Deseret Magazine - October 2021

MAG AZ INE

JIM

GAFFIGAN THE KING OF

CLEAN

THE

OLD GOAT

KEN NIUMATALOLO

WHOSE

WEST IS IT? THE

CONSERVATIVE CASE FOR

ENVIRONMENTALISM

HOW POLITICS BECAME A NEW

AMERICAN

RELIGION

By Shadi Hamid

By Benji Backer

THE

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OCTOBER 2021

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THE VIEW FROM HERE

FINDING COMMON GROUND

BY JESSE HYDE

I

have a friend who feels very strongly about a certain political issue. He posts commentary on it virtually every day on Facebook.

He feels the mainstream media is distorting the truth and that his side isn’t adequately represented. Over time, his posts have become increasingly vitriolic. He’s lost friends who don’t agree with him. Some family members have muted his account. But at least he’s right.

Chances are, we all have a friend like this. Depending on the friend, the issue might be vaccines, or masks, or the evacuation of Afghanistan.

It might be abortion, or voting rights, or whether Joe Biden was actually elected president. Six weeks from now it will be something else.

As Shadi Hamid writes in this month’s issue, politics is becoming a new American religion, pursued with a fevered zeal and rigid absolutism by its most fanatic devotees. “Now that Americans no longer have common religious touchstones or shared understanding of God and family,” Hamid writes, “it makes sense that they would fight their battles over transcendent meaning in the last remaining space where everyone speaks the same language: politics and power.”

The problem is that we’re rarely talking to each other. Chris Bail, a professor at Duke, writes in this month’s issue that data scientists at Facebook have estimated only one-quarter of the content that Republicans post to the social media site is ever seen by Democrats, and vice versa. Twitter is the same: More than three-quarters of the people who retweet a message belong to the same party as the message’s author.

What’s particularly troubling about this? Social media is becoming the go-to news source for most Americans. This allows us to become 8 DESERET MAGAZINE

even more isolated in echo chambers. We believe that our ideas about politics, or the news we care about, is shared by everybody around us.

We’re becoming cultlike in our devotion to certain ideas.

A few years ago, I fell into the trap of arguing about politics on the internet. This was at the height of a very contentious election. I felt like the stakes were high, and that I could use Facebook as a platform for constructive debate. Those who agreed with me cheered me on, but undoubtedly others were embarrassed to see me arguing with kids from my high school I hadn’t seen in 20 years, wives of cousins I’d maybe never met, my little brother’s best friend and an Elvis impersonator my dad had known in high school. Things got so heated with a few relatives I wondered if we’d talk when we saw each other in person.

I never left these exchanges feeling good. In fact, I usually felt terrible, and over time I realized I wasn’t convincing anyone of anything; I was adding to our country’s growing polarization. And so I deleted some social media accounts and stopped arguing about politics on the internet.

There’s nothing wrong with having strong opinions — in fact, our republic depends on an engaged and informed electorate — and there’s certainly nothing wrong with a healthy political debate. I’ve just decided I’d rather have these debates in person, if at all, and that when I see my cousin who likes to argue about gun control, or my dad’s friend who does a mean Elvis impersonation, we can talk about things that we have in common rather than what divides us. Chances are, we won’t talk about politics, and that’s just fine. Maybe we all need to learn how to speak to each other with respect before we’re ready to disagree.

It will get brighter.

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CONTENTS

BEWA RE, BOOMER

22

BY S OFIA J ER EMIAS

TH E EL ECTRIC H IGHWAY

28

BY S OFIA J ER EMIAS

TH E NEW NEW WE ST

30

PUTTING FAMILY FIRST

14

Some parents are rethinking work-life balance amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

BY B E N OÎT MOR ENNE

by bethany mandel

TH E CONSERVAT IV E CASE FOR ENVIRONMENTALISM

ALL THE LONELY MEN

18

American men are facing a silent epidemic: their loneliness.

THE LATINO VOTE

24

The GOP is appealing more and more to conservative Latinos.

by Sonora jha

By mya jaradat

70

BY B E N J I BAC K ER

CAMPUS CULT URE WARS COME TO TV

80

BY NAOMI S C HA EFER R I LEY

WHOSE WEST IS IT? TH E L AST WORD

BY LOIS M. C OL L INS

84

36

America has been obsessed with land ownership since before the states united.

COV E R PH OTO G R A P H Y BY ROBY N VO N SWA N K

by fendi wang

12 DESERET MAGAZINE

BREAK YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PRISM

46

Political tribalism comes from deep inside ourselves. by chris bail

52

Navy head football coach Ken Niumatalolo just keeps on winning. by ethan bauer

42

Jim Gaffigan, America’s funniest dad, on faith, family and balance.

by heather hansman

THE OLD GOAT

THE KING OF CLEAN

L I G H T AT TH E E N D O F TH E TU N N E L

60

For one man, a chance at redemption may lie within Sin City’s storm tunnels.

by Michael J. Mooney

CHURCH AND STATE What happens when Americans bring faith-based fervor to the political realm? by shadi hamid

66

CONTRIBUTORS

CORRECTIONS : In the July/August 2021 issue we reported that Chief Justice John Roberts helped uphold a Louisiana abortion law like one in Texas that he had voted to strike down (“The Man in the Middle”). Rather, the chief justice helped strike down the Louisiana law while upholding the Texas one. And in June, we wrote that the Sandy Hook shooting took place in 2014; it happened in 2012.

Deseret, which was proposed as a state in 1849, spanned from the Sierras in California to the Rockies in Colorado, and from the border of Mexico north to Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming. Informed by our heritage and values, Deseret Magazine covers the people and culture of that territory and its intersection with broader culture.

SONORA JHA

CHRIS BAIL

GORDON HULL

Sonora Jha, Ph.D., is an essayist, novelist and researcher. She is a professor of journalism at Seattle University and is the author of the nonfiction book “How to Raise a Feminist Son” and of the novel “Foreign.” Her op-eds and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Establishment, DAME and in several anthologies. She grew up in Mumbai, India.

Chris Bail is a professor of sociology, public policy and data science at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. He is the author of “Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing.”

His research on political polarization has been featured in The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Gordon Hull is a New York-based artist and creative director in the luxury and lifestyle worlds. He has collaborated with names such as Adidas, Ralph Lauren and Ikea and ad agencies including ACE and Ogilvy. He is a co-founder of the late cult brand Surface to Air. He continues on with a studio art practice that has his work appearing in various galleries in New York City.

SHADI HAMID

BENJI BACKER

RANDY GLASS

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World” and “Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East.” He’s also a founding editor of Wisdom of Crowds, a podcast and newsletter.

Benji Backer is an entrepreneur and environmentalist. He is the president and founder of the American Conservation Coalition. He serves on the Wisconsin Conservative Energy Forum’s Leadership Council and the board of directors for the Mainstream Republicans of Washington. In 2020, Forbes named him to the “30 Under 30” list in the category of energy.

Randy Glass is an illustrator. He attended Ringling College of Art and ArtCenter College of Design. He has created hundreds of the iconic portraits known as “hedcuts” for The Wall Street Journal. Recent clients include Random House, Smithsonian, Rolling Stone, Harvard Business Review and The Los Angeles Times.

He lives in Southern California.

Deseret Magazine (ISSN PP324) is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in July/August and December/January. The Deseret News’ principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Suite 500, Salt Lake City, Utah. Subscriptions are $29 a year. To subscribe visit pages.deseret.com/subscribe. Copyright 2021 Deseret News Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

OCTOBER 2021 13

MODERN FAMILY

PUTTING FAMILY FIRST SOME PARENTS ARE RETHINKING WORK-LIFE BALANCE AMID THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

BY B ETHA N Y MA N DEL

I

t sounds like a plot from a Hollywood sitcom: A new mother decides to leave her lucrative job and, along with her husband and baby, moves in with her immigrant parents who are working to keep the family business afloat. But this isn’t a script. It’s a daring, dramatic life change Erika is currently considering with her husband, thanks to the pandemic.

But, Erika, who lives in Philadelphia, isn’t alone in radically readjusting her life around family due to COVID-19. From work to educational choices, parents around the country are singing a similar tune: “I always wanted to make a big change, but I was scared to try.

When COVID-19 came, I simply had to make certain choices, and it turned out our family is so much happier.”

To be sure, the pandemic hasn’t been easy.

The loss of employment, the loss of plans and of course the loss of health and life. But a silver lining of the prolonged pandemic might just be the way it rapidly reprioritized life choices toward the essentials — especially family.

Rachael and her husband live in St. Louis.

They were balancing work and school when the pandemic hit. But suddenly they were forced into being at home with their infant son around the clock. They bonded in a way they never would have planned. She told me, “While I can’t control much of what’s going on in our country and world right now, I’m finding unexpected meaning in caring full time for my son and for our home.”

14 DESERET MAGAZINE

Rachael put her much-anticipated career plans on hold and, like Erika, was reticent about using her last name for fear it would limit potential job prospects in the future.

The decision to put her career on pause “has given our whole family more flexibility and consistency in our day-to-day life.” Immer-

FIFTY-THREE PERCENT OF MOTHERS SURVEYED SAID COVID-19 HAS MADE THEM MORE LIKELY TO PREFER TO WORK FROM HOME.

sive motherhood — from walking to the park to “stacking blocks midday on the living room floor” — changed Rachael’s outlook, she said.

She realizes not everyone can make such a situation work, and that it’s a reflection of her circumstances that she has the luxury to make certain decisions, but for her the extended period at home due to COVID-19 shifted her mindset and even opened her to the possibility of more children.

Near the very beginning of the pandemic, Matthew Continetti, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in Politico that while “paradigm shift” is among the most overused phrases in journalism when it comes to the pandemic, it really applies. The virus brought about circumstances that shift the way we look at life. New research from an Institute for Family Studies/Wheatley Institution survey found that more than half (53 percent) of mothers said COVID-19 has made them more likely to prefer to work from home either most (34 percent) or half (19 percent) of the time. That’s a 20 percent jump in 15 years since another survey of American mothers was conducted.

This jump could be attributed in part to the ease of working from home in the present time compared to 15 years ago. But anecdotally, it also jibes with the realization on the part of employers and employees about how in-person work can be shifted successfully at least partially to home. A New Jersey mother told me that she was better able to advocate for her desire to work from home after she proved her ability to do so over the course of a year during the pandemic.

And while Erika had hoped life would return to normal by the time she had her baby boy, the pandemic was still going. In the hospital when she gave birth, everyone wore masks; no visitors were allowed. And even though the day care she picked out last December had vaccinated caregivers, the staff remained masked. As ILLUSTR ATION BY CHOI HA ERY UN G

OCTOBER 2021 15

MODERN FAMILY

an experienced s­peech-language pathologist, Erika, 38, was concerned about the developmental and emotional ramifications of her infant son spending all day without seeing faces.

As Vinay Prasad, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, recently pointed out in The Atlantic, “Early childhood is a crucial period when humans develop cultural, language and social skills, including the ability to detect emotion on other people’s faces. Social interactions with friends, parents and caregivers are integral to fostering children’s growth and well-being.”

Erika said her son “wasn’t making eye contact as well and was not as engaged.” They made the very difficult and personal decision to pull him out of day care. This meant Erika would need to stay home, and her husband would have to work more hours. Currently, she’s planning to take some weekend clients as a speech therapist. She’s considering moving in with her parents in New Jersey and throwing their lot in with the family business. It’s not how she would have planned it, but she believes the fallout from COVID-19 will ultimately prove a blessing in disguise, refocusing them on what matters most.

A number of other mothers I spoke with are also rethinking their family’s education plans.

Some have turned to homeschooling. In the September issue of Commentary Magazine, Christine Rosen wrote, “The U.S. Census Bureau reported in March 2021 that the number of homeschooling households had reached 11 percent in September 2020, more than double what it had been just six months earlier.”

Rachel Blackmore, a mother of a blended family of six in Missouri, is one of those COVID-19-inspired homeschool converts.

While Blackmore always wanted to home­ school her older children, the lifestyle seemed intimidating. But when COVID-19 hit she noticed her daughter would still have to wake up early to be on the school’s schedule. She thought, “I’m still going to be responsible for all of this.” So the family decided to piece together a homeschool curriculum. “We’ve become closer, and we have a more trusting relationship than we did before,” Blackmore told me.

16 DESERET MAGAZINE

Becki Johnson, a Latter-day Saint mother of three living in Arkansas, had a similar experience. When COVID-19 forced the family into virtual schooling, Johnson thought, “I could do better.” Her husband took a new job that granted the family flexibility to travel for pleasure, education and to visit family in nearby states. Despite her three children always doing well academically and socially in school prior to the pandemic, they’ve decided the new path is right for them. Instead of driving the kids to and from school every day, and spending the day apart, the family is now at home together. And while it’s “a lot” being

ONE COUPLE MADE THE VERY DIFFICULT AND PERSONAL DECISION TO PULL THEIR SON OUT OF DAY CARE. ERIKA WOULD STAY HOME, AND HER HUSBAND WOULD WORK MORE HOURS.

together all the time, she says, the family is overall happier.

For me, the most surprising pandemic shifts are those who gave up lucrative white-collar jobs. The pandemic made them appreciate that less is more. Raquel was a hardworking lawyer, clocking more than 40 hours a week (she also asked that I not use her last name, worried her comments about scaling back her work commitments could hurt her professionally in an industry often hostile to the idea of putting family first). She planned to go back to work after adjusting to a cross-country move for her husband’s job. But the pandemic allowed her to try a slower pace, working part time as a lawyer and spending more time with her children.

When she worked full time the kids were in

school until 3 p.m. and, on some days, aftercare until 6 p.m. Raquel told me what that meant for their family: “There was a lot of emotional toll on all of us with that many hours apart. ...

There was no time to connect. I’d jump right into dinner and bedtime.”

Once the pandemic subsides, she hopes to work part time while her children are at school, dropping her commitments when it’s time to pick them up at the end of the school day.

Whereas she once had no idea what was going on in school, she can now volunteer to be more involved when COVID-19 restrictions loosen.

Raquel’s positive experience working from home, and the improved work-life balance, is one that a majority of American women increasingly wish to have but not all industries perfectly accommodate; in a recent survey of employers, almost half said their employees weren’t as productive working from home.

Amada, a Catholic mother in Texas, was in her sixth year of study in a history doctorate program with the intention of becoming involved in academia.

While Amada and her husband always prioritized family, COVID-19’s impact on their child care arrangements forced a shift that moved them across the country. She decided to quit pursuing her Ph.D. The result, however, wasn’t entirely negative. “We feel like we’re thriving more than before the pandemic. It came from the realization that we had to firmly commit to family culture.”

She had hoped to balance it all, but ultimately she’s happy with how it turned out. They see the events of this past year as providential.

Amada’s father-in-law died of cancer, but the week before, she and her husband learned they would be welcoming another baby into their family. While expanding their family at the time wasn’t their intention, the happy news was a counterbalance amid the family’s grief.

For the families I spoke with, the lesson of COVID-19 was that while we can’t entirely control our circumstances, we have more control over our life choices than we sometimes realize. The disruption of routine forced many into extended periods of togetherness; and while difficult, it also often became a gift that few wanted to squander.

OCTOBER 2021 17

MODERN FAMILY

ALL THE LONELY MEN AMERICAN MEN ARE FACING A SILENT EPIDEMIC: THEIR LONELINESS

BY SON OR A J HA

E

ver since the publication of my new book on raising boys, I have been receiving messages from men. To my surprise, they write with a yearning for a new kind of masculinity. And almost all of them say they feel alone, sometimes crushingly so.

Sixty-one percent of Americans are measurably lonely, according to a 2019 survey ­using the UCLA Loneliness Scale, the gold standard for decades. A massive study by Brigham Young University, using data from 3.4 million people collected over nearly 35 years, found that individuals who suffered from loneliness or isolation, or even those who simply lived alone, saw their risk of premature death rise by up to 32 percent. One study found that, in terms of damage to your health, loneliness was the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. In her study published in the journal Social Science and Medicine in 2014, Rutgers University sociologist Julie A. Phillips found that male baby boomers in particular were 1.6 times more likely to kill themselves than men in the generation before them. She also found that the generations following the boomers have even higher rates of suicide. While researchers are still working on exact reasons for such a spike, they point to growing alienation as a factor. Add to this the fact that men are socialized into a masculinity that simply does not talk about emotions or mental illness, and you have the perfect storm.

We can turn things around, but it won’t be easy, says Jordan Shapiro, author of “Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist Dad.” Shapiro 18 DESERET MAGAZINE

says that he, too, was raised to be “nonemotionally intimate.” American masculinity, he says, is built on putting down femininity, and some traits like emotional intimacy are associated with girls and women. “Men are emotional and vulnerable, but they learn to avoid it with their male friendships. To men, that would be like being in a boxing ring without any gloves.”

ONE STUDY FOUND THAT, IN TERMS OF DAMAGE TO YOUR HEALTH, LONELINESS WAS THE EQUIVALENT OF SMOKING 15 CIGARETTES A DAY.

Men aren’t allowed to admit to being lonely. “Patriarchal masculinity is so impossible to achieve that admitting to loneliness would mean confronting our shame. Most men are living with that deep, deep, deep denial of how horrible patriarchy makes them feel and how their participation is causing the feelings that they refuse to feel,” he says.

I asked Shapiro if he has close male friends

whom he can call in a moment of emotional overwhelm. He thinks for a moment and realizes, as we speak, that he doesn’t, not really.

He is struck by the sadness of this. “Wow, I suppose I am in the same boat,” he says. He recalls a moment in the week before the launch of his book, when he was overwhelmed with anxiety, because his book was taking on masculine culture. “My anxiety was the equivalent of being in middle school when you stand up to a bully and are afraid of showing up at the playground the next day,” he says. He wanted to talk about this feeling with another man but didn’t know whom to call. “I can’t remember the last time I felt that level of loneliness,” he says.

Where such despair intersects with feminism is that feminism wants to draw men out of the loneliness of a toxic male culture that is doing them harm and is also harming those around them. When alienated and depressed men cannot speak of what ails them and cannot seek help, they lash out. “If you’re trying to be king of the hill, the singular alpha, it’s impossible because there’s always someone who has more power than you — the police, the boss … so you overcompensate in the places where you do have a modicum of power,” Shapiro says. “In the worst cases, it becomes real violence on women or children. It could show up as sexual abuse — the worst sexual offenders are the ones who feel the most inferiority.”

America has seen only too well the violent and public lashing out of male rage. Even in instances where men’s loneliness and alienation ILLUSTR ATION BY HA N N A H DECK ER

OCTOBER 2021 19

MODERN FAMILY

doesn’t lash out, it can often take a hidden toll.

In this past year and a half of the pandemic, in particular, we have heard stories of women’s invisible, emotional labor over and above the burdens of housework and caregiving. Workplaces, sports arenas and other nondomestic spaces are no longer outlets for men. A friend tells me that her husband has been “like a caged animal.” The office was a place where he could interact with co-­ workers. With that outlet gone, “He’s thrashing about at home and I just cannot sponge up all that trauma,” she says.

The concept of the “cage” shows up in many ways when discussing the constraints of traditional masculinity. A global effort called the “Man Box” study, conducted by Unilever in the U.S., U.K. and Mexico, showed that young men ages 18 to 30 felt the pressure to “act tough,” which led them to harm themselves and those around them. These behaviors led to a cost of $20.9 billion that could be saved by the U.S., U.K. and Mexican economies if there were no “Man Box.” What were these behaviors and disorders? Sexual violence, bullying and assault, suicide, traffic accidents, binge-drinking and depression.

In researching my book, I asked Dr. Judy Y. Chu, a researcher at Stanford University, who works on boys’ psychosocial development and is the author of “When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity,” about the hurdles toward mindful masculinity. In her role as chair of the Global Men’s Health Advisory Committee, Chu found that “men who were violent often talk about how they ended up lonely or isolated.” Psychologists who work with these men try to get them to open up about their feelings. They tell them, “Your children will feel better being around you. You will feel better about yourself.’’ Chu says that these men often ask: “Am I the only one suffering this way?” Society sets 20 DESERET MAGAZINE

men up and then makes them feel like they are alone or individually responsible.

Fathers and society in general tend to pass on an initiation into boyhood that gradually dissolves the capacity for emotional presence in relationships and replaces it with detachment, Chu says. “We teach boys to abandon women, and the first woman he must abandon is his mother.” In a longitudinal study that started in Minnesota and included as many as 90,000 kids, researchers found that the single best protector against adolescent risk was if a boy had at least one close, bonding relationship. Without

RESEARCHERS FOUND THAT THE SINGLE BEST PROTECTOR AGAINST ADOLESCENT RISK WAS IF A BOY HAD AT LEAST ONE CLOSE, BONDING RELATIONSHIP.

these close relationships, boys are more prone to loneliness, opiate use and suicide.

So, experts are telling us that men around us will have to bare their pain. But how do men emerge from the shroud of loneliness, the grip of depression and alienation? Where do they go, beyond sports and bars? I asked Gerald Schley, 79. Schley had once invited me to speak to an all-male book club to which he belongs. I asked him if the book club had been a way to build friendships with other men.

“Oh, not the book club,” he says. “You need

to know about my men’s group.” He tells me about a group of 10 men among whom he is the only African American member. “I was a bit wary at first, but I found they were wonderful, progressive men. We go on hikes, visit museums, art galleries, movies, theater and have potluck dinners. We talk about politics, movies, books, family, health, history, aging gracefully, art,” Schley says.

“There was one incident that blew my mind,” he continues. “One of the guys had just lost his wife. There were four of us that had lost wives — we just went around and spoke about the losses we’d had. One person had lost his son to suicide. There’s usually a tendency among men to want to try and fix things, but no one did that. Everyone just listened. Some of us were in tears. It was powerful. You listen to the pain and it has an effect on you, too,” Schley says. “I find that having a group of men to talk to and fellowship with is extremely important.”

America’s men might just be in a moment of reckoning with masculinity, and all of us should be rooting for them to make it more mindful. Men are beginning to talk about loneliness, alienation and their hunger for connection. This cultural conversation finds itself depicted in the wildly successful new television show “Ted Lasso” (20 Emmy nominations this year), which goes to the heart of stereotypical masculine culture — sports — and turns it inside out through its coach-­ hero’s homemade baked goods, hugs, pep talks to his players to be tender and to get, gasp, therapy. Perhaps we are all ready for a new kind of locker room talk, one that sounds like a really good cry.

Sonora Jha is a professor of journalism at Seattle University. She is the author of “How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family.”

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

BEWARE, BOOMER HOW MILLENNIALS AND GEN Z ARE REMAKING AMERICAN POLITICS, AND THE GOP

BY SOFI A J ER EMI AS

A

riel hill-davis likes to jokingly refer to herself as a “geriatric millennial.” She’s a Republican, but as a self-proclaimed “hardcore moderate” she’s been called a RINO (Republican in name only) pretty much since the moment she entered the political sphere in 2008. Through her work with Republican Women for Progress, H ­ ill-Davis, who lives in Washington, D.C., is hoping to reshape the party to appeal to a broader swath of people, including millennial women like herself. “Because I’m a moderate, I’m going to have to fight for space in the Republican Party.” It’s sometimes a lonely fight, but one worth engaging in, because she wants to see her principles of fiscal conservatism engaged on issues from traditionally liberal issues like climate change to criminal justice reform.

Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, became the largest living adult generation in 2019. Their sheer numbers (72.1 million compared to baby boomers who make up 71.6 million of the population) make them a political force to be reckoned with, although youth voter turnout has traditionally been low — according to Brookings, in the 2016 election roughly half of eligible voters under 40 turned out while 70 percent of voters over 55 did. But that is shifting.

Millennial voter turnout nearly doubled between 2014 and 2018, and 2020 saw record numbers of young voters turning out in favor of President Joe Biden. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, millennials and Gen Z will dominate the future electorate by 2036. “Millennials and Generation Z appear to be far more Democratic leaning than their predecessors were at the same age,” the report noted. “Even if today’s youngest generations do grow more conservative as they age, it’s not at all clear they would end up as conservative as older generations are today.”

The next generation of voters is also more racially and ethnically diverse, and more prone to delaying traditions like marriage, according to Kristen Soltis Anderson, a millennial Republican who began researching young voters as a graduate student in the run-up to the 2008 election, when former President Barack Obama managed to capture the support of young people across the nation. Soltis Anderson, 37, said that being conservative was a rarity in her generation: “I found myself fielding this question of ‘Kristin, how can you be Republican? You seem so nice and normal,’ from many of my friends. And that alarmed me.”

She decided to focus her thesis at Johns Hopkins, where she was completing her master’s in government, on why young people weren’t gravitating to the GOP, and eventually wrote a book titled “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up).” Soltis Anderson found that many of the old assumptions about young people becoming more conservative as they aged no longer held true. Instead, millennials have been largely shaped by life experiences, with many entering the job market as the economy crashed in 2008.

One Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2012 found that 82 per22 DESERET MAGAZINE

cent of respondents said finding a job was harder for young adults than it was for their parents’ generation. Many no longer believe their quality of life will be better than their parents’, a realization that has made some question a system that promises if each generation works hard they’ll be able to achieve the American dream. Addressing climate change was an issue that particularly concerned the people Soltis Anderson interviewed, and even the most politically centrist wanted to see the GOP coming up with policies and solutions rather than ignoring the issue.

John Olds, a 22-year-old Republican and one of the founders of Gen Z Grow Our Platform, a nonprofit made up of young people who want the Republican Party to respond to the concerns of their generation, says, “We created an organization that’s aimed at preparing the party to better appeal to young people. But it was done out of frustration.” The recent graduate of George Washington University wants to see Republicans focus on issues that are of importance to him and his peers. He believes there are ways to talk about racial justice, climate change and COVID-19 that are “principled but also appeal to young people.” Part of the disconnect, Olds says, is that the priorities of 70-year-olds and 22-year-olds are very different. Many of his peers are saddled with student debt, trying to figure out how they’ll make a living and support a family, while older politicians have already done all those things. “We shouldn’t tell young conservatives they need to wait their turn; we need to get them in the room and get them working towards building a better party now.”

It was once a given that Americans would gradually shift to conservatism as they aged. But millennials are now reaching their 40s, and there’s no sign it will play out that way for their generation. Soltis Anderson is already seeing the Republican Party changing in response to that reality.

For example, Republican lawmakers proposed planting a trillion trees by 2050 while still maintaining the oil and gas industry. While those aren’t bold measures by progressive standards, talking about carbon capture or boosting nuclear power is a sign that there’s more willingness to engage.

She also pointed to the First Step Act, a bipartisan bill passed during the Trump administration that eased federal prison sentences.

This may be a winning strategy because younger voters’ party allegiances are not yet set in stone, and Soltis Anderson says neither party has done a great job of appealing to this group. “A very slim slice of millennials and Generation Z identify outright as Republicans. But at the same time, there’s not a full-fledged embrace of the Democratic Party. Young people are much more interested in issues than parties,” Soltis Anderson says.

While millennials are more progressive and more accepting of government involvement than past generations, they are also not quite as ­partisan. Layla Zaidane, president of the Millennial Action Project, a nonpartisan organization that works with millennial politicians, says “given all of the ways in which institutions have disappointed and let down millennials and Gen Z, I think we’re more reluctant to identify with even a political ILLUSTR ATION BY MI RKO CRESTA

party.” (Forty-four percent of millennials identify as independents according to one survey.) She sees generational alliances being a far more powerful tool than partisan ones. For example, the organization helped m ­ illennial lawmakers in Kansas form a bipartisan future caucus and created legislation making home ownership more accessible to young people. “We mobilize young elected officials around a very simple idea, which is that the next generation can build a more functional democracy,” Zaidane says.

In the meantime, Republicans like Hill-Davis are trying to pull their party into the future. She laughs that people don’t know what to make of her — she’s conservative but sports blue hair, spends time volunteering for Planned Parenthood and is vehemently pro-choice. “We reject all of the nativism, the racism, the xenophobia. We really see a modernized,

big tent as being a good healthy spot for the Republican Party.” Like many millennials and Gen Z, above all else, she wants elected officials who “want to govern, have tough conversations and figure out how to come up with solutions for the increasingly complex issues that are facing our country.” She doesn’t want to cede that ground to Democrats and feels that conservatism has a place in conversations about climate change.

Rather than focusing on culture wars, Hill-Davis wants a party that embraces fiscal responsibility and small government.

“We’ve been in the trenches for the last five years. We are not going to get a functional Republican Party overnight,” Hill-Davis says. It will take time to create the type of party she wants. It’s a long-term battle, one that she’s not ready to give up on yet.

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE LATINO VOTE MORE LATINOS IN THE U.S. ARE FINDING THE GOP A BETTER MATCH FOR THEIR INCREASINGLY CONSERVATIVE OUTLOOK

BY MYA JA R A DAT

A

nna Paulina luna, a 32-year-old Mexican American who is running for Florida’s 13th Congressional District as a Republican, still remembers the moment she told her mother she’d cast her ballot in 2016 for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Her mother was so upset — and loud — about her feelings that Luna had to hold the phone away from her ear. “She wasn’t having it,” Luna recalls. She adds, with a laugh, that her mom went on to start a Facebook page called “Mothers of daughters who voted for Trump.”

Since Luna’s grandparents came from Mexico to the United States — where Luna’s mother and father were born — the family has voted Democrat, as have a majority of Latinos, historically. But two generations later, the young Luna is making her second attempt to flip one of Florida’s newest blue congressional districts back to red. In her first go-round, she lost to Democratic incumbent and former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist.

Her story points to the intertwined religious and political changes in the Latino community that some say will resonate through American political life for decades to come. Data suggests that the Latino shift away from the Democratic Party is propelled in part by a broader move away from Catholicism. Many Latinos who leave Catholicism turn to evangelicalism, and Latinos are the fastest-growing group of evangelicals in the U.S. And with this realignment of their faith comes a realignment of their political affiliation: Evangelicalism’s emphasis on a personal, unmediated relationship with God — independent of institutions — and individual rather than systemic responsibility closely dovetails with Republican and conservative thinking.

Asked if the GOP might be forced to move toward the center to woo the Hispanic vote, Luna and others — including some Latino evangelical pastors — insist the conservative agenda and the Latino community’s values are already one and the same. What’s new, they argue, is that Latinos are beginning to understand that the Republican Party offers many in their community a natural home.

“Latinos are awakening and they are finally realizing that our values do not align to the Democrats’ platform,” says the Rev. Adianis ­Morales-Robles. An associate pastor at a church in Orlando, she has also served as an engagement coordinator for Latinos for Trump and a faith initiatives liaison for the Republican Party of Florida.

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When she first arrived in Florida from Puerto Rico, she registered as a Democrat. Her decision, she says, was symptomatic of widespread “indoctrination” that tells “us that because we are Hispanics we are Democrats.” As she has knocked on doors across central Florida during various campaigns, she adds, she has heard this idea repeated over and over again by Latino voters.

“But when you learn the platforms and you see the differences in the platforms,” says the Rev. Morales-Robles, “the Republican Party reflects our values and our religious beliefs.” Like most political conservatives, Latinos are particularly concerned with religious liberty, she says, as well as abortion and traditional marriage.

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Though 2020 didn’t reveal a broad Latino swing toward Trump, the

former president did get more support from Latino voters than he got in 2016. And the GOP made modest gains with Latino voters in Florida, Georgia and Texas, while then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden received less Latino support in Ohio than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

Republican candidates’ popularity with evangelicals and a Latino shift toward Protestantism may explain some of the party’s gains with this group. Luna, in some ways, embodies this shift: Though she was born and baptized Catholic, her family attended Calvary Chapel, an evangelical denomination, when she was young. Today Luna and her husband attend a Baptist church.

But the Rev. Morales-Robles says that the affinity for the Republican Party transcends religion and is explained by deeply rooted cultural mores.

Even religiously unaffiliated Latinos are widely opposed to abortion, she says. Data suggests that Latinos are significantly more conservative on abortion than white and Black Americans, with those born in Latin America reporting more opposition to abortion than U.S.-born Hispanics. Hispanics who are Protestant are more opposed to abortion than those who are Catholic. And most Latino millennials believe it should be illegal, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

ILLUSTR ATION BY GORDON HUL L

OCTOBER 2021 25

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

The Rev. Morales-Robles says that religious liberty is important to istered Democrats … 53,000 voters showed up and voted Republican.”

Latino families because they want the right to have their children raised Many of these voters who were registered for one party but voted for with certain faith-based values. the other, he adds, “hadn’t voted for two cycles.”

Both the Rev. Morales-Robles and Luna spoke at the Faith and FreeRocha says that the last election was a “wake-up call” for Democrats dom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in June, where the Latino who have long labeled Latino voters as “a base vote and not a persuadpresence was such that simultaneous translation from English to Spanable vote.” ish was offered. The Rev. Morales-Robles helped recruit the 500 Latino Evangelical Latinos like the Rev. Morales-Robles are part of a mipastors who attended. And there were also speakers and panels that renority that makes a lot of noise but doesn’t really represent the majority volved around issues relevant to the Hispanic community — suggesting of Latino voters, Rocha says, acknowledging that the Democratic Parthat Latino Republicans, particularly those of faith, are indeed a force ty has some work to do if it wants to keep Latino voters. To that end, to be reckoned with. he says, Democrats are already making unprecedented efforts to reach But the Rev. Gabriel Salguero, founder of the National Latino EvanLatino voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election “talking about gelical Coalition, says that Hispanic evangelicals’ march toward the what they’re doing to make their lives better.”

Republican Party isn’t final. Pointing to himself “The president and his super PACs are doing as an example, he explains that a large number of more work earlier than I’ve ever seen any presiLatinos identify as independents. Latino evangelident,” says Rocha. cals, he says, are “the quintessential swing voters,” He adds that the concerns of Latino votpointing out that they represent the convergence ers are not unique. They are a lot like those of of “two realities” in America: that of Latinos, who ­working-class white voters. “Jobs, the economy, tend to vote Democrat, as well as evangelicals, who COVID relief, education — that’s what’s driving HISPANIC lean Republican. folks right now,” he says. “Gas prices, bread prices.

EVANGELICALS’ “George W. Bush won the Hispanic evangelical They’re really concerned about their kids not beMARCH TOWARD THE REPUBLICAN vote both times he ran,” says the Rev. Salguero. ing able to go back to school because working-class PARTY ISN’T “Barack Obama won the Hispanic evangelical vote families have to figure out child care.”

NECESSARILY both times he ran. ... We’re not a monolith.”

Because the Latino demographic is young, FINAL. He also emphasizes that Latinos aren’t single-­ ­Rocha says, with an average age younger than the issue voters. Many — whether Catholic or evanwhite population, Democrats need to step up their gelical — have a pro-life stance that goes beyond game when it comes to communicating with Hisabortion, spanning the cradle to the grave, and that panic youth. includes concerns like poverty, prison reform and If they don’t, young Republicans like Luna affordable housing. might just beat the Democrats to the punch.

“We stand at the nexus of all kinds of social isWhile Luna’s 2020 congressional bid was unsues and immigration and economic issues,” the Rev. Salguero says. “We successful, capturing 47 percent of the vote as opposed to Crist’s 53 think all of these things are priorities.” percent, she’s focusing her outreach this time on young Hispanics like Many Latinos are socially conservative but politically liberal and herself as a strategy. With Crist stepping aside to make a bid to be Florsupport the idea of a social safety net. Those Hispanic voters, he reida’s governor again, Luna’s chances of grabbing the open seat in 2022 marks, might feel alienated by the Republican Party. Still, he says, the seem even better.

Republicans might have an advantage because they have been aggresYoung, tenacious and outspoken, her victory would be a coup remisively pursuing the Hispanic evangelical vote for “decades.” niscent of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who, in New “The Republican Party understood early on that the Hispanic evanYork State, took a congressional seat held by a white man who was a gelical vote is up for grabs,” he says, adding that conservative groups like member of her own party. Anna Paulina Luna, or APL as she’s somethe Faith and Freedom Coalition “didn’t start reaching out yesterday.” times called, would be flipping her district from blue to red.

And Luna, unlike AOC, is unabashedly conservative.

While her mother still hasn’t gotten on the Trump train, Luna says that coming to see her speak at political rallies has been eye-opening for her mom and has helped her broaden her ideas about who is — and who While the Democrats appear to still have a lock on most of the Latino can be — a Republican.

“She came to a few Turning Point events,” says Luna, referring to the vote, political consultant Chuck Rocha — who was a senior campaign grassroots conservative organization, “and saw that there were women adviser to Bernie Sanders — explains that the numbers could be giving and men and Black and white and Hispanics. … And she obviously knew the party a false sense of security. He pointed to Texas as an example: that I wasn’t a white supremacist.”

“You had places like Hidalgo County that shows that they’re all reg­

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THE WEST

THE ELECTRIC HIGHWAY CAN ELECTRIC VEHICLES CATCH ON IN THE WIDE-OPEN WEST?

BY SOFI A J ER EMI AS

W

hen mark nienow bought his 2019 Hyundai Kona Electric it was still difficult to buy a used electric vehicle in rural Montana. So he had it shipped from a dealer in Vermont, setting aside his nerves about spending so much money on a car he’d never seen, let alone driven.

Two years later, Nienow’s put about 12,000 miles on the vehicle, which he mostly uses to drive 100 miles round trip south to Billings for his weekly shopping trip from his home near Roundup, Montana. “For some people, it’s just not going to be a good fit. But for me, it’s perfect,” he says. Perfect with a few caveats.

“Infrastructure is an issue, especially in this part of the country,” Nienow says. A trip to visit Yellowstone (a 212-mile drive) required far more planning than it normally would to ensure he’d have a place to charge. His experience isn’t a singular one and is a perfect example that even if the United States seems primed to experience an electric vehicle renaissance of sorts, the infrastructure out West needs a slingshot to catch up with EV policy and manufacturing.

The signs of a changing private vehicular ownership model are all around. In January, General Motors announced plans to phase out production of gasoline vehicles entirely by 2035.

The state of California announced that by that same year, all new cars and passenger trucks sold in the state must be zero-emission vehicles.

Throughout this year, a host of manufacturers — from legacy brands like Chevrolet to newcomers like Rivian — are releasing new EV models. Even Ford dropped news of its electric F-150 Lightning. In an advertisement for the vehicle Ford boasts, “It’s not just another new EV.” The ad features the truck on desert roads and parked in a wooded forest with a camper hitched to the back. These images seem to imply that this electric vehicle will take you to the remote parts of the West, or that it will be useful on a farm or construction site. But not without electric vehicle chargers placed strategically in those remote 28 DESERET MAGAZINE

locations — which the West does not yet have. A massive bipartisan federal infrastructure bill was passed by the Senate in August, setting aside $7.5 billion to build charging stations. It seems that metaphorically the cart has come before the horse — or more aptly the car has come before the charging station.

With purported cruising ranges of 300 miles, some EVs are getting close to being useful in the rural areas, but perhaps not close enough. “Two hundred miles in Montana is nothing,” Nienow says. “Range anxiety,” or fear that people will not be able to drive and charge their EVs with ease, is particularly acute in regions where getting plain old gasoline can be a concern on remote byways. So what kind of infrastructure is needed?

The Electric Highway Coalition is a partnership of 14 U.S. utilities, established to create a seamless network of rapid electric vehicle charging stations that connect major highway systems stretching across more than a dozen states — from the Atlantic Coast, the Midwest, the Gulf and Central Plains regions.

The West hasn’t seen private utility company partnerships of that magnitude yet — but Nevada, Utah and Colorado partnered in 2017 and signed a memorandum of understanding, which aims to enhance EV adoption, coordinate EV charging station locations and create voluntary minimum standards. Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming later joined as well, with the stated purpose being “improved availability of regional electric vehicle infrastructure (that) will increase access to our highways, promote tourism and recreation in our rural communities, and support our economies.” In the last three years, more than 100 DC fast-charging stations have been built out across the interior West, according to the latest progress report released in 2020.

Currently, Nevada has several projects in the works — including an electric highway on I-80 that would allow travel from Salt Lake City to Tahoe, California. In Utah, Rocky

Mountain Power, Maverik and the Utah Clean Air Partnership completed an electric vehicle corridor on I-15. In Colorado, the state is working to add electric vehicle charging stations along all its major highway corridors, as well as along smaller scenic byways (electric vehicle registrations are high and rapidly growing in the state, making up 6 percent of sales in the first quarter of 2021).

Colorado has also partnered with Rivian, an electric vehicle maker, to build charging stations at every state park. These types of privately owned chargers installed with public subsidies are the most common agreements in the U.S. “We need to make sure that we’re building charging that works for the whole state, not just the urban areas,” Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, says. “We know that recreational travel is very important to folks, and they really want to know that they can get to that state or national park, ski slope or camping area.”

But for now, that’s not possible for EV drivers, although the plans for a more ubiquitous electric highway are slowly materializing. A chunk of funding for electric vehicle infrastructure — about $10 million — came from a settlement from the Volkswagen emissions scandal of 2016, in which a U.S. federal judge ruled that Volkswagen must pay criminal fines for “rigging diesel-powered vehicles to cheat on government emissions tests.” (To date, the company has booked more than $35 billion in fines and settlements.) Colorado’s largest utility is rolling out a program where roughly $100 million will be invested in electric vehicle infrastructure. Additionally, a transportation funding program signed in June 2021 will invest hundreds of millions of dollars. And the $7.5 billion coming from the bipartisan infrastructure bill could help kick-start other Western states that haven’t made as much progress.

“Right now, (electric vehicle charging infrastructure) has to be subsidized by the government or by the utility,” Gil Tal, director of the ILLUSTR ATION BY DAV I D PLUN K ERT

Plug-in Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California, Davis, says. That’s because driving on electricity is extremely cheap (filling up your “tank” can cost somewhere between $6 and $8), and at this point, still pretty rare. It’s not a profitable business. He’s cautious about encouraging states

to invest in infrastructure, because he understands there may be different priorities that need more immediate attention, but “federal investment right now will build a nice push.”

Similarly, Mark Nienow in Montana — despite liking his own electric vehicle — is cautious about encouraging his neighbors to

invest in their own EVs. He had a friend interested in purchasing the F-150 Lightning and was skeptical. “He’s out West, too — thinking that he’d be able to go from New Mexico to Washington or something, and there’s going to be a charge station anywhere he wants to stop. That’s not the case.”

OCTOBER 2021 29

THE WEST

THE NEW NEW WEST A PORTRAIT OF CALDWELL, IDAHO, ONE OF THE FASTEST-GROWING CITIES IN THE AMERICAN WEST

BY B EN OÎ T MOR EN N E

F

rom behind the wheel of her convertible, Anna Peterson points to a cluster of neat and tidy houses surrounded by sagebrush scrubs. “These are all new homes,” she says.

She drives seven miles northeast of Caldwell to Middleton, the small town where she grew up and where her parents are buried.

“This school is brand new,” she says, pointing to a hulking two-story building sitting in the middle of a 60-acre site alongside a softball diamond, a baseball field, a 4,000-seat football stadium and five parking lots with capacity for more than a thousand cars. Peterson, 71, drives away and more modern-looking houses appear on the horizon.

This refrain is echoing all across the Caldwell area, which is situated 28 miles west of Boise, Idaho’s state capital. A city of slightly more than 10,000 people when Peterson was born in 1950, it has since crossed the 60,000 threshold and is projected to reach more than 100,000 residents by 2035. The gravel roads she drove on as a young adult have long been covered in concrete and are now roamed by cars with California plates. School districts compete with real estate developers for land.

Dozens of acres of open fields are being lost to new developments each year.

What’s taken place in Caldwell in many ways reflects broader trends reshaping the region. Western small cities and towns with fewer than 5,000 people saw a 13.3 percent increase in population between 2010 and 2020, the largest growth nationally among small towns, according to data released this year from the U.S. Census Bureau. One of the key takeaways from the new census data: Towns across the West are also becoming increasing-

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ly diverse. In Idaho, the percentage of white people shrank from 89.1 percent to 82.1 percent of the state population, while Idahoans identifying as being two or more races more than tripled to 8.3 percent, according to the 2020 census.

Now many in Caldwell worry that the small-town closeness that for so long defined their way of life could be lost. Peterson mentions predictions shared among locals that the Boise area might one day look like the Los ­Angeles corridor — a sprawl of interconnected suburbs. “If people keep moving in like they are, this is a possibility,” she says.

Skyrocketing housing prices are also a concern, and so is increasingly scarce water in a drier West.

“Are we willing to grow this fast?” says Jan Roeser, a labor economist at the Idaho Department of Labor. “And do we really want to keep up?”

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Caldwell started as a farming community, tucked between the Owyhee and Boise mountain ranges. Confederates fleeing the Union Army during the Civil War settled in the area, digging riverside canals and planting crops along the Boise River. Robert E. ­Strahorn, a railroad builder, selected the site for a portion of a route connecting Wyoming to Oregon, and it soon became the county seat of Canyon County.

This is the world Anna Peterson grew up in.

Her parents married in 1949, and her father cleared sagebrush on the outskirts of town to build a house, a barn and a well and start a dairy farm. From five cows, it expanded to about

100, which Anna and her two sisters took turns milking and feeding before getting on the school bus. It was hard labor but it wasn’t devoid of small joys.

Caldwell and the surrounding area were overwhelmingly white then. When Peterson finished high school in Middleton in 1969, all but a few of the 65 students in her class were white, she says. After graduating, she moved off the farm to Caldwell and got married.

Around this time, the city started experiencing a slow but steady decline. Karcher Mall, a shopping center that opened in 1965 in neighboring Nampa, drew JCPenney and Nafziger’s Men’s Store away from downtown.

The city hollowed out and violence moved in.

In one period of time in 1991, shootings were reported almost every week.

In the summer of 1998, Garret Nancolas, then freshly elected mayor, set up a folding chair and table in the back of his financial adviser’s van and readied for a tour of town to document its troubles.

Sweat dripped off his nose and splashed on the city map rolled out on the table in front of him. As they toured Caldwell, he peered out the side windows and scribbled down notes on the map, marking rundown buildings, streets without sidewalks and empty storefronts.

“Caldwell went through a period of time — almost 30 years — of what I consider to be disinvestment,” Nancolas reflects more than two decades later, now well into his sixth term.

Nancolas and the City Council used a small percentage of property taxes to modernize Caldwell’s sewer system, repair roads, create parks and renovate vacant properties to attract new businesses. This sprucing up culminated in 2018 with the inauguration of Indian Creek PHOTOGR A PHY BY PASCA L SHI RL EY

Caldwe ll Re stau r ants attr ac t patr ons f r om o u ts i d e tow n

c a l i f o r n i a t r a ns p l a n t Ma r i o Lo p e z i s a Rea ltor i n Ca l dw el l

Mayor Garret Nancolas has seen the city ’s transformation

C a l dw e l l sta rt e d a s a fa r mi n g c om mu ni ty i n 1883

OCTOBER 2021 31

Becca Alamilla’s Amano restaurante serves the growing city

Indian Creek Plaza is the center of a revitalized downtown

Like many smal l We ster n tow ns, C aldw ell h as r e ma d e i ts e l f

T h e p o pu l at i o n h a s b a l lo o n e d s i n c e A n n a Peters on wa s b orn

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Plaza, a new pedestrian square downtown.

Named after the stream that runs beside it, the park is now lined with trendy coffee shops and restaurants, and hosts music concerts.

But development extended well beyond downtown’s borders. Caldwell brought water, sewers and electricity to two industrial parks it carved from pastureland. Combined with tax incentives from the county and the state, these efforts persuaded the owners of food processing plants, metal manufacturers and wholesale grocers to break ground, soon covering nearly one million square feet.

Word started getting around that Caldwell was a good place to live.

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Sometime in 2018, Mario Lopez and his wife,

Erika, sat in front of a computer and Googled, “best places to live to raise a family.”

Mario, then 40, had reached a breaking point. His daily routine had him getting up around 3 a.m. to beat traffic from Riverside, where they lived, to Los Angeles, where he did carpentry work. An hourlong drive on the best days, it more often than not turned into a two-hour bumper-to-bumper grind. After he made the drive back, he showered, ate dinner and went to sleep, getting ready to do it again the next day. “I did that for like, probably about 15 years,” he says. “I was like, ‘OK, this is getting old.’”

The city of Meridian, in Boise’s suburbs, kept popping up as No. 1 and No. 2 in various rankings. But when they looked up home listings, the Lopezes found that Caldwell came up as a cheaper alternative, and a trip to the area won them over. “I guess this is not bad, it’s upand-coming,” Mario says the couple thought at the time. In 2018 they sold their house in California and bought one for $229,000. That June, they packed up their two cars and a U-Haul and set out on the 13-hour drive to Idaho.

They are part of a wave of Californians flocking to Idaho. On Facebook groups such as “Moving to Idaho from Southern California,” users inquire about good restaurants and post listings. In 2019, more than half of the net 4,195 taxpayers gained by Canyon County hailed from California, according to the most recent data from the Internal Revenue Service.

Erika fell in love with the place, but it took Mario longer to adjust. He switched careers to become a real estate agent and, while waiting for his Idaho real estate license, took a job as a foreman at a construction company.

When he shared on a job site that he was from California, someone joked that Mario had two strikes against him. The first one was for

being Hispanic. “It was frustrating me to the point where I said, ‘You know what, I’m done with this job,’” he says.

After getting the license, he focused on his new job and less on what troubled him. Mario prowled the city in his black Mazda SUV, hopping from one listing to another. The market was turning red-hot, a trend amplified by the coronavirus pandemic, which sent throngs West now that working remotely was an option. Homes would receive offers within hours. “You go in there, and there are literally about 20, 30 offers already on the house.”

His own home appreciated in value, reaching $370,000 in under two years. So, the Lopezes sold it and recently moved into a larger home they bought for about $400,000. (In August, the median home house price in Canyon County was $400,000, up from $95,000 in 2010, according to Intermountain Multiple Listing Service, a real estate company.) The city was changing around him.

The Caldwell Luxe Reel Theatre, an 11-screen movie theater, opened the month his family arrived in town. He became a regular at Amano, an upscale Mexican restaurant that opened a year later. In the wintertime, the Lopezes put on skates and glide across a ribbon-shaped ice rink set up at Indian Creek Plaza. More importantly, Mario has found a more balanced life, with less work and more family time. Now, whenever he visits family in California, he’s reminded of his past and thinks, “I can’t wait to get back to Idaho,” he says.

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The growth of the Hispanic community pres-

ents business opportunities but also unique challenges. The Caldwell School District, where 60.5 percent of the 5,682 students are Hispanic, only has about 20 bilingual teachers on staff, according to Shalene French, the district’s superintendent.

The Vallivue School District, which covers parts of Caldwell, can’t seem to build schools fast enough to accommodate new students, says Joey Palmer, the district’s director of federal and state programs. That is in part because it’s hard to find land to build new schools; developers have already snatched it up for new subdivisions. And a growing concern is that homeowners are recalcitrant to vote in favor of school bonds, which fund new buildings through tax hikes.

Palmer and I take a tour of Summitvue Middle School, a cavernous two-story building nestled between an industrial park and new housing developments on the outskirts of town. It opened to 746 students for the first

time days before our visit but isn’t completed yet — the lobby still smells of fresh concrete.

A ballot to pass the $65.3 million bond that paid for the building passed by only one vote, but not before a recount, says Palmer, a slender man with slicked-back auburn hair.

“I went from begging for votes and, you know, the whole drama of recounting the votes, to the first day of school, helping kids understand how to open the locker,” he says, his steps echoing in the empty hallways. “It’s just kind of neat how life works out that way.”

Yet so much remains out of the district’s purview. Because of roadwork needed to accommodate a growing number of cars, school buses often fail to make it to school before the bell rings. For a time, some schools were so packed that lunch hour stretched beyond an hour, eating into class time. “Unfortunately there’s no win-win situation in this scenario of growth,” Palmer says.

There is a nuclear option available, however, and that is to stop all new developments.

This year, Caldwell and Melba enacted moratoriums on residential development after the state Legislature capped annual property tax increases municipalities can implement at 8 percent. In Caldwell this has given the city enough time to figure out if new developments will pay for themselves.

But Caldwell might one day have no choice but to impose a new moratorium, Mayor Nancolas says, this time to preserve its water supply. The aquifer Caldwell relies on is abundant, but low rivers and reservoirs mean that it’s not being recharged, he says. And in July, the city’s water system came perilously close to failing to meet demand from its expanding population due to record heat. “If those trends continue, you can’t have growth,” he says.

Back in the convertible, Peterson offers to take me to one of her favorite restaurants among locals. She’s benefited from the development craze — she sold the family farm and its 126 acres for about $1.6 million last year, more than five times what it’d been appraised for. The value of her house has doubled, and the Airbnb she runs keeps bringing new guests scouting for houses or closing deals. But “money isn’t everything,” she says.

She walks briskly to the entrance door of Mr. V’s Family Restaurant, a plain, low building with a red roof, and makes her way to a booth in the back. A hostess wearing a cowboy hat and hoop golden earrings soon comes to our table. “Do you know when this place opened?” Peterson asks. The young woman briefly hesitates. “Nineteen seventy-four,” she says finally. “It’s one of the oldest diners.”

Peterson seems disappointed. “I guess it’s not that old.”

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THE WEST

WHOSE WEST IS IT? IT’S NEVER BEEN ‘NO MAN’S LAND’

BY HEATHER HA N SMA N

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ington Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse blocking agricultural purchases n a wide river bend, just outside of Jensen, Utah, bright by companies affiliated with the Chinese government. fields of green alfalfa break up the buff of the rolling ColoBut other legislators have argued that the bills are racist. Foreign inrado Plateau. vestments are just one indication of how land ownership is changing, The 3,287-acre Escalante Ranch sits just downstream of Dinosaur and how those changes impact the economy and the environment. The National Monument on the Green River — the biggest tributary of other factor — the broader one that encapsulates the international the Colorado River, which brings water to 40 million people. Keep purchases — is that nonlocal, large companies are buying land across moving downriver past the hamlet of Jensen and you’ll run through the country and consolidating ownership of private land. checkerboarded Bureau of Land Management land, where private The reasons foreign investors own Escalante Ranch is the same reason companies are drilling for oil and gas. Eventually, you’ll hit the U ­ intah Bill Gates, who has acquired 269,000 acres of land in 18 states, is now and Ouray Reservation, where members of different bands of Utes the largest private farmland owner in the country. It’s related to the ways were pushed in the 1800s. As of the 2000 census, the population of the tribes have been pushed off their historic territory. reservation was 19,182 people.

It’s why urban rents have skyrocketed, why food This all was once vast swaths of Ute territory. costs are rising and why Salt Lake City home pricThe Escalante Ranch, which has been in operation es are over 30 percent higher than they were just a for more than a century, has prime water rights, year ago. Biggs says he’s frustrated by the racism he’s and in 2011, Chinese investors bought it for about faced for working for a foreign owner. $10 million. Now the owner offers guided hunting Land is a limited, nonrenewable resource — a trips, which ranch manager Frank Biggs says is a AMERICA HAS BEEN fixed asset — and in the U.S. we have it good. part of how he manages the wildlife and ecosysOBSESSED WITH LAND “The first thing to recognize is that the U.S. has a tem. They also grow alfalfa, some of which is exOWNERSHIP SINCE BEFORE THE STATES globally significant supply of farmland,” says David ported back to the growing Chinese dairy industry.

WERE UNITED. Haight, vice president of programs at the American Biggs, who has worked the ranch for 19 years, Farmland Trust, a nonprofit based in Washington, says the operation isn’t much different than when D.C., that looks at land use, access and policy. “If the previous owner, a businessman from Tennesyou look around the planet, about 10 percent of see, was in charge. But he says he gets much more the arable land is in the U.S., and that matters for acrimony, including hate mail, for working for a the food we consume in this country and what we foreign owner. This case at the Escalante Ranch export, as well as how that land is cared for when isn’t a unique one. It’s a glimpse of the tension built it comes to things like climate change and wildlife.” in a generations-long fight over American ground.

Haight says 40 percent of farmland is no longer owned by farmThere’s been a recent surge in foreign investment in American land. ers and is instead owned by nonlocal investors like Gates. And resiBetween 2009 and 2019 the amount of farmland owned by non-U.S. dential real estate is increasingly owned by financial firms like asset entities grew 60 percent, according to data from the U.S. Department manager Blackrock and investment firm Blackstone, which look at of Agriculture. And similar trends are happening across urban and land as a direct investment. The USDA tracks ownership, meaning suburban landscapes, where foreign buyers are investing heavily in agricultural land can serve as a canary in the coal mine for changes in single-­family rental homes. That increase of foreign investment in both use for land across America — because it’s not just agricultural land agricultural land and housing has kicked off a wave of policy to try to that is changing hands. According to a Wall Street Journal report, curb global investments. In July, the U.S. House passed an agriculture appropriations bill that included an amendment introduced by Wash Continued on page 40 36 DESERET MAGAZINE

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Palouse h ills w h eat and lentil f ields at h a rv e st t i me v i ew e d fr om St e p to e Bu t t e i n e a st e r n Wa s hi ngton

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THE WEST

Continued from page 36 corporate investors bought 15 percent of U.S. homes for sale in the first quarter of 2021. That consolidation and outside interest is happening across sectors.

Land is deeply tied to the accumulation of wealth and political power. When, say, a foreign investor buys up a large swath of quality farmland, local or small owners have a hard time buying in. So how did we get here, where land ownership — and the ability to thrive that comes with it — is going to the highest bidder while ecosystems, small towns and historically marginalized groups bear the brunt?

Whose West is it, anyway?

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America has been obsessed with land ownership since before the states were united. As a fledgling country, we basically broke away from the British over land ownership. And in the western U.S. — including the slice of eastern Utah where the Escalante Ranch sits — a combination of colonialism, manifest destiny, desirability and resource economics shaped how land was allocated, and to whom.

After the Revolutionary War, Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1784. Over the next 100 years, the U.S. would claim 1.5 billion acres of Indigenous lands. The federal government began mapping the West and cutting it up into one-mile-square sections — which were used to create a taxable property system, and to establish state boundaries.

The squares were designated as an alternating patchwork of public and private sections, which became a defining feature of the western U.S. In Utah alone there are 116,000 acres of locked-up public land today, and that’s just a fraction of the fragmentation created during expansion.

Across the country, there are currently more than 16 million acres of public lands that are still inaccessible.

In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act. This allowed citizens to claim 160 acres of public domain land if they maintained their claim for five years, codifying the act of manifest destiny. It was implicitly a move to get white Americans to move out across the frontier, but Jedediah Rogers, a senior historian at the Utah Division of State History, says that Utah, because of its rugged, dry terrain and lack of water, was passed over by many homesteaders. Latter-day Saint settlers claimed much of the lush river valleys, but the mountains and desert plateaus were considered too harsh. “It seems really important that much of Utah was not

A stor m is b r ew ing ove r a C a n o l a fi e l d i n t h e Pa lo u s e n e a r Mo s c ow, I d a h o

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or local stores. She says it’s a form of resource extraction. “Financial bennecessarily seen as habitable or was not considered desirable places,” he efits leave, the recirculation of money leaves and the ability of local peosays. “There’s always been a hierarchy of what land is valuable and how ple to make decisions is increasingly limited,” De Master says. “It’s a cycle it serves humans.” of dispossession. We think of colonization as a one-time thing, but it’s an The perceived value of that land changed and grew over time as outdoor ongoing process.” recreation became part of popular culture. For instance, Robert Redford Rippon-Butler says she thinks it’s crucial to keep ownership and bought Sundance in 1969, based on desirability. And all the while, public management local, to value ecosystem services, to make it easier for land was getting sliced off for national parks, forests and monuments, a young people who don’t have a ton of capital to buy land and to give process that started in 1872 when Congress designated Yellowstone. access to communities that have been underserved. She says there are The map solidified and the expansion era stopped in 1976, when two major ways to do that: carrots and sticks. Use incentives to make it the Federal Land Policy and Management Act mandated the permaattractive to keep it in the community, or penalize nonlocal ownership nent federal ownership of public lands that weren’t already claimed through tax codes or prevent it through laws. by individuals or states or designated by the government. It tasked the Haight says the AFT research team looked into six public policy arBureau of Land Management with managing all the land that people eas that were important for equitable land use — from conservation hadn’t wanted — the acres deemed too rugged, dry or inaccessible to easement purchases made by states to land use planning — and found be settled. Because of that, 64 percent of Utah is federal public land (in that the most proactive states were doing a lot with incentive-based the country as a whole, it’s about 28 percent), and another 10 percent is land use planning measures. He says that planning plays a huge part, owned by the state. Less than a quarter is privately owned. and that thinking long term as well as on a broad Land ownership is a limited asset, one that can scale about how land is managed — and how housbe incredibly powerful. Historically the people ing, infrastructure and agriculture fit together — who could own land were the ones with the social is going to be crucial for our nation’s efforts to and financial capital to work within the system, combat climate change and how we resolve water and that’s carried through. Through the middle quality and quantity issues. How land and water of the 20th century, homeownership and land acfit into climate action is a looming question right cumulation grew, and it accelerated in the postnow, but is addressed in President Joe Biden’s proWorld War II era. U.S. urban areas have more than LAND IS A LIMITED, posed 30x30 plan — which would set aside 30 perquadrupled since 1945. And across the country NONRENEWABLE cent of the country’s land and water by 2030 for 2,000 acres are converted every single day.

RESOURCE — A FIXED the sake of conservation. “In the ag community But in 2008, as the recession hit and nearly 10 ASSET — AND IN THE U.S. WE HAVE there is some fear that there could be more regumillion people lost their homes in the subprime IT GOOD. lation, but we see it as an opportunity to protect mortgage crisis, investment groups and wealthy inag land as part of the climate resiliency,” he says. dividuals who could carry the risk moved in. Since To keep land in the hands of people who live then, according to The Land Report magazine, the and work on it, AFT (along with other land use amount of land owned by the 100 largest private groups) is advocating for changes to capital gains landowners has grown to an area larger than the tax policy that would incentivize selling land to state of Florida. individual owners, including qualified beginner “We’re in a massive moment of land transition,” farmers. This would hopefully create a burden for says Holly Rippon-­Butler, who published a report corporate owners and open the door to people who haven’t had access about land use, policy and power in 2020. She says it’s a storm of unto land before. De Master says we can also use land as a form of hischecked commodification and problematic historic patterns. Nationaltorical reparations by supporting land justice efforts movements for ly prime farmland is being consolidated and converted, the average age Native American tribes and for Black and Hispanic farmers who have of farmers and landowners is going up, and young people can’t afford to historically worked the land but have not held title. Other countries, buy in. COVID-19 has pushed people out of already dense places. Remote work means privileged people can buy land wherever they want like New ­Zealand, have started models for that process. And in our and we can’t undo how we rip up land and alter ecosystems. “We have country, whether we’re talking about ranches owned by foreign coma private property commodity relationship with land shored up by polpanies or real estate developed by national corporations, it’s crucial to icy and reinforced by the real estate market,” she says. And when asset think about everything that land is, and can do. appreciation is the underlying value of land use, instead of stewardship Back at Escalante Ranch, the fence line’s sun-bleached planks stretch or production, problematic consequences start to arise. For instance, out, marching toward the buff cliffs of Dinosaur National Monument. the private market never creates an adequate supply of affordable The land on each side of the fence is the same dusty, sagebrush-­dappled housing, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. dirt — nothing to distinguish it as Bureau of Land Management property, Forest Service ground or deeded acreage besides those posts of wood ­Rippon-Butler says that they’ve found that landowners who live on driven into the ground. For far more than 100 years, this land has betheir land can be the most active environmental stewards. longed to someone, and for far more than 100 years it has been fought Additionally, Kathryn De Master, associate professor of agriculture, over with such vitriol. And Frank Biggs, the man at the middle of it all society and environment at the University of California, Berkeley, says now, knows that in America we might have it good — at least for now — absentee landlords might benefit from property ownership, but they but what matters most is that we’re doing good for the future. don’t recirculate their money in the local economy — be it taxes, schools OCTOBER 2021 41

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BY FENDI WANG PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBYN VON SWANK

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or 30 years, Jim Gaffigan has stood onstage before audiences laughing at his jokes as if he were the funny relative at a dinner table.

His humor is clean by stand-up comedy standards and “normie” (of the mainstream). His observations, which have the feel of an introspective child standing in a corner, are delivered with the cutting confidence of a middle-aged man who’s lived a hearty life — because that’s precisely what Gaffigan is. Since 2001, he has released eight comedy albums commenting on pedestrian topics like being overweight and food. One of his most famous riffs is about Hot Pockets. But after becoming a father — five times over — and supporting his wife through treatment for a brain tumor in 2017, his material turned toward parenthood, faith and family in his last five specials. Some comics may have retreated from the industry, but Jim did what comedians do best — find humor in life’s greatest challenges.

During the pandemic, Gaffigan promised to upload a new video to his YouTube channel every day “until the world ends.” In July, he kicked off his latest tour, The Fun Tour, which will take him to 27 cities by the end of this year.

Here’s what he’s learned through it all.

On being a clean comic I grew up in a small Midwestern town where you might curse if you stubbed your toe, but people would think, “Can’t you think of another adjective?” For some comics, it’s stylistically authentic to how they perform — it’d be weird if Chris Rock or Lewis Black didn’t curse. But it’s not like I don’t curse in everyday life, and audiences respond to authenticity. People look at me and think, “He could be from my town. I could hang out with that guy.”

On his relationship with Utah I feel a connection with Utah. I think it’s because we share similar family culture. I find Mormons fascinating — even just their fry sauce, you know? I’ve had people bring me the Book of Mormon like a dozen times. They’re like, “You should be on this team.”

My comedy is kind of self-effacing and the Mormons have a good sense of humor about themselves. I have a ton of material about Utah.

On juggling a career and five children It’s pretty insane. Every three months I evaluate and readjust my schedule to find a balance between being involved in my kids’ lives and maintaining my independence through work and projects. Independence makes you a better parent. I bring my kids on the road with me when it makes sense. Every school break, they’re usually with me doing stand-up. They’ll come with me on bus tours and sometimes to international shows. Before my tour started this year, my family and I were in Hawaii on vacation.

On what his kids think of his comedy We have fun, but I’m their dad, so I’m the bad guy taking the iPad away. I don’t go out of my way to expose them to my comedy; I’m not like, “Sit down and watch my stand-up!” All my kids, ages 8, 10, 12, 15 and 17, probably view me depending on their age. For example, they were all superexcited that I was in the new movie “Luca.” My 15-year-old was impressed because it’s from Pixar, my 17-year-old was impressed because of the storyline and the rest for different reasons. I didn’t grow up with a parent in en44 DESERET MAGAZINE

tertainment, so I don’t know what to compare it to — my dad worked at a small bank — but it’s funny being a parent and a comedian. I was in a parent-teacher conference and the teacher was like, “Your kids are funny,” as if that’s what I would care about. I want them to learn! I’m not caught up in if they’re going to follow the same path as me.

On being in the spotlight I don’t mind if someone approaches me when I’m by myself, but when I’m with my family, it’s a little bit like, “Respect the family.” My older kids might find it annoying, or they’ll make fun of me. My eight-year-old will introduce himself like, “You probably want to meet me, too.” I want to be polite and not rude, but there is no universal approach from fans. I once had someone demand I go over to her friend’s table at dinner and perform for her birthday. I didn’t do that.

On parenthood My general approach is “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m trying my best.” I’ve found this makes parenting feel less overwhelming. When you feel like you know what you’re doing, that’s when you get frustrated, but if you’re like, for example, “I don’t know how to put together this table,” then there is less pressure on you. Another thing — there’s nothing official about parenting! My wife and I are constantly checking in and devising a strategy so we’re not caught off guard. Becoming a parent is also a normalizing force. The entertainment industry can be icky, but when you’re dealing with a baby you don’t have time to obsess on unimportant, self-centered things; you have to make sure this baby is fed. That’s the hidden gem of parenting.

It keeps you grounded.

On the role of religion in his life As a comedian, I never thought I would be religious. I lived across from a Catholic church for 15 years and never went in, then I met a woman in a bodega down the block, got married in that same church and had all our kids baptized there. The most rebellious thing I can do in the entertainment industry is be Catholic. I’m kidding, but the stand-up world is completely agnostic. I was raised Catholic, but never got into it until about 15 years ago. It sounds corny, but I wanted to believe in the notion of mercy, that you could be so imperfect and still embrace faith. If I were writing a joke, I’d blame it all on my wife.

On being a fish-out-of-water comedian All comedians are fish out of water. We’re all in the anti-social social club, whatever that means. As society goes on, we’re just going to discover that all comedians are on the autism spectrum because we’re like this hyperfocused breed. Writers are, too. We find and embrace different points of view.

On finding inspiration Mark Twain called it “the nub” (the point or punchline of a story), and it’s something that bumps into you whether it’s embarrassing, shame-ridden or ridiculous. Sometimes it sits in you, and you have to figure out how to say it, but sometimes it comes right out. I have this notepad on my phone, which we all have, where I’ll jot things down. Here’s a recent one: “They should bundle all streaming services and call it cable TV.” Someone’s probably thought of that before though. The more unique something is to you, the better.

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t is 4:30 p.m. dave kelly has just finished his workday at an advertising firm in early September 2018 and pops a CD into the stereo of his aging car. He is preparing to do battle with a formidable enemy: the New Jersey Turnpike at the beginning of a holiday weekend. When Dave finally reaches the exit for his hometown more than one hour later, he stops to perform a weekly ritual. Each Friday night, Dave checks out half a dozen books from his local library and settles in to read for at least an hour. This week he has chosen a mix of well-thumbed paperback novels, a book about the latest advances in cancer research and a thick tome on human nature by an evolutionary anthropologist.

Though he might not fit the stereotype of Donald Trump supporters, Dave voted for the former real estate magnate in 2016. Raised in a family of moderate Democrats, Dave veered toward the right in the 1980s because he was so impressed by the leadership of Ronald Reagan. But Dave is not a card-carrying member of the Republican Party. He cast two ballots for Bill Clinton in the 1990s and takes liberal positions on most civil rights issues. “I’m perfectly happy with gay marriage,” Dave says. “I don’t understand why you would want to make an issue out of that.” But on economic matters, Dave is more libertarian. When he learned that New York City officials were considering a new law that would require businesses with more than five employees to provide two weeks of paid vacation, Dave warned, “There’s gonna be a lot of companies that fire people to get away from that. There’s gonna be companies that just can’t do it and are gonna go out of business.”

Living outside liberal Philadelphia — and working in a profession dominated by Democrats — Dave normally hides his conservative views. “I have friends I won’t discuss this stuff with,” he says, “because I’m not going to change my mind and they’re not going to change theirs — so what’s the point?” The few times he tried to start such conversations, he explains, things quickly became heated — and the only thing Dave hates more than New Jersey traffic is heated arguments about politics. Because he feels like an unwelcome minority in his day-to-day life, Dave describes social media as a kind of refuge. He originally joined Facebook and Twitter to escape politics and follow updates about his favorite television shows. But he kept finding himself getting “sucked into political discussions.”

Over the past few years, Dave — who does not use his real name on social media — has spent many late nights arguing with Democrats on Twitter. Remembering one of these conflicts, Dave said, “Don’t judge me ... I had a couple of beers.” A local radio station, he explained, had reported a group of white supremacists were planning to march on the campus of a nearby university. “Turns out they’re not,” he says. “The whole thing is a hoax.” After reading more about the story, Dave learned that one of the groups that raised the alarm was the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center. “They pretty much claim anyone who’s to the right of Karl Marx is a hate group,” he says. When he dismissed the incident on Twitter, another user quickly fired back, calling him a racist. “I called her an idiot,” he says. She didn’t know what she was talking about, he decided, because she was only getting one side of the story.

But so is Dave. Though he prides himself on being informed, Dave gets his news from a conservative talk radio station, the right-leaning website Daily Caller and Twitter. Of the several hundred accounts that he follows on Twitter, only New York Times columnist Bret Stephens could be described as centrist. Dave has consumed a steady diet of conservative views on social media for years. Each day, his feed gets filled with content from Fox News, posts by Trump and other prominent Republicans, and dozens of memes bemoaning liberal hypocrisy. Dave has even retweeted a few messages from Russian trolls masquerading as American conserva-

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tives along the way. And that drunken Twitter argument about the white supremacist march at a local university? It turns out that Dave used more colorful language than “idiot” to describe his liberal opponent that night.

You might think you already know what’s going on here: Dave is stuck in

an echo chamber. Social media sites allow people to choose what types of information about politics they want to expose themselves to — or learn what Justin Bieber ate for dinner last night. The problem is that most people seek out information that reinforces their preexisting views. We connect with newspapers, pundits or bloggers who share our worldview.

If you’re a conservative like Dave, you might follow Tucker ­Carlson, the Fox News host, since you appreciate what he has to say about government spending or illegal immigration. And if you’re a progressive liberal, you might follow CNN’s Don Lemon because you appreciate his frequent posts about the issues you care about — racial inequality, perhaps, or climate change.

The problem, the story goes, is that our ability to choose what we want to see traps us inside echo chambers that create a kind of myopia.

The more we are exposed to information from our side, the more we think our system of beliefs is just, rational and truthful. As we get pulled deeper into networks that include only like-minded people, we begin to lose perspective.

We fail to recognize that there are two sides to every story or we begin listening to different stories altogether. Echo chambers have their most pernicious effect, common wisdom suggests, when people like Dave are unaware of them: when people think that they are doing research about an issue, but they are actually just listening to what they want to hear.

When we encounter people from the other side, their views can therefore seem irrational, self-serving or — perhaps most troubling — untrue. If we could only step outside our echo chambers, many people argue, political polarization would plummet.

The concept of the echo chamber existed long before social media did. Political scientist V. O. Key introduced the concept in the 1960s to describe how repeated exposure to a single media source shapes how people vote. The concept gained major traction, however, with the rise of 24/7 cable news stations in more recent decades. Social scientists quickly realized that such stations were allowing Democrats and Republicans to perceive starkly different versions of reality. A popular example of the echo chamber effect is the 2002 U.S. invasion of Iraq. During this period, Fox News repeatedly claimed that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, was collaborating with al-Qaida, the terrorist organization responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. It was later discovered that such claims were false.

But an influential study found that Fox News viewers were two times more likely to believe that such links existed than those who got their news from other sources. If you are a Democrat, don’t pat yourself on the back too quickly. A recent study showed more Democrats are trapped inside echo chambers than Republicans.

Concerns about echo chambers gained added urgency with the rise of the internet and social media. In his influential 2001 book, “Republic.com,” legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that partisan websites and blogs would allow people to avoid opposing views even more efficiently than cable news. The internet activist Eli Pariser pushed this argument even further in his 2012 book “The Filter Bubble.” He argued that algorithms employed by large technology companies made the echo chamber effect even worse. Facebook, Google and other giant corporations exacerbate our built-in tendency to seek information that is aligned with our

THE COMMON WISDOM ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA, ECHO CHAMBERS AND P O L I T I C A L P O L A R I Z AT I O N M AY B E BOTH WRONG AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE.

­ orldview via algorithms that recommend even more of such content to w us. The most dangerous part of these algorithms, Pariser argued, is that social media users are not aware of them. Filter bubbles can preclude the very possibility of bipartisan interaction, Pariser warned, allowing our deeply biased views to go unchallenged.

Meanwhile, social scientists began to uncover substantial evidence of social media echo chambers as well. A 2015 study by data scientists at Facebook estimated only one-quarter of the content that Republicans post on Facebook is ever seen by Democrats, and vice versa. A study of Twitter reached similar conclusions. More than three-quarters of the people who retweet — or share — a message, the study concluded, belong to the same party as the message’s author. These findings were particularly concerning since social media was rapidly becoming one of the most popular ways for Americans to get their news. Between 2016 and 2018, the number of people who got their news from social media surpassed those who learned about current events from print newspapers. By 2018, social media had become the most popular news source for people ages 18 to 29.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a growing chorus of technology leaders, pundits and policymakers now warn of a grim future in which any discussion of politics on social media will quickly devolve into tribalism. We hear calls for social media platforms to break our echo chambers — or at least revise the algorithms that reinforce their walls. And if social media companies won’t relent, then social media users should begin stepping outside of their echo chambers themselves. Only then, many people believe, can we begin the difficult conversations needed to beat back polarization on our platforms.

It’s a compelling story — especially when the people who tell it are those who helped build social media platforms and now regret their actions. But I believe the common wisdom about social media, echo chambers and political polarization may not only be wrong, but also counterproductive.

Common wisdom often becomes unassailable because it is very diffi-

cult to verify. Social scientists have wondered whether echo chambers shape our political beliefs for decades, but studying this process is very challenging. We can analyze people like Dave Kelly — the Trump voter described above — but are his experiences typical? Echo chambers result from the coordinated behavior of millions of people across sprawling social networks that evolve in complex patterns over time.

Even if we had the time and resources to identify thousands of Dave Kellys — and see that people like him develop increasingly partisan views

over time — how could we be sure that people’s echo chambers shape their political beliefs, and not the other way around? If our political beliefs guide how we try to understand the world, would we really give them up so easily? Would Dave Kelly begin to moderate his views if we suddenly began exposing him to social media posts from progressive groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center?

Regardless of what you think about echo chambers, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have produced exciting new opportunities to study them. The social sciences were once considered data poor compared to other fields of study. But some platforms now allow us to collect information about millions of people in seconds. Even more importantly, we can now conduct an epidemiology of ideas, tracing how beliefs about the world spread across large social networks over time. The age of computational social science — the study of human behavior using large digital data sets — also provides new opportunities for experimentation. By embedding randomized controlled trials within social media platforms, computational social scientists have been able to increase voter turnout, organ donation and a host of other positive human behaviors. These types of experiments also hold enormous power to provide insights into social media echo chambers.

But there is also a dark side to computational social science. In 2013, the psychologist Michal Kosinski launched a study to determine whether patterns in social media data — such as information about the things we like or the accounts we follow — could be used to predict our ethnicity, sexual orientation or even our intelligence. Kosinski and his team produced an app that allowed Facebook users to perform a personality test on themselves via the data generated within their accounts. But the now-infamous political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica allegedly created a similar app to collect data for a nonacademic purpose: creating microtargeting campaigns to sway political elections. Though many social scientists question whether such ads were effective, the story highlights a dangerous precedent: The tools of computational social science can be repurposed to violate privacy and potentially manipulate the behavior of people who did not consent to be studied.

Computational social science has another problem too: The digital footprints we leave behind on social media platforms provide a very incomplete record of human behavior. As a thought experiment, let’s put Dave Kelly’s data into the type of app created by Cambridge Analytica.

We could easily conclude that Dave is a Republican by analyzing the news organizations and pundits he likes or follows. A political campaign might even be able to identify which television shows Dave watches and buy commercials to reach people like him. But we would also misunderstand some of the most important things about Dave. Though OCTOBER 2021 49

THE SOCIAL MEDIA PRISM LEAVES MOST OF US WITH PROFOUND MISGIVINGS ABOUT THOSE ON THE OTHER SIDE.

his Twitter feed makes him seem like an angry “Make America Great Again” warrior, the app would not reveal that Dave is actually worried about climate change and disappointed by his party’s treatment of gay people. You’d never know that Dave thinks Trump is a bully or worries about racial discrimination in policing. You would not learn that Dave was skeptical about whether white supremacists were really marching at a nearby university during the incident I described earlier because he believes media organizations are stoking ethnic tensions for financial gain. Most important, you would not learn that this issue is particularly important to Dave because he is part Puerto Rican and suffered terrible discrimination as a child. I mention these details not only to show how many things are left out of the digital record of our lives. On the contrary, I believe the rapidly growing gap between social media and real life is one of the most powerful sources of political polarization in our era.

How did I come to this conclusion? I am a computational social scientist who has spent my entire career studying how social media shapes political polarization. Several years ago, I became so concerned about political tribalism that I founded the Polarization Lab — a team of social scientists, statisticians and computer scientists at Duke University, where I am a professor. Our team diagnoses the problems with our platforms using scientific research and builds new technology to reverse the course.

Together, my colleagues and I have collected hundreds of millions of data points that describe the behavior of thousands of social media users over multiple years. We’ve run new kinds of experiments with automated social media accounts, conducted some of the first studies of how foreign misinformation campaigns influence people and ventured deep inside social media companies to help them fight polarization. We’ve even created our own social media platform for academic research — allowing us to turn on and off different features of platforms to identify better ways of connecting people.

This work has led me to question the conventional wisdom about social media echo chambers, but it has also inspired me to ask much deeper questions. Why does everyone seem so extreme on social media? Why do people like Dave Kelly spend hours arguing with strangers, even when they don’t think it will change anyone’s mind? Is using social media a temporary addiction that we can shake — like smoking — or is it fundamentally reshaping who we are and what we think of each other? No amount of data science wizardry can answer these questions.

Instead, I wanted to see social media through the eyes of the people who use it each day. This is why our lab spent hundreds of hours interviewing people like Dave Kelly and carefully reconstructing their daily lives on- and offline. These stories not only help paint a more complete picture of how political polarization unfolds on social media; they also inspired me and my colleagues to run new types of large-scale experiments in turn.

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Studying social media from the perspective of the people who use it is also important because they are conspicuously absent from public debates about social media and political tribalism. Instead, our current conversation is dominated by a handful of tech entrepreneurs and software engineers who helped build our platforms. These Silicon Valley apostates now claim the technology they created wields unprecedented influence over human psychology — technology that not only traps us within echo chambers, but also influences what we buy, think or even feel. Facebook, Twitter and other platforms were either asleep at the wheel when malicious foreign actors launched campaigns to influence social media users — these apostates claim — or willfully ignored them because they increased user engagement (and therefore their bottom line). This narrative is very seductive for anyone searching for a scapegoat for our current situation, but is it really true? Though social media companies are by no means blameless for our current situation, the evidence that people are simple dupes of political microtargeting, foreign influence campaigns or content recommendation algorithms is surprisingly thin.

Our focus upon Silicon Valley obscures a much more unsettling truth: The root source of political tribalism on social media lies deep inside ourselves. We think of platforms like Facebook and Twitter as places where we can seek information or entertain ourselves for a few minutes. But in an era of growing social isolation, social media platforms have become one of the most important tools we use to understand ourselves — and one another. We are addicted to social media not because it provides us with flashy eye candy or endless distractions, but because it helps us do something we humans are hardwired to do: Present different versions of ourselves, observe what other people think of them and revise our identities accordingly. But instead of a giant mirror that we can use to see our entire society, social media is more like a prism that refracts our identities — leaving us with a distorted understanding of one another, and ourselves. The social media prism fuels status-seeking extremists, mutes moderates who think there is little to be gained by discussing politics on social media and leaves most of us with profound misgivings about those on the other side, and even the scope of polarization itself.

If social media platforms are so deleterious to democracy, why not delete our accounts? After all, I might enjoy using carrier pigeons to communicate my latest musings on Justin Bieber. But deleting our accounts is just not realistic. Social media has become so woven into the fabric of our lives — and particularly those of young people — that it is here to stay. The good news is this: If we social media users are the main source of political polarization, this means we also have the power to push back against it.

Excerpted from “Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing,” by Chris Bail, Princeton University Press.

SEPTEMBER OCTOBER 2021 51

SECTION

52 DESERET MAGAZINE

THE OLD GOAT

COACH KEN NIUMATALOLO HAS KEPT

NAVY FOOTBALL ON COURSE FOR 14 YEARS,

WINNING MORE THAN HIS FAIR SHARE. BUT THE GAME IS CHANGING. HOW LONG WILL

HE KEEP IT UP? BY ETHAN BAUER ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN MELGAR

OCTOBER 2021 53

K

livered by the crew of the Hōkūle‘a, a Polynesian voyaging canoe that stopped here a few years back. Three Coach of the Year awards from the American Athletic Conference. All meticulously organized, just like his clutter-free desk, where every item is aligned with another. “I’m a little OCD,” Ken admits.

He’s relieved to get back to his morning ritual, after the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered Navy’s athletics facilities in 2020. Like everyone else, he and his staff learned to work in isolation, in a strict lockdown that prevented any meaningful bonding. He’d show up for practice at four in the afternoon, “like a Pop Warner coach.” The players weren’t allowed to tackle, at least in preseason practice, or even to block properly, because of potential contact tracing implications. That didn’t bode well for a team that relies on discipline and brotherhood to compete, often against more talented rosters. Navy finished 3-7. Ken doesn’t blame his players, but he doesn’t want them to live through such mediocrity again. As long as he’s here, he believes, he’ll give them a chance. And he’s been here a long time, passing on opportunities at bigger programs.

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en Niumatalolo doesn’t work on Sundays. He never has.

But he makes up for it on a humid Monday morning in August, arriving at R ­ icketts Hall in Annapolis by 3:30 a.m. With graying sideburns and a receding hairline, he steps out of his black Land Rover and lugs a silent burden up three flights of stairs, passing under a full-sized Blue Angel jet strung up from the high ceiling.

Outside his office window, boats dot the Severn River, just above the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Moonlight dances across the water’s light chop, offering a kind of serenity, but Ken doesn’t have time to savor the scene. Not with the opening kickoff hanging over his head. Last season was a letdown for the U.S. Naval Academy football team, after an astonishing 11-2 run in 2019. The head coach has much to do before sunrise if he’s going to right the ship this fall. And he’s going to need help.

He scans a room full of mementos collected over 14 years in a job that’s notoriously hard to hold onto. Nine rings from various bowl games and conference titles — so many, he no longer knows which is which. A kāhili stick adorned with white and red feathers, a Hawaiian royal symbol de-

“WE HAVE ONE RULE: CHOOSE THE RIGHT,” SAYS NAVY COACH KEN NIUMATALOLO. “BE WHERE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE; TREAT PEOPLE WITH RESPECT. IT’S NOTHING EARTH SHATTERING, BUT SIMPLE, COMMON COURTESY IS IMPORTANT.”

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KEN HAS PLENTY TO WORRY ABOUT, STARTING A COMEBACK

SEASON WITH DEVASTATING LOSSES AND UPHEAVAL ON HIS STAFF.

BUT HE ALSO HAS REASON TO BE THANKFUL.

Navy stands on the fringe of today’s college football landscape as a program that exists for the sake of competition itself. Amid an arms race between the sport’s top powers, Navy isn’t sprinting to build a new indoor training center or a multimillion-dollar facility complete with a slide, a bowling alley and miniature golf. The team didn’t even have a nutritionist until 2019. Its athletes must meet the same rigorous academic requirements as other prospective students — the 8 percent admission rate is comparable to an Ivy League school — and commit to five years of military service after graduation. And even offensive linemen have to pass the same military fitness tests, which are not designed for the massive bodies demanded by the modern game. So recruits here tend to be smaller and unheralded. And while the team plays a few high-profile rivals like Notre Dame and Army each year, the Midshipmen are unlikely to compete for a national championship as the sport’s center of gravity grows increasingly inaccessible, shifting toward megaconferences and wealthy boosters who can now pay players for their name, image or likeness, per recent legislation.

Still, Ken has managed to keep Navy competitive. He inherited a program in good shape, but his methods have elevated it to new heights, winning six bowl games and six Commander-in-Chief’s trophies, awarded for outdueling Army and Air Force in their three-way competition.

Relying on the program’s trademark triple option offense, Navy thrives on precision and unity. They’re not the biggest or fastest, but they don’t make mistakes, and they take advantage when the other team does. More importantly, Ken believes, those are lessons his players can carry with them beyond the gridiron. Which is why he believes in his system — why he’s always done things his way.

But first things first. Ken lays a blue towel across the pinkish-orange tile floor of his personal bathroom. At 56, the old quarterback’s knees are starting to go. But Ken is not a man of excuses. He closes the door for solitude, though no one else is likely to come by this early. Stale air freshener fills the room, from cans piled on the toilet tank. He drops to the floor and prays. What he says is between him and God, but he has plenty to worry about — even before starting the season with devastating losses and upheaval on his staff. But he also has reason to be thankful. As Ken reminds himself, winning football games is a good thing, but it isn’t the only thing.

Down the hall, ghosts blanket the walls, in plaques and trophies recall-

ing Navy’s proud football tradition. The school won its lone national title in 1926, but it reached the national championship game in 1964, led by Roger “the Dodger” Staubach. His likeness is immortalized in the Staubach Trophy, a fitting tribute to a man who won the Heisman Trophy before becoming a Hall of Famer and two-time Super Bowl champion with the Dallas Cowboys. His collegiate exploits arguably mark the high point in Navy football history, but the program stayed

strong through much of the 20th century — including a 23-16 victory over Brigham Young University in the first Holiday Bowl.

Those glory days are long gone. What was once an advantage in amateur competition — recruiting in-house from a pool of physically capable future military officers — has become obsolete. Today, the best prospects use college football foremost as a pathway to a lucrative professional contract. Meanwhile, the trend toward conference expansion, exemplified by the Southeastern Conference’s offseason additions of Texas and Oklahoma, concentrates both talent and wealth in a few powerful groups, icing out smaller programs like Navy. Increasingly lucrative television contracts and the fallout of the recent barrage of state-level legislation that has allowed players to accept payment for the use of their name, image and likeness are further removing the college game from its amateur roots. But at a military academy, football is still an extracurricular activity.

The school’s academic standards, Ken says, eliminate half of all potential recruits, while the five-year military commitment halves the half. That leaves just 25 percent of the recruiting pool, and he can’t sell them on perks or campus life. All students wear crisp uniforms — hats included. They make their beds. In addition to their majors, Midshipmen must take military classes, like naval weapons systems or principles of ship performance. They walk the halls knowing that, at any time, they can be quizzed by upperclassmen on which guns are present on certain naval ships. And like other students, football players have to pass the academy’s fitness tests, like running a mile and a half in 10 and a half minutes. After the final game of their senior season, the program puts 270-pound offensive linemen on a rigorous diet and exercise plan to slim down and make the cut, sometimes on the very last day. Ken is straightforward with recruits: This place isn’t for everyone.

He was never in the military himself, though his family was. His grandfather served in the Navy, his uncle in the Marines, his father in the Coast Guard, and his brother in the Army. Ken was born in American Samoa but spent his early years following his father’s job to New York, then to Oregon, and finally to Hawaii. There, his dad retired from the Coast Guard and settled the family in Laie. Ken was five years old. He grew up there, playing every sport he could at the local park, then cooling down at the beach 100 yards away. He eventually played quarterback for the University of Hawaii, watching from the bench as the Rainbow Warriors mounted an upset victory over Ty Detmer and the 1989 BYU Cougars to break a 10-year losing streak to their conference rivals. He stayed on for five seasons as an assistant coach before moving to the Naval Academy in 1995 to coach running backs. Since taking the helm in 2007, he has 101 wins and a winning percentage of 60.1 entering the 2021 season.

Ken has done this by turning the school’s disadvantages into strengths, starting with his offensive system. While most college teams now run pass-heavy offenses that emphasize improvisation, Ken continues Navy’s long tradition, relying on the triple option, which is intentionally different. That makes it hard to prepare for. It empowers its players to react to what the defense does, using the threat of running, pitching, OCTOBER 2021 55

IF TENNIS SOUNDS LIKE LEISURE, THINK AGAIN. “WHEN THE JUICES ARE GOING, KEN’S

THE MOST COMPETITIVE GUY I’VE EVER BEEN AROUND.”

handing off or shoveling the ball to nullify faster athletes and free up more blockers to attack fewer defenders. The system requires consistency and attention to detail; it’s hostile to improvisation, because the slightest misstep in timing will almost always kill the play.

But team is more important than scheme. Ken’s staff of coordinators and assistants spend their days searching their opponents’ game tape to identify weaknesses to exploit or planning new, surprising plays. However, their efforts matter little if the players don’t want to fight for each other — a cliche that played out on the field last season. Ken wasn’t surprised when BYU drubbed Navy at home 55-3 to start the year. And yet this year, he’s confident. He proudly shows off videos he took on his phone of the recent team talent show. They’re back to bonding, he explains, and that bodes well for the long season ahead.

In the corner of his office, in a closet where Ken stores a wardrobe of practice clothing, you’ll probably find a T-shirt bearing a cartoon goat.

Legend says a beloved pet goat died aboard a naval ship in the 1800s.

Rather than bury it, the crew preserved the hide and brought it to a Navy football game shortly thereafter. With the Midshipmen struggling at halftime, one officer donned the goat hide and “romped up and down the sidelines” to fire up the crowd. Navy won, and a mascot was born. Today, “Old Goat” is also a moniker for the longest-serving Naval Academy graduate on active duty. Though not a military man, Ken is the longest-tenured football coach at a program that dates back to 1879 — Navy football’s very own Old Goat. There’s nowhere, he insists, he’d rather be. This job is a constant mission that starts with football and ends, when done right, with something bigger.

ie per day, recently called him out for grabbing a couple of handfuls worth. The whole room laughs. They often laugh about food.

It doesn’t distract from the task before them, though. The season opener against Marshall is only two weeks away, and by 9:30 they’re watching game film. It’s a strange experience to watch game film with football coaches, because they watch the game at a different level than any fan. “That backside ’backer shows it every time,” Ken says. “Double blood, double run support,” an assistant answers. “In one quarter, they’ve shown us their hand,” Ken adds. The coaches are trying to gauge the tendencies of the defense they’re about to face in order to come up with the most informed plan of attack. Once the film concludes, Ken approaches the whiteboard in front of the room and, with a blue Expo marker in his left hand, maps out the five basic defensive looks he believes they’ll see.

They shift to the plays they’ll use to counter. Ken leans back in his chair, arms up over his head. The leather creaks as he lists them off — 10 Bronco and 312 Bravo; 261 Wham and 322 Monkey. Fatigue looms. He’s already worked an eight-hour day and it’s not even noon. “I gotta go get a ­Chipotle update,” he says, walking toward the door. “My brain is starting to fry.”

When the food finally arrives some 20 minutes later, and his secretary tap-tap-taps on the door, the room erupts. “There’s the knock!” someone screams. Ken digs into his bowl of brown rice, chicken, guacamole and salsa. His coaches all thank him for the bounty as they prepare to depart for their position meetings. “There’s a lot of coaches better than me, but I’m No. 1 in food,” Ken jokes. “I’d even take (Alabama coach Nick) Saban down in eating.”

The day officially starts at 8 a.m. with a coaches’ meeting. It’s offensive

Ken lifts the red plastic lid from the slender jar and cracks the metal

tackles coach Danny O’Rourke’s turn to get things started with what Ken calls “Kool-Aid.” Each day, an assistant coach shares something inspiring. The idea is to inject some spirituality into the building — not so much religious as thoughtful. O’Rourke talks at considerable length — with the support of a PowerPoint presentation — about a book called “The Dip.” The basic idea is that when people fail, they come to a point when they must decide whether that failure was avoidable and they should try again, or whether they should quit and focus their energy elsewhere. The parallels to their current challenge are unmistakable; they’ve all chosen to give it another shot.

Ken values loyalty, and many of his assistants return the favor. ­O’Rourke has been at Navy for over 20 years, while running game coordinator Ashley Ingram has been there for 14. When the program fires offensive coordinator Ivin Jasper after Navy’s second loss this season, Ken hires him back with a new title two days later. Their long relationships are revealed by their candor. During the offensive staff meeting beginning at 9 a.m., one coach spoons through his drum of oatmeal and explains that he accidentally seasoned it with cumin. That prompts Ken to mention how his granddaughter, who’s only allowed to eat one cook56 DESERET MAGAZINE

tab beneath it. Pfft, the jar hisses. He removes three tennis balls and secures them in his pocket. “It’s hot,” says Jacob Gregory, a graduate assistant and second lieutenant in the Marine Corps who everyone around here, Ken included, calls JG. He played for Navy just last season as a 234-pound defensive end, but he’s slimmed down now, and he looks the part of a tennis player, with bright red sneakers and hair buzzed at the sides. Before they even begin their usual lunch matchup, his shirt is soaked through with sweat.

Ken tries to play tennis once a day as a physical outlet. When he’s putting in a 15-hour day, he figures, he needs that to stay sane. But if it sounds like leisure, think again. “When you’re on the field, and the juices are going, he’s the most competitive guy I’ve ever been around,” says Joe DuPaix, Navy’s slotbacks coach and a former BYU assistant under Bronco Mendenhall. That apparently also applies to tennis as well as anything else where winning and losing are involved. He usually plays a single set, and he usually wins. The one time JG beat him, Ken forced him to play another set and won.

“Don’t get those going too early,” Ken tells JG after he nails a near-perfect drop shot. As they warm up, students dressed in their all-

he walks down the hall into the offensive staff meeting room for the afternoon assembly. He jokes about running exactly seven plays. “Is that scientific?” he asks rhetorically. “No,” he continues. “It’s just a lucky number.”

His assistants laugh. He seems refreshed. Which is helpful.

Because the day’s most important competition is about to begin.

Ken starts his prepractice routine by walking down a side staircase rath-

er than taking the main stairs or the elevator. It’s out of the way, but he likes the fact that no one is there. “Just to clear my head,” he says. Three floors down, he opens the door onto a balmy afternoon of blue skies, fluffy clouds and sailboats gliding past just a few yards away. Once he passes the black gates that mark the entrance to the practice field, he jogs. There’s no walking allowed between the black gates, he explains — coaches included.

Although he’s a tad slow today. “The tennis took it out of me,” he admits.

He’s the first on the team to arrive, which is how he likes it. He likes to see how everyone comes in. It gives him a good sense of what to expect from the day’s practice. In the meantime he chats with the groundskeeper in Spanish, which he learned on his mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in California. “¿Todo

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white or all-black uniforms shuffle off to class past the faded green fence surrounding the tennis courts. For a while there’s a constant stream of comments, of ooohs and ahhhs for good shots and volleys. Some simply say hello. “Hey coach!” one shouts. “Nice haircut!” Ken replies between serves. “You look handsome!” The young man laughs as Ken raises his racket and delivers a thunderous left-handed serve that thuds against the top of the net. “Come onnn,” he mutters to himself. He’s panting.

He rests his hands on his hips between points. JG’s arms, too, are shiny with sweat. It drips off his nose as Ken catches him leaning. “Great shot!” he tells the coach. “You got me stuck in the mud.”

A break in the action means more stretching. Ken presses his toes against the bottom of the net post. “Gotta keep stretching my Achilles,” he says. “Don’t want an old-man injury.” His wife calls. He promises to call back when the game is over. He hangs up and turns to JG with some advice. “When your wife calls,” he says, “always answer.” “Yessir,” JG says.

After grabbing a quick protein shake from the team weight room and taking a brief shower in his private bathroom, Ken walks across the hall to director of football operations Brian Blick’s office barefoot. As he pulls on his Under Armour socks, he has questions. About recruiting. About balancing toughness with freshness. He ponders how much his players really need to run. He doesn’t want to hurt their legs. Still without shoes,

KEN AND HIS WIFE, BARBARA, HAVE THREE CHILDREN AND FOUR GRANDDAUGHTERS. HE’S NOT YOUR TYPICAL DAD. “MY WIFE IS WAY BETTER AT FIXING OUTLETS AND STUFF LIKE THAT,” HE SAYS.

OCTOBER 2021 57

tice fields. The offense follows up with a fumble. “You guys are about to get beat 500-0!” he warns. When receiver Jayden Umbarger lines up in the wrong spot, Ken’s at it again. “Jayden! JAYDEN! Line up! Get your butt lined up! GOSH DANGIT!” Whatever his momentary misgivings, few take the critiques personally. Ken is a great competitor, defensive ends coach Kevin Downing says. “But he doesn’t allow that to deflect from his real job here, which is to develop young men of character and leadership.”

“I’m a better father from being around him. I’m a better husband from being around him. I’m a better coach from being around him. Because he loves our guys, and our guys know it,” he continues. “So they come out here and give him everything they’ve got.”

You’ll rarely — if ever — find Ken on the field without a visor. Like many visor-wearing coaches, he got into the habit because of former Florida and South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier. “The head ball coach,” Ken says with a reverential smile. “When I started coaching, he was the best.”

So Ken imitated his signature headgear as he worked his way up in the

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bien?” he asks, sounding perfectly fluent. He awaits the team with his hands on his hips, standing near midfield, with the metal goal posts dinging in the wind. A lone seagull caws overhead.

Notice that all the players still have their names taped to the front of their helmets. Any of them will tell you that — for Ken, at least — it’s unnecessary. He’s known them since before he met them. Just ask defensive end Jacob Busic, who first met his future head coach when he arrived for his official visit. “Holy smokes, Big Jake, you’re bigger than I thought,” Ken told him. “He knew my name,” Busic says, “and I’d never even had a conversation with this man.” Ken makes the rounds during stretches, stopping to chat with random players along the way. In the distance, the school band blasts “Anchors Aweigh.”

It’s apparent up close that Navy does not look like most big-time college football teams. They’re visibly smaller. Ken admits he’s had similar thoughts when playing the likes of Notre Dame, among others. “Holy smokes,” he sometimes tells himself, “we have no business being on the field with these guys.” But he’s proved, time and time again, that his team does belong. Sometimes, that requires tough love. Like during the scrimmage, when a blocker goes the wrong way and the play gets blown up. “Gosh DANGIT!” he yells, his voice echoing across the three prac-

FOR KEN, HIS PLAYERS ARE FAMILY. “IT’S IMPORTANT TO BUILD A BROTHERHOOD AND A LOVE-BASED UNIT ANYWHERE,” HE SAYS. “BUT ESPECIALLY IN TEAM SPORTS, WHEN YOU’RE NOT AS BIG OR AS FAST AS OTHER PEOPLE.”

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“THEY WANTED ME TO MAKE SOME CONCESSIONS

WITH THE THINGS THAT I DO, WITH WHO I’M GONNA HIRE,” KEN SAYS. “BUT IF I’M LEAVING THIS JOB, I’M COMING AND DOING IT MY WAY, OR I’M NOT COMING.”

profession. Back when Spurrier was still at South Carolina, they met on a coaches retreat sponsored by Under Armour, which provides uniforms and gear to both the Midshipmen and the Gamecocks. Ken sat behind him on a tour bus and couldn’t resist. He introduced himself, and the two got to chatting. “So,” Spurrier asked in his typically blunt way, in his unique Southern accent, “how long’re ya stayin’ there?” Ken says he told him the truth: He didn’t know. “Lemme offer you some advice,” Spurrier told him.

“Don’t stay in one place too long, because they’ll stop appreciatin’ ya.”

Ken knew this to be true. He’s gone 11-2 at the Naval Academy of all places and still can’t please some fans. Yet, years later, he’s never taken Spurrier’s advice. Why would he? That’s the impression you get talking to him, anyway. The money? “I already make more money than I ever thought I would,” he says. The service academies don’t publish coaches’ compensation, but USA Today reported in November 2020 that Ken’s annual salary was $2.316 million — 60th among Football Bowl Subdivision coaches, and well behind top coaches in Power Five conferences. Ken makes about a quarter of Saban’s compensation as the sport’s top-paid coach. The prestige? “I love coming to work every day,” he says. But what about a different kind of calling — the kind that came from BYU in 2015?

Ken admits he grew up a BYU fan. He wanted to play there, but former coach LaVell Edwards was blunt in telling him the Cougars didn’t have a scholarship for him. Still, Ken’s son played there, and as a ­Latter-day Saint, he admires the program. “I believe in what the school stands for,” he says. “I believe in their mission.” When Bronco ­Mendenhall left BYU for Virginia, Ken was well situated to at least have a chance at the job, because BYU’s head football coach traditionally has been a Latter-day Saint. At the time, there were three such head coaches in the college game: Mendenhall; Kyle Whittingham, who was quite successful (and well-paid) at Utah; and Ken. There were also some coordinators, like Kalani Sitake and Morgan Scalley. Regardless, “The pool was pretty small to pick from,” Ken says.

He doesn’t hide the fact that he was interested. “I was definitely interested in BYU. Definitely very, very interested,” he says. “They’re not a Power Five school, but they’ve got everything.” But he also had a great job at Navy. He liked coming to work every day, and he didn’t take that for granted. “I’ve had some opportunities at Power Five schools,” he says.

“But I’m not just going to jump to jump or go to go. It has to feel right for me. I have to pray about it. And none of them I felt good about.” Given his connection to BYU, the Cougars had something extra going for them.

Ultimately, though, those advantages couldn’t make up enough ground.

“They wanted me to make some concessions, maybe with the things that I do, maybe who I’m gonna hire,” Ken explains. “But I was like, If I’m coming, if I’m leaving this job — because I know how volatile this profession is — either I’m coming and doing it my way, or I’m not coming.”

So, once more, he stayed.

Atop the coffee table Ken sits around with recruits and their parents, a bronze statue of a father and son walking and holding hands rests at

its center. “The Bear Bryant Coach of the Year finalists are pretty cool, too,” Ken says. But those trophies are stashed away on a side table, while the trophy of the father and son is the centerpiece of the room. It faces the door, welcoming visitors and familiar faces alike. It’s the Stallings Award, given annually to “an exceptional humanitarian and coach.” He won it for a variety of reasons, including his service to the Church of Jesus Christ.

That’s on display before practice, when a distressed mother reaches out to him in his capacity as the Annapolis stake president, overseeing multiple congregations in the area. “Hang in there,” he tells her. “You’re a great mother, and you’ve got great sons.”

The interesting part of the award isn’t so much that Ken won it, but that he seems really proud of it. When asked about the Ray ­Lewis-signed ukulele resting nearby, he pivots instead to this particular piece of hardware. Those who know him aren’t surprised. DuPaix recalls that when Navy went to the Liberty Bowl, he noticed Ken step off the team bus and walk across the street. He loves food, but at that moment, he chose to offer his lunch to a person who seemed to need it more. “How many head football coaches, at this level, do you see who really go out of their way to serve other people?” DuPaix says. “I’ve seen one.” That’s not often the image football coaches present to the world, either because they’re distracted with the work or because the game has a hardcore reputation to uphold. “But that’s not real life. Like, real life,” DuPaix continues. “You can have success on the football field and do great things and be super competitive. But you can also treat people the right way.”

That’s the constant tension of coaching at Navy: balancing doing the right thing with winning when it often feels like the two are mutually exclusive. Ken’s goal, year after year, is to have it both ways. To win as much as possible, without forgetting the bigger picture. “When you win, it means everything. But all that euphoria eventually fades. And you were there thinking it was the most important thing in the world, but you realize it’s not really that important. It’s the other stuff,” Ken says. “Who they become as fathers and husbands. And I’ve been here 24 years. I’ve seen them come back. So that’s why I’m sold on it. On this place.”

The longer he stays, the less likely he is to leave. He always picks up the phone when someone wants to talk, he says. He feels like he owes his family that much. But any interested programs will have to make a convincing case to pull him from Annapolis, from the bonds he’s forged over a coaching lifetime. Some might look at his long tenure as a waning opportunity to try to go big, to go for a national title. He doesn’t see it that way. There’s plenty of opportunity, he insists, right here. He isn’t getting left behind by the system; he’s found his niche within it.

At the end of practice, he tells his Midshipmen they need to step it up tomorrow. That they just aren’t where they need to be. But he also doesn’t seem too worried as the whole team drops to the floor for pushups. To win here, remember, requires closeness. Requires bonding. So Ken drops to the floor along with them.

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LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL LIKE HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE, PAUL

VAUTRINOT ONCE LIVED IN THE DARK TUNNELS BELOW

LAS VEGAS. NOW HE’S HELPING

OTHERS CLIMB OUT.

BY MICHAEL J. MOONEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHARD SHARUM

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IN MANY TUNNELS UNDER LAS VEGAS, THE RESIDENTS HAVE BUILT SMALL MAKESHIFT APARTMENTS. (BOTTOM) OBJECTS FOUND IN THE TUNNELS.

Most people visiting Las Vegas don’t know about the tunnels.

Tourists from all over the world stroll up and down the Strip, shopping and eating and gambling until morning is night and night is morning — and they leave never learning about the community of people living in the massive tunnels directly beneath their feet. Plenty of locals have heard of the tunnels, but mentioning it to your server at a restaurant or the porter carrying your luggage still elicits mostly confused looks.

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Because America’s most decadent city was built in a desert prone to occasional downpours and flash floods, Las Vegas has an elaborate maze of tunnels — hundreds of miles in total — to capture and redirect that water. There are entrances to these tunnels all over town, including next to some of the biggest, most popular casino resorts. Tunnels run under or past Caesars Palace, the Rio, the Flamingo and the Orleans.

Some tunnels are only four or five feet tall, but many are cavernous: 15 feet or more from top to bottom. They’re often damp and dank, devoid

AT A TUNNEL NEAR THE FLAMINGO CASINO, LONGTIME RESIDENTS HAVE CARVED OUT AN UNDERGROUND COMMUNITY.

entirely of light for long stretches — a sharp contrast to all the bright signs that glow around the clock aboveground.

For hundreds of people, these tunnels are home. These are America’s forgotten, those left behind in a country with an ever-growing gap between the haves and have nots. Some are transient — temporary ­occupants moving in and out every few weeks. But several tunnels have become small, off-the-map communities. There’s no fresh water, and the only electricity comes from batteries, but people have still managed to piece together meager, ersatz apartments inside the industrial-sized concrete-walled waterways. Some have lived down here for a decade or more. Each occupied tunnel has its own customs and rituals and unofficial leaders.

For those who want help leaving, there is one man who regularly descends into the tunnels. His name is Paul Vautrinot. He knows what the people down here need because the first person he helped out of the tunnels was himself. And even for those who don’t want to leave, or are afraid to leave, to return to a terrestrial plane that was far more traumatic and harrowing than anything they see down here, Vautrinot still helps. He offers food, water, batteries, clean socks, new flashlights. His philosophy on service is simple: He will help those who need it most, and meet them where they are, judgment free. Today help might mean just surviving, but tomorrow, or a day years from now, it may mean climbing out of the darkness.

Every night, roughly 200,000 Americans sleep in public places because they don’t have a home. They crowd into shelters, pitch tents near I-15 in

Salt Lake City, sleep under bridges in towns like Missoula, Montana, or in the doorways of office buildings in Dallas and New York City.

The pandemic has only exacerbated the growing crisis. And yet we’ve come to accept it. It’s easier to look away, to ignore the problem.

In Las Vegas, these people are literally hidden from sight; they’re sleeping under our feet.

Rather than avert his eyes, or forgetting those he left behind, Vautrinot has made a habit of returning to the tunnels every few months.

Vautrinot is 34, with arm and neck tattoos peeking out from his clean polo shirt — ever-present reminders of the changes he’s made in life.

Today he’s the executive director of Shine A Light, a nonprofit outreach program dedicated to helping the people who live in the tunnels.

Shine A Light helps dozens of people every year with housing, drug counseling and job training.

Nearly everyone in the tunnel lives with some sort of addiction, but many have also gathered enough discarded items from above to carve out some semblance of a home. They have beds with bed frames, tables with chairs, coolers and bicycles and barbecue grills — all pulled from curbs or dumpsters. A lot of the beds and bookcases sit on homemade stilts a foot or two off the ground, because when the water comes through, it comes fast and hard, and sometimes it sweeps away everything it touches.

Of course, the tunnels can be dangerous when it’s not raining, too.

There are knives and guns and irrational people down every shaft.

Some sleep burrowed into the smaller concrete pipes that shoot off of the main tunnels. Some residents are hiding from the law. Some are hiding from pimps. Some from their own parents.

But among the regular inhabitants of these same tunnels, there’s also an explicit culture of sharing, a notion that they are often in this situOCTOBER 2021 63

A MAN KNOWN AS VICTORY (BELOW) SWEEPS WATER FROM THE FRONT OF THE TUNNEL WHERE HE LIVES. PAUL VAUTRINOT (BOTTOM) LIVED IN THE TUNNELS FOR THREE YEARS. NOW HE VENTURES BACK TO HELP OTHERS ESCAPE. (RIGHT) OBJECTS FOUND IN THE TUNNELS.

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ation together. Down here, your life might depend on your neighbors.

Not many people know these tunnels better than Vautrinot. If he needs to, he can speed through this labyrinth of connecting flood channels on a bike in pitch darkness.

He knows almost every split, every turn, every camp and community.

“Call me when you’re ready,” he tells people as he hands out supplies.

“We’ll come get you.”

Most people don’t call. Most people are busy getting by down here.

On a sunny day in late spring, a man who goes by the name Victory is using a wide black broom to sweep rancid water and trash out of the tunnel where he lives. He’s the de facto mayor in a set of tunnels near Caesars.

He warns the people in his tunnel not to stray too far from the entrance, because he’s seen people get swept away in the dark-water waves that course through. When you’re far enough in, you can’t hear the rain.

The first sounds are usually the echoes of jumbling barrels and the clatter of random debris loosened by the surging flood. By the time you hear people screaming “Water!” it might already be too late.

“The water gets this high,” he says, lifting his hand to the middle of his abdomen. Enough to drown someone if they don’t wake up in time.

In a tunnel by the Flamingo, a man in his 50s named Philip is smoking a cigarette and sipping a Natural Light. Rays of sunlight coming through a nearby grate illuminate the thin line of twirling smoke from his cigarette. He thinks everyone should experience homelessness at some point. He thinks it would help everyone appreciate the value of clean water and access to electricity. The luxury of a safe bed. What you need to survive in this world.

“It would teach you everything about life,” he says.

Vautrinot lived in the tunnels for three years. His story down here

wasn’t all that unusual. He grew up in Las Vegas. His mother was an addict. He experimented with drugs as a teenager, then at 18, the daughter

of a prominent local businessman offered him opium — and that started his journey with heroin.

A year later, he was living on the streets. He was panhandling at an In-N-Out Burger one day when a group of older guys invited him down to their tunnel. Some of them had lived there for nearly a decade. They had a fire pit, a cooler full of cold beer, a surprising amount of furniture.

They gave him a thin mattress, a bed and a nightstand.

At first, his bed was closest to the entrance — the newest person’s always is — and it was his responsibility to signal back to the others when someone was approaching. (They had a special sound for police.)

He learned that there were codes, mutually agreed upon rules. Break the code and you might come back one day to find your stuff has been set on fire — what constitutes an eviction notice in the tunnels.

After six months, they recruited someone new and Vautrinot moved deep into the tunnel, and settled into his new life. He explored the labyrinthine maze on his bike, made friends, even had a few relationships.

But eventually he started dealing drugs out of his tunnel. He had an elaborate scheme: He’d meet buyers at different grates all over town, take the money through the bars, pass the drugs back in return, then speed back off into the darkness below.

But his dealing drew more people, more attention, and within a few years he’d run off all of the veterans who had taken him in. After three years down here, it all just became too much. The interpersonal drama, the running from police, the dope-sick feeling he’d get when he needed to use. When he got arrested on some outstanding warrants, he decided to enter drug court, get sober and get a regular job — at the car wash above the tunnel where he used to live.

Then Vautrinot started volunteering at Shine A Light. When its founder decided to move to Central America a few years ago, he asked Vautrinot if he’d keep the organization running.

So Vautrinot has seen people come and go, good people, characters he came to appreciate over the years. Some have moved to different cities. Some have been arrested. Some have gotten clean. Some he knows are dead, and some will be back down here soon enough. And yet, no matter how dark and bleak things get, something pulls Vautrinot back underground, to lend a hand wherever he can.

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CHURCH AND STATE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN AMERICANS BRING FAITH-BASED FERVOR TO THE POLITICAL REALM?

BY SHA DI HA MI D

T

including in the public realm. And to fail to do so is to shirk one’s obhe maxim is trite: Power corrupts and absolute power corligations toward God. Faith, or at least their faith, gives them a builtrupts absolutely. But this healthy mistrust of political power unin political advantage. As Shadi Taha, an Egyptian activist and liberal dergirds America’s system of checks and balances. There would be no king parliamentary candidate, once put it to me: “You tell me how you can in the United States to merge church and state — the founders made sure add faith to liberalism and I’ll build you an organization like the Muslim of it. They understood that politics can corrupt religion. In recent years, Brotherhood’s. That’s why religion always beats politics in any match.” however, a different threat looms larger. Religious yearning — when exInterestingly, in Western democracies, this dynamic is almost entirely pressed in politics as a substitute for religion — can deform politics. reversed. Lower levels of religious observance among Democratic ParOver the past 20 years, the U.S., long the redoubt of religiosity ty activists — who are more likely to be atheists, agnostics or “nones” among Western democracies, has experienced the most precipitous compared with their Republican counterparts — means that they must drop in church membership in recorded history. Though mainline find meaning elsewhere. As the recently elected atheist chaplain of Protestantism has taken the biggest hit, few congregations have been Harvard University put it in The New York Times: “We don’t look to a spared. But just because so many have disaffiliated doesn’t mean they god for answers. We are each other’s answers.” have lost the human desire for ultimate and tranIntuitively, if members of one party are less rescendent meaning. ligious and likely to have fewer children, they will If Christianity has become less attractive to have more time for and interest in political activAmericans, then they will find other outlets to diism. And with high levels of education, they will rect their passions — the most popular of which know how to agitate and organize. seems to be politics. But by turning politics into THIS IS ONE OF In an essay published in April, Richard Hanania a place to discover ultimate purpose and commuSECULARIZATION’S argues that this excess of both passion and internion, we have ironically made political power not MANY PARADOXES. est — that might have otherwise been directed to something to be feared, but rather the worthiest of IT HAS MERELY private pursuits but wasn’t — leads to a partisan ends to be pursued with religious zeal.

REDIRECTED THE VERY PASSIONS imbalance. Today, Democrats dominate American This is one of secularization’s many paradoxes. It THAT IT CLAIMS culture so thoroughly that it feels less like a war was has merely redirected the very passions that it claims TO SUBDUE. won and more like a surrender. Mainstream instituto subdue. In societies undergoing secularization, tions and other producers of culture, whether in the such passions in turn create a dangerous imbalance. arts, universities, bureaucracies, media outlets, teleThe result is an ever larger gap between believers and vision stations or film, almost exclusively lean left. nonbelievers, but also among believers themselves.

There is nothing wrong with winning a culture Sometimes this gap can lead to religious conwar. Wars, even cold ones, must reach their own servatives dominating politics, as in the Middle conclusions. What is odd about this state of affairs, however, is that an East. Because such societies remain religious, with large majorities sayascendant left, despite increasingly finding itself in power, continues ing that God is very important in their daily lives, even their so-called to act as if it is the underdog in need of more power and protection. “secularists” are often religiously observant and therefore still derive And so liberals, after having won the culture wars, expanded them some meaning from faith. Family structures largely remain cohesive on new fronts, winning those as well. Corporations are increasingly and vibrant across the ideological spectrum. As a result, politics is less “woke,” as well, even if this is the product of a cynical gambit to use attractive or urgent as an outlet for the innate desire for belonging and the superficial politics of representation to distract from systemic community. Liberals and secularists in such societies simply don’t need economic inequality. politics quite as much.

What results, per Hanania, is a two-party system where one parIslamists, on the other hand, believe that private religious devotion ty “win(s) because they care about politics more.” This increasingly is inseparable from political action. Islam is to be applied in daily life,

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l­ opsided gap raises the existential tenor of politics; liberals cement their hold over cultural institutions and attempt to extend hegemony over public education. Conservatives, meanwhile, assume a defensive crouch.

There is no way to understand the behavior of the Republican Party in recent years without appreciating the perception of cultural siege, which has spurred them to act in increasingly anti-democratic ways.

You don’t need to believe that this cultural siege is real to believe that conservatives believe it is real.

In the process, the political realm becomes theological, at least in one specific sense: It becomes the venue where ultimate judgments are made and where social opprobrium or even punishments are rendered on believers and disbelievers alike.

Now that Americans no longer have common religious touchstones or shared understanding of God and family — let alone even basic biblical literacy — it makes sense that they would fight their battles over transcendent meaning in the last remaining space where everyone speaks the same language: politics and power.

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What might be called “political theology” is not new. That it is in fact quite old and derives from such a dark provenance should give us some cause for worry. Brilliance certainly offers little protection against extremism. Two of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century — Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt — were members of the Nazi Party. Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s lover for many years, tried to explain his Nazism by pointing to “a spiritual playfulness that stems in part from delusions of grandeur and in part from despair.”

Schmitt meanwhile wrote about the political as a kind of divine ­struggle, replacing religion as the domain where “the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or disassociation” is realized. In the religious and moral sphere, there is good and evil. In politics, this is not the relevant distinction, Schmitt posited. The primary distinction, and the only one that matters, is between friend and enemy.

The political is not defined by the inevitability of conflict but by the ever present possibility of it, and thus one must ready oneself for such exceptional circumstances.

In this political realm, “each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.” Where in Matthew 5:44, Jesus says to “love your enemies,” Schmitt’s concept of the political allows him to argue that Jesus said to love your enemies but not to love your political enemies, and he offers the Crusades as an example. The “decisive act” to identify the Saracens as enemies in the political sense effectively sidelines Christ’s counsel in the Sermon on the Mount. Gershom Scholem once called the philosopher Walter Benjamin “a theologian marooned in the realm 68 DESERET MAGAZINE

of the profane.” The same might be said of Schmitt, particularly with biblical readings such as this.

In the Schmittian mindset, we are defined by enmity, and this enmity is transcendent. Identity and belief come not from a loving God but from knowing who or what to hate. And to hate your adversary meant that he was transformed into an enemy, and to have an enemy meant to fight, because your very existence was on the line. And if you had to fight your enemies, it only made sense to win.

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At times, I feel this temptation to dislike, or even hate, building in my own mind and heart. When I do, I immediately grow fearful that I might one day let myself be defined not by what I believe to be true but by what my “enemies” believe to be false.

Because we are broken by sin, and because we are living in history, it is difficult to imagine subduing an otherwise enduring human impulse. The impulse to have and define an enemy will remain with us as, in some sense, a testament to human deficiency. As Kevin Rozario, author of “The Culture of Calamity,” has said in The New York Times: “We know we’re in the presence of history when things are blowing up.

There’s an intensification of emotions when you’re living in historical times, as if it’s more real.”

Some societies have successfully desacralized politics, although it is unclear whether these cases can be replicated elsewhere. The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood points to Japan as an appealing alternative of lower-stakes competition. Countries that have experienced fascist rule, military defeat or both, are more likely to accept a “normal” politics, Wood suggests.

Since neither are particularly likely in the near term on our own shores, thankfully, Americans will have to look elsewhere for inspiration.

At the same time, there is a danger in seeing excessive conviction as a character flaw. If America is a nation of believers — but one where citizens no longer agree on what exactly to believe — then this can be a source of strength and vitality.

The solution isn’t to dispense with conviction. And it certainly isn’t to tell people to hide from public view what they believe strongly in private. To ask someone to hide who they are in the name of a greater good is to ask the impossible.

We may be able to suppress our deepest commitments for a time, but not indefinitely.

And even if we could, it is not clear that this would even work. After all, ideological polarization has risen at a time when a growing number of Americans say, according to one survey, that they are not comfortable “saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”

This suggests something counterintuitive: It is not so much that there is too much belief in our politics but rather that we feel threatened either by other people’s beliefs or by what they might think if they come to

know our own. To frame the problem this way is to shift the conversation from a problem of conviction in politics to a problem of how to manage conviction.

Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe puts it, “All forms of consensus are by necessity based on acts of exclusion.”

In theory, we could rid the public square of “objectionable” ideas, but we do not agree on what is objectionable in the first place. To arbitrate what is acceptable and unacceptable requires an arbitrator — which returns us to the problem of state power and coercion. The alternative is Not all problems have solutions, and to think that they might may to expand the range of convictions and commitments that can be expressed in cultural and political life, without fear of retaliation. itself be the bigger issue. Resolutions to the fact of deep difference are It is helpful, here, to distinguish between “unsettled” and “settled” necessarily coercive, because they view difference as something in need issues. The latter category is made up of a small set of issues that don’t of intervention, either from individuals or the state. In this sense, resistneed to be relitigated and are effectively settled for debate, with a broad ing theological politics is a question of both public attitudes and public and near total consensus position forming over time. Whether slavery institutions. On the institutional level, American life has continued to was good is an obvious example. These are mostly trend toward centralization. This is one of those uncontroversial. However, if a significant slice of issues that by now seems both self-­evident and the population objects to the notion that an issue intractable. Debates that should be local — say is settled, then it isn’t settled yet, and it’s up to citiaround COVID-19 transmission rates and what zens to convince more of their countrymen of their precautions one should take — are primarily IF AMERICA IS A NATION OF position. Because very few of our most charged deunderstood through a national lens. This might BELIEVERS — BUT bates are likely to be settled anytime soon, it means work fine in countries with five or 10 million ONE WHERE CITIZENS that political debate can — and should — stay as people, where everything is in effect local. But it NO LONGER AGREE unfettered as possible. makes little sense for a country as large and unON WHAT EXACTLY TO In practice, for liberals, this would mean that the wieldy as the U.S. BELIEVE — THEN THIS CAN BE A SOURCE 74 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump A growing chorus of writers and analysts, such OF STRENGTH AND might be wrong or misguided, but they are not beas Yuval Levin, Patrick Deneen and John Inazu, VITALITY. yond the pale and they are not any less American. Perhave suggested localism or subsidiarity as the way haps more controversially, conservatives who oppose forward. The intuition here is clear enough. If we, gay marriage, as many still do, are not akin to thought as Americans, no longer agree on what it means criminals. While gay marriage may be settled by law, it to be American, then let us pursue our divergent is still something on which reasonable people of good conceptions of the good in our own way, on our faith can disagree. Orthodox believers of Christianity, Islam and Judaism own terms and in our own parts of the country. But it is unclear how will, as an article of faith, submit to what they hold as God’s teachings reexactly this vision comports with the dominance of an educated elite gardless of what secular notions of justice and equality demand. There are that appears increasingly comfortable with the use of state — and corobvious corollaries for conservatives. Liberals who support abortion are porate — power to promote progressive ideas. Moreover, for many, the their fellow Americans. Abortion is perhaps the epitome of an “unsettled” state appears to be more compelling when dealing with pandemics and issue in American public life. And it is unsettled for a reason — because climate change — issues that appear to demand collective action. fundamentally different conceptions of “the good” have existed and will For now, institutional change on a massive, sweeping scale is unlikely. continue to exist without a definitive resolution.

In this sense, the very thing that could address the crisis of polarization There is a certain freedom in letting go of the need to win an argu— reducing the centrality of the state, and therefore politics, in our ment or claim victory over one’s opponents. Our fellow citizens do not lives — is made more unlikely by that very polarization. need to be converted, and the world does not need to be made anew.

A more realistic place to start, then, is with ourselves — our comThis, I believe, is a better way to live, even as I admit that it is not so munities, workplaces and local governments. It is one thing to think easy to hold one’s tongue (or tweets) when matters get contentious. But that living with deep difference is a good idea. But for the idea and we can at least start by resisting that very human urge to make enemies the aspiration to have any import, the suspension of judgment needs of those who might otherwise become our friends. to be modeled and practiced in everyday life. This is quite different than professing the need for “civility” or seeking “consensus.” These are nice-sounding things to be sure, but their flaw is that they effectively Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a contributing narrow the range of ideas expressed in public life. Consensus is only writer at The Atlantic and the author of “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the possible when there is already a consensus, and there rarely is. As the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.”

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THE CONSERVATIVE CASE FOR ENVIRONMENTALISM THE SOLUTIONS DON’T NEED TO BE BIG-GOVERNMENT AND IMPOSING IN EVERY WAY

BY B EN J I B ACKER

C

radled beneath the Book Cliffs mountains is a mineral-­ dense expanse known as Utah’s coal country. The region, encompassing Emery and Carbon counties, is home to three of the state’s remaining coal power plants. It’s a place few environmentalists have dared tread.

But as an environmentalist myself, I recently traveled to Utah’s coal country not to finger wag or lecture about greenhouse gases; no, I went there to better understand the lives and communities that depend on coal. And what I rediscovered in the process was a pressing need for conservative environmentalism.

I agree with Ronald Reagan: “What is a conservative after all, but one who conserves, one who is committed to protecting and holding close the things by which we live.” And on a practical level, if Republicans cede questions about conservation and earth stewardship; about air quality and water; about public lands and sustainability, then it will be largely Democrats who dominate the discussion. Folks in places like Emery and Carbon counties, who desperately want to be part of the solution, will be left out.

When I spoke with Michael Kourianos, the mayor of Price, he notes that I was one of only a few national environmentalists to take the time to visit. The mayor says how willing and open his citizens are to working on environmentally focused projects. The problem, he believes, is that very few groups or politicians who are aiming to shut down the city’s largest economic driver ever want to talk.

The people in the region, he says, want to utilize their knowledge and expertise in innovative ways to aid a transition away from coal. They know that their knowledge could be useful in a world where countries like China continue to increase coal production and there’s still a need for them to minimize emissions. To the mayor’s point, it does seem like no one even wants to listen to them.

The San Rafael Energy Research Center is just one example. While the energy research center has gained little notoriety beyond Utah, the group has coal plant workers shifting their focus toward finding innovative ways to use coal with few or no emissions. They’re testing, for example, how coal might be used for nuclear power or a low-­ emitting gas. This is happening across the state, where some coal plants are going as far as shifting to 100 percent green hydrogen over the coming decades.

Yet, these communities continue to be vilified and silenced because many environmentalists refuse to consider these communities as part of the climate conversation. Hundreds of counties like Emery 70 DESERET MAGAZINE

and Carbon are being left behind across the country, all because too many environmentalists have an ignorance of people they’ve never met, places they’ve never visited and cultures they haven’t tried to understand.

The solution is for conservatives to become more involved in discussions about how to solve pressing environmental issues in the West and beyond. Everyone wants clean air and fewer emissions; the debate should center on the optimal avenues to get there. Conservatives can do just that — and accurately represent these left-behind communities in the process.

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The right side of the political ledger is ultimately the most compati-

ble home for positive environmental results. Conservatism, after all, is about conserving. From Teddy Roosevelt doubling the number of sites within the National Park system, Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Air and Water acts, and the Endangered Species Act, and George H.W. Bush setting aside more public lands than any other president in recent history, the conservative environmental legacy is substantial. As presidential historian Craig Shirley has pointed out, it was Ronald Reagan who signed more “federal wilderness bills into law than any other president since the Wilderness Act was enacted in 1964.”

But it’s not just conservative government actors who advance environmental causes. Competition within the car industry to create lighter vehicles with more fuel-efficient engines has contributed to fewer emissions. This has spurred an electric car race that has General Motors planning to eliminate internal combustion engines from its new vehicles by 2035 — a highly ambitious goal driven more by market forces than government action. This is one of many examples of how free enterprise and ingenuity (inherently conservative principles) have provided us with immense environmental progress.

There are strong signs that conservative elected officials are retaking their seat at the table, too. Take Utah House conservatives in Congress, for example. John Curtis — who graciously toured me around his district’s energy facilities — has been one of the most forward-thinking leaders on this issue. He recently launched the Conservative Climate Caucus and about one-third of the GOP House delegation is participating already. Newly elected Blake Moore has already been at the forefront of commonsense forest management policies and is a ­member of ILLUSTR ATION BY CRA I G F RA ZI ER

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are some of the most passionate people I’ve met in discussing their love for the environment. They live and breathe immense environmental beauty surrounding them — like the San Rafael Swell. In the purest intention of the word, these people are true “environmentalists.” They care for their planet and specifically the nature in their backyards, but they also want to be able to feed their families and not be vilified for working in an industry where they’ve unintentionally had a negative environmental impact. They don’t just want to be part of the solution, they want to help lead it.

We need more conservative people, like many in Carbon and Emery counties, to join the conversation. If not, the millions of people in conservative America will lose their seat at the table to a few select cities — and specifically to the federal government. To make matters worse, the policies that will come from that — like the Green New Deal — will harm the communities that really do care about the environment most.

PHOTOG RAPHY BY WESTON COLTON

the ­Conservative Climate Caucus. Burgess Owens and Chris ­Stewart are also members of the caucus.

After all, conservatives often live in the areas most impacted by climate change or environmental policies coming from Washington — as farmers, ranchers, energy producers, foresters and outdoors enthusiasts. We care deeply about the environment, but we’ve been tired of the politicization of environmentalism. The conversation has seemingly shifted from relatable, tangible environmental issues to a global conversation with solutions that come across as big government and imposing in every way.

John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s “climate czar,” is an example of what’s wrong with this approach. Most people like Kerry (the owner of his own, oft-used private plane) don’t take the time to visit traditional energy facilities, talk with relevant workers or realize how much they rely on these communities in their personal lives.

Despite the frustrations, the people of Carbon and Emery counties

S avage C o a l T e r mi n a l i n W e l l i n gto n, U Ta h

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P r ic e R iver Ter m inal C ru d e O i l T r a ns lo a d Fac i l i t y I n W e l l i n gto n, U ta h

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Threats to the environment are real — we are facing a dramatic in-

crease in global carbon emissions, our air quality impacted by wildfires is making the West less hospitable, and droughts are causing immense water scarcity concerns. As we’ve seen these and many other issues come to fruition over the past few decades, we’ve learned a lot about the causes. One of the elephants in the room is the reality that carbon production has contributed in a negative way to a few of our globe’s severe environmental concerns.

But instead of vilifying vulnerable communities that had no idea that their production of affordable, abundant energy would be contributing to environmental problems, we should be utilizing their talents, background and brainpower to come up with next-generation solutions. After all, to solve complicated environmental problems, we need a diverse set of solutions and knowledgeable voices.

That’s where the needed growing environmental movement of conservatives comes into play.

First, conservatives need to put the “environment” back into “environmentalism.” We should be the movement that focuses on measuring ­success by what actually works, not what sounds best in a 10-second divisive sound bite. Second, we need to connect and instill an authentic love for our local environment. Humans care about their own backyard more than anything — and know the most about it. As such, environmental solutions should come from locals. To do this, we can humanize the environmental conversation by understanding where people are coming from 74 DESERET MAGAZINE

— in all geographical areas, ethnic backgrounds and political viewpoints.

Third, we need to be the environmental movement of hope — instead of despair. Solving environmental challenges will herald from local conservation projects, exciting new technologies, job creation and an overall improvement of society. That is the conservative way: seeking innovation and solutions to tough problems rather than propagating a narrative of despair, doom and futility in a bid to shame voters into certain pro-environment policies. Lastly, we should be the movement of putting American interests first. The United States has the most impressive environmental track record of any nation over the past few decades. We have been able to create the most innovative solutions, consistently increase the protection of our environment and lead the world in environmental progress.

The more America succeeds, the more the environment does, too.

Most environmentalists have looked at the likes of Carbon and Emery counties as the enemy. That must not happen. But to change it we need a robust conservative environmental movement. I’m a conservative who is a passionate environmentalist. Knowing the two were often at odds in our national political landscape, I founded a nonprofit organization, the American Conservation Coalition, with my peers in 2017. In late 2019, I testified before Congress with the world-renowned climate activist Greta Thunberg as the conservative alternative, which was our organization’s first opportunity to show the world what conservative environmentalism looked like. I’ve seen glimmers of hope that conservatives can retake the environmental conversation that we once led. We are the party that lives amid nature, and it’s time we take back the narrative that we are the ones who don’t care about conserving it.

Benji Backer is the founder of the American Conservation Coalition.

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OCTOBER 2021 75

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CAMPUS CULTURE WARS COME TO TV NETFLIX SERIES ‘THE CHAIR’ MAKES ONE THING CLEAR: THE STUDENTS ARE RUNNING OUR UNIVERSITIES

BY N AOMI SCHA EFER R I LEY

I

“

gnore the students.” That was the advice I received from a longtime observer of higher education when I first started writing about the industry more than two decades ago. It’s not that the student experience doesn’t matter. But students are on campus for a relatively short period of time, he explained. It is faculty who shape the institutions.

To a large extent I found this to be true and it’s one of the reasons I began to write about tenure. What was this “job for life” arrangement doing to the labor market in higher education? What did it mean that professors so rarely left an institution after they had been there for a few years? And how did that encourage a kind of unhealthy groupthink rather than the academic freedom that tenure seemed to promise?

These days, though, such questions seem almost quaint. It is impossible to ignore the students anymore. Though they are still on campus for a relatively short period of time, they seem to be in charge of our colleges and universities. This inmates-running-the-asylum dynamic is on full view in the new Netflix miniseries “The Chair,” released in August.

Starring Sandra Oh, the show follows the usual lines of academic satire. It is true that unlike David Lodge’s globe-trotting literary theorists in books like “Changing Places,” the professors in “The Chair” are not living the high life. But there is plenty of departmental politics, petty back-stabbing and sexual shenanigans. What’s different in the world of Pembroke University, the fictional prestigious school in “The Chair,” is that the students are calling all the shots.

The first way this becomes clear is that the new department chair is charged with getting rid of faculty with low enrollments. Though these are professors who have tenure, they are being pushed out because they have so few students. And the students are not interested in their classes because the professors do this boring thing called lecturing. They don’t try to make the material “relevant.” In one running gag of the show, Oh repeatedly asks her older female colleague to please read her evaluations. What she finds are responses not only irrelevant to the class, but personally offensive. Reasonably enough, she sets them on fire. The most popular professor is a Black woman who encourages her students to perform songs about the lack of women in “Moby Dick.”

The real influence of students, though, is felt when a crisis occurs — or when they cause one. The popular professor Bill Dobson, played by Jay Duplass, makes an offhanded joke about — what else? — Hitler during his class. Students record the episode on their phones, and pretty soon the entire campus is demanding Dobson apologize. Administrators, guided by the steady hand of communications professionals, say they don’t 80 DESERET MAGAZINE

care about the context of the remark or academic freedom. What they care about is the school’s reputation and the students’ demands.

Dobson, who fancies himself a popular professor, holds a “town hall” on the quad to answer students’ concerns about his behavior. In a scene reminiscent of Nicholas Christakis’ 2015 confrontation with Yale students over whether it was OK for his wife to suggest that maybe we didn’t need to police Halloween costumes so much, Dobson tries his hand at reason and students offer illogical, if not moronic, sloganeering in response.

Dobson says: “The university should be a place to uphold free discourse.” A student answers: “It’s all about free speech as long as you’re the one talking.” Hey! You’re berating a professor on the quad and there will be no consequences for you. Are you claiming you don’t have free speech?

Dobson says, “I want this to be a forum where everyone can voice their opinion.” A student says: “You’re a white tenured professor who writes op-eds for The New York Times. You really think this is an equal forum?” No one — not the university or the Constitution — guarantees you equal access to The New York Times op-ed page as part of your free speech guarantee.

A student compares Dobson’s joke to someone drawing a swastika in a dorm. The professor says, “If you are suggesting that what I did is the same as propagating neo-Nazism, that is inaccurate. That is a willful misrecognition.” And the students ask, “Are you saying we misrecognized a Nazi salute? This is how it always goes. You do something that is objectively (messed) up and then when we call you out on it we get accused of getting it wrong.” What do you know? Sometimes — often!

— 19-year-olds get things wrong. And it is the job of adults on campus to point it out.

But this is often the state of real-life campus affairs today, and instead of adults being able to offer instruction to kids on how to use reason to argue a point or why making a joke about Hitler is different than drawing a swastika in a public place, they are being lectured by the kids.

It is not that the faculty or administrators are blameless in all this. Since the 1960s they have been capitulating to student demands — demands for new fields of study, for university divestment, for higher grades, for better food. In August, students at the University of Wisconsin demanded that a boulder be removed from campus because 100 years ago someone referred to it using a racial slur. And the administration did it.

Now it doesn’t seem to matter whether students are on campus four years or four days or four hours. They are in charge.

ILLUSTR ATION BY MI CHEL L E B UDG E

OCTOBER 2021 81

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YEARS EST 2001

THE LAST WORD

T h e R ev. T h e r e s a D e a r

A LIFE CENTERED AROUND HOPE THE LEADERSHIP CONSULTANT AND ADVOCATE TALKS FAITH, GIVING BACK AND PAYING FORWARD

BY LOI S M. COLLI N S

T

he rev. theresa dear doesn’t talk about her resume, or her accomplishments. If you want to know her long list of awards, you’ll have to Google them because bragging isn’t her style.

She will talk about her childhood if you ask because then she can tell you about hope, which has been a theme in her life and got her where she is today. The Rev. Dear was in foster care growing up, living in nine homes between the ages of 11 and 17. Some of those homes weren’t welcoming; she represented a paycheck and was mistreated. In a video promoting the nonprofit One Hope United, she tells how the thought of everything she would be able to do one day got her through hard times.

A minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a member of the national board of directors for the NAACP, the Rev. Dear has been instrumental in building a partnership between the venerable civil rights organization and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which co-authored an op-ed last year on racial harmony.

While the Rev. Dear is a nationally known advocate on racial and social justice, she’s also a leadership consultant and has held prestigious titles in both the corporate and nonprofit worlds, including vice president at Verizon and senior vice president at Metropolitan Family Services.

Deseret Magazine spoke to the Rev. Dear about turning points, hope and race relations in America.

84 DESERET MAGAZINE

To move forward as you have, you must have had some turning points.

There were two turning points. I didn’t have any clothes to wear to my eighth grade graduation. I didn’t even have shoes to wear. All my friends around me were talking about what they were wearing. And I don’t know whether my teacher — I’ll never forget this — noticed I wasn’t contributing to the conversation, but after class, she pulled me to the side. And she just asked me, “Do you have any clothes for graduation?” And I said, “No.” It makes me well up even thinking about it now. But my eighth grade teacher got me clothes for my graduation.

Do you remember what you wore?

I wore a white dress and some white shoes. I do remember that. But she handled it with such discretion. No one knew that she did this.

What else propelled you forward?

I used to help my great-aunt clean houses when I was a younger girl.

And we would clean the house of a family, the Rothschilds in Skokie, Illinois, maybe once a month. And when we would have lunch, Dina Rothschild would talk to me about college. At the time, no one was talking to me about college, you know. No one in my family and not necessarily people at school.

ILLUSTR ATION BY RA N DY GL ASS

But this amazing woman really prompted my imagination to think about the possibility beyond my own ZIP code. I don’t know whether she was doing it intentionally because she saw this little Black girl come into her house with her older, health-compromised aunt and she realized that she wanted to make a difference, break a cycle. I don’t know what her intention was, but she talked about education repeatedly.

And it was through those conversations that, for the first time in my life, I imagined that I could go to college. And it was from those conversations that I was inspired to research college, and college options and college support. And it was from those conversations at their table in her kitchen that I became ambitious and determined to go to college.

And I was the only one in my family that went to college.

Was it hard to get to college?

It was quite tough. I got my undergraduate and graduate degrees from Loyola University. What I knew I had in my favor is that I was pretty smart. That’s what all my teachers told me. But through undergraduate and graduate school, I always worked two jobs and went to school — or in some cases three jobs and went to school part time.

NAACP convention for the first time — flights, hotel, transportation at the convention. I’ve done that for about 15 years.

When I am mentoring and talking to African American youth, I always tell them the story of how a lot of my mentors have been white. Some of those relationships happen organically. And some of it was them looking at somebody that had potential, curiosity and interest. And they said, “I want to work with you.” Let’s just take Dina ­Rothschild. She didn’t spend a dime, she just cared enough to sit down with me and have a conversation in a very loving, inspirational, authentic kind of way. When I am mentoring and talking to white people, I help them appreciate what the Black journey is, and how many obstacles we face that they don’t necessarily have to face, but also that when we come together, when we work together, life can be better. I don’t have any children. But I have mentored, inspired and helped thousands of young people around this country.

Are we getting closer to being one people? Are we making progress on racism?

I do think that we are getting closer and we’re making progress. The media’s job is to exploit things because they need to attract and increase viewership. You don’t see You were instrumental in taking The Church of Jesus many stories about what’s working and what’s goChrist of Latter-day Saints’ preparedness and financial ing well. The thing that has really propelled and preparedness materials and adapting them to be approhas been at the center of my life has been hope. So WHEN I AM MENTORING AND priate for Black , inner-city audiences. What was your I do believe that we are getting better and stronTALKING TO experience? ger as a country around race relations. And all WHITE PEOPLE, What the NAACP and the church have in common we need to do is look at the millennials and Gen I HELP THEM Zers who are going to lead this country. To some is care and compassion for humanity that is so needAPPRECIATE THE degree, we have discounted their work ethic. But ed, especially today. It gave me the opportunity to BLACK JOURNEY, BUT ALSO THAT these are true humanitarians, people who care translate imagery, content and language so that it fit WHEN WE WORK about the climate, they care about the culture of the African American community.

TOGETHER LIFE this country. They care about the communities CAN BE BETTER. within this country, and they care about race relaDo you see a role for future collaborations? tions. And I think that those are the torchbearers Absolutely. And the future collaborations could who are going to make a true difference. I am rebe anything from voluntarism to mentoring. Just ally, really excited about the young people in this as there was a Dina Rothschild in my life, I believe country and what they’re going to do. there are Dina Rothschilds throughout the church I’m also excited about the social awakening of people in this counwho can just have a conversation with a young person about college and try … . It appears that when George Floyd happened, America was like, the great things that the future can hold for them.

“This is egregious, we have to do something, we have to be better.” …

And I’m also encouraged by the sense of ownership that people have You’re describing a process of other people helping you build the future — and about the fact that America is changing. People are deferring less to not necessarily the people you expect. the government to step in. People are owning their ZIP codes, their You know, the reason that my faith is unyielding is because throughout my communities and their neighborhoods. I have neighbors I have waved entire life, the Lord has been there. When I thought my life was on the at for about 20 years. But for the first time, when George Floyd was brink of collapse because of a lack of resources, the Lord always stepped murdered, they drove to my home, they came across the street, these in. The Lord brought people — complete strangers — into my life that are white people, to say, “I had no idea. I’m sorry. I just want you to became friends, he opened up doors that I didn’t knock on. And he made know that I care.” Those are the things that I’m encouraged by. what appeared to be very turbulent paths very, very smooth.

We are an imperfect country. And we always have been. There is no All of these experiences are why I believe in giving back and paying perfect country out there. But we are a country with hope and tremenforward. That propels my philanthropic and voluntarism spirit and amdous potential. bitions. I feel compelled to do it. It’s like my spiritual, social responsibility to do it for others.

Any last words?

I live by a quote by Maya Angelou that says that people will forget what What are some of the most meaningful things you’ve done? you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget I prefer to be behind the scenes. I’m not interested in recognition, but how you made them feel. I think it’s incumbent upon us when we are impact. But I mentor young people of all ages and religions around with people who are different from us to make sure that we make them the country. I buy books for African American students at historically feel valued, welcomed and included.

Black colleges and universities. And I sponsor young people to go to the OCTOBER 2021 85

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