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.
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.
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Amie Parnes on the Campbell Conversations
Apr 26, 2025
Amie Parnes
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. We’re at about the first 100 days mark for the second Trump presidency, that milestone is being marked across the media. Today, we're going to take a look backward at how we got here. My guest is Amie Parnes. She's a senior political correspondent at The Hill. And with Jonathan Allen, another political journalist, she's written an account of the 2024 presidential election. It's titled, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House”. She was previously on this program to discuss her book about the 2016 election entitled, “Shattered” and he also wrote a book about 2020 titled, “Lucky”. She wrote those books with Jonathan Allen as well. Amie, welcome back to the program and congratulations on penning another bestseller.
Amie Parnes: Thanks, Grant. Thank you so much.
GR: It's good to see you again and thanks for making the time. So let me just start with a very basic question, where does this book, do you think, fit in with the assessments of the 2024 election that are going to come later? I mean, journalism in the moment is sometimes called the first draft of history. Is this book the second draft of history?
AP: I think John and I like to think so. I mean, we wrote this book very much, I mean, people saw what happened in the election. We all saw it play out. We saw the twists and turns. But I think these books are good because they essentially take you inside the room, these backroom conversations. You are privy to learning what is happening about, you know, what Nancy Pelosi is telling Barack Obama, what Nancy Pelosi is thinking as she's watching the debate, who she's talking to. So, you know, it's, we look back, but we write these books also to look ahead and we can get into that later. But, you know, it's a good playbook for Democrats and Republicans about what went right and what went wrong.
GR: It's interesting, you mentioned Nancy Pelosi and that's your opening scene there watching that debate. It grabs you, it pulls you right from the first paragraph.
AP: Yeah, intentionally so. I mean, she had her fingerprints all over this so we wanted to put you right in there with her watching the debate and that's exactly what we do.
GR: That's good, it was well done. So I don't want you to give away necessarily the best nuggets in the book. You know, you want people to buy the book and find those. But basically, maybe you already touched on this, but what are readers going to find in this book that they haven't already lived through? It's the inside backroom story and are there other things about the election that they'll find in here?
AP: Yeah, I mean, I think you learn about both sides. I mean, our book has gotten a lot of attention about the Democratic train wreck. But I think you also learn about what was going on Trump's end, too, and what he was thinking and what his aides were thinking. And it was a tumultuous time over there, too, especially during the candidate switch. You know, when Kamala Harris comes in, it's something that, you know, Trump was very surprised about. And so you learn exactly what was going on there. It was really quiet at that time during the switch. But we take you inside what he is thinking and how he wants to change things up. So I think he really, I think I'm not just saying this because I co-wrote this book, but I think you learn something new on every page.
GR: Yeah. Well, you mentioned that, you know, not just the Democratic side, but also thinking about what the Trump campaign was doing. And I was wondering, and this is a morbid question, I'm just going to say at the beginning, but was there a moment where the Trump campaign really thought, okay, you know, this is ours to lose? And in my mind, it was when he got shot and survived, I thought, I remember turning to someone and saying, there's this he's probably got this now.
AP: Yeah. And what's fascinating is Joe Biden's campaign, it was still the Biden campaign at the time, was thinking the same thing in those moments. And we take you inside one really funny moment with a senior adviser who was at his mother's house. And his mother essentially tells him, well, that's over, the race is over, essentially.
GR: (laughter)
AP: But yeah, I think John and I both saw that moment. And I think the, you know, on both sides, they kind of thought that they had it wrapped up in that moment. And it was amazing that Trump actually knew what he needed to do in the moment, which was to project strength. And he does that, he accomplishes that in that very morbid moment. And, you know, you look at what was happening on the other side of the election and the campaign and Joe Biden was projecting weakness in that moment. So you had that dichotomy of these two, strength versus weak and I think it really played to Trump's favor.
GR: I want to come back to some aspects of the question I want to ask you next a little bit later. But while we're on the subject of sort of turning points, you used the word train wreck a minute ago to talk about the Democratic campaign. I understand why that would be an adjective, because, you know, you had the implosion at the debate. You know, there was really no positive spin that could be put on that. And then the scrambling with finding another candidate, controversy about whether that should be an open or closed process. Kamala Harris gets named, kind of anointed and I want to come back to that later. But after all that, it's still a close election.
AP: Yeah.
GR: So I guess I'm wondering, why are the Democrats looking at this like a train wreck? I mean, there is a way to see the glass half full, even though obviously they hate having Trump as president. But still, I mean, you know, it was a pretty close election all that considered.
AP: It was a really close election. But they also lost the House and Senate. And that was Nancy Pelosi's biggest reason for jumping in I think, because she was hearing from members of the House that they were in jeopardy and she wanted to prevent losing the House as much as the White House. And so I think it was just across the board something that Democrats really wanted to prevent, another Trump presidency, they knew what that was like. A lot of them are thinking this one is so much worse than the first time and we could have prevented this. And the thing is, the election, as much as the Harris folks say it was a close race, but that they couldn't have won, you know, that Trump was going to win from the beginning. It was a very winnable race. The Democrats could have won this race. And I think that's why it was such a devastating loss.
GR: Right. Yeah, that's a good point. Were there any foreshadowing or tells in what you were seeing during the campaign of how Trump has approached his second term? I mean, he's doing things he said he was going to do, but nonetheless, this term looks completely different from the first term in terms of discipline and energy level and organizational, you know, I mean the organization of the messaging, I suppose, if not the people he's picked to be in the offices.
AP: Yeah, yeah. I think he, felt like he, you know, he walked in with a mandate and he's doing what he said he was going to do. I mean, anyone that's surprised about tariffs or anything else that he's doing, it was pretty much laid out during the campaign. And he brought with him Susie Wiles, someone that we profile quite a bit in this book, who is sort of the epitome of discipline. And that's what you saw in the Trump campaign. When you look at the book and you look at how the inner workings, you know, the moves and machinations that they were doing, it was all Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. A very disciplined campaign, a very tightly wound campaign, a much tighter campaign than previously with the 2020 and 2016 elections and I think it was all because of them. And he has, you know what's interesting is in the moment when Kamala, and I talked about this a moment earlier, but there's a moment where he can choose chaos again he can bring in Corey Lewandowski and the people from his past who bring a lot of drama with them and he chooses not to go that way. He chooses to keep Wiles and LaCivita on board when Kamala Harris comes in, and there's a moment where they feel like she's winning. And he kind of wants to shake up the race by doing something drastic, but he chooses the status quo and he chooses exactly where he is, which is a very un-Trumpian kind of thing to do, but he does it. And I think that moment speaks to where he was and his mindset during this campaign.
GR: Perhaps there's an analogy now in the way that he is backing off of tariffs. Seems again like he is open to a learning curve on some things at least. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with the journalist Amie Parnes. She is the coauthor of a new book on the 2024 election titled, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House”. So this next question is the one I have been looking most forward to asking you, because I would like an answer and I'm actually kind of frustrated with the Democratic Party in this regard. There's one thing from the Democratic side of the campaign that I can make assumptions about, but I actually don't really know. And I think, as I just said, both former President Biden and the Democratic Party, I think they owe the nation a factual account of this, and they haven't provided it so far, I'm hoping you can tell me. And this is, everyone saw the debate or at least the parts of it that made it on the news the next morning with Joe Biden, but what exactly happened with Biden's decision to step down as a candidate? How and why was that decision actually made? Biden's speech to the nation did not really provide that answer.
AP: No. And I think in the end, he was really dug in and we get into this quite a bit in the book, Grant. But he, you know, he goes from a position of, no, I'm not doing it to he comes down with COVID and it's a really bad case of COVID and he has to get off the campaign trail. It's much worse than they let on. He was having really bad respiratory issues. And so he goes back to Wilmington with COVID, a bad case of COVID, and he is essentially locked in his house with a closed set of advisors. And they're essentially there to present him with the facts. You know, you are losing, poll numbers show that you're not going to be able to win, fundraising is completely cut off, no one is donating anything anymore. And they are essentially able to convince him after weeks of, no, I'm going to do this, I can win again, in his weakest moment he has to make the biggest political decision of his life. And he's sort of backed into a corner, and he does it. And what's interesting is he does it kind of unwillingly and wants to essentially take a victory lap and doesn't want to really endorse Kamala Harris in that moment. You know, essentially wants to take a few days and say, look how great I am, you know, I'm doing this for the good of the country. And she is the one who essentially tells him, no, I need your endorsement right now, which we reveal for the first time in the book. But there was that sort of gap where he puts out a statement and then puts out another statement endorsing her. And we kind of explained what was happening in those moments around that.
GR: Well, okay, so, well that then directly leads to the next thing I want to know is, how and why Kamala Harris was chosen as the new nominee? You said, okay, she pressures Biden to make the early endorsement. But that's just the, I mean, those are two people, you know, there's Nancy Pelosi, there are big other leaders in this party. And so how was it decided that that it wasn't going to be an open process, that there wasn't even going to be the appearance of an open process? How did that go down?
AP: What's interesting about that is that we detail in the book that Nancy Pelosi was really for an open process, as was Barack Obama and they were privately kind of lobbying, you know, and trying to get people trying to sound people out and hear people because they think, why not? You know, Nancy Pelosi doesn't think Kamala can win, she makes that known from the start. She tells a confidant, if he goes, she goes, meaning if Joe Biden goes, then Kamala Harris should go, too. And so she was very much for that. And Barack Obama up until the final hours, you know, he was calling around, talking to people like Jim Clyburn. And Clyburn feels like he needs to quickly back Kamala Harris because he knows Barack Obama is about to call him and kind of listen to him and kind of convince him about what an open primary might be like. So he quickly gets behind Harris to tell Obama, look, I'm behind Harris when Obama calls him. And that conversation lasts like 30 seconds because he's already done what he needed to do. And Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is, sort of, even before Biden gets out, what's interesting is in the hours leading up to the candidate switch, she has a set of close advisers in her pool house meeting to discuss what would happen if and when Joe Biden does drop out. So while she is trying to project loyalty and all of that, she is, you know, quietly assembling her aides to plan the next moves. So when it does happen that she is ready, and she can kind of galvanize her base and do what she needs to do. And so in that moment, she's pretty much ready to go. You know, she has the support, she knows that the fundraising is going to come to him. She pushes him because she needs the delegates, he's basically locked up all the delegates and she needs those. But she, you know, in a moment like that, in her moment of truth, she pushes him to endorse her and kind of knocks the nail in the coffin as far as, you know, the support from Democrats and she knows that. And that's what happens.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Amie Parnes. The political journalist as co-written a new book on the 2024 election has just come out. It's titled, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House”. So let me just ask you this bottom line question. Were you surprised at the outcome of the election at all? Anything that surprised you about the election itself?
AP: I mean, what I think is most surprising, and I don't want to give anything away, was that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz go into it thinking that they are going to win, that they had it locked up. And I think the big bombshell in the book is that you, once again, I don't want to give away too much, but you walk into election night and we put you in the rooms with them and they're shocked that they have lost. Tim Walz can't even find the words to express how he feels, so much that his wife needs to say something because he just can't express how he's feeling. And we use the word gaslighting quite a bit in this book. But I think the biggest moment, I think, is when we reveal that Kamala Harris was essentially gaslit by her own campaign.
GR: Okay, wow, wow. And you mentioned Walz, and so, this, you may have just help me understand something. I have to say, sort of thinking about it as a political analyst, a political strategist, I am surprised that he seems to be trying to position himself in some ways for a run in ‘28. I just think that's not going to happen, man.
AP: No, I mean, it went from, you know, I think her pick of him was interesting because it initially was energizing. I think people thought that he would be able to really speak to white men in particular, you know, a demographic they desperately needed. But in the end, he kind of became a punch line. But they reined him in and they wouldn't allow him to do what he needed to do, which I think he's kind of alluded to in recent interviews. But I think, you know, he was a big disappointment, I think, to a lot of people.
GR: Yeah, this is a comment in the weeds, but one of the things that that I thought at the time was the Democrats kept emphasizing the campaign, kept emphasizing, oh, he's a coach, he's a coach, you know, and so everyone's going to trust him, everyone's going to like him. And I thought, these people had never played organized sports. Because, I mean, half of my experiences with my coaches were really horrible.
AP: Yeah.
GR: (laughter) I wouldn't want them near my political system.
AP: No, I know. But we do tell in the book that he was almost, he couldn't eat or sleep, he was almost fixated on the debate, the vice presidential debate. And that kind of got very much in his head the entire time. So aides had to remind him to eat and you know, to try to get sleep because he was losing sleep. And I think we saw all that play out, but really interesting.
GR: Wow, yeah. So let me ask you a question about the other side then. I want to ask you a question about Donald Trump. You obviously have been looking very closely at this guy for a very long time.
AP: Yeah.
GR: And you wrote a book on the 2016 election as well and the 2020 election. Do you think that Trump, putting you in the armchair psychologist moment here, do you think that Trump has any internal sense of limits of what his power ought to be?
AP: You know, it's a really interesting question. I think in key moments he does. And, you know, we detail one really fascinating thing in the book where, during the debate we kind of give you what’s playing on, the inner dialog in his mind. And he knows in that moment that he can't pummel Joe Biden because Joe Biden is essentially pummeling himself. And so he reins it in, you know, like he doesn't go after, doesn't go for the jugular, thinks in real, and we put you there, but he's thinking in real time if I do go for the jugular, how is that going to make me look? Here's a guy who's very involved in image, obviously, and branding and marketing and he knows that that's not a good look for him. So he has these moments of self-awareness, even though I think a lot of his haters would disagree with that. But he kind of, he knows what things look like. And I think that's why you're seeing sort of the push and pull on tariffs, for example, because he's aware of the headlines and the conversation around it. And so he is able to rein it in when he needs to, if that makes sense.
GR: It does make sense. And it's this really interesting paradox because one of his main appeals to a lot of people is that he's a guy who doesn't give a damn about how he looks, and he's a guy that doesn't give a damn about what he says. So it's, I guess, what is it, crazy like a fox or something. So I'm also wondering too, what your sense of JD Vance is. There was a lot of debate in both parties about how his political views had changed he was first anti-Trump and more moderate than he, you know, becomes more conservative and also more pro-Trump. I'm particularly interested because he's the likely inheritor at this point of Trump's legacy at this point. And I think he'll be a top tier candidate for president in ‘28 unless something really disastrous happens between now and then. So what's your quick sense, quick take on Vance?
AP: I think that's exactly right. But you know what we did see, especially during Signal Gate, he portrays himself, I think, going into the vice presidential pick as a loyalist. He positions himself with Trump in that way. He says, look, I know that in my past I was this, but now I'm this and I'm very much for the MAGA movement. And that's something that's very appealing to Trump. But then we saw in recent weeks, you know, with Signal Gate that he's willing to kind of part ways with Trump behind the scenes. And I'm curious to see how that relationship plays out. We saw what happened with Trump and Pence, for example, Mike Pence. I'm curious to see if those two, if this relationship ends up being as frayed as that one. And some people that I'm talking to think that it might be.
GR: Yeah, I was with political analysts the other day and they said the difference between the two of them, among others, is that Trump has no shame, but Vance had shame.
AP: Yeah.
GR: I don't know whether he's identifying that as a strength or a weakness. 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 journalist Amie Parnes. So we’ve got about 5 minutes left, I want to try to squeeze two or three questions in before we have to stop. I want you to look ahead now and it is just, you know, prognosticating, but how long do you think it will be, if ever, that our presidential elections feel, for lack of a better word, normal again? You know, back to the way maybe they were when Obama was running. Or have we passed some kind of a threshold point that we're never going to get back to again?
AP: I mean, I think that's TBD, Grant. I think a lot of people are curious to see if Trump tries to run again for a third term, which would really throw everything into, it would be a big disaster, I think.
GR: Yeah, I think it'd be a disaster for the Republican Party as well as Trump.
AP: Yeah. But I think that is something that comes into question and various other aspects. But I think I don't think we'll ever quite be on a normal track, quote unquote, again. I think it's all going to be, you know, we write these books and we keep saying, oh, this is the craziest election cycle ever, this is the craziest election cycle and they end up being crazier each time. (laughter)
GR: Yeah. I've given up thinking I'll see a difference in my lifetime, but I am telling my students, they'll see a difference in their lifetime, but that's a long time horizon. I want to come back to something that you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, which was the train wreck for the Democratic Party and sort of, you know, where they are now. Do you have any sense of what the Democrats are generally doing to try to reboot? You know, one, I get the sense there are different potential leaders and different kinds of themes that are being tried out. You have Sanders and AOC on the road, all the while that's happening, the Trump administration's being extremely active and pushing out a lot of different dimensions. David Hogg just came out and said he's got a hit list of Democrats in safe seats he wants to primary, he’s one of the vice chair of the Democratic Party. Do you have any sense of what they're doing to reboot?
AP: You know, it's interesting, I did an interview this week with the governor Gavin Newsom of California and he was essentially making the point to me that they have not done an autopsy yet to find out what exactly went wrong. And I think that's the start. I think there needs to be some accountability, actually, of what has happened. I think Biden or someone needs to come out and essentially own what has happened or claim some responsibility. I think that's the first step and they've been unwilling to do that. But you need to sort of reckon with what happened and how you ended up getting here, what led to a second Trump presidency. And for whatever reason, they're unwilling to kind of face themselves in the mirror. You know, I think they have to do that first in order to rebuild or it's going to be, the house is going to be rebuilt on shaky foundation and they have to regain the trust of voters. I think, you know, while it was a close election, I think a lot of these voters who were traditionally supposed to be Democratic voters voted for Trump. You have to speak to those people and win those people over. So I think what Governor Newsom was saying is essentially right. They need a really thorough autopsy of what's happened. And they haven't done that yet.
GR: Yeah. And it's interesting, I've noticed that he has kind of come out and said some things and participated in some things that would suggest that he's kind of doing a reboot of himself a little bit.
AP: Yeah.
GR: Although I have to say, before I ask you my last question, I have to say that I think my own sense is that in ‘28, the Democrats need to find someone that's not on the East Coast or the West Coast, they need to go to the interior of the country. Well, here's a fun question to end things with. So you write a book on 2016. It's called, “Shattered”, perfect title for the Hillary Clinton Campaign. Then your 2020 book was called, “Lucky”, and your 2024 book is, “Fight”. What's going to be the title of the 2028 book?
AP: “Nap” (laughter), no I’m kidding.
GR: (laughter) Oh, geez, if we could only hope.
AP: No, I don't know. What's funny, Grant, is that John and I weren't even going to do a book on this election.
GR: Really?
AP: Yeah, we were pushed into it by our publisher who said you guys need to get in there. And we had no idea what was going to happen, but I'm sure glad that we jumped in.
GR: Yeah, well I am too. We'll have to leave it there. I could talk to you for hours about this, but that was Amie Parnes, and her new book is titled, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House”. And if you are listening to this and you are any kind of political junkie or have any kind of significant interest in politics, this book is like a giant bowl of your favorite ice cream, you will love it. So, Amy, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me and thanks for writing the book.
AP: I love it, thank you so much.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Marc Garneau on the Campbell Conversations
Apr 19, 2025
Marc Garneau
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today has several notable profiles that should be of interest to listeners in Central New York. Marc Garneau is Canada's first astronaut to go into space and then twenty four years following his first flight, he was the first former astronaut elected to Canada's parliament. The Liberal Party member served in two cabinet posts as Minister of Transport and as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Mr. Garneau, welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you.
Marc Garneau: Good to be with you, Grant.
GR: Thanks for making the time for this, we really appreciate it. So let me just start with this, and I know this is a longer and more complicated story, but if you could briefly just refresh our listeners on the current political situation in Canada, you are in the midst of an election.
MG: Indeed. Our previous prime minister, Justin Trudeau, resigned under pressure in January, and that triggered a federal election. First of all, the Liberal Party, which was the party in power, had to find a new leader, his name is Mark Carney. He became the prime minister and within about a week triggered an actual election which will take place on the 28th of April. So we're right in the middle of it.
GR: So very similar to the British model in that sense, that short, short election periods and the parliamentary system, okay, great. And you mentioned that Justin Trudeau resigned under pressure. I remember that was the story in the States. Just remind us briefly what the source of the pressure was.
MG: Well, a number of things. He had been the prime minister of the country for over nine years. And as often happens with systems like ours, Canadians kind of get tired of the incumbent and decide it's time for a change. And I think it was really a collection of past mistakes and the feeling that the prime minister was not addressing the issues very similar to those in the United States related to affordability, related to housing. And so I think within the caucus, that is the Liberal members of parliament, there was growing pressure for him to step down.
GR: And I know there's a lot of differences between Canadian politics and American politics and also the views that tend to, Canadians and Americans tend to have. I mean, you folks have a, you know, a guaranteed health care system. It's a complicated one at a provincial level, but certainly something different, profoundly different from what the United States has. But would it be fair to say that the Liberal Party would be sort of the equivalent of the Democratic Party in the United States?
MG: I think that's the parallel that is often made. We're certainly closer to being Democrats than Republicans.
GR: Okay, all right. So do you think that this tariff issue that's going on with the Trump administration and obviously its effects on countries around the world, do you think it's affecting the dynamics of this Canadian general election right now?
MG: Oh, it most certainly is. In fact, I think the ballot question in this election is which of the four party leaders, there are actually four parties or five, if you include the Greens, is going to best be able to handle the tariff question and negotiate with Mr. Trump. That is the central question because it is going to have such a profound effect on Canada and unfortunately also on your country.
GR: Yes, I mean, you're a huge trading partner for us. Do you expect that the Liberal Party will maintain its majority in Parliament and that Canada will have a Liberal Prime Minister going forward? I know you're in the Liberal Party and you may not want to speculate about that, but I want to ask anyway.
MG: Well, if you read the tea leaves or look into the crystal ball at the moment now with barely ten days left to go, it looks like the favorite appears to be Mark Carney, who was a former governor of the Central Bank, the equivalent of your Federal Reserve, not only for Canada, but also for Great Britain, a man of great economic experience. And it looks like he's in the favored position at the moment to win. So if that happens, yes, it will be a liberal government. And at the moment, if you believe the poll numbers, it looks like a majority. I don't want to jinx anything here, but it does look like he, at the moment, unless he makes a big mistake, seems to be the favorite.
GR: Okay, all right. And I wanted to ask you a question about Justin Trudeau and his political legacy, because he was known in the United States. But I think kind of more personally, I mean, he became something of a sex symbol here in the States as sort of the world's most handsomest national leader. But what do you think his political legacy is going to be in Canada?
MG: I personally, from having been in his cabinet for a number of years and known him, we were elected at the same time, I think that his legacy will be twofold. One, something that perhaps Americans don't hear a lot about, but that is what we call reconciliation, which is a massive effort which will take probably two generations to accomplish, to reconcile with our indigenous peoples for all the wrongs we did to them. And that's a massive undertaking. It has begun, but I think the Justin Trudeau is the first prime minister to take it to the level that it has reached and I think it has critical mass. The second thing is, as you know, Justin Trudeau is a progressive and believes very strongly in the social safety net and one of his signature initiatives is what's called the Canadian Child Benefit, which is money that goes to people below a certain income and it has proven to reduce poverty with children by a significant amount. And so that, I think, will also be considered part of his legacy.
GR: In the United States, we do have income supports of that nature. They are pretty much run by the states rather than the national government and that was a product of a law that Bill Clinton signed decades ago. But one of the distinguishing features of the United States system is there are a lot of hoops that people have to go through to get that and depending on the state, quite a bit of restrictions on them in terms of work requirements or needing to show that you are engaged in an activity that will lead to work. Is the Canadian system a little more, for lack of a better word, forgiving or generous in that sense? Do you have a sense of that?
MG: Yes and no. We are composed of ten provinces and three territories and constitutionally, provinces have certain rights and certain responsibilities and the two most notable are health care and secondly, education. The federal government provides funding for those activities, but there is a certain autonomy providing that the provinces act within, for example, the Canada Health Act, which has a number of principles that must be respected. So there is autonomy for the provinces to direct a number of things. The other part of it is the fact that some provinces have barriers to trade internally within the country. And this is one of the things that Mr. Trump's threat of tariffs has really brought to the fore. And that is the fact that we within our own country, sometimes our own worst enemy, because we have interprovincial barriers to trade. And there has been a strong resolve in recent weeks for the framers of the provinces to do everything they can to reduce, if not eliminate those interprovincial barriers Economists believe that this will significantly increase our GDP and I think it's a good thing. And hopefully, perhaps Mr. Trump has done us a favor here. He will have provoked this discussion on interprovincial barriers.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Marc Garneau, a former member of the Canadian Parliament who served both as Minister of Transport and as Minister of Foreign Affairs. So you mentioned the tariffs, I did want to ask you a few questions about that. In addition to the fact that the tariffs have been on again, off again, or, you know, increased at one level and then taken down to a 10% level. President Trump has made a lot of comments about Canada in recent months that have often obviously ruffled feathers on both sides of the border. I had a, the first question want to ask you about that is my understanding is that Canada generally derives some of its sense of national identity from being on the one hand, great friends with the United States, but also and maybe more importantly, not being the United States that, you know, you're distinct. Have Canadian views on the U.S. been significantly damaged by all of what the president saying, or is there a stronger sense now of Canadian identity because of this, do you think?
MG: Both. Yes, there has been significant damage caused, particularly when Mr. Trump started to talk about annexing Canada and making it the 51st state. Now, if you do that once, it may be considered a joke in perhaps poor taste, but he repeatedly said it. You don't treat other countries, particularly your closest and best friend, that way. And so, yes, that has ruffled feathers in a very, very serious manner, but it has also galvanized Canadians to begin to take measures that will reduce our dependence on the United States. Not an easy task, because we do more than 75% of our trade with you. We are closest neighbors and I know particularly in the northern states like New York and others across the country, that there's a great deal of exchange, whether it's Canadians coming to shop, Canadians coming to spend their tourist dollars and that has taken a significant hit. And that, I think, speaks to the seriousness with which we view Mr. Trump's aggressive approach towards Canada. It's fine to want to renegotiate tariffs. We have the USMCA Treaty between Canada, the United States and Mexico, and it was scheduled to come up for review next year. That's fine, we can make some adjustments if Mr. Trump wants to change certain things because he feels it's unfair to the United States in a particular area, fair game. And we can do the same, and so can Mexico. But him jumping in right away and taking this extremely aggressive approach towards tariffs is definitely going to have a very painful effect on Canada with respect to jobs and with respect to affordability of certain things. But make no mistake about it, it's also going to have an effect on the United States. I was reading this morning about how you depend on Canadian aluminum. And the reason that you depend on Canadian aluminum is because you haven't got enough in your own country. It's an energy intensive area, you need a lot of electricity to produce aluminum. Another one is potash. Farmers in the United States depend twice a year on receiving their allotment or buying their allotment of potash for fertilizing the soil. Most of that comes from Canada. So there are going to be some serious effects on both sides. And it's unfortunate because it didn't have to happen this way.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Mark Garneau. He's a former cabinet minister in the Canadian Parliament and was the first Canadian astronaut to go into space. So I want to come back to what we were talking about before the break and the effect of what Donald Trump has been saying about Canada, this idea of, you know, annexing it or making it the 51st state. And you were talking about the effects that this is having on Canadians, but also, you know, it's going to have some policy effects, perhaps. This is my personal view of this, and you made a good point about the fact that, you know, if he says it once, we might dismiss it, but if he repeats that over and over again, you have to take it seriously. But personally, I've regarded these statements as just posturing and bluster because it just seems so unrealistic, let's put it that way. I can't imagine Canadians would want this, I can't even imagine that Americans would want it really if it was being considered. So I just wonder, is there any way in which Canadians might be willing to take this a little less seriously? Maybe I'm being to dismissive or optimistic about this whole issue.
MG: Well, I agree with you. And right away when he started to say that, I recognized it as posturing because he is a transactionalist. He's somebody who wants to get something out of this and he takes a very aggressive posture. And no, there is absolutely no chance to quote Justin Trudeau, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that it's ever going to happen. Canadians don't want it. At least 85% of Canadians are totally against the idea. And as you say, perhaps Americans don't want it as well, because it brings a lot of complications, too, as well. But yeah, you know, it's a negotiating tactic. We never thought it was really going to, or I didn't personally think that it was going to happen. But the point is, you don't say things like that. It's really going, in my opinion, beyond proper negotiations if you're trying to make a point.
GR: Yeah, fair enough. So I wanted to ask you this different question about Canadian politics and society, bigger picture question. But in recent years, the United States has really been rent by a variety of social issues that have that have really been part of our political polarization and the divisiveness that you see here. And they cover different topics, race abortion, gender identity, issues about education that relate to some of those things and other things. Now, we've got similar things going on with higher education, the Trump administration waging war in many respects, on what is happening in higher education in the United States. So I'm just curious, has Canada had any analogous experiences in recent years to those kinds of cultural political conversations of divisions?
MG: Yes, it has. I mean, you know, the issues of DEI and the issues of abortion and political correctness and wokeness and all that have also touched Canada, but to a much, much lesser degree that in the United States. I always like to fall back on a very old analogy, but I think it encapsulates very well the difference between Canadians and Americans. You are the famous melting pot. People who come to the United States to make their life subscribe give wholeheartedly to American values and that's the way your model works and it has been extremely successful. We in Canada are closer to the old concept that we've managed to hold on to, which is that our country is a cultural mosaic. In other words, we're more disposed to be tolerant of differences of opinion, differences in culture. Now, having said that, there has been a growing intolerance in certain quarters, a growing one in the last decade or two. But I think it's at a much, much lower level than in the United States. Now, don't get me wrong, we have anti-Semitism in our country, we have Islamophobia in our country. We have people who are against, for example, transgender people but it's at a much, much lower level. And I think that explains the basic difference between Canada and the United States. We have more of a live and let live rather than, okay, you're here now, you have to subscribe wholeheartedly to our values.
GR: On that point, and this is now a pet theory of mine, and it could be absolutely wrong. I'm going to be dealing in stereotypes, but I have to say you fit my stereotype. (laughter) Which is that, is part of this, I mean, Canadians just seem to me on average, much more reasonable people than Americans. I mean, they just seem much more even keeled and much more, for lack of a better word, sort of dealing just in rationality. Is that, am I on to something there?
MG: Well, thank you for saying that, I view that as a compliment. I think that there are strengths and weaknesses to that approach. I admire the passion with which Americans embrace certain things, and it gives them an energy and a capability that is to be envied. But there's always flip sides to every coin. We come from a system that, we were a colony, a British colony. And if you look at immigration in the 20th century, people came from all sorts of different places around the world where they also, much like the example of New York City when people came in boats and ships at the beginning of the 20th century, we have many Canadians who came from countries where they were persecuted. And I think there was a resolve in Canada to say, look, you are now coming to a country where you don't have to be afraid, where you are going to be respected and you're going to be able to live your lives in the way that you would like to be able to live your lives. And so I think that sort of is inculcated in the minds of Canadians. That being said, there has, and I'll repeat it again, there has been a growing perhaps intolerance that we have to be concerned about.
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 Marc Garneau, a former Canadian astronaut and is the author of a new book which I'm about to ask him about titled, “A Most Extraordinary Ride: Space, Politics and the Pursuit of a Canadian Dream”. Well, as I just mentioned, you've just published a new book and it's a memoir, and congratulations on that book. I'd like to talk about it a little bit with you.
MG: Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed the experience of writing it.
GR: Well, does the book have a central, I mean, it's about your life and your experiences, but does it have a broader central message that you want readers to take away?
MG: Yes, I think it does. I wrote it for my children because, you know, first of all, I realized many years ago that I didn't know my parents before, in the first 30 years of their life because I wasn't around. And I realized that there are a lot of things in my children don't know about me and that I'm far from perfect. They have only grown up seeing sort of the public persona because I’ve, you know, I flew in in space 40 years ago, and I've been a sort of a public person. But they do not realize that I had my own challenges in the first, in my teenage years and that I made lots of mistakes and that that's okay if you use that opportunity to learn from those mistakes. So this may sound very boring, but I tried to be intensely honest in writing this book about not only areas where I was successful, but also about my failures and my missteps and my lucky breaks in many, many cases. Because I think that's more reflective of real life and something that perhaps is glossed over by some people when they write their books. And so I'm very proud of the fact that did this book covers my life, warts and all.
GR: Well, I want to just say that's a, you mentioned you wrote it for your children and why, I just want to compliment you on that because I am fortunate, neither of my parents wrote anything in that regard, but I have tapes that they made. And that, you know, it's an important thing and often overlooked. And, you know, you grow up and you hear the stories but you don't necessarily hear everything. And so it's nice to have someone sit down and say, okay, I'm going to you know, here's the entire trajectory. I want to come back to something you mentioned about the writing of the book in just a second. But if you could briefly, I wanted to ask this question first and then we'll finish with a couple of other questions about the book. People who have been to space often say that seeing the Earth from space is, of all the experiences they have, up there, the most powerful one. Was that true for you?
MG: Oh, by far, no question about it. It's been written about and in fact, in a fairly famous book called, “The Overview Effect”. What happens when you go into space and see Earth from above looking down, it is not only a physically different perspective, it's also an intellectually different perspective. Because instead of thinking about perhaps the local problems that we all deal with when we're down on Earth and as we look around us and we can see about five miles around us at any one time, when you're up there and you're going around the planet once every 90 minutes it shifts your perspective and you do a lot of thinking. First of all, you're in an extraordinary place that very few humans have ever been to, but you begin to think about the bigger issues, the bigger questions. For example, are we damaging our planet? You can see that wafer thin atmosphere that allows life to be sustained. You can see the oceans, but you can also see forest fires, and you can see incontrovertible evidence of pollution and other things. And because you're surrounded by the blackness of space, you begin to ask yourself, are we taking care of this planet so that it has a future for future generations? You're also, although you can't see it, and most of the time you can't see it, aware of the fact that there are many conflicts going on down on this planet, this beautiful looking planet, despite what we're doing to it. And you wonder, is there a way that we can find, can we find a way to get along with each other? Because at any one time, there are dozens of conflicts on the planet, many of which we don't even hear about, we just hear about the big ones. And so, again, there are 8 billion of us, it's the cradle of humanity. There is no option B, and so we have to find a way to get along with each other and to make the planet survivable for future generations. That sort of gets a hold of you when you're up there and you’re gazing out the window as you're orbiting over the top of the world and seeing the different countries. And I think it's something that stays with you for the rest of your life.
GR: Yes, I can see how it would. Now, we only have about a minute left. I want to squeeze one more question in, and I'm sorry it's a difficult one, and it's a difficult one to end on, perhaps. But you mentioned already in writing the book that you wanted to deal with warts and all, and you really do deal with some pretty difficult subjects there in that book. I was just wondering if you could share what was the hardest thing for you to write about? And in a few seconds or less.
MG: Yeah, it was the suicide of my first wife. I lost my first wife to, she was diagnosed as bipolar. We had twins at the time, they were 11 years old. And suddenly, after a two year illness, she took her life and I was now a single parent. And the tragedy of losing the woman that I loved and also the sobering reality that I now had to be the parent for two children is something that I've been aware of all my life. But I was encouraged by the editor to be open about it because you know, when this happened a long time ago, you sort of swept mental health under the carpet. And I thought, if I'm going to, you know, live up to my own words about trying to bring it out of the closet, I should be very honest about it.
GR: Well, again, I think that just makes the book better, and it has a lot of hope in it as well. We'll have to leave it there, unfortunately. That was Marc Garneau and again, his new book is titled, “A Most Extraordinary Ride: Space, Politics and the Pursuit of a Canadian Dream. Marc, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. And I want to give you best wishes and also your country best wishes.
MG: Thank you very much, Grant. And similarly to you, best wishes to the United States.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
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Dionne Koller on the Campbell Conversations
Apr 12, 2025
Dionne Koller
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Youth sports has become a cultural and political lightning rod in recent years. My guest today is an expert in that area, particularly the ways in which law and government policies have impacted it. Dionne Koller is a professor of law and the director of the Center for Sport and the Law at the University of Baltimore. She's the author of a new book titled, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport." Professor Koller, welcome to the program and congratulations on the new book.
Dionne Koller: Thanks so much for having me here.
GR: We really appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with something definitional. What do you mean when you use the phrase ‘youth sport’, are we talking about anything under pro, anything before college? What are the definitions there?
DK: Well, Grant, I'm really glad you're asking that because that was an immediate stumbling block when I started to research youth sport and I wanted to figure out what's going on in the United States. We don't have a uniform definition of youth sports, actually, that makes data collection difficult. It can be anything from a running club with kids, cup stacking, to the type of travel ball that we see all over the place. So there is no uniform definition. The definition I adopted for the book is the one that I believe is the model that I believe is most predominant in the US, which is adult led, organized youth sports activities.
GR: Okay, great. And so looking at it, and that's obviously a very broad category, what have been some of the major trends in recent years in that area?
DK: Well, the trends have been really going in a problematic direction, which is the trend is toward increased professionalization, and professionalization includes a few things. First of all, it's the emphasis on early sports specialization, getting kids to pick a sport and get really good at that and play it year round. It's the emphasis on competition and winning. So again, getting young kids traveling and going to tournaments and competing as much as possible with the ideal of win, win, win. And so all of that early sports specialization, emphasis on competition and winning really leads to, as the medical community has talked about, things like overuse injuries, really an epidemic of those types of things. So it's all those things together that we call professionalization of youth sports.
GR: Yeah, I wanted to come back to that notion of professionalization and some of the problematic things it entails. But let me ask this question first back to, you know, particularly the title of your book. So how have laws and public policies affected that trend that you just sketched out?
DK: Well, another thing that surprised me as I started looking at this is law and public policy hasn't affected it in the sense that there is very little law or regulation of youth sport at the federal or state level. I think a lot of parents think, like other products or experiences that impact kids, isn't somebody out there making sure this is safe? The answer is, by and large, no. So what I conclude in the book is that the way law and policy has shaped ultimately youth sports in the United States is through the lack of regulation by choosing not to regulate. It's sort of been described as a Wild West situation. You can have some really great programs and experiences and some that really aren't so great. And so the lack of any regulation, lack of minimum safety standards, those types of things, that's a choice too, Grant. And so I talk about that in the book, which is, our policy is let it be whatever it's going to be.
GR: Well, yeah, on that point then, that's really interesting because a couple of things strike me. One, on the one hand, you know, with the professionalization, it seems like sports are getting more and more sort of rule oriented, you know. But on the other hand, from a governmental perspective, like you say, it's the Wild West. What do you think some of the reasons are that we have been loathed to involve government regulation and other kinds of things related in that field. Is it because we don't want to bother the parents, it's sort of leave it to the parents? What's the thinking behind that?
DK: Well, there's a couple of different things. And certainly in the United States, we have a very heavy emphasis on parental authority. That is a big theme in the law of families. And in fact, I talk about in the book there's something called the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. One of the rights that the international community recognizes for children is the right to play and the right to developmentally appropriate play. We're the only country in the world that hasn't signed on to that, Grant, because we emphasize parental authority. But one of the other things that I talk about, and this has been something that I've done a lot of research on, is that we see courts, Congress, state legislatures say over and over again, we can't regulate sports, including youth sports. We need to take a hands off attitude, because if we do, it will destroy sports, right? This notion of, I call it the ‘sportspocalypse’ argument. That if you do anything to make changes or requirements in sports, it'll destroy sports. And Grant, if you go back to even the 1970’s with Title IX opening up sports to women and girls, that argument was made over and over. Stay out of sports, don't touch sports, you're going to destroy, for instance, men's college football, you're going to destroy men's sports. And I think both of us know that did not happen.
GR: So it sounds like that it's not really a liberal or a conservative point of view. It sounds like this is something, one of the rare things that is, I guess, bipartisan these days.
DK: Well, youth sport is very bipartisan. There's a youth sport caucus in Congress, yet everybody says, isn't it just great? We can all agree that youth sport is great and let's just leave it alone. But what I talk about in the book is that there's a wide open space between kind of micro-managing T-ball leagues and doing absolutely nothing. And we are very much on the doing nearly nothing side of that.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Dionne Koller. She's a law professor at the University of Baltimore and the author of a new book titled, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport." So walking into this topic as someone that doesn't know a tremendous amount about it beforehand, but based on what I do know about law and, you know, this realm of activity, I would have thought that liability law, you know, either through legislation or case law would have had a huge impact on this area. Is that something that has shaped it in any particular way?
DK: Well, I think it does and it doesn't, Grant. And that's a really, really good point. And I think it's the instinct that you have is the thought that many people have that, oh my goodness, aren't there lawsuits aplenty and all kinds of liability going on? There certainly are lawsuits in youth sports, high school sports and private organized youth sports. There certainly are, because there are lots of injuries, there's lots of harm to go around, sports can be a dangerous activity. But what I found is that there aren't actually, when it all comes down to it, there isn't an excessive amount of liability, for instance, assigned to use sport providers. There's lots of immunities and protections built into the system. Parents can sign liability waivers for their kids, and that's very often a condition of participating. Volunteer coaches get immunity in most states from most types of tort lawsuits. The standard for recovery in a tort lawsuit involving sports is a little bit more of a difficult standard to meet than, say, in a typical tort case. So once I really drill down, I think, Grant, there's a fear of liability. And that's talked about a lot, saying if you allow these lawsuits to happen, it's going to ruin all of youth sports. So there's a big talk and fear of it. Is it sort of manifesting in reality? Not to my eyes.
GR: Interesting. Interesting, because I just put myself in the situation of if I were approached and said, you know, we'd like you to be a parent coach on something, my first reaction would just be like, I do not want to expose myself to all of the possible lawsuits coming from that. So it's interesting to know that that the standard for liability is much higher. I was also curious to know whether some sports have seen greater changes than other sports. So, I mean, I know colleagues are always complaining about having to drive their kids to this soccer match, this soccer match, this soccer match. I don't hear that so much about baseball, for example.
DK: Well, actually, I didn't find in my research that there was kind of one sport that was less kind of professionalized than another. I think we see these changes are being driven across really all youth sports. We have been able to monetize and professionalize and drive growth and revenue generation in anything from volleyball to taekwondo, you name it. So I didn't really find that there was a sport-specific difference. But what I found is that the changes have continued to accelerate as state and local governments have emphasized, what I discovered is something called youth sport tourism, attracting tournaments to their localities.
GR: Say more about that. So the states then are, they're tuned into this and they're trying to profit off of it, so to speak.
DK: That's exactly right. So I discovered this when I went looking at state law and I was looking for state statutes saying, surely there must be some minimum safety standards here, for instance. And the statutes that were popping up that I found, Grant, were a lot of statutes that were about stimulating economic development within states saying, okay, we're going to pass a bond measure to build a youth sport megaplex because we want to attract tournaments here. And to give you a personal example, my son played ice hockey and we live in the D.C. metro area, plenty of rinks around here, but I was constantly on the road going to Pittsburgh and Detroit saying, why are we always in a tournament here? The answer is youth sport tourism. This is a deliberate sort of policy choice to attract parents who have disposable income, to fill hotel rooms, to fill restaurants, get these tournaments going. And it becomes a big boost to local economies.
GR: That's interesting, big business. So one huge question that has been in the media a lot and was part of the most recent election rhetoric regarding youth sports has been the question of gender identity and participation and competition. It's been especially, I think, high profile and collegiate, in Olympic level sports. But I just wonder, you know, I'm sure you've looked at that. I'm sure you've thought about that. What do you make of this? And is there for lack of a better question, some way out of what seems to be a political morass here?
DK: Yeah, I mean, I think there's many, many levels to that. And so let's just start with kind of a factual level. How many, for instance, and the issue, Grant, it comes up around trans-girls and women. That's really the issue. So if you look at really numbers, we just don't have the numbers to support the level of sort of fear and panic that's been going on. And in fact, when I look closely, you look closely at some lawsuits that have been brought over this, and courts have dismissed those lawsuits saying we can't find any evidence of harm. That because a trans-girl, for instance, participated on a high school cross-country team. It didn't displace or hurt anybody else. So I think factually it's been way overblown from that perspective. I think the other thing to look at is that a lot of times, and just looking at this objectively, who's making these arguments and how are they being made and why? And when you look at it, the ostensible reason is we need to preserve sport opportunities for women and girls. And as a researcher, I can say the best way to do that is let's enforce Title IX, let's enforce the laws that are on the books that we have never been very good at enforcing. And so to the extent we're worried about collegiate, say, sport opportunities for women and girls, the best thing we can do is not over fund and overemphasized say, a college football team to the detriment of participation opportunities for girls. In terms of just sort of what should we do about it? Well, I'm very clear about this, I don't address it, the book's really not about that, it's really just about youth sports. But in my other writings and work, sport is a very nuanced space, Grant, there are many different levels of competition. Olympic and Paralympic is very different than, say, a youth sport T-ball league, of course. And so because sports are literally made up games, they are made up by us and for us, there are certainly ways that we can make up these experiences so that everybody can participate regardless of their gender identity, regardless of, are you a trans-girl or not? We can make up these games in lots of different ways, and I think we should.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Dionne Koller, a Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Sport and the Law at the University of Baltimore. She's written a new book, it's titled, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport" and we've been discussing the topics that the book entails. So I want to follow up on, even though it's not part of your book, specifically, but I want to follow up with another question about the transgendered issue in sports. And maybe I have been captured by this, you know, overhype in the media relative to the number of cases we're talking about. And I remember in particular on this, seeing the Olympic boxing matches that, you know, got played over and over again with, I believe those athletes were from Russia or some country in Eastern Europe. I just wanted to throw this out to you and it's about the partisan politics that have surrounded this. Democrats have been associated, I think, more with, let's let those transgendered athletes play on women's teams. And Republicans seem to be more associated with, this as some kind of violation of the, you know, women's sports and it's not fair for the other girls on these teams. The strange thing in this, it seems to me, is that there is a biological component to it as well as a cultural gendered component. And it seems odd that in this particular instance, the Democrats don't seem to be following one of the other things that they have put forward in recent years, which is to follow the science, you know, we have to follow the science on it. It seems like in this in this case, they're not following the science. I don't know if there's any law about that or anything that you have to say about that. But it struck me as a as an irony to the political discussion in this instance.
DK: Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons why it played as a political issue that it did, it looked almost disingenuous. How are you denying biology, right? I think from a sports long policy perspective where I come out, Grant, is it's really important to remember there are different levels of sport with different purposes. So the Olympic and Paralympic level is a different setting, it's a different context, we have different goals. Then, for instance, open youth sport, which we say is just every kid should have an opportunity to participate and get exercise and learn some life lessons, right? So at the youth sport level, there really isn't evidence that there is a problem, for instance, of transgender girls sort of invading sports spaces and taking slots away. As you kind of climb the hierarchy, certainly in different sports, there's no denying biology and that biology can make a difference. And then we have to start looking more closely at what the policies are for participation. I will say that the political sort of moment that we experienced was unfortunate from my perspective, not because, biology is real, Grant, and we need to look at that, but there have been, for instance, at the college level or at the Olympic and Paralympic level, common sense policies in place to make sure that people were sort of, relatively, people who were competing in different categories sort of belonged in those categories and we weren't displacing folks. I think what we ended up doing, especially at the Olympic and Paralympic level, is grouping different things into the trans-women and girls participation issue. For instance, there are some individuals, it's naturally occurring, they are intersex. The Caster Semenya situation, which she was a runner, took the world by storm, people said this is unfair. That's a naturally occurring phenomenon and that just happens. And just like I'm not Simone Biles, I'm not four foot eight and not going to be an Olympic gymnast, I'm not Michael Phelps, I'm not built to swim. Other people are born intersex, and that's just the way they were made. So I think we also conflate some of these issues. The biology is that there is not sort of clear cut demarcations, man and woman. But by the time you're talking about that nuance in a political discussion, people have long since tuned out.
GR: Yeah, I was going to say good luck. So I want to come back to something that was at the core of your book and what you talked about at the outset of our conversation here, which is that professionalization of youth sport. And it does really seem like that's been one of the big changes I've seen. It's, you know, it does feel like these are more pro teams. They’re traveling, there are all these different sort of tournaments, it's expensive, some of it involves overnight travel. So why has that happened? Is that because some families just have more money than they know what to do with? I mean, what are the forces pushing that?
DK: Well, you're exactly right, that's the heart of the book. And I said, how did this happen? How are we here today? And what happens is, Grant, at least in my opinion, my analysis is, without any minimum kind of regulation or policy standards, except for, kids should play sports, right? We leave it to the free market to kind of set up what the youth sport experience is going to be and in that case, more is more because you have people out there who are willing to pay and they'll put their kids in it and there's more money to be made. So there's on the one hand, that sort of free market drive for, hey, there's a market here, let's do it. On the other hand, you have the drive from parents. Parents want to be good parents. I put my kids into youth sports, I believe in sports, I love sports, I was an athlete myself. So I say this is a good thing, I'm a good parent by doing this. The problem is, is that, and there's literature on this from the psychological community, once you're a parent and you get a taste of seeing your kid perform on the weekends, boy, it sure is fun and you like it. And it's almost a feedback loop where, look, Johnny's doing great in the hockey tournament, that must mean I'm a good parent, he's thriving, this is all good. You get kind of benchmarks, they won the tournament. You're willing to spend more, you're willing to do more, you push more. And so the confluence of parents working together in the free market and parents believing hey, this is good for my kids, right? And of course, then you add in all the other variables, maybe this will get them a scholarship, this will teach them life lessons. You sort of sprinkle all that in and what you get is a recipe for a professionalization of youth sport.
GR: I want to come back to one possible wrinkle about that a little bit later if we've got some time but let me ask you this question, which is kind of the opposite of the emphasis on winning. One of the other things that I have noticed in some youth sports is like a de-emphasis on what I would call a meritocracy. It's the idea of everybody gets a trophy for participating rather than you get a trophy if you achieve something. How does that fit into this?
DK: Well, I think there are there are a couple responses to that. First of all, when I went looking for a sort of youth sport policy and in terms of developmental stages, et cetera, we don't have any kind of government agency that's responsible for sports at all in this country, that's fairly unique in the world. And so we don't set any type of goals for different ages and levels based on development. So again, left to the free market. Well, if you're charging parents a whole lot of money to participate in soccer and it makes the kid happy to get a trophy and then you get more sign-ups, you're certainly incentivized to keep giving out trophies and medals and making everybody feel good because it keeps the kids kind of in in your program. So I think without any kind of thought to what should youth sport be in this country, is it about developing elite athletes? Is it for exercise? Is it about friendship and collaboration? What are we doing? Without any direction, we just get these market based impulses to, they paid a fee, you get a trophy. (laughter)
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 University of Baltimore law professor Dionne Koller. Okay, so this is beyond the bounds of your book and what you have focused on, but I have to ask this as well. Intercollegiate athletics, they've seen a real earthquake recently through the name, image, likeness, compensation and this transfer portal, and it looks much more like a professional enterprise than did before. Where do you see this system continuing to evolve? Do you have a sense of where we're going with this?
DK: I do, Grant. And actually, that's a fair question. I don't address it in the book, but I was among the first people to testify way back in 2020. Congress held hearings on this and NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) and where were things going and I testified before Congress and I said don't panic. What has happened in intercollegiate sports and I think most people don't realize this, but the Supreme Court ruled 9 – 0 in 2021 that the NCAA was violating antitrust law with different aspects of their model which I will not go into, but basically they were violating antitrust law. This Supreme Court is not unanimous on much of anything, Grant, but that they all agreed on. Similarly, the Department of Justice under the first Trump administration, the Biden administration was opining lots of antitrust violations going on with the NCAA model. The NCAA has been on notice for years and years and years that their model restraining payments to athletes, restraining the ability to transfer, things that every other kid on campus can do, that that is an antitrust violation, meaning it's not at all been a free market and all the benefits have been flowing to coaches and administrators and of course, not students. And so what we're seeing now is as these antitrust violations have been addressed by the courts, including the Supreme Court, we're getting a free market in college sports, and that's a little messy, Grant, that's going to take some time to sort of work out because it's been suppressed, literally for decades. And so what I am here to say is, don't panic. College sports is still going to be great because even though it looks more professional, it's been professionalized for quite some time in terms of the demands on athletes working 50 to 60 hours a week. It will shake out and it will still remain what we treasure about intercollegiate sports, which is watching our favorite players play for our alma maters, including Syracuse.
GR: Yeah, well, that's good news, thanks for telling me that. So we only got a couple of minutes left. I want to try to squeeze in two questions if I can. I want to go back, and these are big issues so I apologize for the time constraint. I want to go back to the professionalization. Not all parents, though, are going to be able to afford all that. And I know that some really feel squeezed, they don't want to disappoint their children. But this is the, you know, they got to buy this kind of equipment and go to this place. I imagine that's creating some real economic problems for some families.
DK: Absolutely. And this is one of the real sort of tragedies of youth sport in the United States today. It's by and large, a pay to play system, very, very different than it was, say, 40, 50 years ago. State and local governments have pulled back. We don't have a lot of public funding for youth sport. That means that a lot of kids and families, people who want to get their kids out there, they can't afford it. And so this has been talked about for a very, very long time. When I co-chaired a congressional commission on the state of the Olympic and Paralympic movement, we looked at the youth sport pipeline. We made a recommendation to Congress. We said, get back to publicly funding widespread youth sport participation. The American public really supports that.
GR: And so this builds off of what you just said. But again, extremely briefly, just a few seconds left, what kind of changes would you make then to make it better? It sounds like more funding is one and what else?
DK: Minimum safety regulations, not micromanaging T-ball leagues, not a government takeover, but really states and the federal government can do more to guarantee a minimum safety experience for kids.
GR: All right, we'll have to leave it there. That was Dionne Koller and again, her new book is titled, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport." If you're getting frustrated with that drive that you just had to take for your kid to play in a tournament, this is the book to understand why you got where you are. Professor Koller, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. Really appreciate it.
DK: Thanks so much for having me.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
George Hawley on the Campbell Conversations
Apr 05, 2025
George Hawley
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. With our historic levels of political polarization and the hard political feelings that have been generated during the Trump era, each side tends to see the other in the worst possible and the most extreme light. My guest today has written a new book arguing that Democratic and media misperceptions of Republican voters have been especially pronounced. George Hawley is a professor of political science at the University of Alabama and the author of, “The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization”. Professor Hawley, welcome to the program and congratulations on the new book.
George Hawley: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
GR: We appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with a real basic question, what prompted you to write this book?
GH: Well, a couple of things. One was just feeling like there was a, sort of an incongruence between how people were talking about the Republican Party, at least in terms of ordinary Republican voters as this increasingly radicalized element of society and my own experiences and actually interacting with them. So broadly speaking, that would be part of it. Another issue, not to put it on a more social science-y level, I think there's been a ton of really excellent research over the last ten years on what's going on inside the Republican electorate. But my frustration with so much of it was that it was, so much of it was reliant on single snapshots in time, what we would call cross-sectional studies. Either looking at just a single example of the American National Election Study or, you know, some really good and clever experimental studies done. But there wasn't that much just looking at, okay, well, what is going on with the Republican Party over time? And, you know, things that don't require a lot of methodological sophistication but looking at, you know, what are some survey questions that have been asked again and again over the last couple of decades, and can we see has there been this great sea change among Republican voters? And if so, where do we find them? And, you know, as I took a, you know, a deep dove into as many different types of questions and as many different types of surveys as I could find, that we're doing this kind of, you know, over time, taking the temperature over and over again, I was finding more often than not a greater amount of continuity rather than difference over time. I saw that this, you know, this is worth talking about and saying, look, to have a question about polarization and radicalization, but we should also note where we see less change and that's largely what I emphasize in this project.
GR: And you mentioned methods there as you were talking about surveys, talking about social science experiments, the methods that you used in this book, we don't need to go into terribly great detail about this, but you went beyond public opinion surveys. You, I think you did some interviewing and like you said before, you have your own observations. So what did you draw on in writing the book?
GH: Well, quantitatively, I relied predominantly on, you know, the standard big surveys, you know, the General Social Survey, American National Election Survey, Cooperative Election Study, Baylor Religion Study, those that have been done consistently over time that are publicly available so that anybody can check my work and see that it's solid. But I also think that survey data can sometimes be a little bit misleading or at least incomplete. So to supplement that, I also went out of my way to have as many interviews as I could with really just ordinary Republican voters. And I did a fair amount of traveling for this, so I go out and I have a, essentially a focus group in an evangelical church in the Midwest, or I travel up to Nashville to meet with people there. I mean, I did a fair amount of interviews here in Alabama just because it's where I am. But I also went out to the West Coast and elsewhere just to try and get at least some broader geographic representation. So this was, you know, and the people I interviewed, you know, they varied a lot in terms of their levels of political interest and activities. So some of it was people who really don't think about politics very much more than, you know, going out and voting every four years and people who are, you know, rather dedicated activists. I went out of my way to avoid, you know, professional conservatives, so to speak, that I've done, you know, or, and I wasn't going out of my way to try and find people who would have identified with the radical right, which I've done in previous research, looked into that element of society. But that wasn't my main focus here, though, if I did encounter somebody who had far right sentiments, I didn't disregard them either. So those were sort of a mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative. So the quantitative stuff, as I said, is not examples of, you know, tremendous methodological sophistication. There's not a ton of, you know, regression tables in this book.
GR: Right, right. And so briefly, what's the reality that you found among the Republicans that you spoke to and looking at, as you say, the continuity in the survey data? How is the actual typical Republican different from the current stereotype of the typical Republican?
GH: Well, one thing that is true when we talk about polarization is that there is a lot of anger in the Republican electorate. But it tends to be more ideological and partisan than, say, racist or anti-Semitic, which is where a lot of the other focus has been. That is, if we look at attitudes using things like, say, feeling thermometers or attitudes such as racial resentment, which is a term political scientists use a lot. I don't find much compelling evidence that Republicans have gotten say, more racist or more nativist. And the evidence of greater anti-Semitism is almost impossible to find in large data sets. But the degree to which the anger is there, what we've seen, especially since 2000, is this dramatic increase in really just kind of loathing for Democrats and for liberals, but not necessarily for racial or ethnic or sexual minorities, where in fact, over the last couple of decades, feelings have gotten somewhat warmer rather than cooler.
GR: And certainly that loathing goes both ways as far as my experience goes. You're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with George Hawley. He's a professor at the University of Alabama and the author of, “The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization”. Okay, do you think there are certain, let's think about the misperceptions, do you think there are certain kinds of issues on which the misperceptions are most pronounced? You mentioned nativism, anti-Semitism, racism. Are there other things where the misperceptions are most pronounced, or is that where they are?
GH: I think that's where the biggest gap we find is. And I want to be very clear, I am not in any way downplaying the problems of racism, really aggressive nativism, or anti-Semitism. Those are real phenomenon. And if you spend all your time online, particularly on social media, you'll think that this is a widespread massive problem among your ordinary voters. But my takeaway lesson from this is that the type of people who are sitting on X, formally Twitter, all day posting really just nasty, racist, anti-Semitic or otherwise exclusionary stuff are not well representative of the Republican Party overall. And I think that that's an important thing to remember. And I think this is can be a problem in multiple senses because I think that the degree to which people have misperceptions of the Republican Party, it can also perhaps be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because my fear is that a lot of pro-Republican or, you know, conservative nonprofits and other groups, they are perhaps just as mistaken as others and think that, oh, well, where the party is going, where the voters are going is in this really far right direction and so in order to stay relevant, we have to keep up with that. We need to maintain at least as far right of a sentiment as the average person out there. And I'm here to say that I think that would probably be a mistake. I mean, both a moral mistake, but also perhaps a long term tactical or strategic mistake on the part of these parties and these elements of the right broadly conceived. And so I hope that reading this might cause some people to rethink a few things and perhaps, you know, dial back some of the extremism that we do see in other elements of the right.
GR: Yeah, that was I thought, in some ways ,that was the most intriguing part of your book. And you do have a lot of thought provoking arguments that that misperception that you're just talking about, it actually helps the minority on the far right. And you said, you know, you use the word self-fulfilling prophecy, but it actually strengthens their position because they appear to be more of the mainstream than perhaps they are.
GH: Yes, that's my position. And, you know, as I've been working through this project, you know, one thing that has been coming up to my mind is actually a comment that Peter Viereck made back in the 1950’s. He was a sort of moderate to conservative thinker at the time, and he was noting at the height of McCarthyism that a lot of people were making the mistake of thinking that all forms of prejudice and bigotry tend to move together. But he was saying in the context of McCarthyism that that was really not what was happening. Because what he found actually that was that sort of the McCarthy sentiments were strongest among those conservatives who tended to be most anti-segregation and similarly, the place where McCarthyism was weakest tended to be in the white supremacist south where people were actually coming out, including conservatives, pretty strongly against McCarthy was the argument he made. And he said, look, ideological polarization or ideological bigotry and hostility does not necessarily move in tandem with other types of hostility and bigotry. And so the fact that we see a lot of Republicans become intensely hostile towards Democrats and liberals and the left more broadly does not necessarily indicate that other types of hostility are also on the rise. So I think it's important that we be able to disaggregate different types of negative attitudes within different portions of the electorate rather than just assume that if we see one negative trend, that it means that other trends are going to be necessarily correlated with that.
GR: So what do you think is most responsible for the misperception and the stereotype?
GH: Well, I mean, to be honest, a lot of it is to be blamed on the Republican leadership. Look, the fact of the matter is, is that the, and particularly I think President Trump has certainly fed into this. Look, the reality is, is that Trump did run, especially in 2016 and then again in 2024, very aggressively nativist campaign. There are a lot of people, sort of, at least on the periphery of Trump world who say some, have a history of saying some really negative and hostile things. And the fact that Republican voters came out and enthusiastically supported him anyway, you know, on its face seems to provide evidence that at the very least they're not uncomfortable with that style of politics. But does that necessarily mean that they endorse it and want to see the party move in a far right direction? I'm not so sure that that's true. So I'm not making the case that, you know, the people who have these misperceptions, you know, don't have any good reason for developing them. But I think that it is worth following up and saying, hey, you know, what is the actual data? Show us. And that's what I tried to do here.
GR: I want to pursue that line of inquiry when we get back after the break. You're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with George Hawley. The University of Alabama political science professor has recently written a book titled, “The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization” and we've been discussing the issues that he raises in his book. Well, you were talking about some of the sources of the misperceptions and in particular, you were talking about Republican leadership, President Trump. I wanted to ask you flip that to the other side. Certainly, it would seem that the Democratic Party has decided that it tactically benefits from painting Republicans as an extreme way as possible. Do you have any thoughts about that?
GH: Well, sure. And you know, that's just the nature of partisan politics, right? You need to build up as much fear as possible to get your voters motivated. And so I'm actually not, you know, necessarily too critical of Democrats for doing this because Republicans do the same thing, right? This notion that Democrats are all a bunch of socialists who wish to, you know, destroy the West has been, you know, a common theme in conservative media and from Republican politicians, at least the more irresponsible ones for some time. So, yes, I think that just the nature of partisan politics does incentivize leaders to promote what I would consider to be misleading narratives about voters on both sides of things. And that's unfortunate. I wish it wasn't the case, but it's probably not going to go away. And again, this is not a problem that is localized on either one, more on one side than the other, in my view.
GR: Right. I wanted to also ask you about for lack of a better word, legacy media, mainstream media. It's my sense that they've bought into this a little bit, this sense of misperception particularly on the Republican side. Do you have the same sense?
GH: Yes. And I think part of that is just sort of the nature of what makes for an interesting story like the far right, the radical right is a, you know, makes for a compelling magazine article or newspaper piece or, you know, or makes for good television, you know, the people who are out in outlandish costumes and, you know, carrying swastikas and saying just the most awful things is, you know, is good media. You know, it's popular and it gets people interested much more so than, oh, here's what, you know, that an average guy who doesn't think about politics very much is really like. And, you know, luckily, you know, as an academic, I have a different set of incentives. You know, it's not that important that I sell a ton of books, even if my subject is less interesting to a lot of readers than the, say, the far right would be. And then the other issue of course is that the far right, you know, loves media attention as much as they say they dislike journalists, you know, they want to get that attention. And so it ends up being a system in which both sides, you know, in a way kind of benefits. And so I think this is a way in which the radical right can project power in a way that is outsized compared to their actual representation in the overall electorate.
GR: Yeah, that's a really good point. And then finally, on sort of who's to blame on this, I wonder about academia, too. And so you and I are teaching in completely different areas of the country. I can say that in my area, it's pretty obvious, you'd have to almost be blind and deaf not to think that that academia as a whole has bought into this view of the Republicans as a general stereotype. Do you have a different sense of academia in the South?
GH: No, I would say that we are, even down here in the Deep South academia, professors tend to live in something of a bit of a bubble. I would say that you know, the social worlds of academics, you know, it isn't necessarily going to overlap with, you know, your typical red state experience, even when you're living in a place like Alabama. So I do think that there is a sense in which a lot of academics, even those who study these things very carefully, are socially disconnected from the subjects that they're studying, which I think can create some problems of its own. You know, a lot of the qualitative work, even very good qualitative work that I see among academics who go out and try and study, you know, Republican parties, there's kind of almost like a Gorillas in the Mist style aspect to it. But look at these really strange, exotic people that I've managed to find and I’m studying. And so I think that can be a little bit off putting and can sometimes lead to misperceptions as well.
GR: Yeah, yeah, I'm going on safari in North Dakota or something like that. I understand that since the book's writing, you've begun to have some second thoughts about some of the arguments that are in the book more recently. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
GH: Sure. Well, just by the nature of academic publishing this project, the final draft was completed in 2023, so before the 2024 election it really begun in earnest. And at this point I'm just not sure if maybe we have finally reached an inflection point where perhaps the radical right, the views and preferences and talking points have started to permeate the broader population. I think that if that's the case, I think a probably an important moment was when Elon Musk took over Twitter and made it X and not only made it a place for basically untrammeled free speech, but also seems to be putting his thumb on the scale in favor of voices that I would consider to be fairly far right and radical. And I think it would be naive to say that that couldn't have any possible consequences. So I wouldn't be surprised if some of the things I've been hearing from some of the more irresponsible voices on the right start to become more pervasive. Another thing I noticed in the 2024 election that was quite striking in comparison to 2020 was how the Trump campaign dealt with the immigration question. Because what I found very fascinating about the 2020 election for all of the bad things that occurred there, particularly of course in the refusal to acknowledge Biden's win, but despite all that, what I found perhaps most interesting was the degree to which immigration was really just not an issue at all that year. And I was starting to draw the conclusion that, you know, to the degree to which everyone said that nativism was absolutely essential to the Make America Great Again movement to Trump, they'd be saying, hey, maybe a less aggressively nativist Trumpism could do just as well. Because after all, Trump's diehard supporters, they didn't stop supporting him because he stopped showing very much interest in immigration. So I thought that perhaps kind of the nativist element of Trumpism might start to be downplayed. But then, of course, this most recent election happens after the book is completed. And they very much went back to sort of the 2015-2016 talking points and perhaps even went farther with that when we saw the, you know, the rather ridiculous claims about, you know, Haitians eating pets and that sort of thing. And the degree to which that is becoming a sort of pervasive sentiment within conservative media and elsewhere, I wonder if we might be starting to see in the future a sharper turn to the right. So I can't, unfortunately at this point I'm still waiting for all the best data sets from the 2024 election to come out. So until they do, it's purely speculative on my part. I'm not able to say, one way or the other whether or not my intuitions and the things that I found writing this book still hold today.
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 University of Alabama Professor George Hawley. What are some the, you mentioned when we were talking off microphone about some of the issues, policy areas that are most important to understand some of the nuance, I think in the Republican position. Do you have a few things you want to add about that?
GH: Sure. One thing that people were talking about a lot, especially in 2015, 2016 and beyond, was that Trump isn't kind of represents a repudiation of Reaganism, right? And sort of the default Republican position that, you know, markets are good, trade is good we want a less regulated economy. And with the rise of this populist movement, perhaps those sentiments were going away. And what I did find was that sort of doctrinaire economic conservatism was not popular among Trump voters. However, if you look at similar questions asked again and again and again, the reality is, is that economic conservatism in particular has really never been that popular, at least even among Republican voters, like the notion that you should raise taxes on high earners. It actually, it polls pretty well among ordinary Republican voters, and it always has. So the degree to which the previous iterations of the Republican Party were sort of pro-free market, anti-regulation in favor of, you know, supply side tax cuts and that sort of thing, that was always at odds with what Republican voters said they wanted in polls. So the degree to which we see an economic populism becoming any type of force within the Republican Party, that is more the party actually being aligned with its own voters as opposed to, you know, representing some major sea change from the bottom up.
GR: And maybe even in an indirect way explains some of what was surprising at the time, anyway, Bernie Sanders popularity when he ran because it sort of speaks to those themes of taxing the rich and taking a little more skeptical view of some of the free market doctrines. I wanted to ask you a question about the effects of polarization. And this is more speculative probably for you, but the effects of polarization on what and how people think and how that might be driving part of the change that you might be perceiving since you've written the book. I mean, and maybe you got a sense of this in your in your focus groups, but let me just take like, you know, a more moderate Republican, for example. They know that other people view them as you know, populist, a particularly right wing Trump supporter. And so perhaps maybe they begin to take on some of those views almost out of a reaction or a frustration. I mean, maybe it's a little bit of, you know, like up yours kind of sentiment. You know, if you're going to paint me in a certain way, all right, I'll just go there. Do you think there's any kind of that dynamic driving the two sides?
GH: Yeah, that strikes me as plausible. I mean, people like to, partisanship has become an increasingly important part of people's social identity, even as you know, we don't necessarily see an uptick in interest in policy or ideology. People take their partisan identities, you know, I'm a Republican or I'm a Democrat, they take that very seriously. And people like to feel like they're team players. So the degree to which people you know, want to demonstrate, know the degree to which I'm on team Republican, I think probably could drive people to just kind of adopt the norms that they perceive within that party. I think that's entirely plausible.
GR: And we've got about a minute and a half left or so and I wanted to leave you some time to speculate on this or provide at least your sense from talking to folks what your experience tells you. But how (are) we ever going to climb out of this hole of mutual misperception and political hyperbole regarding the other side? Do you have any clues that you could impart to us for where the glimmers of light are here?
GH: Oh, that's very difficult. I don't think I even, you know, speculated one sentence about that in the book itself. But I do think that one of our problems is a high degree of, at least ideological and political homogeneity within our social networks. I think that there is too little dialog across the partisan divide. I think that the degree to which people would be willing to do that, I think would help to alleviate a lot of the misperceptions out there. And, you know, you can see small studies showing that this can, in fact, be effective. The real challenge is you know, how do you scale it up? How do you force or at least encourage greater amounts of bipartisan dialog? And to my knowledge, no one has yet, even people who are working very hard at this has yet to figure out how you can do this at scale in a way that would move the needle for society. I encourage more of that sort of work, but as of now, I have no panacea, unfortunately, to offer.
GR: Well, we'll have to end on that ambivalent note. That was George Hawley and again, his new book, and it's nuanced and it's well worth reading, especially if you are suspicious about the title is called, “The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization”. George, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, I really learned a lot in this conversation and it was very interesting.
GH: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
GR: You've been listening to Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations and the public interest.
Steve Featherstone on the Campbell Conversations
Mar 29, 2025
Steve Featherstone
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Steve Featherstone. He's been on the program a couple of times previously to discuss magazine articles that he's researched and written. But he's with me today because, since 2021, he's been the outdoors reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard and syracuse.com. In that role he covers everything from hunting and fishing to hiking and ecology. Steve welcome back to the program, congratulations on this position.
Steve Featherstone: Yeah. Thank you. It's good to see you again.
GR: Good to see you. So let me just start by, you know, the job itself. I mean, it seems like for a lot of people it's got to be a dream job. You go out in the outdoors, you experience different fun things and then then you write about them. Is that the way you thought about it when you first approached it?
SF: 100%. As you know me from previous times on the program, I had 20 years as a freelance writer. And what was nice about that job, I got to pick and choose my stories. Bad thing about that job is that you've got to convince someone else that story's worth doing, right? Oftentimes the answer's no, even if I thought it was great. This job, because it’s a daily job and it's a newspaper, there's an endless hole for content, as we call it now, called content. And so I can just do virtually anything I want as long as it's related to upstate New York and recreation and it is really a dream job. In fact, I could not imagine having or taking another newspaper job if it wasn't the outdoors beat.
GR: Wow. Yeah, well, my understanding about you is that prior to taking this beat, you were someone who got out in the outdoors, you enjoyed them, but you weren't like a hardcore survivalist or outdoors person. You weren't someone who, you know, goes out and lives on only what they can forage or, you know, hikes and insane distance in a certain amount of time. I was just curious, first of all, if I'm right in that impression, but also, do you think that gives you a certain sort of everyman's or every person's experience? And so it gives you a particular view about what you're writing about that is kind of immediately connecting with the people that are going to read it?
SF: Yeah, you just totally nailed my personality in the way I (unintelligible) stories, 100%. I'm doing it right then, if that's what you're getting out of it.
GR: (laughter)
SF: Yeah. I'm not the guy who, okay, let's take a look at what the outdoors writer used to be. My relationship to outdoor writing. You’re right, in the past, for instance, I've gone to Chernobyl, as you know, right, or Fukushima, and I've written stories about the impacts of these disasters on the ecology of these regions. So, you know, it's in some ways it was outdoor writing it was writing about nature in this very sort of specific way. When I began my very first job out of, at the master's program at Syracuse, was out in the middle of Kansas working for Garmin International, the GPS manufacturer, which, they hired me with my master's degree and everything else, because I actually had some of a background in hunting and fishing. That's what they liked on my resume. Not that I, you know, had a master's degree, not that I had written, you know, this or that. It was because I had some hunting and fishing background. So they got me all the way from New York State to move out there because my job was to speak to outdoor writers. My job was to get outdoor writers to write about this new technology. So my interface with this industry that I am now part of was as on the other side, right? Back then, it was a very different job than what I think what it is now. Back then, it was just all guys and they were just old dudes. I was this young, you know, twentysomething kid out of college and I would walk into these rooms at these conferences and they would all be like these, to me they’re me now, I'm 57 years old, right, I’m old. I was looking at dudes that were like, looked like me, they had white hair, you know, they wearing flannel, and all they wanted to talk about was like rifle calibers and, you know, and deer and fishing. And I had some background in that, but nothing like they did. So I was, you know, like a little bit like a fish out of water. But, you know, that was a really great position to be in, especially being a young man, because in that environment, they wanted to kind of treat you like, almost like a son. Here, buddy, let me show you what this is about. And that, I think, has kind of been part of my approach to this industry, to this subject, to this topic, the outdoors all along as this sort of outsider, very enthusiastic, interested outsider who's willing to basically try anything as long as it's related, you know, to the outdoors, whether it's fishing, hunting, some kind of weird ice climbing. I did snowmobiling this past winter, which was, you know, hit or miss.
GR: Yeah. I'm going to ask you about that later. So let me ask you a different kind of question, a little bit more kind of higher altitude, what do you think is the most important aspect, your impressions anyway, were the most important aspect of the different kinds of outdoor activities or aspects about the outdoor environment here in Central New York, that we as Central New Yorkers have the least appreciation of? You know, the sort of the hidden thing perhaps that you've experienced. I don't know if there's something that comes to mind.
SF: Well, here's something that comes to mind. And it's immediate and it's related to a story I literally just published this morning, and that is trout fishing. Okay, so I'm going to ask you let me ask you, Grant, you think of trout fishing, what comes to mind?
GR: Well, I have done a fair amount of it, so… (laughter)
SF: So, oh gosh you’re not the guy to ask. (laughter)
GR: So what comes to mind? What comes to mind is the kind of almost the competition or the healthy way, a pleasant way, the mutual tension between the fly fishermen, the people who won't use bait, the people that go out there with a worm and a sinker. And what I have discovered is my son is now explicitly a fly fisherman. And what he has convinced me to do is, I won't use bait anymore. So like, if we go out there together, he's looking down on me because I've got a spinner and then, you know, we're both sort of looking funny at the person with the big worm hanging off their hook. (laughter)
SF: Well, the advantage to that, as you know, is that if you can fish, year-round for trout, as long as it's artificial, catch and release and the artificial lure, so, you know, you had an advantage if you're not fishing with that worm because you can do it year-round here. So one thing I think maybe a lot of folks don't appreciate, and if I were to answer that question, if you asked me what I'm not a huge trout fisherman, I've probably fly fished just a couple of times in my life. I'm thinking like A River Runs Through It, right? Brad Pitt, golden light, you know, you see the leader and you know, he's whipping that line back and forth and it lays on the water, right, we have that here in New York State, right? It's the, you know, Roscoe, New York is where in some ways it's the birthplace of fly fishing, as we imagine it that way, right? I think is maybe in the popular imagination is how it's understood. You have a much more, you know, specific appreciate appreciation for trout fishing, you know, you can do spinners, spin reels. Here in Onondaga County we have probably one of the best trout fisheries, not just in New York, but probably regionally. Now, let's go down the list, some four, we we've got Butternut Creek, we've got Limestone Creek, we've got Nine Mile, probably the big daddy, and then Skaneateles Creek. Four all within Onondaga County. And the great thing about it is we have a county run fish hatchery out in the Elbridge, Carpenter’s Brook Fish Hatchery, paid for by our county tax money, right? And they stock all these streams, you know, beginning now in mid and late March through May with 70,000 fish. 70,000 fish. Now if we just left that up to DEC, that's the State Department of Environmental Conservation which stocks around 2 million fish statewide every year, now, here we have our own little hatchery that does it just for us in Onondaga County. So if, even if you don't fish I would highly recommend you buy a cheap rod, get out there with your worm or salted minnow, right?
GR: (laughter)
SF: Head over to Nine Mile Creek on April 1st, buy your license of course, your fishing license, and just tour in the creek, see what everyone else is doing. Catch a stocked fish, okay? There's no shame in that. And you will be hooked.
GR: (laughter) Yeah. You didn't mention a couple of little gems that my son and I go to and I'm not going to say them on air (laughter).
SF: Oh, no. Of course, yes, a true fisherman.
GR: Yeah, that's right.
SF: We're going to squeeze it out of you, Grant and it's going right in the paper.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Steve Featherstone. He's the outdoors reporter with the Syracuse Post-Standard and syracuse.com. So, you already spoke to this, I think, just now, but I wanted to get your thoughts about how the outdoor opportunities, recreational opportunities in Central New York compare with other places and you know, there are a lot of, you just mentioned the incredible fishery that we have here. But I'm thinking like when I think about it, I think there are a lot of activities and a lot of opportunities, but in a lot of ways they're more subtle than what you might find in some other more dramatic areas. I mean, it's not like, you know, we're ocean fishing, you know, for tarpon or we're, you know, hiking on some glacier or something like that. I don't know if you had any reflections about that.
SF: Sure, I think about that all the time. So when I was freelancing, one of the great things about freelancing is it's great if you're raising children. My wife is the breadwinner, she allowed me to do everything when I was freelancing because I could pick and choose my assignments. But in between then I had three kids I had something to do with. So let me tell you, having three young kids in this area in Central New York, the opportunities to get them out and doing something outside are just endless. I was just up, was it at last at the end of February, fishing, steelhead fishing. I did a story about that up on the Salmon River. And I was still steelhead fishing with this guy who he's kind of a nut, great guy, knows the river well. He goes to Kansas every year because he likes to storm chase. And we got to talking about that and his experience of Kansas was exactly my experience of Kansas when I moved out there back in the early 90’s to do this job at Garmin, which I spoke about. His first impression was, what do these people do? There is no water here. And that was the first thing I thought, where do people fish? There's no, in the summer, there was one reservoir that everybody would drive their boat to. It would be like an hour into the water. I mean, just think about around here all the opportunities you have. You've got Oneida Lake, the largest freshwater lake within the bounds of the state borders. Just right her, actually Onondaga County borders it. But right here in Central New York, it's the biggest fishery in the state, right in our backyard. You've got, you know, you've got Skaneateles Lake, which is fantastic as you probably know, fantastic rainbow and lake trout fishing in addition to the usual stuff, you know, perch and bass and walleye, which gets a lot of people upset. And so these things, that's just fishing. If you wanted to talk about hiking, I live over here in Manlius. Within 10 minutes, I can be in a county forest, a state forest, another state park, or at Clark's reservation. I can be in two land trust properties, Three Falls Woods, which is literally I could probably walk there from here, right? Beautiful property, it's, you know, owned by the Central York Land Trust and you can go in there anytime you want. And then there's another one over not that much further away off of Woodchuck Hill Road. That's all within ten, you know, ten, 15 minutes. And I could take, great places to take the kids, which I did quite often. And if you just, I think probably in Central New York, if you just looked at a map, anybody, these opportunities are probably within five, ten minutes of every residence in Onondaga County, whether it's for hiking, fishing, kayaking. I mean, look at Syracuse, you've got this Onondaga Creek runs right through the middle of the city. The city of Syracuse itself has three trout brooks that run it in the city limits, it’s nuts.
GR: Yeah, no, you're right, that's a great point. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Steve Featherstone. He's the outdoors reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard and syracuse.com. So you had quite an adventure with snowmobiling this winter, from what I read of your story. Tell us a little bit about that.
SF: Well, I really so you know, we live in Central New York. You can't be an outdoor writer and not write about snowmobiling. Part of the problem is that we've had some really bad winters lately for snowmobiling. If you look, just last year, not this year, last season there was almost no snow. Now Tug Hill always gets snow. Here in Onondaga County, I think for the first time in history, not a single trail opened. Imagine owning a sled and paying insurance on that and you can't even ride it on the local trails. So, you know, Tug Hill got a lot of business. So this year, lots of snow, great weather. And I thought, this is my year, I'm going up there, I'm going to do a snowmobiling story. So I got a friend to take me up there. He had, you know, this very powerful snowmobile and he also belongs to a club where we could, like, spend the night. It's like, oh, this is great. And it was a really awful weekend weather-wise. I mean, great for snowmobiling, there’s tons of snow there was lake effect happening. So we got up there and yeah, I got on a sled for the first time in 50 years and probably, I don't know, within a couple of hours, I had already, I hit a tree.
GR: (laughter)
SF: Yeah, yeah, not good, you know, $900 worth of damage to this guy’s sled, he was not happy. But here's the thing, it was super slow. I wasn't doing anything dangerous. I wear glasses. I don't know if you can see me, you can't see me on the radio, but if you're looking at the feed, yes, I wear glasses and they had fogged up and I was just lifting the visor up. And in that moment that I was lifting it up, I just, the snowmobile kind of jerked and went off the trail at like one mile per hour, climbed a snowbank and then just hit a tree and bent the bumper on the snowmobile. No one was hurt.
GR: But you almost went over the side of a cliff too as I understand.
SF: Why did you bring that up? I've gotten in trouble from my readers for this.
GR: I mean, as I recall, you were reassured, all right, my question is, were you reassured? Your guide, I think, or your buddy told you, yeah, you probably wouldn’t have survived.
SF: Well, this, okay, my buddy, this tells you about his attitude, the fact that he put me on a sled like this and literally just said, oh, okay. I told him, I said, Martin, I have not been on a sled and probably 50 years. Technology's changed quite a bit, these are very powerful machines. These aren't the machines that I drove when I was, you know, whatever, ten years old. So he literally he puts me on this machine and then just takes off and says, follow me. So I'm okay, I'm on this thing and I'm thinking, okay, he's going much faster, I'm not going to try to match his speed. He ended up going like 96 miles per hour at some point he told me, and he showed me on his console, how fast he was going. I got it up to about 74 before I thought I was going to lose control of the sled. Not in a bad way, I was like, this is, this feels too much like I’m hydroplaning so I'm going to slow it down. Well, that part where we were up in the, near that cliff in Whetstone Gulf, I couldn't see the cliff, it was just woods. And Martin, of course, knew what was there because he rides up there all the time. I wasn't going fast. It was a wooded trails, going very moderate speed. I was enjoying looking around and all of a sudden I see Martin leap off his sled because he's ahead of me on the trail and stand in front of my sled. And he puts his hand on my break and says, stop, stop, stop. And I'm like, what the heck is going on? And I was about three feet from a 200 foot drop off. I just didn't see it. (laughter)
GR: Well, maybe leave your ride there (laughter). So you mentioned the trout season starting up. We're talking just a couple of days before the official opening of it.
SF: Are you are you going out?
GR: Yeah, I think I am. But I just wanted to ask you, I assume you'll be out there because you've already talked about it.
SF: Oh sure, yeah, it's going to be cold. It's going to be like 39 degrees or something.
GR: Oh, dear, okay. Well, the thing I'll ask you, just a personal question and we'll do it real quick and move on to something more important. But the problem that I have with the trout season is that there's always this idea in the family that on the first day, we're going to keep them. Usually we're catch and release, but I have to clean them.
SF: (laughter)
GR: And so by the time I'm done doing that, it's like the last thing I want to do is sit there and eat that thing. (laughter) Will you guys be eating trout on Tuesday?
SF: I would love to. You know, the nice thing about being an outdoors writer is because I'm often covering these things, so I think people feel sorry for you. So you'll have a kind of like, I've had this happen so many times, especially like up at the Salmon River during the salmon run, right? It's like, oh yeah, you're not able to fish? Sorry buddy, here, take this fish and there's like giving me fish. I’m like, I would love to, but what am I going to do with this? I’ve got a job, I’ve got to walk around and take pictures, I’ve got to, you know, talk to people, I can't carry a fish with me. So will I be eating trout? I, you know, maybe you inspired me, maybe I will put a cooler in my car and I will accept trout that are given to me, and I'll run back to the car and throw them in there and eat them later.
GR: There you go. You don't need a cooler at 39 degrees. So of all the new activities that you have been exposed to that you hadn't done prior to taking this job, what's the one so far that you've most liked?
SF: Wow. Okay, so it's interesting that you ask that because I was talking with my editors and we're thinking about starting kind of a new, I don't know, a new thing and like a video intensive, right? Because this is where I think eyeballs as we call them, right? Eyeballs are going, you know, people aren't reading as much they like they like to see video. And, you know, my kids are a great example of this, right? They want to consume all their content in video. So, you know, we're thinking about that here at the paper and we’re starting a new series and then thinking about what kind of things can I do, you know, what kind of weird stuff can I do? One of them we were thinking about was like, you brought it up earlier, is bushcraft - like survivalist kind of stuff. I thought it would be really fun, well, I don't know if it's fun, it probably won't be fun, is to just to go out for a weekend with a survivalist with someone who knows bushcraft and just live in the woods for, you know, bringing nothing with you, nothing, Not a sleeping bag, not a tent, nothing, you know, not a cell phone, obviously. And just go out and see what it's like to have to make a fire, find stuff to eat and just videotape the whole thing and make a video and write a story about it. That would be fun.
GR: Well, don't invite me on that one.
SF: And you know it’s just going to rain too.
GR: Well, I am among other things, I am just done sleeping on the ground, that ship has sailed for me. (laughter) If you've just 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.com outdoors reporter Steve Featherstone. So, of course not all activities are going to be everybody's cup of tea. I was curious, maybe the answer is snowmobiling, but what's the one activity that you've tried so far in this role, in this job that you know, you could have done without? You came home and said that I won't do that again on my own.
SF: I don't know. You know, I like everything, I really do. Let's bring it back to the steelhead story. The thing that attracted me to the steelhead story wasn't the fish so much. I mean, you know, fishing at some point is just fishing, you know? So the thing that attracted me to it was like, look what these steelhead fishermen are doing. The worst time of year you can imagine. It's January, it's 20 degrees out, it's probably snowing. If it's not snowing, maybe it's sleeting. You're out in your waders in a stream that's maybe 33 degrees and you're standing there in this awful weather casting over and over for a really hard to catch fish. That to me sounds awful. I don't want to do that personally, but I do want to talk to the person who does love that. So yeah, so personally, yeah, there's lots of stuff I wouldn't want to do that I don't personally care for. I mean walleye fishing, hugely popular here, not a big fan. I mean, it's okay, I love to eat walleye, but just sitting there and jigging over one spot and catching walleye, it's not my thing, you know, ice fishing, not my thing. But I love the fact that people here love these activities and I love talking to them about it. I love meeting them and listening to their passion for it. And people in this region are very passionate about these things.
GR: That's interesting. And you and I are on the same wavelength because ice fishing, the steelhead, the walleye trolling, those are not in my list of fishing types of fishing that I like.
SF: You're a trout snob, Grant.
GR: No, no, no actually, I'm a small mouth bass and northern pike snob. That's what I really am.
SF: Small mouth, they’re crazy, right? We've got one of the best small mouth fisheries in the United States right here in Central New York.
GR: And I've got some nice tiger huskies over on Otisco Lake.
SF: Oh, beautiful for that, wow.
GR: So I wanted to come back and ask you a question that you alluded to in an indirect way when you were talking about your experiences with your children. I know that, for example, in the realm of hunting, there's a real concern that the younger generation is not replacing these old guys in flannel shirts as you said before, in insufficient numbers to keep these pastimes going. And I just wondered, have you noticed any kind of concerns similar across the board based on your experiences? I mean, you know, we read all these things about kids are doing gaming all the time, they're on their phones, they're, you know, totally entrenched in social media. Do you think there's something we should be worried about?
SF: Oh sure, absolutely, yeah. And this has been a long going trend. I'm an example of the trend. My dad was a very active outdoorsman. He was a city cop in Syracuse for many, many years. But when he wasn't doing that, when I was very young, I mean, he would be gone for two weeks, you know, in Pennsylvania, hunting whitetail with his buddy at hunting camps, right? And he hunted all of his life. He fished all of his life. I would go, we would go up to the St. Lawrence River and fish for bass up there. So me though and my brother, my brother, you know, he hunts occasionally. We've got some properties, you know, south of town here where we hunt on. It makes it easy for us. I don't hunt. I have not hunted since I was 18, big game. But I love it. I just don't have the, I don't know, I just don't have the passion for it, I guess. Now, that is probably, I'm probably part of a trend I think that really is concerning for a lot of outdoorsmen now. If you go to these outdoors clubs, every town has one. There's one of Fabius, there’s one in Fayetteville, there's one in Camillus, they're all over the place, right? They're loaded with, you know, 60 plus old guys, right? There's not a lot of young blood in there. There's some. The fact that syracuse.com even has an outdoors writer is probably testament to the fact that there is a, maybe a larger concentration of people who hunt and fish here than there are elsewhere in the state. It's the reason why I have a job. But yeah, I mean, it is a concern, absolutely, and I'm probably an example of it.
GR: So we only got a couple of minutes left. I want to squeeze two quick questions in if I can. First of all, setting aside the limitations of this area, but if you want to include the area in your answer to this, it's fine. But thinking here and also thinking about anywhere in the world, what is the top on your bucket list of future outdoor activities?
SF: Wow. Okay, well, it meanders. It's such a smorgasbord. What one of the top thing be, you know what I want to do? This is weird. I want to carp fish.
GR: Oh, my goodness. Okay, so you are going to have to hook up with my son because. He is an accomplished carp fly fisher.
SF: Oh, carp fly fishing.
GR: We'll talk later. (laughter)
SF: Okay, so you might know this then, maybe your son certainly does. So the Syracuse area, Onondaga Lake and Seneca River is a world class wild carp fishery. And wild carp, carp fishing in general, worldwide, extremely popular. It's on TV. You know, it's a TV sport, right?
GR: Well, they fight like crazy, they just dive. Yeah, he's caught them everywhere.
SF: They’re big!
GR: Yeah, they're big, they get huge.
SF: And here in Syracuse, we've got this world class fishing. I want to fish for carp in the way that carp fishermen do here.
GR: All right, great, last question. I have to ask, it's kind of silly. Your name is like, perfect for this job. I mean, it's a really cool name anyway, but it's perfect, Featherstone. I mean, it's like if I was writing a novel and, you know, you were the outdoor writer, this is what it would be. Do you think you were, like, born for this?
SF: Well, my name could be. Well, you might remember the old days. There was a columnist in the Syracuse paper, I remember named Rod Hunter?
GR: Yeah.
SF: I think up I’m going to need a made up name like that, that would be even better.
GR: Well, I like Featherstone, so, okay, we'll have to leave it there. We could talk for hours, obviously. That was Steve Featherstone is from syracuse.com, he's the outdoors reporter. Steve, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. This has been an absolute delight.
SF: Thank you. Grant. Maybe I'll see you on Tuesday, opening day trout.
GR: All right, you've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Former Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner on the Campbell Conversations
Mar 24, 2025
(WRVO News (file photo))
Stephanie Miner served two terms as mayor of the City of Syracuse, from 2010-2018. Before that, she served on the Syracuse Common Council. Now, she teaches at Colgate University, and has written a political memoir titled "Madam Mayor: Love and Loss in an American City."
Program Transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Stephanie Miner. She served two terms as mayor of the city of Syracuse beginning in 2010, and prior to that, she was a Syracuse Common Councilor at large. She also ran for New York State Governor in 2018 on the Serve America Movement party line. And currently she teaches at Colgate University. She's with me today because she has published a new political memoir. It's titled “Madam Mayor: Love and Loss in an American City.” Former Mayor Miner, welcome back to the program, and congratulations on your book.
Stephanie Miner: Thank you. Grant. It's great to be back. I'm a little out of practice. I haven't done this in a while, so I remember the rules are try to not answer the question and be brief as a politician. So now that I'm an author, I will try to answer the questions, and be verbose.
GR: Limited, verbose. But I will just say, I remember when you were in office, I thought you answered the questions there, too. And in that vein, before we start this, I should note for our listeners for full disclosure that I've spoken to you in the past about writing this book, and I've read earlier versions of it and offered comments, so I should put that out there. But let me just in a way, kind of follow up on what I just said here for my first question. And note that because of what I teach and what I write about, I've read a fair number of these kinds of books that deal with state and local level politics. And I think one of the ways that yours is different and notable is that there in the book, there's a lot of substantial treatments of things like city finance, the different policy challenges that cities face, both they have faced currently facing will face, as well as the more political and personal stories that, you know, people would expect. And something like this. And I wanted to know whether that substantial, content emphasis reflected something important about you as a politician. Were you do you think you were a little bit different kind of politician that way?
SM: I do think so. And I, you know, I think that about me, but I had many people tell me that throughout my political career that I was on the wonky side, you know, and some would say, derisively, by the way, you're too smart to be in politics, too dumb to be an academic. I, I think you know what this book really is in the best sense of, writing in books is it's it's my voice. And my voice is to, you know, both be substantive. But it's also my experience. And I was aiming to have my experience as mayor, you know, make, make the, policy part of it interesting and applicable to people. So they would understand, because fundamentally, I wrote this book trying to answer the question, why is change so difficult?
You know, there's a saying like, you can't fight City Hall, and yet it often feels like City Hall can't do anything. At least when I was the occupant of City Hall, I frequently felt that way. And this book is an attempt to explain, you know, why federalism matters when you're a mayor? Why the, the division of power between the federal government, state government, and local governments, matter and how it impacts policy and why money matters and why the the lack of a sustained urban policy since really, Ronald Reagan, the impacts that it's had on infrastructure, education, financing, all these things that you can imagine. And again, I was using my experience to, you know, put some meat on the bones.
GR: Do you think that what you just said is the most important thing about cities and local governments that citizens least understand or appreciate that, you know, cities occupy a particular place, but there are all these other forces acting upon them. Is that I mean, what if I asked you just straight up what is the thing that most citizens least understand about cities? What would you say?
SM: I would say that it is that there is this sense that mayors and cities have a great deal of power. But in a federalist system, like we currently have, the power is diffuse and having power, but not having money, or having power that is significantly, impacted by what the state says you can and can't do, you know, has an ability to, or will, limit the policy choices that you can make.
But on the, you know, on the flip side of that, that's the sort of negative case, the positive case about local politics, particularly with a city like Syracuse, and its size is you do have the power to implement change quickly, measure that change and fix what doesn't work, or attempt to fix what does, what doesn't work. And, you know, so you can be very facile, as a mayor in a city the size of Syracuse and, and implement policies, which was one of the one of the things I most enjoyed about being mayor and most enjoyed about local politics, that the the issues that we were trying to impact and fix were the issues that impacted people in their everyday lives.
GR: So you've got a lot of stories and the book that, are moments where particularly early on where where you kind of have a almost like an epiphany or I might say a holy crap moment where it's like, where where it's like, oh, I, I am, I do have this power, you know, people are looking to me to do acts or see me as a leader. On why is there a particular story that you could relate quickly that you think kind of illustrates that? Because I found those very interesting.
SM: I think, look, all of the stories and there were different moments throughout my eight years as mayor where I had that feeling in different times. But for me, I think the most profound was that my first name, Stephanie, disappeared. And for eight years, people either called me mayor or they called me boss. Some of the some of the people that worked for me would call me boss.
And so, I, you know, after I left the mayor's office, I wouldn't answer if people said Stephanie. I mean, that's like a profound change. And now, you know, I've gone back to my first name. I will run into people and they'll say, mayor, mayor. And I like I, you know, and they almost have to yell it for me to pay attention to it. So it was the sense of for eight years I lost, you know, I lost or my identity was subsumed into my title. And then you have to go back to having your identity, you know, become, you know, preeminent in your first name and who you are. It's not related to your job.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Stephanie Miner. The former Syracuse mayor has written a book titled “Madam Mayor: Love and Loss in an American City.” Well, this is, in this similar vein, but more, more profound and more personal. I wanted to pursue the book's title a little, which is “Love and Loss in an American City.” And one aspect of that, of course, is very personal for you. You know, your late husband, Jack Mannion, to talk about in the book, but it obviously I think that title refers to other things as well. And, I think there are more political as well as personal. I was just wondering if you could unpack that a little bit as far as what that meaning is in the book.
SM: Sure. And by the way, this is probably the 35th idea of a title that I had. And it took me a while to land on it. But, you know, the, the, “Love and Loss in an American City.” It's a story about how I loved politics and loved government and how I have frequent losses in it, but still loved it.
So that sense of that you can love somebody, love something, and really work hard at it and still lose one of the titles that I had in my mind for both the chapter and the title for the book is wrestling with an octopus, because there are many days where I felt like, okay, I've, I've got this problem. I figured it out and I've, you know, I've pinned it. And then another tentacle comes up and slaps across the face. And just like that's what being mayor is like, you're just constantly wrestling. And when you think you pinned it, something else comes up. But later on, when I was, writing the book, I was thinking about, processing my grief over the loss of my husband, who was a, you know, a partner par excellence in, my political career and the sense of community and how, you know, loss is an inevitable part of life losses, an inevitable part of politics.
And a good friend of mine who said to me, you know, the seeds of every defeat are planted in a victory. And the second part of the title in an American city really is this idea that Syracuse is very emblematic of a, of an experience that cities across the United States have gone through and are going through once a very, very prosperous city, one of the, you know, most prosperous cities, top 30 in the United States. And then now our indices are, you know, indices of desperation, of poverty, job loss, unemployment, economic recession. And so using this idea of, you know, love and loss and an American experience, and trying to use the particular of my experience as mayor in Syracuse to illustrate, illustrate the general of what it's like to govern in the United States, you know, in a, in a city.
GR: Yeah. I think it's a great title. And I, I do remember some of the earlier ones, and I think you, I think you landed on the right one on, iteration 35. So that's good.
SM: At least it could have been 350. You know, you just kind of keep going through it.
GR: Well, obviously, I think a lot of the, media and public attention that this book is going to attract will be concerned with your retelling of your experiences with then-Governor Andrew Cuomo. He's now running for mayor of New York City. And you were experiencing his political bullying. I will just call it that. Before it became more widely known and exposed, although I think it was something of an open secret in Albany for a long time. Is there one story that you think best exemplifies that aspect of his political style?
SM: Well, I think that's the story. When they came out with what they said was a policy that was going to reform the pension issues. And I was quoted as saying, well, I have questions about it. And then he sent the lieutenant governor into Syracuse to go meet with the editorial board to threaten to have the state take over the city of Syracuse.
I think that, you know, when a mayor of the fifth largest city asks and says that she has substantive questions about a policy, and he responds by saying, well, you know, you should ask for a financial control board in other words, you know, we're going to take over governance of your city. That to me, was, you know, one illustration. But as you know, because you've read the book, there are many, you know, Andrew Cuomo and I, it's almost Shakespearean. I mean, I think this book was destined to come out in March because of my publisher and timelines. I mean, I had no idea that Andrew Cuomo was going to, you know, run for mayor, much less announce in the same month that my book was coming out. It's just it's, you know, just the universe, I suppose. But we have very different ways that we look at leadership and think about it. My issues with Andrew Cuomo were substantive and policy-based. And he responded, in tactics that were bullying, and, you know, in ways that were political and personal and the I think the perversity of it is that it, it, you know, made me larger in the public, mind, you know, you have a very powerful, tall male governor, punching down on a short at the time, young looking, female mayor and people expect their mayors to fight for their constituents.
I mean, that's what people want mayors to do. So there's also a sense, well, she's just doing her job. And you know, and very it was very clear, that he was, going to take out his frustrations or his disagreements with me, on the people of the city of Syracuse, based on my policy, you know, my disagreements with him on policy. And that was a difficult thing for me to navigate because it's not fair. It's not right. But there's also, you know, I can't change who I am. And ultimately, I had to kind of come to peace with this idea. Well, the people the city of Syracuse elected me four times, and they knew, you know, that I was a fighter and that that's what I did.
But being, you know, lots of sleepless nights about, geez, you know, is it right for me to disagree with him? If you know, when he's threatening funding on a housing project or the school district? Those are hard decisions to make. His view of leadership is, you know, when the media cycle say the best words. And if you win, you know, you get, to the victor goes the spoils. And if you lose, you get nothing.
GR: All of this. Well, all of this is sounding very familiar. More recently, as well. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with former City of Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner. She's published a new political memoir. It's titled “Madam Mayor: Love and Loss in an American City.” And we've been discussing her book.
I want to continue on what we were talking about before the break, about your experiences with Andrew Cuomo. And again, because he's running for mayor, get some further thoughts about that first, kind of a more general question that's related to this. I've heard you on many occasions speak of a certain kind of political corruption. Not money in a drawer or money in someone's freezer, but of putting position over purpose. And, do you think that that's a good description of a political failing that he suffered from, Andrew Cuomo?
SM: I don't know. I think that our system has these our system has now incentivized people where ambition is more important than solving problems. And, you know, ambition always used to be part of the political, your political analysis. But there was also a big part of it, which was, well, I've got to have a track record to run on, and I've got to be able to say to people I've done X, Y, Z, or I'm going to do X, Y, Z.
And now with just all the money flowing through the system, it's almost like you can create your own reality. And so, you know, with Andrew Cuomo, what I, I think the way he left the gubernatorial office is sort of, emblematic or illustrative of this, illustrative of this, this what is happening. He left, because of, you know, sexual harassment, workplace scandals. But prior to him leaving, he was reelected when there was a huge scandal with the Buffalo Billion. Right. A, you know, allegations of bribery judges in the Southern District saying this is the worst form of government and the worst form that we've seen of pay to play. And on top of it being, you know, just filled with corruption, it was a substantive failure, too.
And across the Thruway, we in upstate saw all of his policies were substantive failures. But Albany in the policymakers in Albany weren't really interested in that. And yet, sexual harassment. And clearly, I'm, you know, I, I don't want to say that that is less than but Andrew, the way Andrew Cuomo governed and his failures, I think were political and they needed to be addressed through a political process. And they were, you know, and so now we have this where he's coming back and he just he's using the money. A lot of it is taxpayer dollars to just have this bullhorn, which says, I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do anything wrong. And look at all the great things I did.
And there's for a whole host of reasons. There is nobody really on the other side saying, oh, wait a second, you know, did you really? More people left New York. We lost congressional seats. Your prime economic development policies, remember start up New York, Buffalo, billion casinos, all of that were just complete, subsidy failures and ethical failures and legal, legally corrupt as well.
GR: Yeah. Those are important points. Very personal question here. You answer it very quickly, I'm sure. But, when all this stuff hit and we learned more about all these things regarding his administration, I'll throw in a couple others, nursing homes and the number regarding Covid deaths, how all that was handled, his own, his own personal book deal and having staff work on that. He made millions of dollars from that. Did you have a moment of schadenfreude or at least sort of. Gee, I you know, this is what I was saying, people and, you know, did you have that sense of vindication at all?
SM: You know, not really, because as I said, I had started sort of this processing of my relationship with Andrew Cuomo back when I was in the midst of my struggles with him and realizing that the only way that I could govern and the only way I could live with myself is to say, you know, this is the this is the way I think is right. And this is the way I think it should be done. And so by the time all of those things happened, you know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton says he had absolute power, and he had never shown himself to be very interested in policy. And, you know, when you have a public health crisis, you need policy experts to guide you through it.
So there was, for me, there was a sense of I'm not surprised, but I'm saddened by it because I'm saddened by a political system that allows that to happen. And, you know, and allows real suffering to almost go on rectified or unwitnessed because of the, short attention spans. And, you know, again, money can buy big bullhorns and you can just scream into it or pay people to scream into it toxic things on Twitter or X and, you know, and it just takes people's attention away.
GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is former Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner. One last question on Cuomo. I'll move on to other things. What do you make of his new run for city mayor? Are you surprised?
SM: No, I, I'm not I'm kind of surprised that he is, a frontrunner, but he has a lot of money. He's a very skilled political operative. And, you know, our country is in a place where, you know, loud voices are winning right now. So, you know, he is somebody who has spent his entire life running for office.
And then to get kicked out of it that way. I didn't think that, you know, I thought he would always try again. You know, he's already been through several iterations. There was there already Cuomo 2.0 when he ran for attorney general. So now this is Cuomo 3.0 or 4.0.
GR: Interesting. Yeah. There is a there is a history of this. So, let's talk about, your political career going back to being on the city council and then as mayor, you were, in many respects, I think, something of a, like a skeptical soothsayer, you know, you warned us about. And you really took a lot of flak regarding the Destiny mall project on all the tax breaks. You were almost at one point on standing alone on that, and then again, you know, you were talking about how the governor was treating upstate cities and those policy issues. I wanted to get your take, given that history on micron, because that's something that has kind of happened after you've left office. That one, to me, seems like a better bet than the Buffalo billions. And, you know, the, Film Hub and all these other things, and certainly a better bet. And Destiny Mall. I wonder how you're viewing. Well.
SM: I think substantively, when you look at the federal government's investment and the international need for chips and to secure ourselves from Chinese influence in Taiwan, that all of those partners, it makes, it makes intellectual sense. My skepticism, though, and this is, you know, I'm a product of my experience is is things that the government gets into for economic development, where they're the primary mover, never materialized the way they say it's going to materialize.
And, you know, we have a free market system. Government should do the things that government is good at roads, bridges, picking up trash, water, educating children, those kind of things. I think when you make the government, the government a partner in a free market economy, it's very, very dangerous. Because what happens is I think the, the nature of doing things for profit, they're all sudden start looking at the, at the government as, instead of shareholders or customers. And so, again, I'm a product of my experience, you know, Empire Zone's destiny, start up New York film hubs, Buffalo billion, all of these things that government, Democrats and Republicans have said is going to, you know, turn up ups, turn around upstate New York's economy haven't worked, but did work, you know, building infrastructure systems that people, smart people, business people and others could take their skills and figure out how to use to make a profit.
GR: Well, I wonder now what goes what's on my mind is the President Trump certainly said a lot of people's hair on fire here in the Syracuse area when he, you know, said repeatedly that the Chips act was a terrible thing. You know, we ought to look into, seeing if we can reverse it. Would you go that far or do you. I know you're not a fan of President Trump. You've made that very clear when you were mayor. But, anyway.
SM: You know, no, I wouldn't, but as, you know, as a citizen of Syracuse and Central New York, it's troubling because there's been investments made, commitments made. And, President Trump and his administration have shown themselves to, you know, not work under traditional political rules. And the traditional political rules would be like, well, that act passed. It's done. You know, let it move its course. So, I think we're I think it's very dangerous, in terms of what Trump is doing. But I also think I, I'm troubled by whether or not the Chips Act is going to move forward. And there's the funding, but there's also the part of when you have the federal government and the state government as partners, when you have this change of leadership.
And now all of a sudden, you know, it's the cult of personality, well, then what happens? Because you have to have you know, look, the same is true for 81. You have to have some sort of consistency in order to make these changes. And these long-term policies move forward. And the kind of tumult that we're seeing in Washington that's going to flow down to, Albany in terms of money and policies, is going to impact micron 81 schools, Medicaid, Medicare, I mean, across the board, Social Security.
GR: That may be even another reason to have the kind of suspicions you have is it's unpredictable, depending on who's who's in there. And in doing it. We've only got about a minute left. I wanted to ask you this last question. And we'll see where it goes. If you answer it in a sentence. But, I was wondering about your future. Obviously, politically would be my main interest, but otherwise too. Can you imagine a scenario in which you might pursue elected office again? You've still got lots of time.
SM: Yeah. I can't, I will tell you, I loved it, and I enjoyed it, and feel profoundly grateful that I had the opportunity to do it. I didn't think about it at the time as a sacrifice, but having been out of office, I look at things and I realize I did. I sacrificed time with my family, time with my friends.
And, you know, somebody pointed out to me, I may be the one politician who, you know, when I say I want to spend more time with my family, I actually means it. But, you know, for close to 20 years, I was a slave to other people's demands on my time. And so being able to make my own calendar, being able to do the kind of things that I want, and I am, you know, I really am enjoying Colgate. It's just a it's a perfect place for me. And it gives me enough to talk about the substance of politics, and also sort of fill this niche of somebody who's run for office to talk about war stories as well. So I enjoyed, not actually writing, but I enjoyed after writing, reading, the book. I'm enjoying teaching and I'm doing some consulting for Bloomberg Philanthropies as well.
So being able to fill my time with the kind of things I want, but, still being able to say, no, you know, I'm going to take a long weekend, or. No, I, you know, I want to read this book this weekend. It's, I feel very, very lucky that I'm in a position where I can do that.
GR: Well, I'm glad you also found the time to write this book. That was Stephanie Miner. And again, her new book is titled “Madam Mayor: Love and Loss in an American City.” And if you want to learn more about Syracuse politics and policies as well as just the general culture here in this area, this is, this is your book. So, Mayor Miner, thanks so much for taking the time to talk. I really appreciate it.
SM: Thank you for having me. Grant, I appreciate it.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media's conversations in the public interest.
Aaron Kupchik on the Campbell Conversations
Mar 08, 2025
Aaron Kupchik
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Aaron Kupchik, a Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. He discusses his new book, "Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice."
Program Transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Aaron Kupchik. He's a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. And he's here with me today because he has a new book out titled “Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice.” Among his other books is “Judging Juveniles: Prosecuting Adolescents in Adults and Juvenile Courts.”
Professor Kupchik, welcome to the program.
Aaron Kupchik: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
GR: Well it's great. It's great that you made the time. We appreciate it. So let me just say, first of all, I know this is a serious book on a serious issue and we will treat it seriously. But I thought your title was very, very clever. Well done on that. I got a grin when I read that because of the different ways that that means, but for the opening question, I just want to set some basic understandings for our listeners.
Your book is based on the assertion that school suspensions are an instance of racial discrimination and racism, as I understand it. And I just want to say, you should know that in recent years there have been, similar claims and news reporting about this in the Syracuse City school system, and our listeners will probably remember some of that.
But let me ask you this, in terms of your book, on what basis do you make the claim that school suspensions are, an instance of racial discrimination?
AK: Well, if we look at almost any study, conducted over the last 20 years, when scholars have started thinking a lot more about how we punish school, punish in schools, we see that, youth of color are really much more likely to be suspended out of school than white youth, even for the same behaviors. So it's not the case.
I wouldn't argue that it's always intended poorly. You know, there I tend to trust teachers and educators generally as really well-intended people who are doing a very difficult job with insufficient support and pay, and often hostility directed at them. And so it's not the case that every use of suspension is racially motivated. Far from it. But there's a historical piece to this in a contemporary piece to this.
And the contemporary piece is imbalance or disparity. And it's clear it is exceptionally clear. There's also a historical piece to this, and that's what I'm really trying to, I guess that's what my book does, is fill in that piece right? Because nobody had looked at it in detail before. And what I found was that we only started using suspensions as a way to remove unwanted students.
And those were Black students who were admitted into formerly segregated white schools. So that's its origin story. Is in racial exclusion. And when we follow that through to today, we see that patterns are still playing out.
GR: You know, I want to get into some of that, historical part of your of your argument a little bit later. Let me just stick with some current-day things and then we'll get into that. But and you just mentioned this, but you also you note that suspensions as a disciplinary method have become more common in recent years.
So they've really ticked up just generally in addition to the imbalance that you, cite. Can you give us an idea of the magnitude of that change in recent years? And, you know, whether it's followed some sort of particular trajectory?
AK: Absolutely. What we see is that, you know, in the 90s, the two pretty the late 90s, early 2000s, the rate of suspensions just skyrocketed, more than doubling nationwide. And, you know, this follows all sorts of punishments, right? This is the same time where we saw mass incarceration take off. And when we started investing much more in policing and punishment in society.
And so in the mid to late 90s through the early 2000, we saw suspension rates really took off, particularly for Black students. So their rates of suspension really grew by quite a bit. We have seen, for the past ten or so years, suspension rates start to decline, which is notable that the rate of decline is nowhere near the rate of increase we saw a generation ago.
But we have seen some progress in terms of reducing suspension rates.
GR: And I'm going to get into now some of the things you anticipated when you were, mentioning how difficult the job the teachers have, is and, and one of the things that I have heard from teachers and administrators when this issue of suspensions has come up is that, first of all, they're just reacting to the behavior in their classrooms, so they're not reacting to race.
And you already, I think, sort of acknowledge that that that can be the case. But the way they see this is they have a duty to the students, the parents and the community to deliver education to the entire class. So they see these suspensions as unfortunate, but necessary for them to, in a sense, make the trade off between being inclusive but also delivering what they're supposed to be delivering to the to the entire school.
How what's your reaction to that? And how do you see that is sort of being sorted out?
AK: Up until the very last portion of your statement, I completely agree. So absolutely, they have, you know, again, I believe most teachers are very well-intended and, you know, and doing a hard job, and they do have an obligation to teach to the entire class. And sometimes one or maybe two students are making that difficult or even impossible. And that is an extremely difficult position for anyone to be in, particularly a teacher who's got so much other stress on them.
What I don't agree with is that that necessarily lead has to lead to suspension. There are so many other potential things we could do. It's not a suspension or nothing problem. And yet suspension or nothing is how many schools? Not most, but many schools treat it. And that's not the individual teacher's fault. Again, I want to try to remove I'm not trying to blame individual teachers here.
They are the products of the systems in which they work. Right. And it's administrators and systems. And through a historical legacy, are the ones who are creating the options that they have. In other words, I think I can say that more clearly. Right? What I'm saying is that the system in which these teachers are, are doing their best to take care of children and to teach them the system is flawed.
And it's not those teachers fault. It's often not the principals fault. It's that over time we've created a very narrow set of options and a set of assumptions and norms that this is just what you do and this is the only option. And that's the real problem.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Aaron Kupchik. University of Delaware professor has a new book out. It's titled “Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice.” So on that point, I'm wondering and I'm just and this is just in my head right now, whether maybe what's going on with some of these administrators in terms of using suspensions so readily is that it's just the easy thing to do.
You know, it's like, okay, I have a problem. Let me deal with it. Let's just take the kid out of the class. Versus thinking about this in a deeper way. They've got other things that are pressing on them that they've got to get done. I don't know if you had a sense in your research that that might have been part of the dynamic.
AK: Oh, absolutely. There's no doubt. You know, administrators are under pressure too. You know, the irony is that it is short-term, easier, long-term, more difficult, and more costly to do what we do.
GR: Hmm.
AK: So it's true removing the student who's being a problem who's causing disruption. You know is a short-term fix for the teacher, for the principal. But that student comes back and that student comes back worse off. Having, you know, having missed days of lessons, having missed the supervision, having, you know, now, maybe they're embarrassed or they're seen differently.
What we see is that suspending kids out of school tends to make those individual students behaviors worse, not better. It also has a chilling effect on other things. So research prior research has shown that when you look at when you compare high suspension schools to low suspension schools, but that are similar on other factors, you know, including, poverty levels, race ethnicity, type of location, funding levels and so on.
The high suspension schools tend to have worse average test scores among low-income among non-suspended students. So suspensions aren't helping the other kids learn. They might be a temporary reprieve for the teacher. But they're in long term, they're not helping the academic mission. They're not helping improve behaviors. So yeah short-term understandable. But we need to find better long-term solutions.
And there are long-term solutions that are that are better and that are out there. We just don't use them as much or as well.
GR: Oh, I want to find out what some of those are. It's a very interesting statistic. And also the way you describe that it's impossible not to hear the parallels with some of the criticisms of the criminal justice system and how that how that operates as well. Let me let me throw out one more thing, though, about, that that I've heard teachers say, and that is that they feel like many days they're primarily engaged in crowd control more than education.
And, and they're very frustrated in that way. And they say, well, you know, school children are just not as able to focus as they used to be when I first started teaching. They're not as well-behaved, etc. Maybe it's impossible to know that there's there any truth to that. Do you know of whether kids have just become more harder to handle?
AK: I'm sure you love this answer, but yes and no. Okay. And so. I think those are two separate things. I think attention spans are different than behaviors. So there are certainly far more children with, attention. Issues and limitations. There are many more children who are diagnosed with ADHD than there used to be. And I can tell you from teaching in college, you know, the pandemic has really hurt, you know, generationally, student engagement.
You know, so I think that there, you know, the challenge of keeping students engaged and present, you know, physically and mentally. Yeah, it has got to be more difficult. But in terms of behavior, you know, the, you know, there's a, an annual report that, the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the federal Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Education publishes called Indicators of School Crime and Safety.
And they've been tracking, school crime and student misbehavior for, you know, for since the early 1990s. And one of the what I think is the best measures, in there, it looks at students age 12 to 18 across the country and their reported victimization rates, which can include having something stolen out of your locker to being assaulted.
And what we see is that victimization rates in recent years are a fraction. I mean, I'm talking about 20% what they were in the early 90s. Students today are much safer in schools, meaning that student misbehavior and crime is much less today than it was going back to early 90s. We saw an enormous decline throughout the late 90s and 2000.
GR: That's fascinating. You know, and I have to say it sort of fits my own experiences where I can remember when I was in high school, which was before the 90s, by the way. But, that fights were tolerated to some degree. And when my son went to high school, there just weren't. And so that I could I can see that difference.
You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Aaron Kupchik. He's a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, and he's the author of a new book titled “Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice.” And we've been discussing his book and the issues that it raises.
You know, Aaron, one thing you mentioned right before the break was how criminal behavior had declined. And one of the things that pops up in people's heads, of course, when they hear that as well, that's maybe because we started suspending or punishing more, you know, and so is that is that the reason why that happened or something else?
AK: You know, the data show that that's not the reason why that happened. And in fact, criminal behavior and misbehavior in schools directly tracks reductions in youth behaviors and communities. Right. So crime rates of youth in communities have fallen at exactly the same rate over exactly the same periods of time. So it's it's something generational. It's something about youth today, suspending kids out of school makes their individual behaviors worse, not better.
GR: Yeah. And that's that's a that's a very powerful statistic, I think. So let me ask you one specific question about, your study. And then we'll get into the history that you mentioned and also what the better alternatives would be. You take in your book two deep looks, in addition to looking at more general data, two deep looks into two school systems, one in Newcastle, Delaware, and the other one in Boston, Massachusetts.
I'm going to guess that the Delaware choice was because you were there. You could you had access, Why Boston?
AK: Well, Boston, I think works for a few reasons. You know, when this issue was first noticed, going back to the 70s, the issue of suspensions as a consequence of desegregation, and it got some attention down in the South. And a number of people back in the 70s looked at how as soon as school districts were desegregating, they started kicking kids out through out-of-school suspension, particularly Black students.
And so it was something that we knew happened initially down in the South, and I wanted to see whether it happened in other places, too. So, yes, you're right. Delaware was convenient because it was its home. But it was also an excellent case study because, I mean, the University of Delaware is right on the Mason-Dixon line.
If it were drawn straight rather than going around the state, you know, it's right in the middle of the country. It's neither North or South. And yes, I describe in the book, it's just got a fascinating, disturbing, fascinating history. Racial exclusion, you know, with some characteristics of being a northern state and some of southern, too. Boston is, you know, this northern liberal, all, you know, city with all of these, you know, academic institutions.
And so I wanted to, to look at, two other sites again, that weren't south. And I kind of crept upward, but a Mid-Atlantic and a northern side.
GR: Well, the reason why I did Boston kind of caught my eye was that it has, I think, a notorious racial history when it comes to education and, I mean, I can attest to some personal experience to the kids from Boston that I met when I went to college. And I was like, wow, that's not what I expected to hear from someone from Massachusetts.
So do you account for that, that Boston might be kind of a, you know, an extreme case? I mean, I know there's a I know there's a tradition in social science of deliberately picking things like that. But, you know, I, I don't want to get too deep in the weeds here, but just that that struck me.
AK: I don't know, the busses and extreme case, I mean, I think if you look at any city, you'll, you'll find that racism, you know, racial hostility throughout the 20th century was was everywhere. I mean, I believe that, you know, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr lived in Chicago, he described racism there. That was above and beyond what he had seen in the South.
Right. You know, and not typical in Chicago, we could look at, you know, I think almost any northern city and come away with a similar conclusion, that this is, you know, maybe think this is might be an outlier. Which means they're not outliers.
GR: One of the things I wondered, and I was curious to see if you had any, thoughts about this as is there any evidence that these suspension decisions are, formulated differently when the teachers and the administrators are not white, when they're African-American or or or brown, as opposed to if they're white?
AK: Yes. There is some research. Not a lot, but there are a number of studies that do look at punishment rates when you have teachers and it's administrators who, who are, who are Black, or African-American. And what it finds is that the punishment rates are lower than with white teachers and administrators, but they're still not equal to those that white students receive. So the problem is reduced, but not eliminated.
GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is University of Delaware professor Aaron Kupchik. Okay. So let's get into some of the historical aspects of your study and then what the better alternatives would be. So as we've already talked about a lot of your book concerns tracking this history of discrimination, drawing a line between, forced desegregation of school systems that were segregated and then suspensions as kind of a response to that. Just just track, track that out, track that connection out a little bit for us.
AK: Sure. What we see is that suspension or suspending children out of schools followed these mandatory desegregation. So what I found was that jurisdictions where they, were forced to be segregated. And I looked very carefully and in-depth at Newcastle County, Delaware's history and Boston's history of desegregation. Each of them had a desegregation effort that was the result of a lawsuit, and before the desegregation suspensions were very uncommon. They were used occasionally, but very uncommon in Boston, for example, a few years before, desegregation. Any suspension had to be approved by administrators at the district level according to their code of conduct. Right. So it was rare enough that that had that, you disagreed, estimate suspensions weren't, something that school districts reported in their data.
It wasn't something that the state Department of Education was reporting in either state. It just wasn't a focus. And when they did talk about student misbehavior and discipline, they didn't talk about suspension as a solution to that. Immediately after these schools desegregate ended and Black students entered formally, all-white schools suspensions became issue number one. Topic number one.
I spoke, for example, to two people were there on the ground at the time in each of these places. One of them, for example, J Street, who's, you know, still a Wilmington City Council member and here in Delaware told me that suspensions were unheard of in in schools before desegregation. But it was an issue the first day that students were literally getting off, the Black students were getting off the busses on day one of school to their formerly all-white school, and they were being suspended.
GR: Well, so I know that you had said earlier that when we were talking about this in the current day that, you know, teachers have a hard job. It's not like they're sitting there thinking, I'm going to suspend this Black student because they're Black. You know, it's not that. But it does sound like at the beginning there was that kind of conscious, coordinated effort.
Is that fair to say?
AK: Well, I think it's partially true, but I don't know if it's fair to say, because I wouldn't want to lump all teachers into that. There were a lot of teachers who really meant to do well, even then, back in the 70s, and they were just, you know, one, one phrase that came up from many of the people I spoke to was how unprepared the schools were.
And there was a lot going on, and there was a lot of chaos. And so certainly many teachers that were explicitly racist and did not want those Black students in their school. Others were scared. You know, which has a racial component, right? But they weren't ill-intent. Others were very well-intended. Actively wanted to do well, but just didn't have the tools or preparation.
They had pressure put on them by others. So, I wouldn't lump all teachers in on saying that. That there was intentional hostility.
GR: That's a good point. So. So let's get to the $64,000 question. Spend a lot of time on us. So. So okay. This is what we shouldn't do. What should we do? What? You know, if we want to have education happening in the classrooms, we want to be fair. We want to have the right outcomes. How should we be thinking about this differently?
AK: I think schools need to mirror functional families better. If you think about how parents good parents discipline children because that's part of parenting, they you don't kick your kid out of the family for 3 to 5 days when they do something wrong. Right. We don't suspend them out of the family. Instead, there are consequences. There's accountability. Maybe lose some privileges.
But there's there's teaching about behavior and learning, and there's acceptance that you can come back in still a full fledged family member, right? Without a label put on you that you're a troublemaker. You know, without being left behind in some way. And, and so I think we need to model that obviously schools are very different than families, and have different pressures.
And I'm not saying that every teacher needs to be the parent of each kid there. But modeling some of those efforts of how do we hold students accountable, but in ways that don't scar them, in ways that don't keep them back, right, that help them learn and move forward? You know, there are a lot of teachers out there who are amazing at doing this.
I mean, I speak to educators all the time who say they you're in they often work in areas where there are high crime rates. So we know that students are coming with with issues. Right? And they tell me, look, I build a rapport with my students and I talk to them and they trust me. And so they don't want to upset me.
And when something does come up, we talk about it and we I help them solve the problem as best I can. That's what we need to do more of now. That takes resources and time. Right. And and teachers need help doing this. It would be unfair to suggest any teacher who has a class of 40. Anytime a student is disruptive, can take ten minutes and work with that kid.
That. That's not realistic. They need help doing this. And there are programs out there. Restorative practices has grown. It is in schools. Where we try to mediate conflict. We sit down with students who do things wrong. With the people that they might have hurt or offended. They learn about why it was wrong and what they can do better.
Positive behavioral interventions and supports is another type of program that schools often do. But what I found in and across studies that I've done is that often these kinds of strategies aren't always they're not always well done. They're they're sort of add-ons, but without full investment. Right. And as long as those things exist alongside more punitive discipline, they're not going to be fully successful.
One other point I have to mention, one of the most surprising things I found in my historical research on this topic was that these strategies and these understandings, these are these are things that are typically thought of as new and progressive. They were in place before we started suspending kids. And when desegregation first happened and people noticed the rise of suspension.
This was their concern. And they said, no, you know, there are student advocates in the 70s saying, no, no, no. What we need to do is invest in schools so that they can actually mentor and counsel children. You know, we don't want to kick them out. And that will lead to these problems. So I guess what's new was old or maybe is that.
GR: Well, we've got about oh, less than a minute. And I wanted to squeeze one last question. And so I apologize. It's going to be kind of a lightning round. But you've obviously spent a lot of time talking to a lot of different people and watching things. Leave us with something that you saw that really inspired you that was positive. Give us a positive note to go out on.
AK: We have seen progress over the last ten years. More and more schools are embracing, as I said, restorative practices as positive behavioral intervention supports and other strategies. Suspension rates have gone down. I believe that, you know, most educators I speak to get it. They understand that school suspension should be a last resort. It's just how we use it and the extent to which we can build up better alternatives is the issue.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Aaron Kupchik. And again, his new book is titled “Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice.” It's a provocative and informative book on obviously a very, very difficult topic. Professor Kupchik, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciate it and I learned a lot.
AK: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be here.
Russell Shorto on the Campbell Conversations
Mar 01, 2025
Russell Shorto
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with author and historian Russell Shorto, director of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical Society. Shorto discusses his new book, "Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America."
Program Transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Russell Shorto. He's the director of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical Society, and the author of a number of popular books, including “The Island at the Center of the World.” He's with me today to discuss his new book. It's titled “Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.”
Mr. Shorto, welcome to the program.
Russell Shorto: Thank you very much, Grant. Thanks for having me.
GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. It's a very interesting book. And let me just start with sort of a basic build-up question, and we'll get into some of the other things after that. So you're telling the story of the 1664 English takeover of Manhattan from the Dutch in that, as my understand, it resulted in the name New York. And then you're talking about the importance of that and the importance of the city, sort of over time and, and through American culture. And so I would want you in politics as well. And I, I would like you to set the stage for us. I mean, what was going on at that time with the Dutch and the English and how did Manhattan and what would become New York fit into that context for them?
RS: Okay. We're talking about the 1600s here. So I think most Americans think of colonial history as the 1700s. But there was a whole century before, when the English established, the Puritan colonies and the pilgrim colony in New England, and they established some settlements also in Virginia and Maryland. But in between that whole section of the eastern seaboard, the Dutch planted the colony of New Netherland, which encompassed all or part of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, part of Pennsylvania. And its capital was New Amsterdam, at the tip of Manhattan Island. The two sides, the English and the Dutch, were bitter rivals in the 1600s. And the English were particularly bitter because the Dutch were, like ahead of them at everything. The Dutch built up this trading empire that, you know, they were the envy of Europe. So, that's kind of the backdrop.
And the Dutch colony lasted 40 years. And it really, in particular the city of New Amsterdam and Manhattan, they built this, this, center of capitalism, what we would call capitalism. The word didn't exist then. And, and, it was pluralistic. There were at least 18 languages spoken. And this became part of the envy, part of what the English envied.
GR: Interesting. And so you've got also when this conflict or this rivalry really comes to a head in and the control of Manhattan, you've got basically two commanders in the field, essentially, staring each other down. And what's interesting in the story is they kind of go off script, right? I mean, they, they take matters into their own hands. Tell us about that.
RS: Yeah, exactly. I, you know, I write narrative history. So I, I think of myself more as a storyteller than a historian. I always, you know, it's a strange thing, but people, when they're trying to compliment me and they say, “Oh, I read your book. I learned so much.” It sort of annoys me. I would rather that I would rather they said, “Oh, I just started reading it. I couldn't stop, you know, I it's the story that interest me.” So I look for conflict. I look for two individuals in conflict. And here you have a situation and this is the late summer of 1664. You have these English warships in the harbor in what became New York Harbor, pointing their cannons at this fort at the tip of Manhattan.
And in the fort they have their cannons pointed at these ships. So you can't get more conflict than that, but that they're ready to go at it. But as you say, they go off script and that is that's really the story that I tell in the book.
GR: Well, tell us a little bit more about what they do. Tell us what? Give us that story.
RS: So that, Richard Nichols was the commander for the British. He was sent on this mission to take this piece of the this desired piece of the eastern seaboard of North America from the Dutch. And he was the ships were filled to the brim with, you know, gunpowder and everything they needed. So he was ready to blast away.
Nichols had done his homework in London, and as I said, the Dutch were the envy of Europeans. And people had gotten to know that New Amsterdam this, you know, in the middle of nowhere. Was this intriguing place where they were doing business, this little, you know, kind of Wild West, or you might say Wild East Town was doing business with the Caribbean, West Africa, Europe.
So he was intrigued and he wanted to he didn't want just the real estate. He wanted the the secret sauce. And the secret sauce was in the people, the this mixed community of 18, 20 languages. So he wanted somehow to get it in such a way that they would come with it. Now, on the other side, Peter Stuyvesant was this very savvy leader of the Dutch colony.
And he his situation was he had been trying for years to get the Dutch government to give more support to this colony. He'd been saying, look, we're right beside this continent of North America. We can we can exploit it. But you have to send more people. You have to send soldiers. And they just ignored him. So he was at his wit's end.
So what happened was these two guys started to talk. They started to send messengers on rowboats back and forth.
GR: Interesting. And so so what is the ultimate outcome, then, of those of those negotiations?
RS: I should add that, on the English side, England in the 17th century was this will sound familiar, a deeply polarized society. You had the Puritans who essentially were religious extremists who wanted, a religious take over the government. They wanted a theocratic rule. They wanted to, you know, outlaw dancing and card playing and all kinds of things.
So you had them and then you had basically everybody else, and they everybody else was grouped under the monarchy. So they were the royalists, whether or not they particularly cared about the monarchy, they fought this bitter civil war. The king was beheaded. The his sons, the princes went into exile. Then eventually they come back and, they now are in charge again.
So they're looking at North America, and they see these Puritan colonies in New England that have been there for decades. So they're the enemies basically still, and they see the Dutch in this real estate that they want. So they send Nichols in this, this flotilla, to do two things to, to take this Dutch colony and then to make the Puritans fall into line.
And Nichols succeeds in the first. But in the second, he fails utterly because the Puritans based in Boston were very strong. They could, you know, they had an ocean protecting them from England. They could care less. They were minting their own coins and, you know, and they had this very, rigorous and violent, government that persecuted anybody who wasn't of their sect and so on.
So that was the that's what, the dynamics got set up here.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Russell Shorto, who has a new book out titled “Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.” Well, so what you were saying there at the end is really what I wanted to ask you a couple deeper questions about.
And just to go to the title of your book, it's, it's that last phrase “and Shaped America” that I really want to focus in on. And I think you're getting into it now, when you talk about that split between the Puritans and the non-Puritans and England, and then how the non-Puritans, in a way, was, were reflected in some of the aspects of that culture that the Dutch had established already there in what would become Manhattan in New York City.
So so I wanted to hear more about that, because you were one of your arguments in the book, is that this moment was, as you already talked about. It's part of a much larger split in England and the colonies, but that it that it's reverberated through time, that that we can track a lot of things back to this.
So say a little bit more about that. I'd like to hear about that.
RS: So the deal that, the Dutch and English, leaders who are about to go to war with each other instead they, they, they, hash out this deal and the deal is basically Nichols, the Englishman doesn't really understand what the Dutch have. You know, nobody has heard of capitalism and the way that works. And, and, and in Europe, a tolerant society that allows for many different religions and languages was unheard of almost.
So he doesn't get it, but he knows that it works. So he wants to keep that. So the deal is the Dutch will keep their features of of a tolerant society. They will. So the agreement they sign, it says everyone who's here, whatever your your background, your language, you can you'll keep your house, you'll keep your business.
By all means, keep your trade networks in Europe and everywhere, because we want you to stay. We want you to, and but the one caveat is going to be it's now going to be an English town. And we're going to call it New York after the Duke of York, the brother of the King. So that was what they did.
And they and the reason they were able to do this was because these English and the Dutch had a lot in common. They were pragmatic, they were relatively tolerant. And tolerance, you have to say relative. Obviously, you know, there's slavery here. Tolerance did not apply to Africans. It didn't apply to native people. But relatively tolerant. They believed in global trade and business.
Whereas the Puritans based in Boston were a very different, came from a very different, cut. They were, you know, these religious, intolerant, their way or the highway kind of thing. So that then that's established as New York. Okay, there's New York and here's Boston, and the Puritans don't go anywhere. And what I'm what I sketch out then at the end of the book is that dynamic is going to slowly reverberate through American history, because we've got two centers of ideology.
One is outward looking, pragmatic, the other is more inward-looking, more, it becomes sort of America first, you know, that becomes, you know, the Puritans saw America as the promised land. And in the 19th century, that becomes manifest destiny. We have a God-given right to take over the continent. So you see that those two, ways of thinking throughout American history, I mean, obviously Boston, you don't think of today as like a Puritan stronghold, but, so the geography changes.
But in the lead up to the Civil War, you've got, you know, what they're arguing about, is slavery, the, the morality of slavery and whether it should extend as the country moves westward. Then that breaks out into the Civil War, then reconstruction, which is basically fails because they fail to resolve these differences.
And then that moves straight into the 20th century. You in the civil rights movement, all the protests around that, and then even into our time, gay rights and all the, you know, controversy over, trans rights and pronouns. And, I mean, all of this is from one side, it's the, the continuing unfolding of freedom that came with the American Revolution.
But from the other side, it's this is, you know, sort of violation against our moral code. And, you know, ideas are hard to track. It's like trying to track, you know, atoms or something. But I still think it's worthwhile because you try to figure out who we are and where we came from. And that's what I think is an interesting trail.
GR: Well, and so I'm glad you brought that up, because that was exactly the thing that I was having the toughest time wrapping my head around. And so I, I, I'll wait to put sort of my $64,000 question to you until I ask this other one, because you talked about, the Civil War and I one of the things I thought about was you characterized New York as sort of keeping its pragmatic Dutch, you know, diverse, multicultural aspect, more tolerant.
And then Boston being more purely Puritan, more strident and reformist. I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that during the Civil War, it was New York City that, saw a lot of support for trying to preserve the peace, preserve the union in any cost and New York was where you had these big draft riots and resistance to the Civil War, whereas New England and I'm thinking of like the burned over district, up here in upstate where you had, you know, stridently abolitionists, which I think were associated with this Puritan tradition.
And so in that sense, it's the it's it's a would that be fair to say that it's that it's that sort of different way of thinking in New York that led them to be less enthusiastic about the idea of, of, of, you know, sending hundreds of thousands of people to die for this cause?
RS: I think, you know what I, what I, suggested a minute ago, the geography really changes. And New York, New York City in the Civil War becomes its own thing, which is a really strange thing. It, you know, the, Fernando Wood was the mayor at the time, I think, and he put forth this idea that New York City should stay out of the war altogether, secede, and become its own republic, called Tri-Insula. The three islands, Long Island, Manhattan, and Staten Island.
Because New York, he thought, you know, I mean, New York, was all about trade. And they wanted to be able to do business with both sides and that. So that's, you know, the when I'm talking about these ideologies, the geographies switch. Of course, by the time by the time of the revolution, New England, where you associate with revolution with, quote freedom and and they then look back to the, the Puritans as having sought freedom from England.
But the, the the funny thing about that, it's a little bit of playing with semantics, because when the Puritans came, yeah, they were seeking religious freedom, but only for themselves. And they persecuted others who were who wanted to settle among them. So, you know, there I think the revolutionaries, a century later, kind of, you know, reading between the lines a little bit.
GR: Yeah. Interesting. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Russell Shorto is the director of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical Society, and the author of a new book titled “Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.” And we've been discussing his book, So you use the term Christian nationalism to describe the Puritan set of beliefs, right? Is that…
RS: Well, nationalism? I mean, they weren't thinking in terms of a nation. I was kind of reading later history back into that.
GR: Okay. All right. But you make an association between. Right. Okay. All right. So this is what I'm wrapping my arms around. So is so is Donald Trump the Puritan here? I mean, how do, how do we or or is he a distant echo of a Puritan or. I don't know, I mean, he seems in some ways to be the embodiment of this Dutch way of thinking, you know, just just one, one actor among 100 possible models.
RS: Grant, I wrote a book set 400 years ago. I could, you know, if you want to stretch, you know, it's pull and push and pull. That's good. And I know I'll go along and play along with you, but, you know, I would acknowledge that we are really stretching, stretching these, these notions pretty far. But I think, you know, I think Trump, played into the Puritan, the America first, you know, Make America Great Again, the religious right, that whole side of the equation, which, as I'm arguing, goes back to the Puritans. He plays into that. To what extent he himself is a true believer in that, you know, that's that's anybody's guess.
GR: And certainly in terms of tolerance and that kind of thing, I can see the I can, I can see the, the connections. Well. Let me I'm a political scientist, so you're going to have to forgive the Donald Trump questions and the other kind of questions here. But but, the when I was thinking about this notion of the divide that you identified here and the aspects of the way of thinking about, culture and, and thinking about what's right and thinking about being on missions and America first, that kind of thing.
I started to think about other deep divides in the country that are both old and more recent. That came to my mind, and I was thinking about, well, to go back to like the time of the founding, you had this sort of like, Roman republican tradition and ideas that the founders participated in. But then you had more of these capitalist, individualist, Scottish enlightenment that would be kind of more in line with the Dutch, I think, in that sense.
So you have that that, I was thinking of, first half of the 20th century divides over what's the right role of national government in our domestic affairs? You know, the political arguments you've heard during a time of the New Deal and then second half of the 20th century and into the one we're in now, divides over race and identity and inclusion and how those things should be thought of.
So I know that you are hesitant about taking something that long ago and connecting it to today, but can you help me think about how to place the divide that you've identified, which is very compelling in line with some of these other things over time? How how might this play out?
RS: I think that we're all, you know, it's our mutual inheritance. Is the Enlightenment and the and the Enlightenment we think of again as the 1700s. But the Dutch Enlightenment of the 1600s is what spawned the wider European Enlightenment. So these ideas are very much in the air and animating, in this case the Dutch, and and among that is this notion of liberalism, meaning liberalism as a, as a broad philosophy of individual freedom.
And so I think most people today, that's part of their makeup. The, the, the crux, though, is how you choose to apply it. You know, today, people on the left would say we believe in freedom for all. That's why we think, you know, if you're trans or or you're gay or whatever you are. Whereas people on the right would say no, we believe in individual freedom.
And that's why, you know, you're persecuting us with your pronouns and all that. So, you know, that's where, you know, but I think the important thing from history, from way back history, is that this is all our mutual inheritance. And I would add, maybe that it kind of feels like that broader in inheritance, which is foundational to all of us, is under attack these days, you know, with kind of, tendencies toward dictatorships and that sort of thing in the air.
GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is the writer and historian Russell Shorto. So, this might seem like a, really bizarre question, but what I, as a political scientist and a political scientist in New York, and upstate, I've paid a lot of attention to the division between upstate and downstate, politically and also culturally.
But certainly, it's a big issue you know, in Albany. And so I'm, I'm wondering if this kind of split that you're talking about that happened all these many years ago isn't mirrored, in a way, in the split between upstate and downstate, because upstate has it seems to me again, I'm thinking of the, the abolitionists and the the, the, all the religious movements, like the millwrights and, you know, all the rest of it that came out of upstate, the Mormon, among others.
And, and then contrast that with, again, this sort of more pluralist, inclusive kind of mentality of downstate. I don't know if there's anything there that you think is worth pulling out, but.
RS: Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. And, you know, as you were asking me that, I was thinking, you know, one thing that I'm curious about, if Andrew Cuomo declares candidacy for mayor of New York, you know, he's associated with the state as a whole and being governor. How are New York, how are the people in New York City going to feel about that kind of thing?
I have spent, most I've spent a lot of time upstate in Albany. And not just, you know, Albany as the capital, but just with the town. So I have a pretty. And I used to live in the city long ago. So I have a, you know, my own personal sense of that vibe and the differences.
And one thing that I would say is interesting, that goes all the way back is in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, the the capital was New Amsterdam. So Manhattan, the second city, was, which then became Albany, because James, the Duke of York, was also the Duke of Albany. And so and Beaver was important as the name kind of suggests, Beaver Town, because that's where they traded with the native people for furs from the Mohawk River Valley.
And then they'd go down to Manhattan. But you had that. You had this tension between those two cities even then, that are 150 miles of wilderness between them. But you had this, you know, and the people in Albany kind of, you know, they were they were more rural back country. They were more Dutch at a time when Manhattan was this polyglot, urban kind of place.
And they were more like the real, you know, we’re the real keepers of morals and all that. So you had those that divide even then.
GR: Yeah. It's interesting. So we got about three minutes left, maybe a little less. And I want to try, if I can, to kind of squeeze in three questions. So this is going to be more of our sort of pseudo lightning round, if you will, for the first one is New York, as you well know, is often called the capital of the world.
And, you know, to, invoke your previous book, “The Island at the Center of the World,” with the rise of China and also some of the dramatic changes in communication technology in recent decades, do you think that New York is going to remain that way? In say 50 years from now? Will we be still calling it the capital of the world, do you think?
RS: Okay, well, I have to be short in my answers and I'll say, no, I can't see how because, you know, but what I the point I make in this book is that, New York, you could say, was the first modern city for all these reasons. And what's interesting is that template has been copied now all over the world, even in places that are sort of, autocratic in cities like, you know, Moscow or Beijing or something like that.
They have this vibe of of that. But no, I don't I think that will change. And it's kind of changing before our eyes.
GR: And the other two questions are more personal in terms of your own relationship with the city, because obviously you know it very well and you know its history very well. The first one is what part or area or place in today's New York most connects you to the past.
RS: Oh that's eastern I used to live in the East Village, and when my daughter was a toddler, I would take her to the churchyard of Saint Mark's in the Bowery to run around and play. And that's where Peter Stephenson's tomb was. And that's how I first connected with all this. So when I'm in the East Village, I. I feel like I'm back home.
GR: Interesting. And did that did that get you started on some of these travels that.
RS: Me started on that that way I got to Charlie Gehring, the translator of the archives in Albany, and that got me on. That's what I've been on that track ever since, basically.
GR: Wow. Serendipitous. And and and maybe this is going to be the same answer then, but let's say you can't use that answer again. What is your own, personal favorite place to be in New York and why?
RS: My favorite place to be, you know, I like, I like walking on Broadway, which is still has a grittiness, still has, kind of, you know, I like walking along the river, of course, Riverside Drive and looking across at New Jersey, even though that's not that's not New Jersey and not New York there. I like a lot of, you know, I'm, I'm most comfortable, most familiar with Manhattan, but now my, my kids live one in Brooklyn and one in Queens. So I'm becoming more familiar with Astoria and and, Flatbush. And so, you know, I'm discovering the city through them.
GR: Okay. So, so the the past is the future, in a way. We'll have to leave it there. That was Russell Shorto. And again, his new book is titled “Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.” If you think you know New York and its significance to the country, you'll want to read this book to read and learn the full story.
But Mr. Shorto, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. A lot of fun.
RS: Thank you, Grant. It was fun.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Alexander Marion on the Campbell Conversations
Feb 22, 2025
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Syracuse City Auditor Alexander Marion. He was elected to the position as a Democrat in November 2023. Prior to that, he served on the staffs of State Senator Michael Gianaris and Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner.
Catherine Herrold on the Campbell Conversations
Feb 16, 2025
(Syracuse University)
USAID has been in the news more lately than at any point since its founding during the John F. Kennedy administration. What exactly does the government agency do? How does it fit with all U.S. foreign aid? Could its work be done more efficiently elsewhere? This week, Grant Reeher talks with Catherine Herrold, a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School, and an expert on USAID.
Julian Zelizer on the Campbell Conversations
Feb 08, 2025
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Julian Zelizer, a Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and the author of the new book, "In Defense of Partisanship."
Rachel May and Will Barclay on the Campbell Conversations
Feb 01, 2025
Will Barclay / Rachel May
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Governor Kathy Hochul has given her State of the State address and presented her budget for the year. Back with me today on the program to provide reactions to that and also offer a preview of the legislative session are New York State Senator Rachel May and Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay. Senator May represents the state's 48th Senate District and leader Barclay represents the 120 Assembly District. Leader Barclay and Senator May welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you both.
Rachel May: Thank you.
Will Barclay: Thanks for having me on.
GR: Well, thank you, thank you both for making the time. Senator May, I'll start with you. A very basic question, and if you could be brief, I'd appreciate it. But what do you think are the most significant new initiatives that the governor has set forward here in the State of the State and also the budget?
RM: So, I'm pleased that she's leaning into issues about both affordability and child poverty. Obviously, here and in central New York and Syracuse in particular, child poverty is a major issue. So the fact that she wants to expand the child tax credit to continue putting some specific money into Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo for fighting child poverty, universal school lunches, all of those are really important measures, I think, to help lift our kids out of poverty and make life more affordable for parents raising children. Her child care initiatives, I think, are great, but I haven't really seen the money being put behind it. So I feel like that's one where we need to fight for more investment to realize some of those child care savings that she's promising. But I would say on those fronts, it's a pretty exciting budget or at least a budget plan. I would say for agriculture she's done some really good things with dairy farm sustainability, with investing in farm worker housing, a number of the agricultural products that we produce here locally, like maple syrup, she's leaning into as well. So I feel like those are good things. On housing we need to do, I think more than she's proposing, but at least she's proposing some things that I've been calling for, like a revolving fund for housing construction. So, you know, on balance, I think it's a pretty good budget for some of the really key critical issues that we need to be pushing for.
GR: And Leader Barclay, as you took all this in, what was front of mind for you in both what you've set forward in State of the State and the budget?
Will Barclay: Well, in the State of the State, I was, after the State of the State I was pretty complimentary, oddly enough, with the governor because she did what Senator May said. She talked about the issues that seem to be important to New Yorkers and certainly were key issues in this past election. That's affordability and crime. So I was pleased, you know, she talked about it, she talked about a middle class tax cut, which we certainly would support. She talked about the child tax credit, which is a bill that we've had in the assembly that interestingly has been blocked by the assembly majority over the last few years, but hopefully now that the governor's proposed it, maybe they'll look at it in a different view, a different light. So I was happy with that. However, and she also talked about the rebate program, which is a little inefficient, about taking our money and giving it back to taxpayers. But in my mind, any time we're giving money back to the taxpayers, I think it's probably a positive thing that I could support. But then we got to her budget address and it was curious because I was very quiet about how much she was going to talk about spending and she blew the doors out. The budget proposal that she has, which is usually the lowest starting point in this whole budget process, is $252 billion. It's an 8% increase on state funds, I think seven point on all funds percent. And, you know, that's simply the trajectory that I've talked about on this show, I talk about anywhere I go that New York cannot afford to continue on. And I know revenue has been coming in pretty well in this state, but it doesn't seem like there's a political will, either governor or the two majorities to cut taxes. And ultimately, the problem is we're losing people in New York State because it's too expensive to live here. And I didn't see much in this budget other than those few things I mentioned that's going to change that trajectory. So I was sort of disappointed in her budget address. The $252 billion, we're going to be, you know, we spend the most and tax most of any citizens in the United States. And it simply it's just not a system that we can continue on with.
GR: Well, you've anticipated the question I always ask at this time of the year of the two of you or others. And Senator May, I'll kind of just channel what Leader Barclay just said and say, I did want to get your reaction to sort of the big picture of the budget, you know, putting it in context because when you think about specific programs like the ones that you mentioned, you know, it is compelling. I mean, you know, there are good things that you want to do with those things. But, you know, it is this, if my understanding is, it's another record high budget and New York is always on the top or near the top of the list of tax burden relative to other states. The last time I checked, we are still projected to have outmigration from the state that, you know, may cost us another congressional seat the next time we do a census. So, I mean, Senator May, how should New Yorkers be viewing the state's spending and the future trajectory of the state spending from kind of this bigger picture? I don't know if there's a crisp question there, but you have the specific programs that are compelling, but when you look at the whole thing, it does seem like there's a problem.
RM: Well, I will say we are actually being very fiscally responsible, not like increasing deficits or that kind of thing. We have a lot more money to handle some of the real problems in the state because we increased, we made modest increases on the super wealthy a few years ago, everybody predicted that they would all move out of the state when we did that. But in fact, we have more millionaires and billionaires in the state now than we had before, and they are way wealthier than they were before. So that's one of the reasons why the state is bringing in more funds. And honestly, the Republicans in the Senate complain about this every year and then they say, and why don't we have more money for this, this, this, this and this? So it's like, everybody wants more money. We are facing a situation where the Trump administration is probably going to take away a lot of funds that we have depended on, like for Medicaid. And so we have to be making investments now that we can make so that we can put ourselves in a position to weather the storm that is coming, because we can certainly expect to be in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. I do think some of the investments are really good ones. The $200 million for upstate, we were asking for more than that, but I'm glad she put that in there for upstate. I think, you know, really thinking about ways to beef up our infrastructure, get us in position to weather both the climate storms that are approaching and the political storms that are approaching. I think this is a smart way to spend the money.
GR: I want to come back to the Medicaid issue, you brought up something that that I did want to pursue, but Leader Barclay, I’ll come back to you. The senator mentioned the extra tax on millionaires and my understanding is that this calls for the earlier, I guess, renewal of that tax before it was set to expire. Is that, what is your view on that? I mean, would it be possible would it be smart to double down on that effort and to and to really try to get more money out of the very, very wealthiest in New York State? Because, particularly downstate, the senator is right, we've got a lot of those people. New York City has a high concentration of them relative to other parts of the country. So is that one way to go?
WB: Well, first of all, I've never seen a tax that's been instituted in New York State that doesn't continue on. So, which, the Senator is talking about is altering the millionaire's tax so it's put on when we had a fiscal crisis. And oh, we’ll just put it on a few years, but lo and behold, we're not a fiscal crisis now, apparently. But guess what? We're going to take the sunset off and extend that tax going forward. Now, the Senator points out that there's, you know, millionaires and billionaires in the state and they may have increased, but everything's increased. And New York State is growing those millionaires and billionaires at a lower rate than any other state in the country. So, you know, they may not be leaving, but they are leaving New York State. And to further things, the more dependent you get on these wealthy people to cover your revenue requirements in the state, you know, you can just lose a couple of them and that becomes a huge hole in your budget that, in fact, that happened in New York City just a few years ago when, you know, there were something like 29 billionaires were responsible for something like 35%, 40% of New York City's budget. A couple of them left and they had some real deficits on it. So again, it's just not a sustainable system going forward, we have to look at ways. For instance, the governor says on the rebate program, sales tax, we, because inflation, the state's got a windfall from sales tax, which is great. But why don't we look at reducing sales tax? There is a so-called regressive tax that I would think some of the Democrats would want to look at to maybe ease the burden on that. But no, we don't want to do that, we'll just take your money and hand it back, and not back to everybody, just a few, you know, some of the people we, you know, we want to try to be helpful to. So to me, again, it's just more tax and spend more tax and spend in New York. And we're going to just end up with the same results that we've been seeing with people flocking out of our state, unfortunately.
RM: We actually have the lowest middle class tax rates in 70 years and we have been cutting those. And one of the reasons is because we've been able to, you know, have the super wealthy pay a little bit more of their fair share. We have a situation in America where the richest few have gotten infinitely richer. Our state budget is about one Jeff Bezos this year and about 1.6 of a Elon Musk. And we we're seeing people get extremely wealthy and we're seeing ordinary people just falling behind and falling behind. And so we're trying to make the investments in reversing that trend here in New York State. And so far, it's, you know, this budget, I think, shows that that's working to some extent.
WB: One thing I'd ask is, are people leaving New York State because their taxes aren't high enough? Are they leaving New York State because, you know, the cost to live here? They're leaving New York because there is an affordable crisis. They're going to states with lower tax burdens. I mean, it just is evident, it's happening. So we're just going to continue on that same path that we've been on? It doesn't, you know, the facts are the facts.
RM: Most of the evidence is people are leaving because housing is too expensive and we don't have enough of it. And so the more we have more and more housing, the better. But, you know, we've got all these difficulties with local governments refusing to permit more housing, with, you know, zoning codes that are so restrictive that we, it's really hard to build more housing. And so that revolving fund money, the whole point of that is to make it more affordable for developers to build more housing so that they can get the housing that we need.
WB: I think we ought to look at the costs of why housing is so expensive in New York. Developers don't want to take the risk because it's incredibly hard to build a new house in New York. Even upstate is really, really expensive because we put all these requirements on these developers to do it. You know, it's just getting worse instead of better. We now want, you know, heat pumps in every house. Looks like it's going to be $26,000 more money if you require that. So it's just one thing after another in New York State that makes no one want to take the risk of developing housing. That's one of the reasons we have high housing costs.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with New York State Senator Rachel May and New York State Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay. And we've been having a very spirited discussion about the upcoming legislative session and the larger picture of spending and the size of government in New York State. Senator May, before the break, you wanted to get in (what) leader Barclay had been focusing on, the number of regulations and new requirements that the state puts on housing as a major contributor to its increase in costs, because developers don't want to take that risk unless they know they're going to get a certain kind of return and just making it more expensive itself to build the houses. That makes sense to me, just thinking of some of my own personal experiences, but you had a response that you wanted to make to that.
RM: Yeah, well, I agree about the regulation, and that's why I have carried several bills that are designed to reduce the kinds of regulations that make it really expensive to build housing. We have one, and the governor picked it up in her budget, it's about the environmental review process for multifamily housing, which is, you know, there are really good reasons to not want to be damaging wetlands or having toxins in the soils or something where you're building housing and I definitely think we need to keep that kind of environmental review. But the review process has been so onerous and has opened projects to lawsuits to such an extent that it becomes almost impossible to build multi-family housing in infill areas, places where there's already public transportation, for example, or walkable communities that the lawsuits that they get hit with are so frequent. And they delay the projects so much that a lot of times they just don't get built and the developers end up building sprawl development way out in a cornfield somewhere, which is not good for the environment either. So we are trying to streamline that and the governor agrees that we should do that. I had a bill last year that got put in the budget that was about new configurations of multifamily housing that make it easier to build more affordable housing and more pleasant kinds of housing for families. So we're working on some of those regulations. I think something like the heat pumps, if we can electrify the buildings, in the long run they will be much cheaper to operate and safer. We won't have all of the dangers of gas in the houses. So you know, sometimes things are more expensive, but in general, I think we are working on the regulations to make it affordable to build more housing.
GR: Okay, I want to get into two big issues with the time we have left. Leader Barclay, I'll ask you my Medicaid question. When I've looked at the New York Medicaid program, it really is mind boggling because of the per capita expense of this program that we have in this state. And it's double or more than double that of California, which just blew my mind when I first realized that. So it's obviously a huge part of the budget. And my impression, though, is that neither party is really serious about doing any serious thinking about how you would go about trimming that back. You hear about waste, fraud and abuse, but at some point some hard decisions are going to get made. And I just, you know, every year when this budget comes out, I see the Medicaid part. Does your party have any plan for doing something about that?
WB: Well, one, I would totally agree with you, Grant. The idea that trying to find a solution to the Medicaid growth is very difficult because it's going to take those hard decisions to make. And unfortunately, you know, we've made some decisions over the last decade or so. Where, just increased the idea, let’s just increase Medicaid programs as much as we could in New York because we would get the federal reimbursement for that, with no guarantee that that was always going to be the case. And maybe in the future, the Medicaid federal portion is going to go down, what are we going to do with that? We have, you know, really high levels of income to still, you know, still qualify for Medicaid in New York. There's been a huge increase over the last, since, I guess, you know, maybe the last six or seven years. And then, you know, every health care organization is dependent on those Medicaid dollars. So somewhere along the line we’ve got to look at it. And it's not incentivizing the right efficiencies in the system because there is ultimately going to be winners and losers in that. And when there's winners and losers, those (unintelligible) get very, very difficult. But, you know, that's what we need leadership from the governor. She probably needs to spend some political capital, and is probably going to go against some of her constituencies that don't want to see that. But, you know, if she could do that, I would be with her. If that meant the overall lowering the tax and spend budget she has.
GR: So, Senator, May, it's tough to talk about this without really getting into the policy weeds and I'll try to summarize what I'm about to say as quickly as I can. But you mentioned something that really caught my attention, which was a concern that you have that under Trump, the federal portion of Medicaid is going to go down and that's going to hurt New York State and it will hurt a lot of other, “blue” states. Prior to Obamacare, this is what I understand, prior to Obamacare, the reimbursement to the states varied from 50% to 75% depending on the states. New York was in the 50% category, so it's a 50/50 split. But then the extra part of Medicaid to bring all the states up, and New York was already pretty high, that part the federal government has paid all or most of that additional expense. I think I've got that about right. So I'm very curious, though, what are you worried about that the Trump administration's going to go after here in this Medicaid formula?
RM: Well, reproductive health first and foremost, but also just in general, they are trying to figure out how to cut federal support for the poor, for people they don't like, whether it's immigrants or LGBTQ folks. So they are strategically trying to figure out how to attack the groups that they have gained so much political capital by demonizing. And we are worried about that. I was at an event yesterday, the Bipartisan Pro-Choice Caucus in the legislature, which isn't actually bipartisan, had a series of presentations from experts about the kinds of ways that both executive orders and taking advantage of right wing judges who are making really extreme decisions in different ways that the administration can really interrupt our ability to offer the kinds of reproductive health care that our population expects.
GR: So and then Leader Barclay, I'll bring you in on something related to this. But, so the way I understand what you're saying then is, the strategy is going to be going after covering certain kinds of things that are related to these other groups or, in that way, then putting federal restrictions on if you're getting Medicaid dollars, you can't spend them on X, Y, and Z and it comes back to that. And so that's going to be the mechanism then, rather than just, we're going to go from 50%, I thought maybe you were saying there's going to be an effort to say we're going to change your formula from 50% to 40% or 30%.
RM: Well, we don’t know. How can we possibly know? Their stock in trade is throwing curve balls and making it impossible to plan ahead. So my expectation is that that kind of change can't happen as fast as some of the other changes that they're making. But, you know, it wouldn't be this year's budget, but next year's budget that it would affect. But we'll see.
GR: Okay, interesting. I'd be stunned to see if you could get the change in the formula writ large across the board, through the Senate. But I understand what you're talking about in terms of targeting, you know, certain kinds of procedures that then are to the benefit of certain people. But Leader Barclay, I want to bring you in on this. More generally, what the senator is talking about relates to this more general point, more generally after Trump was elected in November, there was a conversation in a lot of states, mostly among Democrats, about whether the states are going to form a resistance, you know, what's going to be done in in light of this, and even some competition you know, who's going to be the leader of it? Is it going to be Gavin Newsom in California is going to be Kathy Hochul in New York? What's your sense of where the mindset is now? Is this is New York going to be sort of a fortress of resistance? And if that's the case, if that's what you're getting from the governor or other leaders, is there a danger there of kind of putting yourself in such stark opposition to the presidency?
WB: No doubt. You know, I was pleased right after the election that it seemed the governor softened, maybe her former viewpoints on the president, but now she seems to be ramping that back up. You know, I always think it's best to try to work with somebody before you start attacking them. We just got through an election where the president won, you know, not only the electoral vote, but won the popular vote. So clearly, there is a move in this country that people want change. They want change from the last four years of the Biden administration. It seems to me the president ran on a bunch of these things and he's acting on those things currently. So, New York could, I guess, try to put up some, I don't know what specifically you would do, but some try to Trump-proof New York. But I think you do that your own political peril. And I'm not sure New Yorkers are so in agreement for trying to Trump-proof New York.
GR: Well, Senator May we've got about a minute and a half left. I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that, I mean because it sounds like you see yourself as part of this resistance. Can you talk a little bit about kind of the strategy and how it might end up benefiting the state rather than hurting the state?
RM: Yeah, well, let me start by saying we had this interview two years ago together, and Leader Barclay said that Trump was a thing of the past, that we didn't have to think about him anymore, that he was so damaged by the by the January 6th insurrection that we were going to move on from him and I feel like we are in this ‘Alice in Wonderland’ kind of rabbit hole situation where responsible Republicans are refusing to hold him accountable in any possible way. He wasn't held accountable for that, he hasn't been held accountable for appointing really dangerous people to his cabinet. It looks like the Senate is going to cave on those appointees. And so we are…
WB: How about the people, Senator, how about the people that voted for Trump?
RM: Sorry?
WB: How about the majority of Americans who voted for Trump? He won the popular vote.
RM: He didn’t get a majority, he got a plurality.
WB: Plurality. He won more votes than Kamala Harris.
RM: Right. And so many people were saying…
WB: Because they’re dumb? They don’t know what they’re talking about?
RM: …really going to do what he says he’s going to do, we’re just going to vote for him because he’s…
WB: We’re dumb. We’re dumb, we don’t know what he’s going to do, but we just want change?
RM: No, but like, he kept saying he was going to bring down grocery prices and then almost the instant he was elected, he said, well, honestly, I can't really do that. So he was presenting a set of policies that he couldn't actually carry out.
GR: I hate to I hate to do this, but we…
WB: Unlike Kamala Harris, who was, she was being truthful and honest about everything she ran on and people are just, they just got caught up in the whole thing and they didn't know what they were doing, so they voted for Trump because he was, fooled everybody. Is that, was that the sort of idea?
GR: Well, I am sure the two of you, at this point I am sure the two of you are not going to find common ground on this president.
WB: No.
GR: But I do appreciate both of you making the time, we'll have to leave it there. Obviously, the next year is going to bring up a lot of strong political feelings and views and we saw those here today. That was New York State Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay and New York State Senator Rachel May. I want to thank both of you for taking time and I want to wish you both good luck with this session. It sounds like one way or another it's going to be interesting. So thanks to both of you.
WB: Thanks for having me on.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Rep. John Mannion on the Campbell Conversations
Jan 24, 2025
<i>Congressman John W. Mannion (NY-22) outside his Washington, D.C. office</i>( <i>Office of Congressman John W. Mannion </i>)
One of the most competitive, watched and costly congressional elections last November was right here in central New York, in the 22nd Congressional District, where Democrat John Mannion defeated incumbent Rep. Brandon Williams. This week, Grant Reeher talks with Rep. Mannion about his transition from state Senator to member of Congress, his early impressions of the House, and the beginning of President Donald Trump's second term.
Program Transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Last November, right here in Syracuse in one of the most closely watched congressional races in the entire country. New York's 22nd district, Democratic state Senator John Mannion defeated first-term incumbent Republican Brandon Williams. My guest today is that newly minted Congressman John Mannion. The 22nd district 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 and congratulations.
John Mannion: Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to be on Grant.
GR: We really appreciate you making the time. I know you're really busy getting up to speed here, so let me just ask you a first basic question. How is the transition going?
JM: I'm enjoying it. You know, it's really been a great experience. Obviously there's a lot to do. I was a state senator and we had to shut down an Albany office and a Syracuse office. And then we are kicking into gear hiring staff. Many of my, staff at the state Senate are with me. Some new folks and certainly some people who have experience here in DC. So I think the the biggest things in the first, from Election Day to now would be a hiring staff, getting the offices up and running. And I will say that, you know, everybody that comes on board has to get an official, email address before they can start communicating with constituents. That seems like a small thing, but it doesn't happen on day one. Doesn't happen the day they sign the papers. So while we're getting our office, going here in Syracuse, which it is, and our website is up. So I encourage everybody who has a constituent case or concern or whatever it might be, to please contact us. And then we will have a Utica office as well, which is a part of this process where we have a goal date of March 31st at the latest. But as far as the team goes, we've got a robust DC team. We have a robust, Syracuse team. And we do have, people hired who are dedicated to the Utica office once it's up and running and they're already working with us.
GR: Well, it sounds like you're getting a fast start. So I know that, at the beginning, and prior to to taking the oath of office, new members of Congress attend a couple different orientation sessions. And I was curious to ask you a question about that, because as a state senator, you already know quite a bit about the legislative process. So I was curious to know what was the most surprising new things you learned when you had this orientation at the federal level?
JM: First of all, I want to say that they were fantastic. The first thing that happened, we were ten days in DC. Then about a week or two later, we were three days at Harvard. And then after session started, we were in Williamsburg, Virginia. Not everybody participated in everyone. I did and found it incredibly helpful. And yes, some of, we know that, knowledge or words or vocabulary power and there's a lot of things that translate from the state legislature to here, but some don't. And one thing that I've found is that while I'll give you an interesting number and then I'll tell you something about the job, if you had to guess. Grant, I hate to turn a question on you in the history, in the history of the House of Representatives, how many people have served in that capacity? And I won't make you answer if you don't want to, but it's a it's 11,000, 11,000.
GR: Okay. Okay. Yeah.
JM: The 11,000 really is an honor and a privilege. Now..
GR: That's a small number. I mean, when you think about it, I think I would have I think I probably would have aired on a higher number I think.
JM: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So I would have too. The reason I share that information is because it it took me back a step to think. I'm one of only 11,000 people that have ever run, taken the oath and voted on legislation here. Of those 11,000, how many have been women or are currently women?
GR: I'm going to say, boy, 200.
JM: 250.
GR: I'm not bad.
JM: Yeah. But again, it's a it is a reminder. You know, I look at the, freshman class right now, 17 women in that class, and you go, this is 10% of about 8%, maybe of the women who have ever served. So one one thing about the process that I learned is, committee work is different here. Changes in legislation happened in the midst of the committee. And honestly, in Albany, it felt like those changes in legislation happened more in the conference, meaning the Democratic conference, the party in the majority. So, again, I have not been in the throes of committee work other than just being established on committees. And, some really preliminary, preliminary stuff, but amendments to legislation as it moves and the process, the reconciliation process that we're all going to see coming up here and trying to make sure that we have our spending, our budget in place is also different from the state legislature. And in an ideal world, they both would be very bipartisan on the scale of bipartisanship, we'll see what this Congress brings. But there certainly is opportunity for the minority party to get amendments in. I don't think they'll get in as frequently as the majority party members amendments do. But they will they do happen and they will.
GR: Well, that's good, that's good. That's good to hear. I was also curious to know if you've had any particular, sort of chill down the spine or, you know, civic, civic moments that you started any sort of particular times where it just other than that, other than that number that took you by surprise? Sure.
JM: You know, listen, I, I'm, I'm a Democrat. I've been a Democrat all my life and I've, certainly, you know, Hakeem Jeffries came to the district. I've met other, leaders in the party, President Biden, President Clinton. But I day one down here, we got to meet, or, you know, we were more sort of either was the freshman class or it was just the Democratic freshman class. And then the next day we had a caucus meeting. And in that caucus meeting, you walk into basically what's a briefing from Catherine Clark and Pete Aguilar and Hakeem Jeffries, and you walk through that door and they just keep coming out of the door getting a coffee, which is, you know, Nancy Pelosi comes in and then AOC comes in and, and a lot of people that I had spoken with on the phone, but that was a moment where I'm like, I am in this room right now. I'm in this room right now. And, that was impressive. Also, when we were certifying the Electoral College vote, you know, I was shaking hands with people. And the guy I spoke with was Jon Ossoff, and I didn't recognize them. Probably because I wasn't expecting it. And, he said, I'm John. I said, I'm John. I said, where are you from? He said, Georgia. And I went, oh, yeah, you're that John, I got you. Yes.
GR: So it sort of sounds like a little bit of the experience of you're a, you're a rookie and you're, you're, you're in the majors. And then the coach says, you're going to bat after Jeter.
JM: Yeah. It is, it is a little bit like that. Yes. Yeah. The gravity, the gravity of it is real. And, you can appreciate it here. And of course the, the beauty of it, the majesty of it, the, decorum. So far, it's been it's been really, amazing to be a part of.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Congressman John Mannion, who has just begun representing New York's 22nd district. So, just tell us a little bit about your committee assignments, how they are going to be able to fit with your desire to work on behalf of the district?
JM: Well, people know my background, and I would not have this job if it was not for, really a passion for public education and it being the great equalizer and all that it does. So I was hopeful that I would get on Education and Workforce, and I did. And, you know, this is a committee that does much more than just education. There certainly is a lot of funding that comes out of it. Title One funding, that is to help some of our, neediest communities and education and, you know, our, our disabilities funding, but also there's workplace protections in there. There's a lot based on, health insurance coverage provided by employers and then apprenticeship programs. So I wasn't just a teacher while I was teaching, I was also a union president. And then I was chair of the disabilities committee in the New York State Senate. The only one. And this is the space where I can really make some positive impact, in, in all those areas. And that's where my knowledge base is coming from. And, you know, when the President was in the campaign and he was talking about dismantling the Department of Education, I disagree respectfully, particularly because of some of the things that I cited around individualized education and funding for students with special needs. So, that's one committee. And then the other one was a little, I had a feeling that was going to happen. This one was a little bit of a wild card. But I was. But I served in the state Senate, and that was to be on the Agriculture Committee and in central New York, you know, we know we've got a very robust agricultural economy and history. I, we have a farm bill that we have to get over the line, and there will be opportunities to me, for me to fight for things that are good for central New York farmers and those that are in that space. And, you know, I again, you asked what surprised me, we know what we're known for here in central New York. There's a lot of things, but but, you know, front of mind is usually dairy or apples. And when I found out apples were a specialty crop, it got my New Yorker up. Let me tell you, I was like, this is a specialty crop, but as you can imagine, those crops that, we don't call specialty crops corn, wheat, soy. We do a lot of that in that space, too. But I'm looking forward to serving on that committee. And I've got a great relationship with local farmers, visited farms, and, and I, I tried to do my best to be their voice in Albany. I'm going to do the same here in DC.
GR: That sounds like a good combination. You know, you mentioned, bipartisanship before, when we were talking earlier and I was wondering, have you on that point or other points, have you, have you spoken to, your, the predecessor to your predecessor, John Katko? So to get any tips about that because he, he made that a priority for his service.
JM: I have. And of course, John and I have a good relationship. If you look back through the annals, you know, I certainly supported Democratic candidates that ran against him, and he supported Republican candidates that ran against me. But we didn't we didn't take shots at each other. We touted the positive things about, the people we were supporting. So he has been helpful and, we, have a lot of common connections being sort of West Side folks here. We actually attended the same schools. I bring that up because he's a little bit older than me, so we weren't in the same grade. But, he has been helpful, and, you know, there's room for bipartisanship. He was a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus. And that caucus that is bipartisan is currently filled. And I've spoken with the leaders of that caucus and expressed interest in it. Hopefully, you know, I'll find, I'll find a spot there eventually. But right now they have their numbers. And as you probably have witnessed, it is a it is a unique, it’s going to be a unique Congress. So, you know, and I and I've already had, very good conversations, certainly with my freshman colleagues and members of the New York delegation that are Republican, because we've got a lot of shared interests, with our with a number of things, you know, the tech hub, the drone hub, salt taxation. So where we, we, we have absolutely going to find common ground.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Congressman John Mannion. The Democrat defeated incumbent Republican Brandon Williams in New York's 22nd congressional district in last November's general election. On that point that I just mentioned there in the in the re-intro, your seat was considered one of the top Democratic targets for, for 2024, really got identified. And, I imagine, in the next two years, your party is going to be very keen to defend it. It's going to keep it in its sights. And I was wondering if you think that fact might help you to be able to leverage some additional funding or projects for the district, you know, through that, through the Democratic leadership?
JM: Well, number one, I hope so. And number two, if uh, I certainly will do my best to remind them of that. You know, in the state legislature, you want to do the right thing and you want to make sure you get your fair share. And I know that I did a good job of that and was a good voice of central New York, now representing central New York in the Mohawk Valley. The process is different. I am a freshman, but like I referenced in the previous, section, there's spaces like in the farm bill where we can get things done for the district and, you know, there's some hangover also that we have to keep our eye on. And that would be, funding that has been appropriated in the past that could be cut if we're not careful about it. And I do, you know, some of that comes from, legislation that might be 1 or 2 Congresses back. And, you know, there's talk about the I-81 funding. There's concern. This has been in the media. We have checked into that immediately and been assured that, we should not be concerned, you know, when the governor or excuse me, when the President signs an executive order that says we're going to pause these funding appropriations. We're in the midst of a project here. We have a contract. That contract is between the USDOT and the New York State DOT. And this is the largest infrastructure project in the history of upstate New York. We want to make sure that's going we can't go back. We've all driven those roads. A lot of us have anyway. And there's no turning back. We've got to complete this project and I'm confident that's going to happen. But there's going to be opportunities there. And, again, we, you know, this is this is governmental, but there's politics with everything in this world. And, I'm going to try to advocate for central New York, regardless of whether, you know, people are looking out for me or not.
GR: Same issue with Micron, too. And I've read about Senator Schumer doing the same thing that you're doing, with, the I-81, making sure that that, that that will, will happen. I wanted to ask you this question that goes back to, the last time that you and I spoke when you were a candidate for Congress, and I asked you, among other things, if Donald Trump should win, the outcome wasn't known back then, would you be likely to join a potential wholesale resistance effort in Congress, you know, to, to try to take him on? And you emphatically said, yes, I will. What? How does that how does that look now? Are we you or what you hearing is trying to figure out more ways to find common ground, or is there, are the are the lines of resistance already forming where where is your caucus and where are you on that?
JM: Exactly. Well, listen, we've got to find we have to work together, and we still have to call out the President. These executive orders, I, I have, you know, I'm participating in this show today. I've already been on other shows. We have a social media presence, some of those executive orders, and I'll start with the commuting or clemency for the January 6th rioters. That is, not the will of the people. It's certainly not the will of the justice system. And what many of the people on the other side of the aisle have said is, look at what Biden did. But I call that out. And I say, I understand that some of that was preemptive because of what the current president was saying about what he was going to do. He was very clear about retaliation and retribution. So, but we're talking about not just people who broke the law. They broke the law trying to interrupt the pillars of our democracy, which is the certification of a free and fair election and the peaceful transfer of power. And that and I that was driven by the current president, and media and social media outlets that perpetuated this lie. And it's very dangerous. Dangerous for me, for my kids. It's dangerous for you. It's dangerous for Republicans and independents, and we can't have that, you know. So these were violent acts made against law enforcement to interrupt our democracy. So I disagree. And I'm going to continue to and in every setting that I can, I'm going to remind people of that. I do, you know, this is one thing about politics, Grant, that I really don't like. You know, somebody will tweet at me from the other side and say, like, I demand that you call out, you know, the governor or you call for this person's resignation. I don't like that, but I am pleading with more Republicans to denounce this executive order, and it's very scary. Some of these are leaders of white supremacist paramilitary organizations are I'm fearful that we're not going to be left in a better place as a result of their release. So we stand up. I stand up with my conference, shoulder to shoulder. They call things out, and I'll use access to the media to do it as well and remind people of what happened on that day and before that day and after that day. People went to federal prison outside of the January 6th rioters because of, trying to overturn an election and, very dangerous. We can't have that. And we need we need everybody to call it out.
GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is Congressman John Mannion from New York's 22nd district. Well, you've kind of given an early, I think grade on the next question, I was going to ask you, but what are your early impressions? I mean, we're in, you know, you and I are talking on Thursday. So what we all, you know, all of 72 hours into this thing. But what are your early impressions of the Trump presidency?
JM: Well, first of all, the people he has around him and himself have had four years to plan. Right? So when we flipped the switch on Inauguration Day, we saw what happened. And like, with his, nominees, he is flooding the zone. He's flooding the zone with executive orders, and presidents have dozens, if not, you know, over 100 executive orders. But some of these are really negatively impactful. And they'll be litigated out in the courts. We've already talked about, you know, the excusing of the January 6th sentences. But also, Biden had an executive order capping the cost of insulin, that's blown up, that's going to negatively impact people's lives. You know, for sure. Certainly, some of the things that are directed at our history and, to try to make sure that everybody has an opportunity moving forward, whether it's, you know, competing for a job or a, spot, you know, program or university, you know, some of those things honestly, are just, mean anti-American and appealing to his base. I don't think it appeals to the broad, you know, American public. And we we heard a lot of in the campaign about saving people money, about costs, about reducing inflation. I don't see that here. I don't see it. And, you know, again, I think he's preying on people's fears, using immigration, an us versus them mentality and demonizing. And it's so robust in what has happened with those executive orders that the Democratic Conference and my team are continuing to weed through it and push back where we can and find allies on the Republican side to push back and advance legislation, or court cases to get this right.
GR: Two, two of them, two of the things that struck me and I and I don't think probably the one I'm going to ask you about is, I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I don't think it's likely to probably survive a court challenge, but one about ending birthright citizenship. And the other one that was in the inaugural address about, taking back the Panama Canal. You know, those are things that get talked about, but I guess I had thought maybe that would be things that would be soft-pedaled once he was in office. But what are your thoughts about this, this notion of rethinking birthright citizenship?
JM: I think it's unconstitutional. You know that my one-word answer is unconstitutional. As somebody whose grandparents, you know, came to this country, right? And, my father was born here. He was a United States citizen. I talked to so many people who have this situation. And if we're going to end that, we're going to be talking about separating families and it's just unconstitutional. I mean, I should stop right there. You know, the president does not have the authority to change the Constitution with a pen stroke. And, that is something that's really, you know, unbelievable to me. And I got so fired up about it Grant, I forgot your second one.
GR: No. That's okay. I just wanted to ask you about that one. I was just mentioning a couple of that that surprised me. The Panama Canal.
JM: Oh, the Panama Canal again, we have relationships around the world, our allies. We are here in 2025. NATO has been in existence 80 years or so, in between 75 and 80. And, the peace by and large, that we've experienced over those 78 or whatever my number of years are here. Has been largely because of our strength and our alliances. And, you know, one of those sessions that we talked about, we went through national security and new member training, and we've gone 78 years without a nuclear bomb detonation, in wartime, not testing. And we've gone 78 years without a world war. And that is possibly the longest period of time going back millennia, that we have not seen such a large-scale war. So the Panama Canal agreement again, let's work through that. But I was hoping hopeful that like tariffs on Mexico and Canada are going to increase costs for Americans and, and ruin some of the projects that we absolutely need related to our infrastructure and, and projects like Micron.
GR: Okay. We got about a couple minutes left. I want to squeeze two questions in if I can. One of the things that's gotten a lot of attention, obviously you alluded to it earlier is the cabinet picks that that the president has made. Just really quick here. Of of all the picks, is there, is there one you think is really the best? Well, who's the best person coming at?
JM: You think that's, you know, I will say this, you know, Marco Rubio, I believe depending on the timing of this, he he has been approved, I believe, you know. Yes.
GR: That's right. Yeah. Unanimously.
JM: Exactly. And he is someone who I think, you know, has served this country. He's he has character. I think he's qualified. I think he's experienced and I, you know, yes, he's already an elected official. And Trump likes to be an outsider and he likes to bring in these outside folks. But what we need from individuals, we need them to be qualified. We need them to have character. We need them to be experienced and have the background to do the job. Clearly not, I mean, I would say probably a majority of these candidates don't fall into that category. I think that he does. And that's that's the kind of, people we need representing our country.
GR: Well, let me let me ask you, you got to be really quick here. Maybe just give me a name. But who is there one of the picks that stands out as the worst?
JM: You know. The health policies that Robert Kennedy Jr is carrying out there to be in charge of basically the largest health care, you know, system in, and when it comes to research that this country does, when it comes to partnerships, you know, and, some of his positions on things, you know, we've, we've I was a biology teacher and we eradicated so many diseases that were so negatively impactful on families, the loss of life, childhood mortality as it relates to, the vaccinations and other treatments for kids. So, you know, I certainly question that one.
GR: I could see people can't see this, but I could watch you. You were having trouble picking one, I think. But you pick that one. We'll have to leave it there. That was Congressman John Mannion. Congressman Mannion, again, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. And I do hope that we can speak again as the session unfolds. I'd like to check in with you from time to time, so.
JM: I'm looking forward to it Grant, thank you for having me on today.
GR: Thank you. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media Conversations and the Public Interest.
Emily Thorson on the Campbell Conversations
Jan 21, 2025
(Syracuse University)
Much has been made in recent years about both misinformation and disinformation among American citizens. This week, Grant Reeher talks with Emily Thorson, a political science professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School, and the author of "The Invented State: Policy Misperceptions and the American Public."
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