concern is that you'll have several years where there will be, for lack of a better word, a lot of sort of transportation pain involved in this. Do you have any plans for mitigating that?
PH: We're going to need help from the county sheriff's department. You know, the city police department, right now, has 36 vacancies. We're going to need manpower. I'm sure that there's a traffic plan, but manning that traffic plan and implementing that traffic plan, we might even have to reach out to the state. I have the same concerns. I worry about traffic sort of jumping on all those north-south arterials west, you know, to try to get around the city. And it'll be a learning curve and we're going to need every facet as far as every media organization, digital media, everything to let people know how they can get around the city. It's going to be a huge undertaking.
GR: And here at the end, a question about Micron. You've already talked about the opportunities that this is going to create for the area. That seems clear and it also seems pretty clear it's going to be completely transformative in a lot of different ways. You're an industrial development guy, you think a lot about this kind of stuff. What are your biggest worries? What are your biggest concerns about Micron coming in here?
PH: That we're going to be able to fill the jobs and all those benefits spread evenly across all our neighborhoods, all our neighbors, especially the challenged neighborhoods. This, you know, when the factories moved after World War (II), in the 60’s, that devastated a lot of those neighborhoods, some of the neighborhoods I represent. This time we can get have a resurgence in those neighborhoods if we are cognizant of what we need to do in order to give our people the best chance to work at Micron.
GR: Do you have any concerns somehow that it will change the fundamental nature and character of Syracuse as a unique location? I mean, one thought I have is that it will do a lot of great things, but in a lot of ways we might end up feeling like a more generic place. I don't know if that question makes sense.
PH: You mean we won't be a college town anymore?
GR: Or we won't feel distinctly upstate, we won't feel distinctly Syracuse, you know? You will lose your accent, you know? (laughter)
PH: You know what, Grant, I was thinking this the other day, as I go to neighborhood meetings across the city, we are blessed we have like, all these unique neighborhoods that all sort of like exist their way. And they all, like, unite and, but I mean I don't think this will change the character, this might even enhance the character of Syracuse. I can't imagine this will change the character of Syracuse, except for, you know, our noted cynicism that we're really good at sometimes. But, you know, you say something about Buffalo up in Buffalo and you're going to get a punch in the snoot. But you say sometimes in Syracuse and sometimes people agree with you. You know, I mean, we're just like that. But I think we have some great neighborhoods in the city. And I think people who come from other cities, this happens all the time, I hear this all the time, people who’ve moved here, love it. I mean, they love Syracuse and I think they're going to be citizens for life. But sometimes we let our own, our cynicism get a little bit.
GR: You know, I've got some neighbors that just moved in across the street from New York City and it's an epiphany for them about the ease with which they can do different things. Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Pat Hogan and again, the Democratic primary for mayor in Syracuse is June 24th. Early voting starts on June 14th. Councilor Hogan, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me, I really enjoyed our conversation.
PH: Thanks, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Chol Majok on the Campbell Conversations
Jun 07, 2025
Chol Majok
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. The Democratic Party primary for Syracuse City mayor is Tuesday, June 24th and early voting starts on June 14th. Continuing our interviews with all three candidates, my guest today is Syracuse Common Councilor, Chol Majok. Councilor Majok is a Councilor-at-Large representing the entire city, but he was first elected as a councilor from the Third District. He previously worked in Mayor Stephanie Miner's administration and in 2022, he ran for the Democratic nomination for Congress in the 22nd Congressional District. My interview with Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens can be found on WRVO’s web site, wrvo dot org on the Campbell Conversations page under the local programing tab. Next week I plan to have Common Councilor Pat Hogan on the program. But for today, it's Councilor Majok. Councilor Majok, welcome to the program, it’s good to see you.
Chol Majok: It is great to be here. Thank you for having me.
GR: Oh, well, thanks for making the time. Let me just start with a very basic question. And if you could be brief on this one. I know you could speak for quite a long time on it, but briefly, what's your vision for the city of Syracuse over the next four and possibly eight years?
CM: Well, my vision is with the hope that, you know, when I get elected is to leave this city better than I found it. That is the overall overarching vision. Now that can, I have, I do say this in my vision that I will lead Syracuse into a future where families thrive, neighborhoods flourish, and opportunities are accessible. That is in a nutshell, of what I intend to see this city when I take over and when I leave it, that our families are doing better, that our neighborhoods are safer and opportunities in all neighborhoods, people can have accessibility to those opportunities regardless of economic background.
GR: Okay. And thinking about the last eight years of the Ben Walsh administration, how do you think your emphasis on policy and what initiatives you would take might differ from his and in what ways?
CM: Well, Grant, I'm a true believer in that, you know, in order to move a community forward and to move a city forward, we have to look at our assets. And our assets in this sense are the people. What has happened with Syracuse is that poverty has beaten down this community, that the value of people is under the struggles and the problems. And when a community is dealing with something like this, it becomes a leadership problem. And leaders need to figure out how do you equip people to do for themselves? You know, as somebody with a large experience in workforce development, equipping people to do for themselves, I am the right person for this for this job to be the mayor. Precisely because Syracuse is in this space where Micron is coming, Amazon is already here. And when you talk about Micron and Amazon and many other better paying jobs, they are outside of the city, right? And we need to be able to first do two things, equip people with the right skills, number two, be able to have reliable transportation where people can access those. People talk about changing poverty and challenging poverty to be able to challenge poverty, yes, government policies are great, but if we want to uproot poverty, we have to equip people. We have to equip people to do for themselves that include fathers, mothers, guardian, people and residents in the community. I'm raising a young family and raising a young family to be able to successfully raise that young family, you cannot subtract economic from that equation. And being able to get the right economic tools in my belt to raise that family, I need skills. I need to be able to get to those jobs, and that's where my skills and talent come in. I have a business development experience and talent development experience, which is what this city really need when you look at the future of it, that's what really this city needs. Yes, we can talk about housing, housing is great, we need housing, but we also need to talk about sustainability. Without the right skills to really manage oneself economically, you can't sustain housing. And that's where my skill and talent become essential in equipping people to do for themselves so they can sustain those housing and be able to sustain tax base in our city.
GR: You mentioned your background in workforce development as part of the toolkit that you would have and being able to do that. I was also thinking of your own personal story. I mean, you came here to the United States with nothing and here you are running for mayor. Do you think that that gives you a particular perspective on this issue?
CM: Absolutely, absolutely. I just had a fundraiser this weekend, Professor Reeher, had a fundraiser this weekend and was put together by New American Leaders. And I'm saying that to say I didn't realize how much of an impact I have made, especially to disadvantaged communities, especially those that came in the same background as I am, refugees and immigrant and struggling people, until I saw a number of leaders that said, Brother Chol, what you have done here is something that would outlast us as a generation and will lead into the next generation, right? And that in itself, when you are grinding, when you are working every day and you when you are trying to do your best, you don't look at how far you have come. But people who have lived like you are looking at you. And this race is not just about me, Professor Reeher, it's not just about me. It is about everyone that have lived like me, people with struggle, people who have came to America to seek second chances in life. And America has embraced them and offer them those opportunities to transform their lives. They are looking at me and they are saying, Chol, if we can come to America, pay taxes, revitalize neighborhood, why can we not leave city hall? So this is a fight for every single person, every marginalized community and every struggling person, irrespective of race and gender.
GR: Do you think that that is the most important thing that differentiates you from the other two Democratic candidates? This background, this is what separates you from Pat Hogan and Sharon Owens?
CM: Well, I have a couple of them that separate me from that. Yes, I have the ability to relate to a lot of the city residents here, as when I came, I was not born here, but I grew up here. I went to city school district, a graduate right there. I grew up in the most impoverished neighborhood in the city, Brighton neighborhood. And we have not had a mayor with my background or a candidate with my background that have ran at this level. So yes, there is that differentiation that people, I can relate to people more than the other candidate, that's one. The other piece is, is that as a candidate, I'm coming in with executive training. I'm not just talking about one of those trial and error kind of training that I have seen with other candidate where they make mistakes. I have theoretical knowledge, I've been trained, I’ve applied it as well. So I'm coming equipped more than most mayors in the executive office. I have legislative experience at the state level and then at the city level. That differentiate me between Pat Hogan and Sharon Owens, right? And I am at this point between all the candidate, I am the only one who have been elected at-large, citywide. We have ran a successful citywide election. So when it come to later to Republican, I'm the only one who know how to run election and wins election. So that's the other part of the party. Accountability, you know I'm going to be different because I'm going to take accountability. My record has shown that anything I do, I take accountability for it. Something that I’ve seen, Deputy Mayor Owens and the current administration rarely take accountability for. For example, the advanced I.T. situation that we are dealing with, that is a looming fraud in our city. Second, the Blueprint 15 that Deputy Mayor Owens share and never to accountability for. I'm going to take accountability and people are looking for accountability, Professor Reeher. So that's what really differentiate me a lot with my opponent and we don't have time but I would have went in with a lot as well.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with city of Syracuse Democratic Mayor candidate Chol Majok. Just for our listeners, you mentioned experience at the state level and what you're referring to there is your previous work for state Senator Dave Valesky, right?
CM: And Marty Golden as well.
GR: That's right. Marty Golden, that's right, got it.
CM: Two state senators.
GR: I forgot about the first one, yeah. So I want to ask you a question about the most recent city budget, because that became quite controversial and you were at the center of that along with your two opponents. So, Mayor Ben Walsh proposed a $348 million budget. It involved a 2.2% spending increase and a raise of about 2% in the property tax rate. It also drew on the city's general fund, which is, you know, essentially the city's savings account to cover a remaining deficit in the budget. The council rejected that proposed raise in taxes and lowered the budgeted spending by about 2.5% percent or $16 million. The mayor then vetoed some of those changes that the council made, and then the council overrode those vetoes in unanimous votes. I think I've got that all right. So my first question for you is, watching the way this unfolded, it's hard to believe from a distance that this mayor's race didn't factor into that back and forth in some way. Just explain briefly if you could, why was the council concerned about the increases in the budget this year when you folks were fine with similar increases in previous years?
CM: Well, the short answer to that, Professor Reeher, is that since 2020 we have $123 million that we could play with and we could push around and be able to balance our budget with.
GR: And that was from that was from the COVID money, right? Is that what you’re talking about?
CM: COVID money, absolutely. We have COVID money, next year budget we will no longer have that COVID money. And, and people who are intimate with our city budget knows that we don't generate enough from tax base to be able to cover our expenses. Number two, a basic economic formula is that you don't spend what you don't have. And as a city, and I have said it repeatedly, and I had some people, I rubbed some people the wrong way, I have said it, if the council have to be the adult in the room to really balance the city budget, then so be it. And at this point, Professor Reeher, what is really pushing the council, and you can see people have said that is political, it’s not political, it's unanimous. Nine of us, only two councilors are running for council so far for mayor, only two councilors, right? And all nine councilors voted unanimously to reduce the spending the city is experiencing. So the short answer to that, Professor Reeher, we just don't have it. And it is irresponsible and fiscally unsustainable to continue to spend the way Mayor Walsh has spent city resources. Mayor Walsh has raised our budget by over $100 million since he has been in the office. The city just does not generate enough to be able to sustain that much recklessness, we just don't. And if as councilors, we have to look out for the best interests of our city and constituent, then that's what we were elected to do. We will do our job. And I applaud all my fellow councilors for doing their job.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Chol Majok. The Syracuse City Common Councilor is running for mayor and will appear on the ballot in the Democratic primary on June 24th. So I have a second question, as I mentioned about the budget, and it's about the criticisms that have come, and they've not just come from the Walsh administration, they've also come from outside observers about the lack of openness by the council regarding these decisions about the changes. That there wasn't an apparent attempt in advance to reach out to the administration, say, hey, you know, this looks like too much, we have a problem. Why did the council operate in what appears anyway to be more out of the public's eye in this regard?
CM: So we as council have been accused of politicizing and being secretive, in which it is very surprising, very surprising to councilors. Because what the council has done is what they have always done, right? And there is never a time after a month-long budget hearing, there has never been a time where councilors go back to department head that are managed by the mayor to ask them of their opinion as to what, how we are going to adjust our budget. Now, Professor Reeher, let's make this correction. There's a difference between executive level of government and legislative branch of government. There are two different, and there is nowhere that I have seen the legislators have to go back to the executive to consult them as to what to do. Otherwise there wouldn't be no difference in branches of government. We have done our job just like we have always done in previous years. Nothing was different. Now, in the past five years, like I said earlier, we had ARPA money so we were flexible with the mayor and his spending. This year we cannot allow that. And as councilors, we have a responsibility to make sure that when we deliver that budget that it is to the best of our ability. Three hundred and almost fifty million dollars, it's a large budget. And as councilors we needed to do right by our constituents. That's why we hired the same auditor, the same auditor that was hired by the mayor to look at the city budget. Why was it a problem for us to use them to be able to really vet the process? Now, let's not make no mistake, there is a $27 million deficit, $27 million deficit. The council was able to only take out $16 million of it. There's still a deficit to be addressed. Rather than the Mayor Walsh and Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens worrying about that, they are worried about why the council took time to really vet this process. They are worried about our process and they are not worried about the $14 million deficit that they have to address. That is to me, that's where the constituents should be spending their energy, not the process the council took to balance the budget.
GR: Okay, now I want to come back to something that you spoke about in the first part of our conversation. You spoke very powerfully about your background and what that brings to the campaign and what you are representing for the city and how this is a bigger campaign than just about you, and I want to follow up on that and link what you said to more national issues. And so, you're an immigrant to this country, you have this powerful story about your history as a refugee from South Sudan, often called the Lost Boys. You were one of the Lost Boys and made this amazing journey. And our country right now is in a pivotal moment when it comes to how we deal with and think about immigrants and immigration. This is a conversation that's happening across the country. Do you think that your campaign is somehow importantly linked or has a meaning to that in certain ways?
CM: Well, Professor Reeher, you know, Syracuse and upstate, especially upstate New York here, has a long history of being trailblazers, being inclusive, being a welcoming community. And that is undeniably our history. And at these times, the time that we are in with the federal government, it is shameful. And there are people that I have talked to that have said, Chol, they come to me and apologize and said, Chol, this is not who we are as a country. We are a country that embrace immigration, a country that embraced otherness, a country that embrace the world. This is not who we are. And when I hear that, Professor Reeher, it just give me more energy to want to run. Because immigrant in this country at this point are being beaten down by our government. And they need some space where they can be uplifted and folks like me running is a testament to that uplifting. You know, a good statement that Syracuse, New York, can give to immigrant and to our values is electing people like myself. It is a statement that we see you immigrants, we see you refugees. We see you, those that are coming from broken worlds and see Syracuse as a space where they can get second chances. When I run, Professor Reeher, I am running to be able to uplift those voices, those voices that our federal government is pursuing to beat down. And New York, Syracuse, New York is going to stand, as it always have done, to be able to make sure that we stand by those that come from broken worlds and are here seeking second chances in life. And our message to them, yes, you are embraced, yes, you are welcome, yes, you are listened to and yes, you will be here and this is your home.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Syracuse mayoral candidate Chol Majok. You mentioned Micron earlier, I wanted to ask you a question about that. Obviously, there are amazing opportunities for the city of Syracuse and the broader community, even the whole state of New York here from this Micron mega microchip facility in Clay. Do you have any, and would you bring into the office, any major concerns or worries about that development?
CM: I have a couple of them. I am excited, just like anybody else in this community, to have Micron in our community. Very excited, because the opportunities that Micron is going to bring are going to be great. If it is managed well, we will see a level of economic innovation that we have not seen for a long time. So that to me is exciting because as a young father, as a man that is raising a young family, I can see my daughters and my sons and myself and my wife being able to look at Micron as a gateway to uplift ourselves out of poverty. So many other families, so many other individual and household in the community, it’s exciting. Now, a couple of things that are concerned for me. One, I know that Micron is going to come with their own people and the few that are going to be left, few position that are going to be left to be filled. This is a city, if we go in the same pace and the same direction that we are going in, those jobs are not going to reach city residents, they are going to go to suburban people. If the rate we are going is the way we are going to go without the change of leadership, those jobs are going to be grabbed by suburban people, for a couple of reasons. First, skills level. Our skills level at this moment, Professor Reeher, is atrocious. We need to upskill people, something we have not done. And this is where somebody like me, who has a workforce development experience, would be able to see through that and be able to give people to there. Few opportunities that they would be able to reach our city, this is the second part. Few opportunities that are going to reach this city, right? Maybe I’m going to be challenged by transportation factors. As you know, Micron is going to be far away from the city and transport portion at this moment is one of the most challenging, challenging barrier for our city resident to uplift themselves out of poverty. We have an address that BRT is coming in 2026. But BRT is, unless if they change the route with the right leadership, BRT is not going to go outside of the city limit. So skilled issue is going to hinder people from Micron, and I have a plan and the skill and the ability to get people there, right? Transportation is going to be a factor. And some of the things that we as a current leadership is doing nothing with. So I'm going to change those. And if Micron is going to be for our people here, those need to be addressed head on.
GR: So we've only got a couple of minutes left, so you'll have to be brief on these, I apologize. But I have heard you in the past and you've done it on this program, speak very eloquently about America. And what it means to you and your experiences. What are you telling your children right now about America?
CM: Well, one of the best thing that I tell my children is that, you know, you are in America. America is the only place that I have been to. America is the only place where a child of a janitor can sit on the same table as a child of a president. America is the only place you can do that. And I always tell my children, regardless of the circumstances, you don't have to be your condition, you don't have to live your conditions. And I always tell refugees, I said, just because you came as a refugee does not mean you have to live like a refugee. America is the only place I know that can allow a refugee to come in as a refugee with no English. Get a doctrine and run for a mayor of a major city. America is the only place you can do that. And I said, regardless of the struggles, regardless of the struggle, you cannot take away the fact that America can create dream far beyond your imagination. I always tell my children, Professor Reeher, take opportunities, regardless of the obstacles. Always remember, you always have a chance to take that chance, just like your father has.
GR: Now, last question. You've only got a couple of seconds for this one, I'm sorry. In 2022 you ran for Congress, in 2023 you ran for Common Council-at-Large, successfully. In 2025, now you're running for mayor. Do you just love being a political candidate?
CM: Well, Professor Reeher, you know, this work is all passion, it’s all passion. And as you can see, you know, in 2022, I ran for Congress because I saw that I was going to be redistricted out of my seat. And I have passion for this work. So I tried it and then it didn't work, and I knew 2023 came up. I had to keep my seat. I had to stay in politics, that's why I kept running. And I got elected. And at this moment I see that I am the most qualified candidate, I got to take it. And there is a room for my experience and for the candidate of my caliber. So I'll do it and I'm excited to do it, people are excited to see me do it and let's go from here.
GR: Okay, I’ll have to leave it there. That was Chol Majok. Again, the Democratic Party mayoral primary in Syracuse is June 24th, early voting starts June 14th. Counselor Majok, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. And I just want to say on a personal note, regardless of the outcome, you are inspirational in your story, and so I do wish you well.
CM: Thank you, thank you for having me. Like I always said, my vision for the city of Syracuse is to lead Syracuse into a future where families thrive, neighborhoods flourish, and opportunities are accessible.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Aran Shetterly on the Campbell Conversations
May 31, 2025
Aran Shetterly
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Aran Shetterly. He's a writer and editor and the author of a relatively new book on the Greensboro massacre in North Carolina titled, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul". Aran, welcome to the program and congratulations on the new book.
Aran Shetterly: Thank you. Great to be with you.
GR: Well, it's good to have you. So a really interesting book and an interesting timing on it, too. Let's just start with some basics for our listeners. Remind all of us what the Greensboro Massacre was.
AS: Well, we all need to be reminded because it's sort of left our public consciousness in a lot of ways. So in 1979, a multiracial group of activists was organizing in the mills in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were trying to bring black and white workers together. And these were still some of the largest textile mills in the whole world. I mean, Levi's dungaree jean material was made there for over a hundred years. And they were having trouble bringing people, white and black people together in those mills and felt that the Klan was perhaps, the Ku Klux Klan was perhaps interfering with their work. And so they decided to have a march to talk about why it's important to bring workers together, that they would have more power to advocate for better hours, better health care, better services, better pay. And they called it ‘Death to the Klan’ and they put up these posters. And they were organizing on November 3rd, 1979 setting up, putting up the sound truck, putting up posters, singing some freedom songs. And all of a sudden, a caravan of Klansmen and neo-Nazis drove up to the start of the march, picked a fight, started shooting, killed five of these activists and injured another ten, drove off, and no one was ever held criminally responsible for what happened. And when I found out about this, I thought, wait a minute, how do I not know about this and what is this story? I need to go deeper.
GR: Interesting. So one of the things that struck me, looking at your book and then what you just said to me right there, the name of the event in the march was ‘Death of the Klan’ and from what I've read, the marchers were chanting ‘death to the Klan’. What did they mean by that? And I know that, we'll get to this a little bit later, but some of the folks that that were charged pointed to that as kind of the notion that the antagonism was going in both directions.
AS: Yeah. I mean, that's a great question and some ways, the antagonism was going in both directions. But what they really meant was death to racism, death to an ideology that separates people in the way that the Klan has done. And that's, you know, later and after all the trials and after everything that took place, the leader of this march, Nelson Johnson, would say, I really regret that we didn't say death to racism, because that's really what we meant. And instead, the title made it seem personal in a way that they didn't really intend it to be.
GR: Right. And so you mentioned that no one was ever ultimately held criminally accountable for this. But there were people arrested, there were people caught, correct?
AS: Correct. And there were, I mean, almost by chance, though, because one of the curious things about this event was that the local police had decided to take a low profile approach. So they were out of sight, they weren't actually near where the marchers were. And yet they had an informant that was telling them that the Klan was actually going to show up that day and that they had guns. So it was a bizarre and very faulty, if not deliberately faulty decision that came from the top of that department. So at the last minute, some police swooped in and arrested 12 of these Klansmen, most of the shooters. And they were then tried in a state murder trial, then a federal criminal civil rights trial. And then finally there was a third trial, which was a federal civil trial.
GR: Okay. And were there any guilty verdicts or liabilities that were ultimately meted out here, even have a civil kind or no one was ever held accountable in any way?
AS: The third trial was really the most interesting trial, because the plaintiffs, you know, the activists were able to hire their own lawyers. And so instead of having the district attorney, prosecutors doing the state murder trial or the Justice Department lawyers doing the federal criminal civil rights trial, they had their own lawyers who could present the evidence and the arguments in the way that they wanted to. And not only that, there was this incredible judge. No judge in North Carolina would hear the federal civil trial. And so a judge from Richmond named Robert Merhige came down and camped out in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for six months and heard this trial. And Merhige was this incredibly fair judge who had also been responsible for integrating schools in Virginia in the early 1970’s, among other things, and admitting women to the University of Virginia. And he refused to let the jury in that civil trial be all white. The previous two juries had been all white. And there was one black man on that jury in the civil trial. And at the end of the day, there was a judgment in which Klansmen, neo-Nazis, the informant for the police department and Greensboro Police Department officers were found jointly liable for death. And as far as I know, that's the only judgment like that in American history that's held Nazis, Klansmen and police together jointly liable.
GR: Was there any money that ultimately got awarded to any families?
AS: A fraction of, you know, what they'd asked for. And they actually awarded the money only to one of the families who had suffered the death of one of their family members. And it was the only member who had not been a member of the Communist Worker's Party, which is what a lot of these activists were part of. And so it was a curious and somewhat political decision on the part of the jury to award $350,000 about to that one family. But what is interesting is what the activists did is they took most of that money back and put it into a fund that they have used then for decades to fund civil rights work at the grassroots level around the South.
GR: Interesting. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Aran Shetterly, and we're discussing his new book, it's titled, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul". So you mentioned there, right before the break the Communist Worker's Party being principal organizer of the labor action and the protest. So that has to change the dynamics of all of this. And this may be an overly simplistic question, but is this something about communism and anti-communism? Or is this something about race and racism or about labor more generally? I mean, how do you disentangle those things as a historian and a writer when you're trying to unpack what's going on back then?
AS: That's a great question, actually. And the thing is, at some point, you really can't. There's sort of like this Möbius strip, right? You're not sure which side you're on when you're trying to describe this at times. It’s particularly the animosity toward, right, that's being directed from the Klan and the Nazis. So what happened was, and this was one of the reasons they were acquitted in the first two trials, the state murder trial and the federal criminal trial, was that their defense lawyers very cleverly wrapped them in the flag. They said these are patriots, they weren't acting out of racial animus, they were going after communists, and you send them halfway around the world to fight communists in Vietnam and here they are trying to protect the United States from communism and you're going to hold them accountable? And, you know, there's something to that argument, right? It's like, well, it's okay to go fight it around the world, but here they're protected? It's a little confusing. And so, I mean, I don't believe that's right, but I'm just saying I can understand why it causes conflict in the minds of the shooters and the jury. So, yeah, that was a big part of what happened. What's interesting is that Judge Merhige even said, you know, you can't really disentangle these two things, race and communism in this trial. And what he meant by that is that a lot of times civil rights activists were being called communists when they weren't, you know? And anyone who was advocating for equal justice, for true equality, for full participation in our democracy would often get called a communist. And there have been all these witch hunts through our history. So in a way, whether they call themselves communists or not, the Klansmen, the Nazis, because of what they were advocating for, the labor justice across racial lines, we're probably going to consider them communists anyway.
GR: So you are pretty sure, and the way that you're talking to me today also suggests this, that the juries got this wrong, that that the folks that were on trial were the ones that did the shooting, were the ones that did the killing. And how do we know this? I mean, this may seem like a dumb question, but why are you so sure?
AS: Well…
GR: The cops grabbed them right away, like almost in the act? I mean, what would be the reason why, hey, we didn't get the wrong person? It seems like a silly question, but I just want to make sure.
AS: Yeah. What's very interesting is these trials were quite complex, to be honest with you. And what was clear was, the people prosecuting the trials were a little uncomfortable prosecuting in a sense, on behalf of people who called themselves communists. And so they made some decisions that compromised their ability to really prosecute the trial well. And the thing is, is that the marchers had a parade permit, they had a legal right. They'd gone to the police department, they'd gone to the city. They had a legal right to march that day. So when the FBI came in to investigate, they opened their investigation and it turned out this was the third largest FBI investigation in our nation's history at the time, they opened their investigation as a civil rights investigation because the marchers had gone through the proper channels and had their freedom of speech protected to march and to say whatever it was they wanted to say that day. The Klansmen and Nazis who drove up had no such permit. They were just confronting this march out of the blue. And so that really becomes down to, this was not sanctioned on both sides. It was it was sanctioned on one side and then ambushed by another side.
GR: Okay. And so the trials happen, in almost all instances these folks are not held accountable, except for this one instance that happened, you know, several years later, the civil trial.
AS: Right.
GR: How would you characterize what's going on in Greensboro between the end of these trials? And 2004, which is when is the sort of the positive part of your book, the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established. What is life in Greensboro like on this issue during that time?
AS: Well, this is why I call it really a, you know, a struggle for an American city soul in some ways. I mean, this was an incredibly divisive event that fractured Greensboro in a lot of ways, as these tragic events tend to do in our communities. And, you know, the very first thing and, you know, as a sort of investigative journalist-historian, what I get drawn to when I hear that the mayor at the time, the minute the shooting happened, says this has nothing to do with Greensboro, essentially. Don't even look here, you know, it's just some extremists who happened to pass through our city, I think, wait a minute, let's see what this has to do with Greensboro. But you have a big section of Greensboro’s residents who followed that mayor and believed this didn't have anything to do with us, you know? And we shouldn't even be talking about this, you know, we need to just sweep this under the rug and move on. And, you know, a lot of people in the city were traumatized by this event, but they weren't given the ability to process it, to talk about it. The justice system couldn't process it and come out with a verdict that anyone really trusted and so it festered. And the people, you know, who were the activists got blamed essentially for what had happened. Oh, you called it ‘Death to the Klan’, you baited the Klan in here, and they became pariahs in the city. And so there was a lot of pain and trauma and healing that needed to happen and still does, to be honest with you. It's a long process to recover from events like this.
GR: Yeah, I want to pursue that a little bit more when we come back from the break. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Aran Shetterly. He's a writer and editor and the author of a new book titled, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul" and we've been discussing the book and the issues that it raises. So right before the break, we were talking about the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. How did this commission get established?
AS: So it's interesting, in a way it starts with art. A woman named Emily Mann wrote a wonderful play called, “Greensboro, a Requiem about the Massacre” and it was performed in Greensboro. And all of a sudden, people were able to start conversations about what had happened that they hadn't been having for at that point, almost 20 years. And coming out of that, Nelson Johnson, who's at the center of my book, who had become by then not a communist anymore, but a pastor and a remarkable activist, he continued, you know, being an activist his whole life, he just died this past February and truly a tremendous loss. But he saw this and he thought, wow, conversations can be had and when they're had, there's a healing aspect to that. And so he they started talking about this, and it was, happened to coincide with an American foundation that was interested in seeing if the South African model of a truth and reconciliation process could actually work in the United States. And so they came and said, we'll fund this. Let's see if we can you know, make something happen. Now, the city of Greensboro wanted nothing to do with it. And so what ends up happening is actually a pretty remarkable achievement to my mind, of Greensboro civil society. NGOs, churches, business leaders come together to put on a full scale truth and reconciliation process. Bishop Desmond Tutu visits Greensboro twice, members of the commission in South Africa participated fully in helping organize and structure this commission. And they held two years of basically studying what had happened and having open forums in which people who were participated or connected to it came to talk, including Klansmen and police officers and these activists and lawyers and judges. Quite a remarkable process that ran from 2004 to 2006 and produced this incredible report that basically laid out the history as they saw it, of what had taken place that day on November 3rd, 1979 and issued a whole set of recommendations for the city of Greensboro to try to prevent something like this from ever happening again.
GR: Wow. Let me interrupt there because I just heard you say that Klansmen or former Klansmen were part of this too. How did they generate that kind of trust across the board? I can see how you'd get one side or the other side, but my goodness, how did they thread that needle?
AS: Well, I think they tried to tell people that they were not controlling in the least what they said, they were going to invite them in to tell their stories. And what's interesting about that is two Klansmen came. One was reflective in a very interesting way. He said, you know what? I grew up in the South, I grew up with stories of the Confederacy. We had a frying pan that we said, you know, saved my grandfather's life because a union bullet hit it. And, you know, I eat my fried eggs out of that frying pan my whole, growing up. And he said, so, you know, I believe those ideas, if I had grown up in New York City, he said, maybe I would have been a communist.
GR: Wow.
AS: The other Klansman said to a shocked audience that was shocked into silence, God guided the bullets that day. So you saw that one was open and possibly changing to some degree in his mind, and the other one wasn't, but hugely informative to people listening about where things stood.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the writer Aran Shetterly. So you mentioned that the commission made recommendations and those were directed in part towards avoiding something like this in the future, making things better. What were the, can you summarize the recommendations?
AS: Well, there were a bunch. There were a bunch about sort of economic equality, to be honest, and fair housing, about equal pay, about, you know, issues that, you know, sort of fester in communities and lead to tensions that eventually can explode. There were also recommendations around the police force in establishing an independent oversight commission, right, to look at police actions. That's been something that's been much more difficult to truly achieve in Greensboro. But I have to say that Greensboro, you know, has made some progress on a bunch of these recommendations. It's not perfect, but they are sort of moving in that direction. In fact, you know, I was impressed when my book came out that the first conversation I had in Greensboro was led by the director of the Human Rights Office for the City. And we had over 200 people who came and she asked great questions about this history. So, you know, the history, it's opening up.
GR: I have to confess, I know a bit about North Carolina and where its politics have been in in recent years and how it is changing dramatically in terms of, you know, who it votes for, for president and that kind of thing, or at least the some of the internal politics of different congressional districts, but I don't know these individual towns all that well. So tell me tell me where Greensboro sits in North Carolina today.
AS: Greensboro is in what's called the Piedmont, it's the foothills. And so it's not far from Durham and the triangle area, which we think of as Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh. And it was a city that had big aspirations. You know, it thought it could be the Charlotte, essentially, of North Carolina at one point. But the banks decided to relocate to Charlotte, and that's what made Charlotte, you know, this massive city is the banking industry. So Greensboro had a troubled transitioning from the textile mills and run essentially as a company town of the mills into this modern era. But it has five colleges and universities there, including the state's flagship black university, North Carolina A&T, which has had a played a huge role in terms of the city's activism and the way the city has had to deal with the issues that it's been confronted with.
GR: So it sounds like it's within a transitional state. It's kind of a transitional town, and…
AS: It's a transitional town.
GR: Being both sort of a piece of rural, but near what we would think of as the liberal epicenter of North Carolina.
AS: Exactly. I think that's actually very well put, that it sort of struggles between being sort of a more liberal town and a more reactionary town and where the center is in that, just like the rest of us are trying to figure that out.
GR: Well, I have to apologize, I'm only giving you about 3 minutes to wrestle with this last big topic. But I wanted to ask you the obvious question here at the end of, are there lessons for us where we are now as a country politically, or otherwise that you think come from this event and its aftermath and the commission? I mean, what should we be thinking about in terms of where we are nationally and what you've taken a deep dive into historically and bringing it up to the present?
AS: So, two days ago I got a text from a Greensboro police officer who I talked to while I was doing this research, and he said, Aran, can you talk? I said, sure. And he called me up and he said, I'm in tears. I just finished your book, and he said, and I feel so ashamed that I bought the line, the story that Nelson Johnson was to blame for that massacre and I'm so sorry that I never got the chance to meet him. And so one of the things that I feel like I've learned over and over, and that was a powerful example of it, is that if we try to sweep these complex histories under the rug, they don't go away. You know, they fester, they continue to caused division in our society and we really need to face them and process them. And it took that guy courage not just to read the book, but then to call me up and actually tell me how he felt. And I really appreciated that courage. But one of the things that we talked about, and this is interesting, is he had been, after he left the police force, he was a private investigator for Oliver Stone on the JFK assassination movie, his JFK movie. And so this cop said, you know, I see a line from JFK to Greensboro, he said, when we don't openly discuss these traumas and tragedies, when things feel like they're hidden, we lose faith in our government. And I think, honestly, that he's on to something that without the accountability, right, of who was to blame for what happened in Greensboro, really accountable and held accountable for it, who is to blame for these different things, we end up where we are today with cynicism and a leader for whom there's no accountability or barely any accountability. We're struggling to find it and clawing that back is difficult. So I think that's something that we can take away from this.
GR: And maybe thinking of the future, perhaps some sort of variation of the way that Greensboro dealt with this is something that will be I thinking, about ten, twenty years from now, who knows.
AS: Absolutely. In 2020 in the depths of COVID, the Greensboro City Council held a Zoom meeting in which they apologized for the city's complicity in the murders that day, that the police department should have been there and they weren't. And it was a very powerful moment. And that's the kind of reckoning we need with all sorts of aspects of our history, I think.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Aran Shetterly and again, his new book is titled, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul". And, when you search for that book, I want you to note that Aran is spelled A R A N. Aaron is really interesting book, and thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me about it.
AS: Thank you, Grant, really enjoyed it.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Sharon Owens on the Campbell Conversations
May 24, 2025
Sharon Owens(Ellen Abbott / WRVO)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. The Democratic Party primary for Syracuse City Mayor is Tuesday, June 24th, with early voting starting on June 14th. My guest today is one of the three candidates contesting that primary, Syracuse City Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens. In addition to serving as deputy mayor in the Ben Walsh administration, Ms. Owens is also the board president of Blueprint 15, which is helping to lead the effort to redevelop the East Adams Street area following the tearing down of interstate I-81 in the city. Note that I also hope to have the other two primary candidates, Chol Majok and Pat Hogan on the program prior to the primary. But for now, Deputy Mayor Owens, welcome back to the program, it's good to see you.
Sharon Owens: Good to be here, thank you for having me.
GR: Well, thanks for making the time, I really appreciate it. So I'm going to start with just a very general question. Do you have a vision for the city of Syracuse over the next four and perhaps next eight years that you could articulate?
SO: Yes, absolutely. We, our city is entering into a moment, and my campaign is called, “Maximizing the Moment”, where we're going to see some transformational things happening for our city and in the region. But specific to the city, the I-81 project really is humming around the city, you can't move anywhere without seeing that. It’s going to be transformational for how our community looks and feels. The next job and the next mayor is going to be absolutely keeping this city moving and open for business. And so I'm prepared for that moment for our city with 81, particularly with Micron in particular, and the economic opportunity for our city. You know it's no secret in the nineties when New Process Gear, Carrier, G.E., Miller Brewery all started closing down, we had a really strong and thriving middle class, particularly for people of color, who were able to send their kids to college. And those kids came back to Syracuse, and many of them with a college degree, still worked in those factories because they were great paying jobs. And we really missed the ball when we transitioned and those jobs started leaving that there was no plan moving forward. And here comes Micron with another economic opportunity for us, a new industry for us. And I'm really proud of the work I'm doing to really prepare not only for the 81 work, but for Micron work. Our individuals and our community to be prepared to have that opportunity for that work. So the vision for our city is to absolutely keep growing. We're on a trajectory, I think we've done a great job in this administration to really work on our infrastructure. You have to have a growing city that's based on solid infrastructure. We've been doing that, whether it's roads, sidewalks, lighting, working on our water pipes and the like. What my vision is, is really to improve the human condition as we move forward with the growth of the city, because we can grow and grow and grow, but if our human condition is not keeping pace, then we're missing the mark again. And I'm just committed not to missing the mark of a moment of growth with a city that leaves people behind.
GR: I want to pick up on a couple of the things you mentioned there a little bit later in our conversation. But let me focus in on, you mentioned some accomplishments of the Walsh administration there that you are part of and I wanted to ask you some specific questions about how you would be different or similar to that, and the first one is leadership style. How would you characterize your leadership style, and in particular, do you think it would be different from Mayor Ben Walsh? Everybody is a different person, how would you characterize your leadership style?
SO: Well, I think my leadership style is based on my experience. I mean, people ask the question of what makes you different from Ben Walsh? Well, we're clearly two very different people. He's a fortysomething white man, and I'm a 61 year old black woman with the experiences that come with being a 61 year old black woman. And so my perspective on life is a little different than his and just experience. But we have the same principles, which I think is important for leadership. Leadership for me is steeped in a 40 year career of executive leadership in managing people, places and finances. And so I'm coming in with that on the ground experience of how do you, identify problems, how do you find solutions, how do you work with people, how do you collaborate? And that is my style. If I am the person in the room who thinks I have all the answers, then that room is not effective, that room is not full and I need to make sure I have other voices in that room. We have very similar styles. I have a little bit more fire in me, I think. I've learned a lot from Ben Walsh in when to release that fire and when to knock. And so I've learned a lot from him in that. His campaign was, “Rise Above”, and sometimes I'm like, Mayor, you're being a little bit too nice on this one. And so, but I have been the collaborator. We have come through a time in our community where we weren't working together and we were suffering from that. And I think through my experience with the Walsh administration, I understand that collaboration is the best way to move forward. I will continue that collaboration. I'm doing it now on a day to day basis. When I complete this conversation with you, I go back to work, and that work is about collaboration, initiative, developing, working for the city, the residents of the city of Syracuse.
GR: You know, you mentioned being a black female. And I wanted to ask you, perhaps a sensitive question about that. I was going to do it later, but I'll do it now because you brought it up. When Stephanie Miner became mayor, she was the first woman mayor of any of the big five cities in the state. And those would be New York City, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo. When it comes to black mayors, only Albany and Syracuse have not yet had black mayors, and that's despite their large non-white populations. I have to say, I was surprised by this. And I would have thought that this is something that would have been a priority for the Democratic Party in Syracuse a little while ago. And maybe it's just that the stars haven't lined up, I don't know. But do you think that race is important in this election, sort of given the times right now, and should it be?
SO: When I talk to individuals in the community, they are excited about the prospect of Syracuse moving into a space of electing someone of color, particularly an individual, black individual, black female. Many of those folks are still smarting over the federal, the national election with Kamala Harris. I run, and I mentioned my black female, who I am, because that's who I am. And I'm proud of being black, being a female, being a mom, being a mother of a son with a disability, being just the individual who fell in love with the city and stayed here. My qualifications are my qualifications, but I stand in full pride and understanding of the significance of my being a woman and being a black woman running in this race.
GR: Okay, all right. Back to leadership styles and thinking about the Walsh administration. A couple of questions related to that. First of all, I would never expect you to throw your boss under the bus, but is there anything that stands out to you during the past eight years with Ben Walsh that you wish, with hindsight, the administration could have had a do over on?
SO: There are a couple of things. One was, I kind of, I think we're getting some momentum now on the housing authority issue, where we're looking really to be able to close on some significant progress over the summer. We have been kind of, I and others in the administration had kind of seen some concerns we had about capacity and ability for the existing staff of the housing authority to take on such a matter. Now, this is across all the housing, the reformation plan of the housing, it's a billion dollar project. None of us have done anything like this. So to bring, it would be critical to bring in all the capacity necessary to do it. And we were just not seeing that willingness to bring on the help needed to do it and thought that it was really putting the progress in jeopardy in, I think the urgency that we have seen lately from the mayor, I would have pulled that trigger a little sooner. About two years ago we saw it coming. And so there was urgency. He was very clear, been very clear from, you know, late last year into early this year. That should’ve happened probably two years ago.
GR: Okay. And then I'm thinking about your two opponents in the primary, Pat Hogan and Chol Majok. In terms both of not only leadership style, but also policy priorities. What are the most important differences between you and the two of them?
SO: I think that for me, I have been engaged throughout this city and not just, you know, focused on particular neighborhoods or particular populations, but my engagement has been in, basically because of the work that I must do right now, it's been engaged across the city. It is ironic to me that one of my opponents in particular always talks about my lack or our lack of transparency. And I think we've been the most transparent administration with dashboards and information, particularly when it came to ARPA funds. We have dashboards, how we're spending money, how we plan to spend money. This recent budget situation we've been through is clearly not transparent. So to speak about my lack of leadership and transparency I led the Reimagining Policing Initiative under the former governor. There was the executive order for reimagining policing after the murder of George Floyd. Mayor Walsh turned to me and said, Sharon, you’re going to lead that process. Now remember, all municipalities that have governance over law enforcement, DA, county, city, municipalities all around us had to engage in a plan of how they were going to move in looking at how policing happened in their communities. Mayor Walsh turned to me and said, you lead that charge. The county looked to me, the DA's office looked to me and we initiated what had to be a dozen community meetings for transparency to make sure that the community's voice was heard through that process and created a dashboard to ensure that people knew exactly what our plan was going to be. While all municipalities had to participate, quite frankly, many municipalities phoned it in. But we did not, our community would not allow us to. And when we talk about my style, it is very much focused to going into the community and hearing their voices, because that's where I come from. Boy, of the 40 years I've been working in Syracuse, 30 of them have been on the ground in neighborhoods. And that is the aspect that I bring to City Hall, I have been bringing to City Hall and will continue to do so as Mayor.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Sharon Owens. The Syracuse City Deputy Mayor is running for Mayor in her own right, and will appear on the ballot in the Democratic primary on June 24th. So, Deputy Mayor, you mentioned this recent round with the budget process before the break and I did want to ask you a question about that. The issue of the city's budget, it's become quite controversial in recent days and weeks. It's a moving target that's being determined as we speak and you and I are talking on Wednesday May 21st. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about that and I'll try to be as brief as I can but I want to provide some background for our listeners. So just as background, and correct me if I don't have something right here, but my understanding is the Mayor proposed a roughly $348 million budget. It involved a 2.2% spending increase and a raise of 2% in the property tax rate. It also drew some money from the city's general fund. And the city's general fund is essentially its savings account to cover the remaining deficit of that budget. The general fund is estimated to be at around $120 million at the end of the fiscal year. That's compared with $50 million when Mayor Walsh first took office. I believe a lot of that money came from the support for COVID that was provided to cities from the Federal Government. But anyway, the council rejected that proposed raise in taxes and lowered the proposed budget spending by 2.4% or about $16 million. I know it's a lot more complicated than that, but is that basically correct so far?
SO: All the marks.
GR: Okay, great. So my first question for you is, how unusual is it for the city of Syracuse to dip into its general fund, sometimes it's called a rainy day fund, to cover a budget? You know, it's something that hardly ever, ever happens, is it something that periodically happens? I mean, how weird is this?
SO: No, it is unfortunately a reoccurring need of the city because of the cost to run the city versus the revenue we're able to generate. Again, Grant, the major sources of revenue for the city of Syracuse are sales tax, which we saw some increase in. But it's trending to level off and property tax. And again, you know, when you look at the whole pie of property in the city of Syracuse, 48% of those property owners actually pay taxes because as in most cities, you know, hospitals, educational institutions, which are all important economic drivers are tax exempt. And so there's always been a gap in that revenue versus the expenses to run the city. And so that is why that rainy day fund is important to be able to fill that gap. And as you mentioned, when we had come into office, there was $50 million there and through wise use of those ARPA funds and other revenue generating opportunities, it's at $120 million. And so no, that is not an unusual occurrence to dip into that fund.
GR: Okay. And do you think that the budget as proposed by the mayor, gets it about right? Do you have any big issues with it?
SO: I mean those increases that you mentioned, when we look at the increase, it was about an $8 million increase from the previous budget. I'd like your listeners to understand that many of those costs are not controlled by the taxpayers or city government. It is pension costs that are rising, it is insurance costs that are rising. So those costs that, those are costs that we do not control. There are other costs that included positions that we wanted to bring on, initiatives we wanted to bring on. For example, we've heard from our business community that our permitting process just takes too long. So we responded with outsourcing, that permitting to professional firms who can do, who have state licenses to do building reviews. And so we have about six of those, we put that money into the budget so that we can continue to outsource and get that turnaround much faster than what we can do with a couple of staff people. So we didn't arbitrarily add positions in order to just, you know, bring on positions, but it was to increase the efficiency. You know that we have started this red light with the school busses, the red light enforcement, so people are not passing school busses or school zones. But from a legal perspective, when you are identified by those cams there has to be a adjudication process to ensure that it was you, it was your car and give you an opportunity to dispute that. That takes people to do. And so while it appeared that the council was in favor of these red light initiatives to protect our students and our children, they're cutting the very mechanism by which we would be able to enforce it. And so that's kind of where we stand, you know, and in their cuts of 16 million, I heard from many people who have been in city government for a long time and a cut of that magnitude is unprecedented. I think, Grant, the thing that was most egregious to me was, yes, we had hearings, but Joe Cecile or Mike Monds, did not hear in a hearing that they were going to cut 3.5 or $2.5 million. But before you had your vote, you could have very easily picked up the phone and said we are going to cut $3.5 million. Chief Cecile, what is going to be the impact of that and how can you help us get us to that number? None of that happened, and I think that is the most egregious because our department heads in our departments are readily available for any ask, particularly of councilors, but not to get a phone call before that vote was the most troubling part of it.
GR: So, this is a tangled question but I want to try to simplify it as much as I can here. And just to see, I have some other things I want to ask you about some other issues, so maybe if you can just be really brief here.
SO: Sure.
GR: I would assume that it is not an unreasonable assumption to think that the city's budget situation is likely to get better as Micron unfolds. Would you agree with that?
SO: It is our hope that it, particularly because of sales tax, if we can generate more housing that could be taxable, yes.
GR: Okay, all right. So one last question on this, and we've got about 7 minutes left, I want to save some time for other things. But it does seem to me that there are obviously some political questions suggested by the context of this budget issue. You're the mayor's deputy, you're running for mayor, the other two Democratic candidates are both on the city council, one of them is acting as the council president. I'm trying to see a possible political angle here and the one that I can discern is that they can try to say that, hey, look, the administration wanted to raise your taxes, but we stopped that, or I stopped that. Frankly, I could see that working in a general election, I'm a little more perplexed about how it works in the Democratic primary. But do you think that what is going on is election oriented at all? And if it is, can you state in a sentence what you think the intended message is?
SO: I would hope that it's not, but I don't know how it's not politically motivated when the first public response from Pat Hogan in particular was not from him to the press as a councilor, but it was to him to the press from his political campaign. It was a press release from his political campaign. You have not seen that from me. My job is Deputy Mayor.
GR: Okay. I want to come back to the beginning of our conversation and the fact that, you know, the very tagline for your campaign is to keep, you know, what is it, keep moving forward?
SO: “Maximize the Moment.”
GR: …and maximize the moment. I've been thinking a lot about that, actually, and I wanted to ask you a question about it. It seems to me that, both the redevelopment of the East Adams area and Micron, they're both great opportunities and huge opportunities. But I've also worried about just the degree of disruption that both of them are going to bring. And it would seem to me that whoever the new mayor is, they're going to have to manage that disruption very deftly. And if you could just say a few more words about that, I would be very keen to hear them.
SO: Absolutely. I started our conversation by saying that the next mayor's, you know, one of the priorities is going to be keeping the city moving, keeping the city functioning. Because the, what's going to be happening with 81, you can see it along Erie Boulevard. Not only just what's happening with 81, but we're doing our own infrastructure work and multiple sides of the city. This is the most I think anyone in Syracuse in a long time has had to deal with, traffic detours, and it is construction. So my priority is conversations around businesses on those corridors, how people are going to get out to work, what are going to be the routes for children on busses and traveling and walking during that time. It is going to be critical for this next mayor, and I have the existing, I meet with the DOT on a regular basis. I was just on the panel with that team regarding the environmental impacts and how we can protect people as they move towards the next project, which will be Almond Street. So I'm very much in the weeds when it comes to the day to day implications of communicating to our community. Syracuse, this is all going to be worth it. Our city is going to look and feel completely different, especially for the I-81 project. And for Micron, we cannot talk about poverty seriously until we're able to get people work that increases the household incomes of the people there. Not only individuals, but all individuals in a household. That's how we address poverty.
GR: Yeah, and that was actually right leading into what will probably be my last question for you, is the Micron opportunity is huge. You mentioned these other companies, Carrier, Crucible, I don't know if you mentioned that one or not, but, you've mentioned several others. And this is bigger than all of them. And so, what would be your biggest worries about that? I know what your biggest hopes are, but what are your biggest worries? Is it that this happens and poverty keeps getting more and more isolated and concentrated in a way? I mean, what do you worry about?
SO: What I worry about is what I work the hardest against. And it is to ensure that we're preparing people in the city of Syracuse for these jobs. I have always said to individuals in the rooms that we have to demystify what the jobs actually are. You know, these big fabs are big clean rooms with, you know, and OCC is looking to train individuals right now. So it's not complicated, many of those jobs are not complicated. So how can we prepare people? My biggest fear and worry is that we cannot miss the mark on this and leave folks behind in this amazing opportunity. And it's not just Micron, it's all the residual opportunity that's going to happen too. And we have to get the transportation right to make sure we can get people to Micron and other industries that are going to be opening up in our community. And so that is critical as well. I can not not hope, I'm just a hopeful person. That's what's driven me and my whole life. But I'm also very sober about what are the challenges we have and how we have to address them. And instead of pointing my finger and complaining about the challenges, I get down and I roll my sleeves up and try to address them.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens. Once again, the Democratic Party mayoral primary in Syracuse is June 24th, and early voting starts on June 14th. Deputy Mayor Owens, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciate it.
SO: Thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure.
GR: Thank you. You've been listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Eric Heinze on the Campbell Conversations
May 17, 2025
Eric Heinze
Program Transcription:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Eric Heinze. He's a professor of law and humanities at Queen Mary College in the University of London. And he's the author of a new book titled, “Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left.” Professor Heinze, welcome to the program and congratulations on this new book.
Eric Heinze: Thank you very much, Grant, it's an absolute pleasure to be with you.
GR: Well, we're really glad you made the time. So, but before we get into some of the arguments that you make in the book, I just want to take a few minutes at the beginning to make sure that you and I and our listeners have a shared understanding of a couple of terms and I'm going to take them right from the title of your book. First of all, just briefly, what's critical theory?
EH: Yeah, you might say that critical theory is the academic or more intellectually driven branch of what would broadly count as progressive or leftist politics. Having said that, right, there's never been any such thing as a unified left, right? Or as a unified kind of theory of progressive politics. And there is never been anything like a unified critical theory. Particularly today, what we refer to today as critical theory is a loose umbrella term to encompass many different kinds of writing and thinking and discussion that have been going on now for the better part of a century.
GR: Okay. Then how would you define the left? Because I know it can mean something different in Europe, for example, than it does in the United States. So although in some ways we're looking more and more like Europe, but what how are you using the term ‘left’?
EH: Yeah. And there again, my aim with these terms, left progressive, critical theory, my aim is not to define any of them, right? And, you know, to say these thinkers count and these don't, I take a completely different approach. What interests me is, rather than generalizing about everybody, is above all, to try to identify some of the dominant strands of thought that I think have very much driven leftist politics, leftist activism and what goes on in the universities as well, right? So it's more about just kind of identifying a couple of influential themes, topics, tendencies, and really trying to unpack them and see what works with them and what doesn't.
GR: Okay, and let me throw something back at you and see if you would agree with this, then. When I hear those terms, what I normally think of, first of all, is concerns about inequality and in particular concerns about economic inequality and an effort to understand what generates it, what are the limits on political efforts to change it? And then as a kind of an addendum to that, I would say earlier leftisms were more concerned about class inequality, whereas more contemporary leftism seemed to be more concerned about ethnic or different kinds of identity inequality. Is that all fair, in your view?
EH: I think it's, yeah, it's a very important characterization, right, because again, we know that we're only talking about trends and tendencies, right? Obviously, you know, you can still find people who stick to the, you know, to the very Marxist idea that really is just about, you know, economics and class. But then, as you say, on the other extreme, we have all sorts of identity politics, which, you know, often doesn't necessarily highlight economics and then everything in between.
GR: And so, all right, so what's the central problem then that you're trying to address in this book? What do the critical theorists have to come clean on?
EH: Yeah, yeah, exactly right. If you look at what you and I have just discussed so far over the past few minutes, I think a lot of your listeners will know that, you know, simply looking for, you know, things that the left hasn't done very well or should have done differently or things that it's omitted, there's nothing new about that. And that's not really the crux of my book, right? And in particular, the crux of my book is not to start picking through this particular type of identity politics, right? And to say, well, you shouldn't talk so much about X, you should talk more about Y, it's not that at all, because I think a lot of people do this and some of the very interesting ways. That's not my project. I would define it in a somewhat different way, right? If we look at the kind of culture wars that we've witnessed in recent years, right, you have these people, critical theorists, people on the left, right? Who, in various ways insist that we need to take a very critical view of centuries of Western history. Then you have people on the far right who simply negate that by, they simply want to dismantle and destroy it, right? They want to get rid of DEI, they want to get rid of queer theory, they want to get rid of postcolonial theory, right? And so you have these two extremes, you know, which simply define each other, right, at the far ends. And what I want to do is just break out of that, you know, almost verging on a cliché of a culture war. And I tried to do it like this, one of my arguments is that probably the single most important achievement of the left over more than a century does not lie with any particular politician or set of policies, but rather lies with, first of all, fundamentally shifting what it means to think about justice and injustice, what it means to argue about them, right? In other words, the left does not always win on these questions, as we know, right? The conservative and far right forces are as strong as ever, right, and have always, you know, had their, you know, they have always been more or less strong over the past century. So it's not that the left always wins, but it's very much the left which has defined the terms of the debate, the way, the things that are considered to be important if you're talking about justice and injustice. Now, this entails a second thing, which I think is probably the most important of the left's achievements, again, as opposed to any politician or policy. Which is that leftist thought over the past hundred years or so has fundamentally redefined what history is, right? I think if you look throughout the world, go back as far as you like. Sure, you can find many of societies where from time to time it was considered important to, you know, look over past mistakes and consider how things can be done better, there's nothing new about that. What the Western Left has done over the past century or so has fundamentally redefined the very meaning of history, not as the high deeds of great men, you know, from Alexander the Great, right up through, you know, Winston Churchill or whoever your favorite is, right? But rather, history suddenly now becomes an exercise in collective self-scrutiny. History becomes a kind of duty, right, a kind of a moral duty that all of us should collectively, right, understand ways in which the West over centuries has perpetrated mass injustice, right, along the lines of capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, right? And that this should be the fundamental way in which we understand our culture. This, I think, is unprecedented throughout humanity, right? And it's something I admire. Again, the far right response would be that this is where we've all gone wrong, right? That this is the downfall. And I say quite the contrary if you care about democracy, right? Democracy is best and works best precisely when we're deliberating in a serious and critically minded way about deep and structural problems and injustices, right? And so on these two points, the meaning of justice, the meaning of history, I think my book lavishes praise on the left. The problem then, is that this injunction, that understanding injustice, that understanding history has to be an exercise in collective self-scrutiny, is something that the left for decades now has constantly taught the rest of us to do, but has not been doing itself. And many people on the left are amazed or outraged or disgusted or simply laugh when they hear me say this because they genuinely think that they do this, right? They say, oh, yes, you know, of course, you know, we think about mistakes we've made and, you know, we don't support Stalin anymore and we don't support Mao anymore, right? And so they really do believe that they have been engaged in collective self-scrutiny. And so what I do in the book is I say that this notion of collective self-scrutiny or what I call memory politics, unfolds in two steps, right? The first is, you know, kind of hashing out some sort of agreement on a historical record and even that can be very controversial, right? But what characterizes leftism and what characterizes critical theory is the second step, which is that these histories cannot simply remain locked in textbooks and lecture halls. They need to be disseminated to the broadest possible public through film, through documentaries, through television, through radio, through cultural events, through museum exhibitions, through training programs. Again, I don’t, unlike the far right, I don't attack any of that, I support it, I say keep doing it. But it is that step two, that we have never seen from the left when it scrutinizes its own history, right? So all of the rest of us have to go from step one to step two, but when the left is looking at its own history and all stops at step one. It says, yes of course, you know, Stalin, terrible, Mao, terrible, Pol Pot, terrible, but where are the training programs? Where are the films, the documentaries made by the left, right? In order to show us what collective self-scrutiny is, instead of just telling the rest of us to do it with whatever our political commitments may be. This, in my opinion, has been the number one problem of leftist politics. It's not you know, that Kamala Harris forgot to say A or B, right? It's not that at all, right, it's far deeper. It's far more fundamental and it goes back much further in time.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Eric Heinze. He's a law professor at Queen Mary College at the University of London and the author of a new book titled, “Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left”. And we've been discussing the work and the issues that it raises. Eric, I want to dive a little more deeply into some of the things that you were saying. One of the things was this issue, and it reminded me, as you were talking and also when I was looking at your book, I was reminded of this. This issue surrounding the former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn regarding anti-Semitism in the Labor Party and the way that the Labor Party reacted to those charges, or those concerns. And there were some things that were brought to light and made public about conversations that folks were having that concerned some people. And one of the things that struck me is anti-Semitism used to be associated with the right. Lately, it seems to be, have become more of a problem for the left. Certainly, in the United States, it was a problem for the Democrats in 2024. So I'm just curious to get your thoughts about is that kind of, does that illustrate what you're talking about there, in some ways?
EH: Yeah, in a number of ways. One of the things I try to show in the book when I examine this problem of leftist anti-Semitism in Britain, is to show that even people on the left who claimed, and I think their intentions were good, I think their heart was in the right place, right, people who claimed to care about this problem of anti-Semitism and wanted to kind of dig into it, come clean about it, right? In the book, I note one journalist in particular just because I thought this was so symptomatic of the problem, namely that this particular journalist, a young but very prominent Guardian journalist by the name of Owen Jones. Now, a very strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, a very stern critic of Israel, therefore, you know, nobody could accuse me of, you know, of sources that were maybe too sympathetic to Israel. I don't think anybody criticizes Israel more than Owen Jones, you know, pretty much on a minute-to-minute basis if you look at his Twitter feed. And so I said, okay, then I'll look at his account, you know, because he's certainly not going to make up stories of anti-Semitism. And indeed, I checked all the stories that he reported. And so on the one hand, a harsh critic of Israel, but on the other hand, someone who did want to, as I say, come clean about anti-Semitism. And here's the problem, right, so in many ways, I praise him because at least he went much further than many. Many just wanted to hush it, to deny it, say it's all a plot by Mossad and so forth. So Owen Jones, on the one hand, a harsh critic of Israel, nevertheless, at least, you know, was upfront, right, that there have been many incidents in a short period of time that we need to reckon with this. But then the question is, well, how does he reckon with it, right? Again, better than most and yet there are still real problems, right? So if you look at Owen Jones’ other writing on things like racism, poverty, LGBTQ people, women and so forth, he very commonly characterizes these problems as, and often literally uses the words: systemic, structural. And even if he's not using those words, it's clear that this is how he's analyzing these problems, whether, again, he's been doing this for years and I cite several examples and you can find many more, he writes a lot, right? And so these problems are always systemic, structural, built into the very fabric of how Western society or certainly British society has been operating for a long time. Then all of a sudden he said, okay, now we're going to take leftist anti-Semitism seriously. But he never analyzes that as systemic or structural on the left. All of a sudden, it's just a bunch of mistakes and what's incredible is that he himself recites case after case after case, again, in a very short period of time, right? And yet each time he then explains it as, oh, it was a mistake and, you know, Corbyn really should have reacted a bit sooner or should have used different words or, you know, should have told such and such an adviser, right? It all just becomes, you know, a bit of, you know, sort of juggling the chairs on the, you know, on the deck of the Titanic, right? In no way does he either use the word or more importantly, use the concept of structural or systemic injustice.
GR: Or something that's baked in in a particular way because of the history and because of the struggle.
EH: Yeah, it's all the big oops, it's all just a big banana peel. And the reason I go into this is because, again, this we get this too much from the left and forgetting about the anti-Semitism, right? You know, oh, you know, the USSR, oh, well, that wasn't real socialism, as if it wasn't just a big mistake, right? You know, Mao, well, that wasn't the real socialism, right? And you know, no, right, if they are right, that structural injustices are, as you say, embedded, built into the very fabric of what Western society has been for centuries, then how is it that many of the leftist own commitments so easily come free of that past? Either we're all embedded in our past, or we can all just wipe our hands and walk away from it. But the idea that the left is constantly wiping its hands and walking away from it, right, while the rest of us have to keep rehearsing, almost ritually rehearsing it, it just doesn't make any sense.
GR: Well, let me… Yeah. Go ahead. Finish your point, I want to ask you a question.
EH: Just to give a very quick example of that, right, in case some people, you know, think again that I'm being unfair. You know, just look at a university campuses, right? We’ll have things like, you know, Women's History Month and Gay History Month, LGBTQ History Month and backwards, and that's good. Again, I don't want to dismantle that, keep it, right? Give me one example of, I don't know, Socialist History Month. And again, I don't mean done by the far right. I mean done by leftists and done in the same way. Yes, this is also an example of how liberationist and egalitarian and indeed socialist discourses were massively abused not to create that kind of society, but in fact to create just the opposite, which is precisely the critique of Western liberal democracy. I don't think you could name maybe one campus, and that's a problem.
GR: Yeah. Well, if you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the law professor Eric Heinze. You know, you're saying all these things, and I'm constantly thinking of George Orwell, you know, as someone who was willing to do that. I mean, if you read “Homage to Catalonia,” he's willing to do it, you suggest, and certainly “1984” goes in that direction too. I don't want to take up the whole rest of the time with this, but I have a quick story I want to relate to you to get your reaction to it. So I'm going to put you maybe in the role of psychotherapist here for a minute, you can send me your bill when we're done. But I was in a, several years, few years ago, a DEI training at my school, and it was being led by a gentleman whose name I won't use, but we got into it. And the idea of this conversation, it was on Zoom, was that it was about, I don't know, 50-60 people, and it had professors at all different ranks. And, you know how the system works. So I was a full professor, there were full professors there. There were associate professors who are ultimately wanting to be full professors and there are assistant professors who are scared that they won't be tenured, right? And so, all right. So we're going to have a conversation about identity and race and inclusion and all of this and at the beginning of this, I brought up what I perceived to be a problem is how, because it was billed as an honest conversation, no judgment, honest conversation, I said, how can we have an honest conversation given the gross inequalities of power that exist here on this Zoom call? You've got assistant professors, you know, supposedly discussing these things with the people that are going to decide whether they're going to stay or get fired. How’s that going to be an honest, open conversation? Well, immediately I got turned into by the leaders of this as sort of the bad white guy in all of this. Like somehow this point that I was bringing up as a challenge to what we were doing had something to do with my race and my gender, maybe my age too, I don't know. But it was, it just seemed strange, was like, hey, I'm the one talking about let's think critically about the power relations that are in this room. And the reaction was sort of, oh, no, this can't possibly be the case here. And it reminds me very much of what you're talking about.
EH: Yeah and it's tragic. In fact, getting back to your reference to someone like Orwell, I mean, one of the points I tried to make in the book is that, again, the problem is not so much with what I call step one of memory politics. You can find many important thinkers throughout the history of the left who were willing to call out abuses, that's not the problem. And again, many people reject what I say because they think that I don't know this, right and they think that I just want to rehash all the terrible things that Stalin did, right? But the problem again is, where is step two? And I think the story that you just told also illustrates that. It's this kind of, oh, but we don't need to do this.
GR: Right.
EH: Because if they thought they didn't need to do it, they would do it, right? Again, if it's not so hard to put on, as I said, you know, Women's History Month, LGBTQ History Month, Black History (month), whatever, right, why is it so hard to do the self-criticism that they insist that all the rest of us have to do? As I say in my book, don't tell us, show us.
GR: Yeah.
EH: If collective self-scrutiny is the way to do history for those who care about justice.
GR: So what is then, we’ve got about 4 minutes left and I've got sort of two questions I think will completely occupy us here. But you've given me a sense of what the prescription is, you know, how does the left get out of this trap? And it's don't tell us, show us, engage in this kind of thing. Is there anything that you might add to that as your recommendation for how we go forward?
EH: Yeah. I mean, again, I don't think it's hard to do. I think that critical theorists and leftist thinkers, they've always had the tools, yeah? And so let's just take a quick example before we wrap up, right? You know, again, a lot of critical theory has been about looking at some of the foundational norms of Western liberal democracy, individual freedom, civic equality, economic opportunity and showing how law and politics in society were actually structured to use these as just defying ideologies to entrench the opposite, to entrench unfreedom for the people at the bottom, inequality, lack of opportunity. Again, that's good, this is the genius of critical theory, keep doing it. But what about doing that same analysis with, again, the leftist discourses of liberation and egalitarianism and indeed socialism that again, much of the left was at the very least lending legitimacy to and often zealously supporting for more than a hundred years, right? If it's not hard to do it with liberal democracy, then it's not hard to do it with many of the regimes that the left has also, again, at least lent legitimacy to over the past hundred years. So the tools are there, it's only a question of will. Are we willing to subject ourselves to the same scrutiny that we insist that everybody else needs to undertake?
GR: So, final question on that point. You mentioned the word regimes, so, you know, the Academy is one of these regimes, obviously. And so what I wanted to ask you about, I wanted to take this back to the United States and make it very current, and that is do you think then the problems that you're describing here, do they give President Trump and American Republicans, more generally, enough of a kernel of truth when they go after higher education on the grounds of viewpoint diversity, ideological intolerance and so on? I mean, you know, they're going way over the top, one might argue, and how they're reacting to this and we would be, you know, right to point that out. But at the same time, does the academy and does the left by extension, not do itself a great disservice by not at least acknowledging that the kernel of truth there, before they make that critique? And only in a minute I'm giving you for this, I'm sorry.
EH: Yeah. And that kernel of truth will only seriously be acknowledged when its roots, its causes are acknowledged. And I don't think the left has really understood them, right? And this is why, again, you know, people think that I just want to rehash again the history of Stalin and Battle and all the rest. No, it's not about that at all. My book, it's not about history, it's about memory. They're not the same thing, right? I'm not reproaching the left for denying facts of history, I'm reproaching them for the ways in which they do memory politics, the very one-sided and self-contradictory ways in which they do it.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. It's a fascinating book, and this has been a fascinating discussion. Again, you can send me your bill for the therapy, but that was Erik Heinze. And again, his new book is titled, “Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left.” Very, very provocative, very interesting book. Professor Heinze, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. I really, really enjoyed this.
EH: Thank you, Grant. It was an absolute pleasure for me.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Dennis Patterson on the Campbell Conversations
May 10, 2025
Dennis Patterson
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. As expertise and the exhortation to ‘follow the science’ become politically weaponized, my guest today is Dennis Patterson. He's a Law Professor at Rutgers University and he's also a Law and Legal Philosophy Professor at Surrey Law School in Britain. Together with Rutgers Law School Professor Jacob Hale Russell, he's written a new book. It's titled, "The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism." Professor Patterson, welcome to the program and congratulations on the new book.
Dennis Patterson: Well, thank you so much for having me, I appreciate your time.
GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with a little introduction for you and our listeners about why this book caught my eye, a couple of reasons. First of all, it taps into a set of concerns I've had about elites in the academy in recent years and also, as it happens, I've just finished teaching a course on democratic theory, that's democratic with a small ‘d’. And one of the issues that we discussed was the role of expertise, just how far it can and should take a society in making political decisions and what kinds of decisions we ought to be willing to cede to these subject area experts versus weighing the value trade-offs for ourselves. So I'm very, very keen on what you have to say here. We'll get into the details of your book as we work our way through the issue but I want to briefly, just to start out, just ask you a very basic question. What prompted you and your colleague to write this book when you did?
DP: Well, Jacob and I have had written and had written four articles during the pandemic. We started off shortly after the first wave of COVID with an article in an online publication called Stat News. And the thesis of that article was stop blaming the ordinary American for failing to follow the rules, because, and take the virus seriously, because, in fact, they are and they are doing what they're told. And so if there are problems, the problems lie elsewhere. We then went on to write a couple of more articles. The one that got the most attention was a piece called, “The Mask Debacle”, and that was about three years ago. And our basic thesis there was that the pandemic had, the management of the pandemic had evolved into basically political theater. And the whole idea that anyone was, quote, “following the science” or any science struck us as implausible. Because if you looked at blue states and red states, the regulations that they had were largely political, not driven by any kind of scientific metric. You see, our fundamental focus is not on who got things right or wrong in the pandemic, everybody makes mistakes, it's the way we talk about this. And our thesis has always been that the elites, the technocratic elites who manage the economy and culture, are basically engendering the populism that they claim to decry. And I would go so far as to point to the reelection of Donald Trump as an example of that. Neither one of us is a Trump supporter by any means, but, you know, it's just, you cannot denigrate people day in and day out, tell them their opinion is worthless, that their values and aspirations don't count for anything, and then expect them to just fall into line. That's not going to happen, it didn't happen. And unless things change, it'll just keep occurring. Anyway, that's how we got into it.
GR: Yeah, certainly not a good way to appeal to voters. So we'll work our way through some of these and I particularly want to investigate, probably in the later half of our conversation, about how what actually fuels the populism. But let me break it down first in terms of what's going on with this notion of expertise and experts. You write about an age of what, very provocative phrase, an age of mindless expertise, just say a little bit about that.
DP: Oh, well, we have a passage in the book where we recount the number of times the word expertise appears in the pages of the New York Times. And until about five years ago, it was just like every other word, and then it just explodes. And now we have experts for, you know, everything from drugs to picking a spouse to buying a car, what books to read to your children. I mean, it's just, we really do valorize expertise and we're in some ways that are obvious and important, like science and health and ways that are, you know, absurd, like the best birthday cake for a two year old and things like that.
GR: (laughter) I missed that one. So do you think that when it comes to that phenomenon, proliferation of notion of expertise, that we're living in an age that's different from the past? When I was thinking of the time about 120 years ago or so where there was a real revolution in this notion of professionalism, everything became more professionalized and self-styled professionalism. Do you think something's going on that's unique to our age right now?
DP: I do, I do. And I think it's basically this, but it's also very cultural and it's not across the board. I think that people like us who are, you know, credentialed, educated, tend to believe that the only thing that really matters in any discussion of policy for example, our facts. And if we just get the facts right, everything else will just sort of take care of itself. And one of the messages of our book is, is that, this just ain't so. You can you can have lots of facts but the question remains what to do with them. But we have, I mean if you look at just, you know, popular culture, like, I don't know, Malcolm Gladwell and then somebody more sophisticated like Dan Kahneman, there's all this emphasis on the cognitive and understanding the world and it's basically empirical. And we love to, and Americans love a clean, neat scientific solution to everything, it's cultural. And of course, science is absolutely fantastic at providing solutions. But one of the things that the pandemic did was it really raised the question just how far can we go in making decisions about how to live with just facts? And the answer was, not too far. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the general public's trust in the public health complex is at an all-time low. Now, if that's true, and I see this all the time, that's the claim, the question is why? What happened during the pandemic to make things that bad?
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Law and Legal Philosophy Professor Dennis Patterson, and we're discussing his new book. It's titled, "The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism". I want to pick up on exactly that last point that you made there, because, and I suppose that you and I, as you just said, you know, we're credentialed, we might qualify as elites in our society this way. There's this sense I think that the elites, by and large in our society tend to think, and maybe I'm going too much by what I'm hearing from my colleagues, but tend to think that we are living in an age where expertise and factual knowledge are just being discounted and dismissed out of hand.
DP: Yeah.
GR: And it also seems to be the case that for these elites, that that discounting is also linked to democratic backsliding in their minds. That there's almost a causal relationship there. So it sounds like you would agree with that premise that the expertise and factual knowledge are being discounted and dismissed, is that correct?
DP: No, I don't think it's correct at all.
GR: Oh, okay, explain that then.
DP: So one of the themes of the constellation of issues that you mention is that we allegedly live in a post-truth environment where, you know, everybody has alternate facts. You believe, you have your truths and I have mine and so the idea of an objective reality around which we can coalesce is an illusion. Now, there's plenty of social, this topic is a bit controversial, but there's a lot of social science data to support the proposition that we don't live in a post-truth environment. And in fact, for example, the internet is constantly blamed as, internet and social media are blamed as the means by which people acquire beliefs that are false. And then they lead to, you know, the undermining of democracy et cetera, et cetera. In fact, a lot of empirical evidence points to the proposition that social media does nothing worse than reinforce what people already believe. And so if they are getting misinformation, it's coming from another place. And I also want to point out, as Marty Makary made this point during his confirmation hearing, the government was the primary source of misinformation during the pandemic. The need to close schools, social distancing, closing down the economy, masks. All of the non-pharmacological intervention that the government pushed were ineffective. This is a fact. And yet everybody was told you had to wear a mask, your kids had to stay home, it was it was just all wrong. So, so much for expertise, facts and the truth. Now, are there vaccine deniers? Of course, of course. There are flat earth people, and there are all kinds of people who believe things that are just obviously false. But it's not the vast majority of people out in the public domain. Most people believe things that are, by and large, true. They try to follow the rules as best they can, but they also question, sometimes rightly, the dictates and the mandates of government. And I think that's going to happen more and more. Now, the way the pandemic was managed, the way it was talked about, the derision that was delivered to people who deigned to question what the government was doing, this has all backfired now. And so you want to know why we have more populism? This is in part the answer, because, you know, one of the ways I characterize our book is and I'll speak just for myself here, we're basically diagnosing a pathology, a one that you and I are very familiar with from the faculty lounge. And that is, you know, condescension, right? If you don't have the credentials that we have, you're not worth talking to, right? Second, technocratic paternalism. The idea that facts determine everything. And if you would just shut up and follow what we tell you to do, you'd be fine. And finally, intellectual tyranny, that any dissent is going to be suppressed. I mean, look at the attack on the Great Barrington people, Fauci and Collins trying to tank them, you know, with articles and such. The Biden administration’s suppression of people on Twitter and Facebook. I mean, this stuff just can't go on. And again, it turns out these people were by and large, correct. They certainly weren't wrong, right? I mean, the Great Barrington people, they were on to something, focused protection was just as plausible. And of course, my favorite example, right, where did the virus come from, a wet market or a lab, right? Remember when Trump suggested it came from a lab? Everybody said he was a racist. I never understood why it was racist, like, why a wet market is less racist in a lab, but okay. But that aside, right? And now it is at least plausible, if not more, that the virus came from a lab. In fact, it might have been a lab, you know, that received funding from the United States government. So maybe, you know, we don't know the facts about that yet. But the point is, is that we can't even talk about a thesis like that without it being completely politically polarized.
GR: You’re listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Dennis Patterson. He's a Law Professor at Rutgers University, also a Law and Legal Philosophy Professor at Surrey Law School in Britain. And he's the author of a new book titled, "The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism” and we've been discussing the book. I want to come back to something that you mentioned, this idea that, you know, the facts drive everything. And not only that, but if you question them in any kind of way, among these, within these elite cultures, the academy being one, that you are immediately kind of dismissed, and also that the conversation becomes very polarized. This is something that I have experienced and I've talked to other guests about and I wanted to get your thoughts about it. It seems to me that there is this blending of partisanship, political polarization, and this sense of science and ways that you've been discussing it in this strange way that very immediately in any kind of conversation that's about policy, things do get put in these polarized camps. And not only if you have a, what would normally be a legitimate question to ask, if you even ask that question, one of the moves that gets made is, if you're in the academy, you're put into a Republican camp and immediately suspect, you know, even questions something to even ask probing follow up. Is that something that you're getting at here in this?
DP: Well, we're not only getting at it, but we're getting it. We had we had colleagues who read some or all of our book.
GR: Yeah. I wanted to ask you about your reaction you're getting from your colleagues, so go ahead. I’m glad you bring it up.
DP: I mean, some people said you guys sound like you're Trump supporters. Which, my reaction was like, the book is written in English, what do you mean? Like, you know, how can you possibly say that after… And the answer is because you deigned to question the mantle of authority. So, for example, to give you a very, very concrete example of life during the pandemic. So Rutgers had a policy where everybody in a classroom had to wear a mask. And this went on for, I think, it went on for two years. In the last semester the edict was, and this was after like Penn and lots of other local schools had abandoned masks, Rutgers kept it. And there was one guy who would send out the emails say(ing), you have to, wearing a mask as mandatory. And I said to him, I wrote him an email and I said, let me get this straight. The students sleep together, eat together, recreate together, they only have to wear a mask when they come to the classroom, what science supports that? Never got an answer. And it turned out that there were some people in the AAUP, the union, my age, your age, right, who wanted all the students to wear masks because they were worried about getting a virus. Now, of course, all the teacher had to do was wearing N-95 properly, and they would have been fine. But this is the kind of problem that I experienced because I could never get an answer to this question. And then I would ask my colleagues, why do you think this book has a Trumpian tilt to it? Well, because you're criticizing the government's handling of COVID. And I said yeah, but I mean, you know, first of all, everybody in Sweden was supposed to be dead by the end of the week and it turns out their death rate was no worse than any other Scandinavian country, please explain. I mean, they just, it's a kind of a mindset that if you just, look, I've been an academic for 35 years. When I started out, you could question anything, you could demand an explanation of anything. Now, if you raise a question about the plausibility of a fair number of policies, you are ostracized.
GR: Right.
DP: That is a real phenomenon. It's not just you know, what fire and other people are reporting. I mean, I can tell you from the front lines, people don't want to raise questions. Now, when you're my age and my seniority, you don't care.
GR: (laughter)
DP: I mean, I couldn't care less what you think. I mean, what's the Dean going to do, fire me for asking a question? No, you know, none of that's going to happen. But it's not as interesting because, you know, there's only sort of one point of view. And for the younger people, they don't want to say a word because they're afraid of saying the wrong thing.
GR: Well, that's a whole ‘nother can of worms. I will say that I had a day in my class this semester, and the students brought it up, where there was a very honest conversation about the concerns that they had about, in a sense, falling out of line with some of the other classes that they were taking.
DP: Well, you know what's interesting about that topic...
GR: Well, I'll just say some of the stories were for me, they were hair raising. They were worse than I thought.
DP: But tell me why. You know, because in my, I just finished teaching populism again. The students report that they're worried about other students commenting on them. Is that your experience?
GR: No, these students were worried about their grades and the faculty. And my experience at Syracuse, every place is different, is that the students aren't that bad with each other. Now, is a there is a subset, right, who's very vocal and very doctrinaire. But for the most part, the students are pretty open and pretty eclectic and tolerant. It's, their report is concerns about the faculty. And this is particularly since this most recent election. You know, I'm a political scientist, I think about this a little differently. And I don't want to take too much of the time that people want to hear from you. But in the dynamic that you're talking about, one of the things that seems to me that's going on is, let me make a specific example with Fauci, for example. I think the mindset is, Trump is criticizing Fauci, therefore, I cannot criticize Fauci.
DP: Right.
GR: That's the driver. And that's where I think, like, I would put the partisan piece up front. Let me ask you this question. And if, by the way, I should say to my listeners, if you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the Law and Legal Philosophy Professor Dennis Patterson and we're discussing his new book, “The Weaponization of Expertise…”. I've got a few writers on the program that have written in a similar vein to you. They're not making your specific argument, but they're concerned about different aspects about academic and intellectual culture, thinking and political assumptions. Musa al-Gharbi is one of them I've spoken with, wrote the book, “We've Never Been Woke”. I get the sense that there is now a growing recognition of this as a problem that includes your arguments among a group of elites that cut across different political ideologies. Like you say, you're not a Trump supporter, and it's growing. Is your sense that even though there is this backlash, there's starting to be some wind in the sails of folks that are questioning this?
DP: Couple of puffs, a couple of gusts of wind, but I'm not I'm not sure that things are going to change that much that quickly. One thing that I think has gotten better is the, it has gotten better on the left, and that is the cancel culture atmosphere. But now Trump is filling that void trying to do the whole thing from the right. And so net / net, things are pretty much where they’ve been. But I don't think any conservative on an American campus is suppressing the speech of their more left wing colleagues. But certainly the opposite has been true for decades. You couldn't criticize anything without being ostracized. And so I do think that there is, that in a sense, and I just sense this in the faculty lounge, that people are now of a view that we just, there is nothing about which everyone agrees. And so we have to hear the dissenting voices. Now, I think it'll be a cold day in hell, at least at Rutgers, before there's a space made for somebody who questions some of the more fundamental aspects of our institutional ideology, but hope springs eternal.
GR: Do you think that a more productive conversation about the problems that you are identifying here can happen once Trump departs the White House after that particular polarizing figure goes away? That maybe the conversation in the faculty lounge and elsewhere can begin to go forward?
DP: I would say no, but, and I'm not a pessimist by disposition. I mean, I may have Irish heritage, but I'm not melancholic at all. But I'm a realist and, look, I mean, people just, I'm at a law school that takes social justice as its number one institutional commitment, that's not going to go away quickly. I'm more interested in producing students who can pass the bar and be successful lawyers. That's my number one priority. So can we talk about it? Sure, we do talk about it now. I think people are polite, but, you know, I don't think much is going to change.
GR: Well, let me jump in if I can, just because we only have about half a minute left or so. I can't leave the conversation on this. Do you see a way out then? I mean, your final chapter is giving political judgment a chance. What do you mean there? In 30 seconds, get us out of this morass.
DP: Well, it starts with it starts with the recognition that your interlocutor is not someone who proceeds in bad faith, that in fact, people have different views of the world. It's like the old, you know, the old liberal political ideal that my conception of the good is something that I get to decide, not you, not the state. And so people have different competing conceptions of the good. If you cannot proceed in a respectful conversation where you take the other person seriously, you let to make their argument, you don't make ad hominem arguments about them, that's the sort of thing that I think we need to do. And I think in some ways that aspect is getting a bit is getting a bit better. Because Trump is such a polarizing figure, that no one really wants to be associated with that temperament. And it's all about temperament. If you evince disdain for people, no conversation as possible. So just at that very basic level, respect for your interlocutor is a great place to start.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Dennis Patterson and again, his new book, written with Jacob Hale Russell is titled, "The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism." Professor Patterson, thanks so much again for taking the time to talk with me and really appreciate you writing this book.
DP: Thanks.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.