PETE BUTTIGIEG & ALEX PADILLA | CONSERVATORSHIP CONTROVERSY CAROL ANDERSON ON GUNS AND RACE | THE VERA RUBIN STORY
Commonwealth The
THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021
GETTING THE ANSWERS
LIZ CHENEY
On the Insurrection, Biden, Afghanistan & the GOP
ZOE LOFGREN The January 6th Committee
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The
Commonwealth
CONTENTS
October/November 2021 Volume 115, Number 5
FEATUR ES
“One of the really important things the select committee has to do is understand more about the planning that went on, understand more about the financing of the effort. It’s also clear that there were organized paramilitary groups within those who breached the Capitol. We need to understand exactly what those connections are and how that happened.”
24 Liz Cheney The Republican U.S. representative from Wyoming came to the Club to discuss the insurrection, Afghanistan and the state of her GOP. 42 Zoe Lofgren A member of the House select committee investigating the insurrection explains the goals and challenges of the committee. 50 The Conservatorship Con Pop superstar Britney Spears isn’t the only person suffering from a broken conservatorship system, but her ordeal has highlighted the problems for many. 58 Race and the Second Amendment Carol Anderson dug into the history of the Second Amendment and found it inextricably tied up with determination to keep Black people under control. 66 Vera Rubin, Pioneer Science journalist Ashley Jean Yeager describes the accomplishments of Vera Rubin, who convinced the scientific world that dark matter might exist. 72 Future of Transportation U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Senator Alex Padilla.
—LIZ CHENEY
ON THE COVER: U.S. Representative (R-WY) Liz Cheney at the Club in August. (Photo by Ed Ritger.) ON THIS PAGE: Above: Dan Ashley and Liz Cheney. (Photo by Ed Ritger.) Right: Professor Carol Anderson. (Photo copyright Stephen Nowland/Emory University.)
“The relationship between African-Americans and guns and violence has actually been shaped by the Second Amendment and constitutional history.” —CAROL ANDERSON The Commonwealth Club of California, established 1903
DEPARTMENTS
4 Editor’s Desk The Morning Crew, by John Zipperer 5 The Commons Remembering James Hormel, our next gala honorees, and more. 8 Program Listings See what programs are coming up in October and November 2021. 23 Programs Info About our programs and attending Club events. 78 The Big Picture
The
Commonwealth October/November 2021 Volume 115, Number 5
EDITOR’S DESK
JOHN ZIPPERER
Vice President of Media & Editorial
BUSINESS OFFICES
The Commonwealth, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 feedback@commonwealthclub.org
VICE PRESIDENT, MEDIA & EDITORIAL John Zipperer
HEARST EDITORIAL FELLOW Corey Rose
PHOTOGRAPHERS: Kassin Dela Cruz, Bill Grant, Ed Ritger, Rikki Ward, John Zipperer ADVERTISING INFORMATION John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, (415) 597-6715, jzipperer@ commonwealthclub.org The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. Copyright © 2021 The Commonwealth Club of California. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 597-6700; feedback@commonwealthclub.org EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question-and-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub. org/watch-listen, or via our free podcasts on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or Spotify; watch videos at youtube.com/ commonwealthclub. Published digitally via Issuu.com.
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Photo by Bill Grant
The Morning Crew
H
ere’s a peek behind the scenes of life at The Commonwealth Club of California: Each morning, for the 16 years that I have had the pleasure of working here, I would arrive before all but one of my coworkers. I almost never got there before George Dobbins, who has headed up our program staff for more than 22 years. From now on, I guess I will be the first one into the office. After more than 2 decades shepherding our programs, George has retired. Since we were the only two people in the office at 7:30 in the morning, we would have time to talk, one of us visiting the other’s office. We’d talk business, thinking about meetings or any challenges our departments needed to collaborate on. But then we’d talk about To all of the 9,000-plus lighter topics, and our conversation would speakers he dealt with over inevitably turn to people in the news, movies and television. It seemed as if practically any the years, he represented person I’d mention, George would have a the Club with dignity and a story to share about that person. Before hanging his hat at the Club, George friendly, helpful face. had a long career in media, working everywhere from Disney to CNET to various local stations. As a producer and editor, he worked with everyone from Ron Reagan, Jr., to D.L. Hughley to William Shatner (of whom he was a big fan, and he had always hoped to get Shatner on a Commonwealth Club stage some day). As you can imagine, having produced programs with big-name guests, he had great behind-the-scenes stories to share with me, but he always downplayed my suggestion that he needed to write a book about his experiences. At the Club, George dealt with Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, plus actors, scientists, authors, governors, comedians, and more. Liberals and conservatives and everyone in between. We estimate he produced more than 9,000 programs at The Commonwealth Club. And for all of them, he represented the Club with dignity and a friendly, helpful face. That’s George on the left in the photo at the top of this page, being honored on his retirement by Club president and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy and ABC 7 news anchor Dan Ashley. So long, George. I wish the best for you and your beloved Rosie. And I hope William Shatner says hi to you some day.
THE COMMO N WE AL TH | October/November 2021
TALK OF THE CLUB
N E WS O F T H E C L U B , S P E A K E R S , M E M B E R S A N D S U P P O RT E R S
IN MEMORIAM
James C. Hormel
T
Photo by Rikki Ward
he country lost a pioneer and major philanthropist August 13, 2021, with the passing of James C. Hormel at the age of 88. Hormel made history in 1999 when he became the first openly gay person to serve as a U.S. ambassador, assuming the role of ambassador to Luxembourg following a protracted political battle between the Clinton administration and opponents in Congress. He was a longtime member of The Commonwealth Club’s Board of Governors and a strong supporter of the Club and its work. Chances are, if you have visited the Club’s waterfront headquarters, you have enjoyed the view from our second-floor Hormel Nguyen In 2016, The Commonwealth Club recognized James C. Hormel (left) for his lifetime of lounge, named after James Hormel and his work for human rights; KQED President and CEO John Boland presented the award. husband, Michael Nguyen Hormel. He was one of the founders of the LGBT raising event of the year, so make a donation M.D., UCSF; Monica Gandhi, M.D., rights organization the Human Rights Cam- to The Commonwealth Club to support our M.P.H, UCSF; Diane Havlir, M.D. UCSF; paign, served on the boards of directors of critical mission to provide balanced, civil Margot Kushel, M.D. UCSF; Carina Marthe San Francisco dialogue on society’s most challenging issues. quez, M.D. UCSF; and Kim Rhoads, M.D., Chamber of Com“I will miss This year’s special event will honor front-line M.S., M.P.H. UCSF and Umoja Health. merce and the Amerphysician heroes and a medical pioneer as The work and contributions of these eight ican Foundation for his kind heart recipients of our Distinguished Citizen award. women has safeguarded the health of our AIDS Research, and If the last 18 months has taught us any- citizenry and kept the Bay Area one of the and generous thing, it is that real heroes don’t wear capes, safest regions of the United States. From supported numerous local nonprofits. they wear white lab coats. The tireless work scientific research to develop the vaccine, spirit.” of our scientists and front-line physicians to social impact programs for guaranteeing “I will miss his kind heart and genhas kept our community safe during the health services to all, these doctors and —DIANNE COVID-19 global pandemic. erous spirit,” said scientists have gone beyond the call of duty. U.S. Senator DiThe Commonwealth Club is pleased to Join us as we honor their commitment, reFEINSTEIN anne Feinstein. “It’s dedicate its Annual Gala and Distinguished silience, knowledge and strength. We thank those qualities that made him such an inspi- Citizen Awards to eight outstanding mem- them for what they have accomplished for rational figure and beloved part of our city.” bers of the Bay Area medical and scientific the betterment of humankind. We call them community: Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., is the Distinguished Citizens. CELEBRATIONS co-inventor of the CRISPR technology and Learn more at commonwealthclub.org/ a Nobel laureate, HHMI investigator, Li 2021gala. Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences and professor in the de- ART WORLD partments of molecular and cell biology and oin us November 19, 2021 at 6 p.m. for a chemistry at the University of California, virtual fundraising gala and celebrate the Berkeley; Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Ph.D., leadership of women in science and medicine. M.D., M.A.S. at the University of California or many years, the Club has featured The annual gala is the Club’s biggest fund- San Francisco (UCSF); Alicia Fernandez, local art at its headquarters. The work of painters, print makers, photographers, textile artists and more have graced our walls. But this fall we turned over the walls of our Farmer Gallery—plus the bookshelves of our lounge, prominent locations throughout the building, and even our rooftop Kaiser Permanente Terrace—to an exhibit of sculptures. ➔
Gala Honors Women in Science, Medicine
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Sculpture at the Club
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THE COMMONS TALK OF THE CLUB FANCY SCHMANCY
Our Ears Are Burning
Photo by Kassin Dela Cruz
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Visitors to the Club are greeted by some of the works from Scuplture of the Pacific Rim.
Called Sculpture of the Pacific Rim, the exhibit is a collaborative project with the Pacific Rim Sculptors group, which has members in the Bay Area, all along the West Coast, and around the globe. Their work includes sculptures in bronze, mixed media, organic materials and more, and they range from statues to wall hangings to freestanding works. The Club’s Leadership Circle and Supporter members got a behind-the-scenes preview of the exhibit at a special reception on Saturday, Oct. 2. The event featured four of the artists in person, who were engaged in a discussion of their work by Robert Melton, the co-chair of the Club’s Arts member-led forum. You can see the works on your next visit to 110 The Embarcadero through 2022.
hen George F. Will returned for a Club program recently, the moderator—The Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last—couldn’t have been happier to talk with a hero of his. In a Bulwark podcast with his colleague Sarah Longwell the morning of the event, Last bragged about his moderating gig: JVL: “I am interviewing George Will today for The Commonwealth Club, and I am all a-titter about it.” LONGWELL: “Uh, The Commonwealth Club . . . ?” JVL: “Yeah, it’s like some fancy speaking society out in San Francisco. I don’t get to go out, because of COVID. Instead of being in San Fran“I’m super cisco, sitting at a dais across from the excited about greatest columnist of his generation, I’ll be it; it’s a dream sitting in this room, which is my office/ job.” bedroom, and I’ll be doing this over —JONATHAN Zoom. But I am suV. LAST per excited about it; it’s a dream job.” Maybe in the future we’ll be able to have Last and Will on stage together. But until then, you can watch or listen to the program at commonwealthclub.org/will2021 and see Last’s virtual Club debut. Now if we can just get Sarah Longwell on a program at our fancy speaking society . . .
Leadership of The Commonwealth Club CLUB OFFICERS
Board Chair Evelyn Dilsaver Vice Chair Martha Ryan Secretary Dr. Jaleh Daie
Treasurer John R. Farmer President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy
BOARD OF GOVERNORS
Robert E. Adams Willie Adams John F. Allen Scott Anderson Dan Ashley Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman John L. Boland Charles M. Collins Kevin Collins Mary B. Cranston Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dorian Daley James Driscoll Joseph I. Epstein Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Fleming Leslie Saul Garvin Mary Huss Lata Krishnan John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy
Lenny Mendonca Michelle Meow Anna W.M. Mok DJ Patil Donald J. Pierce Bruce Raabe Skip Rhodes Bill Ring George M. Scalise Charlotte Mailliard Shultz Todd Silvia George D. Smith Jr. David Spencer James Strother Hon. Tad Taube Marcel TenBerge Charles Travers Don Wen Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Mark Zitter
PAST BOARD CHAIRS AND PRESIDENTS
* Past Chair ** Past President
Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman* J. Dennis Bonney** Maryles Casto* Hon. Ming Chin** Mary B. Cranston* Joseph I. Epstein** John Farmer* Rose Guilbault*
Claude B. Hutchison Jr.** Anna W.M. Mok* Richard Otter** Joseph Perrelli** Toni Rembe** Victor J. Revenko** Skip Rhodes** Renée Rubin** Richard Rubin* Connie Shapiro** Nelson Weller** Judith Wilbur** Dennis Wu**
ADVISORY BOARD
Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last got the chance to interview for The Commonwealth Club the man who inspired him to be a columnist, George F. WIll.
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THE COMMO N WE AL TH | October/November 2021
Karin Helene Bauer Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Steven Falk Amy Gershoni Jacquelyn Hadley Heather Kitchen
Amy McCombs Don J. McGrath Hon. William J. Perry Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Nancy Thompson
Missed an issue? Want to download a copy? Find more than 10 years of The Commonwealth magazine online, on demand.
issuu.com/thecommonwealth
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October & November 2021 UPCOMING PROGRAMS
YOUR GUIDE TO IN-PERSON & ONLINE EVENTS AT THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2 Deep Dive into Local Art Scene
Sidnea Amico, Artist DK Haas, Artist Catherine Mackey, Artist Jeremy Sitton, Artist Allison McCrady, Artist; Curator; Art Dealer—Host
Please join us for a lively and intimate gallery art tour at 1890 Bryant Street Studios on Saturday, October 2, at noon—led by artist, curator and art dealer Allison McCrady of the Club’s Arts Member-Led Forum. For an hour and half we will visit many amazing artists’ studios. We will see and learn about techniques and processes in-person, straight from the creator’s mouth. We will discuss why a piece of art is appealing? What makes us like it? Why is the technique unique? SAN FRANCISCO Location: 1890 Bryant Street Studios, 1890 Bryant Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon–2 p.m. tour MLF: Arts Program organizer: Allison McCrady
Sculpture of the Pacific Rim
Marguerite Elliot, Artist, California Sentinel: Eco-Warrior 1, Steel, Wire, and Gold Leaf Marilyn Kuksht, Artist, Our Roiling World, Steel Charles Stinson, Artist, Ifa, Bronze Oceana Stuart, Artist, Eternal Bliss, Bronze, Eternal Seduction, Bronze, Reminiscent, Bronze Robert Melton, Freelance Curator; Community Events Arts Organizer; Co-Chair, Arts Member-Led Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California—Moderator
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Sculpture of the Pacific Rim, 10.2
Join us for an exclusive special event for Commonwealth Club Leadership Circle members, featuring the exhibit and four artists. The Sculpture of the Pacific Rim exhibit is a collaborative project with the Pacific Rim Sculptors organization, which has members in the San Francisco Bay Area, along the West Coast, and across the continent and globe. The show features artists from the Pacific West Coast whose works range from figurative, bronze, mixed media, organic, wall hanging and freestanding works. Thematically, the works touch upon a wide range of subject matters and ideas; some invite contemplation while others are playful and whimsical—all presenting a sort of narrative about the human experience and our quest for understanding and making sense of the world we live in. SAN FRANCISCO Location: 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 Time: 2:30–3 p.m. doors open & check-in, 3–5:30 p.m. program MLF: Arts Program organizer: Robert Melton Notes: The Sculpture of the Pacific Rim exhibit at The Commonwealth Club of California lasts from October 2 through 2022.
THE COMMO N WE AL TH | October/November 2021
MONDAY, OCTOBER 4 Dashed Dreams: The Tokyo Olympics, Sex Testing and Biology
Eliza Anyangwe, Journalist; Editor, As Equals, CNN Gender Inequality Project; Twitter @elizatalks Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show,” KBCW TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Co-Host John Zipperer, Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club—Co-Host
Leading up to the recent Tokyo Olympics. athletes Annet Negesa of Uganda and Maximila Imali of Kenya both had their Olympic dreams crushed because of rules set by the track and field global governing body, World Athletics. They are just two—of many—elite women athletes who have been told their natural testosterone levels, if not lowered through medication or surgery, disqualify them from competition at the highest levels of sport. Join us for a conversation about intersex biology and the history of sex testing in women’s athletics ahead of the Tokyo Olympics. ONLINE
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5 Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D.: The COVID-19 Pandemic and What Comes Next
Scott Gottlieb, M.D., Former Commissioner, FDA; Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Author, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic Mark Zitter, Chair, The Zetema Project; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Moderator
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., has been one of the most visible commentators on the public health crisis. His insights and writings have helped shaped some of the country’s understanding of the public health impacts of the pandemic since early in 2020. As the country continues to battle the pandemic—especially the emergent delta variant of the coronavirus—Gottlieb will visit the Club for the first time to discuss his new book, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic. Gottlieb’s new book outlines how the United States must prepare for future pandemics by learning from the mistakes made handling the COVID-19 outbreak, which has caused one of the greatest public health tragedies in American history. Gottlieb outlines his efforts in the early 2000s to develop a “Pandemic Influenza Plan” to ready the United States for the threat of a global pandemic, and how short the country came up when it was time to mount an effective response to the novel coronavirus. Further, Gottlieb identifies the early reasons why the United States was so underprepared for the pandemic, from failing to enlist the private sector in large-scale manufacturing of testing supplies and medical equipment to resolutely sticking to the narrative that COVID would go away on its own.
tebellum United States as heading north on the Underground Railroad. In the southern states, the closer choice was Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1837. In The Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards gold medal winner for nonfiction, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, author Alice Baumgartner tells the important but little-known story of Mexico’s radical anti-slavery stance and how it affected slaves in the United States as well as how it might have mitigated the Civil War.
ONLINE Time: 5–6:15 p.m. program MLF: Reading Californians Book Discussion Program organizer: Kalena Gregory
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 6 After One Hundred Winters: America’s Stolen Lands
Margaret Jacobs, Professor of History and Director, The Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln; Author, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands In Conversation with George Hammond, Author, Conversations With Socrates
brutal legacy of systemic racial injustice to Indigenous people. Jacobs also explains how early attempts at reconciliation were only successful in further robbing tribal nations of their already reduced land holdings and forcing their children into abusive boarding schools. True reconciliation, she insists, can only emerge through Indigenous leadership and sustained relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people rooted in specific places and histories. In the absence of an official apology and a federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a movement for transformative reconciliation is unofficially underway that puts Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and values at the forefront. With historical sensitivity and an eye to the future, Jacobs urges people to face the past and learn from it, and once they have done so, to redress past abuses.
ONLINE Time: 9:30–10:30 a.m. program MLF: Humanities Program organizer: George Hammond
Lessons from Concurrent Pandemics of COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS
After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States has thrived on land violently taken away from Indigenous people. Settler historian Margaret Jacobs asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. She argues that we have much to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it, even as she lays out the
Ignatius Bau, Former HIV Prevention Program Coordinator, Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum; Former Member, President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS Cecilia Chung, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives and Evaluation, Transgender Law Center; Health Commissioner, San Francisco Vince Crisostomo, Director of Aging Services, San Francisco AIDS Foundation
Eliza Anyangwe, 10.4
Scott Gottlieb, 10.5
Gottlieb Photo by Jen Goldberg Photography.
MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM Time: 9:30–10:30 a.m. program
ONLINE Time: 12:30–1:30 p.m. program
Reading Californians Book Discussion: South to Freedom
Alice Baumgartner, Author, South to Freedom Kalena Gregory, Chair, Reading Californians Book Discussion MLF—Moderator
We tend to think of runaway slaves in an-
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UPCOMING PROGRAMS OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2021 Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show,” KBCW TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Host and Moderator
SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 11 a.m.–noon doors open, check-in and complimentary lunch, noon–1 p.m. program Notes: Thanks to Gilead Sciences, Inc. for its generous support of The Michelle Meow Show. This program presented in partnership with GAPA Theatre, The Connection at the San Francisco Community Health Center, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and The Commonwealth Club of California. This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, nonprofit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit calhum.org.
Ryan Hampton: Big Pharma, Bankruptcy and Injustice
Ryan Hampton, Addiction Recovery Advocate; Author, Unsettled: How the Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Failed the Victims of the American Overdose Crisis In Conversation with Beth Macy, Journalist; Author
In September 2019, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, filed for bankruptcy to protect itself from 2,600 lawsuits for its role in fueling the U.S. overdose crisis. Author and activist Ryan Hampton served as the co-chair of the official creditors committee that acted as a watchdog during the process—one of only four victims to act as representatives of big insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmacies. Though Hampton originally believed that holding Purdue to account would be enough to right the scales of justice, he soon came to
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Greenberg photo by Andria Lo.
Join us for an important intergenerational conversation with LGBTQ Asians and Pacific Islanders and their allies. Our panelists will share QTAPI stories and experiences of the dual pandemics of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19; their histories as Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States; their past and current roles in community organizing and the political process; as well as other issues that are part of the current cultural and political shifts and relevant to the experiences of QTAPI individuals. Sarah Stein Greenburg and Laura Holson, 10.6
learn that, no matter what the media said, Purdue did not do this alone. Hampton argues they were in fact aided and abetted by the very systems that were supposed to protect Americans. Unsettled: How the Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Failed the Victims of the American Overdose Crisis is Ryan Hampton’s look into what happened behind closed doors—the story of a broken system that failed to protect people over profits, and let millions of lives be destroyed by the opioid crisis. From Purdue’s bankruptcy proceedings to the company’s eventual restructuring and the evasion of true accountability, Unsettled is also the untold story of how a group of determined ordinary people tried to see justice done against the odds and in the face of brutal opposition from powerful institutions.
(commonly referred to as the d.school), Sarah Stein Greenberg is an accomplice to dazzling ingenuity. In her debut book, Creative Acts for Curious People, Stein Greenberg taps into her close ties with bold thinkers and confident doers, providing readers with the ultimate mechanisms to get creative juices flowing. Straight from the cognitive toolkits of Google’s chief evangelist or renowned choreographers, Stein Greenberg lays out practices for mindful observation, intuitive connecting and much much more. The more than 80 exercises, while lighthearted, require a thoughtfulness and intentionality meant to give readers their very own eureka moment.
Sarah Stein Greenberg & Laura Holson: Creative Acts for Curious People
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7
ONLINE Time: 3–4 p.m. program
Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director, Stanford d.school; Author, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Way Laura Holson, Writer, The New York Times
The great creatives throughout history have been those who can ignite their own fire of innovation and ambition, but what is the flint that brings these sparks of creativity to life? And in a time of great uncertainty, why does creativity matter more than ever? As executive director of Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design
THE COMMO N WE AL TH | October/November 2021
SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE INFORUM PROGRAM Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 5–6 p.m. doors open & check-in, 6–7 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing
Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World
Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Communication Sciences, and Otolaryngology, Northwestern University; Author, Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World In Conversation with George Hammond, Author, Conversations With Socrates
Making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs our brains must do. Our hearing is always on. We can’t close our ears the way we
close our eyes. And yet we are quite adept at ignoring sounds that are unimportant. Nina Kraus explores what is going on in our brains when we hear a word, a chord, a meow, or a screech, and examines the partnership of sound and brain, showing how the processing of sound drives many of the brain’s core functions. Our hearing brain interacts with what we know, with our emotions, with how we think, with our movements, and with all our other senses. Auditory neurons make calculations at one-thousandth of a second. Hearing is the fastest of our senses. Sound also plays an unrecognized role in both healthy and hurting brains. Kraus explores the power of music for healing as well as the destructive power of noise on the nervous system. She traces what happens in the brain when we speak another language, have a language disorder, experience rhythm, listen to birdsong, or suffer a concussion. Join us as Kraus explores how our deep engagement with sound leaves a fundamental imprint on who we are.
J. Trump to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is one of the most tumultuous periods in recent American history. Robert Costa and his co-author Bob Woodward have taken on the task of documenting the transition in a never-before-seen way in their new book, Peril. With material ranging from secret orders to transcripts of phone conversations from the Trump and Biden White House, the 2020 campaign, and more, they tell the story about changes, a first inside look into Biden’s presidency, and the unique challenges that face the new administration. Join Costa he as analyzes this intense period in history as well as the overall landscape of American politics in 2021. ONLINE Time: 5–6 p.m. program
Monday, October 11 is 2021 National Coming Out Day. Join us for a fascinating conversation with a talented Pixar animator who directed the recent Out short on Disney+. Steven Clay Hunter joined Pixar Animation Studios in 1997 and has worked as an animator on a number of Pixar’s most beloved films, including A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo. He was an animation supervisor on The Incredibles, WALL•E and Brave. Recently, he helped bring to life the characters Hank from Finding Dory (for which he won the 2013 VES award) and Duke Caboom from Toy Story 4. Most recently, Hunter made his directorial debut with the SparkShort Out on Disney+, which was shortlisted for an Oscar Nomination this past year. In addition, Out is
John Lithgow, 10.7
Steven Clay Hunter, 10.11
Lithgow photo by Robert Zuckerman.
ONLINE Time: 10–11 p.m. program MLF: Humanities Program organizer: George Hammond
John Lithgow: A Confederacy of Dumptys
John Lithgow, Actor; Author and Illustrator, A Confederacy of Dumptys: Portraits of American Scoundrels in Verse
John Lithgow’s acclaimed acting career has seen him star in shows like “3rd Rock from the Sun” and “The Crown” and films such as Bombshell and The World According to Garp. In his newest collection of satirical poems and illustrations, Lithgow expertly tracks the dark and lyrical stories of 25 “American Scoundrels.” Join us as award-winning actor, author and illustrator John Lithgow presents the stories of both long-forgotten figures and the bad actors of today. ONLINE Time: 12:30–1:30 p.m. program
Peril, with Robert Costa
Robert Costa, National Political Reporter, The Washington Post; Co-Author, Peril In Conversation with Scott Shafer, Senior Editor, KQED’s Politics and Government Desk
The transition from President Donald
MONDAY, OCTOBER 11 National Coming Out Day with Pixar’s Steven Clay Hunter
Steven Clay Hunter, Director, Out, Pixar; Animator, Pixar Animation Studios; Twitter @BubbleOfThunder Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show,” KBCW and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors; Twitter @msmichellemeow— Co-Host John Zipperer, Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club—Co-Host
nominated for a GLADD award. Prior to coming to Pixar, Hunter worked for Walt Disney Animation on many projects, including Fantasia 2000 and Hercules. He first learned computer animation at Industrial Light & Magic on Casper the Friendly Ghost.
SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 12:30 p.m. doors open, check-in & lunch, 1–2 p.m. program Notes: Complimentary lunch before the program is provided courtesy of Serramonte Ford.
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Hill photo by Associated Press; Yang photo courtesy Andrew Yang.
UPCOMING PROGRAMS OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2021 TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12 Which Comes First, Overeating or Obesity? Carbohydrates, Insulin and Metabolic Health
David S. Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D., Endocrinologist and Researcher, Boston Children’s Hospital; Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School; Professor of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health Patty James, M.S., N.C. Nutritionist; Chef; Author—Moderator
Standard treatment for obesity, based on a law of physics, assumes that all calories are alike, and that to lose weight one must simply “eat less and move more.” However, this prescription rarely works over the long term. According to the Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of obesity, the metabolic condition of fat cells plays a key role in determining body weight. High intakes of processed carbohydrate raise insulin levels and program fat cells to store too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. Consequently, hunger increases, and metabolic rate slows in the body’s attempt to conserve energy. From this perspective, calorie-restricted, low-fat diets amount to symptomatic treatment, destined to fail for most people. Instead, a dietary strategy aiming to lower insulin secretion promises to increase the effectiveness of long-term weight management and chronic disease prevention. ONLINE Time: 9:30–10:30 p.m. program MLF: Health & Medicine Program organizer: Patty James
Rationality, with Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; Author, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters In Conversation with Lara Bazelon, Professor of Law and Director of Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinical Programs, University of San Francisco
In his new book, popular psychologist and author Steven Pinker explores the concept of collective rationality in society. Today, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding, yet we continue to produce fake news, medical quackery and conspiracy theories. Pinker explains this by rejecting the cynical cliché that humans are simply
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Fiona Hill, 10.12
Andrew Yang, 10.13
irrational, arguing instead that the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology can add up to crippling irrationality in a society. Over time, humans have discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and set out the benchmarks for rationality itself. But despite our sensible thinking in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, he says we often fail to take advantage of the reasoning we’ve discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others. Pinker asserts that a society that is collectively rational depends on objectivity and truth—and that this kind of thinking leads to better individual choices and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Join Steven Pinker and Lara Bazelon as they delve into this topic and reveal how today’s society, in all its complexity, is formed by our collective human nature.
Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century In Conversation with Ellen Nakashima, National Security Reporter, The Washington Post
ONLINE Time: noon–1 p.m. program Notes: Thanks to the Ken & Jackie Broad Fund for its partnership.
Fiona Hill: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century
Fiona Hill, Former Senior Director for Europe and Russia, National Security Council; Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution; Author, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding
THE COMMO N WE AL TH | October/November 2021
Before Fiona Hill became a celebrated foreign policy expert and key witness in the 2019 impeachment trial of then-President Donald Trump, she was a coal-miner’s daughter from northern England in a town where the last of the coal mines had closed. Her father urged her to get out, saying “There is nothing for you here, pet.” Hill went on to study in Moscow and at Harvard and served under three United States presidents. But in both Russia and the United States, she saw troubling reflections of her hometown and similar populist impulses. Now she draws on her own journey out of poverty and her unique perspective as a policymaker to warn that America is on the brink of socioeconomic collapse and an authoritarian swing that could rival modern Russia. She says expanding opportunity for desperate and forgotten Americans is the only long-term hope for our democracy. ONLINE Time: 3–4 p.m. program
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13 Andrew Yang: Forward
Andrew Yang, Entrepreneur; Political candidate; Author, Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy Raj Mathai, News Anchor, NBC Bay Area—
Schiff photo by Roger Lis.
On Lok Kathleen Sullivan, Ph.D.; Executive Director, Openhouse Eric Carlson, Directing Attorney, Justice in Aging; Author, Long-Term Care Advocacy and 25 Common Nursing Home Problems — and How to Resolve Them Michelle Meow, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show,” KBCW TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Moderator
Adam Schiff, 10.14 Moderator
Dubbed the “most surprising” candidate, Andrew Yang made waves with a rousing 2020 presidential campaign. With his newfound platform, he advanced the cause of progressive concepts such as the universal basic income, bringing them into mainstream discussion. A year later, Yang is more adamant than ever that the need for change is urgent and that we can rely on no one else other than ourselves to bring it to fruition. In his upcoming book Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, Yang emphasizes once more the cumulative and mounting pressures like job automation that already threaten what he argues is an antiquated system. He says that only daring measures can bring us back from the brink of becoming a failed democracy. At INFORUM, Andrew Yang will lay out his vision for an American future that is modern, sustainable and serves its constituents. Hoping to defy creeping stagnation, he extends a call to action to every American citizen. The message? “Now or never.” ONLINE INFORUM PROGRAM Time: 12:30–1:30 p.m. program
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14 The ‘Pronoun Provision’ and LGBTQ Seniors
John V. Blazek, Executive Director of Day Service and Chief Development Officer,
Is intentional misgendering a crime? Should it be? How does it affect the person who is the subject of the treatment? In July 2021, a California district court struck down a provision of the LGBTQ Long-term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights that banned nursing home staff from “willfully and repeatedly” misgendering or using the wrong name to refer to a resident when they’ve been clearly informed of the preferred name or pronoun. That provision, known as the “pronoun provision,” was ruled to be an infringement on free speech, with one of the judges writing that “misgendering may be disrespectful, discourteous and insulting, and used in an inartful way to express an ideological disagreement with another person’s expressed gender identity,” but the First Amendment “does not protect only speech that inoffensively and artfully articulates a person’s point of view.” Advocates for LGBTQ seniors, and especially for transgender and gender nonconforming seniors, have called the decision alarming. Openhouse, a San Francisco-based LGBT senior housing, community and services organization, states “Misgendering can be harmful to a resident, particularly as it relates to feelings of safety, acceptance and isolation.” Join us for a live-stream discussion among advocates and professionals working with transgender and nonconforming seniors about the impact of the ruling and proposals for what to do next. ONLINE MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM Time: 9:30–10:30 a.m. program
Susan Orlean: On Animals
Susan Orlean, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Author, On Animals
Celebrated writer Susan Orlean visits The Commonwealth Club for the first time to discuss her new book, On Animals, a collection
from her lifetime of musings, mediations and in-depth profiles about animals. Orlean, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is fresh off her last best-selling book, The Library Book, about the Los Angeles Public Library, which won numerous awards. Her new collection focuses on a range of creatures—the household pets we dote on, the animals we raise to end up as meat on our plates, the creatures who could eat us for dinner, and the various tamed and untamed animals we share our planet with that are central to human life. Since the age of six, Orlean has been fascinated by stories about animals, and her new book brings forward a lifetime of writing about cross-species connections. How humans interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets and naturalists for ages. Come hear one of America’s most gifted writers discuss why she is so passionate and curious about the subject.
ONLINE Time: noon–1 p.m. program
Rep. Adam Schiff: Midnight in Washington
Adam Schiff, U.S. Representative (D-CA); Author, Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could
From the congressman who led the first impeachment of President Trump, Adam Schiff’s Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could delivers a vital inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour. Prior to the 2016 election, Schiff had been sounding the alarm over the threat posed by a global resurgence of autocracy. As he led the probe into Trump’s Russia- and Ukraine-related abuses of presidential power, he came to the conclusion that the biggest threat to American democracy came from within—arguing that Trump’s presidency has so weakened our institutions and compromised the Republican Party that the danger will remain for years to come. From being a prosecutor to a congressman known for bipartisanship to a liberal lighting rod and archenemy of the president, Adam Schiff tracks his own path to meeting the crisis he argues is severely imperiling America: the dangerous appeal of authoritarianism. Join us as congressman Adam Schiff deepens our understanding of authoritarianism in the Trump administration and warns that,
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UPCOMING PROGRAMS OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2021 even after his defeat, the unleashed forces of autocracy remain as potent as ever.
SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 2:30 p.m. doors open & check-in, 3–4 p.m. program
MONDAY, OCTOBER 18 Bitcoin in the Middle East
Fadi Elsalameen, M.S., International Relations and Economics; Adjunct Senior Fellow, American Security Project Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer, Human Rights Foundation; Co-Author, The Little Bitcoin Book
Today’s speakers, who are human rights activists as well as being business-oriented, will discuss why Bitcoin matters, especially in the Middle East region. Alex Gladstein, vice president of strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum, has connected many dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, philanthropists, policymakers and artists, to promote free and open societies. He has shared his views at MIT, Stanford, BBC, the European Parliament, the U.S. State Department, and other venues. He is the singularity expert at Singularity University and advises Blockchain Capital. Fadi Elsalameen, who was born in Hebron, is a critic of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and has received death threats for his pro-democracy and anti-corruption work. He is a graduate of Seeds of Peace, a successful businessperson, and has also shared his views at many leading institutions, including The Commonwealth Club. ONLINE Time: 9:30–10:30 a.m. program MLF: Middle East Program organizer: Celia Menczel
Risk with General Stanley McChrystal
General Stanley McChrystal, Retired Army General; Author, Risk: A User’s Guide In Conversation with Dan Ashley, Co-Anchor, ABC 7 News; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors
From his first day at West Point to his years of deployment in Afghanistan, retired fourstar U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal is no stranger to the deadly risks of combat. Throughout his illustrious career and efforts
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helping business leaders navigate a global pandemic, General McChrystal has seen how individuals and organizations have failed to mitigate risk by focusing solely on the probability of something happening as opposed to the interface by which it can be managed. In his new book, Risk: A User’s Guide, McChrystal and co-author Anna Butrico offer a battle-tested system for detecting and responding to risk. This book offers an alternative way of maintaining a healthy “risk immune system” that involves monitoring 10 different dimensions of control the authors say can be adjusted at any time to effectively anticipate, identify, analyze and act upon the ever-present possibility that things will not go as planned. ONLINE Time: noon–1 p.m. program
medium and large employers, and health-care staff to be vaccinated. Working together and partnering with government and community leaders, the private sector plays a role in helping to close the vaccination gap in our workforce and communities. What can the business community do to stop this pandemic? What is the private sector’s role in helping keep our communities safe? How are organizations responding to local, state and federal mandates? What processes are working and not working? What will it take to return to a strong and stable economy? Join a panel of business leaders across industries discussing opportunities to address this public health crisis and how we can work together to end it. ONLINE Time: 4–5 p.m. program Notes: This program is generously supported by our partner Kaiser Permanente.
One Fair Wage, with Saru Jayaraman
Saru Jayaraman, President, One Fair Wage; Co-Founder, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United; Director, Food Labor Research Center, UC Berkeley; Author, Behind the Kitchen Door, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining, and One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America
Stanley McChrystal, 10.18
Destination Health: The Private Sector’s Role in Ending the COVID-19 Pandemic
Greg A. Adams, Chairman and CEO, Kaiser Permanente Additional Speakers TBA Raj Mathai, News Anchor, NBC Bay Area
As the devastating effects and tragic loss of life from COVID-19 persist 18 months after the global pandemic began, the world is desperate to end this public health crisis. As businesses across industries are rolling out varying degrees of vaccine, testing, and masking mandates, President Biden announced the requirement for federal workers,
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As president of One Fair Wage and director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, Saru Jayaraman has fought for a reimagining of tipped industries. She argues that at just $2.13 an hour, what tipped-wage workers are paid is unlivable on its own and that, unsurprisingly, the people in these jobs are often society’s most vulnerable: undocumented, BIPOC, and women workers who already make cents on the dollar of their white male counterparts. In place of the 30-year-old subminimum wage, Jayaraman has worked tirelessly to realize a fair living wage for these essential workers. In the wake of COVID-19, she says it is more obvious than ever that changes need to be made if we want to keep everyone’s head above water. Jayaraman’s message is unwavering—our drivers, delivery workers, servers and nail technicians deserve to have a livelihood. At INFORUM she will lay out what changes she says need to be made and how we can achieve a fair, livable wage for everyone in our communities. SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE
INFORUM PROGRAM Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 5–6 p.m. doors open & check-in, 6 –7 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19 David Wessel: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age
David Wessel, Senior Fellow and Director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, Brookings Institution; Author, Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age
When a Silicon Valley entrepreneur developed a tax break intended as a way to incentivize the rich to invest in underserved communities, the idea was pushed into law
areas where the wealthy can place their money profitably and avoid capital gains taxes. Wessel provides vivid portraits of the proselytizers, political influencers, consultants, real estate dealmakers and individual money-seekers looking to take advantage of this opportunity. He looks at the cities in which the Opportunity Zone initiatives have failed, as well as a few where they have succeeded, and offers a lesson on how a better-designed program might have helped more left-behind places. Join us as David Wessel, offers an in-depth analysis of the bill he faults with keeping the rich richer—revealing the gritty reality of a system tilted in favor of a few while leaving many out in the cold. ONLINE Time: 9:30–10:30 a.m. program
A Conversation with Bret Baier
Bret Baier, Chief Political Anchor for Fox News Channel, Anchor and Executive Editor, “Special Report with Bret Baier”; Author, To Rescue the Republic: Ulysses S. Grant, the Fragile Union, and the Crisis of 1876
Brought to us by Fox News Chief Political Anchor Bret Baier, To Rescue the Republic is an epic history of Ulysses S. Grant—spanning from the battlefields of the Civil War to the violent turmoil of Reconstruction to the forgotten electoral crisis that nearly fractured a reunited nation. Desperate for bold leadership in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln turned to Ulysses S. Grant, appointing him lieutenant general of the Union Army, precipitating their victory within a year. Four
Charles Blow: A Black Power Manifesto
Charles Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times; Author, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto In Conversation with Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law, NYU School of Law; Co-host, “Strict Scrutiny” Podcast
Saru Jayaraman, 10.18
with little scrutiny or fine-tuning and few safeguards against abuse. With an unbeatable pair of high-profile sponsors and deft political marketing, the Opportunity Zone became an unnoticed part of the 2017 Trump tax bill. In his new book Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age, bestselling author David Wessel follows the money—starting from this Opportunity Zone initiative—to see who profited from the plan that was supposed to spur development of blighted areas and help people out of poverty. His findings? The Las Vegas Strip, the Portland (Oregon) Ritz-Carlton, and the Mall of America. In other words, lucrative
Violence against Black people—both physical and psychological—has seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests in the summer of 2020. “After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy,” Charles Blow writes, “ it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves.” A New York Times op-ed columnist, Blow felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans, one that involves a succinct, counterintuitive and impassioned correction to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. The Devil You Know is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country. Join us as Charles Blow offers a road map to true and lasting freedom. ONLINE INFORUM PROGRAM Time: 12:30–1:30 p.m. program Notes: Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.
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Charles Blow, 10.19
years later, as president of the United States, Grant rose to the challenge of Reconstruction by advancing its agenda and aggressively countering the Klu Klux Klan. When the contested presidential election of 1876 produced no clear victory, it was Grant who forged the painful compromise that saved the fragile nation, but tragically pushed the Civil Rights movement even further down the road. In this book, Baier dramatically reveals Grant’s palpable and essential influence on the United States as it suffered through a severe period of internal division. SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube
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UPCOMING PROGRAMS OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2021 THURSDAY, OCTOBER 21 Fritjof Capra: Patterns of Connection
Baer photo by Karl Rabe.
Fritjof Capra, Author, Patterns of Connection In Conversation with George Hammond, Author, Conversations With Socrates
Brett Baier, 10.20 Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 11:15 a.m. doors open & check-in, noon–1 p.m. program, 1 p.m. book signing Notes: Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.
Bryant Terry’s Black Food
Bryant Terry, Chef; Author, Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora
With dazzling illustrations, sumptuous recipes, and its own curated playlist, Bryant Terry’s sixth book, Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, is a feast for the senses. Terry, a renowned vegan culinary innovator, returns to dive into the depth and breadth of Black foodways spanning nations and time. Black Food celebrates both the creations and creators, pairing heartwarming stories of generational traditions with the soul-filling foods at the center of them. From tropical Afro-Caribbean dishes like jerk chicken to beloved Nigerian jollof rice and further on to southern sweet potato pie, this book is an ode to the African diaspora’s influence on food and culture.At INFORUM, Bryant Terry will share the stories, people, places and ingredients that make Black food the diverse and divine cuisine it is today. ONLINE Time: 6–7 p.m. program Notes: Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.
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Join us for a virtual conversation with Fritjof Capra to discuss the evolution of his thought. In the late 1950s Capra read the work of Werner Heisenberg, a founder of quantum mechanics, and quickly intuited connections between the discoveries of quantum physics and the traditions of Eastern philosophy. The result was his bestselling book, The Tao of Physics. His synthesis, dispensing with the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton in favor of a systemic, ecological one, provided him with a different perspective on the life sciences, ecology and environmental policy. Six decades later, Fritjof Capra remains at the crossroads of physics, spirituality, environmentalism and systems theory. Organized thematically and chronologically, the essays in Patterns of Connection document his revolutionary and far-reaching intellectual journey. ONLINE Time: 10–11 a.m. program MLF: Humanities Program organizer: George Hammond
Joe Weisberg: Do We Have Russia Upside Down?
Joe Weisberg, Television Writer; Creator, “The Americans”; Former CIA Officer; Author, Russia Upside Down In Conversation with George Hammond, Author, Conversations With Socrates
Join us for a conversation with Joe Weisberg, who makes the case in his new book Russia Upside Down that America’s foreign policy toward Russia is failing, and we’ll never fix it unless we rethink our entire relationship. Weisberg came of age in America in the 1970s and ’80s as a Cold Warrior. He studied Russian in Leningrad, and then joined the CIA—just in time to watch the Soviet Union collapse. Less than a decade later, though, a new Cold War broke out. Russia had changed in many of the ways that America hoped it might. It had become more capitalist, more religious, more open to Western ideas. But U.S. sanctions crippled Russia’s economy, and Russia’s internet-based retaliations have exacerbated our own political problems. Weisberg says the old
THE COMMO N WE AL TH | October/November 2021
Bryant Terry, 10.20
paradigm—America, the free capitalist good guys, fighting Russia, the repressive communist bad guys—simply doesn’t apply anymore. But we’ve continued to act as if it does. Weisberg asks hard questions about our foreign policy and attempts to understand what Russia truly wants. He concludes that we are fighting an enemy with whom we have few if any serious conflicts of interest, we are fighting this unnecessary war with ineffective and dangerous tools, and our approach is not working anyway. With our own political system in peril, and continually being buffeted by Russian attacks, he argues that we need a new framework. Urgently. Weisberg makes it clear what the stakes are and lays out the foundation for a new American foreign policy for dealing with Russia. SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE Time: 2:30–3 p.m. doors open & check-in, 3–4 p.m. program, 4 p.m. book signing MLF: Humanities Program organizer: George Hammond
Equity and Justice in the Development of Cities
Rev. Norman Fong, Former Executive Director, Chinatown Community Development Center, focused on addressing poverty, housing and small businesses in Chinatown Rev. James McCray, Executive Director, Tabernacle Community Development Corp., a developer of affordable housing in San Francisco with a focus on slowing the city’s
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out-migration of African Americans Gerald Harris, President, Quantum Planning Group; Chair, Technology & Science Member-Led Forum, The Commonwealth Club—Moderator
Our speakers, Rev. Norman Fong and Rev. James McCray, will discuss their direct handson experience in working to address the issue of equity and justice in community development, especially around building affordable housing, engaging community members for advocacy and support, and the broader issues of economic development connected to jobs and small business support. They will reflect on how these issue exist in San Francisco and in cities around the country. Join us for a timely discussion on equity and justice in the development of cities. SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE Time: 5:30–6 p.m. doors open & check-in, 6–7 p.m. program MLF: Technology & Society Program organizer: Gerald Harris Notes: Presented in partnership with Chinatown Community Development Center, Tabernacle Community Development Corporation, and The San Francisco Black Community Restoration Institute.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21 Humanities West Presents Dante’s Divine and Comic 700th Anniversary
Kip Cranna, Dramaturg Emeritus, San Francisco Opera Marisa Galvez, Professor of French and Italian, and by Courtesy, of German Studies and Comparative Literature; Faculty Director, Structured Liberal Education, Stanford University Timothy Hampton, Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature; Director, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley George Hammond—Moderator
Many nations have a national poet, whose poetry helps carve out their own unique cultural niche in human civilization. Italy has enjoyed many literary geniuses for over two millennia, but still looks to one man the most: Dante. Like major poets in other cultures, Dante’s influence on the Italian language can hardly be overstated. The Divine Comedy was
Corporate pledges of reaching net zero carbon emissions have quickly become commonplace. Critics argue that such pledges are mere greenwashing, and even if pledges are fulfilled, the balance sheets usually utilize carbon offsets, which can also be of questionable quality and accountability. Proponents of corporate net zero pledges say we’ll never get to net zero emissions without corporate action, and pledges represent legitimate ramping up of corporate ambition and commitment. How can consumers, investors and policy leaders distinguish between stalling and increased ambition? Can third-party auditors hold companies accountable? And could corporate pledges play a meaningful role in the climate negotiations in Glasgow?
Dante’s Divine Comedy, 10.22
the first major work of literature to leave Latin behind in favor of Italian, and it remains the world standard of poetic excellence. Dante’s fertile imagination also inspired artists, writers and theologians, making him almost as influential about the afterlife as he is linguistically. Join Humanities West in person at The Commonwealth Club, or via livestream, to celebrate the 700th Anniversary of Dante’s death—which ironically occurred not that many months after he completed his speculations about post-death possibilities—with a two-hour, three-lecture Dante feast: • Timothy Hampton on “Dante After Dante: the Forms of Memory.” • Kip Cranna on “Dante at the Opera: From the Divine Comedy to a Comic Puccini Delight.” • Marisa Galvez on “Dante Before Dante Become Dante.” SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 4:15–5 p.m. doors open & check-in, 5–7 p.m. program MLF: Humanities Program organizer: George Hammond
MONDAY, OCTOBER 25 Corporate Net Zero Pledges: Ambitious or Empty Promises?
Simon Fischweicher, Head of Corporations and Supply Chains, CDP North America Greg Dalton, Founder and Host, Climate
ONLINE CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM Time: 8–9 a.m. program Notes: This program is generously underwritten by the Erol Foundation.
Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor: This Is Ear Hustle
Nigel Poor, Visual Artist; Co-Creator and Co-Host, “Ear Hustle” Podcast; Co-Author, This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life Earlonne Woods, Co-Creator and Co-Host, “Ear Hustle” Podcast; Co-Author, This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life Piper Kerman, Author, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison—Moderator
Some might say that Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods were destined to meet. Poor, a professor of photography at CSU Sacramento, was volunteering with the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison when she met Woods, who was serving a 31-year-to-life sentence. The two bonded over a love of storytelling and with no formal experience, began a podcast together where they showcase the realities of life in prison while detailing the path of their fateful friendship. Their upcoming book, This Is Ear Hustle, shares its name with their well-received podcast, which has gone on to become a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize and is in its seventh season. The book avoids the overtly political and instead delves into the richness of humanity found even behind the bars of the prison system. With candor,
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Poor and Woods photos by Nigel Poor; Kerman photo by Michael Oppenheim.
UPCOMING PROGRAMS OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2021 the authors showcase the unlikely inspiration found in stories of the incarcerated. At INFORUM Earlonne Woods—whose sentence was commuted in 2018—and Nigel Poor will take our stage to help our audiences become “ear hustlers’’ themselves, eavesdropping on the tales of resilience, forgiveness and the lives that exist behind some of America’s most well-guarded doors. SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE INFORUM PROGRAM Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 5–6 p.m. doors open & check-in, 6–7 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 California Travel Secrets for Your Next Staycation
Ruth Carlson, Author, Secret California: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure Karen Misuraca, Author, Secret Sonoma: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure In Conversation with George Hammond, Author, Conversations with Socrates
Is the trip from your living room to your kitchen no longer exciting? But you aren’t quite ready for Rome? Ruth Carlson returns to The Commonwealth Club with her travel insights for nearby but unusual California attractions, from Angels Camp to ZZYZX, and from a town with its own secret language to a perfume museum with a whale poop exhibit. Karen Misuraca joins Carlson to focus on Sonoma’s curiosities, icons and hidden treasures, including a beer lovers festival in wine country, flesh-eating plants that create their own little shop of horrors, Charlie Brown’s cartoon world, Gold Rush era bars, hidden beaches along a world-famous coastline, and the tallest trees on the planet. Or would you prefer to fly through the treetops, stargaze through powerful telescopes, or loll about in geothermal hot springs? Whether your intent is to travel by imagination, or to plan your next nearby vacation, join us first to enhance your trip. SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 2:30–3 p.m. doors open & check-in, 3–4 p.m. program MLF: Humanities Program organizer: George Hammond
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Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor, 10.25
Keisha N. Blain: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America
Keisha N. Blain, Historian; Associate Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh; President, African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS); Author, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America Aimee Allison, Founder and President, She the People—Moderator
Dubbed a social justice manifesto, Until I Am Free, by author Keisha N. Blain, is a unique opportunity to hear about life from the perspective of a working, impoverished and disabled Black woman. Blain, an award-winning historian, details the life and accomplishments of Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist too often forgotten in the narrative of racial justice. Defying the layers of marginalization that threatened to hush her powerful words, Blain holds Hamer in the same esteem as her contemporaries Rosa Parks and MLK. Through Blain, Hamer’s message is given new life in an age where the same issues remain pertinent. At INFORUM Blain will peel back the layers of Fannie Lou Hamer—layers that ostensibly would have taken power away from her but instead became the very source from which she drew it. This conversation will be moderated by Aimee Allison, founder and president of She the People. ONLINE INFORUM PROGRAM Time: 5–6 p.m. program
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Notes: Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.
Rick Ridgeway: Climbing, Conservation and Capitalism
Rick Ridgeway, Former Vice President, Patagonia Greg Dalton, Founder and Host, Climate One
Rick Ridgeway estimates he’s spent a total of more than 5 years of his life sleeping in tents, often in the world’s most remote places alongside fellow outdoor adventure luminaries Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia) and Doug Tompkins (founder of The North Face). Ridgeway himself worked for Patagonia for 15 years and was behind the company’s infamous “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ad campaign, which paradoxically advocated sustainability and increased sales. What is the role of corporations in conservation? And where is the line between greenwashing and truly green practices? Join us for a live conversation with one of the world’s foremost mountaineers and former Patagonia vice president, Rick Ridgeway. ONLINE CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM Time: 6–7 p.m. program
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27 Money and the Perils of Dementia
Catherine A. Madison, M.D., Founding
Director, Ray Dolby Brain Health Center, California Pacific Medical Center Gretchen Hollstein, C.F.P., Principal and Senior Wealth Advisor, Litman Gregory Asset Management Natalie Oh, C.L.U., Insurance Professional Denise Michaud, Chair, Grownups Member-Led Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California—Moderator
ONLINE Time: 9:30–10:30 a.m. program MLF: Grownups Program organizer: Denise Michaud
Courageous Conversations About Race
Glenn E. Singleton, Author, Courageous Conversations About Race Brandon Schneider, Chief Operating Officer, Golden State Warriors
For more than 30 years, Glenn Single-
Ridgeway photo by Jimmy Chin; Cordell photo by Laurie Naiman.
Many families don’t expect that dementia will be a factor in financial decisions, but it is more common than we think. The challenge is that people can start having trouble managing their finances years before being diagnosed with dementia. Our expert panel delves into this subject so you will recognize when a loved one’s capacity is declining and what to do about it. They will explain a dementia diagnosis,
when you know the legal components of financial capacity. The concept of preparing for a loss of capacity can be a scary thing to face. Yet it can be comforting to learn the definite ways to manage your financial affairs, so they can be handled in your best interests and in line with your values and expectations.
is critical that we address racial issues in order to uncover personal and institutional biases that prevent all people, and especially people of color, from reaching their fullest potential. He sees Courageous Conversations as serving as the essential strategy for systems and organizations to address racial disparities through safe, authentic and effective cross-racial dialogue. Creating Citizens will host a discussion between Singleton and Golden State Warriors Chief Operating Officer Brandon Schneider. The Golden State Warriors have been a great example of what happens when an organization takes seriously the lessons learned about addressing racial disparities and making investments into anti-racist work while championing diversity and inclusion. ONLINE CREATING CITIZENS PROGRAM Time: 5:30 doors open & check-in
Her Honor: LaDoris Hazzard Cordell
LaDoris Cordell, Judge (Ret); Author, Her Honor: My Life on the Bench...What Works, What’s Broken, and How to Change It
Rick Ridgeway, 11.3
LaDoris Cordell 10.27
the implications of this condition on our planning abilities, and suggestions on how to create an advance directive with this outcome in mind. They will also discuss how families can navigate their financial matters, with their advisors, if faced with the unexpected issues of dementia. They will share some examples of the best practices of individuals and families who successfully prepare for the possibility of dementia, and share some pitfalls of not planning ahead for this increasingly common experience. The concept of having or losing the capacity for financial decision-making is vague to most people. Yet it is understandable
ton has been helping companies begin a dialogue around race and confront deeply entrenched habits and thought processes. His book Courageous Conversations About Race is a blueprint that gives educators the tools to create equity at their school sites and beyond. During a time in our history when anti-racism is becoming the dominant goal of many organizations and communities; Singleton has been able to amplify lessons that he has been teaching for years as an anti-racism instructor. Why examine and address race? According to Courageous Conversations, race matters in our nation and around the world. Singleton says it
There is only one room that bears witness to marriages, divorces, adoptions, and criminal proceedings—the courtroom. Judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell has sat in this room and dedicated nearly five decades of her life to putting justice back into the justice system. As the first African American female judge to serve on the Superior Court in northern California and a trailblazer in many other respects, her years on the bench have put her, in the most literal terms, front and center to the societal microcosm that is the courtroom. In her debut book Her Honor: My Life on the Bench . . . What Works, What’s Broken, and How to Change It, Judge Cordell gives an inside look into a judge’s chamber. She shares real stories of the trials and tribulations involved in making life-changing, sometimes life-or-death decisions. Further, she presents hard-earned knowledge on the cracks in the system and how we can repair them with institutional accountability and equitable reconfigurations. At INFORUM Judge Cordell will detail a career that has been steadfast and powerful in its advancement of LGBTQ+ rights, police accountability, and elevating of BIPOC communities. She will draw on stories both heartwarming and painful to shed light on the good and bad in a system that she says
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UPCOMING PROGRAMS OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2021 sharing relationship advice, tales borne from stardom, and a generous dose of humor. Sincere, striking, and welcomingly blunt, Milano’s stories are sure to charm time and time again
Milano photo courtesy Alyssa Milano.
ONLINE INFORUM PROGRAM Time: 6–7 p.m. program Notes: This program is part of The Commonwealth Club’s Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1 Sebastian Junger: Freedom
Alyssa Milano, 10.28
should, must, and will serve all.
SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE INFORUM PROGRAM Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 5–6 p.m. doors open & check-in, 6–7 p.m. program Notes: Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28 Alyssa Milano: Sorry Not Sorry
Alyssa Milano, Actor; Activist; Author, Sorry Not Sorry
Alyssa Milano’s renowned career is characterized by one success after another. If you don’t know her from one of her many TV or movie roles since her debut at age seven, then it’s undoubtedly her activism in politics and the #MeToo movement that has put her on the radar. Milano’s life — being raised in the limelight of celebrity and being in the rooms others dream of — has given her unmatched insight into parts unknown. At the same time Milano is a wife, a mother of two (plus many animals), and has strived to maintain a sense of normalcy despite her powerful, star-turned-humanitarian persona. From within this unique well of knowledge comes Milano’s new book Sorry Not Sorry, a series of both unimaginable and wildly relatable tales from a life’s worth of playing many roles, including herself. At INFORUM, Milano will give an insider peek into the head that wears many hats —
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Sebastian Junger, Co-Director, Restrepo; Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair; Author, Freedom In Conversation with George Hammond, Author, Conversations With Socrates
Sebastian Junger returns, in person, to The Commonwealth Club to discuss the ideas in his latest book, Freedom. Throughout history, he says, humans have been driven by the quest for two cherished ideals: community and freedom. The two don’t coexist easily. We value individuality and self-reliance, yet are utterly dependent on community for our most basic needs. Junger examines that tension—which lies at the heart of what it means to be human. For much of a year, Junger and three friends—a conflict photographer and two Afghan War vets—walked the railroad lines of the East Coast. It was an experiment in personal autonomy, but also in interdependence. Dodging railroad cops, sleeping under bridges, cooking over fires, and drinking from creeks and rivers, the four men forged a unique reliance on one another. Junger weaves his account of this journey together with related digressions on primatology and boxing strategy, the history of labor strikes and Apache raiders, the role of women in resistance movements, and the brutal reality of life on the Pennsylvania frontier. SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 11:30 a.m. doors open & check-in, noon–1 p.m. program, 1 p.m. book signing MLF: Humanities Program organizer: George Hammond
The COVID Labyrinth: Where Are We In It and How Do We Escape?
Dr. Leana Wen, M.D., Emergency Physician; Visiting Professor of Health Policy & Man-
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John McWhorter, 11.2 agement., Milken School of Public Health, George Washington University; Former Commissioner of Health, Baltimore City; TED MED Speaker; Author, Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health Dr. George Lundberg, M.D., Editor in Chief, Cancer Commons; Editor at Large, Medscape; Executive Adviser, Cureus; Clinical Professor of Pathology, Northwestern University; President and Chair, The Lundberg Institute Dr. Susan Levenstein, M.D., Primary Care Internist; Blogger, “Stethoscope On Rome”; Author, Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome George Hammond, Author, Conversations with Socrates
Join us for a medical panel discussion about where we are in the COVID pandemic. What progress has been made? What failures contributed most to making recovery so complicated? How do we, and should we, accelerate the vaccination programs in other countries? Do we have a realistic exit strategy? Or will we be living with COVID for the foreseeable future? And does that mean that the distrust in medical authorities and governments that the pandemic has exacerbated will prove to be a socially intractable problem for decades to come? The 11th Annual Lundberg Institute Lecture will once again deal with the major medical issue of our time, asking the questions that need to be answered if we are to find our way forward successfully. Join us in person in San Francisco, or by livestream, to ask your questions too. SAN FRANCISCO & ONLINE
Hawken photo courtesy Paul Hawken; Campoamor photo by Margarita Gandia
Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco Time: 2:30 p.m. doors open & check-in, 3–4 p.m. program MLF: Humanities Program organizer: George Hammond
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2 John McWhorter: The Limits of Antiracism
John McWhorter, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University; Author, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America
Since the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, Americans have been engaged in a vast discussion on the state of race in America. The issue has become a divisive, tense debate about how the country faces its racist past, the meaning of systemic racism, the role of critical race theory in K–12 schools and universities, and what it means to be “anti-racist” during this challenging moment in American civic life. Renowned linguist and award-winning writer John McWhorter feels this debate and discussion has been dominated by a “woke mob” that subscribes to theories that are illogical, unreachable and, ultimately, racist in their impact, however unintentional those effects may be. In his book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, McWhorter argues that an “illiberal neoracism,” disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the American social fabric. McWhorter reveals the workings of this new progressive approach toward race, from the original sin of “white privilege” to the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics. He sets out to show how efforts that claim to “dismantle racist structures” are actually harming his fellow Black Americans by infantilizing Black people, setting Black students up for failure, and passing policies that disproportionately damage Black communities. Some call it “antiracism,” but to McWhorter, it features a racial essentialism that’s barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past. Please join us for an important discussion on the limits of antiracism with an increasingly visible writer who has a different roadmap to justice that he believes will help, not hurt, Black America. ONLINE Time: noon–1 p.m. program
Paul Hawken, 11.3
Diana Campoamor, 11.3
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3 Diana Campoamor: A Latine Vision for a New American Democracy
Diana Campoamor, Founder, Nuestra America Fund (NAF); Editor, If We Want to Win: A Latine Vision for a New American Democracy
There is no version of America’s past, present or future that does not involve the Latinx community. As the second-largest ethnic group, the Latinx community has played a fundamental role in shaping our culture, our elections and our society. And yet, as Nuestra America Fund (NAF) founder Diana Campoamor argues, time and time again this community is undermined, their contributions are pushed to the wayside, and their voices are consistently hushed. Campoamor’s book, If We Want to Win: A Latine Vision for a New American Democracy, is a pushback against such silencing. Twenty Latinx visionaries from diverse causes come together in its pages to share their stories of growth, resilience and revolution. With a diversity of knowledge ranging from environmental justice to philanthropy, these stories cover a wealth of lived experiences. From this they mastermind a future in which harmful stereotypes are replaced with nuanced understandings of the community’s diversity and their accurate portrayal sets the tone for a more representative and just democracy. At INFORUM, Campoamor will be in conversation with a panel of experts to recount their own stories of growing up in the
Latinx community and validate the experiences of the community at large. With this shared wisdom on their side, they will reiterate the bounty to come from a more just future in which the Latinx community is accredited, vindicated, and cherished.
ONLINE INFORUM PROGRAM Time: noon–1 p.m. program
ReGeneration with Paul Hawken
Paul Hawken, Environmentalist; Author, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation Elizabeth Carney, Entrepreneur; Chair, Business & Leadership Member-Led Forum—Moderator
ReGeneration has two meanings. It refers to regenerating life on earth, and it refers to a new generation of humans coming together to reverse global warming. Join Paul Hawken as he demonstrates, through his new work, a response to the urgency of the warming crisis. You will come away with your own sense of purpose and next actions for renewal. ONLINE Time: 3–4 p.m. program MLF: Business & Leadership Program organizer: Elizabeth Carney
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4 Sam Quinones: America in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
Sam Quinones, Journalist; Author, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the
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UPCOMING PROGRAMS OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2021
Sam Quinones, 11.4 Time of Fentanyl and Meth
In 2015, Sam Quinones woke up many Americans to the dangers of the opioid epidemic with his book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. In his new book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, Quinones explores the terrifying next stages of the opioid epidemic, and the stories of individuals and communities that have fought back. Quinones was among the first journalists to capture the true danger presented by synthetic drugs. In fentanyl, traffickers landed a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine, and laced it into cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills, causing tens of thousands of deaths—at the same time as Mexican traffickers made methamphetamine cheaper and more potent than ever. Combined, these new synthetic drugs wrecked communities across the country, particularly rural areas, led to a surge of mental illness concerns, and fed a growing homelessness problem. At a time of great despair because of multiple drug epidemics, Quinones also finds sources of hope, in communities fighting back against rampant synthetic drug issues and helping individuals repair their lives. He concludes that the nation has forsaken “what has made America great” and that “when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like drug traffickers, our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.” ONLINE Time: 3–4 p.m. program
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Roosevelt Montás, 11.5
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16 Roosevelt Montás: Rescuing Socrates
Roosevelt Montás, Senior Lecturer, Center for American Studies, and Director, Freedom and Citizenship Program, Columbia University; Author, Rescuing Socrates In Conversation with George Hammond, Author, Conversations With Socrates
Join us for a virtual conversation with Roosevelt Montás to discuss how a classical, liberal education is still spreading, both in-person and over the internet, to people of all backgrounds throughout the world, and how, even though currently out of favor academically in America, it is still transforming millions of lives. Montás weaves together memoir, literary reflection and the impact that reading Plato, Augustine, Freud and Gandhi has had on his life. Rescuing Socrates describes Montás’s emigration from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was 12, and his discovery of the classics as an undergraduate at Columbia University. After graduating, he stayed at Columbia, earning a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, serving as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and starting a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. ONLINE Time: 10–11 a.m. program MLF: Humanities Program organizer: George Hammond
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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17 David Cay Johnston: The Big Cheat
David Cay Johnston, Co-Founder, DCReport. org; Author, The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family; Twitter @DavidCayJ
The Trump family is one of the most talked about families in the United States. Donald Trump’s presidency elevated that and helped put them on an international stage. Over the last half decade, journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston has provided the American people with fascinating insight into the financial world of one of America’s most influential families. Johnston talks about the financial life of the Trump Family in his new piece of work, The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. This new book details the aspects of the Trump family’s finances during the four years Donald Trump spent in office, leaving no details out, to give you the complete picture. ONLINE Time: 3–4 p.m. program
LATE-BREAKING EVENT Pathways to Peace: Through the Lens of Interfaith Youth Our young panelists will present their views on what might bring peace and reconciliation to our troubled world. Thursday, October 28, 3 p.m. More at commonwealthclub.org/events
PROGRAMS INFORMATION T
he Commonwealth Club organizes nearly 500 events every year on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports. Programs
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CREATING CITIZENS The Club’s new education department. COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG
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MEMBER-LED FORUMS Volunteer-driven programs that focus on particular fields. COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MLF
MICHELLE MEOW SHOW Talks with LGBTQ thought leaders from a wide range of fields of expertise. COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MMS
WEEK TO WEEK Political roundtable paired with a preprogram social. COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/W2W
typically one hour long and frequently include interviews, panel discussions or speeches followed by a question and answer session.
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LIZ CHENEY Wyoming’s Republican U.S. Representative on the Democratic Crisis
WAGING A LONELY WAR FOR THE
soul of her party, Republican Representative Liz Cheney makes the conservative case for democracy at home and abroad. From the August 17, 2021, program “A Conversation with Congresswoman Liz Cheney,” part of our Future of Democracy series, supported by Betsy and Roy Eisenhardt. LIZ CHENEY, U.S. Representative (R-WY) In Conversation with DAN ASHLEY, Anchor, ABC 7 News Bay Area; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors
Moderator Dan Ashley follows U.S. Representative Liz Cheney from the green room to the stage of the Club’s Taube Family Auditorium. (Photo by Ed Ritger.)
DAN ASHLEY: I am very pleased to introduce today’s guest, Liz Cheney, congresswoman from Wyoming. Liz Cheney serves as Wyoming’s lone member of Congress in the U.S. House of Representatives. As a prominent Republican, Representative Cheney made national headlines of course earlier this year when she voted to impeach President Trump, saying he provoked the January 6 Capitol attack. She has also vowed to fight to keep President Trump out of office if he runs again and has challenged all assertions by President Trump and his supporters that the 2020 election was fraudulent and stolen. This led to her removal as Chair of the House Republican Conference, where she was the third-ranking Republican. She was recently appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to serve on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. In a Washington commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH
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Post opinion column published this past May, Representative Cheney wrote, “The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.” She went on to write, “History is watching. Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.” So today we’re going to have a conversation about the outlook for American democracy and many other things as well. Great to be with you. CHENEY: Great to be here. Thank you. ASHLEY: Let’s begin with the costs, political and personal of standing up against the president and your party, as you did. Describe the consequences of that. CHENEY: Well, thank you first of all, for having me. Thank you to The Commonwealth Club. I suppose I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the cost or the consequences. I really do think that where we are as a country and where we are as a party is—is it a really perilous moment? I think that when
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“People sometimes say, ‘Well, our institutions held that day.’ And they did, but institutions don’t defend themselves.” —LIZ CHENEY you look at what happened on January 6, when you look at what former President Trump did in the lead-up to the 6th, what he did and failing to send help while the Capitol was under attack and what he’s continued to do since, he’s demonstrated that he is willing to sort of roll through any guardrail of democracy, and I think that is very dangerous. I think that all of us as Americans—and those of us, especially, who are elected and who have taken an oath under God and the Constitution—have a responsibility and obligation to protect the republic and to protect the peaceful transfer of power. ASHLEY: So many of your colleagues, congresswoman, chose not to do that— Republican colleagues. They didn’t take that same stand. Why do you think that was the case? And was it worth it to you politically
THE COMMO N WE AL TH | October/November 2021
and personally to take that stand? CHENEY: Well, look, I think that we really [are] at an unprecedented moment, and I think that there were members who made political calculations instead of taking a step back and saying, “The republic only functions if we are faithful to the Constitution.” So from my perspective, it wasn’t a choice. There is no choice, because of the gravity of what happened. And it was a very near-run thing. The attempt to delay the count and the violence of course itself, it didn’t work. It didn’t work. People sometimes say, “Well, our institutions held that day.” And they did, but institutions don’t defend themselves. They held because of a lot of brave people, people at the local level who refused to yield when former President Trump called them and said, “Just find me some votes.” It held because Vice President Pence refused to reject
Left: ABC 7 News Anchor Dan Ashley and Rep. Liz Cheney on stage in the Taube Family Auditorium. Above: Cheney makes a point. (Photos by Ed Ritger.)
slates of electors. But the institutions depend upon people defending them. ASHLEY: Before we go any further, just because you were there that day on the 6th, describe your experience in the Capitol as rioters began to storm the building. CHENEY: I was on the floor [of the House of Representatives], and we were in the process of debating the electoral votes. The security—the Secret Service details, the Capitol Police details—came onto the floor and evacuated the speaker and some of the other leaders on both sides who happened to be on the floor, but many of us were there and stayed. It was something you never think is . . . you can’t even imagine it’s going to happen. I mean, we could hear the mob approaching. We kept getting announcements from Capitol Police going up to the Speaker’s chair and announcing that the mob had breached the Capitol, the mob was in the rotunda, that tear gas had been released. ASHLEY: What was going through your mind? CHENEY: It just was surreal. And I was
angry. But we were following instructions. They told us to get gas masks out from under the chairs and begin to put them on. ASHLEY: Did you get that? CHENEY: I got it out. I didn’t put mine on. Many people sort of opened them up and waited to see whether or not we need them. ASHLEY: When you say you were angry, what made you angry? CHENEY: I was angry because this is the United States of America. And the Congress was in the process of conducting one of our constitutional responsibilities, which is to count the electoral votes and certify the winner of the presidential election. The notion that we had a violent mob that had invaded the Capitol was just—I couldn’t believe it. ASHLEY: In the aftermath of that and what happened in terms of President Trump trying to nullify and discredit the election, do you feel that some of your Republican colleagues should be embarrassed by their behavior, even ashamed by what they did do or did not do?
CHENEY: Absolutely. When you are entrusted with the responsibilities that we have, and look, if you look at what just about everybody said immediately after the attack, people knew at that moment, on the 6th and the 7th and up until many days after what had happened and how dangerous it was and how wrong it was. So then to have many of those same people—Kevin McCarthy, for example, the Republican leader, decide that he’s going to go to Mar-a-Lago before the month is out to essentially rehabilitate the most dangerous president in American history, I don’t have an explanation for that, but it is certainly something that he should be ashamed of. ASHLEY: Perhaps it hasn’t been hard because you are obviously doing what you think is right, but you really have taken a very vocal stand against some of your Republican colleagues. That has been isolating, I would suspect for you in Congress. Am I right? CHENEY: Well, again, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that, because what matters is the future of the country and what matters is the future of the party. I am a Republican. The first person I ever voted for was Ronald Reagan. I’m a
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conservative Republican. I believe that our party has to be based on truth, and I believe that the majority of Republicans across this country know that, and that we have to decide as a party if we’re going to be back in a position where we’re winning elections, we have to be able to convey to people we believe in the truth. We believe in the Constitution. We’re going to conduct ourselves in a way that’s serious and responsible. And I’m committed to making sure that that’s the direction we go in. ASHLEY: We’re going to leave this topic in just a moment, congresswoman. But what did you think as you heard the president and others try to discredit this election? You never believed, or did you, that Joe Biden didn’t win fair and square? CHENEY: I did not believe that he lost. I knew that Joe Biden had won. ASHLEY: [What did you think] when you heard the rhetoric otherwise, from your Republican colleagues in leadership positions and the president? CHENEY: Well, we went through a process. So after the election itself, the president had every right to bring legal challenges. We have a process to do that. Either candidate could have done it, and the president did that and he had a right to do it. But once you get to the point where over 60 judges have said there’s no merit to these claims, then there’s a moment, and particularly once the Electoral College has met, then it becomes very dangerous for a president of the United States to reject the rulings of the courts. It’s one thing to disagree with court rulings. I happen to think, for example, that [Chief] Justice Roberts got it wrong on Obamacare, and our First Amendment rights give us the protection to say that, but you don’t get to ignore the rulings. And that is what President Trump was doing. So as we watched after the certification, the continued claims, the continued efforts to try to delay, the continued efforts to pressure local officials, that took us into territory we’d never been in before. When you have the president saying the same things about our process, that it doesn’t work, that it can’t convey the will of the people, the same things, for example, that the Chinese government says about democracy, people really need to stop and think about what he did and what he continues to do and why that’s so dangerous. ASHLEY: You believe, as many do, that President Trump inspired and ignited the rage that led to the Capitol riot. Beyond his role more broadly, what is happening in the country that makes this really, as you said,
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once unthinkable act even possible? How could we possibly get to this point where hundreds of Americans would storm the American Capitol? CHENEY: I think there’s a lot going on in the country. . . . If you look, for example, just at what the defendants are saying now— we’ve had something like 600 charged—and if you look at their pleadings, many of them say, “Well, we were there because President Trump told us to come.” So I think there clearly was a provocation. I think that one of the really important things the select committee has to do is understand more about the planning that went on, understand more about the financing of the effort. I think it’s also clear, if you look at many of the videos that have been out publicly, that there were organized paramilitary groups within those who breached the Capitol. We need to understand exactly what those connections are and how that happened. ASHLEY: All right. Congresswoman, besides what happened at the Capitol, and we are going to move on from that, what would you identify as Donald Trump’s greatest failure as president? CHENEY: Well, nothing comes close to what he did in terms of attempting to steal the election. But I do think that he had some good policies. I think that what he did with respect to tax policy was good. I think what he did with respect to deregulation was good. So there were good policies. What he did to fund the military was good. But I think what we’re seeing today, for example, in Afghanistan, Joe Biden bears responsibility for the decision, which has led directly to this just catastrophe. But President Trump said all along he wanted to withdraw our forces and he instructed Secretary of State [Mike] Pompeo and others to negotiate with the Taliban. I think that certainly is something that you have to point to, that setting the United States down the path where we’re negotiating with terrorists, where we’ve made concessions to the terrorists, we basically committed that we would have 5,000 prisoners released in Afghanistan, completely sidelined the Afghan government and set us on the path that led to what we’re seeing today. I think certainly that’s a failing. And I think the management of COVID is a failing. ASHLEY: You answered actually my next question, which was on the other side of that question, which is what do you think was his greatest success as president. You pointed to a few things that you believe he did quite well.
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CHENEY: Yeah. And look, I think if you look at, in particular, the funding of the Defense Department, we live in a world that is full of an array of threats, that the velocity of the threats, the number of them—it’s a very dangerous world, and the danger is accelerating. His commitment to provide the resources necessary for several years for the Defense Department to begin to do what’s necessary to meet those threats, I think was very important policy. ASHLEY: And my next area of conversation here is Afghanistan. But before that, let me button this with one of the questions from a member of the audience, and I’ll paraphrase it a little bit for the purpose of this conversation. Going back to the election and the claims that it was illegitimate, “they won by a landslide,” as he said, which we knew not to be the case. There are still a great number of people in the public—I don’t know how many lawmakers really believe that, but the public believes, a number of Republican faithful, that that is the case, that [Donald Trump] did in fact win the election and that Joe Biden somehow stole the election. How do you and the Republican leadership push back against that notion and make it clear to members of the party and party supporters that this was a legitimate election, so that we don’t have this dangerous cycle happening every four years? CHENEY: I think that part of it comes with having leaders of my party recognize they aren’t bystanders. Too often, what’s happening today is you have party leaders on the Republican side who know that it wasn’t stolen, they know that what Donald Trump is saying is not true, but they go along with it. That’s a dereliction of their duty, because we aren’t bystanders. We have the responsibility and the ability to help educate the public and to make sure that people understand the facts. I think actually it’s one of the really important things the select committee has to do, which is walk through the different aspects of the lie about the election and help people to understand and recognize that these claims are just not true. It doesn’t mean that there wasn’t fraud, but there was not sufficient fraud to have changed the outcome and the courts have decided that. ASHLEY: Let’s turn now, congresswoman, to Afghanistan. The images we’ve seen in the last couple of days of Afghans running Right: Rep. Liz Cheney represents Wyoming in the U.S. House of Representatives. (Photo by Ed Ritger.)
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on the tarmac, trying to get on airplanes, obviously heartbreaking, cnd certainly for many of the men and women who served in Afghanistan, infuriating to some degree. Why did it happen? CHENEY: I think there are a number of reasons. I think first of all, allowing our policy to be set around political slogans is extremely dangerous. So we’ve had now three presidents, essentially Obama, Trump, and now Biden, all of whom said, “Oh, we have to end the endless wars.” Twenty-five hundred forces on the ground in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from being able to do what they’ve now done, to prevent safe havens that the Taliban—who, by the way, never has renounced Al-Qaeda. In fact, the leader of the Taliban swears allegiance to the leader of Al-Qaeda. Anybody who tells you that the Taliban renounced Al-Qaeda, or that they ever agreed to renounce Al-Qaeda, it’s just not true. So we should have done a better job. Our leaders should have done a better job at explaining to the American people why we need troops deployed, why they’re important for our counter-terrorism efforts, for our counter-intelligence efforts. The notion that you’re going to simply announce we’re withdrawing was wrong. I think it reflects a misunderstanding about America’s role in the world. And again, what we were able to accomplish with a relatively small force was certainly an important element of our security. When you look at what’s happened today, it is heartbreaking. On top of the fact that the policy of withdrawal was wrong, certainly the way that it’s done is indefensible. I just saw, before I came, that there’s been this announcement sent out to Americans in Kabul, “Get yourselves to the airport and we’ll get you out. But the U.S. military cannot protect you getting to the airport.” Now that is absolutely stunning and unacceptable. And President Biden’s speech yesterday in my view was appalling. For somebody who told the American people that he was an expert on foreign policy and told the American people that he was compassionate, that speech was blaming everybody else, showed no understanding of the reality of what’s happening on the ground and was not the kind of speech that the leader of the United States of America should ever give. ASHLEY: President Biden said yesterday, as you well know, that even he was surprised at how rapidly the Taliban was able to overrun the country. Should he have been surprised? Did we know that this was a very real possibility?
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“The idea that the Taliban was ever going to provide for U.S. security or not provide safe haven to terrorists is just not true.” —LIZ CHENEY CHENEY: He should not have been surprised, and he should have listened to the military advice that I’m confident he was receiving. I think he ignored that, and the consequences are grave, not just for what it means for us in terms of our security and our ability to defend ourselves from Islamic terrorism, which now we have to undertake an entirely new and expanded effort to do that because they will have a caliphate. What it means for us globally, who is going to trust the United States [after] watching the footage that we’re seeing now out of the Kabul airport and what it means in terms of the way that we have empowered our adversaries. It’s going to be something that will take concerted effort to recover from, and he should have listened
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to his military advisors. A SH L E Y: Spea k ing of surrea l, you mentioned the scene at the Capitol when it was being attacked. A surreal scene, I thought today was when the Taliban held a news conference for world media and they pledged to not seek reprisals against those who supported Americans, to allow Americans to leave. Do you believe any of that? CHENEY: No, of course not. And this was one of the problems of the last several years. And we have now seen since the devastation that is on our televisions all across the country about Afghanistan, attempts by people in the Trump administration to sort of rewrite the history on this. I think that is also wrong, because this has been such a devastating
event that as a country, we have to make sure we learn the right lesson from it. At the time that Secretary Pompeo was meeting with Taliban leaders, was negotiating with them, there were many, many of us who were saying you cannot negotiate with terrorists. The document that some now are claiming was some sort of real agreement was a surrender document. The idea that the Taliban was ever going to provide for U.S. security or not provide safe haven to terrorists is just not true. I think it’s important for us going forward to learn the lesson of what happened here in a way that is fact-based. ASHLEY: Not true, and some would say ludicrous on the face of it. CHENEY: Right. ASHLEY: How could this crisis have been avoided? Do we stay or could we have gotten out in a way that did not create this current crisis? What could President Biden have done differently? What could President Trump have done differently to lead up to this moment? What should Biden have done? CHENEY: He should have stayed. ASHLEY: But for how long? When does
it end? CHENEY: Well, I mean if you look at U.S. forces deployed in Germany, U.S. forces deployed in Korea, we have to really look at the facts of what was happening on the ground—2,500 forces. We were working with the Afghans. We had trained the Afghans. The Afghan army was doing the majority of the fighting, but they had our air support and they had our ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance]. They were in a position where we were able to prevent the takeover of the country. We were able to slow and stop the establishment of safe havens. We had intelligence operations we were able to conduct. The idea that you go from that status quo to this disaster as a matter of a policy decision is indefensible, not to mention what’s happening now. Pakistan is on the border, obviously. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. We’ve created a completely unstable situation. You’re going to have Afghan refugees certainly contributing to instability in Pakistan, which is very dangerous. So at every single moment here, the impact of this decision is going to be
grave, and in some cases catastrophic. ASHLEY: So we should not have withdrawn these troops? CHENEY: We shouldn’t have withdrawn the troops. You don’t say, “Well, you know, we’re going to defend American security for 20 years and that’s it.” You don’t end wars by leaving. What’s happened is that the terrorists have won in Afghanistan. So that’s not ending wars. And that’s something President Obama talked about, “I’m going to end wars.” And we saw what happened in Iraq. The withdrawal from Iraq led ultimately to the establishment of the caliphate that we then had to go back in and defeat. So it’s important for us to understand what those forces are doing and why they need to be there. ASHLEY: Congresswoman, something like $1 trillion spent in Afghanistan, $80 -something billion spent on training Taliban forces, all to no avail. CHENEY: Training Afghan— ASHLEY: —Afghan fighters, yeah, all to no avail, as we’ve seen. As soon as we remove our troops, the whole thing collapses. Was this doomed from the start? CHENEY: No, and I would disagree that it was to no avail. I think if you look at, we went into Afghanistan obviously after 9/11. It’s important to remember that before we invaded Afghanistan, we said to the Taliban, “Give up Al-Qaeda and we will not come in.” That should have been a lesson. If the Taliban wasn’t willing to give up Al-Qaeda facing the kind of military action that they faced, the notion that something else was going to incentivize them to do it is just not right. The way I look at it is, there’s one question. The question is, what does our security require? If you determine, as I think is right, that U.S. security requires that the terrorists can’t establish safe havens, then you have to determine, “All right, what is it going to take in terms of our activities on the ground to prevent that?” It is not fair to say, and it is actually, I think, shameful to say the Afghans aren’t fighting. The Afghans fought alongside us for 20 years. They took the vast bulk of the casualties, and they were able to do that in part because we were providing air support, we were providing training, we were providing weapons. And once you pull that away and you create a situation where America seems like we’re departing and washing our hands in the situation, it’s not a surprise that we would be where we are today, but it is tragic. ASHLEY: I use the phrase to no avail because
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I wonder how the history books will judge the time spent in Afghanistan, given how we just left. We may have to go back in, who knows, but how we just left and what do we show for it other than of course getting bin Laden many, many years ago. How will history judge this episode? CHENEY: I think it’s very important that history recognized that after 9/11, we’ve now gone 20 years without a mass casualty attack launched from Afghanistan, and every American and allied service member who fought in Afghanistan needs to know that that is an important, hugely important element of keeping us safe and that what they did is something that we are all grateful for. Having our forces deployed there kept us safe. Now that they aren’t there, the cost of defending the nation is going to increase.
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ASHLEY: And the risk will increase as well. CHENEY: And the threat will increase, yeah. ASHLEY: We’ve heard today from a number of servicemen and women who were there, some came back wounded, some did not, who are very frustrated, angry, heartbroken about what they’re seeing, because they served there. They worked alongside the Afghan fighters and the Afghan people, and they are sickened by the images that they’re seeing. They feel that we as a country have abandoned the Afghan people. What would you say to them? CHENEY: We have abandoned the Afghan people. I think that the fact that we did not put in place apparently the planning to be able to evacuate American citizens, we didn’t put in place a planning to be able to evacuate
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Afghans who worked with us— ASHLEY: Which we could have done weeks ago, right? Leading up to this. CHENEY: Yes. And there will be, I’m confident, many investigations into what happened. The fact that we turned over Bagram Air Base, and now we’re trying to evacuate people from Karzai International Airport, people will have to explain why that happened. But the bottom line of abandoning the Afghans when they were fighting with us and we gave them a commitment—and think about the Afghan women. I mean that is absolutely heartbreaking, and when I see people today saying things like, “Well, maybe the Taliban is going to be a new and improved Taliban.” It’s just wrong. If anything, the Taliban will be stronger than they were before.
“Those who say America should withdraw from the world—people that have the Rand Paul view of the world— don’t understand that if we withdraw, there’s a vacuum and that vacuum is filled by . . . people who do not share our views of the world. They don’t share our views about democracy. You really do have to ask yourself, ‘Do you want to live in that world?’” —LIZ CHENEY
ASHLEY: Having survived this. CHENEY: Better organized, better fighters, yeah, and being able to claim this tremendous victory against us. So I think that this will go down as one of the worst and most dangerous foreign policy decisions potentially in the history of the country. ASHLEY: That’s a big statement. Are you worried about the human rights violations that are likely to come against women and others? CHENEY: Well, I mean we’re seeing them already. When you have Afghan women who we worked with and encouraged and who demonstrated unbelievable strength and commitment to rebuilding their nation and their society, and now they’re being raped. They’re being forced into these relationships, raped by the Taliban fighters,
killed, tortured, and then for President Biden to have made the decision that has caused this, and then for him to stand up and say, “Listen, we’re going to continue to speak out for the Afghan women.” I mean that is really cynical and disingenuous. ASHLEY: In the days, weeks, months, even years that follow, what must we do in Afghanistan now? What is our path forward? CHENEY: Well, I think several things. One is the Biden administration has got to put together a strategy that is a very clear strategy for how we are going to ensure we’re not attacked again. This has fundamentally changed all the calculations about how do we protect the United States from terrorist attacks. And one of the things that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is all of the prisoners that have been released from Afghan prisons over the last 72 hours or so and the ones that were released before under the Trump agreement, they are populating not only terrorist activity inside Afghanistan, but terrorist organizations globally. And so they will—as you’ve seen the chairman of Joint Chiefs and others say—[have] increased the threat to the United States. So the Biden administration, number one, they have to get the people out. They have to get the Americans out and they have to get the Afghans out who helped us. That’s got to be number one. And number two, they’ve got to make sure that they’re putting in place a plan that reflects the increased resources, the increased focus and attention it’s now going to take to protect us. ASHLEY: Can you see a situation where we go back in? CHENEY: Look, I think it’s very hard to imagine at this moment, but I think that the Biden administration has to take a very hard look at what’s necessary. I mean the idea that we have let this happen, and it could have been avoided with the status quo, that’s something they will have to answer for. ASHLEY: All right. Let’s turn our attention now to the coronavirus. The United States seemingly caught on its heels at the start of the pandemic, and slow to fully respond. Now the delta variant is once again, as we know, filling our hospitals. Could this have been avoided and how? CHENEY: Well, yes. And I think the Chinese government bears direct responsibility. One of the facts that I think tells you the responsibility that they bear—and there are discussions about, did it come from the lab? Did it come from the wet market? I think it looks increasingly like it came from the lab, but the fact that the Chinese government
stopped all travel from Wuhan province to the rest of China, they said, “You can’t come into the rest of China if you’re in Wuhan.” But they allowed travel into the rest of the world, that act alone is the spread of this virus, because they clearly understood they had human-to-human transmission. They were trying to protect themselves, but they unleashed it on the rest of the world. And the economic consequences, the consequences in terms of lost lives, all of those things are the direct result of the fact that the government of China unleashed this virus. ASHLEY: So what do we learn from that? How do we protect the world, not just this country, from this happening again? What’s the lesson learned? CHENEY: I think several things. One, we have to be clear-eyed about the responsibility of the government of China. I think I support the notion that they need to pay restitution. I think that the consequences of this—we all are vaccinated; we’re all likely going to have to get shots on a regular basis probably. We don’t know what kinds of variants and mutations you’re going to see in the virus, but we’re going to be living with this probably for the rest of our lives. And that is a circumstance that I think they’ve got to be held responsible for. ASHLEY: Is that going to happen? Will they be held responsible? CHENEY: There are a number of ways that it needs to happen. I think one is countries around the world need to recognize the danger that they pose, and that has to affect where supply chains are. It needs to affect where we produce pharmaceuticals in the United States and where those supply chains are. As we’re going into this next phase of sort-of the great power competition, I think that the fact of their unleashing of this virus should be a very clear lesson for people about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party, the nature of the government of China. And when you think about things like those who say America should withdraw from the world, people that have the Rand Paul view of the world, for example, don’t understand that if we withdraw, there’s a vacuum that is filled and that vacuum is filled by China. It’s filled by Russia. It’s filled by people who do not share our views of the world. They don’t share our views about democracy. And you really do have to ask yourself, “Do you want to live in that world?” But we need to be able to build allies and bring them together around standing up against a global surveillance state, which is the Chinese model here. ASHLEY: But of course, the next pandemic
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may well not come from China or even that part of the world. And clearly, this last 15, 16 months has made us very aware of our vulnerability to a potential [pandemic], something perhaps given our modern way of living in modern science, we took for granted that this could [not] really happen. The next virus could be far worse. What are the lessons learned for us? CHENEY: I think there are some lessons learned that are good ones. If you look at the fact that the United States was able through Operation Warp Speed, which was another policy of the Trump administration that was a really good one, to develop vaccines in a relatively short period of time, the fact that we have been able to respond to it I think is important. But I think we need to make sure that we’re doing everything possible to provide the resources to NIH, to the CDC, so that we are protecting ourselves. And I think we need to think through the vulnerabilities and what’s necessary to respond when you have a power like China willing to unleash this kind of death on a global scale. ASHLEY: From the start, President Trump downplayed the severity of the coming pandemic. What would you say to governors like Greg Abbott of Texas, who as we know, just tested positive for COVID himself, asymptomatic. We certainly wish him well, but Ron DeSantis of Florida, who continued to resist mandatory masking and other pandemic safety measures. What would you say to those leaders, Republican leaders, who have not embraced some of the mandatory masking, mandatory vaccinations, and those two states [are] particularly seeing huge spikes in coronavirus cases? As a fellow Republican, what would you say to them? CHENEY: I think this never should have become political. And I do think President Trump bears responsibility for the fact that it did become political. Decisions going forward have to be made based on what the best public health information is at the time. So, if you have local school districts, for example, that believe that they have to mask in order for kids to be back in person, those decisions should be made based on health. There’s a whole series of decisions around masking, decisions around vaccinations, that we have to do everything we can to get the politics out of. At the same time, I think we as a society are going to be dealing with the consequences of kids not being in school. Those are very real, and I don’t think we know the full cost of that. So when you look at many kids [who] have been out of school for over a year, and
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“In Wyoming we are doing really interesting and innovative work on carbon capture and carbon sequestration, and some of the proposals on what to do . . . that come from the far left basically ignore all of that.” —LIZ CHENEY the cost of that in terms of education, the cost in terms of mental health, I think are very real. We need to be thinking through how we’re going to address that and address those issues, but issues around public health ought to be made based upon medical advice and medical guidance and not politics. ASHLEY: You mentioned President Trump, but beyond that, just as a culture, what has happened where science has become so politicized and that we, as someone said recently, don’t debate policy as much as reality anymore? What has changed in this country from your perspective? CHENEY: I think that we in many ways have sort of lost a common set of facts, not just about science, but about many things. And some of that is because of social media. Some of it is because of the algorithms, so social media companies use that to sort of drive people to more and more radical places, to get more and more likes and clicks. We need to think through how we get back to a place where we can debate facts and we can say we have different perspectives on what the solutions might be, but it’s very difficult and challenging if you’re in a situation that’s sort of post-truth. I think the combination of people being at home so much, having so much time on the internet, the algorithms that are being used on the internet, the siloing of information—and look, we see this, I think Fox News does it, I think MSNBC does it. They don’t want people changing the channel. So you sort of tell them what they want to hear. That means that there is no longer a set of basic recognizable facts we can base our movement forward on. ASHLEY: And I have my facts and someone else has their facts and never the two shall meet. Let’s turn now to another topic that we are increasingly concerned about, and that is climate change. Hundreds of thousands of acres are once again on fire in California, as we face another devastating wildfire season, exacerbated, most experts say by human
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activity. From a policy standpoint, what do we do as a state and a country? How do we need to address the concerns of climate change in the years ahead? CHENEY: Yeah, I think this is another issue that we really need to get the politics out of. If you look at the forest fires, for example, one of the things that I know we face in Wyoming and we face across the country is bad forest management, and years and years where we have not had the timber sales that we’ve needed to have at the numbers we’ve needed. We haven’t had the ability to have things like the Roadless Rule. When you combine the Roadless Rule with the beetle kill that we’ve seen in some of our national forests, you end up with dead trees that nobody is allowed to go in and clear out. So the forest fires are a direct result of those bad management policies. I think one thing we do need to look at is look at the last year and a half. And because of COVID, clearly, and I haven’t looked at the numbers, but I would imagine that emissions were down because people were not driving. They weren’t out, they were in their homes. ASHLEY: That is true, actually. Pollution was down. CHENEY: So you had a year and a half where carbon emissions are down, and it would be interesting to see, well, did the temperature decrease as well? And it didn’t. So recognizing and understanding policies that you want to put in place and making sure those policies have a direct impact on what you’re trying to do—so if the purpose is we have to deal with global warming, then I think it’s incumbent upon us to say, “All right, what policies really work?” Too often, what we’ve seen in Wyoming for example, is policies that are put in place from Washington that are incredibly damaging to our economy, but don’t actually affect ultimately global temperature. So you have a situation, for example, in Wyoming, we are doing really interesting and innovative work on carbon capture and carbon sequestration,
and some of the proposals on what to do about the environment that come from the far left basically ignore all of that—we just have to move completely beyond fossil fuels, which is not realistic. And I think we need to recognize progress is being made and come together to find solutions that actually are solutions. ASHLEY: A small but growing number of Republican leaders have started more publicly to acknowledge that global warming and climate change is an issue, and that it has been exacerbated by human activity, but there is great, and you alluded to it a moment ago, great disagreement as to what to do about it. There’s real reluctance to dramatically change our reliance on fossil fuels. Do you think we, at some point, need to dramatically change our reliance on fossil fuels? CHENEY: I think that we need to recognize that fossil fuels are fundamental to running the economy, and that we have made huge strides at being able to get access to those fossil fuels and being able to use them in ways that have less impact on the environment. That’s very important. In Wyoming, we also have wind energy. We’re now going to be the site of a new nuclear facility. I think that’s all important, but I think we have to be realistic. Wind energy is important, but wind energy, when you drive between Laramie and Cheyenne and you look out, you don’t just see beautiful Prairie anymore. You see an awful lot of turbines and those turbines have a very negative impact, for example, on our eagle population, on our birds generally. And what do you do when the turbines break? Where do you put them? You end up with landfills full of turbines. So there are consequences to all of these decisions. I think it’s really
important for us to say, “What are we trying to accomplish?” Let’s do things that actually accomplish it, not just things that maybe make us feel better and ultimately don’t contribute to improving the environment. ASHLEY: You say that fossil fuels are fundamental to our economy and surely they are; do they have to remain that way in the decades to come? Can we or should we, and I ask the question openly, ultimately move away from fossil fuels? CHENEY: Look, I don’t believe that we should. I think that my view is those fossil fuels are actually a national treasure and that we have been able to provide reliable and affordable electricity, to do it in a way that really does reflect how important it is to be good stewards of the environment. And it has improved significantly. So if you look, if you come to Wyoming, and I’ll take you to show you land that’s been reclaimed from our coal mines, for example, the land is in much better condition in some circumstances than it was prior to the mining. So again, I think it’s about, let’s be honest about what we’re able to do. Let’s be honest about the way that we have been able to now get access to oil and gas in a way that makes us energy independent. If you’re talking about national security threats, foreign adversaries would like nothing more for example than to be able to shut down our grid, to be able to make our grid not reliable. We’ve had challenges with that here in California and in Texas. So I think we should be doing things that ensure that there is a supply of energy for the grid and doing it in a way that reflects that we need to do it at a low-cost way so it’s affordable, but it’s got to be reliable as well. ASHLEY: We’ve discussed some of the issues in this country that are important, that are
making a lot of headlines. Is there anything that you or your colleagues are looking at that maybe aren’t making all the headlines that we need to address as a nation? You mentioned stability of our power grid is a good example. Is there anything else that is on the horizon that you think we’ll need to address as a country? CHENEY: Yeah. I’m on the Armed Services Committee, so a good part of my time is spent focused on the national security threats, and on certainly a weekly basis and sometimes a daily basis we’re reminded on the committee that the stability globally and the primacy of the United States and the primacy of our military forces, those are things we’ve taken for granted, and there are things we’re losing. We had, for example, the commander of Strategic Forces Command testify several weeks ago in front of the committee, and he talked about the progress that China is making in terms of modernizing its nuclear forces. He said it’s breathtaking. We are now facing adversaries who are making advances in space, in cyber, AI, and in nuclear forces in ways that present a real threat to us. It’s important for the American people to recognize that our security and our prosperity and our freedom depends upon being able to deter adversaries. That deterrence requires that our adversaries know we have the capability and we have the will, and that’s the best way to ensure we don’t have to use our military force; but weakness is really provocative, as we’re seeing in Afghanistan today. ASHLEY: Are we getting behind in these areas in a dangerous way? CHENEY: Yes, we are facing a situation where there are areas where we no longer have the advantage that we had before. I guess that’s the best way to put it. Part of this is, and I particularly look at China in this regard, I think the Chinese government has recognized for many years and has been very determined to advance on multiple fronts against us. Both parties got China wrong. Both parties sort of said, “We’ll open up economically, and they will open up politically.” That didn’t happen for a number of reasons, but at about the same time that they were opening up economically, the technology to conduct a global surveillance state, certainly, and certainly a national surveillance state for them, became available. So we really do need to recognize the danger if China, for example, gets ahead of us in space, if China gets ahead of us on AI or on cyberspace, and we have to put the kind of determined, concerted effort into preventing
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that, that they are today putting into trying to accomplish that. A SH L E Y: Congresswoma n, is your concern regarding China from an economic standpoint or from a military standpoint? CHENEY: Look, I think that they are a threat across the board, because their view is that they must replace us. Their view is that their own success— ASHLEY: As the world leader? CHENEY: Yeah, that it’s a zero sum game. So it’s not just us. I mean, if you look at what the Chinese government has been doing, look at what they’re doing with data. There’ve been the news stories recently about some of the testing, for example, that pregnant women around the globe use, which has become clear that the company that produces those tests has connections to the Chinese military. So when you take those tests or when you do 23andMe or anything, that data goes right back into the Chinese government. I think those kinds of things we have to be much more aware of, and recognize the vulnerability that that poses. ASHLEY: You’re on the Armed Services Committee. What keeps you up at night? CHENEY: Well, I also have five kids. ASHLEY: That may be even more worrisome. CHENEY: Yeah, depending on the day. I think what keeps me up at night is I worry that the United States, that we have begun to take for granted how important our role in the world is. We’ve had a series of presidents now, I would say beginning with Obama, who didn’t fundamentally recognize the danger of American withdrawal. And I think that we cannot get into a situation where we say, “You know what? We don’t have to worry about that whatever global issue is because somebody else will take care of it.” The lesson really has to be American strength, America being able to convey to our allies that they can count on us; American leadership in the world really matters. I think that we’re now in a situation we’ve got the debt that is growing in ways that itself is a security threat. We’ve got new spending that’s being proposed and the allocation of funds [is wrong]—spending too much, but that the Defense Department budget is insufficient. That keeps me up at night, [the thought] that we will lose the ability to deter adversaries and that an adversary will make a calculation that they can challenge us or they can threaten us, and that we will have lost our ability to deter it. And that makes conflict more likely. ASHLEY: On the flip side, what makes you sleep soundly at night about where we are as
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“There are Republicans who say, ‘Just ignore [Trump].’ But he is very much committed to having power again. It’s important that we make sure that doesn’t happen.” —LIZ CHENEY a country? Not the five kids. CHENEY: What makes me sleep soundly at night is that we’re America, and that we have tremendous potential, that the ideas that are at the heart of our founding, the miracle of our founding, the miracle of our freedom is incredibly powerful and important. I will tell you specifically in the time since my vote on impeachment and the months after that, one of the things that has been really tremendously moving and inspiring has been the reaction of young people, young people across Wyoming, young people around the country and young women especially, who have reached out to me, who’ve come to my events, who’ve come to talk to me to say, “Thank you, and we want to fight for our Constitution, and we want to fight with you.” It’s not a partisan thing, but it is really moving and inspiring to see that reaction from our young people, and that gives me tremendous hope about the future. ASHLEY: Do you have any interest in running for president? Will you run for president? CHENEY: Look, I am totally focused on doing everything that’s necessary, obviously to represent the people of Wyoming and help make sure that we prevent Donald Trump from being the Republican Party nominee and ever getting anywhere close to the Oval
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Office again. ASHLEY: Do you really think he would run again? Or is that just talk? CHENEY: Yeah. ASHLEY: You think he might? CHENEY: And I think that it is such a dangerous possibility, we have to assume it. You can’t ignore him. I think there are Republicans who say, “Well, just ignore him and he’ll go away.” But he is very much committed to, I think, having power again. I think it’s important that we make sure that doesn’t happen. . . . I think that for the country, we have to have a Republican Party that is not captured by a cult of personality. That’s what’s really important. I mean, we’re going to have an election in ’22; we’ll have a presidential election in ’24. The majority of my party is not captured by the cult of personality, but there are people who [have] been deeply misled and betrayed by Donald Trump. He’s a man [whose] idols are people like Vladimir Putin and Erdogan. ASHLEY: How do you explain that? How is that even possible? CHENEY: . . . It matters whether you elect people who are committed to the republic. And I think what we have seen is that wasn’t his priority.
Walking France’s Dordogne & Loire Valleys May 30 – June 10, 2022
Itinerary Monday, May 30
Depart the U.S. for independent flights to Bordeaux, France.
Tuesday, May 31 Bordeaux, France / Sarlat, Dordogne
Arrive to Bordeaux and transfer to Sarlat. (~2 ½ hour drive.) Check in to our centrally located hotel and gather for introductions and a welcome dinner. Hotel Plaza Madeleine (D)
Wednesday, June 1 Sarlat / Dordogne
Friday, June 3 Vezer Valley
Transfer to Sergeac and walk to Saint Leon sur Vezere, an exquisite village by the river with a stone-roofed church and two chateaus from the 14th and 16th centuries. Learn about the Vezere Valley, classified as an UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the afternoon transfer to Peyzac and walk along the Vezere River passing by La Roque St. Christophe and the prehistoric site of Le Moustier. We end in the hamlet of Lespinasse. Enjoy a free evening and dinner on your own in Sarlat. Walking: Up to 6 miles / ~3 hours, through towns and on trails Hotel Plaza Madeleine (B,L)
Saturday, June 4
Join a local expert this morning as we start our exploration of Sarlat, capital of the Périgord Noir. Visit the farmers markets of Place de la Republique and sample local specialities. After lunch we start our hike, walking along the tracks of a former steam engine. See the castle of La Fillolie and the church of St. Amand de Coly. Enjoy a field lecture about the region of Perigord and medieval religious and Romanesque architecture. Return to our hotel for dinner. Walking: Up to 7 miles / ~4.5 hours through towns and on trails Hotel Plaza Madeleine (B,L,D)
The Lascaux IV Cave
Thursday, June 2
Beynac-et-Cazenac
The Dordogne Valley
Today our walk follows the Dordogne River until reaching Domme, a beautiful 13th-century fortified town built on a hill approximately 500 feet above the river. After a picnic lunch take an expert-led excursion to the “Royale Bastide” of Domme. Return to Sarlat for dinner at local restaurant. Walking: Up to 9 miles / 5 hours through villages and on trails Hotel Plaza Madeleine (B,L,D)
Enjoy a guided visit to see the reproduced prehistoric masterpiece. The Lascaux IV Cave, a replica of the Lascaux cave that was discovered in 1940, opened in December 2016 and enables visitors to get a feeling of the original cave with the help of new technology keeping the original cave from damage. Our afternoon hike includes a visit to a small vineyard in St. Cyprien and a truffle hunting demonstration. Walking: Up to 4 miles /~5 hours, city walking and trails Hotel Plaza Madeleine (B,L,D)
Sunday, June 5 Transfer to Beynac-et-Cazenac, a village built on a cliff edge on the north bank of the river. Explore the castle of Beynac with a local expert. Learn about the history and architecture of the Dordogne Valley. After lunch continue walking on to the village of La Roque-Gageac with its ochre-colored houses and its overhanging cliffs. Enjoy some free time in the village before we sail along the Dordogne River on a typical “gabarre” boat. Return to Sarlat for dinner and an evening on your own. Hotel Plaza Madeleine (B,L)
Monday, June 6
Thursday, June 9
The Caves of Dordogne
Chateau d’Amboise
This morning we visit the Cave of Cougnac to see the prehistoric cave paintings dating back to the upper Paleolithic period. Depictions include deer, Megaloceros, ibex, and mammoths as well as various schematic human figures, interpreted as wounded men, virtually identical to similar figures at Pech Merle. Continue to Gourdon for lunch and then on to the village of Carlux. Visit the small medieval fortress here, then walk down through the lovely village of Rouffillac and along the river to Aillac. Walking: Up to 6 miles /~3 hours in caves, villages and on trails Hotel Plaza Madeleine (B,L,D)
Tuesday, June 7 Loire Valley
Today we depart the Dordogne and spend the day driving north to the Loire Valley. Stop in the village of Buzancais for lunch. Arrive to our hotel in Tours in the late afternoon. Dinner at our hotel. Walking: Up to 1 mile Grand Hotel De Tours (B,L,D)
Wednesday, June 8 Chateau de Villandry and Chateau de Moncontour
Transfer to Savonniere and walk along the river to Chateau de Villandry one of the last great chateaux built during the Renaissance. Enjoy an expert-led tour followed by a field lecture. After a picnic lunch transfer by coach to Chateau de Moncontour. Learn about the sparkling wines of the region during a wine tasting. Walk back along the Loire River to Tours and enjoy dinner on your own tonight. Walking: Up to 8 miles /~3 hours on flat, smooth asphalt, along the river Grand Hotel De Tours (B,L)
Travel to Chateau d’Amboise for a guided visit. After lunch on your own we continue to Civray de Touriane to begin our walk. Enjoy beautiful views over the Chateau Chenonceau, probably one of the most beautiful castles in the Loire Valley. After our hike we take a public train back to Tours. Tonight we gather for a celebratory farewell dinner. Walking: Up to 5 miles /~2 hours, on roads and forest trails Grand Hotel De Tours (B,D)
Friday, June 10 Loire Valley (Tour) / Paris / U.S.
After breakfast at our hotel transfer to Paris (2 ½ hours) for flights home. (B)
What to Expect
Participants must be in very good health and able to keep up with an active group of walkers. Walks are moderate with some strenuous segments and ascents. On average guests will walk 4-7 miles each day over 3-5 hours, broken up throughout the day. Our longest hike option is up to 9 miles. Walkers can opt for shorter hikes if they prefer. Some days there is only walking at site visits. Travelers should be able to walk on gravel and dirt hiking trails, over uneven terrain and use stairs without handrails. Sturdy walking/hiking shoes are required; ankle-high shoes are recommended. One does not have to participate in every activity, but the tour is geared towards the pace described above.
Trip Details
Dates: May 30 – June 10, 2022 (12 days) Group Size: Minimum 10, Maximum 20 (not including staff) Cost: $6,395 per person, double occupancy $900 single room supplement
Included:
Tour leader, local guides, and guest speakers; activities as specified in the itinerary; transportation throughout; airport transfers on designated group dates and times; 10 nights accommodations as specified (or similar); 10 breakfasts, 8 lunches (including some bagged picnic lunches), 7 dinners; wine and beer with welcome and farewell events; Commonwealth Club representative with 13 or more participants; gratuities to local guides, drivers, and for all included group activities; pre-departure materials.
Not included:
International airfare; gratuity to tour leader; visa and passport fees; meals not specified as included; optional outings and gratuities for those outings; alcoholic beverages beyond welcome and farewell events; travel insurance (recommended, information will be sent upon registration); items of a purely personal nature. (415) 597-6720 OR TRAVEL@COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG
Phone: (415) 597-6720 Fax: (415) 597-6729 May 30 - June 10, 2022
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E-mail Address SINGLE TRAVELERS ONLY: If this is a reservation for one person, please indicate: ___ I plan to share accommodations with _____________________________ OR ___ I wish to have single accommodations. OR ___ I’d like to know about possible roommates.
___ I am a current member of the Commonwealth Club. ___ Please use the credit card information below to sign me up or renew my membership. ___ I will visit commonwealthclub.org/membership to sign up for a membership.
I am a ___ smoker ___ nonsmoker. PAYMENT: Here is my deposit of $__________ ($1,000 per person) for ____ place(s). ____ Enclosed is my check (make payable to Commonwealth Club). OR ____ Charge my deposit to my ____ Visa ____ MasterCard ____ American Express The balance is due 90 days prior to departure and must be paid by check.
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Mail completed form to: Commonwealth Club Travel, PO Box 194210, San Francisco, CA 94119-9801, or fax to (415) 597-6729. For questions or to reserve by phone call (415) 597-6720. ___ I / We have read the Terms and Conditions for this program and agree to them.
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Terms & Conditions
The Commonwealth Club (CWC) has contracted European Walking Tours to organize this tour. Reservations: A $1,000 per person deposit, along with a completed and signed Reservation Form, will reserve a place for participants on this program. The balance of the trip is due 90 days prior to departure and must be paid by check.
conjunction with the tour. Trip Cancellation and Interruption Insurance: We strongly advise that all travelers purchase trip cancellation and interruption insurance as coverage against a covered unforeseen emergency that may force you to cancel or leave trip while it is in progress. A brochure describing coverage will be sent to you upon receipt of your reservation.
Eligibility: We require membership to the Commonwealth Club to travel with us. People who live outside of the Bay Area may purchase a Worldwide membership. To learn about membership types and to purchase a membership, visit commonwealthclub.org/membership or call (415) 597-6720.
Medical Information: Participation in this program requires that you be in good health and able to walk several miles each day. The “What to Expect” outlines what is required. If you have any concerns see your doctor on the advisability of you joining this program. It is essential that persons with any medical problems and related dietary restrictions make them known to us well before departure. Proof of vaccination against COVID-19 is required of all particpants.
Cancellation and Refund Policy: Notification of cancellation must be received in writing. At the time we receive your written cancellation, the following penalties will apply: • 120 or more days to departure: Full refund of deposit • 119-91 days to departure: $350 per person • 90-60 days prior to departure: 50% fare • 59-1 days to departure: 100% fare Tour pricing is based on the minimum number of participants and can be cancelled due to low enrollment. Neither CWC nor European Walking Tours accepts liability for cancellation penalties related to domestic or international airline tickets purchased in
Itinerary Changes & Trip Delay: Itinerary is based on information available at the time of printing and is subject to change. We reserve the right to change a program’s dates, staff, itineraries, or accommodations as conditions warrant. If a trip must be delayed, or the itinerary changed, due to bad weather, road conditions, transportation delays, airline schedules, government intervention, sickness or other contingency for which CWC or European Walking Tours or its agents cannot make provision, the cost of delays or changes is not included.
Limitations of Liability: In order to join the program, participants must complete a Participant Waiver provided by the CWC and agree to these terms: CWC and European Walking Tours its Owners, Agents, and Employees act only as the agent for any transportation carrier, hotel, ground operator, or other suppliers of services connected with this program (“other providers”), and the other providers are solely responsible and liable for providing their respective services. CWC and European Walking Tours shall not be held liable for (A) any damage to, or loss of, property or injury to, or death of, persons occasioned directly or indirectly by an act or omission of any other provider, including but not limited to any defect in any aircraft, or vehicle operated or provided by such other provider, and (B) any loss or damage due to delay, cancellation, or disruption in any manner caused by the laws, regulations, acts or failures to act, demands, orders, or interpositions of any government or any subdivision or agent thereof, or by acts of God, strikes, fire, flood, war, rebellion, terrorism, insurrection, sickness, quarantine, epidemics, pandemics, theft, or any other cause(s) beyond their control. The participant waives any claim against CWC/ European Walking Tours for any such loss, damage, injury, or death. By registering for the trip, the participant certifies that he/she does not have any mental, physical, or other condition or disability that would create a hazard for him/herself or other participants. CWC/ European Walking Tours shall not be liable for any air carrier’s cancellation penalty incurred by the purchase of a nonrefundable ticket to or from the departure city. Baggage and personal effects are at all times the sole responsibility of the traveler. Reasonable changes in the itinerary may be made where deemed advisable for the comfort and well-being of the passengers. CST: 2096889-40
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Investigating January 6
Representative Zoe Lofgren Reports BAY AREA U.S. REPRESENTATIVE ZOE LOFGREN
sat down for an important discussion about the state of American democracy and specifically the incidents surrounding the January 6 insurrection and the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol. From the August 4, 2021, online program “House Select Committee Member Zoe Lofgren: A Conversation About the January 6 Attack.” ZOE LOFGREN, U.S. Representative, (D-CA 19th District) Dr. GLORIA DUFFY, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California—Moderator GLORIA DUFFY: It’s my great pleasure to introduce our distinguished speaker, the Honorable Zoe Lofgren, U.S. representative from California’s 19th Congressional District, which encompasses San José and the Santa Clara Valley. Congresswoman Lofgren has been a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 1995. She currently serves on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. She is an attorney and a former law professor. Representative Lofgren has most recently been appointed to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. She has said that her goal on that committee is to uncover the truth, protect our democracy and ensure that such an attack will never happen again. Let’s start out on the January 6 Select Committee, since that’s of such high interest and such importance to our country and our democracy. Where were you on January 6, 2021? ZOE LOFGREN: [In] the Constitution, the statute specifies that the vice president will count the votes. So there are these mahogany boxes and all of these certificates sent by the states are in those boxes. And there are four tellers. I was one of the four, the chair of the House Administration Committee, and the senior Republican [Rodney Davis] and our equivalent committee in the Senate, Roy Blunt and Amy Klobuchar. The vice president opens the ballot. He reads, and then
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he hands it to the tellers. We took turns. So that’s what I was doing when objection was made, which we expected, to the Arizona electoral count. Now, I had been tasked by the speaker of the House along with three other Democratic House members to organize the defense of the vote. We had spent a couple of days—actually about a week—with other members. We decided the people most ready to defend the votes were the Democratic representatives from the states that were being challenged. So we had met with the Arizona delegation. We had data, we had case law that we could give them, but they were carrying the bulk of the weight. And the objectors objected. I was the first Democrat to speak in defense of the voters. Then I went into the House cloak room, because the Republican House members or most of them were refusing to wear masks, and I was trying to avoid breathing their air and getting sick. So I was in the cloak room when I heard some noise and turned on the news channel and saw that a mob was attacking the Capitol. I went back out and it was pretty clear that the members who were speaking had no idea that it was going on, but the situation
“How 10,000 Americans thought it was the right thing to do to attack the Capitol is something we need to better understand.” rapidly deteriorated. Speaker [Pelosi] was evacuated. We were told to shelter in place. We could hear the pounding on the doors and the sounds of the mob. And then we were evacuated. As we were going down the stairs escaping, we could hear the glass being broken at the other end of the hallway. So that was my onthe-floor experience. We escaped through the tunnels over to the Longworth [House Office] Building. I actually went up to my office on the fourth floor so that I would have an opportunity to connect on the phone with various officials, since I did chair the House Administration Committee. I could see out my window, which faces on the Capitol, what
was going on. DUFFY: Did you ever in your wildest nightmares think that anything like this could happen? LOFGREN: No, actually, I didn’t. As I was on the floor, my adult son and daughter were texting me, expressing considerable alarm about my safety. I said, “Well, don’t worry. I’m on the floor of the House. That’s the safest place you could be.” They were texting their disagreement, and it turned out they were correct. How it came to be that roughly 10,000 Americans thought it was the right thing to do to attack the Capitol, to viciously maul a police officer, and invade the Capitol, to try and hang the vice president is something we need to better understand than we do now. DUFFY: You’re certainly on the path to doing that through the committee. One last question about the day-of: What went through your mind as you were hearing this noise and so on? What did you think was going on? Who did you think this was? LOFGREN: I had the benefit of having seen the mob on the television on the cloak room. So I could see that they were Trump supporters, they were carrying Trump signs,
Photos this spread: Scenes from the pro-Trump crowd and protest at the Capitol. (Photos by Tyler Merbler.)
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and that they had come from the rally that the then-president had held near the White House. They had marched from that rally up to the Capitol with their “Don’t tread on me” flags and their Trump flags and in some cases American flags, [and] started attacking the police to gain entry. So it wasn’t a mystery who was attacking. I had a lot of thoughts as I was watching it unfold. I was wondering, Why aren’t these individuals being repelled? I recall that when we had demonstrations, largely peaceful demonstrations, at the Capitol from Black Lives Matter activists, there was a huge force that was unnecessary. There was no violence at that demonstration. And there was none of that [show of force] here. I learned a lot since then about the management failures at the Capitol Police. Certainly, the officers operate with tremendous bravery and I’m very grateful for what they did. They, I believe, saved my life and the lives of many others. But there were very serious deficiencies in the preparation and the management of the department that need to be corrected. Interestingly enough, the House Administration Committee has oversight over the police, but we have
“I had a lot of thoughts as I was watching it unfold. I was wondering, Why aren’t these individuals being repelled?” no control over the police. There is an old statute that vests the complete control of the Capitol Police with the sergeant at arms of the House and the Senate, and weirdly enough, the architect of the Capitol—and they also dropped the ball. DUFFY: So in your role chairing the House Administration Committee, does it have any role in investigating what happened or reviewing the situation? LOFGREN: We’ve had five hearings so far, basically going through [reports;] the inspector general of the Capitol Police has done a series of reports and investigations into the Capitol Police posture, as well as the inspector general for the architect of
the Capitol outlining deficiencies in their preparation. We will continue to do that. But the charge to the insurrection committee, the Select Committee, is much broader. It’s not just what happened on that day, [but] what led up to it? Who organized it? When did it start? What was the goal? Who paid for it? A very broad look at the participants and the organizers, which is certainly beyond the jurisdiction of the House Administration Committee. DUFFY: Looking at the enabling legislation for the insurrection committee, it seems to focus very importantly on security issues, command control, communications intelligence, the Capitol Police, security agencies. What corrective measures can be taken to prevent this from happening again and improve security? Is that a major focus of the committee’s work? LOFGREN: It is a focus, but I wouldn’t say it is necessarily the major focus. Because of the work we’ve done in House Administration [Committee], we know some of what needs to be changed. We haven’t yet made a proposal on how to change the governance of the Capitol Police Board, but we do know that the posture of the agency needs to be changed.
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There’s unanimity on this point. As a matter of fact, it was in the work plan that was never implemented of the Capitol Police that they should be more of a security agency than a regular police department. More like the Secret Service than San José P.D.—because that’s really the role that they’re playing that needs to transform the entire posture of the agency. There were intelligence failures, not only in the Capitol Police, but in the intelligence agencies writ large. They have a dysfunctional and not a dedicated intelligence unit in the Capitol Police, but they got only scatterings of information from other intelligence agencies. So we need to broadly look at our information sources and how we credit information that is in the public domain. Certainly, there was a lot of this organizing that was in plain view and yet did not really permeate into the planning by either the FBI, the Secret Service or the Capitol Police. You’ve got to remember the vice president was in the Capitol also when that mob descended. He had with him the nuclear football at his side. So there were failures, not only in the Capitol Police, but also in the Secret Service on the risk to the nation. DUFFY: Presumably interim measures have been taken. There has been a lot done since January 6, ad hoc, to upgrade everything from intelligence to training to recruitment of the security agencies and the Capitol Police. LOFGR EN: There have been steps taken, but I would not be honest if I said we’ve accomplished all that needs to be accomplished. For example, in terms of riot control at the Capitol Police, they didn’t have equipment or some of the protective equipment had expired and was crumbling. There was no system in place to make sure that the equipment was constantly updated. The officers had not been trained, for the most part, in the use of non-lethal weapons that you would use as a riot got out of control. So there’s a lot of problems. Some are being rectified, some remain to be done. We do not have jurisdiction over the Secret Service, over the FBI. We do have oversight jurisdiction and judiciary, but I do think we need to take a hard look at how unprepared, not just the Capitol was, but the federal government was to the threat that this posed. What would have happened, you know better than I, Gloria, in terms of the nuclear football had the mob secured them? It would not be a good thing. DUFFY: Unbelievably frightening. So this is one aspect of the committee’s work, but the other aspect you mentioned
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and you’ve talked about is who was behind the attack, who organized it, what their aim was. Can you talk a little bit about that other set of objectives and concerns for the committee? LOFGREN: Well, I can’t speak for the committee, obviously. We’ve just been appointed. I think we’ve been in existence less than a month. We’re putting the staff together, we’re doing our work plan, we’re outlining the subpoenas that will soon be issued to outline what it is we need to start working on. Some of it has been overt. The former president was very clear in his statements about what he was seeking to do, which was to overturn the election. He referred to Republican congressmen who were helping him to do that. How did that work? Who else was involved? Both in terms of the people close to the president, but also other entities. Were there foreign actors involved in this? There’s a lot of questions, more questions than answers now, but we have an intention to get the full picture that we can then make known to the public. DUFFY: Let’s talk for a moment about the composition of the committee, Nancy Pelosi’s strategy in rejecting some of the Republicans and bringing on [Republican Representatives Liz] Cheney and [Adam] Kinzinger. Tell us a little bit about that strategy. How’s that going to work out in the end in terms of the credibility of the committee, the acting on its recommendations and so on? LOFGREN: Well, I think you need to take a step back, because our first choice was an independent commission. And Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who chairs the Homeland Security Committee and is chairing the Select Committee, worked with his ranking member, this top Republican on that committee, to do a bipartisan bill.
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And every single thing that the Republicans wanted, we agreed to. And when it was all done and it was our understanding, we later found out that was correct, that Mr. [John] Katko, the ranking Republican, was in communication with his leadership. So the bill was introduced. It was bipartisan. And then Mr. McCarthy, the minority leader, said, no, he could not take yes for an answer. I think an obvious conclusion from that is that he does not want an investigation into what happened leading up to January 6. [Then] the bill passed the House and we did get Republican votes to pass it, went to the Senate and the minority later, Mr. McConnell, put it on the basis of personal favor to oppose the commission and it was defeated. So then we were faced with two options. One, do nothing, or two, do something. The only thing left to us was a Select Committee. Under the terms of the committee, there would be five Republicans who could be appointed, and they were subject to veto by the speaker. When McCarthy nominated his five Republicans, two of them were unacceptable. And I’ll tell you why. One of them voted against certifying of the election. That was not a disqualifier. He is a freshman from Texas, but we made an assessment that he would work. He’s a Trump supporter, but that’s his right. But he would work and investigate this. The other two members—Rodney Davis is the ranking member in House Administration [and] he, again, is a Trump supporter, but he would work in good faith on this, as well as Mr. [Kelly] Armstrong from North Dakota, who I’ve worked with on the Judiciary Committee, who again is a Trump supporter, but an honest individual who would work in good faith. Mr. [Jim] Jordan is clearly going to be a
“Jim Jordan admitted he spoke to the president on the 6th of January multiple times. . . . In fact, the president referenced him as one of the individuals working to overturn the election.” fact witness. He recently admitted that he spoke to the president on the 6th of January multiple times, and in the days leading up to it. In fact, the president referenced him as one of the individuals who was working with him on the plan to overturn the election. There is a conflict. I don’t know whether he would show up without a subpoena. We would hope that is true. But that is really a conflict in terms of being on the committee. The other proposed Republican said the whole thing was a sham, and he was obviously not going to work in good faith. The speaker invited the minority leader to put two other Republicans up who would [replace them]. They can be hostile to Democrats if they want to be; that’s not the issue. The issue is, are they going to work in good faith to get answers? And instead of doing that, he withdrew all of the applicants. Many of us felt that it would be good to have a bipartisan committee, and the speaker did invite Liz Cheney and then later Adam Kinzinger to join. They are superconservative. As Liz said at our hearing, she couldn’t think of a single policy item that she agreed on with the Democrats on the Select Committee, which has nothing to do with our task. Our task is to investigate this. DUFFY: Talk a little bit about the powers of the committee. It has subpoena power. Justice [Department] has said there’s no executive privilege. Will it be calling highlevel witnesses like former President Trump? LOFGREN: Well, I don’t know. I’m really not in a position to say who we’re going to call at this point. We will call whoever is necessary to get to the truth. My personal view in terms of calling former President Trump is balancing the trouble that would cause in terms of actually getting him to appear versus the weight of the testimony for a man who has a veracity problem. How
many lies per day we used to count up? So I think that has to be factored in to any decision relative to the former president. But certainly there are many individuals who we believe will speak to us and who will lead us to others. Some will appear voluntarily, some will require a subpoena. There are also entities that have information, for example, in the social media world, [and those] companies require subpoenas for legal purposes. So we will have a very wide net. I expect that the former president will try and litigate everything. He’s a very litigious person. However, a lot of the deck was cleared on some of this in the last administration. For example, the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the then-lawyer for the president, Don McGahn, that was fought to a standstill. And ultimately he had to appear. So the legal issues being advanced have been quite litigated and the House has prevailed. Those precedents can be asserted to jump to the chase, if you will, on some of these cases. DUFFY: Are there any other powers or authorities that the committee has that are important to this investigation? LOFGREN: I think that the power to get documents and the power to get testimony is a major issue. Obviously, when it comes to compelling members of the House to speak, we may have other means available to us, but that would be speculation at this point. So far, the members whose names have been in the press as potential witnesses have all indicated they have nothing to hide while also trying to intimidate us into not calling them forward. So we’ll see how this develops. DUFFY: I am getting some questions from our audience. One person wants to know when the next hearings will be. Will they be televised? When will the public have an opportunity to see more of the work of the committee? LOFGREN: I don’t have a date right now. We decided to open our debut, if you will, as a committee with the video and testimony of the officers, just because there are some members of Congress and [the] House and Senate, as well as propagandists in the media world, trying to indicate that nothing really happened, which is absurd. I think if you watch the video and listen to the testimony of those officers, who were amazing, you couldn’t help but understand that something did happen on January 6 that was violent. And it was not a bunch of tourists visiting the Capitol. This month, the House is in recess. The members of Congress are home in their districts, visiting with their constituents. And
the members of the Select Committee are meeting virtually, outlining our next steps. We’re not going to have a hearing just for the sake of having a hearing. I believe that our proceedings will be a mix of private interviews, depositions, and public hearings. And we’ll have a public hearing when there’s something that we have to show to the public. DUFFY: I watched some of the testimony of those police officers, and I can only imagine what it was like to be there and to hear what they had to say and the emotion with which they said it. What was the atmosphere like in the hearing room when they were testifying? LOFGREN: Actually, it was surprisingly emotional. I don’t know if you noticed. I don’t know Adam Kinzinger very well at all or Liz Cheney. We don’t serve on any committees together, we’ve never been on a congressional delegation trip together. When Adam went to speak, he was choked up and I didn’t expect that. And he didn’t expect that. For all of us sitting there listening to what these men went through, the assaults that they went [through], they were hurt and they went back and they washed as best they could the poison out of their eyes and turned around and went right back out for the fight. And what they did was they saved our lives. All of us were aware that had they not done what they did, quite likely we would not be sitting at home. Some of us would have been killed. That was the intention pretty clearly of various members of this riot. So there was that element. And in different degrees, one of our members was in a room—I didn’t know this until just the week before the hearing—that she had been in a little room that was down the hallway from where the officers were with tear gas. And what they did allowed her to be evacuated. It was very personal for each one of us. DUFFY: I just want to mention that Liz Cheney will be with us here at The Commonwealth Club on the 18th. [See page 24.] So if you have any questions we should be asking her, let us know. LOFGREN: Well, I’ll tell you what. Again, is not someone I know very well, but I have been impressed that she’s very bright. She has good questions. She’s got good ideas. She and I probably don’t agree on 99 out of 100 policy items. But certainly, I’d love to get back to the point in our country when she and I could argue about policy instead of having Republicans and Democrats argue about reality. DUFFY: Okay, we’ll put that to her. So what’s the practical impact of the committee’s
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work? It does its work, it has findings. What’s the import in law and public policy of those findings, recommendations, particularly about the more complex issues like who was behind this and who organized it? LOFGREN: We don’t know the answer to that yet, Gloria, because we’re starting this journey. We’re not at the end of the journey. It may be that we will find things out that the Department of Justice doesn’t know. It’s highly politicized in a way, not partisan—but it was the president of the United States who had that rally. It wasn’t a non-entity. So that can’t be overlooked. What changes should be made to statute, if any, we’ll have to wait upon what we find out. I do think laying out what happened to the American public is very important, because the most precious thing we have is our American democracy. And I think Liz says something to the effect of “we care more about hating our political enemies than we care about loving our American democracy.” I hope not. The best outcome would be . . . the American public understanding what actually happened and a renewed commitment to democracy and to the American Constitution that would be aside from any legislation or any prosecution. To me, that would be the most important thing, for the American public to renew its passion for the American democracy. DUFFY: This is a question from our audience. Do you think that what happened highlights larger problems with homeland security in the U.S., larger vulnerabilities that we have? We’re about to come up to the 20th anniversary of 9/11, which obviously came from outside, but what do you think the current state of homeland security is at this point? LOFGREN: Well, certainly after 9/11, quite a few steps were taken to increase our security posture, to share information among agencies, but that was always outward looking. I will say I was walking back over to the Capitol after the riot and I thought our foreign enemies saw this, too, that it is possible to breach this building and to do damage to the institution. So I think the success of the rioters did make us more vulnerable, not only to other domestic terrorists, but also to international enemies. As you know, we have them. I do believe that the failure to focus on white supremacist extremist groups has been a failure. And I lay that back to the time of really when Janet Napolitano was the Secretary for Homeland. They were beginning that, and they got a lot of pushback from the
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Republicans in the House in particular, and they pretty much dropped it. That was a mistake, because these extremist groups are violent and they have grown since that time. Some of the FBI experts had said they are the biggest threat to the American democracy right now. So it doesn’t mean we can’t pay attention to foreign adversaries—we have to, we have them, we’ve got to keep ourselves safe from them—but a bigger threat right now might be internal. DUFF Y: Another question from the audience: What is your gut feeling about the allegations of Congress members actually being complicit in the attack and providing access information, locations, timing, et cetera? LOFGREN: I don’t know the answer, and I don’t want to leap to a conclusion. Certainly, we will examine that. If that is the case, that would be a very serious matter for any member of Congress who was involved, as well as potentially the Department of Justice. DUFFY: Getting back to your comments about how President Trump would probably fight everything and be litigious and so on, one member of the audience wants to know how likely do you think that he will be held accountable personally in any way for what happened? LOFGREN: Well, obviously, the House of Representatives does not have the capacity to initiate legal action, an indictment or something—that’s not a legislative role. We did impeach him twice. As a matter of fact, the second impeachment found that he incited this riot. A majority of the House voted for that; 10 Republicans voted for it in the House. And although he didn’t get the 60 vote margin the Constitution requires, 57 percent of the United States Senate said he was guilty of that, which is pretty phenomenal. So the House and Senate have reached a conclusion that he was complicit inciting this riot. What goes beyond that is what we need to look at. What was he doing all day? Why was the National Guard not permitted to come and save the Capitol? There are a lot of questions that need answers. DUFFY: What’s the committees timeline or purview? How long could it be investigating these matters? LOFGREN: Well, each committee exists only for the term of the Congress. So it could not continue beyond this Congress. Certainly, we don’t plan to go that long, but we will take the time that we need to get all the answers; and we’re going to work as fast as possible, because we don’t really want to drag this out. We want to get to the chase.
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“It doesn’t mean we can’t pay attention to foreign adversaries—we have to, we have them, we’ve got to keep ourselves safe—but a bigger threat right now might be internal.” DUFFY: How are your fellow members of Congress and you yourself dealing with the trauma of having been through this experience on January 6, and if not for some protection potentially having lost your lives? LOFGREN: We’re all different and our physiology has us reacting in different ways. I know that some members [are] really continuing to get therapy for the trauma that they experienced. I give them credit for that. If you need medical care, you should get medical care. So that is a good thing. I tend to be fairly even in my demeanor, although my husband insisted that I was more traumatized than I let on. I think he was right in terms of when I first saw the videos afterwards, I did have a very emotional response. But I think I have, by continuing to watch, desensitized those reactions. So I’m just moving forward. The police officers involved had varying responses. A number of police officers have taken their own lives. Whether or not you can draw a direct line, obviously, you never know what’s going on in the lives of individuals. But certainly that so many officers were subject to that tremendous abuse, we can’t ignore. We know that hundreds of officers were injured and the psychological injuries may not have been as well diagnosed as the physical; people lost eyes and fingers and had other damage that is permanent. But I think everybody who went through that has some little stab that they’ve got in their heart. DUFFY: You mentioned holding hearings early on to really remind people that something actually happened. I certainly marvel, as I’m sure you do, at the current ability to deny facts and reality and have a completely different interpretation of things that have happened. So going back into how our country is educating people, how people are consuming media to arrive at a place where they think the things that happened
didn’t happen or whatever, whether it was the Holocaust or whether it was what happened on January 6, what do we need to do in this country, whether it’s in civics education or how media is available and consumed? What do we need to do to establish a better base for our citizenry in understanding, participating in and appreciating our democracy and our civil society? LOFGREN: I think, Gloria, it’s not just civics education; there’s a psychological aspect of this that we need to better understand. Let me give the example of one member of Congress who said, “Looks like just a bunch of tourists.” Well, he actually, during the riot, was on the floor helping the Capitol Police to push furniture up to the door so the rioters couldn’t get in. He must know that he’s lying, because he was there. I’ve seen a picture of him there. I’ve seen the tape of him saying it looked like tourists. He’s a liar. But there are people in the public broadly who are thinking that what that liar said is true when it’s a complete falsehood. And the question is, how do we have a common reality? I thought it was a positive that apparently Fox News —whose media sta rs a nd entertainers are trying to pretend that this really didn’t really happen, that the officers were actors, really absurd things that they’re saying—but the news division actually ran the hearing so that Fox News viewers would see the video tape, the officers’ testimony. I think if you saw that, it would be hard to conclude that nothing happened. I do think we’ve got to better understand the role of propaganda. It’s not new, there’s been propaganda through the ages. How is a complete lie sold to the American public or any public, as is happening in other countries as well, so that reality is distorted? I’m for civics education. It was my favorite class in
high school, and every kid ought to have a copy of the Constitution and read it. But that’s not the only problem we have here. DU FF Y: So a lot of responsibilit y is incumbent, I think, on the media to counteract, report correctly, seek truth, fact check what is out there from other media? LOFGREN: I think that’s correct. I think the role of social media in particular—not just social media, because broadcast media has played a role in this as well, in terms of creating a false narrative and luring people into believing it, and also how that interplays with political leaders. Certainly, President Trump is still saying that the election was stolen. People tend to believe that he’s the president of United States. Of course, it must be true, making things up that somehow there was a computer defect when there are paper ballots and the paper ballots are counted by hand and yield the same result as the machine tally. You know it wasn’t a machine glitch, because you’ve got paper ballots that were counted by hand, and yet the lie continues to resonate. DUFFY: One audience member says, How do you even begin to have conversations with fellow Congress people and some of the folks online today that are living in a completely different reality? LOFGREN: Well, it’s not easy. Some of what I’ve tried to think through and get advice on is, How do you engage with someone you [not only] have a political disagreement with, because we know how to do that, but has a different reality? Providing a frontal assault on their false fact basis [is] generally not very successful, because it causes people’s character to crumble. So to ask questions, What piece of information would cause you to doubt what you just said? Would X and Y make you wonder whether that’s accurate? Instead of attacking the person as a dummy or ill
advised, because that’s not fair to our fellow citizens, people are getting information and they’re trying to put together what happened. Let’s be respectful and see how we can come to a common agreement of facts. That’s the issue. DUFFY: What are you most concerned about other than the work of this committee? LOFGREN: I’ve got a lot of different assignments. I’m on five separate committees, which I think is some record. We’re doing actually some good things with bipartisan efforts in the Science Committee, especially when it comes to using science and technology and understanding, detecting and fighting wildfires, which is a particular interest here in the West, although not only the West. You get the picture looking at the news and not surprisingly that it’s all acrimony, all partyline votes. Well, the Science Committee is a little beacon of hope, because I think all of the bills that we’ve taken up so far this year have been unanimous. For example, a huge expansion in the capacity of the National Science Foundation to support science and also the Department of Energy research projects. We had bipartisan votes on that, not only in the committee, but in the House. That’s very important, because we won’t have a growing economy in the future if we don’t have robust funding for basic science research that only the government has the resources to fund. I chair the Immigration Subcommittee in the Judiciary Committee, and I’ve been trying for all these many years to get reforms to what is close to a dysfunctional immigration system. We have passed several bills in the House and they’re over on the Senate side now. The Dream Act, which people have heard of, young people brought to the United States as children. We also did a bipartisan bill that I wrote with the Democratic and Republican lawmakers. It took us over a year to write, along with the United Farm Workers Union and all the growers sitting down and hashing out differences. Got a big bipartisan vote for the farm workers in the House. And that’s also over in the Senate. We’ve done work on the president’s proposal, the U.S. Citizenship Act, which is very big and very important. Obviously, the COVID situation is not what we want it to be. This variant has set us back. The role of the Congress has primarily been to make enough resources available to the private sector that we don’t have even more economic damage before we get through to the other side, in addition to making sure that we have vaccines and testing and the like.
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Pop superstar Britney Spears’ very public fight to regain control over her assets has brought new attention to the often murky world of conservatorships. (Photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhysadams/ and Wikimedia Commons.)
THE BRITNEY SPEARS CASE EXPOSED
to the world what thousands of people nationwide each year say they are experiencing: the deceitful side of conservatorship. Conservatorship is the court-ordered assignment to a third party of the responsibility for care and the conservation of the estate of an incapacitated person. Critics say unscrupulous conservators and guardians protected by influential attorneys neglect and exploit the very people they claim to safeguard. From the August 30, 2021, online Grownups Member-Led Forum program “Britney Spears and the Conservatorship Con.”
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RICK BLACK, Executive Director, CEAR (Charlotte, NC) THOMAS COLEMAN, Attorney; Executive Director and Founder, Spectrum Institute (Palm Springs, CA) LISA MACCARLEY, Attorney; Founder, Bettys Hope LEANNE SIMMONS, Human Rights Advocate; Entertainment Industry Professional; Co-manager, @FreeBritneyLA Dr. GLORIA DUFFY, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California—Moderator
BRITNEY SPEARS AND THE CONSERVATORSHIP CO CON G L OR I A DU F F Y: Today we’ l l be talking about a subject very much in the news, conservatorships—also known as guardianships in many states—in large part due to the current controversy over the conservatorship of the pop star Britney Spears. Conservatorships are a legal construction allowing others to take care of those who are not able to take care of themselves. They are obtained and managed through the court system with the intention of protecting vulnerable individuals’ health and financial well-being. But a lot of things can happen
during the conservatorship process. And practices are being brought to light now both in California and across the nation on the part of attorneys, conservators, guardians, fiduciaries, family members, courts, and other actors that point to much-needed reforms. In particular, attention has recently focused on practices where attorneys, fiduciaries, conservators, and courts may collaborate in a predatory manner to place individuals in conservatorships to access their assets or for other self-serving reasons. Sometimes the conservatee or a ward’s
health or wellbeing is damaged in the process, and deaths have even occurred. Sometimes conservatorships are necessary where they are needed under current court practices, which lack effective judicial review of attorney fees. Attorneys may exploit the process to take as much as possible of the person’s or family’s assets. First let’s turn to Rick Black. RICK BLACK: My wife and I were first exposed to guardianship or conservatorship in California eight years ago, when her father was taken captive. Through all the efforts that we
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undertook through law enforcement, through local attorneys, we quickly recognized that the system that claimed to be there to protect the vulnerable and the disabled seniors as well had one intent, and that was to continue the exploitation of a vulnerable adult. Since that time, we have investigated over 4,000 cases since 2013. We were never able to protect my wife’s father; it cost our family over a million dollars and the life of a dear loved one. But what we’ve learned over the last five years is that our experience was not unique. In fact, it was not isolated in any regard. Our advocacy in the state of Nevada yielded the criminal conviction of 10 professional guardians and attorneys who commonly used guardianship as a cover for criminal acts. Since founding CEAR [Center for Estate Administration Reform] in 2018, we’ve learned that there are hotspot states, hotspot counties across the country where predatory attorneys routinely use guardianship and conservatorship as a weapon to exploit. CEAR advocates seven days a week on behalf of anyone who comes through our website or through our hotline. We tell people what the legal community refuses in most cases to even admit. Fortunately, today we have two attorneys joining us, Thomas Coleman and Lisa MacCarley, who have made a career out of educating the public on what routinely happens within adult guardianship and conservatorship—a domain where predatory and sadly parasitic attorneys, those who want to create as many conservatorships and guardianships as possible, participate. Once t hey get t he coveted court
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order to commence a guardianship or conservatorship—the only way anyone can be appointed into those roles is via a court order—they then have really complete authority to liquidate an estate for their own personal benefit. We’ve coined a phrase here at CEAR which describes better than 90 percent of the cases that we counsel: Isolate the victim, defame legitimate protectors, and liquidate the estate. Isolation of a vulnerable adult, whether it’s by their own choice, living alone after a spouse has passed or someone who’s lived alone for their entire lives, creates an opportunity for the nefarious. Distance to loved ones, distance to legitimate protectors is an ally of an exploiter. It’s so very important that as our wealth grows and as we age that we have documents in place that best protect us from interception of our estate. The two documents that we define as the most important documents that anyone can execute are the durable power of attorney with backup agents, a primary and a secondary, as well as the health-care advanced directive, again with a primary and secondary agent. Have those documents notarized and give them to your legitimate protectors who you trust implicitly will come to your aid in time of need and who understand sadly that the system that creates conservatorships in California is too often committed on furthering exploitation versus truly protecting the vulnerable. You might ask why. In California it’s estimated that $200 billion a year transfers generationally in the state. That is those who are elderly, who have their
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documents in place and intend to transfer their assets to heirs, whether it’s a nonprofit or a family or other recipients. The legal community understands how easy it is to intercept those funds through trust fraud, conservatorship fraud, and other probate fraud activities. Within the conservatorship industry, we don’t know how many wards are in California. To be a ward, subject of a conservatorship, that affects anyone 18 or over. We see many disabled young adults whose parents are prompted to place them into guardianship as soon as they turn 18 by school districts, by hospitals, by the legal community, and others. Yet the durable power of attorney and the health-care advanced directive can easily serve to protect that class of individuals versus a guardianship. The point that we want the audience to know today is that once you’re under the control of the courts, you and your loved ones control nothing; the judge controls everything. And generally they are highly influenced by attorneys who practice before them every day. You’re a stranger in that environment, and you need to understand that. Within conservatorship, we estimate [at CEAR], based on national numbers, that there’s 140,000 wards in the state of California. Those wards would represent over $30 billion of estate value. That is a profit center for the legal community within the state. Whether it’s 70,000, which has been estimated by other groups or 140,000 or anywhere in between, the sad part is the state of California has refused through the state bar
and through the Supreme Court to enforce a census within the state so that there’s total transparency on how many individuals lose their rights each year and are placed into a conservatorship. Throughout this hour, we’re going to hear from how things were missed in the Britney Spears case and many, many other cases within the state. And I hope that the listeners are enlightened to their risks to conservatorship in the state of California. DUFFY: Rick, you essentially left your very successful career to focus on this. Tell us just a little about your own background. BLACK: I’m an engineer by training, but I was an executive with General Electric for 18 years. I left there and went into private industry, worked in private equity for about 15 years. In 2015, thanks to a successful career and the odyssey that our own family [went] through in a guardianship, I chose to leave my desired profession and work seven days a week as a free volunteer for families across the country. Eventually my wife and I formed CEAR in 2018. But to your point, Gloria, we approach this from a financial perspective. Follow the money is the key to all of our investigations, because that is the driver in these cases, whether it’s estate trafficking—another term that we’ve come up with over the years—or Medicaid fraud. Medi-Cal, Medicaid, the federal entitlements [that] flow into California for the disabled, presents a quite large piggy bank, if you will, that people can draw from regardless of whether the vulnerable individual receives those treatments and therapies that are claimed. DUFFY: Now, let’s turn to Lisa MacCarley, tell us about yourself and your work. LISA MACCARLEY: I’m an attorney in Los Angeles County focusing primarily on probate conservatorships in Orange County and Los Angeles County. I have been documenting dysfunctional conservatorships for the last decade, because I spotted problems in the system. In fact as a practicing attorney, I actually became so disenchanted with what was going on, I stopped being a court-appointed attorney. I have a different perspective than the other panelists, because I’m an insider as well as someone though that is very critical of the system. And what I am seeing in the Britney Spears case, since that’s the focus, was what I call incompetence and cronyism. This is a feature of where our judges have no training, no supervision, no accountability. In other communities, we call that qualified immunity, meaning that the system is broken because the legal community does not have valid checks and balances on the judges who are presiding
“Once you’re under the control of the courts, you and your loved ones control nothing; the judge controls everything. And generally they are highly influenced by attorneys who practice before them every day.” —RICK BLACK over these cases. We literally have people that come out of careers of 30 years in the criminal courts, 30 years perhaps in other areas of law. They put on their black judicial robes and suddenly they are tasked with making life-and-death and very critical decisions that frankly they have no business making. That’s why most of the judges that we see here—Judge Penny who’s presently in the Britney Spears case is something of an exception—but most of the judges are what I call short-term employees, they’re temps. They come in for a few years, they get to a point where they’re familiar enough with probate, and I think other panelists would agree, then they have very lucrative careers in mediations. But the idea is that we have judicial officers that should not be presiding in these cases. One of the facts that I point to is that on February 4, 2008, which is when Britney Spears was denied justice because the commissioner at the time, Reva Goetz, would not allow, I believe, Adam Streisand, a very well-known attorney in the probate community, to represent Britney. This failure on the commissioner’s part was stunning when she fired Adam Streisand. There’s no statutory authority; that was the violation of Ms. Spear’s constitutional rights to have counsel. But from there what I point to is that apparently not a single person in the courtroom in that moment knew that Britney Spears had the 100 percent unequivocal right to be represented by an attorney of her own choice. So then the question is, why did that happen? And that is because Judge Reva Goetz was told to rely on the favorite crony Sam
Ingham. I’ve known Sam Ingham most of my career, since the late 1990s. I don’t know that he’s any different anymore, maybe a bit more egregious in what he did to Britney Spears. But this is normal; this is judges who don’t know what they’re doing being allowed to be run around by attorneys that are perhaps equally incompetent and unscrupulous. But the judges are being told by the Judicial Council of California to rely on reports and statements made by these attorneys. So the attorneys are running the show, and nobody is looking at what the law actually is in the state of California. So these injustices—although now we look at it and we can’t even believe what happened to Britney Spears, this is what is happening to seniors and other adults facing or in conservatorships every day. So my charity that I started because of cases like Britney Spears, Betty’s Hope, is an attempt to get our legislators as well as our county supervisors to acknowledge that judges and lawyers are a terrible mix. Judges should not be picking lawyers, paying lawyers, appointing lawyers. They should have nothing to do with who is appointed or chosen to represent persons facing or in conservatorships. So to me, the fix is preventing people from being traumatized, exploited and abused as Britney Spears most definitely is being subjected to. But it’s because of this flaw where judges are told to rely on their favorite probate court-appointed counsel. It’s despicable. We need to contact our state legislators and tell them that they need to change this system; it is a systemic flaw. DUFFY: Tom Coleman, you’re an attorney. You’ve been investigating the role of attorneys in particular in probate cases. So tell us about yourself, your organization and what you’re doing. THOMAS COLEMAN: This program you’re putting on today I think is a very great service for the public to become educated, because people hear little tidbits about things and they know that there’s something wrong, but rarely do they have a chance to really listen to some of the in-depth analysis by people who have experienced these problems firsthand, either personally like Rick or in the trenches like Lisa or in individual cases like Britney’s case and Leanne advocating for her freedom. My involvement has been in civil rights advocacy over [nearly] five decades. Time flies for many causes and constituencies. Around 2012, I was introduced to my first taste of abuses in conservatorship cases, not representing anyone, but just as an outside civil rights attorney that people would come to. I’m like, “Isn’t there something wrong here?”
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After going through a few of those, I decided to start doing auditing of cases and going into the court records. What I found was a pattern in practice of civil rights violations. Our organization, Spectrum Institute, we’re a nonprofit advocacy organization. Basically I take kind of a bifocal approach to this. So one lens looks at the financial, but the other lens is looking at the civil rights violations. Because in many of these cases, the individuals wind up getting a public defender if they get an attorney at all to defend them; they don’t have significant assets. So it’s not so much the financial abuses that are going on, although there’s a little bit of that too with respect to government benefits, but it’s more somebody trying to control and take over their life. Maybe a young adult with developmental disabilities and someone doesn’t want to see them have sex or have relationships. It can be benevolent motives, but whatever the motives, stifling someone’s freedom for benevolent reasons is still stifling their freedom. I’ve looked at this, and every year I would look at different part of the system. This is a very complex system, and the cases are very complex. There are many parts to the system, and there are many players in the case. So finally after all these years of continuing nonstop seven days a week our research and analysis and publishing reports and so on, I think I have a pretty good handle on the players and so on. [There’s] a matrix of what’s involved in a conservatorship case. A respondent [is] responding to a petition that’s been filed and needs to respond and do something to defend their rights, because if they do nothing, then the petitioner will just win by default, so to speak. So you have a petitioner who files the case. The petitioner has an attorney in many cases, sometimes not. And then you have a court investigator that may be involved. You may also have a guardian ad litem who’s appointed [by the court to watch over someone during the case]. You have capacity experts, you have regional centers. Sometimes you have the Department of Developmental Services, who could be a petitioner. Also petitioners can involve family members, it can be involve the public guardian. If the public guardian is involved, then you have the county counsel representing the public guardian, and then of course you have a judge. So you’ve got all of these various participants, and then you have the adult who’s the target of the proceeding who may or may not be given an attorney, who may show up with an attorney of their choice only to have the judge refuse to acknowledge them. And then
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“Although now we look at it and we can’t even believe what happened to Britney Spears, this is what is happening to seniors and other adults facing or in conservatorships every day.” —LISA MACCARLEY
in some cases, the judge does not appoint an attorney and the person has to go through the proceeding without anyone to defend them. The issues that are involved are constitutional rights, safe alternatives to conservatorships that should be considered, the threat of major life decisions being taken away from the individual. And also the possibility that they could be given a conservator to control their life for the next several years or decades depending on the age of the person who could neglect their rights or abuse them. So that’s how complex that individual case is. The system itself is complex. I did a symposium presentation a while back and gave people an overview of what’s involved in the system itself. Either directly involved or indirectly, you’ve got federal, state and local government entities, you’ve got judicial, legislative and executive branch officials. You’ve got professional associations and disability rights organizations, and so on. In terms of reform, every single one of these entities has a role in reforming the broken system. And believe me, all parts are broken. But if we make the wrong proposal to an agency, they’ll just ignore it because they’ll say “It’s not in my purview.” So we have to target the proposals to the right entity. You’ve got the Supreme Court, the judicial council, the Court of Appeal, the Superior Court, the legislature, the state bar, the Department of Developmental Services for people with developmental disabilities. The Department of Fair Employment and Housing should be there to protect people’s civil rights if any of these participants violate their civil rights. Disability Rights California is funded $10
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million or more per year and should be there to help people, but hasn’t been lifting a finger to do so. The county governments have a significant role. The supervisors choose which entity is going to provide legal defense for indigents. The county council is involved, and other entities at the county level like the public guardian. The U.S. government could be involved, more involved than it has been if it chose to, but so far has just been nibbling around the edges. The legal profession could really be spearheading reform, but isn’t doing anything really. Other professions, medicine, psychology, and social worker are all involved. So you see there’s this complex system, and reform is a complex multifaceted approach. I believe that the key to reform is through the attorneys who should be advocating for these individuals. First of all, you [have] got to get the judges out of appointing attorneys. The judges should just be sitting there and whoever appears before them, they should have to deal with that person; they shouldn’t have direct or indirect control over who gets appointed to an individual case. They shouldn’t be paying the attorneys, and they shouldn’t be training or coaching the attorneys; that should be for somebody else. The attorney should have performance standards, just like a doctor that’s performing surgery doesn’t just do what he or she feels or wants to. There are standards that guide them through the process, and there are consequences legal and otherwise if you fail to perform according to standards. These attorneys have no performance standards. The trainings are terrible. I just wrote a commentary last week about a recent training program; it omitted the important things that attorneys need to know, and it gave them misinformation on others. We sent a request to the California Supreme Court. There were about 10 organizations asking them to convene a work group on conservatorship right-to-counsel standards. The Supreme Court is in charge of the state bar, the state bar reports to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court therefore promulgates the rules of professional conduct. It also therefore is in charge of the discipline system and the complaint system for attorneys. Therefore the buck stops with the Supreme Court. So we want the court to finally acknowledge its responsibility for allowing this mess to occur, because the mess is mostly because the attorneys are basically trying to please the judges and to keep their income stream going, and they’re not trying to please their client or protect their rights. So this is pending recently. Finally, the Spectrum Institute has a funding and fees review project. Look at
legal services as the key to reform. For the last year, we’ve been looking at public funding of legal services, indigent legal defense services. Every county provides legal services for people without assets who have an attorney appointed. It could be a public defender department. In some counties, it could be a contract public defender, a law firm under contract with the county supervisors. Or it could be the court-appointed attorney system, like Los Angeles, which is the worst of all. So we’re going to be releasing our report on the public funding of legal services [on] September 7. Go to our website spectruminstitute.org, and you’ll be able to review it. Basically what we found in a nutshell is a system in disarray, that’s fragmented, that is providing deficient services and needs major reform. We have our recommendations to the various entities that would have authority to make sure that people who don’t have assets but whose civil rights are at risk in these proceedings receive proper legal representation. The second part of it has to do with the fee gouging, the fee for all, the abusive fee system, if you want to call it a system. But it’s ad hoc, where individual judges can do whatever they want without guidance, without accountability, without appeals generally. . . . In cases where the people do have assets, their assets might just be their home. Maybe they have $300,000 in assets in the home. Well, believe me, that’s going to be eaten up in attorney’s fees in a wink. So the judges are making the individuals pay not only for their court-appointed attorney who may be actually advocating against them. And the individual, the senior, is having to pay the attorney to advocate against the senior, which is another abysmal situation. But they also are being forced to pay for the attorneys for the petitioners, sometimes the objectors, and also the attorneys for the temporary conservators, the attorneys for the permanent conservators. One attorney in a case told me [about a woman] in her eighties who had significant assets. In her case, she did not have a court-appointed attorney as an advocacy attorney. Yet at one point, out of her estate she was being ordered to pay five attorneys, not her own because she wasn’t even given one. We will be working for the next year or more on the fee abuse situation and issuing a report on that. The system is badly broken; every part of it is broken. No one is funding conservatorship reform, it’s people like us who are doing this as volunteers. That’s why it’s taking so long. If some foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation were to donate a chunk
“The buck stops with the [California] Supreme Court. We want the court to finally acknowledge its responsibility for allowing this mess to occur.” —THOMAS COLEMAN of money, and if the money were targeted on cleaning up this attorney mess, we could speed up and accelerate the reform process. DUFFY: Leanne Simmons, Lisa touched on the Britney Spears case. I know you’ve been extremely involved in that case, advocating for Britney Spears. So please tell us about yourself and what you’re doing. LEANNE SIMMONS: First I would like to thank The Commonwealth Club for having this program, because it’s so important that we’re educating the public about these issues. I think that in Britney’s case, in particular, the lack of awareness about this type of thing is what has allowed it to continue for 13, going on 14 years now. I myself started as just a Britney Spears fan who was kind of concerned about the seemingly really microscopic control over her day-to-day life. And the fact that she was working for 13 years doing tours, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars, seemingly able to do so, yet under this conservatorship that had taken away all of her rights to make her own decisions. We were just fans dabbling in the law; we didn’t know too much, we just knew something felt off. In 2019, there was a whistleblower, a paralegal who was familiar with Britney’s case who confirmed a lot of our concerns, and the fact that Britney at that time was allegedly being held against her will in a facility and had been mistreated for most of her conservatorship. That’s when the ball started rolling. For the last two years, we have been fortunate to team up with other advocates and activists who’ve been working on this for many years, decades. We realized that this is so much bigger than just Britney, this is systemic. It involves cronyism and just the lack of oversight in our systems. These
judges and lawyers are able to do whatever they please, and there isn’t a lot of checks and balances. There’s no oversight. That’s a huge part of what I think needs to be implemented in this situation, because as Tom had mentioned, this is a very complex system. There are all these puzzle pieces. I think it’s overwhelming to the average person, it’s overwhelming to those in the legal community even. It’s just a very intricate system. So we need to simplify it, and we need to make sure that there is oversight into it. Britney’s case in particular I think could be a really great catalyst for this reform. It’s wonderful that the narrative is happening now. People are talking about conservatorships, people who had never heard the term before are now aware of what it is. Yes, Britney is theoretically very rich, she’s young and able-bodied from what we can tell, and a young white woman. It’s easy to dismiss that and think there are bigger issues out there—she’s got money, she’s fine. But when you look at it, she doesn’t have control of her money. So how much is that fortune worth when she doesn’t have a say in how it’s spent? I think that that’s important to recognize. Another thing that Tom had said is you can just have a home that might have some assets in it, you don’t have to have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. These predators look for even the smallest things, and you’d be surprised what people will do for small sums of money. It’s important as a fan and with a mom aging, grandparents, friends, myself, this is a threat to all of us. The system is set up to take control over anyone, and oftentimes over false accusations of disability or ineptitude that aren’t even true. We should be very aware of this, and we should fight as we’re moving forward, because the baby boomers are aging up and we’re all getting older. This is a predatory system that tends to go after those who are elderly and also those who are disabled. I am very honored to be a part of the Free Britney movement, which has kind of evolved into this passion for the rights of conservatees and reforming the system, because it is so much bigger than just Britney. We want her to be able to go have children or to Starbucks, be able to [exercise] her constitutional rights, of course. But beyond that, it is, again, coming back to that systemic problem that we opened a can of worms as a fan base. I think the majority of us are really grateful to have teamed up with other advocates. I firmly believe Britney will be free and very soon. But the work is not done at that point, we need to take this further and continue to
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reform these laws and make sure that this sort of thing is not happening in the future. DUFFY: The Britney Spears case has upscaled visibility of this issue. Let’s talk about that case for a second, since it is so visible right now. What what would be a humane, appropriate, supportive situation for her? MACCARLEY: Well, I’m going to go ahead. I am adamantly against maintaining this conservatorship for a number of reasons. I am convinced that Ms. Spears never qualified for a probate conservatorship. A probate conservatorship is only appropriate when someone is truly unable to make decisions and take care of their own needs and very basic food, clothing and shelter. It does not require someone to be sophisticated as a business manager, it doesn’t actually require them to be shrewd or business savvy whatsoever. What happened to Britney Spears, let’s be very clear, was a violation of her constitutional rights. Ms. Spears at this point should be free of the conservatorship, she should have people that she has vetted and appointed to help her with her medical decision-making as well as her financial decision-making. And as Rick properly pointed out, there’s no reason that I can see why this could not be managed with a durable power of attorney, health-care directive, and other estate planning documents. She has a living trust, her assets should be in the living trust. She should have competent fiduciaries around here, she does not need a probate conservatorship, never has. I’m appalled at what’s going on, I’m appalled that the judges have allowed this to be maintained, especially in light of her statements on June 23. So right now in my viewpoint as an attorney, I’ve done this for over 25 years, Ms. Spears should be free of this conservatorship; she does not need the protection of the court. In fact, I would argue that she needs to be protected from the Los Angeles County probate court. COLEMAN: I agree with you on that. I think that she’s been abused in the conservatorship. What would the problem be to terminate the case, see what happens? If a new situation arose, where there needed to be some intervention, then you could always take a fresh look at it, but give her a chance. BLACK: Yeah. I look at the numbers. We estimate looking at what has been submitted to the court that the attorneys have been paid over $20 million from her estate since this . . . conservatorship was begun in 2008. At any one time, and I’ve counted them in the past, there were at least a dozen attorneys who were feeding off of her estate. Many of them, maybe even all of them, knew that she didn’t
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“I firmly believe Britney will be free very soon. But the work is not done at that point. We need to take this further and continue to reform these laws and make sure that this sort of thing is not happening in the future.” —LEANNE SIMMONS qualify for conservatorship when it started, and she was actively arguing to end it from as early as 2010. So there’s more than a decade here of more than a dozen attorneys who were extremely well paid who ignored Britney unilaterally for the 13 years. The point that I also want to make is Britney is unique in that she’s young, vibrant, quite lucid. In our government, you’re allowed to make mistakes, we’re all given free will. Making mistakes is part of growing up, it’s part of being human. Yet in this case, those couple of issues at a time which was very, very high stress for Britney Spears back in 2008— two young children, going through a divorce, husband isolating the children from her and paparazzi all over her—we’re going to use that moment in time to judge this woman for 13 years? Most wards don’t have their abilities to fight back. Many wards are targeted, groomed, thrown into conservatorships due to illness or injury or dementia, have lost their ability to fight back. And that’s what should alarm the public, that here’s a woman who’s quite vibrant, quite articulate, didn’t qualify 13 years ago, and yet she still finds herself in one of these. DUFFY: Rick, I want to go back to some of your early comments. You talked about winning some convictions in Nevada. Can you tell us a little bit about those cases, what was going on? When you and others have pushed some of these issues, what kind of cases [were they, and] what were the outcomes? BLACK: Nevada to date is the only state where the attorney general of the state launched a criminal investigation, based on mountains of evidence that my wife and I
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and other activists presented to him back in 2014. Adam Laxalt was newly elected to the Nevada attorney General’s office. He was alarmed by the evidence that we presented and launched a statewide investigation. The conservatorship, guardianship system, sadly—back to the dysfunction that’s been described—is a haven for narcissists and sociopaths. It’s an environment where lying is rewarded. I want to define it more critically for your audience. Attorneys are licensed by the state bar. You can get a law degree, but then you have to be licensed by the state bar in every state to practice. But then there’s this unique group called litigators, and litigators make their money in a courtroom. In a courtroom, they don’t take an oath, they don’t have to tell the truth. And in an equity courtroom where billions of dollars are at stake, they can lie routinely. What the attorney general of Nevada uncovered with this investigation with the help of ourselves was they’re statutorily required to submit an accurate inventory when a conservatorship commences; they weren’t doing that. They are statutorily required to define where each and every penny is spent and who it’s given to every year; they weren’t doing that. In Nevada, less than 4 percent of all guardianship cases that were reviewed were statutorily compliant. And within that, there was an immense amount of criminal activity that sadly was being protected by this court. So that was how that investigation began. It was following the money, it was showing the statutory noncompliance and then getting those bank statements to show that the money had been misappropriated. There’s only two other states that have taken action on this, and they were actually done by the federal government, which is also extremely alarming. California has never undertaken a criminal investigation at the county or state level or federal level. In New Mexico the FBI came in, because six professional conservators had ripped off over a thousand people. Those six executives were sent to prison in 2020 and ’21. But again, it took the FBI, it took the Department of Justice, to combat this from a criminal perspective. The only other state where we’re seeing a prosecution underway is the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where it’s a recognized hotspot for estate trafficking within the professional guardianship environment. We do have a woman there, actually five conspirators, no attorneys involved, but the the DOJ has 850 some counts on her, and she’s currently going through criminal prosecution. The federal government is starting to
understand the dysfunction of the system and the ability for predatory attorneys to use it to violate civil rights of the individuals as well as to conduct criminal activity. But we’ve got 3,500 counties in the U.S. and a lot of law enforcement that continues to ignore these crimes. DUFFY: So some questions coming in from our online audience: “Does a contested conservatorship ever cost less than $200,000 to litigate? I’m concerned that there is an estate size for which only informal solutions are available, and it’s a fool’s errand to challenge control of, say, a relative who is exploiting a vulnerable senior.” Comments? COLEMAN: Well, from what I’ve seen, first of all, there aren’t that many contested hearings that occur, number one. There just seems to be a lot of settlements. And a lot of settlements occurred because the estate would be eaten up in contested hearings or trials or whatever. Theoretically, the individuals have a right to a jury trial. I examined the records of the data from LA County. Over a period of 12 years where 24,000 probate conservatorship cases were processed, there were two jury trials. I think that the real problem is occurring more with the settlements and the backscratching of everybody to get the conservatorship in place. Then afterwards there can still be other objections and things that eat up the estate, but I think the real problem is just the collusion more so than the contesting. DUFFY: I’d like to do a very quick lightning round and ask each of you if there’s one thing you could do that you think should happen, one practical thing to change and improve this conservatorship system, what would it be?
BLACK: It would be to implement the federal FREE Act, which is currently in committee, which gives contested cases an exit ramp to go to a federal court and have . . . a full de novo review of whether the conservatorship was appropriate. And if it was, who should be the conservator of that individual? Without federal oversight, these problems are only going to continue to grow. MACCARLEY: Absolutely separate judges, lawyers, and money. Tom also articulated the same plan. But I did actually study the model in Las Vegas where they funded an entirely different group of lawyers that are separate from judges. Other counties do that. In California, that should be mandatory. And I think that would start settling a lot of these problems where judges no longer are basically assigning their favorites to cases and then following directions from those lawyers. SIMMONS: Yes, definitely going off of what Lisa said. I think way too many conflicts of interest are being allowed to continue. And how is someone who is incentivized to keep a conservatorship going going to advocate to end it? It gets messy there obviously. It comes down to oversight. When there’s a single judge who is relying on her favorite court-appointed attorney, that single person has way too much power over the ward’s estate and life. So I do think it needs to be overseen at a higher level, potentially federally, because the states just do what they want at this point, and we need more control over these systems. COLEMAN: Okay. I agree with everything that everyone said. Take something that interests you personally and you feel that you can do. For example, a letter to your state
legislator saying that you support SB-724 by [California State] Senator Ben Allen. It creates modest but necessary reforms to the court-appointed attorney system. So that’s a very specific doable act. The other, if you’re in LA County, for example, Lisa and I are going to be working together and trying to get the LA County Board of Supervisors to stop throwing money at the court to allow them to operate this court-appointed attorney system and instead to consider the Nevada style attorney system. DUFFY: I’m going to throw one on the table from some conversations I’ve had actually suggested by my district attorney in Santa Clara County here in California, which is that counties have local rules of court. In Santa Clara County, they’ve instituted a local rule that fee petitions by attorneys have to be closely examined by judges to make sure that the fees are actually in the interest of the protected person and their estate. There are some criteria obviously for that. Seeing that as a statewide standard in California and elsewhere would be great, because at least then judges would be obligated to examine whether this fee for all has inbuilt interests, as you were talking about, Lisa, or whether it’s actually doing something for the person who’s on the conservatorship or the guardianship. I think all of you have pointed to what is really a civil rights issue in the U.S., a human rights issue. We don’t usually think of this area as among civil and human rights. But it is, it fits that criteria. And it is . . . a system that needs to be reformed so that there isn’t a bias, an abusive quality to it.
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Emory University Professor Carol Anderson. (Photo copyright Stephen Nowland/Emory University.)
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CAROL ANDERSON
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION
Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America
clearly states that Americans have the right to keep and bear arms, an argument often used to dispute proposed gun control legislation. Historian Carol Anderson uncovers the history behind the Second Amendment and argues that it was designed to keep African Americans vulnerable and subdued. From the July 21, 2021, program “Carol Anderson: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.” Dr. CAROL ANDERSON, Ph.D., Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies, Emory University; Author, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America In Conversation with MELISSA MURRAY, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law, NYU School of Law; Co-host, “Strict Scrutiny” Podcast
MELISSA MUR R AY: I’m especially delighted to be joined by Professor Carol Anderson. Her research focuses primarily on how centuries of racial injustice have informed the processes and outcomes of policymaking. In her new book, Professor Anderson performs an in-depth analysis of the Second Amendment, exposing the highly racialized motives behind its drafting, ratification and subsequent deployment. Welcome, Carol. CAROL ANDERSON: Thank you so much for having me, Melissa. MURRAY: The text of the Constitution’s Second Amendment reads as follows: “a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Much of constitutional history is steeped commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH
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in mythmaking, but as you show in this book, there might be more to this story than this David and Goliath narrative that we’ve been given over the years. Can you give us this additional context for the Second Amendment? ANDERSON: The additional context was looking at the role of slavery and the laws that came up in order to control the enslaved. You saw a series of laws about, “thou shall not bear arms. The enslaved shall not have the right to bear weapons. They must be kept away from weapons, they must be unarmed, disarmed.” Slave patrols had the ability and the function to go into slave cabins and look for contraband, such as books, as well as weapons. Then, seeing the ways that those laws and that architecture roll through the colonies, the Constitutional Convention and the ratification conventions, it was like, wow, slavery permeated those discussions. I saw the way that the South played a game of hardball, saying, “You will not have a United States of America unless we are able to protect slavery.” This is why we get the Three-Fifths Clause, this is why we get the 20-year extension on the Atlantic slave trade, this is why we get the Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution, this is also why we get the Second Amendment. During that ratification convention, ratification had stalled and James Madison rushed down to Virginia, which had been one of the major holdouts, and he ran up against the buzzsaw of Patrick Henry, George Mason and the anti-federalists. They were arguing that by putting the
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control of the militia under the federal government in the Constitution, you couldn’t trust the federal government to protect the slave holders from an uprising. They began to push hard, threatening this constitution that Madison had stitched together. And so what they did was they started demanding a Bill of Rights. They made it clear to Madison that they would push for another constitutional convention unless they got the protection of the militia. This is why you get this outlier. You get the right to free speech, freedom of the press, the right not to have a state-sponsored religion, the right to not be illegally searched and seized, the right to a speedy and fair trial, the right not to have to deal with cruel and unusual punishment. And then you get this, the right to a wellregulated militia for the security of the state. That thing is the bribe to the South to buy on to the United States of America—we will protect slavery by protecting the militia. MURR AY: Why have we never made these connections between slavery and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? Why instead has the narrative about the Bill of Rights been about these anti-federalists, who were so deeply consumed with this question of individual rights and the possibility of a tyrannical central government? ANDERSON: Our origin story is wrapped up in the mythology of these noble founders, who were just steeped in fighting off the tyrannical regime of the British. When you have this very flattened, two-dimensional origin story, you don’t deal with the complexity of the reality of what these folks
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were really dealing with and the choices that they were making. When we get this narrative story about this incredible militia that fought off the British, that was there to fight against domestic tyranny, what we don’t hear is how George Washington was absolutely beside himself that the militia was absolutely unreliable during the War for Independence. Sometimes they’d show up, sometimes they wouldn’t, sometimes they fight, sometimes they take off running. What the militia was really good at was putting down slave revolts. Absolutely, really good at that. The silence in the Constitution on slavery—that is the same silence we have had in our histories. It is the thing that we are ashamed of. So the origin story of the greatest nation ever cannot be rooted in slavery, because one of these things is not like the other. MURRAY: There’s a quote from Thomas Jefferson that appears in your book where he talks about the possibility that his slaves could justifiably turn against him. And he is deeply worried about this. It’s not an idle fear; this is the Age of Revolution. Not only have the American colonists rebelled against the British, the French are about to overthrow their monarch in a year or two. Closer to home, the Caribbean nation of Haiti has just experienced a massive overthrow of not only the institution of chattel slavery, but the government itself by enslaved persons. This looms large in the history of the Second Amendment, and we’ve never heard of this, either. Can you make the connections
between these external events and what happened here in the United States? ANDERSON: This is the Age of Revolution. So one of the things that happens is this fear that these revolutionary ideas will carry forward to Black people, that Black people will think that somehow this idea of selfdetermination and self-government, this idea about being able to rule yourself, that Black people will believe that that applies to them. And Haiti verifies this in ways that sends shockwaves through the United States. This is where you get Thomas Jefferson going, “Oh my God, if this thing gets unleashed, we have to fear it. We must fear it.” The fear that his own enslaved people will justifiably rise up against him. You see this coming through in terms of the laws, so that as you have slave owners fleeing Haiti with their enslaved, when they get to Baltimore, Baltimore opens up the public armory to white citizens so that they can protect themselves against these Haitian enslaved people coming into Baltimore. You have South Carolina actually banning the enslaved from Haiti from being able to come into South Carolina. One of the things that happens in the United States shortly after the Haitian Revolution begins is you have the Uniform Militia Act of 1792, that says that every white man between the ages of 18 and 45 has to be part of the militia, and has to have a gun. So you’re seeing the definition of citizenship and the responsibilities of citizenship wrapped up in the role of the militia gun ownership and whiteness. Then we have Gabriel’s revolt in 1800 in Virginia. That is a multi-city, multi-county planned revolt that they find out about on the day it was supposed to happen. Governor James Monroe is just shook. He is trembling. He’s writing to Thomas Jefferson, “I just found out about this. Oh, we would have been in blood if this thing had really gone off.” They called out the state militia, the various militias, to go and round up and hunt down Gabriel and his followers. Then, you have mass public hangings as a way to send the signal: This is what happens to Black people who believe in freedom. MURR AY: The response to Gabriel’s Rebellion is to make an example of the slaves who were involved in that uprising. We didn’t have a similar response to the Whiskey Rebellion, nor did we have a similar response to Shays’ Rebellion, but they too were very
much a disruptive force in colonial America. What explains the difference? ANDERSON: Whiteness explains the difference. It’s also the sense that Black people, you have to be afraid of them, they are a danger, they are a threat to the security of the United States, they are a threat and a danger to white citizens in the United States. White men are not seen as dangerous in that kind of collective sense. With the Whiskey Rebellion, [they were] tarring and feathering federal tax officers over tax policy. At the end of the day, what you ended up with were a handful who were tried and convicted, and they received pardons. When you had African-descended people rising up for their freedom, the response was, we have got to make a full example of you so that no one who looks like you believes that they have the right to be free. So we see the
constitutional history. You begin the book with a discussion of the police murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. These are both men who are shot and killed when they are in lawful possession of firearms. They are exercising their Second Amendment rights, and yet they are killed because they are seen to be threatening. Can you say more about that? ANDERSON: It was the killing of Philando Castile that was the genesis for me for this book, because here you have a Black man who was pulled over by the police. The officer asked to see his ID, and Philando Castile, following NRA guidelines, alerts the officer that he has a license to carry weapon with him. But when he is now reaching for his ID as the officer has asked, the officer begins shooting Philando Castile. He wasn’t threatening the officer, he wasn’t brandishing
“George Washington was absolutely beside himself that the militia was unreliable during the War for Independence. Sometimes they fight, sometimes they take off running. What the militia was really good at was putting down slave revolts.” —CAROL ANDERSON revolt in 1811 in Louisiana, where they are beheaded and their heads put on spikes to line the road to the plantation as a warning to the enslaved, this is what happens when you believe that you can be free. When you’re looking at the ways that [slave owners are] talking about slavery, they know that it’s wrong, but they’re doing it anyway. There’s the fear of retribution, that, “when they get free, they’re going to do to us what we have done to them. That is why we have to keep them unarmed and subjugated, because they are inherently dangerous criminal people.” MURRAY: There are two main contributions to the book. One is surfacing this lost history of the Second Amendment, this other origin story that has really been hiding in plain sight and hasn’t been talked about as part of the Second Amendment. The second contribution, though, is the way in which the relationship between African-Americans and guns and violence has actually been shaped by the Second Amendment and
the gun, he hadn’t pulled it out, pointing it at anybody. He simply had a license to carry weapon and he was gunned down. And you got silence from the NRA, virtual silence. It was only when Black members of the NRA began pushing for the NRA to make a statement that they did. What they said was, “Well, we believe everybody has the right to bear arms, but we have to wait for the investigation.” Journalists and pundits were saying, “Don’t Black people have Second Amendment rights?” And I went, “Lord, that’s a great question. Let me go find out.” That’s what had me hunting back into the 17th century and taking us all the way through to see about the right to bear arms, the right to a well-regulated militia and the right to self-defense. MURRAY: Can you say more about Black militias and how their service translates or doesn’t translate into a bid for citizenship and to be recognized as citizens later in the history of the country? ANDERSON: You have in New Orleans
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this Black militia, and they had been there since the early 1700s, and under French rule and Spanish rule. When the U.S. moved in, you had whites in New Orleans demanding that the governor disarm and disband this Black militia. He figures out that this Black militia is the best trained, the best organized and the most efficient fighting force that they have. The white militias, they’ve got lousy officers, they’re too spread apart to handle all of the challenges that are happening in the territory. He tries to square the circle with whites who are demanding the disbanding of this Black militia with the security needs of the area. So he removes the Black officer class of this militia and installs white officers on top of them, thinking that that would appease whites. And they were like, “No, we want them gone.” Then, there was that massive slave revolt in 1811. And the Governor Claiborne was like, “Oh my God, we need help.” He calls on this Black militia to help put down the slave revolt, and then notes how effective and efficient they were in doing so. They got no love for that effort. Then comes the War of 1812. Andrew Jackson is looking at that armada that is coming from the British to invade New Orleans and get ahold of the Mississippi, because if you can control the Mississippi, you’ve got an incredible gateway to control America. Andrew Jackson looks around and he sees that that Black militia is an incredibly organized, well-run fighting force. And he’s like, “I want them, I want them. And I will treat them equal to white men in the army.
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I will pay them equally.” Those Black men fought something fierce. And he notes, “I heard you were good, but I didn’t realize how good. Wow.” But after the victory, after the war, he sends them off to the swamps as a labor battalion to do the work that white men did not want to do. What happens after the War of 1812, what happens after the Civil War, what happens after the First World War is that you get Black men fighting for the United States of
on some of the themes that you’ve mentioned in the book. One of the points he makes here is if those African-Americans had been permitted by the states to bear arms as what’s their right as citizens under the Second Amendment, they would have been able to stand up to these marauding mobs of white men. So he very much is making a connection between the Second Amendment and racism, but it is to turn the argument about gun control, to say
“This isn’t a pro-gun or anti-gun book. This is about Black people’s rights, and seeing those rights consistently undermined because of the antiblackness coursing through this nation that sees Black people as a threat.” —CAROL ANDERSON America and believing that they will come back to be able to fully experience democracy. Instead, what they experience is fear of Black men who have learned how to use weapons, Black men who have learned how to take up defensive positions, Black men who have soldiering skills. MURRAY: I think you may actually have a very receptive audience for this book among the Supreme Court of the United States, and in particular, one member of the court, Justice Clarence Thomas. In a 2010 case, McDonald v. City of Chicago, he wrote a really interesting concurrence that picks up
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that gun control is actually bad for AfricanAmericans. Where does your book come in on this debate among progressives and gun rights enthusiasts about how gun control affects these different communities, and in particular, the African American community that really has been besieged by gun violence? ANDERSON: Where my book comes down is that this isn’t a pro-gun or anti-gun book. This is a book about Black people’s rights, and seeing those rights consistently undermined because of the anti-blackness coursing through this nation that sees Black people as a threat. It doesn’t matter whether
we’re armed or whether we’re unarmed. Over 80 percent of Black people are killed by Black people, but over 80 percent of whites are killed by white people. But we don’t have the narrative of pathology about whites killing whites at that rate, because so much is focused on the anti-blackness and the inherent criminality of Black people. Anti-blackness is short-circuiting our ability to have real, actual gun safety laws. So what you hear from people like Lauren Boebert is that if you take away our guns, we will be left defenseless against the gangs, against the drug dealers and against the thugs. And as we know, those are pejorative synonyms for African Americans. That yelling about defenselessness is the same language that we heard in 1788 from Patrick Henry and George Mason, “we will be left defenseless.” And that’s why we have to really deal with this history. Toward the end of the book, I’m dealing with Stand Your Ground, the right to open carry and open carry states, and the Castle Doctrine. What we’re seeing in those is disproportionate fear of Black people in these laws that are supposed to be the hallowed ground of the Second Amendment. What Stand Your Ground does is expands the concept of the Castle Doctrine. The Castle Doctrine says that if you’re in your home and somebody comes in that’s an intruder, you have the right to defend yourself, you have the right to ward them off. Stand Your Ground expands that to, you don’t have to be in your house. Anywhere where you have a right to be and where you perceive a threat, you have the right to stand your ground. Well, that perception of
threat, because Black is the default threat in American society, puts Black folks in the crosshairs. For white people who kill Black people under a Stand Your Ground law, they are 10 times more likely to walk with justifiable homicide than Black people who kill white people under stand your ground—10 times more likely. For white people who kill Black people, they are 281 percent more likely to walk under justifiable homicide than white people who kill white people. When Black people are the victims of this violence, it becomes acceptable in the judicial system because Black is the threat. I also look at it in terms of juxtaposing Kyle Rittenhouse to Tamir Rice. Kyle Rittenhouse is the 17-year-old white teenager who crosses state lines with an illegally obtained AR-15 to go to a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, so he can defend the property against BLM. The police welcome him. They’re like, “Oh, we really appreciate you guys being here. It’s hot out here, you want some water?” So they don’t see the 17-year-old with an AR-15 as a threat, as dangerous. He goes and he shoots down three men, killing two of them, seriously wounding a third. He walks back to [the police] with his hands up as if to surrender to the police, and the police go right by him. They don’t see him as a threat. Tamir Rice, who was the 12-year-old Black child in Cleveland, in an open carry state, who’s playing in the park by himself. And the law says, as long as you’re not pointing a gun at someone, you can open carry. Granted, it was a toy gun, but it didn’t have the orange tip on it, but he wasn’t threatening anyone. The police came and within two seconds, they
gunned him down, saying he was dangerous, he was a threat. Kyle Rittenhouse is one of the boys. Tamir Rice is a threat and he is killed within two seconds. MURRAY: What happened in California to basically thwart the Black Panther’s efforts to keep Black people armed and protected? ANDERSON: The Panthers really arose in response to the police brutality raining down on that Black community. They had a framework of policing the police. California had open carry laws. They knew how to open carry, they knew what kinds of guns they had to have, and they knew that they had to be licensed and they knew the distance that they had to maintain from the police as the police were making an arrest. Well, the police did not like having these Panthers watching them, observing them and basically monitoring them, policing the police. So the police would stop the Panthers, but they couldn’t arrest them on anything because they were following the law. The police ran to Don Mulford, who was a California assemblyman, and said, “You got to help us here. The Panthers are dangerous, they are dangerous, they are a threat, they are a serious challenge to our being.” And Mulford is like, “I got this.” So with the help of the NRA, they drafted legislation to make the methods that the Panthers were using to police the police, that open carry, to make it illegal, to make the Panthers illegal. And you had Governor Ronald Reagan, who was eager to sign this legislation, because he had been hearing about these Panthers as well, and that they were a threat, that they were dangerous. Not only did you have this confluence of
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conservative NRA, assemblymen and Ronald Reagan working on gun control when Black people are carrying arms, but you also had no movement in terms of getting at the root cause, which was the police brutality that had driven the Panthers to come into being. AUDIENCE QUESTION: What role have gun rights organizations played in these disparate approaches to gun control that impact individuals on the basis of race? ANDERSON: One of the major gun rights organizations is the NRA. The NRA began in 1871, founded by Union soldiers as a marksmanship club. They were absolutely distraught at the lack of marksmanship that they saw in the Civil War. So they spent a lot of time teaching folks how to shoot. That
have not dealt with defining Black people as inherently dangerous, as inherently criminal, as inherently a threat. So this expansion of gun rights will heighten the precarity of Black life. MU R R AY: How do we have t hose conversations, though, where we can actually be honest about excavating our origins if there aren’t people who are ready to hear it? ANDERSON: One of the long battles in American society has been about our history. It is the way that the Civil War morphed from a war about slavery to a war about states’ rights, about economics without understanding the economics of slavery. It was the role of the United Daughters of the Confederacy that transformed our textbooks
“We have not dealt with defining Black people as inherently dangerous, as inherently criminal, as inherentlly a threat. So this expansion of gun rights will heighten the precarity of Black life.” —CAROL ANDERSON was the role of the NRA. You started seeing greater politicization happening in the 1960s, particularly when it came to gun control laws. They were there helping to draft legislation. Then there was the coup in 1977 at the NRA convention in Cincinnati, where the kind of politicized, virulent right wing took over and said, “enough of this being nambypamby about politicization, we’ve got to go full bore into politics.” In that coup, this is where you then see the NRA really going after politicians who are about gun control. MURRAY: The Supreme Court will take up an important case next term, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett. That will be another case that really, I think, seeks to expand the scope of gun rights in common use. Are you worried about backsliding? Because I imagine there must be a world in which the expansion of gun rights could be met as enhancing the rights of all citizens or enhancing the rights of some citizens over others. ANDERSON: Right. What I see is the enhancing of some rights over others, again, because we have not dealt with the anti-blackness in American society and we
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so that the role of slavery just basically got elided over in terms of the Civil War. Our history matters. And this is the backlash that we’re seeing, because we know that history matters, we know that the narrative stories that we tell are powerful in shaping the way that we understand the world and the way that we analyze it. MURRAY: As you say, in the Cruikshank decision, the Supreme Court basically says that the 14th Amendment only applies to state action, insulating private acts of racial violence from any kind of recourse. But over the last 50 years, there has been an emerging interest in originalist interpretation of constitutional texts. So the idea here is that judges should read and interpret the Constitution with an eye toward how its terms would have been understood and experienced at the time of drafting and ratification. Because it is rooted in how things would have been understood in the past, perhaps originalism is less attentive to questions of race and racial discrimination that exists in our modern day period, but you are actually offering an originalist take on the
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Constitution and the Second Amendment, one that makes race and slavery central to the founding and to the Constitution itself. With that in mind, how should lawyers and judges deploy this new understanding of the Second Amendment of the Constitution itself in their efforts to interpret constitutional text? ANDERSON: The originalist slant really seems to me to be a way to try to undermine the role of racism and race in the United States. By doing what I’ve done, which is to go back and look at the ways that James Madison was drafting the Constitution and drafting the Bill of Rights and the pressures that were on him, then you’re having a very different discussion about the Second Amendment. And you’re seeing that it is steeped in anti-blackness, having there in the middle of the Bill of Rights the right to control and contain Black people’s rights, the right to deny Black people their rights. Wow. I think that what we need to do is to remove the Second Amendment from this hallowed ground that it currently has that has been propped up by the NRA and to treat it the way we treat the Three-Fifths Clause, recognizing that this is a function of slavery, it is a function of the denial of Black humanity and a denial of Black people’s rights, and really reconceptualizing in this nation what real safety and security looks like and also what real citizenship looks like. AUDIENCE QUESTION: When you teach history to your wide-eyed students down there in Atlanta, what surprises them the most about the history that you discuss and discover together? ANDERSON: I had a student who had asked the question, “Well, why haven’t African-Americans after the Civil Rights Movement made more progress?” I said, “That’s a great question. Go to the archives.” In our archives, there’s a collection called the Neighborhood Network Association. What they did was they tracked Klan members in Georgia’s government and in Georgia’s judiciary in the ’70s and ’80s. When you begin to track those Klan members with the legislation that they’re blocking and with the judicial decisions that they’re making, things become very clear about the roadblocks to progress. I could have said whomp-whomp-whomp, and sounded like a Charlie Brown adult, but there was something about my student finding that information on his own that now it’s enlightening for him. It’s like, “I get it. I get it.”
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ASHLEY JEAN YEAGER:
Astronomer Vera Rubin’s Galactic Vision
TOLD TIME AFTER TIME SHE NEEDED MORE DATA
to back up her bold ideas about the universe, pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin got the data that helped establish the reality that we live in a universe with more dark matter than luminous matter. From the August 26, 2021, Humanities Member-Led Forum program “Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond,” part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. ASHLEY JEAN YEAGER, Associate News Editor, Science News; Author, Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond: The Life of Astronomer Vera Rubin In Conversation with GEORGE HAMMOND, Author, Conversations With Socrates GEORGE HAMMOND: I’d like to welcome Ashley Jean Yeager, a science writer and the author of Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond. It’s the story of the life of astronomer Vera Rubin. Let’s talk to Ashley about this very interesting story about a female astronomer from the 20th century who was one of the first scientists who supported the idea of dark matter. Ashley, first, welcome to The Commonwealth Club. Great book. Wonderful job. ASHLEY JEAN YEAGER: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited and honored to be here. HAMMOND: Let’s start with a little bit of background about Vera. We have this woman fighting against the old boys club, basically, to make progress. Very successful at it. Let’s just give an idea about the span of her life. She only passed away a few years ago in her 80s, but really got active early on. Maybe we can set up how she did this. YEAGER: Yeah. Vera Rubin was born in the 1920s. She grew up mostly in Washington, D.C. At the age of about 10, I guess, she was sharing a room with her sister. There was [this] row of windows in their bedroom, and she just became fascinated by the stars. She would spend every night looking out the window, watching the stars, tracing their paths across the night sky. While she was doing this, she was trying to read about scientists, Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, and she also came across the story of Maria Mitchell, who really put professional astronomy on the map for the United States. Maria Mitchell discovered a comet with a telescope, and because of that was awarded a medal from the king of Denmark, and then went on to found an observatory at Vassar College. Vera learned about all of these different stories, and then eventually ended up at Vassar to study astronomy.
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Far left: Science journalist Ashley Jean Yeager, (Photo by Chris Johns.) Near left: Cover of Yeager’s biography of Vera Rubin. Top: George Hammond on the Club’s Taube Family Auditorium stage interviewing Yeager. Above: Yeager makes a point about the development of deep space science.
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HAMMOND: One thing that’s important about [studying] astronomy at Vassar—how big was the department? YEAGER: She was the only student in the department. This is the 1940s, just after World War II had ended, and she was the only astronomy major at the time. H A MMOND: But they had a little observatory and a professor. That’s not too bad. YEAGER: They did. They had a little observatory, and that was actually where she got some of her first hands-on experience going out and making photographic plates of the night sky and different objects in the night sky. I think [that’s] where she really learned to love to do it and going through that process of making those observations. About the same time, she ended up meeting Robert Rubin, who became her husband. He was a graduate student at Cornell at the time, and as Vera was thinking about what her next steps were, she had applied to Harvard [and] several other universities to do her graduate work in astronomy, and ultimately decided to go to Cornell with Bob. I think this is something that was a really fundamental decision that in some ways put her on the path to being this luminary in astronomy, because she was able to ask
questions as a graduate student that maybe she wouldn’t have been encouraged to ask at a place like Harvard or Princeton. She had that intellectual or creative freedom to dig into something very different than a traditional question. Actually, the question she asked was, Does the universe rotate? Which is something that’s incredible to think about, and her logic made sense. It was something that George Gamow, one of the big name cosmologists at the time, had posited. The idea was [that] everything rotates, right? Planets rotate around, they orbit the sun, stars orbit a galaxy. Why wouldn’t galaxies orbit a center point in the universe? She really went after that question and tried to collect data to find an answer. She did find some unexplained— HAMMOND: It’s pretty bold to think that you can get any data to support an answer on that. Right? YEAGER: Right. Yes, exactly. Especially at that time. This is late 1940s now. You’re just starting to have these galaxy surveys, where you’re starting to see threads of long tendrils of galaxies, some of the beginnings of the large-scale structure of the universe starting to emerge. Yeah, she was trying to get the different velocities of galaxies as they move through the universe to look for this universal
Above: At the NASA Sponsors Women in Astronomy and Space Science 2009 Conference, left to right are Anne Kinney of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Vera Rubin of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Nancy Grace Roman of NASA Goddard, Kerri Cahoy of NASA Ames Research Center, and Randi Ludwig of the University of Texas, Austin. (Photo by NASA.) Right: Vera Rubin with John Glenn. (Photo by Jeremy Keith.)
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rotation. She did find some strange, unusual, unexplainable behavior, and she presented that at one of the big astronomy meetings and got the reaction that no one really believed her. They were like, “No, this can’t be right. You don’t have the data to make this claim. You need to go back and do more work.” I think that really stuck with her as a criticism. Like, okay, I constantly will need more data to confirm whatever conclusion I draw. You have to remember, at this time, she wasn’t able to go to the telescope herself. There were no facilities that were open to women in the late ’40s, early 1950s. HAMMOND: Just out of habit that they didn’t do it or were there so very few astronomers that were women? Is there anything in the basis for why that was true so late? Because it’s fairly late, in the ’40s and ’50s, to say women can go and look into that. Or was it just a habit, like in accounting or something like that, where there were so few women as well? YEAGER: I think you could say that, but then there are also arguments that there weren’t really facilities for women. One of the famous stories for Vera is about this bathroom at Palomar Observatory, and how, essentially, the application said women can’t apply because we don’t have the facilities
to accommodate women. That segmented everything just for men. HAMMOND: All they needed was an allgender bathroom, and everything would have been fine? YEAGER: Exactly. Vera would later make that point. HAMMOND: It’s just a funny thing that people use as a block to stop something from happening, basically. YEAGER: Yes, yes. Absolutely. HAMMOND: Sorry to interrupt the story, but [what stopped her is] a very interesting part of the story. Apparently, tiny little things. YEAGER: Yeah. She actually had this memory of going to Lowell Observatory when she was a graduate student, and she saw these male astronomers making observations and publishing all these papers, and it made her feel inadequate. It made her really question, They’re so far ahead of me, can I actually do this given the limitations that I have? That was always a question in the back of her mind, and for some reason, she pushed forward and kept trying to challenge it. I think a lot of that was from support from her husband. He very much wanted her to have a career and made a lot of decisions to make that possible for her. H A M MON D: She bre a k s t h rou g h eventually. Each step of the way, it’s basically
that she does something fairly outstanding and makes a presentation, and each time there’s more data, it’s more convincing, it’s a little bit more reliable. People are going to use the fact she’s a woman doing this, right? YEAGER: Yeah. HA MMOND: Eventually, she breaks through. But it takes how long before she actually gets time on [telescopes]? YEAGER: She really wasn’t able to go and observe until the early 1960s. I think that was the beginning, and I think she really coveted being at the telescope, because it was so sacred, almost. What happens is that Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona opens. When it does open, it’s open to women, so she applies for time there. Around the same time, her husband has the opportunity to go on sabbatical and picks to go to La Jolla, California. Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge are there, and they’re world-renowned astronomers at this point, mainly for their contribution to understanding how stars make their energy. Vera asks them if she can work with them, and that’s another opportunity to go to the telescope with them. She gains more skills, and that’s when she really starts working on the question that will become her central thesis that gets us to the point of understanding that the universe is made of stuff that we still don’t understand. What happens is Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge are looking at galaxies and how stars orbit the galaxy, what speed they have going around the center of the galaxy. They’re looking mainly at stars close in to the center of the galaxy and recording those speeds. The assumption is, at that time, that they’re only going to look at stars a certain distance from the center of the galaxy because, just like in the solar system, the speeds of stars farther out will drop off, and that is just what everyone assumed, it was written in papers over and over again, and no one really said, “Hey, let’s try to find stars farther out from the center of the galaxy.” HAMMOND: The example was that the
solar system, the planets, due to the speeds, do drop off. YEAGER: Yes. HAMMOND: It’s a really big issue. Why don’t you describe what it is? In the case of the solar system, there’s a central sun, and then there’s the planets going around it. Everyone’s familiar with crack the whip, for example, this game. Of course, the outside person ends up going faster than they possibly can and goes flying off. There is something like that going on in a solar system, and they assumed it would be true for galaxies. That’s the basis for their assumption, and it’s easier to do the stars closer, and so that’s all they did. But Vera said, “Let’s look at this differently.” Go ahead. I’m sorry. YEAGER: Oh, no, no. That was a great explanation. HAMMOND: Why is it that in the solar system, not live, but in the solar system, when the planets go around, they go at different speeds? YEAGER: Yeah. Pluto is very, very far from the sun, and so the gravity on it is not as great, and so it just plods along. While if you look at Mercury, Mercury’s very close in, and it’s just whipping around the sun super fast. It’s basically what’s pulling on those planets and just the difference in the amount of gravity that you have to affect those speeds. HAMMOND: But in the galaxies, the central core—whatever it is, some people think black holes, some people think other things—of a spinning galaxy is only a small percentage of all the mass in the galaxy. Whereas in the solar system, our sun is something like over 99 percent of the mass in the solar system, and therefore, that might be part of the picture too. YEAGER: Yes. Absolutely. H A M MON D: Ever yone made t his assumption, that the galaxies would behave the way the solar system did, and Vera wasn’t so sure. This is her big contribution into the dark matter thing. YEAGER: Yes.
“It made her feel inadequate . . . ‘Can I actually do this given the limitations that I have?’ That was always a question in the back of her mind, and for some reason, she pushed forward and kept trying to challenge it.” —ASHLEY JEAN YEAGER commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH
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After that, after asking that question about whether the universe spins, she really got into how an individual galaxy spins. That’s how she gets to this point of looking at these different stars to understand how are galaxies put together. She starts to question this assumption, and really with her students at Georgetown, because she did her Ph.D. at Georgetown and then ended up staying on as faculty there and took on some students, and they actually helped her first start to ask this question about the Milky Way, our own galaxy. Really trying to find stars very, very far from the center of the galaxy, and much farther than where the sun sits from the center of the galaxy, and try to understand, Do these stars move quickly? Do they move more slowly? Do they plod along? Our galaxy’s hard to work with, because we’re inside of it. It makes it very hard to get a sense of what’s going on. HAMMOND: I thought that was a very interesting part of your story, that people were much more confused about the Milky Way and trying to figure out what’s going on, than [a galaxy that’s] much more distant because you can look at it from the outside. They learned much more about galaxies from the further-away galaxies, and then applied it to the Milky Way and tried to figure out if it’s true here. YEAGER: Yeah, absolutely. She’s asking this question, she’s working with our students, and also had been influenced by the Burbidges. She gets to this point where she’s juggling a lot of different things. She’s juggling teaching, she’s juggling going to the observatory and doing her research, her family, trying to figure out how to navigate departmental politics. She gets to a point that she feels like, okay, something’s got to give here. She decides that the thing that she would want to give up is teaching. She goes and asks for a job at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, which is part of the Carnegie Institute. There are researchers there who are asking the same question about galaxies, and they’re working in radio astronomy, radio wavelengths. Obviously, she’s working in the visible wavelengths, what we can see. After some deliberation, they finally do decide to hire her. She’s the first female staff scientist at the department, and that leads for some interesting onboarding practices which happened to happen on April Fool’s Day, April 1st. She shows up, and they have no paperwork for her. At first, they think she’s a
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secretary, and she has to claim, “No, I’m a staff scientist.” What was really interesting, and I think, again, a crucial moment in her career, is the director at the time had set up two offices for her. He had set up one office with one of the radio astronomers, and then he had set up another office for her with this very gifted instrumentalist, Kent Ford, who was creating this device that essentially would take photons from very faint objects and magnify them so that you could see stars very, very far away, which became key to Vera’s work. She moved in with Kent Ford. He told me, many decades later, that she just never moved out. This started the beginning of their collaboration. What she did with him is she used this instrument that he had to look for very faint stars in our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, and start to track the speeds of those stars as they orbited the galaxy. This was late 1960s. She starts to notice something very odd, even in some of the first observations that they make, that those stars far out aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re moving way too fast, if you were using the assumption that the galaxy would work like a solar system. This starts to get into the meat of Vera’s work. . . . If you were following that solar system assumption, what you would think that you would see is . . . the stars really far out going really, really slow around the center of the galaxy. But what Vera started to observe is that that didn’t happen. The speeds didn’t drop off. Those stars really far out are zooming around the galaxy at roughly the same speeds as stars much closer in. HAMMOND: You talk about in your book, when we think about galaxies, we’re thinking about the central thing with the cloud of stars around it. But you’re saying that every galaxy is actually a big spherical halo that goes this far out. Galaxies, in addition to solar systems, have a central core, and at the core of the galaxy is even a deeper core, but then all the stars that we see, that’s still pretty much the center of the galaxy, and that the galaxy is surrounded by stuff for hundreds of millions of light years around it, or whatever, that are still in its orbit. YEAGER: Yes, absolutely. This starts to get to this question that she and others were stumbling on in the late 1960s, early 1970s, that you have these objects really, really far out, farther than where you can see the galaxy, and they are moving way faster than astronomers would have expected. People start to question,
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“What’s going on here? Why are these objects super far out moving so fast?” What they’re starting to think about is, Okay, if this data is true, if these numbers are true, then something out there has to be pulling on those stars, something has to be revving them up, just pulling them along, making them go super, super fast. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to stay in the galaxy. They would just be flying off into space. At about this time, you have theorists [who] see these observations, they see some other observations about galaxies and clusters also moving rather quickly. There comes this point where researchers start talking about dark matter. In reality, dark matter the term was really coined in the early 20th century as researchers were looking at individual galaxies and also these clusters of galaxies. They had this sense that things weren’t operating the way astronomers had assumed. That there might be something else out there, whether it’s stars that we can’t yet detect, whether it’s something unknown that we don’t know, but there might be this stuff that’s pulling everything along, making things move fast, or making galaxies interact in ways that we don’t understand. HAMMOND: At the beginning, it sounded like from what you wrote, the assumption was that it was more like the matter of dead stars, old planets, the equivalent of asteroid belts. That kind of thing. But you don’t really see these things, because what you see is the light. Luminous matter is one thing, [and there’s] non-luminous matter. It got more mysterious as time went on? Y EAGER: It got more mysterious as time went on. That’s right. You had these rumblings about dark matter in the 1920s, 1930s, but no one who really took it seriously, unfortunately. People just thought, Oh, how can the universe be made of stuff we can’t see? Those observations must be wrong. Really, when we returned to this question in the 1970s, she got the same reaction. There were some theorists who were starting to piece together that maybe galaxies had more matter, that maybe they had this spherical halo that encompass them. But it wasn’t a mainstream idea yet. You had all these different pieces to suggest that the universe was playing these tricks on us, but not everyone was on solid ground that this was really happening. What happens is Vera publishes these results, she gets some pushback from people saying, “Oh, well, that’s just Andromeda. That’s just our neighbor. Maybe it’s an outlier.”
“The fact that she was still curious well into her 70s to ask those questions and try to find those answers really spoke to how curious she was about the universe and trying to understand what’s going on.” —ASHLEY JEAN YEAGER HAMMOND: You need more data. YEAGER: Yeah, you need more data. You really have to do this in other galaxies. To which she says, “Fine, I will go do that,” and she does. [In the] late 1970s, she’s starting to put this observing program together. You have to remember, this is really hard. You’re looking for stars and galaxies very, very far away. You’re trying to measure how quickly they move around that galaxy, and you can’t use one or two stars. You have to have several stars in that galaxy. It’s a tall order, but she just becomes determined that she will do it. She starts to do this in galaxy after galaxy. At first, she has five galaxies where she sees the same pattern. Essentially, you see the same thing. The speed starts to go up, and then in the most part, they level off. Meaning those stars, again, very far out are traveling much faster than what you would expect if you’re using that assumption of Newtonian gravity and
the idea of the model of the solar system. What she’s showing is there are smaller galaxies, there are mid-sized galaxies. Then [there’s] one called UGC 2885, and that is one of the largest spiral galaxies in the universe, and you have that same pattern. [UGC 2885] is massively wide, and even very, very far out at the edge of that galaxy, those stars are still moving super fast. This paper with this data came out in early 1980. At this point, there had been the theoretical work, there had been two astronomers who had written a review article saying we need to take the idea of dark matter seriously. Then I think with Vera coming along and saying this isn’t just something that we see in one or two galaxies, this is something that we see in 20, 30, 40, maybe even 100 galaxies. I think the astronomy community had to take a step back and say, “Okay, we really need to take this issue seriously. We really need to start thinking about what these data are telling us
and how it’s going to reshape what we think about the universe.” Because essentially what all of this is telling us is that most of the matter that we’ve been looking at, this luminous matter, really only makes up a small portion of the matter that’s in the universe. Essentially, the universe has played a trick on us, that we’ve been looking at this one thing and the rest has been hidden, and we really don’t know what it is yet. That opened the floodgates for researchers to really start thinking about “Is dark matter made of dead stars and planets and some of these other objects that we know about, that we can’t see, or is there something else?” In the 1980s, you get to this point where there’s two camps and they’re starting to collect all this different data to try to understand what is it that’s tugging on these stars? What is this dark matter? Because now we have to accept that it exists. H A M MO N D : S h e ’s m a k i n g t h i s contribution in the 1980s. She’s in her 60s or getting into that area. That’s another unusual thing. Scientists usually make the great contributions a little earlier than that. She just kept being productive. YEAGER: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Even the galaxy UGC 2885—this is [also known as] Rubin’s Galaxy. It’s actually named after her. Even into the early 2000s, Vera was still looking at this galaxy, still looking for the farthest stars that she could find, because she wanted to check that her data were correct, and she wanted to know how far out do you have to go before stars’ speeds around the galaxy might drop off? Is there a point where you get that curve that’s flat, and then it starts to level off, and then it starts to get back down? Right? Because then if that’s true in how the galaxy is put together, you might get to the point where you’re running low on dark matter. There’s not that matter to tug on the stars. Or the other thing that she proposed that I thought was really fascinating is maybe the dark matter halos continue and they actually touch other galaxies. Our dark matter halo could be touching Andromeda’s dark matter halo. There’s been evidence. NASA suggests that that’s not the case. But the fact that she was still curious well into her 70s, to ask those questions and try to find those answers, I thought really just spoke to how curious she was about the universe and about the world around her and really trying to understand what’s going on, and just not ever losing that kind of childhood curiosity.
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Pete Buttigieg and Alex Padilla:
Photo by Austin Distel/Unsplash
GOING ELECTRIC THE LONG-ANTICIPATED ELECTRIFICATION OF THE
transportation network is happening now. Will the United States be a leader or a follower in this revolution? What public policy measures are needed to ensure American jobs and American companies are at the forefront? From the June 11, 2021, online program “Electrifying the Transportation Future: 12th Annual Mineta National Transportation Finance Summit.” This program was supported by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San José State University. PETE BUTTIGIEG, U.S. Secretary of Transportation ALEX PADILLA, U.S. Senator (D-CA); Former California Secretary of State KAREN PHILBRICK, Ph.D., Executive Director, Mineta Transportation Institute— Program Emcee
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KAREN PHILBRICK: Welcome to today’s meeting of The Commonwealth Club of California. I’m very pleased to introduce a special guest, the Honorable Pete Buttigieg, 19th U.S. secretary of transportation. Prior to joining the Biden-Harris administration, Secretary Buttigieg served two terms as mayor of his hometown in South Bend, Indiana. A graduate of Harvard University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Secretary Buttigieg served for seven years as an officer in the U.S. Navy reserve, taking a leave of absence from the mayor’s office for a deployment to Afghanistan in 2014. Time prevents a full accounting of his many accomplishments. So I will simply say, Welcome. We are so pleased you could join us for this fireside chat, Mr. Secretary. PETE BUTTIGIEG: Karen, thank you so much for the kind introduction and thrilled to be reconnected with The Commonwealth Club, which I’ve so enjoyed addressing, and very honored to be in the virtual company of Secretary [Norman] Mineta, somebody whose public service is also something that time would prevent us fully acknowledging even now, but who has opened doors for so many, who has been very kind to me in introducing me to this position, following in his footsteps; and whose record of service
in uniform and in public leadership really is inspiring. . . . I’ll speak for just a few very brief moments, and I look forward to a brief exchange as well. But the main thing I want to convey is the importance of vehicle electrification to meeting the president’s goals for our climate. This administration views climate change as a defining challenge in our time. It’s why at the April Climate Summit hosted at the White House, the president laid out the ambitious target to cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030, in addition to re-establishing U.S. participation in the Paris Accord. The scale that we need in order to actually make that real is why the president’s jobs plan is so important, especially when it comes to electric vehicles. Now, I believe the industry is moving there already. I believe adoption around the world is happening already. So someone asked why [do we need] a push on this, if this is where things are headed.
And I think that the reason has to do with answering three questions. First of all, if electric vehicles [are] in the future, will they be made in America? Will America be leading these markets? Will there be American workers and American firms on American soil making EVs? I think that largely depends on our policy choices. Secondly, are they going to be affordable and accessible to all Americans, especially those who are less wealthy and those who live in rural areas, which for reasons I’ll go into in a minute are among those who stand the most to gain, but not if they can’t afford it in the first place. And third, maybe most important—okay, an EV transition may be ahead, but will it happen fast enough to beat climate change before it’s too late? So much of that depends on the choices we make. So let me unpack each of those very briefly. First of all, making the cars of the future in America. This is why the president’s plan focuses on every part of that. Domestic supply chains, retooling factories to build components, funding manufacturers for training programs, helping Americans get the skills to build batteries and other parts of electric vehicles, as well as assembling the vehicles themselves, and creating all the jobs
“This is a very blue collar vision for a greener America, and the plan incentivizes companies to manufacture their [electric] cars right here at home.” —PETE BUTTIGIEG
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
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that come with that. And by the way, a lot of these jobs are not newfangled, futuristic, mysterious jobs. This is the auto workers who will make cars. This is the electrical workers who will install the charger base that we need to support those cars. This is, in other words, a very blue collar vision for a greener America, and the plan incentivizes companies to manufacture their cars right here at home, which takes me to the second point, which is making these electric vehicles more affordable and accessible. As mentioned earlier, the jobs plan envisions rebates and tax incentives for buyers of electric cars. This is to make the upfront costs more attainable for more Americans, as well as the $15 billion we envisioned to build a network of half-a-million chargers across the country. Because there are some places where, even as we speak, you could easily make a profit on an electric vehicle charger, others where it doesn’t pencil out on its own, unless we make some policy choices. And often those are rural communities. Rural areas have been the last to be fully connected to any of the new advances in our country—electricity, telephones, broadband internet. In each of those cases, good things happen when policy stepped in. That’s something we need to do here. Rural residents, because they drive 66 percent more miles, just as a matter of common sense, [they] burn more fuel and can save more
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money. I’m thinking about my in-laws in Michigan, a mom-and-pop landscaping company, and what my father and motherin-law could save with an electric pickup truck. They could charge at home. They will have an electric truck that actually has better torque than the old gas truck, which is useful when my father-in-law’s plowing snow in the winter, as well as when they’re towing equipment. And they won’t have to worry about the distance if we get the charging network right. So every family that’s thinking about their family budget stands to gain from the EV revolution, but only if we set the table right away. Time is of the essence; the climate crisis, the timelines—they’re not established by Congress. They’re not established by the officials like me. They’re established by physics, and they’re bearing down on us. We can rise to meet this challenge and do it in time and be proud of our actions beginning in the early 2020s when it came to decarbonizing transportation. But only if we act now, only if we act big, which is why you see such energy and such boldness in the president’s vision. So I appreciate the chance to just share that quick outline with you and I look forward to our conversation. PHILBRICK: Well, thank you so much for those comments. They’re very intriguing and let’s just jump right into the first question
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here. At a conceptual level, what’s the appropriate role for the federal government in helping the U.S. transition toward electrification of the fleet and what specific components of the American Jobs Plan will support that transition? BUTTIGIEG: I think the federal role really is to fill in the gaps. State government, local government, [the] private sector, they’re all playing a role, but it’s clear that they shouldn’t be asked to do it alone. The jobs plan includes $174 billion total to the EV market. The main elements of that include $15 [billion], as I mentioned earlier, to develop this national charging network. This would be a formula program to strategically deploy the EV charging infrastructure, as well as potentially other alternative fuel sources along designated fuel corridors that we were already identifying in partnership with the Department of Energy, so that it’s very clear where that national network is and so that range anxiety doesn’t stop adoption. And then as I mentioned earlier, [the plan includes] those consumer rebates and tax incentives. Now, we also have to recognize it’s not just private vehicles, right? The federal government, we’re a huge purchaser of vehicles. So electrifying the federal fleet and postal service, school buses. The [plan includes] funds to electrify at least 20 percent of the yellow bus fleet, 40 percent of transit
vehicles, which is obviously a big part of the solution. And even as we work toward getting the [American] Jobs Plan passed, we’re working this into what we’re doing right now. So for the first time, we have in defined, new ways, climate as a criteria in our existing grant program, both to send a message and to make real improvements and help communities that are doing it. So the federal government’s not going to own and operate every charger, we’re certainly not going to design, develop and sell electric vehicles; but we do have a very important role. And the jobs plan is part of how we step up to that role. PHILBRICK: Absolutely. Thank you. And in that response, you touched on equity. So I’m curious, how can the federal government ensure the benefits from electrification— whether cleaner air or well-paying new jobs— are dispersed equitably to communities across our entire nation, whether rural or urban? BUTTIGIEG: The truth is that our transportation policy has a mixed legacy in this country from an equity perspective, but now’s the chance to do something about it. That’s why the Jobs Plan includes a Justice 40 initiative. We call it Justice 40 because it envisions 40 percent of the overall benefits of the federal investments around things like climate going to disadvantaged communities that have been overburdened or underserved because of federal policy. It’s a chance to make right what was broken in the past. You also consider the fact that often it is communities of color and low-income communities that are more likely to live near ports or highways, where there is more particulate matter coming from tailpipe emissions, therefore higher rates of susceptibility to things like asthma. There’s a public health equity issue baked into our climate equity issue. All of which is transportation equity. So this needs to be envisioned in all of our work, specifically funded in the president’s [American] Jobs Plan vision, but also just contemplated in the ways that we’re working with states, with cities, with communities, notably with tribes. As your question mentioned, this is about racial equity, but also regional equity and making sure we support urban and rural communities alike. Rural communities may struggle with EV adoption in terms of range, but they’re actually better off in terms of charging access, because most houses stand alone. You can plug it in your garage. Urban environments
“Transitioning to electric vehicles is an essential step in reducing our carbon foot print. It will also strengthen our economy.” —ALEX PADILLA
it is the opposite. You’re not as worried about range, but not everybody has a house with its own plug points. That’s why we need to think about how to make shared or publicly accessible charging stations more available in cities. All of this adds up into a picture where every American [is able to benefit], because we’re doing this and because we’re doing it now. PHILBRICK: Absolutely. And you know, you touched on the importance of having well-paying jobs, family supporting jobs. To what extent will moveing the nation toward electric vehicles create those quality jobs, those well-paying jobs that can support our families? BUTTIGIEG: Yeah. I think this is where we get to prove the falsehood of the old framework of climate-versus-jobs. This is about job creation through climate action. That’s why whenever you hear the president talk about climate, he’s also talking about jobs. This is a great example of how to do it. And it’s why the [American] Jobs Plan calls for investments connected to things like local hire, community workforce, project labor agreements, registered apprenticeships, because we also need to get people into these jobs who haven’t had a shot at it in the past. And I applaud those organized labor unions, for example, that have been proactive about welcoming in those who have not had the
U.S. Senator Alex Padilla.
historical expectation to seeing people who look like them on work sites. We’ve got to get this right. And that’s part of what we can do in this electric vehicle revolution. PHILBRICK: So true. You remind me that if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. And how critically important it is that we engage that K-through-12 sector also in this conversation about futures and transportation. I know we’re down to our last couple minutes together. So I have one final question. What are the key barriers the nation will face in moving toward this electric vehicle fleet? BUTTIGIEG: So a lot of it’s technical— supply chains, electrical grid infrastructure. A lot of it’s financial—making sure we’re actually willing to make the investments, those market-making investments, that catapult the electric vehicle adoption faster than it’s been. But actually I think a lot of it’s cultural. We just need to realize that part of our tradition has always been innovation. So in an odd way, nothing could be truer to our tradition, the same tradition that produced internal combustion engine vehicles that defined my city until the collapse of the Studebaker car company in the ’60s. And then that collapsed . . . and our recovery from it defines the life of my hometown to this day. We need to realize the relationship between past, present, and future and acknowledge that nothing could be more
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American than finding a way to lead the world on the cars of the future, just as we did on the cars in the past. PHILBRICK: Absolutely. What a pleasure it has been to be with you today. Thank you for making the time. Thank you for sharing your incredible comments. And we wish you well, Mr. Secretary. BUTTIGIEG: Well, thank you. Thanks for this conversation and thanks again for the expertise and the passion of everybody participating in this event. These kinds of problem solvers are going to create incredible results. I think we’ll look back and be proud of the 2020s if we get off to the right beginning right now. PHILBRICK: I couldn’t agree more. Thanks again. Be well. I’m now pleased to introduce U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, who will make some introductory remarks. Senator Padilla is the proud son of immigrants from Mexico, who previously served on the Los Angeles City Council and was then elected to the California State Senate, where he passed more than 70 bills, including landmark legislation to combat climate change. He was named one of Sacramento’s most effective legislators before being sworn in as California’s first Latino secretary of state in 2015. He was reelected in 2018, receiving the most votes of any Latino elected official in the United States. Now, he’s gone on to even greater things. In December 2020, Senator Padilla was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom to finish the term of Vice President Kamala Harris. Welcome Senator Padilla. ALEX PADILLA: Hi, I’m Senator Alex Padilla. Thank you for inviting me to open this important conversation of the challenges and opportunities of electrifying our transportation system. As we begin the process of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, we must invest in a more just and more sustainable future. In California, we know that climate action can’t wait. California’s already experiencing the devastating effects of the climate crisis, from record-breaking droughts and wildfires to coastal erosion and habitat loss. And the transportation sector is the largest generator of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. To meet the demands of the climate crisis, we need to make bold investments in cleaner transportation technologies. Along with partners in the Senate, I introduced a
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resolution that outlines a plan for electrifying America’s future. We call for a widespread modernization of the power grid to support the electrification of high emissions sectors like transportation and are proud to support President Biden’s call for $174 billion of federal funding to bolster the electric vehicle market. Transitioning to electric vehicles is an essential step in reducing our carbon footprint. It will also strengthen our economy by spurring the creation of goodpaying jobs and innovative technologies, but federal grant funding is just one of the funding sources we’ll need to renew our infrastructure for a clean transportation future. Low-interest federal loan programs and bonds are also helping transportation agencies to access the capital they need to get shovels in the ground. In more than 20 years of public service, I’ve seen that virtually every major infrastructure project using federal funds also leverages state and or local dollars. And increasingly, public-private partnerships are bringing additional investments to infrastructure plans that will pay off for the whole community. It’s our job as policymakers to ensure that our funding strategies and new projects are also rooted in equity. Low-income communities, communities of color, immigrant communities, and Native Americans disproportionately live on the front lines of the climate crisis, but have too
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often been left out of critical infrastructure investments. To address decades of environmental injustice and disparities in health and employment, we must bring robust funding to projects in vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. We must ensure that electric vehicle infrastructure like charging and fueling stations are available to all Americans in all communities. We should bring cleaner, safer electric school buses to every school, an effort I’m leading in the Senate. And we need to improve the sustainability and reliability of public transportation, which has enormous potential to connect communities to jobs and resources. That’s why I’m a proud co-sponsor of the Build Green Infrastructure and Jobs Act, which would invest $500 billion over the next 10 years to accelerate our transition to an all electric public transportation future. This bill would create up to 1 million jobs at the same time as supporting equity in fighting the root causes of climate change. Now is the time to build a clean transportation future. That means innovating beyond our traditional infrastructure funding tools, because the investments we make today will multiply in value for our communities and our environment. Thank you. PHILBRICK: And thank you, Senator Padilla. It’s just so wonderful to hear your vision of an equitable, just, and sustainable future. And we look forward to working with you on achieving that vision.
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THE BIG PICTURE U.C. Berkeley journalism professor William J. Drummond gives a presentation in the Club’s Taube Family Auditorium about the San Quentin News, the prison-based journalism project for which he has lent his expertise. (Photo by Sara Gonzalez/SMG Foto.)
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February 21 to March 4, 2022
*Explore Jerusalem, sacred to three major religions. *Experience Masada and visit Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. *Travel to Bethlehem and Ramallah in the West Bank. *Visit ancient Caesarea, a Druze village in the Golan Heights, and Safed, known for being a center of art and religious mysticism. *Discover cosmopolitan Tel Aviv and colorful Jaffa. *Hear from political officials, both Israeli and Palestinian, as well as specially arranged guest lecturers. Cost: $8,125 per person, double occupancy
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