What's an earth. I'm taking my pels in the vitamins. You know, I gotta stay strong. You know what I'm saying. Many of you all probably know. Leslie Jones is one of the comedians on Saturday Night Live. She's also one of the stars of the female version of Ghostbusters, and earlier this summer, she was eviscerated, really abused mercilessly on social media, particularly Twitter, with the most hateful, bigoted, disgusting comments. She really got a lot of attention because she stood up and she shared this with the world, which really kind of I think unveiled what a cess pool social media can be. Have you experienced much hate speech yourself? Oh, I've I've been swimming in that cess pool. Actually, you know, people don't really understand how it's like a sucker punch when people say that such mean, nasty, negative, ugly things about you, either about who you are, you know, your intelligence, your appearance, and I think under the cloak of anonymity, people feel emboldened to say all sorts of horrific things. Well, and I've seen what people say about you online and I know you, I'm your friend, and it's really upsetting because I know that it isn't true, and thank you for your support. You're welcome anytime. And I think that anonymity, as you said, gives people an ability to say things that they never would dream of saying if they actually had to identify themselves or to be face to face with somebody. We're going to talk with two people today who are on the front lines of this issue. First, Jonathan Weissman. He's an editor for the New York Times, and he quit Twitter over hate speech and he did something very very brave, which will tell you about in a moment. And will also be hearing from Richard Cohen, who's president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Now, Richard's been mired in this stuff for decades. He'll tell us that for every big win against hate speech, there is inevitably a backlash. But there are still things that we can all do to fight these hateful words and deeds. I guess the question is our technology companies doing as much as they could. Well, it's a tough issue because you want people to be able to participate anonymously from places like Syria and Iran where they have no choice, but in this country people are sort of abusing that privilege in order to be really nasty and inject a lot of poison into the public discourse. Now, of course I'm the target of some of this because I'm a public figure or whatever. But we wondered if other people experience that even in their small circles, even among their followers on social media. So we decided to head out to Times Square, the center of the New York universe, of course, to find out what other people are experiencing online. And here's what we discovered. Hi, can I show a quick question? Sure, have you ever experienced hate speech or somebody being abusive to you on social media or online? Yeah? Political? Yeah? How does it make you feel when you get those kinds of comments like, I don't want to be a part of it. I mean, I just ignore it. To be honest with you, when you see it online directed at other people, what do you think? In general? I don't like any kind of anybody that makes any adverse comments to people online because it goes to everybody, and I don't I don't agree with that. Leat haters hate Honestly, They're going to talk about whatever they want to talk about. Are you shocked sometimes when you see the level of discourse online. Well, I'm I'm not shocked because that was what the Internet was originally supposed to be, which was supposed to be an area where it's democratizing opinion to send and so forth. So unfortunately it matches up with the spectrum of the world. I think there needs to be some boundary of you know, what's appropriate and what's not right. You sort of teach kids and people what's appropriate what's not and you have to kind of practice it in real life. I think have you ever experienced online bullying or hate? You know you're talking to I'm the Finnish dragon for men's health. So basically everything I post is he skipped leg days, calves look terrible. I hate his face. Um, I wish you would die. Do you monitor your comments and do you ever remove them? We often remove them. That's half my job. He's growing to the Facebook feed particular. Yeah, Facebook definitely. So it keeps you hate speech, keeps you very busy, It keeps me employed. Yeah, definitely. There is rough out there, all right, stay safe out there. A big thank you to everyone willing to talk thus on a warm summer day in the middle of Times Square, very warm now, Let's talk about Jonathan Wiseman. Jonathan is a very fine writer for the New York Times, and he confronted really something that is so ugly that many of us believed, probably incorrectly, had been put to bed a long time ago, which is just blatant anti semitism. So he's here to talk about that and what he did about it. Hey, Jonathan Wiseman, Hi, Katie, how are you. I'm good, Brian, and I are really delighted that you're here to talk about what happened to you, because I think it's emblematic of the times we're living in and how strange and surreal social media can be, and how actually upsetting and dangerous it can be as well. Let's start from the beginning. This all happened when you posted an article about fascism. Tell us a little bit about why you posted it and what it was about. You know, if something catches your fancy, um, you tend to tweet it out to your followers. It was something that I do several times a day. And Robert Kagan, kind of a neo conservative author uh supporter of a lot of military interventions past um now at the Brookings Institution. He had written a piece for the Washington Post on how fascism is coming to the United States, and I tweeted it out to my followers and I had gotten a response back that I had never seen before. It was just simply my name in three parentheses from somebody who identified himself as Cybertrump. And I tweeted back to him, I said, do you care to explain? And you know that let loose this retuperative anti Semitic rant and it's he said, I have belled the cat. Um. And with the belling of that cat, the trolls, the neo Nazis, the white supremacists started just day losing me with Holocaust imagery, Nazi iconography, really really ugly stuff that I really thought was, you know, things of the past. Tell us before I ask you a little bit more about some of the things that were tweeted at you how this sort of three parentheses thing works, and how it's so called bells the cat, because I know that a lot of news organizations have since written about this. Yeah, I of course knew nothing about this until I was sucked into it. Um. It turns out that this group of neo Nazis and white supremacists had come up with an actual piece of software, a Google Chrome plug in that you can download, and it puts these three parentheses around Jewish sounding names, which allows them, if they have the right software, to search social networks m for the three parentheses and then find targets to go after, because oddly enough, most search engines don't look for things like parentheses and that kind of thing. They only look for numbers and and letters and set things like the at sign. So they had come up with an actual organized way to find and target certain people with Jewish sounding names. That's just unbelievable to me. How long has this been going on, by the way, because I know it was recently discovered, but was this a practice that had been in effect for years? Even? I don't think so. I think it's been several months. And I think the first targets were Jewish conservative writers and pundits, people like Bill crystal Um, who had been targets of what they called the alt right, and now it's moved to more mainstream journalists like myself. I understand that Google Chrome was made aware of this, then they got rid of the software that enables this process. Is that right? That's right, it was. It was labeled something very generic that you would never ever recognize as some kind of software targeted for anti semit So they had no idea that it was there, and once they found out about it, they yanked it off. What did it feel like when you first got those tweets that showed things like dead bodies in the Holocaust and other neo Nazi symbols. Yeah, I mean the Holocaust. The concentration camp imagery is such a shock in this context because it turns your stomach and the first time you see an image of like Donald Trump in Nazi garb, flipping the switch on a gas chamber in your face inside that gas chamber, it's a shock. Now the tenth time you see it, you start thinking this is a joke. These people are just sick um and you start imagining them sitting in their parents basement in their pajamas. The shock value does wear off. But you know, the goating, uh, the anti semited goating, the constantly asking you, well, why are Jews always oppressed? Why are Jews always thrown out of these countries through the centuries. It's very, very frustrating, And Trump is kind of a funny hero for these neo Nazis because he hasn't made, to my knowledge, any anti Semitic comments. He in fact has a Jewish daughter and son in law. His daughter converted when he got married. Why do you think he's become so celebrated and protected by these people online? They in in his language on immigrants, they see a kindred spirit. They think that he's sending signals that that there's much more to it than he would that he would like to say, but he can't say it because he's running propresed it in. So. Wolf Blitzer one time was talking to Donald Trump and brought up the anti Semitic goating of of journalists and asked him, what do you think about this? Do you were you repudiate that? And he basically said, I don't speak from my followers. I don't speak for all my voters. No, I I think anti semitism is terrible. But he did not overtly repudiate them, did not say I do not want your vote, I do not want your support, the way Ronald Reagan once did when the clan had endorsed him. Jonathan, one interesting thing that you did was you didn't mute these people. You didn't block them from your account. You actually retweeted so all of your followers could see what they were saying to you. Why did you want to do that? Because if you, you know, just ignore them, it's hard for somebody to go onto your Twitter feed and and see what you're seeing. If you retweet, then everybody who follows you seese it. At first, I would make a little comments to make sure that nobody thought that I was, you know, in endorsing them by retweeting, uh, And then I just started just retweeting, retweeting, retweeting to create a record, uh, and to show anybody who wanted to see how ugly things were could just search for at Jonathan Weissman and find all sorts of evidence right there. What was the reaction when you were retweeting? Because I was following your Twitter feed and I was looking at how some people were coming to your defense. Did you get much support from the journalistic community? And I've gotten a ton of support. And when I decided to write about it, it was actually then there was another reporter for Air. It's one of the Israeli newspapers. He's the one that came up with the idea that we should all put those triple parentheses around our names, um, to show that we're not cow, to show that we're not afraid, but also to thwart the software. And I thought that was an amazing moment of solidarity because now I if you look on Twitter, you see a lot of people with these triple parentheses. So yes, I do feel supported and I do feel like I have accomplished something. But you quit Twitter because you were upset with the reaction you got from the company. Tell us what transpired? Who did you call, what did they say, What were you hoping to achieve, and what didn't you get? So as as you said, Katie, I wanted to create this trail of anti semitism so people could see what they were what they were doing. And I thought, I'll leave all this stuff out there for a little while. But now I'm kind of growing sick of this. So I started reporting the most vicious anti Semitic tweets coming at me to Twitter. Because Twitter has something called the terms of service. When you sign on to Twitter, nobody ever reads them, um, but you click on something saying okay, I under stand the terms of service, and those terms of service say no harassment, no singling out people for ill treatment based on race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic origin. You're vowing to to to follow Twitter's rules. So I started reporting them to Twitter, and at first I would just get a little acknowledgement saying, we got your report, we're looking into it. We got your report, we're looking into it. Then one of the New York Times social media people, we have people who you know, we're hired to look after our social media she's she decided to take upon herself too, to put together a compendium of all the worst things that had had come my way and send them in a in a package to Twitter. And then she got one of these notes back from Twitter saying we've looked at what you've sent us and we see no violations of our terms of service, which shocked me. I mean, I mean honestly. And and then I remember, remember her name is ari a. Re sent me this, and I sent her a little frowny face back, saying this is ridiculous. The next morning I woke up and there was somebody I would have sent her something more than a frown face, but you were very polite. I was. I was much more angry at Twitter than I was by this point at the neo Nazis because I've got grown used to them, um and and I went on to Twitter. I said, this is a brief rant, and I said I'm getting off Twitter because Twitter will not follow its own rules and will not police itself. And almost immediately as soon as I did that, I started getting notes back saying We've looked at this count and we've suspended it. We've looked at that account, we've suspended it. We've looked at some of the accounts, and they said, we don't see we still don't see, um a violation of our terms of service. And I, honestly I went back and I could not figure out what criteria Twitter was using to decide that this guy's account is going to be suspended and this guy's account was fine. I honestly didn't see any difference between them. What about this argument that the conundrum that some of the social media outlets ostensibly find themselves in Jonathan withdrawing the line between free speech and hate speech. It's a question that I've gone over in my own head for a long time now, a lot, well the last few few weeks, and my attitude at this point is if Twitter wants to make an announcement saying we're doing away with our terms of service. We don't care. We can have a wild West. We're gonna have open free speech. Say what you want. You know, if they did that, I'd probably signed back up. At least they were being honest. Or I find offensive is that Twitter can wear the halo of the terms of service that says we don't put up with harassment, we don't put up with racism or anti semitism or homophobia, we don't put up with these things, but then don't do anything to police it. So they have to make a decision. Asian, they are either one thing or another, but they can't have it both ways. And the suspensions you talked about are meaningless because you're suspending the accounts, but not the people behind. All of those people can just set up additional hate spewing accounts. So what do you think Twitter actually ought to do to fix this problem short of turning it into a wild West. It's it is a conundrum. It is very hard to puzzle out. And a lot of people have said, well, who cares, are just a bunch of trolls, And my answer is you're right, who cares? Why do I why do I need Twitter? So I just my attitude was why if if I'm offended by the way Twitter is policing itself, then I will just say goodbye to Twitter for a while. Did you hear from anyone like Jack Dorsey or any executives at Twitter after this whole bruhaha? Because I think you put them in a terrible light. I've been expecting to hear from somebody and I haven't. They've really been remarkably quiescent about this whole thing. They don't seem to want to engage. What do you think this says about the state of our country? You know, I wonder did these people always exist? Are we just now seeing them because they have a platform they can express their views. Is there something going on that the numbers are multiplying? Um? What's your take on what this says about us as a country? When Katie to jump in, I mean, the polling does show that deeply entrenched anti Semitic views, at least according to the A d l S poelling, have have gone down from about twenty nine percent of Americans in n twelve percent. But it's still twelve percent of the American people anyway, And that surprises me. Surprises you that it's gone down. No, it surprises me that it's at twelve percent. I mean, remember in Washington, especially where where you see this high partisan uh commitment to Israel and politicians of every conceivable stripe from from very liberal to very conservative tumbling over each other to get to to get to the right side of Jewish voters. I would never have thought it was twelve franc I would have thought it was considerably lower now. But we've seen if you look on a newspaper website, if the comments sections under articles allow anonymity, the tone of the discourse is horrific. It degenerates so quickly. But if you have to use a real name, it stays at a certain level. It just it's like road rage. If you don't have an identity, I don't know. I guess it's as old as Lord of the Flies or older than that. Um. But I do think that the tone of this presidential campaign and the tone set by Donald Trump have empowered people to bring out views that they used to only speak, you know, in the privacy of their home. Around there, around the angry dinner table or something. I mean, people seem willing to speak in public the way they used to never. I mean, I get your point about Trump not being strong enough in condemning David Duke or anti Semitic pronouncements, But are there elements of his campaign, of his platform that you think are attracting white nationalists anti Semites even though white supremisists and yeah, even though what he's saying of the time is not anti Semitic. But I think if if you call for a blanket ban on Muslim immigrants, if you call for a giant wall on the southern border, if you talk about Mexicans as rapists and thieves, I think you're sending a signal that exclusionary politics are now mainstream. Do you think that. I know that a number of newspapers have done away with the comments section, or they're monitoring them more carefully, because you look at them. It is so depressing to see how the discourse quickly devolves into basically a verbal fist fite between respondents, and the kind of vitriol and nastiness that is so pervasive. Then I read the letters to the editor in the New York Times, and I think, Wow, my faith in America has been restored because people have different opinions, but they're all sort of thoughtful and well written, and it's just it's it's like they're two America's. Well, you know, the Wall Street Journal did a great exercise where they created a blue Facebook and a red Facebook and if you are a conservative you're tending to see on Facebook, and if you're a liberal, what you're tending to see on Facebook? And they made a very very compelling illustration of how different and how divided the country is along political grounds. I mean, if you look on the on the New York Times comments, now, they're curated. There are editors picks, there are readers picks, and so we we empower certain readers to actually go through and select the best ones you can click on, you know, see all as well, but those are policed. I mean, we actually employ people to go through them. So what's the solution, Jonathan, I mean, what have you learned from this whole bizarre and really upsetting experience. I think that part of the solution is to not care so much about social media. You know, since writing off Twitter, I've been spending a lot more time actually reading the whole article off of you know, off of the New York Times in the Washington Post apps and not becoming almost like an automaton consulting my social media feed. Um. I actually feel like it's been good to pull back from that world, and I think we could all do with a little less time on social media, right. And it's kind of narcissistic, don't you think, because it makes you obsessed with what people are saying about you instead of looking outward and saying what you think is going on in the world. It's a weird inversion, isn't it. I have teenage daughters and they measure, you know, their self worth by their Instagram following and their life. It's crazy. It's weird that they can quantify their popularity on social media. But I really wish they would just leave it alone. You know. Do you think, Jonathan, that there's a broader challenge for the mainstream press this election cycle? Um, when it seems like some reporters have crossed the line from just covering the campaign to describing Trump and his candidacy and his supporters in ways that might have seemed too much like advocacy, UM for the other side or against one side. Do you think that the mainstream press reinforces this narrative of a liberal bias based on the way some are covering Donald Trump. I think I and a lot of journalists involved in watching this campaign are wrestling with this because on the one hand, we have an obligation to fact check and to cover any candidate with a jaundiced eye, with a sense that they can't just get away with the big lie saying something over and over until we all accept it. It's our responsibility to point out when something is just factually in accurate, untrue. I think that you know, famously, the Huffington Post declared that they weren't going to cover Donald Trump as a true candidate that we're gonna keep, They're going to relegate him to the entertainment section. And I remember arguing at that point, we need to cover Donald Trump like a like we would cover any other candidate. We need to scrutinize this policy proposals. It's very difficult, and I do think that that that reporters, I think in this campaign are faced with a candidate that is unprecedented that nobody's we We have ways that we cover candidates. There's a rhythm of a campaign, but with with Trump, uh, much of that rhythm has just been thrown off because he's not running what what most people would call a campaign. You know, there's no yard signs, Um, there is, there is no advertising. How do we we have to we actually do have to rethink the way we cover a presidential campaign when the candidate himself is not behaving like a candidate. Not only not behaving like a candidate. But of course, Walter Cronkite had that famous moment when he spoke out against the Vietnam War. When do you have a moral imperative to speak out against something that is seems so contrary to the principles upon which this country was founded. It took Walter Cronkite a long time to get to that point, right. So, um, I think that a lot of people might say that, you know, a blanket ban on Muslim immigrants already cross that line. But I think that you can point out where Trump or Clinton I've gone through the lines of what is constitutional and what is democratic without necessarily denouncing them. One of the Times reporters he's are our Supreme Court reporter wrote a story about all of the ways that Trump's proposals are anti democratic and anti constitutional, and in so doing he spoke only to conservative constitutional scholars. He didn't speak to one liberal in the entire story. And that story was incredibly widely read. It was extremely successful in getting its message out. But I don't think anybody would read that, as you know, Walter Cronkite creed a cour It was just at LIPTOC going through the proposals and measuring them up against what we know to be what the the tenets of the of the Bill of Rights. But of course Lyndon Johnson said famously, if we lost Walter Cronkite, We've lost the war. And today, does any institution have sort of the moral heft to be able to say something and have it really affect public opinion, because so far it doesn't seem to. You know, I I actually think it would have to be kind of a truth power moment where a conservative came out against Trump. But then again, so many conservatives. Someone was going to say, Bill Crystal, hello, No, I mean well, then Robert Kagan story, uh that that came out, and and Max Boot It's so in fact, some of the most eloquent writing against Trumpism has come from conservatives. All those have done is show just how far apart the Republican power structure. The Republican intelligentsia is from so much of the Republican base. Um. What we have seen is people that we used to you know, routinely call up to get a sense of where are conservatives these days? We found out that they have no influence whatsoever. And I would argue it's not just the Republican base, it's this new base of populism that we've seen bubbling up throughout this camp paint. What we learned in the rise of Donald Trump is that there is a whole new quadrant. It's the socially conservative, economically liberal voter. The person who feels like a white working class is besieged and they don't want special treatment going to Gaze and African Americans and Latinos, but they do want their social security, and they do want their Medicare, and they don't particularly uh, you know, want government to shrivel up and die. So it is the populist quadrant, the social conservative economic liberal. Um. Uh that Donald Trump's candidacy is unearthed when make America Great Again is fundamentally a nostalgic, backward looking sort of message. Let's take America back to when it was last great, and presumably that means when they were you know, when the demographics were different, when they was different. A friend of mine said, when he sees that on a on a baseball hat, he sees make America white again. Well, you know when, um, when Donald Trump sat down with one of the Times as UH diplomatic reporters, UM foreign policy reporters David Sanger, and David Sanger mentioned, so you would say that your policies are kind of America First, and he said yes, yes, And now ever since then that interview, he's been using the term America First. Never once has he googled America First to understand the historic context. We still have no evidence that he understands, you know, Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee that tried to keep the United States out of World War Two. He seems to be a historic in his sloganeering, at least in a sense that maybe the most anti Semitic thing he ever says exactly it is. But I'm not sure if he has any idea the anti Semitic undertones of of America First. Well, fascinating conversation. Jonathan Weissman. I guess I won't see on Twitter, but I'll see on Facebook. That's right, I am on I'm on Facebook. Thanks so much for talking with us. It's uh, it's it's it's upsetting, but but a really important conversation. So thanks, thanks so much, Jonathan, Well, thank you for having me. So after we recorded this interview, we were surprised to see Jonathan Wiseman started tweeting again. We asked him about his change of heart, and he told us that a recent piece about the Iran nuclear deal in the Wall Street Journal had him itching to communicate online with other journalists, and Facebook just wasn't doing the trick. He wrote to us that Twitter in Washington is much more of a conversation between journalists and that that was the audience he was seeking. His one tweet about the Iran deal got a hundred and eighty six thousand impressions and reminded him that Twitter is still a powerful medium of communication. And also, to his surprise, he says that his Twitter bullies had nothing to say. He's tried to be more judicious in his use of Twitter, he told us, but he still hasn't heard anything from the higher upsite Twitter about what he went through Jonathan said, Twitter can root out hate speech, but it chooses not to. Also, don't forget to pick up a copy of Jonathan Wiseman's excellent novel Number four, Imperial Lane, which comes out in paperback in January. How big is this problem? Is it simply an isolated incident a pack of anti Semites getting ahold of one person on social media? Or is it widespread? And what other kind of bigotry is being unleashed online? We're going to talk about that coming up. By the way, if anybody out there is wondering who this disembodied voices, this guy named Brian Goldsmith, let me ex plane briefly. Brian and I have known each other for a very long time, gosh, maybe ten or fifteen years. Brian I started working for you in two thousand four as a summer intern on the Today Show. Wow. Brian, by the way, is only thirty four years old. But the reason why he's here is he's got one of the sharpest political minds I know. Plus I happened to find him really amusing sometimes you and three or four other people, and so that's why he is my ED McMahon, Can you do an ed McMahon laugh. Ha ha ha, No, not so good. I think you need to go home and work on that. I hadn't practiced my Ed McMahon laugh. Boy started almost as genuine as the real Ed mcman laugh. If we were Ed mcman and Johnny, we would go out and have like ten martinis after this each. Sounds good to me. Yeah, now let's get back to the show. Obviously, the story about Jonathan Weissman is so upsetting, and we wanted to get a broader perspective on what's happening visa vi anti Semitism and social media and also just around the country and around the world. So Richard Cohen is president of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. Hey, Richard, thanks so much for talking with us. Sure, Katie, Hey Richard, it's Brian Um. I'm sure a lot of people have heard of the Southern Poverty Law Center but may not want to admit that they don't know what it actually does or why it exists. Can you share a little bit about the history of that organization and and what you do today. I appreciate the opportunity to you know, the Southern Partarty Law Center is founded in nineteen seventy one, forty five years ago. Uh, really to make the promise of the newly enacted civil rights laws, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act a reality in the Deep South, you know nowadays is you know, kind of organizational motto is fighting hate, teaching tolerance, and seeking justice. The project that monitors white supremacist activity. That's kind of our arm that fights hate. Right now, we focus primarily on issues of recent immigrants, the rights of children. Uh, we have a lot of work trying to push back against the problems of mass incarceration. Really the full gamut of civil rights issues. Richard, was there an aha moment when you said, this is my calling, this is what what I want to dedicate my life to. You know, when I was a junior in high school, way back when my my Civics teacher, you know, challenged me, he um, he made me read in brief Supreme Court cases. This is in the eleventh grade. What year was that? Killing me? Katie? Stop it stop. I think I'm probably older than you are. No, No, I'm I'm sixty one. So that would have been in nineteen seventy one, seventy two. So really sort of a very tumultuous time in our nation's history. I mentioned one of the things too, you know, the first democratic the first uh uh convention that I watched was the nineteen sixty eight convention. I was thirteen years old, and of course that was the convention where the police are rioting in the expression whole world of watching, and you know I was. I was mesmerized by it even as a little kid. And you know, one of the things that stood out of the person who stood out the most for me was Julian Bond, who really came to national attention then. And you might remember, although he was too young, his name was placed into nomination, you know, in the Supreme Court it excuse me, for the vice presidency. And of course Julian was the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. I think about those days when I was thirteen years old and think about it today, and of course I'll think about Julian's legacy. He was such a close friend and we lost him last year. You know, I suppose that was as much in a moment for me as anything else. Do you have any trouble attracting Wait, wait, wait, wait, I want to know if Katie's older than me. I'm two years younger. I'm younger. Richard. You're killing me. Hey, listen, you know I would have dated you in high school. You would have been a senior when I was a sophomore. What can I say? Yeah? I think that's probably a lie, but we'll move on. Why were you were a cheerleader in high school? Why? Yeah? What do you? What do you? What does that say? Is that? Is that an indictment of me or Richard? Because Richard went to Columbia First of all, I like smart guys. He went to Columbia and he went to UV A law school. Richard, Okay, I'm sure you would have dated in high school. Um, do you have any trouble attracting really smart, ambitious lawyers to Montgomery, Alabama and work for the Southern Poverty Law Center. You know, we're lucky. There are a lot of people who have a lot of passion, you know, who go to great schools and want to join our cause. So you know, we don't have a hard time recruiting people. Sometimes we have a hard time keeping them for very long, uh, just because they want to move to a big city. But you know, we've been incredibly lucky to be able to draw new talent to our cause. And you know, we don't have any secret formulas at the Southern Privorty Loss, and we have any patents or copyrights. All we have is talented and passionate people. It's really what's sustained us for forty five years. I guess you sometimes wish business weren't so good, right in terms of the kind of things that you're dealing with. Yeah, we've seen a real explosion of extremism in in recent years, and you know, unfortunately the rhetoric surrounding you know, this year's presidential campaign has amplified it. Brian Goldsmith is here. I know that you all have talked on the phone together and we both talked to Jonathan Weisman. What did you make of the whole Jonathan Weisman Twitter story. Well, it's an example of the fact that at so much on Twitter as like a drive by shooting. You know, they're very, very few barriers to entry to get a Twitter account. You know, it's not no real systems of verification and whatnot, and so that anonymity breeds you know, ugly conduct. Why do you think Twitter doesn't follow its terms its own terms of service on hate speech. Look, we have a lot of experience with the digital industry, and you know, they like to pay lip service to their terms of service. So we're opposed to hate. We don't like misogyny. But the reality is that, you know, it's a pain in the butt for them to enforce those terms. Well, when you've talked to executives at Twitter, or you've you reached out to various social media platforms, I mean, are they embarrassed? What what's their explanation for for not policing it. I think they have no good explanation for it. Sometimes it takes you know, the media to expose them. Uh, you know, we want one time wrote a story about iTunes that caught their attention and led them to pull all of their hate music off their site, which is really important. I commend you know, Tim Cook for doing that. I know that you use the term hate speech or hate music. How do we define what that means? What's protected but offensive speech under the First Amendment, and what crosses the line to a point where the content should be removed? Well, look, none of this, none of the speech that we're talking about, is illegal. But of course these are private companies. They can remove speech that they find offensive if they want to. It's not like the government doing it that would that would amount to censorship. So we're not talking about illegal speech. We're talking about ugly speech, offensive speech that violates the term terms of service of these of these organizations. And typically the kind of speech that we're talking about is that which, you know, vilify someone for their race, their religion, their sexual orientation or not or vilifies entire groups. So again, it's not a question of whether the speech is illegal, because it's not. The question is is it ugly enough to violate the terms of the service of these private organizations. But it sounds like you are making some progress that you are exposing some of this hateful behavior or speech or the use of these platforms to the companies that oversee them or own them. And they've been fairly responsive except for Twitter. Well, you know, Twitter hasn't moved as quickly as some of the others. Most of these, you know, high tech companies are run by liberal minded people, and you know, if you can get their attention, you know you can make progress. You know, we've gone to the Silicon Valley and with people from Google, from Amazon, from from PayPal, and you know, we're making some progress there, but you've got to get on their radar. These are big, giant companies, and uh, you know this is oftentimes not a high priority for them. Tell us about a personal experience you've had where you have been so discouraged or hurt or depressed about language, or a situation that you've witnessed and wanted to wanted to fix, you know, Katie, To be honest with me, sometimes it's a little bit like blood on the operating room floor. Uh. Sometimes I hear so much hate speech that I don't want to say I'm used to it, but I guess what I would say is nothing particularly shocks me at this point, unfortunately. Let me ask you about the role, Richard, of social media in kind of empowering or fueling this kind of hate speech or these kinds of organizations or movements. I know that Stormfront, which is a leading neo Nazi portal, had a hundred and forty thousand registered members in two thousand eight and now it has over three hundred thousand. I mean, what role does social media have and expanding the numbers and the intensity of some of these individuals. I think it has multiple roles First, you know, it makes it easier to find kindred souls. Second, you know, the people you're talking to, most of them share your views, and you know, you you get encouragement, you get validation, and I think that, you know, kind of ramps up the intensity. Some of these people eventually get frustrated, uh and enough talk and act out. Dylan Ruth was an example of that, you know, in his manifesto he said, and someone needs to take action. I guess it's me. And you know, so that was the final step. Who are these people? Do they feel disenfranchised? Alienated? Are they workers who have been sort of laid off? I mean, are there is there a common thread among some of these people in terms of what's binding them together other than just hate and intolerance. Well, you know, I think that most of the people in the white supremacist movement, most of the people who are foot soldiers at least, tend to come from somewhat marginalized backgrounds. They look for reasons, perhaps outside of themselves, to explain their failures, and they glom onto a powerful narrative. You know, you're here, you are You're Dylan Roof, You're an unemployed kid with no future you can you can think about that, or you can suddenly decide that you're a warrior for the white race and you're going to strike a blow for freedom. I think that some of the people who were attracted in this country to the siren song of Isis are in the same position. There's kind of a lack and that they they're they're searching for an identity, uh, and suddenly they're offered one by this seemingly invincible, powerful group that is going to you know, change their lives and give it meaning. You said earlier that you thought extremism has exploded and hate speeches on the rise. Is that just because technology and access to technology is more widely available or do you think that says something deeper about our society and the direction that we're moving in. I think it says something about global trends. Really, Um, what we've seen over the past decade has been you know, the increasing diversity of the United States. We've seen the same thing in Europe, increased immigration, and our country is having has had a backlash to that. You know, President Obama in many ways is the symbol of the country's changing diversity, but he's also been you know, kind of a ferocious target of its backlash. Also, I would say in the past you know, half dozen years, at least past seven or eight years. You know, the dislocations in the economy caused by globalization, the worldwide recession has has pushed people to look for answers and has increased stereotyping. So I think we're looking at some some real global trends, some macro trends, and you know, and those things are exacerbated, you know, by the ease of communications that that exists in the modern world. So you see it happening all over Europe obviously and here in the Iided States. I think possibly exacerbated or probably exacerbated by Donald Trump's candidacy. Have you seen a correlation between his popularity and the amount of hate speech that you're seeing either online or in other forms. Absolutely? Uh. You know. First, you know, usually in the white supremacist world, you know, they don't get involved in politics. It's like a pox on both their homes. Both parties are irredeemably corrupt. Trump, on the other hand, hasn't been embraced by the white supremacist you know, people like David Duke have called him, you know, the glorious leader. So you know we're having that. You know, suddenly he's their champion. Another thing, you know, we did a survey Katie. Uh. You know our schools around the country, teachers around the country. You know, we have a program that provides free educational resources to every school in the nation. We asked the teachers, you know, what impact had the election had in your school. More than half the teachers, two thousand of them responded and talked about you know, Mr Trump talked about how they had been increase in bullying in their classroom and increase in in kind of ugly rhetoric. Uh, kids who were scared, kids who thought they would be deported. One of the things most depressing to me, and this this was depressing, I would say. A teacher wrote us and said, look, you know when people said stuff in the past, my kids in the past said things that were out of line, they were off color. I'd rebuke them and they shut up. Now when they say things. They asked me, Hey, why can't I say that the future president of the United States is saying that? Wow? When you told me sort of the Raison Detra of the Southern Poverty Law Center to make sure the Civil Rights Act the Voting Rights Act were implemented and followed. I couldn't help but wonder, Richard, where we are now compared to back then, Because, as you know, the Voting Rights Act has been old back in certain ways, and it seems like the race relations in this country are as fraught as ever. So when you look back from n to two thousand sixteen at the trajectory of these things, what do you what do you come up with? Well, it's remarkable, frankly, how much progress the country has made since those days. And it's depressing also that we see so often, especially in recent years, to be taking a giant step backwards. Uh. You know, the fight for justice is one that every generation has to wage. Uh. And you know, it's it's it's it's nothing. It's not anything where people of goodwill can rest on their laurels. There are always new battles to fight, and there are always forces that are trying to hold us back. Let me ask you, you gave us some very depressing sort of statistic trends. So what do you do about this? What do you do about the increase in hate speech? Is? How do you counter it? I know that the state department, has a whole Countering Violent Extremism department to try to come up with alternative narratives for people online. But how do you how do you nip this in the bud and look, it takes a full court press, right you have to. It takes, you know, work by people in schools, people in churches, community leaders are political leaders. There's not one magic bullet, you know. For us, again, it's reflected on our organizational motto. We try to expose the people who are who who who have hated their heart. And I think that some of the things I'm talking about our pollyanish. But we're people who have hope and people who believe that, you know, as Dr King said, the moral ark of the universe may be long, but it bends towards justice. That doesn't mean that justice is inevitable. That doesn't mean that it's going to happen without our efforts. But I think, you know, I think you have to have hope in order to continue this kind of struggle. Richard Cohen, thanks so much for talking with us, and thank you for the great work that all of you do with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Thank you, Katie. It's so nice to end such a depressing topic on a positive note, because I do think people are basically good and kind. They're just some bad apples that give us all a bad name. Thanks to the whole team at Your Wolf, including Chris Bannon, Bretta Cone, and the Reverend John Delore for helping to produce our show. Thanks to Mark Phillips for our theme music, and thank you for listening. So maybe you think we're kidding when we say we want you to leave a message and tell us what you think about the show, We're actually not kidding. Katie has me here chained to the old fashion style answering machine, so it would just make my life a lot better if you would call and leave a message at nine to nine two two four four six three seven and let us know what you think about anything you've heard on the show, anything you want us to talk about, questions for Katie, really, anything you want to talk about it all. So give us a call again nine to nine to two four four six three seven, and also please subscribe, rate and review the show. Number one, it helps us to learn what you think, and number two, it helps other listeners find the show. If it helps to make fun of my calves so you can get through the day and it's a tough day. I'll be that for you today. I know you're a good person. And the other thing it does, too is it makes you want to train a little bit harder. So I don't skip leg day even though they think I do. I'm Trayvon Freed. You're now in the room where it's happening, where we get out about the best musical of all time, Hamilton, Hamilton's We'll be talking about the lyrics, the history, the production, and we've got some amazing guests. We have actress Christian Chinnem with comedian Jhon Hodgment. I ran home and I said to my wife and two children, you have to listen to this. Hamilton cast member Jasmine Cyphis Jones. This is amazing. Subscribe right now and you'll never miss an episode. Join us in the room where it's happening, everybody, that's amazing.