The Commonwealth October/November 2020

SUZANNE NOSSEL | MARIN’S COVID RECOVERY | MARIA RESSA CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD WINNERS | CIVIL RIGHTS JOURNEY

Commonwealth The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI On the Front Lines of the Pandemic

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URGENT PROGRAMMING

BALANCED PERSPECTIVES

“There’s a lot to be done. There’s lessons learned here. I would hope when this is over—and it will end—that we sit down and talk about the fact that we need to look at what went right, look at what went wrong.”

—ANTHONY FAUCI

INSIDE

Commonwealth The

October/November 2020 Volume 114, Number 5

FEATURES 8 Dr. Anthony Fauci Fighting the virus 16 Maria Ressa and Ramona S. Diaz A crusading journalist confronts an authoritarian president 22 On the Road to Freedom Two young women tell of their moving experiences on the Club’s civil rights trip 26 Marin’s Path to Recovery How Marin County can bounce back 32 Suzanne Nossel Does free speech have a future in America?

38 California Book Awards

See who won the 89th annual awards DEPARTMENTS 4 Editor’s Desk John Zipperer 5 The Commons Talk of the Club Quote Unquote 40 Program Info About Club programs 42 InSight Dr. Gloria C. Duffy ON THE COVER: Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony S. Fauci at a coronavirus briefing in April at the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour.)

ON THIS PAGE: Dr. Fauci at the podium.

(Photo by NIAID.)

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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Commonwealth The

October/November 2020 Volume 114, No.5

EDITOR’S DESK

BUSINESS OFFICES

The Commonwealth, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 feedback@commonwealthclub.org

VICE PRESIDENT, MEDIA & EDITORIAL

John Zipperer

FOLLOW US ONLINE facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub twitter.com/cwclub youtube.com/commonwealthclub commonwealthclub.org instagram.com/cwclub ADVERTISING INFORMATION John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, (415) 597-6715, jzipperer@commonwealthclub.org The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. Copyright © 2020 The Commonwealth Club of California.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 597-6700; feedback@commonwealthclub.org EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question-and-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub. org/watch-listen, or via our free podcasts on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or Spotify; watch videos at youtube.com/ commonwealthclub.

Published digitally via Issuu.com.

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Photo by Efraimstochter

A Troll in the Park

T

he first time I encountered a troll was in a children’s book decades ago. I think the troll lived under a bridge or something, either scaring people or turning out to have a heart of gold despite a fearsome appearance. Trolls were rare things in those days. Alas, the modern troll is ubiquitous and evinces no heart of gold.

The modern troll I’m referring to of course is the person who posts inflammatory comments in chat or comments sections of online discussions—whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or elsewhere.

In this issue of The Commonwealth, you’ll find an excerpt from a recent program featuring Suzanne Nossel, the head of PEN America. She discusses defending free speech from challenges across the political spectrum, and she describes how she approaches it by trying to understand what the challengers are really after, how much they understand about free speech, and how communication itself actually works. (If you’re talking to an audience, you have to understand how that audience is hearing what you’re saying.)

Which brings us back to trolls of the digital kind. We are, by definition, a free speech organization. We feature discussions and interviews with people from a broad array of political, economic, social and racial backgrounds on a wide range of topics.

The Club itself does not endorse a speaker’s views, but we hope to assist the development

of better policies and practices—whether in government, business, culture, or just our own homes—through the exploration of problems and possible solutions. When we have a speaker who might be controversial speak on a Club program, we are offering a platform for civil dialogue, something that’s sorely lacking elsewhere these days.

During most of our live-streamed programs, we have a chat feature on the YouTube or Facebook video windows, where people post questions for the speakers or just make comments on the topic. Some of those conversations are wonderful, and they show our members’ commitment to really digging into issues, whether it’s something as serious as nuclear deterrence or something as fun as good food.

If a viewer thinks a speaker is completely wrong and wants to make that statement in the video chat section, they’re entitled to do that, misspellings and all. But if they are profane or they attack a speaker or others in the audience, or if they continually bring up completely unrelated topics in an attempt to smear a speaker, they can expect their comment to be deleted and possibly themselves to be banned from the chat. And they can also expect Club members to chime in, telling them to be civil and stop ruining the party.

JO H N Z IPPER ER VI C E PRESI DENT O F MEDI A & ED I T O RI AL

The Commons

TALK OF THE CLUB

Zoom and the Art of Proper Lighting

W

hen you come to an in-person Commonwealth Club event, what you see on stage has a story behind it. From the lighting and the sound projection to the screen behind the speakers and the placement of the chairs—it has all been put together by our staff and volunteers to ensure the best possible experience for the speaker and the audience— whether they’re in the room or watching and listening thousands of miles away.

In the digital-only era, we also try to control as much of the presentation as possible, but some things are out of our control. Such as CNN’s automatic lighting.

In early September, CNN’s chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, was interviewed for a Club program by Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffery. Jeffery participated in the online program from her California home, while Stelter was in CNN’s New York City office, which he reported was practically empty. So few people were there, in fact, that the motionactivated lighting in his office turned off, and Stelter jokingly rolled his seat back and waved his arms in an attempt to activate the ceiling lights.

You saw it here first.

below of Joe and his wife, retired judge Judi Epstein, in front of some fine outdoor dining.

Our next door neighbors at legendary San Francisco restaurant Boulevard have expanded into outdoor dining so they can continue serving customers while also giving people the room to do so safely.

The Club is pleased to offer them some virtual dining space, and we’re in conversations with other neighbors to find ways our building can help them safely reopen for business. Stay tuned.

Take a Number

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ur home at 110 The Embarcadero in San Francisco has also been a good citizen lately. In July, the building’s Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium was used as a training space for Census workers, all socially distanced and wearing masks. And come November 3, our building will once again serve as a polling station. Both are apt uses for this 117-year-old civic institution.

Good Sidewalks Make Good Neighbors

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he entrance to the Club’s beautiful waterfront home in San Francisco might be covered by a mural and all of its programming is taking place online, but our building is still a site for gathering and conversation—socially distanced, of course.

Commonwealth Club Board member Joe Epstein recently visited the waterfront with his family, and his daughter snapped the picture

Joe and Judi Epstein pose before the Boulevard seating on the sidewalk in front of the Club’s headquarters. (Photo

by Laura Rosenthal.)

LEADERSHIP OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB CLUB OFFICERS Board Chair Evelyn Dilsaver Vice Chair Martha Ryan Secretary Dr. Jaleh Daie Treasurer John R. Farmer President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy BOARD OF GOVERNORS Robert E. Adams Willie Adams John F. Allen Scott Anderson Dan Ashley Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman Harry E. Blount John L. Boland Charles M. Collins Dennis Collins Kevin Collins Mary B. Cranston LaDoris Cordell Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dorian Daley James Driscoll Joseph I. Epstein Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Fleming Leslie Saul Garvin Paul M. Ginsburg Hon. James C. Hormel Mary Huss Lata Krishnan John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy Lenny Mendonca Michelle Meow Anna W.M. Mok DJ Patil Donald J. Pierce Bruce Raabe Skip Rhodes Kausik Rajgopal Bill Ring Richard A. Rubin George M. Scalise Charlotte Mailliard Shultz Todd Silvia George D. Smith Jr. David Spencer James Strother Hon. Tad Taube

Marcel TenBerge Charles Travers Kimberly Twombly-Wu Don Wen Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Mark Zitter PAST BOARD CHAIRS AND PRESIDENTS * Past Chair ** Past President Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman* J. Dennis Bonney** John Busterud** (deceased) Maryles Casto* Hon. Ming Chin** Mary B. Cranston* Joseph I. Epstein** John Farmer* Dr. Joseph R. Fink** Rose Guilbault* Claude B. Hutchison Jr.** Dr. Julius Krevans** (deceased) Anna W.M. Mok* Richard Otter** Joseph Perrelli** Toni Rembe** Victor J. Revenko** Skip Rhodes** Renée Rubin** Richard Rubin* Robert Saldich* (deceased) Connie Shapiro** Nelson Weller** Judith Wilbur** Dennis Wu** ADVISORY BOARD Karin Helene Bauer Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Steven Falk Amy Gershoni Jacquelyn Hadley Heather Kitchen Amy McCombs Don J. McGrath Hon. William J. Perry Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Ray Taliaferro Nancy Thompson

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The Commons Alex Stamos, Director, Stanford Internet Observatory We did a comparison of all of the [social media] platforms of what their policies are [regarding disinformation]. From our perspective, none of the companies have sufficient policies.

We rated them not with whether we agreed with them or not but whether they had the policies and whether they were sufficient to understand and predict what steps they were going to take. . . .

None of the companies are specific about what they are going to do. Facebook specifically has a ‘newsworthiness’ exemption for the president, which I think is going to get them in trouble.

Personally, I think that’s a fine thing around the general [election], if the candidate says . . . “I think the election’s being stolen,” and they’re making a general statement; I don’t think that’s something a trillion-dollar company should censor. But if they’re going to inject a specific fact and it’s a falsifiable fact, then that becomes problematic.

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Voices from the Club

QUOTE

Joan Ryan Author, Intangibles: Unlocking the Science and Soul of Team Chemistry When we understand how our brains are wired and why they’re wired that way—you know, the modern human . . . is wired to connect. We are what one neuroscientist calls open-loop creatures, meaning we’re not born with everything we need to survive. So because we’re open-loop creatures, we are profoundly influenced by each other.

Jake Peavy, the great Cy Young pitcher who played for the [Oakland] A’s, captures that in a sports reference, but it’s true for all of us. When I asked Jake Peavy, who has just given 100 percent every moment he’s on the mound, and anybody who’s seen a pitch knows this—he’s just ferocious—I said, “Jake, you know, if team chemistry elevates performance, why does it matter for you, because you literally can’t give more than 100 percent.”

And he said “My teammates bring out a fight in me I can’t willingly summon for myself.”

UNQUOTE Susan Eisenhower Author, How Ike Led On June 5, [1944] just as these paratroopers are about to take off to the Normandy coast to unknown fates, [Gen. Eisenhower’s seen] smiling at those boys.

I think it is particularly noteworthy, because his decision about the airborne drop was probably one of the toughest of that whole Normandy enterprise.

The reason is rather simple: His technical expert, who was responsible for the 24,000 paratroopers who dropped, warned General Eisenhower about a week before D-Day that he thought the paratroopers should be canceled, because the Germans had reinforced a position and he thought it was dangerous and that between 50 and 70 percent of paratroopers and glider troops would be lost in that exercise.

Ike went into a room for two hours and decided against that recommendation, because the paratroopers were central for

opening a number of pathways off Utah and Omaha beaches. Having made that decision a week earlier and having written a note for his pocket that said “If the landings fail, the responsibility’s mine and mine alone,” he goes out and looks these paratroopers in the eyes—thinking that his technical expert said between 50 and 70 percent of these boys are not coming home.

He wasn’t giving them a pep talk about getting on a plane and dropping behind lines in Normandy. He was talking to them about home.

I once asked my father [John Eisenhower], “Why would he do that?”

My father, a military officer, said “They knew what they were about to do and were probably scared half to death.”

So imagine that smile, and a man who came out and had the courage to look them in the eyes before they took off.

Mary-Frances Winters Diversity and Inclusion Expert; Author, We Can’t Talk About That at Work!

There’s a lot of talk today about defunding police departments.

I don’t know about defunding them—when people hear that word, it’s such a negative word.

I think perhaps redistribution of some resources, smarter use of the money [is needed]. I think we do have to realize if they’re there to serve and to protect, are they really serving and protecting?

But I also think we have to take specific actions when police do wrong.

I am not anti-police. I am absolutely not, and I don’t think most people are. But what we are

is anti police who kill unarmed, innocent Black people. They shoot them in the back eight times; they put their knee on their neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Those people need to immediately be dealt with in a way that is just.

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ANTHONY FAUCI Doctor in the Spotlight IN THE FIGHT AGAINST THE

coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci has been a widely trusted voice explaining the evolving scientific understanding of the disease that has struck the world. From the August 18, 2020, online program “A Conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

Dr. ANTHONY FAUCI, Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAID); Member, White House Coronavirus Task Force

In Conversation with Dr. GLORIA DUFFY, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California

GLORIA DUFFY: What’s your highest priority problem in fighting the coronavirus right now?

ANTHONY FAUCI: The highest priority is something that isn’t yet a problem, but I could then tell you what a problem is. The highest priority right now, as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is to develop successfully more than one safe and effective vaccine, which I think is going to be essential if we really want to put a durable end to this pandemic, simultaneously with developing interventions in the form of therapies. The problem from a public health standpoint is to try and get the country to act in a uniform and consistent way to get the infection down to a very low baseline, which would make it much easier to be able to open up the country in a safe and prudent way to get the economy back. Right now, the problem we’re facing is that if you look at the numbers as a country, when we had the big spike that was driven predominantly by infections in the northeastern part of the country, dominated by the New York metropolitan area, when those came down in that region of the country, the other areas of the country began to essentially surge.

So we never got the baseline back down to a low, low level. It went up and then stayed at around 20,000 cases OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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per day, which is a very precarious place to be when you’re trying to open up the country.

And we saw that in the southern states, as they try to open, including Southern California among other areas like Florida and Texas and Arizona, as the cases started to come up and peek at 70,000 a day. You can’t operate in a really effective way to keep the country safe at the same time as you’re opening up when you have that higher baseline. So the problem, if you want to call it a problem, Dr. Duffy, is that we need to act in a much more uniform, consistent way in carefully and prudently watching out and following the guidelines for opening the country, because I do believe we can open the country and get the economy back. We can do that successfully, but we can’t do it in a helter-skelter way. We’ve got to do it in a consistent [way].

DUFFY: Why has it been so difficult to get a consistent policy covering the entire country and, of course, to get people to adhere to it?

What do you see as the main barrier?

FAUCI: There are a number of barriers, but one of the things that at least contributes to it—I don’t think there’s one thing that’s the unidimensional issue that drives it—is that our country is a very large country and it’s heterogeneous geographically, demographically, and certainly with the level of infections in different regions, states, counties, cities. So you can’t look at the United States just as a whole when there’s so many different areas, having different experiences. The very nature of the federalism in our country, where the states have a lot of say as to what goes on, in many respects appropriately in their state—but when you want to get the country as a whole to pull in one direction [it becomes problematic], because one part of the country will ultimately impact the other when you’re dealing with a pandemic for the world and an epidemic in the country. You can’t have one doing it really well, having one not doing it really well without one influencing the other. That’s just the nature of infectious diseases. Operating in a vacuum could work for some aspects of behavior, but it doesn’t work very well when you’re dealing with a highly transmissible viral infection.

DUFFY: So we do have a federal government, even if we are a federation of many states; what would be a few things you think the federal government could do or should do to promote uniformity among the states and regions?

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FAUCI: Well, obviously that’s something of a great deal of discussion. I think a consistent message from above would really be a very, very important factor in getting to where we want to be.

DUFFY: States like California have been pretty stringent about their regulations regarding masking and distancing and which businesses can open and close and so on.

And still some people are not adhering to the practices I’ve seen here in some regions of California. I wonder sometimes is it a lack of basic scientific understanding of how contagion occurs? Is it a sort of iconoclastic attitude that what people do doesn’t affect others? What do you think is behind the noncompliance?

FAUCI: You’ve just correctly named two of them. Let me expand a little bit on it. When there is a lack of a successful implementation of a global health program, particularly if you’re trying to successfully open up the economy, there’s two issues that are a bit separate but nonetheless overlap. You can have the authorities in the states, the cities— namely the governor and the mayor—do it right and proclaim that we should be doing it this way. That only works if the citizenry of the state, the city, the county pay attention to it and do it. But what we have seen throughout the country [is] situations where certain states—not California, California, as you said appropriately, from the top, did it in a stringent way—but some states jumped over the benchmarks and jumped over the guidelines and jumped over the checkpoints.

Other states try to do it right, but the people in the states for one reason or another didn’t pay any attention to it. I think one of the compelling reasons for that is the extraordinary breadth of manifestations of this disease. That essentially for 40 percent of the people who get infected, they don’t even know they’re infected because they have no symptoms. I’ve been chasing viral outbreaks for almost 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything with that disparity of manifestations, from nothing to some people who get sick for a day or two and are fine to some who are in bed for a few weeks and now we’re starting to see that they may have some lingering cardiovascular neurological things that we haven’t even fully recognized.

Some people that require hospitalization, some require intensive care, some require ventilation and some die.

We know that the people who will likely get in trouble and have a poor outcome are

the elderly in general and any age who have underlying conditions, such as hypertension, obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc. So you don’t have a uniform threat or a uniform concern and anxiety in the population, because if it uniformly affected everyone and everyone was at a high risk of getting really sick and/or dying—you don’t have that. You have some people who correctly look at the data and say, “Well, the chances of my really getting into trouble are extremely low.” Then you get people who are in a risk group, who know if they get infected, they may wind up in a hospital. They may die. So it’s very anxiety-provoking for them Getting back to the other group—and this is the thing that I think undermines the message. There is an understandable, and I would even use the word innocent misinterpretation of what it means. If you get infected and you have no symptoms, it isn’t no harm, no foul, who cares? I get infected, but I’m in a vacuum; a young person, again, likely because they’ve got so many other things in their lives that they don’t want to be bothered with this, they can incorrectly assume that they are in a vacuum. They’re not, because by getting infected, even if they don’t get a single symptom, they are propagating a pandemic, which is greatly influencing the country as a whole and killing some people.

Because by getting infected, even if they don’t get a symptom, they almost certainly sooner or later will infect someone else who then infects someone else who can be someone’s mother, father, wife, on chemotherapy for breast cancer, immuno-deficient child.

So you’ve got to appreciate—and it’s a very difficult message—that you are not in a vacuum. None of us are in a vacuum.

We’re all part of a very unfortunate dynamic that’s going on in our country. By preventing ourselves from getting infected, we are helping to dampen the outbreak. By getting infected and not caring, we’re propagating the outbreak. So it’s got to be not only a sense of your own responsibility to yourself, but a societal responsibility.

That’s the reason why I say often we’ve got to all pull together on this, even though you’re assuming that this doesn’t mean much to you because you don’t have any symptoms.

Boy, that’s a tough message to get across.

DUFFY: Thank you for iterating that message. It underlines the importance of a strong social contract and sense of community responsibility.

Let’s talk for a moment about vaccines,

Top to bottom: Fauci with Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. (Photos by NIH History Office from Bethesda; courtesy of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum; official White House photo by Pete Souza; and official White House photo by Andrea Hanks.)

because you put that at the top of your list in terms of a challenge. I understand we’re having third-phase clinical trials of one vaccine out here in California. Can you give us a progress report? And I know everybody’s asking you when can we expect this, but can you tell us the status of the progress toward a vaccine?

FAUCI: Right now there are a number of candidates that are in various stages of clinical trial, nationally and internationally.

In the United States, the federal government to a greater or lesser degree is involved in enhancing, facilitating, and even developing about half-a-dozen vaccines that are at different stages of development. In a vaccine, you start in an animal model. Then you do phase one, which is safety. If it looks good, you go to phase two. If that looks good too, go to phase three. There are two and likely soon three candidate vaccines that are in phase three trial, two of which started a few weeks ago, on July 27. Those trials are large trials encompassing anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 individuals per trial, with the goal of determining, A, are they safe, and, B, are they effective?

You need to enroll a lot of people, get their prime, get their boost, and then observe over a period of months whether or not you truly have safety and you truly have efficacy. When you say a progress report, the progress report is that patients are being enrolled in those studies. There are a few thousands of patients already in there. You would not expect at all to get any indication at this point. You likely, with the ones that are already in phase three, start to enroll it completely over a period of a month or two. Then over the next few months, you hopefully will get a signal of efficacy and a confirmation of safety. I mean, you could give a progress report on are you getting patients in the trial? Yes. That’s a good progress report. But you wouldn’t expect any results right now. You’d expect them as we get into the fall.

Now let me just say one of the things that’s important. People ask, What’s the chance of this working? Whenever you’re dealing with a vaccine, you should never ever say anything that “I’m confident that this [will OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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work].” You could say, as I’ve often said, that you’re maybe cautiously optimistic based on certain things. Based on the animal data, which are impressive, and the early phaseone data—which was originally for safety but you can get some inkling as to the type of response—and in the phase one of one of those and in probably more than one of those trials, that the level of antibody, which is the end point that you want to see in addition to efficacy, the level of antibody that you induce—important antibody, neutralizing antibody that blocks the virus—is at a level that’s equal to or even greater than what you would get with natural infection, which is never a guarantee, but it’s a pretty good predictor that you’re on the right track.

Having said that, that has allowed me and others to say, given the amount of effort and resources that’s put in, we would hope that by the end of this year, the beginning of 2021, we would know whether the vaccine is safe and effective—and hopefully it will be, and there’ll be more than one. We can then start distributing it to the people who need it. So we’re talking about something [at the] end of this year, beginning of next year, DUFFY: And I’m assuming there are no shortcuts of the normal scientific method here, the [Vladimir] Putin vaccine, for instance, that there’s no way to sort of short circuit this process.

FAUCI: It’s very interesting, because I get asked that all the time now. People need to understand there’s a difference between having a vaccine and proving that the vaccine is safe and effective. You’re giving [vaccines] to people who are not sick; you’re trying to prevent infection. It would be irresponsible to give a vaccine to people when you haven’t even tested it yet. So if you want to say that we have a vaccine, we have half a dozen vaccines, but we wouldn’t want to do anything with them until we put them through the proper randomized placebo control trials to prove that they’re safe and prove that they’re effective. So when you hear that the Russians have a vaccine—great, congratulations. But the question you need to ask: Have you tested it appropriately to prove its safety and efficacy? And the answer to that, to my knowledge, is they have not, unless they’ve done something that I don’t know about. I doubt if they tested it in tens of thousands of people.

DUFFY: Here’s a question from our audience. If and when the vaccine comes to market, how will it be rolled out? Who

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would be prioritized? Who will pay for it?

Will there be enough syringes? Will it be made available in other countries? What if it comes to market first by a company outside the U.S.? So—what are you anticipating in terms of the rollout, and some ethical and equity questions that arise about this.

FAUCI: Whenever you have an intervention, and typically it’s a vaccine in which you’re rolling it out at a time when you don’t have a dose for everyone, then you have to do some sort of prioritization. The standard way in this country, and we’ve done that, is that there’s a committee called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which recommends to the CDC who makes that final decision about who you give it to—you know, young people, old people, vulnerable people, frontline workers or what have you. With this vaccine, there’s an extra added element to the discussion and the dialogue. The National Academy of Medicine has been commissioned by the NIH and the CDC to also weigh in with an independent committee, made up of ethicists, biologists, community people, to help in the decision of what the prioritization might be. I don’t know what that’s going to be, but if it follows the general trend in situations like this, you usually make sure you protect your health-care workers and frontline workers who are putting themselves in harm’s way to take care of individuals.

Then you worry about people who are at a higher risk of having a poor outcome— the elderly, those who have underlying conditions, a variety of other individuals. So that’s what the prioritization is going to wind up being. Whether or not you have enough of the utensils as it were to distribute it, that was why as part of this Operation Warp Speed there are two leaders of that one, a scientific leader and a logistic leader. The scientific leader is Moncef Slaoui, who’s responsible for making sure all these trials get coordinated.

The logistic leader is a general, Gustave Perna, who has extensive experience of supply chain and meeting supply and demand as a general in the United States Army. He’s been put in charge of making sure we get all this material, and hopefully he’ll be successful in that, cause that’s his job.

DUFFY: There are a number of other questions about a vaccine. What would you say to the anti-vaxxers for instance?

FAUCI: Well, you know, there are antivaxxers who are against any kind of vaccine, no matter what. Sometimes [it helps] if you

discuss with them without condemning them, because if you condemn them, you’ll never win them; try and engage them at the community level in a dialogue about the facts about vaccines and try and dispel the misinformation; because some—not all, but some—of the things that fuel people’s hesitancy for any kind of vaccine is the misinformation that with social media often gets widely spread, such as the relationship between the measles vaccine and autism, which is completely, completely untrue.

But when you’re dealing with a new vaccine like this, the way that you can get people to ultimately wind up vaccinating, which would be to their benefit and the benefit of the community, is to first make sure that when you do the vaccine trial, you have equitable representation of multiple demographic groups, so that you don’t only test it in one group and then distribute it; and another that you have proved the safety and efficacy in older people, younger people, minorities, people with underlying conditions, so that when you’re getting ready to distribute the vaccine, you can say, “We tested it in all of these groups and we know it’s safe and it could be effective in these groups.”

Once the vaccine is approved, then you want to make sure that the people who would benefit from it most will take the vaccine.

That’s when you have got to be transparent about all the data and utilize something that we initiated during the early years of the intervention, in the clinical trials with HIV, the vaccine networks, the treatment networks, the prevention networks, is to implement what we call community engagement. Reach out to the community and get them to be part of the dialogue and part of the discussion of why it’s important as an individual and as a member of society to get vaccinated.

So it’s a whole bunch of things, including particularly community engagement.

DUFFY: Just taking that community engagement point a little bit further. What role do you think there is for community assistance in addressing the coronavirus?

For example, I understand that Johns Hopkins has a training program for contact tracers. How can the community at large get involved more proactively than just keeping themselves safe in their environment to [help] solve this pandemic?

FAUCI: I think just what you said, it’s extraordinarily important for the community to get involved, because they’re the ones

Fauci in a March 2020 briefing at the White House. (Official White House photo by D. Myles Cullen.)

that are going to be able to successfully do a number of things, including the very important identification, isolation and contact tracing. I was just on a Zoom [meeting] a few weeks ago with the crew from San Francisco General Hospital who were very much involved with getting together and learning and getting the community involved in that kind of identification, isolation and contact tracing.

DUFFY: There are a lot of questions [from our audience] about after effects and ongoing impact on health from coronavirus diseases, underlying conditions that may have a prolonged impact on people after they’ve had coronavirus and apparently recovered, for example myalgic encephalomyelitis algia and other conditions. Could you say a little bit about the long-term public health impact of this pandemic?

FAUCI: Yes. I’m glad you brought that up, because that is something that is a learning

process in progress. That’s one of the things about trying to get out the scientific evidence and the data when you’re having a moving target, because we’re totally naive in our experience with this. As the weeks and the months go by, we learn more and more, and sometimes assumptions and statements that might have been made in February, March, April, as you get more clinical experience in June, July and August change, and you need to be humble enough and flexible enough to admit that you’re still in a learning process and always make your recommendations, your conclusions, hopefully flexible conclusions at the time based on the data and evidence you have.

So that’s an introduction to an answer to your question, which is we are starting to see things now that we didn’t see early on.

One is that people, even those who are not hospitalized, people who have had symptoms [and] were home in bed for a couple of weeks, OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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essentially clear the virus and then felt they wanted to get back to a normal life who find that a substantial proportion of people don’t feel normal for several weeks beyond the socalled clearing of the virus. We don’t even know how long that’s going to last.

The other thing that is even more disturbing is that there are case reports . . . coming out—I just went through a whole bunch of them, literally a couple of hours ago—of individuals who were sick, thought they got better, and then they have cardiovascular problems. Myocarditis cardiomyopathy can lead to arrhythmias, sometimes even sudden death. Neurological abnormalities. When you do MRIs and PET [positron emission tomography] scans, both of the heart and of the central nervous system, there are things that we didn’t imagine.

So this idea that if it doesn’t kill you, you’re okay—we’re going to start modifying that a fair amount and be very careful about how benign a so-called recovered infection might be. I don’t know where that’s going to go, but there’s clearly something there [involving] lingering effects, both of things as symptomatic as fatigue and brain fog and things like that, as well as some organic things that clearly [are] demonstrable on MRIs and PET scans and things like that.

So we’re in the learning process, and we need to withhold any judgment until we learn more about these post-recovery syndromes that people have.

DUFFY: So a lot of people are wondering when it is safe to do X—go to school, fly, etc.

So a couple of questions about that. What’s the triggering point that you think would make resuming public schools, students attending public schools, safe?

FAUCI: I’m glad you asked it in that way, because it’s the same thing you always get asked. You’re asking it understandably for the United States, except that the United States isn’t one place, it’s like 30, 40, 50, as it were, different places. So the way you look at something like school is, I always say the default position should be in general that you try as best as possible to get the schools open, because of what we know about the deleterious effects on children psychologically, and even from a nutritional standpoint, the isolation, the things that are bad for the development of a child.

Then there are the downstream deleterious, unintended ripple effects on family that have to disrupt work schedules.

So as a default, you should try to get the

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kids back, but you cannot ignore that you have to pay attention to the safety, the welfare and the health of the children, of the teachers and of the people associated with them, which means that when you make a decision about opening, you’ve got to look at where you are and what the level of infection is.

There’s a big difference between a green zone or a green county—where there’s very little infection in the community and you’re dealing with an elementary or a middle school; you can’t throw caution to the wind, but you can open with a fair degree of safety and impunity—then you have what’s called the yellow zone. We have a degree of infection there that you may need to do some mitigating things. You may need to—and this should be decided at the local level with attention to the guidelines that the CDC has put out about opening schools, because they’re very helpful [if you] read through the guidelines—you can do things like hybrid examples, part online [and] part in [person]; physical mitigations, desks that are separated, morning, afternoon classes; every-other-day classes; doing what you can do outside; good ventilation. It’s a whole bunch of things that you can do, and then know how you deal with a student or students who get infected.

Then you get the red zone, where you got a lot of infection in the community. You really have to think twice before you want to put kids back in school then, because as we’re starting to see, three things or more can happen. You go and the kids get affected; they close down. So why open it up to begin with? Parents say, “No, I’m not going to do it.” Teachers say, “I’m not going to show. I’ll do it online, but I’m not going to show.”

So it’s so much more complicated than saying either close them all or open them all. We live in a big country that’s very heterogeneous in so many ways, including the level of infection, because there are some places that [have] no problem. And there are some places [where] there is a problem.

DUFFY: Dr. Fauci, what are the important steps to take in the coming months and years to help us prevent future pandemics, and improve and strengthen our public health structures in this country? What reforms do you see needed?

FAUCI: Well, I think one of the things that’s so important, because I’ve been through this before with the scare of the pandemic influenza and the famous chicken virus that jumped from chickens to humans but didn’t spread efficiently from human to human,

that together with the biodefense effort that we put in following the anthrax attack, we put a big pandemic preparedness program into place. The thing that I would think we need to do is to maintain corporate memory, because what happens is that as soon as we get through this ordeal that we’re going through, people tend to want to put it behind and they talk about lessons learned. But then a few years from now, people focus on resources they need for what the problem of the day is as opposed to the problem that might occur 2, 3, 4, or 5 years from now. So that’s the thing that we need to do.

There’s a lot to be done. There’s lessons learned here. I would hope when this is over—and it will end—that we sit down and talk about the fact that we need to look at what went right. Look at what went wrong.

Look [at] resources, about strategic national stockpiles, all the things that people like to put behind them after they’ve gone through an outbreak. We can’t let that happen. We’ve got to realize that outbreaks like this occur, emerging infections have occurred forever.

They occur now, and they will occur after you and I are no longer around. We happen to have gotten hit by a historic one this time, literally nothing like this in the last 102 years since the 1918 pandemic. But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen again, nor does it mean we may [not] have another different kind of an outbreak. We’ve got to be perpetually prepared, because the threat is perpetually there. So that’s the one thing I’d like to see happen.

DUFFY: Would you say that should happen at the national level through a task force?

World Health Organization? What should be the steps to make sure we do a thorough review and take steps needed?

FAUCI: I don’t want to be the one to prescribe that now. But I can tell you some of my thoughts that I think people should appreciate—that pandemics by the very definition of pandemic means it’s global, the entire planet. So you have to have an international look at this, because there’s got to be cooperation and collaboration about transparency, about sharing of information, about making sure data is available from all countries that could be helpful to others.

Then we’ve got to talk about the shared responsibilities that the nations of the world have. So it should probably be something on the international level, as well as within our own country at the national level of what we can do ourselves and then how it relates to

Top: Fauci, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, gives an update briefing in April; Vice President Mike Pence looks on. (Official White House photo by D. Myles Cullen.)

Bottom: Fauci has been a frequent figure at the coronavirus briefings, including one in March attended by President Donald Trump. (Official White House photo by Tia Dufour.)

the things we will do with others.

DUFFY: Some people are wondering about other vaccinations, for instance, the time is coming up to get our flu vaccinations. Should we do this on the early side to make sure that we don’t contribute to straining a system that perhaps later in the winter would be providing coronavirus vaccinations?

FAUCI: Even in the best scenario, I don’t think you’re going to have widespread need to be able to administer a COVID or a coronavirus vaccine until well after you’ve vaccinated most of the people with influenza, because you want to start literally in the very early fall to start vaccinating. And I cannot see that you’re going to have large quantities of coronavirus vaccine available until the end of this year or the beginning of next year. So I don’t think it’s going to be a conflict.

DUFFY: I happened to be having my annual physical and told my doctor I would be speaking with you. He asked me to ask you, What are you doing to take care of yourself?

How do you get through the day? What are your mechanisms? This is obviously a very burdensome and stressful time.

FAUCI: I would be untruthful to you to tell you that it’s not extremely stressful. It’s the time elements involved, all the things you need to do and keep up on really make it at very best a 16-, 17-hour day. So I certainly am trying not to completely run myself into the ground. I think that happens only because I have a very intelligent and convincing wife who is also in the medical field. She reminds me that it doesn’t do any good for me to be flat on my back from exhaustion. So it’s a very good partner there.

But what I do do, to the extent I can, I try and exercise about 45 minutes to an hour every day. That usually entails a walk at night with my wife and my daughter’s dog, walking very fast, a power walk. I get a few miles in. That really releases the stress and the tension for me.

“You have to have an international look at this, because there’s got to be cooperation and collaboration.”

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PERHAPS NOWHERE IS THE WORLDWIDE

erosion of democracy, fueled by social media campaigns, more evident than in the Philippines. Journalist Maria Ressa has found herself the target of an authoritarian president who doesn’t hesitate to go after critical members of the press. From the August 4, 2020, online “Michelle Meow Show” program “Maria Ressa: Independent Journalism Under Attack.”

MARIA RESSA CEO and Executive Editor, Rappler; Journalist; Author RAMONA S. DIAZ Director, A Thousand Cuts In conversation with MICHELLE MEOW , producer and host of “The Michelle Meow Show,” and JOHN ZIPPERER, Commonwealth Club vice president of media and editorial.

THE JOURNALIST vs.

THE PRESIDENT Philippine journalist Maria Ressa has faced increasingly tough legal action as a result of her reporting on President Rodrigo Duterte.

Rodrigo Duterte. (Photo by King Rodriguez/Presidential Photo)

MICHELLE MEOW: Ramona, Thank you for this very captivating, eye-opening film [A Thousand Cuts]. If you watch the trailer, you might think that the whole documentary is based on Maria Ressa, the award-winning journalist, and her experiences of being attacked by an authoritarian type of government leader. But it didn’t start out as a documentary about Maria Ressa. How did the film [develop] when [Rodrigo] Duterte became president in 2016?

RAMONA DIAZ: Right after he became president, the drug war started, and then all the photographs from that drug war started showing up on my [social media] feed. People started sending it to me, and it was horrific. I couldn’t really turn my gaze. I’m a martial law baby; I grew up under martial law in the Philippines, and there was something there that was very frightening. All my senses were like, Oh my God, what is going on? I was finishing Motherland, my previous film, but by the time I got to the Philippines to research my film, it was this sort of vague notion of making a film about the drug war. But by the time I got there in late 2017, a lot of people were already doing that film.

I’m very immersive in my filmmaking. I just stay and stay and stay with the person I am filming. So when I looked around in Manila, there was Maria Ressa and [her news site] Rappler. She was questioning the drug war. But more than that, she was OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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also talking about disinformation and the weaponization of social media. So that was the extra layer that I found. [The film’s focus is] very specifically the Philippines, because it still is about the drug war and all these other characters, but it zooms out and becomes more global.

But it still was very much this sort of ensemble cast of people that I felt like I was going to cover equally when I started out.

There’s [retired police general] Bato, [popstar-turned-government-secretary] Mocha Uson or the other allies of President Duterte.

This was 2018 and we started filming with Maria; . . . then I decided the midterm elections is what’s going to be the backdrop of the film. So I said, “Okay, principal photography starts in February.” Well, in February, she got arrested. The first time she got arrested was February 13. I remember because I arrived in the country the day before to start principal photography, because the election campaigning just began. So there was this parallel story, sort of Maria—twice arrested, detained, and harassed by the government—and the midterm elections.

You couldn’t write that. As we started filming, it was obvious that she was becoming the center of the film—when I film, the center of gravity begins to shift and she becomes the center. Also she gave us full access. I found myself in the room where she was being detained that first night. And I’m like, “Okay, here I am,” because I sort of fought my way to the front of the crowd. And I said, “I’m with Rappler.” And she didn’t disabuse them of that. So I’m like, okay, I’m with Rappler now. Once you’re there and fully embedded, it starts. And then you realize she’s the story. So she became a star, and then we traveled with her.

Who knew that like a year later, it becomes more and more relevant as the days pass.

In a way unfortunate, but here we are. It’s a really relevant film, but it’s nothing that I plan. I hope to decode what’s happening in the Philippines, because although I make my films there, I live here in the U.S. and I produce my films here. I try to decode what’s happening there to an audience beyond the Philippines to a Western audience.

JOHN ZIPPERER: Besides following Maria, of course, as you mentioned, you feature Mocha. She’s a very interesting—I don’t want to say character, but a very interesting person in this. You get some very intimate discussions with her where she’s revealing her life. Was she easy to convince

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Documentary filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz.

to be a part of it and what were you expecting to get from this person?

DIAZ: Mocha was familiar with my other work. I did a film about Imelda Marcos, the former first lady. I did a film about Arnel Pineda, who was the lead singer for the rock band Journey. So everyone from like first ladies to rock stars, to teachers, to mothers; and she was interested in telling her story.

No one is ever the antihero of their story.

Everyone’s a hero of their own story. I wanted to know how she saw herself. I’m not interested in bad guys as such. I’m interested in the story behind that. I always want the more nuanced narrative.

Did it take convincing? No, because she liked my other work. She was familiar with it.

She also understands that I have an audience beyond the Philippines. She was also running for Congress. So that’s another thing; she very much understands the power of story, the power of media, the power of the camera.

MEOW: She was very open, which was a little bit surprising. One of the questions that came up for me was just how you were able to get some of the inside footage. The other ally [of Duterte was] the retired police general who’s now a senator of the Philippines, Ronaldo dela Rosa, or Bato. He himself is a character, but he is very, very upfront and

open and honest about the war on drugs and about the state-sponsored killings of individuals that they believe to be [involved with], even in possession of, drugs or drug trafficking. How were you able to capture this part of the documentary?

DIAZ: I’m very transparent when I film.

They did know I was filming Maria, and Maria knew I was filming Bato. It’s very important to be transparent and to be above ground. I think our visibility also protected us. You know, if it were more under the radar, I wouldn’t have felt as protected.

I just stick around until they talk to me and they show me things that they feel I want to see. There’s a scene in front of prisoners and [Bato] basically threatens them, “You better stop drugs, or I have a way of stopping you.”

That’s his thing. He’s Bato; he will threaten.

It’s also in an atmosphere President Duterte talks about killing every day. The president’s rhetoric is full of violence, it’s a language of violence and killing and coming after you and “I better not find you in drugs, because we are going to kill you.” So out of that is Bato, who also feels “I could speak that way and I can show you what I’m going to do.” He likes the image of him. He’s the tough guy.

Bato means rock in the Philippines. That’s how he wants the world to see him.

Journalist Maria Ressa.

[Maria Ressa joins the program from her home in Manila.]

MEOW: Maria, in the film you mentioned that you’re not scared of being arrested because it only makes you more resolute.

You said, “I see firsthand how the law has bent until it is broken. What we’re seeing is death by a thousand cuts of our democracy.”

So for many nations, many who believe in democracy and a free world, what are the consequences if we continue to damage press freedom in this way? And I guess that was me formally asking you, by the way, why should we care what happens to you?

MARIA RESSA: Information is power. This is the reason I became a journalist, because it’s giving information to people—the facts, mostly the facts!

This time period has shown you how Silicon Valley—the technology that we now consume information on­—has impacted our entire world. You are in California, and those companies in California have now helped destroy democracy in many parts of the world—here in the Philippines is one of those places. That’s important. Ramona talked a little bit about what we have had to endure, but it isn’t just in the Philippines. This death by a thousand cuts is happening in every democracy around the world, because facts

are debatable. When facts become debatable, you cannot have democracy, you can’t have truth, you can’t have trust. So that’s the first problem that is global in nature and why you should care.

We are seeing this everywhere around the world, and we are seeing networks that are linking together. Networks that used to be targeting Venezuela are now targeting Poland, strangely enough, [and] are targeting Spain. The same networks. The networks of disinformation in the Philippines are connected to the alt-Right, that are connected to the Russian disinformation networks. So I guess part of it is this tearing down facts leads to a different geopolitical power play. I sound way too academic, but I guess part of what I’m saying here is that once you elect a digital authoritarian—and we do because it’s the tech platforms, the social media platforms have enabled the rise of populist authoritarian-style leaders—once they have the reins of power, they then cavein democracy from the inside. They use the tools of democracy to stifle press freedom.

We are so chilled; we’re now in Siberia in the Philippines, but there in the United States, “Hello, what’s happening to you guys?” Right? A one-party state, you’re still far from that, but we’re certainly there, the

same place where Hungary is; Viktor Orban has used the virus to consolidate power, as the Philippines has. The same place where you have the Law and Justice Party in Poland or Vox in Spain, not to mention [Brazilian President] Bolsonaro.

This is happening all around the world and believe it or not, it starts with the choices that have been made by Silicon Valley companies.

Power consolidates power. That’s what we are trying to prevent now. We’re trying to protect our democracy, but our dystopian present is actually your dystopian future.

It’s your present now? How the heck are you going to have integrity of elections? If you don’t have integrity of facts, how can people make choices rationally for whom to vote for?

If they don’t know the facts, that’s a question.

We don’t really have an answer for it.

ZIPPERER: In normal times, you would expect [a U.S. administration] to, if there were a Filipino journalist who was being persecuted by the government, whether it was publicly or through back channels, you would expect that administration to say, “Hey, you should think about this, don’t do this. We are your friends, but there are limits to things.” So let me put it bluntly. Do you think the Philippines has passed the point of no return regarding press freedom and possibly democracy?

RESSA: No, I don’t think so. I think the battle is now.

We’re just on the precipice. The largest broadcaster, ABS-CBN—a newsgroup I headed for six years, that’s why I came back to the Philippines—has been shut down in the middle of a lockdown. I think we’re now the world’s longest lockdown in dealing with the pandemic, but [it’s] largely securitydriven. Just yesterday we’ve gone into a more intensive lockdown. We’re under home quarantine. So the shutdown of ABS-CBN happened at a time when Filipinos couldn’t go out. The last time that happened was in 1972, when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, and it stayed shut for 14 years.

So we’re right on the precipice. There’s an anti-terror law that essentially allows a small group of cabinet secretaries to designate someone like me a terrorist. When they do that, you can be arrested without a warrant and jailed for up to 24 days. We are now challenging this at the Supreme Court, more than a dozen petitions at the Supreme Court.

But by next year President Duterte will have appointed 13 of 15 Supreme Court justices.

So we’re right on the precipice, and this is part OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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of the reason why what we do right now—we journalists, we Filipinos—this matters.

Who knows, right? Maybe democracy is not that important, but I would prefer to have that clearly defined. We shouldn’t have a government playing in the grave pretending to be a democracy, and yet taking away the rights that are guaranteed in our constitution.

That’s where we are today. And this is part of the reason I think many Filipinos are asking Ramona, “When will we be able to see the film in the Philippines?”

We are all connected. The world has never been the way it is today. Part of the problem is that the social media platforms, which have now become behavioral modification systems, these social media platforms connect us all globally. So a lie told in San Francisco travels instantaneously to Manila and vice versa. It is unprecedented that you can have just on Facebook’s properties 3.2 billion people of the 7.2 billion that are the world’s population. It is unprecedented that now local is global and global is local. So you’re not immune from it. And truly it is the decisions that are made in America that have cascaded globally in terms of the quality of information we get, in terms of the facts we get. Because right now on social media

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facts are actually relegated to the side, lies laced with anger and hate spread fastest and further than really boring facts. So this is a problem in our information ecosystem that really truly must be addressed before we can even begin the journalists’ battle for checks and balances as the fourth estate.

ZIPPERER: [One of our live-stream viewers writes] that “Journalists like Maria Ressa, who stand up for the truth at such personal risk, deserve something more than a purple heart. They are the true defenders of democracy.”

Going off what you were just talking about, Maria, in the internet and social media companies and their gurus over the past few decades the mantra was, This is going to be something that undercuts the authoritarians, because no government will be able to establish a fantasyland world, because the people will be able to talk to each other and share a truth. Instead, of course, it’s Russia and China, which have really learned how to manipulate this and weaponize it.

What you were just saying about [the journalist’s duty to truth], it reminds me of the old line that a lie can [travel half way] around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on. Do you see the forces

that could help either respond to this or be a countervailing force to it? Do you see them, if you will, getting their shoes on and getting ready and realizing this is more [serious] than just, “I’m going to tweet something else against them,” but that there needs to be some sort of structural or policy response to this kind of thing?

RESSA: Before the coronavirus, before the pandemic happened, I always thought 2020 was going to be the year that big tech was held to account. We can’t even get near the shoes.

I mean, it’s that far [away], it is exponential.

I think that the biggest problem right now is that it plays to the worst of human nature.

You talked a little bit earlier about hate and what happens when you become a target of these disinformation networks. Three things happen. The first goal is to pound you to silence. The second goal is to create a fake bandwagon effect, manufactured consensus.

In my case, it was journalist equals criminal.

And in four years, the weaponization of social media plus the weaponization of the law kind of made that alternate reality real.

The third part is a consolidation of power for those with power. I’m reading two books right now that are playing with my mind, and I want to share them with you. Sinan

Top left: During an interview with President Duterte, Maria Ressa looks at a pile of documents containing names of government workers allegedly involved in the illegal drug trade. (Photo by King Rodriguez/Presidential Photo.) Bottom left: U.S. President Trump and Philippines President Duterte in Manila in 2017. (Photo by Karl Norman Alonzo and Robinson Niñal Jr.) Right: A protest against the the drug war killings. (Photo by Ryomaandres.)

Aral from MIT wrote a book called The Hype Machine. He lays out both behaviorally how the social media platforms trigger our dopamine, triggers chemicals in our own bodies that keep us addicted to it, and the way it is designed itself polarizes society, it divides us, it pushes us to the extreme.

The second book is Anne Applebaum’s book called The Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

The point here is that anger and hate, it takes something very personal to all of us.

Like, if you are disappointed because you didn’t get a job, somehow it allows you to then blame someone else for your own insecurities and shortcomings, and you join this movement and that then becomes a party. So it uses hate. In the film, one of our reporters, Patricia Evangelista, says that President Duterte promises revenge to those who didn’t have it. I think that’s what we’re seeing happening around the world.

It isn’t just the monetization of hate. It isn’t just hashtag #stophateforprofit. It is truly the politicization of—we’ve seen this before.

We saw this in Nazi Germany. We saw this in Stalin.

MEOW: The film does now include the outcome, the verdict of the cyber libel case.

You’re facing up to 7, 8 years in prison and a fine, and still have to work through some other charges.

We’re asking you, what do you do? It’s funny, because you asked in the film, “What do you do when the president lies?” Um, Maria, what do we do when president lies?

[Laughter.] What do we do now?

RESSA: I’ve obsessed about this for 4 years.

When I was first arrested, I actually texted Ramona because she had just gotten in and I was like, “I’m being arrested if you want to come join us.” It’s what we are seeing because of the technology, so technology is the enabler. It’s like it threw gasoline into the fire of normal people.

So let me first answer your question and then kind of pull it out bigger. The atomization of meaning has happened. So what do we do? I think the first is Americans demand accountability from the American social media platforms that are enabling the destruction of democracy. “Move fast, break things” doesn’t work anymore. When you’re talking about huge groups of people, of societies, of democracies, and we have seen cheap armies on social media roll back democracy all around the world.

The first studies came out in 2017 and by 2019, Oxford Computational Propaganda Research Project puts the number of countries where this has happened at over 72.

I think the second one is understand that the battle is individual. When I say the atomization of meaning, it means that you now have also tremendous power.

So aside from demanding accountability, which every American has, you guys are far more empowered than we are, because your institutions still work. Our institutions have collapsed.

The first is social media. The second is, you. I asked this of Filipinos, “What are you willing to sacrifice for the facts? What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?” Because this is now what the times demand of us.

We journalists have to sacrifice a lot to do our jobs right now. So it’s an individual one.

Then I think the third one is to pull it out broader. Think about it like this. The world became very, very complex and starting in

2014 before technology really came in, people all around the world were looking for—I’m going to say we were nostalgic for a past where someone stronger, bigger can take care of all of these complex problems and just solve it.

I saw it in India with the election of Modi; I covered it in Indonesia when Governor Joko Widodo was running against the sonin-law of former President Suharto. This I knew very well, because I covered the end of nearly 32 years of Suharto in Indonesia. And Prabowo, the son-in-law of Suharto, almost won. But what you saw was [for] the people, like Americans, it’s too complex. They want it distilled. They want someone to take it off their shoulders.

Well, here you go. It goes hand in hand— 2014 was also the year that Russia and Ukraine created two different realities and the world didn’t really look at it, but it was a harbinger of things to come.

So the question now is, once technology became the gasoline into the fire that has amplified the lure of digital authoritarians, what do we do? I think the answer there is at least in the Philippines, we go back to the tools of democracy. For me as a journalist, we keep doing our jobs because the worst thing that could happen is for all of the things you saw to stop us from doing our jobs. Because that’s the end goal.

I think here’s the silver lining. This time matters. The pandemic is a once-in-a-century event, and it has accelerated the demise of democracy in many parts of the world because government gets more power, gets more money. We see what happened in Hungary. We see what happened here in the Philippines. Our government essentially took that power and money and shamelessly used it to get more power. But the silver lining is this: A virus is not something you can demonize. You can’t hate a virus and get anything done, right? Governments have to perform. And I guess this is what we’re seeing in the Philippines today. Our medical frontliners over the weekend just demanded different actions from government, because it’s their lives on the line. It’s our lives on the line at a time when lies kill. Everyone has a stake.

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Pilgrims on the Road to Freedom A report from two students about their Club trip to visit important sites from the Civil Rights Movement

DANA KING: This afternoon, we are going to hear from two amazing young women. Ashley Hayes, a senior at the university of Michigan, and Zaynab AbdulQadir-Morris, who is a graduate of UC Berkeley.

These two exceptional women were part of the organization in the Bay Area called Cinnamongirl, Inc., which mentors and provides leadership opportunities to young women of color.

Welcome Ashley and Zaynab.

It’s so great to see you both again.

I traveled with Ashley and Zaynab and about 30 other people as part of The Commonwealth Club group tour in early March to the U.S. South. We visited sites critical to the Civil Rights Movement and met some truly inspirational people.

We s t a r t e d i n J a c k s o n , Mississippi, where we visited Medgar Evers’ home. We went to

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“Our trip started just two weeks after Ahmed Aubrey was murdered.

We walked across the bridge in Selma the day Breonna Taylor was murdered.”

the Mississippi Delta and sat in the courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi, where Emmett Till’s murderers were acquitted. We went inside Little Rock High School and heard from Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, and into the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where we met with bomb survivor Reverend Carolyn McKinstry. In Memphis, we visited the [National] Civil Rights Museum and saw the room at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed the night before he was killed.

Then we walked across the E d mu nd Pe t t u s br id g e i n Selma, Alabama. We ended in Montgomery, where Rosa Parks and many other women inspired the Montgomery bus boycott and where we experienced the deeply moving National Memorial for Peace and Justice. There were,

of course, many things that we did and saw, including eating some rea lly great food and listening to some incredible blues music, but that gives you a sense geographically where we traveled.

Our trip also started just two weeks after Ahmed Aubrey was murdered while jogging. We walked across the bridge in Selma the day that Breonna Taylor was murdered in her bed. And it was two months before the murder of George Floyd. So a lot happened on our journey and since our journey.

I’d like to start it by turning it over to Zaynab.

Z AY NA B A BDU LQA DIRMORRIS: Every time I’ve started to draw up my presentation for today, attempting to articulate what it was like to tour the American South, tour trauma, tour property, tour afterlife of injustice, I couldn’t help but be swallowed by

IN MARCH 2020, TWO YOUNG

scholars joined a Club trip to Jackson, Little Rock, Memphis and other historic sites of the CIvil Rights Movement. We invited them to tell us in their own words the trip’s impact on them in terms of today’s events and their visions for the future. From the June 2, 2020, Inforum online program “On the Road to Freedom: Through the Eyes of Young Leaders.”

Produced in partnership with Cinnamongirl Inc. ZAYNAB ABDULQADIR-MORRIS, UC Berkeley African-American Studies Major ASHLEY HAYES, University of Michigan Afroamerican and African Studies Major, Education for Empowerment Minor DANA KING, Journalist and Artist—Moderator

Left: Participants, some carrying American flags, marching in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965.

(Photo by Peter Pettus.)

sorrow. It’s a type of sorrow I felt 6 years ago sitting on the carpet of my childhood bedroom, unable to concentrate on packing shirts away for my first semester of college, because I could only stare with futility at Trayvon’s face against asphalt, a deep red pooling from his head to city gutter. It’s the sorrow that shouted over me throughout my first semester of college. The sorrow that led me into the streets of Berkeley and Oakland night after night, screaming from the cavity of my chest that my life mattered. After a hot-blooded first year, I decided that I was done with sorrow. I was tired of making my pain palatable for white and non-Black people of color. I made sure to amplify every name, every hashtag in the years following, but I never allowed myself to get emotional, to get personal, already aware of what misery it would

bring me.

I’ll be clear: This trip was not an miserable experience. What I learned from the lips of those on the frontline, the freedom fighters, the wounded healers is invaluable.

Every day, every city I was inspired.

The grief the trip triggered was . . . our price for trying to find answers in ancestral homeland.

For me, this trip was not about policy or protest, but origin. My grandmother, Uli Morris, was raised in Greenwood, Mississippi i n t he 192 0 s , her pa rent s sharecroppers. In adulthood, she migrated to California, Compton, where my father was raised. I kept this in mind all throughout the trip in which Ashley and I kept journals. We were asked to write how we’re feeling so not to forget the experience.

On that first day, I woke with Mississippi’s morning light,

“The grief the trip triggered was . . . our price for trying to find answers in ancestral homeland.”

immediately reaching for my camera. I hurriedly brushed my teeth, washed my face, slipping on boots, a dress, rushing out of the hotel, determined to discover Jack son, to document a nd witness the city. I started down the street—city hall. Andrew Jackson immortalized in bronze stood tall, . . . one arm akimbo, the other, pressing a staff firmly into the statue’s base, still declaring that this was his providence.

Brilliant pillars stretched to the hazy sky behind him. Aside from his shadow, Jackson was deserted.

There are no cars rushing past, no tour groups crowding to take pictures perhaps whispering about the general’s legacy—a bustling plantation of 300 slaves, genocide of the indigenous. It was just me and him. I climbed up State and President Streets, hoping to get a closer look at the city, getting near to a tomb. Placard absent, I can only identify its purpose by reading what had been chiseled in stone, “CSA, Confederate States of America.” The monument honored its sons, their sacrifice.

After looking at the monument, I started toward a railroad track and then a white man suited in button-down slacks waived for my attention. I wasn’t sure what type of white Southern man he was, but I pulled my headphones down. as he approached. He wanted a OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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picture in front of the monument; his grandfather, a Confederate soldier serving Jackson. He came to chase that history, driving from one battle site to the next. He continued on to me about his Southern heritage, but I could only think of the Negro soldiers that fought against the Confederacy in their starch uniforms, head high, chest out freely marching in a scorching April heat. Freedom finally clear in the scopes of their rifles, thinking, “At last, we are countrymen.” What a rich history I offered the man, and he started crying, dabbing his eyes with the red, white and blue tie barcode with the word “Vote.”

I took his picture landscape and then portrait to capture the entire monument. He insisted that I also take one.

I walked 12 more miles that day.

Drenched in the afternoon sun, I escaped the cool shade of the capital’s lawn, watching the broad polyester body of the state’s flag, its Southern cross, Confederate stars proudly rustling in the wind, it’s ripple echoing for me in Jackson.

On the fourth day of the trip, we drove as dawn emerged across Arkansas’ horizon to arrive at Little Rock Central High School. We began with the tour of the school, pausing for a moment at its mouth, taking in the 150,000-square-foot structure. From the stairwell we were greeted with four female statues, each dedicated to an educational theme. I could only remember Opportunity. She stood there in a flowing gown to plate braids, almost sneering at us below, hands preoccupied with her dress, unaffected, uninterested in what goes on down below.

After making our way through the hallways of the school, we crossed the street to the visitor center, where we listened to Elizabeth Eckford and Dr. Sybil Jordan Hampton’s testimony about what it meant to be the first. Due to a breakdown in communication, Miss Ekberg accidentally arrived early on September 4, 1957, to then be denied entrance to the Little Rock campus at every entrance she approach. She recounted that that day only two people affirmed

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her humanity, wiping spit from her curls and the dress her mother, a seamstress, prepared for her. An education journalist and a teacher serve as the only barrier between mob and child, wiping her tears, talking over the litany of curses and threats. They told her, “Don’t let them see you cry.” Elizabeth had already thought ahead, arming herself with sunglasses. I began vibrating with anger, hearing about the complicity of soldiers, a city, a country, while children were attacked before cameras; pressing nails into the palms of my hands to hold back tears, hearing about violence in the classroom, that stalked in the hallways, bathroom stalls; the tirade; their sacrifice. I could only make out a thank you before sobbing on my knees before Miss Eckford and Dr. Sybil Jordan Hampton.

On the morning of September 15, 1963, the day the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed, the pastor’s Sunday school message was love that forgives, grounded in Matthew 5:43 and :44. “You have heard it that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Walking through the restored church and up the carpet and stairs, where the Klan

Above: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church as seen from Kelly Ingram Park. A statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. faces the church. (Photo by Chris Pruitt.)

“I could only make out a ‘thank you’ before sobbing on my knees before Miss Eckford and Dr. Sybil Jordan Hampton.”

detonated seven sticks of dynamite, suspending Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair in the air, with torn Bible passages in pews, I could not imagine such a permissible God. Over lunch, Reverend Carolyn McKinstry assured me and Ashley of the necessity of forgiveness, tenderness as well, warning us of the consequences of being consumed by vengeance and bitterness, of clutching to hate, closing yourself off to living fully.

On our final day, we entered the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, pantheon of the lynch, a constellation of death.

We wandered through its copper columns, each engraved with every date, every name of the victims, requiring curving, leaning, t wisting to comprehend the pillars above our shoulders, many reading, “Unknown,” “Unknown,” “Unknown.”

I was one of the first to leave the Memorial. Down the hill, I walked around the corner, only a few feet from the legacy museum, sitting in front of an abandoned building. I closed my eyes trying to concentrate on the rush of a fountain across the street. I opened my eyes to historical markers. The signs were erected in every city

we had visited. This one read, “Montgomery slave market.” I shut my eyes once more. The cultural preservation work . . . was impressive, but I still could not shake the deep feeling of disappointment. To borrow from King, . . . it was disorienting to see what endured, to confront ghosts of the past and the living, to encounter aftermath and afterlife of anti-Black racism, America’s foundation, and witness it as an imperial spectator, but finishing Dr. King’s quote, “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.” It, too, was endearing to witness a love that endured somehow, that sculpted and erupted new sculptures, new literatures, new histories—love dreaming defiantly. In March on this trip under the Southern sky, facing and contending with broken promises of liberty, justice and equality, I was overcome with a disappointment, but I also learned the utility of dreaming again.

ASHLEY HAYES: I’d like to begin with the quote that reads “For the hanged and beaten, for the shot, drowned, and burned.

For the tortured, tormented, and terrorized. For those abandoned by the rule of law. We will remember with hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. With courage because peace requires bravery.

With persistence because justice is a constant struggle. With faith because we shall overcome.”

Entering a new setting for the first time, my guard is always up.

I have to be observant of where I’m at, who I’m around, what my role is in this space. I was either the only, or one of the only in this room. I’m the youngest person in the room. I’m a black female; the only one from the Midwest, the Detroit area. Those identities overlap with one another in this experience of how I processed everything that we took in along this week together. But I always try to take something positive away from my experiences, even though it was uncomfortable at times. We learned about Black history on a deeper level, which was a lot within itself.

Ou r group comprised of primarily an older, white audience, only two people under the age of 25 and only four black women. If the demographics were reversed, the entire cultural dynamic would have been probably different for how this trip would experience bias.

I have to understand that I want to hear what everyone else thinks, how they feel, and because it gives us a greater perspective of what the world really is. It’s much bigger than my own or just how Black people feel. Then I think about the Black lives that have innocently been lost for centuries, systematically, strategically, frightfully. You see Black people being shot and killed by white people, white people being acquitted or not tried at all. Then I understand the hate, the anger, the hopelessness that my people feel regularly, and we haven’t been able to shake it. James Baldwin once said, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

This trip was painful. Trying to love the people who look like the people who hate me, learning together about the Civil Rights Movement and applying that knowledge today, was painful. But it stuck with me the most.

My experience compa red to that of the travel group was t ra nsformat ive. Idea s were challenged for me. My mind was open. And I had to evaluate what I knew if I took in what new knowledge was presented before me. This is something I wondered and wanted to process before putting it out in the atmosphere for me to talk about with my group.

How they felt learning about Black history, civil rights in America, alongside the majority white audience, or even learning about blackness in America with only four other Black women—these are two separate ideas, both of which were vital in my processing a nd development of how I experienced our week together. I grew to love it for what it sparked

“When we are so passionate about this, we should be the ones willing to help someone else to learn.”

in me intellectually and personally.

Most days after we experienced whatever we have for the day, we had a dialogue or conversation, we came back together and recapped the day. [These] where some of the most formative moments of this trip, based on the conversations we had, reflection, emotions, a lot of thoughts where our group honestly told us that they didn’t know that certain things happened in America.

But then I think about my own experience at U. of [Michigan] in classrooms, where we talk about different experiences and things that are going on today or have happened recently. And students say, “I’ve never heard of the Dylann Roof shooting. I never knew that this happened in this part of the world.” And at first to me it sounds crazy; how do you not know that certain things are going on or certain things haven’t happened during your lifetime or in the past, which isn’t so far gone?

But that’s our reality that we live in, where some of us know, some of us don’t. On this trip, I learned about things I didn’t know myself, and I had to give others grace, because I can’t ridicule somebody else for not knowing something. . . . It is so often said that Black people shouldn’t be responsible for educating people on our history or experiences. But I will challenge that, because no one has ever made a difference by being like everyone else. So my question is, When are we—the ones that care so deeply to make our history known, our lives matter—going to start educating other people on that? So often we tell other people that, “It’s not my responsibility to be the one that educate.”

When we are so passionate about this, we should be the ones willing to help someone else to learn. To be one of the only Black people in a space is draining. and doing this work individually is back breaking. But if we work collectively to find a place for everyone to work and learn and fight, it is achievable. This wasn’t light work for any one of us. It still isn’t, but it’s necessary.

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Planning for the Recovery in Marin The road ahead for the North Bay HOW HAS MARIN COUNTY

handled the health and economic crises of 2020? And how will it recover in the future?

From the July 29, 2020, online program “Marin Recovers: Looking Ahead in the North Bay.” This program was supported by the Marin Community Foundation and Relevant Wealth Advisors.

Mike Blakeley, CEO, Marin Economic Forum Gabriella Calicchio, Director of Cultural Services, Marin County Omar Carrera, CEO, Canal Alliance Vicki Larson, Lifestyle Editor, Writer, Columnist, Marin Independent Journal— Moderator VICKI LARSON: It’s nearly the end of July.

Along with the rest of the Bay Area, Marin is experiencing an increase in COVID-19 cases. Plans to fully reopen the county have had to be slowed as county leaders try to reduce the transmission of the coronavirus in the area. Of course the entire county, like the rest of the country, has been dealing with this since March and many of our lives—our work, shopping, school—look totally different than they did just a few months ago. The impact on the Marin community has been profound.

We are a different place than we were just a few short months ago. Today we’re going to talk to three community leaders in Marin who are facing the pandemic in different ways. We often talk about case counts, hospitalizations and, sadly, deaths when we’re talking about COVID-19. But today we’re

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Photo by Daniel Di Palma

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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going to talk about our county and how specific parts of our county’s communities are doing.

Omar, I want to start with you, because I think there can be no discussion about reopening the county or moving forward unless we really address our essential workers, many of whom are Latino and live in the Canal, which has been devastated by the pandemic. Can you tell me a little bit about the Canal Alliance, what you’re seeing in the community and what needs to done?

OMAR CARRERA: The Canal Alliance exists to break the generational cycle of poverty for Latino immigrants and their families, by lifting barriers to their success.

We have seen how COVID-19 has disproportionatey affected low-income communities, most of them communities of color. Nonprofit organizations [that] meet the needs of these populations also face historic challenges. The top three challenges our industry is facing are maintaining the financial health of the organization, providing effective support to staff to work successfully in a virtual world—something that many organizations never intended to do due to the nature of their work­—and be able to respond to the growth in the demand for services and the rapid change in client needs.

Canal Alliance has successfully responded to these three challenges. Our strong financial position that we had before COVID-19 has allowed us to maintain not only all our services available to the community, but also to provide job stability to our workforce during this complex year.

We have being able to transition 90 percent of our programs to a virtual environment.

By fall, 100 percent of our programs will be available. Also we have to add new programs to respond to the COVID-19 crisis; that has allowed us to stay relevant to the community needs. For that, we have partnered with the Department of Public Health to launch new programs and services in the community. We are currently supporting the mobile testing site in the Canal. We are coordinating the distribution results. We are coordinating the services for positive cases, and we are providing financial assistance to thousands of people. Very soon we’ll be launching a contact tracing program to support those initiatives.

We have to recognize that the Latino community is the most impacted in Marin County, but that is due to the historical inequities the Marin County always had

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before COVID-19. So it’s not suddenly that COVID-19 came in so we have issues with digital divide, with housing, with employment and with many other issues.

Latinos, as you mentioned, they have been the essential workers before COVID-19, during COVID-19 and most likely post COVID-19. Essential workers have been on the front line since day one. And thanks to them, many of us have been able to work from home successfully.

LARSON: The Marin Economic Forum focuses on economic vitality in the county.

It’s probably not an easy time right now, Mike. Can you tell us how you are addressing the pandemic?

MIKE BLAKELEY: Yes, indeed, these times are very interesting for all of us here.

The Marin Economic Forum is a nonprofit public benefit corporation. So we serve the community at large, and unlike a Chamber of Commerce, we’re not member-based and we don’t advocate for specific things. In fact, we operate more like a think tank, and we produce research and data and strategy development for both the public sector and the private sector, really to help guide decision making as it relates to matters of the economy here in Marin.

Like the rest of the world, the Marin economy has suffered drastically from this event. There are some things that are unique to our economy that have made the problems worse, but in some cases we’ve also been able to show some resiliency.

Just as the rest of the country was asked to shut down in order to try to control the spread, the businesses here in Marin asked to shut down were significantly affected because they serve primarily the resident population. If you look at the composition of our economy, you’ll find a high number of personal service-type industries, such as salons, yoga studios, restaurants. In fact, those are the businesses that have been most acutely affected, because they’ve not been allowed to serve their regular customer base.

So it’s not just the story of those businesses needing to temporarily shut down or struggle through these times, but it’s also their employees. As we know, most of the employees in those service sectors tend to be from the lower economic strata. So they have been even more adversely affected, because they’ve not been allowed to work.

Here in Marin, a number of businesses have been able to access federal assistance, and the different jurisdictions in Marin

all acted very quickly with the county to set up other financial assistance programs, small grant funds. So there was a very good response to serving the immediate needs of our small business community and trying to help them survive. But now those funds are starting to run out, and we’re starting to see a resurgence of cases. We’ve had to pull back the reopening of certain sectors, which had been in some cases open for just a day or two.

Obviously the uncertainty of all of this means that it’s difficult for businesses to plan.

If there’s anything businesses don’t like, it’s uncertainty. If you unpack that uncertainty, it’s not just, Will we control the spread of the virus? It’s things like, How are consumers going to react? What are their consumption patterns going to look like? Again, the personal services sector that plays such a significant role in the economy has been most adversely affected here. So we’ve got this situation: What is the future of a consumer economy when consumers are behaving totally different than they did before?

All of our small businesses and our main streets are now faced with this uncertainty of whether their customers are going to come back. One of the things that that really brings to light, much like Omar mentioned about preexisting conditions before COVID, we already had a number of our businesses that were facing challenges before. Particularly in the retail sector, there’s been a large shift to e-commerce and to online shopping that was already happening before COVID; that has shifted dramatically in the last three or four months.

That digital shift is going to be permanent.

That’s everything from working from home, which means people aren’t buying lunch at our small restaurants. It means working out from home, which means all of our gyms and yoga studios are having to shift online, which is really only bringing in a small percentage of the revenue before. These are the issues that we’re faced with now, although it’s an affluent community. There some areas of resiliency, like home prices have stabilized, there are even some small increases over the last year.

Equity markets have stabilized; that’s good for those Marin residents that have savings.

But as we know, these pockets of resiliency are really related to the more aff luent population. As Omar just described, those most affected by this were most vulnerable in the first place.

So it’s a little bit of a tale of two stories here in Marin. The affluent population, which

The panelists for this online Marin Conversations program. Clockwise from top left: Canal Alliance CEO Omar Carrera; moderator Vicki Larson, lifestyle editor and writer for the Marin Independent Journal; Marin Economic Forum CEO Mike Blakeley; and Marin County Cultural Services director Gabriella Calicchio

also was able to quickly adjust to working from home, is managing okay in this. The small businesses and their employees and our residents that work in those small businesses and rely on them for income, they’re the most adversely affected.

LARSON: And now to you Gabriella. I know that as the director of Cultural Services for Marin, you run the Marin County Fair, which we really missed this year. You’ve been trying to promote the arts, and I will say that is something that I absolutely miss. I miss live music, theater, arts festivals. Tell me a little bit about what Cultural Services does and how the pandemic is causing you to pivot a bit?

GABRIELLA CALICCHIO: Absolutely.

As the director of Cultural Services, our team produces the Marin County Fair, but our main year-round business is serving as a rental facility to hundreds and hundreds of different arts groups, artists, arts organizations, performing arts, visual arts. I’m also the executive director of our nonprofit, Marin Cultural Association. The nonprofit’s mission is to support art and culture in Marin County. It’s pretty basic and simple. Basically we’ve had to repurpose what we do here on the Marin Center campus and pivot to supporting the pandemic. As most people know, we continue to be the point of testing

for Marin County, one of the first points of testing and the largest. We also have an alternative care site set up in the exhibit hall, which at any point we are ready to activate.

At some point we had what we called the RV village in back of the exhibit hall to host those that were vulnerable in terms of housing and who were either positive or waiting for results as to whether they were positive or not.

A couple of months ago when the county launched marinrecovers.com, I was asked to head up two sectors. One was hotel and hospitality, and the other was the art sector.

As we all know, there are many different genres within the arts. I have spent a lot of time talking to those that are running dance studios, running the theater companies that exist here, running the film places where we produce independent films.

Everybody is really, really hurting. Most of the organizations that had any kind of real budget over a million dollars have had to lay off the vast majority of their staff.

Across the country, nobody knows when mass gatherings will be allowed again, when we will once again be able to gather in a venue like the Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium. When we are allowed to reopen, it will be with a minimum number of audience members so that we can be socially

distanced. If you look at a venue like ours, we have 2,001 seats. And right now, [Marin County Public Health Officer Dr. Matt] Willis is saying when and if we’re allowed to [reopen] it will be with 500 people. Nobody can produce any kind of event in a 2,001-seat theater with 500 people and break even.

That’s what I’m hearing from the artists and the arts organizations surrounding us.

We haven’t figured out a way out of this yet, and what it’s going to look like on the other end. Just as a reminder, we did an art and culture plan that was adopted by the board in May of 2019. In that plan, we worked with Americans for the Arts, and we did an economic survey on the impact of the arts in Marin County. In 2018 alone, the arts contributed $76.4 million to the economy in Marin County. So we’re not just talking about all of the other things that the arts bring to our community and the value there, but we are also talking about economics when it comes to the art sector.

LARSON: Yes, it seems so dire with, as Mike was saying, so much uncertainty businesses can’t plan, consumers can’t plan. I don’t know about other people, but I’m very cautious with my money now, because as a consumer, I’m not quite sure what my livelihood is going to be, whether it’s going to continue with the OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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“We have an eviction moratorium. It’s helpful, but all it does is postpone the problem to a later day.”

same salary. I depended on Airbnb income to support myself. That is gone.

Mike, I heard that something like 30 to 80 percent of restaurants are going to be gone. I spoke to a restaurateur who is worried once weather changes and we can’t do outside dining, if there’s no inside dining, he’s not going to be able to make it. I hear that over and over. What do you see ahead?

B L A K E L E Y: R e s taurants have really had a tough go of this. They have been forced to pivot their operations, which has not only involved expense but has also involved downsizing.

There are no real winners on the restaurant scene out of all of this. Even though some organizations were already focused on takeout-only, you can say they’ve been able to sustain, but they’re certainly not winning.

One of the sad things about the restaurants from a data perspective is that all the major financial institutions have been analyzing the transactions of their credit cards and their debit cards. What they have been finding is that where spending on those credit cards has gone up for restaurants also correlates to where cases of the virus have gone up.

Unfortunately they put out this data in a very big way, which scared off people from restaurants, even though the restaurants are doing all that they can to try to make sure that it’s a safe environment.

So we have a lot of restaurants in Marin County. I hear from those owners frequently.

They’re very concerned about their future.

Even some of the beloved places in Marin County have had to close down. Maybe not just restaurants, but there’s the famous story of Three Twins Ice Cream, which is a beloved brand; it had to actually go out of business.

The food industry and the restaurant industry are extremely hard hit. What we’re watching very carefully though are two things on the demand side, and that is consumer sentiment and consumer behavior.

So from the sentiment perspective, this is

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—OMAR CARRERA

“Restaurants have really had a tough go of this. There are no real winners on the restaurant scene.”

—MIKE BLAKELEY

where opinions vary, but the reality is that there are certain signals that consumers will respond to in terms of how they feel comfortable getting back out there.

As most people have tried to say, once a vaccine is available, that will go a long way psychologically to making people feel more comfortable about getting out. But there was actually a poll done by the strategy company McKinsey that asked people to rank in order what signs they needed to see that would make them feel comfortable going out and resuming their consumption, getting into stores, going to restaurants. The number one thing was not a vaccine, but it was when a public health official comes out and publicly says, “It’s safe to do this.”

We haven’t really seen very much of that here in Marin County. What we’ve seen is the Marin Recovers effort that Gabriela alluded to, [which] is trying to be very public and trying to do a very good job of informing the public of what’s open, what’s not and what’s safe to participate in. The businesses are following very closely what Marin Recovers is advising. So we’re all trying to convey that message of confidence to consumers, but it’s a great unknown.

The other more important part is the behavior of consumers, because that is where the money is actually being spent. What we’ve seen there is this shift to digital. That is going to have a huge effect, because some of

you may have seen in the last three months, the level of online consumption has matched the growth of the last 10 years.

That’s an astounding figure. This is data supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Bureau also projected that if the online consumption patterns that existed the last three months continue for the next three months, that would be equal to almost $150 billion of business that would have gone to brick and mortar businesses that will have shifted online. So for those small retail stores here that have been able to develop e-commerce, that’s okay, but that doesn’t nearly tap into the online behavior consumption behavior that we’re seeing occur, and it is likely to continue.

LARSON: Let’s assume that a number of our small businesses are not going to be able to make it. What happens to our towns?

What happens to San Anselmo and Mill Valley, which have very vibrant downtowns, if there’s nothing that’s going to bring people downtown—no music venues, no shops. It’s very hard to imagine what a future is going to look like.

BLAKELEY: That is the question. From our perspective, we believe that really needs to be a community-driven process. So we’ve been talking with the county and other stakeholders from the business community about the need for a longer-term economic strategy for Marin County. We have never

“[If] a number of small businesses are not going to be able to make it, what happens to our towns?”

—VICKI LARSON

I think one of the weakest things in the county around reopening the economy and dealing with this crisis is at the policy level. I will say respectfully with [regard to] Marin Recovers, their structure was focusing primarily on the business side. They forgot one of the most important things that any business has, which is the workforce. Cities need the sales taxes the businesses provide, and businesses need the talent to be able to be successful.

The opportunit y for us in this moment is in public health. So we are just launching a contact investigator program in partnership with the public —GABRIELLA CALICCHIO health department and UCSF. have that implemented health protocols, We are training people to get certifications right? Now they had to provide PPO; there in that field and provide support to the is a decrease in the customer base similar to county. And [it] is crucial to make sure what Gabriella was sharing. We are seeing that we have a successful isolation strategy this. So we add cost to small businesses, in place, because if people continue to right? These health protocols cost money. be infected and they live in overcrowded At the same time, the customer base went environments and they don’t get all the down. So [not] all of the people working for support that they need—let me tell you, those businesses came back. Right? We were there’s no reopening the economy at all unless close to 2 percent unemployment rate before we deal with that.

COVID-19.

LARSON: Gabriela, are any of the arts Now the essential workers didn’t go back organizations looking at doing outside to work in the same way that they were doing venues? Like the restaurants have pivoted to before COVID-19. These are the people dining outside? [who] need their daily income to survive. CALICCHIO: One of the issues even That has created other social issues and before the pandemic is that the arts were in problems. They are invisible to us now, but trouble. Artists were exiting Marin County, they are coming our way. because they couldn’t afford to live here. They One of them is the housing crisis. We have couldn’t afford to create their art here. debt accumulation, growing every single day, And going back to the racial inequities and we have not created policies that help us around Marin County, particularly by park fight that. We have right now an eviction artists, they can’t afford to live here. They’ve moratorium; I mean, it’s helpful, but all it been coming in from other communities in does is postpone the problem to a later day the Bay Area to perform here. So we already for us to talk about. And then it’s going to had a major issue. be bigger and unmanageable.

This is one of the few wealthy counties [We should be] discussing things [such in the country that doesn’t have a dedicated as], how can we focus on particular census funding source for the arts. Prior to the tracks with low-income communities? What pandemic, we were working on the idea of can we do to protect them? And what can we a dedicated tax of some sort to support the do to support all the work that we are doing arts. All of that has kind of been put on hold, with the public health department and other but it’s time for us to rethink how we get this started again. nonprofits or the ground level?

“Even before the pandemic, . . . artists were exiting Marin County; they can’t afford to live here.”

really had one of those in the past, and that would be the perfect place to bring the community together and to decide for ourselves what we want the Marin County economy to look like, because we are going to have to deal with these repercussions from this, just like the county has had to deal with the Great Recession.

This has to be a community discussion, because economies are much more than just the businesses or the jobs. They’re the higher education system. They’re the social sector. We need to make sure that any kind of recovery that happens in Marin is equitable and inclusive, but we also need to make sure that it recognizes that times have changed. The Bay Area is a hyper-competitive marketplace. So what Marin is going to do with its economy really needs to be discussed and debated.

LARSON: Omar, because a lot of the Latino community works in restaurants and some in the service industries that are struggling, does the Canal Alliance have a plan to maybe help train people in new things? What are you doing to help the community with the unemployment that’s hitting so hard?

CARRERA: If I may just [give] you some context about the topic Mike was talking about. There’s a lot of the businesses that are not going to be able to come back at all. In the restaurant industry, we are seeing already that the impact that those businesses now

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THE COMMO N WE AL TH

Does Free Speech Have a Future in America?

SUZANNE NOSSEL MAKES THE CASE FOR THE SMART DEFENSE

“When we have done programs on campus, we’ve actually been advised not to use the term free speech in the title of the program. [Students] consider it a conservative, kind of right-leaning cause; they don’t consider it relevant to their social justice goals.”

—SUZANNE NOSSEL

AMID “FAKE NEWS,” CAMPUS

speech codes and conspiracy factories, critical free speech is facing new challenges and can’t necessarily rely on its traditional supporters. Are Americans just done with freedom of speech? From the September 16, 2020, online program “PEN America’s Suzanne Nossel: Defending Free Speech.”

SUZANNE NOSSEL CEO, PEN America; Author, Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All JASMIN DARZNIK Author, The Bohemians— Moderator

JAZMIN DARZNIK: As the country juggles numerous domestic crises that tear at our civic fabric, I can’t think of a more timely and important topic to discuss than freedom of speech and a more inclusive public culture. These topics aren’t easy to talk about, and I’m very glad that we have Suzanne here to guide us through some of them.

Let me start out by asking the big question: Why this book now?

SUZANNE NOSSEL: It [goes] back to these conversations that we have had on college campuses across the country over the last few years, where we’ve become increasingly concerned about a climate of censoriousness.

We see this in incidents like protests over people like Condoleezza Rice being invited to give commencement speeches and having to pull out because there is such a climate of hostility toward their presence that they can’t even go through with the appearance and deliver a message to students. Students calling for trigger warnings on syllabuses that alert them to material that may be uncomfortable or induce some kind of trauma. Safe spaces, the idea that some students have advocated that the campus should be an environment where people are protected from ideas that may make them feel—they would call it unsafe, I would think of it more as uneasy or put into an awkward position or uncomfortable.

We began to hear more and more about those arguments being made on campus and clashes that were happening at places like Yale and the University of Missouri over these issues. As we went around,

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Above: Pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators hold signs on the sidewalk outside Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley in 2017. (Photo by Pax Ahimsa Gethen.)

Right: The cover of Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt, which became embroiled in discussions about alleged cultural appropriation.

our instinctive response as a free speech organization was, this is pretty outrageous.

You know, these students are turning their backs on the very role of a university as an environment for the free flow of ideas.

College is supposed to be the place where your notions get tested. You’re staying up all night debating with your dorm mates or in the college dining hall with that give and take, confronting people from all sorts of backgrounds and ideologies. Why are these students backing away from that and regarding it as something uncomfortable, cringe inducing, as opposed to a robust, energizing part of their education?

So that was our instinctive response. But then as we went around to college campuses and did workshops at places like Middlebury and UC Berkeley, where there have been major outbreaks of violence, and those two instances UVA, Charlottesville, we heard something pretty different that made a big impression on me, which is really that for most of these students who resort to calls for bans or punishments on speech, their real objective is not to curtail freedom of expression.

That’s not what they’re after. What they’re after is a more equal, inclusive, anti-racist and just society. They’re struggling with how to bring that about. How does the campus become a truly welcoming environment for students from all backgrounds? How do students from nontraditional backgrounds, whether racial background, socioeconomic

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background and international background, make their way in institutions that were made for white cisgender men many, many decades ago?

I think that drive for inclusivity is admirable to me. It’s sort of the next phase of the Civil Rights Movement. Now as a society we’re seized with this. It’s what’s driving the protests in the streets of our cities, but it can sometimes cross over into censoriousness. What we found is that students kind of barely know where those boundaries lie, and they are not focused on the free speech implications of, for example, a call to discipline a professor who may say something offensive in class. They haven’t thought through the risks of that—the fact that that power may someday be turned against somebody that they agree with, or be used to silence their own protest or demonstration on campus.

Those issues really are a microcosm of the struggle we’re having as a society with how to reconcile the essential drive toward the next phases of equity and inclusion for our society as a whole, with the robust protections for free speech that are enshrined in the Constitution and that in my view are a really essential part of who we are as a country and as a people.

DARZNIK: I’m really intrigued by the structure of the book [Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All]. My expectation might be that I would enter into the book with an examination of the legal history of

the First Amendment, but it’s not organized like that. It’s organized in a way that I appreciate very much as someone who’s a citizen and active, sort of curious about what I might do and how I might enter into a more inclusive and yet robust exchange of ideas. So could you tell us a little bit about how you chose to structure it the way you did?

NOSSEL: I do lay out in the book what the legal underpinnings are of free speech protections in this country, what the exceptions are to the First Amendment, because I think that’s important to know as one engages in these debates, but actually it comes toward the end of the book.

I divide the book into four sections of principles to consider when you’re a speaker: when you’re voicing your own views and opinions, when you’re a listener, when you’re considering free speech issues, and when you’re debating free speech policy questions. I offer a set of considerations for each scenario.

I began with the speaker, and the very first principle is about being conscientious with language, because I was thinking about that target audience of people who have become alienated and skeptical of the idea of free speech and who are not interested in reading a treatise on Oliver Wendell Holmes and the doctrine of incitement to imminent violence and what it means to shout fire in a crowded theater.

To young people, particularly today, that can seem quite remote. When we have done programs on campus, we’ve actually been

“Students . . . are not focused on the free speech implications of [curbing speech]. They haven’t thought through the risks of that—the fact that that power may someday be turned against somebody that they agree with, or be used to silence their own protest or demonstration. ” advised not to use the term free speech in the title of the program. “Don’t call it free speech, because they won’t show up.” They consider it a conservative, kind of right-leaning cause; they don’t consider it relevant to their social justice goals.

I wanted to frame this in a way that would speak to those who harbor those doubts. [We do that by] talking about conscientiousness with language, and the idea that as a speaker you have an obligation to think about who’s in your audience. It’s sort of a funny situation talking with you right now, because the fact is I have no idea who’s in our audience. We can’t see our audience. We don’t know how old are people, what are the races or ethnicities of people? Are there men and women? We know none of that. But what I urge in the book is, whether you’re posting on social media or writing articles or speaking in front of a classroom or on television, to try to give some thought to the breadth of people that might be in your audience and how they may react to what you say.

So if you’re talking about a particular community disability, understand how they like to refer to themselves and what kinds of metaphors or images may be considered objectionable or retrograde. I talk about the whole progression of how we talk about people with mental disabilities and this kind of euphemism treadmill, where over time different terms [are used]. Years ago terms like imbecile become very offensive and freighted with negative associations.

And then they get replaced with terms that are more neutral, that sometimes in some instances themselves over time kind of take on those negative connotations. But it’s something that as speakers in a world where

Above: Nossel and Darznik in their online Commonwealth Club conversation.

our speech is so often decontextualized, we’re communicating via the internet and people may not know who’s doing the speaking, they may not see the quote in any kind of context in terms of the give and take in which whatever you’ve said may have come up and people can reach snap judgments. So it’s important to have that conscientiousness.

That’s where I began the book.

DARZNIK: As a writer, I feel like I belong to a tribe that’s really attentive to language. But I have a fear myself—and I know that it exists in many of my writer colleagues and friends and students—that we have become perhaps over-conscientious about our language.

I’m thinking about instances like the debacle around [Jeanine Cummins’ novel] American Dirt. That was just one instance that I suppose you could construe as a kind of silencing, when a writer is essentially shoved off into kind of oblivion because her identity in some way is objectionable, that we don’t think that it’s a right person to tell the story. I wonder what you made of that episode and of episodes like it, and the lessons that we as writers and maybe also by extension publishers ought to extract from these moments where there’s a real calling out or canceling of a writer for one reason or another.

NOSSEL: The American Dirt incident happened after the book had gone to press.

But I do talk about the issue that it raises of what people call cultural appropriation or the idea that a writer who does not themself come from a particular background decides to tell a story of people from that background—in the case of American Dirt, a white writer with a Puerto Rican grandmother, but who told a story about an undocumented Mexican

immigrant. It was a major book, she had all sorts of blurbers, it was a big release. And she was hammered by Latinx writers who argued that she had no business writing the story and in some instances faulted the way that she portrayed her characters and the depiction that she gave of the culture that she was writing about. She responded that she had done a great deal of research. There were many people who stood by the book as just a riveting page-turner and a very moving account of a community and an experience that doesn’t get enough attention.

To me, the issues that raised are really inextricably linked with the barriers that have faced writers of color, as they have sought opportunities to be published and gain the support of the publishing and entertainment industries for their stories.

Historically if you look, and there are some tabulations of this, although they’re really incomplete in the children’s book area, there is an annual report that is published about how many stories there are by authors of color about characters of color. The numbers are beginning to climb up, but they have lagged very far behind the representation of these communities within American society. So there is a systemic pattern of exclusion that has affected these writers.

I think it’s a very legitimate complaint.

I also view it as a free expression issue. The obstacles that stand in the way of people from particular backgrounds, being able to participate fully in our discourse—whether that’s in journalism, in book publishing, in magazine writing, in entertainment—those all stand in the way of free expression. If we believe that free expression ought to be an open marketplace of ideas, that means OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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everybody has a role, an opportunity to play into that. If people do not, or their opportunities are impaired in some way, that to me is a constraint on free expression.

So I think that’s a major issue that the publishing industry must confront, and it’s manifesting itself in this kind of resentment toward white writers—or you know, it’s not always even white writers, there are other types of cultural appropriation that people accuse writers of porting over into a culture not their own.

My view is, ultimately, writers need to be able to tell whatever stories they want to. The whole premise of literature and the power of literature is that it’s a portal by which you can enter into a life that’s not your own and sort of inhabit a world that you would never personally experience and be inside the head of someone who is fundamentally different from you. The writer is the emissary, the conduit. To close off the writer’s freedom of imagination and say, “You’re an IranianAmerican writer. You may only tell the story of Iranian-American woman immigrants.

You can’t tell the story of a man. You can’t tell the story of somebody who’s born here in the United States. You can’t set a story in France or South Africa”—I think would be incredibly inhibiting and just impoverish the range of stories available to all of us and make the life of a writer much less interesting and free and deter people from entering into the endeavor.

So I think that’s very destructive. But I think those calls come from a place of great frustration in terms of the failure to confront these barriers. Until there is a more systemic effort to address them, I think these resentments are going persist and these debates are going to protract.

DARZNIK: As with every difficult subject, these debates are not new. They’ve just reached a fever pitch it seems in the current climate. That brings me then to think about the section of the book where you’re examining the principles of listening and thinking about what constraints perhaps there ought to be on free speech or free expression in instances where it’s used or usurped to advance hate speech, or in fact justify behavior or conduct that is hurtful.

How do we draw that line between offering this expansive, robust exchange of ideas and protecting groups that have been historically perhaps particularly vulnerable to these abuses?

NOSSEL: The United States has the most

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protective standard for hate speech of pretty much any jurisdiction in the world. In Europe and in Canada they have banned things like Holocaust denial, the idea of incitement to discrimination. So language that is denigrating against people based on a group identity can be banned and punished by the government. Here under the First Amendment, that’s not allowed. That doesn’t mean hate speech should be considered acceptable or permissible by any means.

I think one of the reasons we are in such a fraught moment in terms of free speech is that over the last four years, there has been an erosion of the taboos that used to play some role—never perfect—in protecting against hateful speech. We’ve seen kind of an endorsement of hateful speech at the highest levels of our government, from the president, who demeans immigrants, women, people of color, people on the basis of religion, even disability. What that has done in society I think is make a lot of us feel, myself included, that we need to do more to protect people from the impact of this hateful speech that is being spewed from people in positions of authority. So the impulse to then police smaller spaces, whether it’s a campus, a classroom, a magazine that you’re part of, an organization, and be quite intolerant of noxious speech in those contexts intensifies.

It’s an effort to sort of correct against something that is seen as harmful and spreading throughout our society as a whole.

Now, in terms of dealing with hate speech, I think it’s a serious issue and I devote a whole chapter to the harms of [hate] speech, because I think it is the case that free speech defenders historically have been a bit reluctant to fully acknowledge those harms for fear that doing so would open the door to censorship and constraints on speech. I think that’s the wrong attitude. I think as free speech defenders, we have to own up to the fact that particularly where hateful speech and messages are pervasive—so somebody who’s lived their whole life being on the receiving end of racial slurs or being treated as if they’re the hired help at a setting where they’ve come as a student or as a professor or been subject to stereotypes—can be incredibly damaging psychologically, to academic performance and even physiologically. So I think we have to come to grips with that. I call on free speech defenders to fight against hateful speech and hate crimes. But what I don’t subscribe to is the idea that we’d be better off if we gave our government greater leeway to

ban and punish hateful speech.

I feel like this administration is the perfect illustration of that, because if they weren’t constrained by the First Amendment and Donald Trump had the leeway to punish hateful speech, what is his idea of hateful speech? It’s criticism of him. Affording him that authority would be in my mind incredibly dangerous. People may have a vision of some magical version of a combination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall and Barack Obama who would adjudicate where the boundary lies in terms of what is hateful speech. But the reality is it would be courts and judges and prosecutors, and affording them that discretion could be incredibly confining and open the door to misuse.

In my view, the greater the power that government has to police speech, the more likely that they will use it to serve their own prerogative. So I’m just very wary of that solution, but I do acknowledge that hate speech poses, a serious problem.

DARZNIK: It was inevitable we were going

Nossel says that social media platforms have usurped the roles traditionally played by media and in-person discussion of issues. (Photo by LoboStudioHamburg.)

to talk about the administration of the First Amendment. It applies to government intervention, not private platforms like Facebook or Twitter. How do we combat this often purposeful misunderstanding, which is effectively being claimed by the right wing, to obscure these lines? The right to free speech, it seems to me, the very definition of it seems imperiled.

NOSSEL: Yeah. There are really complex issues about how these platforms now hold dominion over such large swaths of our discourse. They roll up into one the functions that used to be performed by newspapers, magazines, town meetings, family photo albums, coffee klatches, telephone calls. All these things that we used to do and vehicles for expression now have been kind of bound together in Facebook and Twitter and a few

other platforms. Overwhelmingly [people], especially young people, are getting nearly all of their news through those platforms.

We’ve seen the weaponization of speech.

In many different categories, whether it’s terrorist recruitment, conspiracy theories like QAnon spreading fake news and false information about COVID-19 quackery, spurious cures—in terms of the election, the level of disinformation that is escalating right now poses a very direct threat to our democracy.

I see a sort of a sowing of mistrust in society writ large. The idea that free speech or concerns are implicated in relation to these platforms is absolutely legitimate.

And you’re right, they are not subject to the First Amendment that protects us only against encroachments on free speech by government. While Americans are used to reflectively thinking of the First Amendment, the notion there is that we can rely on lawyers and courts to figure out this stuff for us. Yet with so many of the controversies that we’re talking about right now, whether a fake or doctored video of Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden should be taken off Facebook, or whether a student should be punished for something that they say in class or a poster that they put up in the dorm room that is offensive—these are issues that don’t implicate government action at all, and yet they are governing what can and can’t be said in society, what book you can publish. That doesn’t involve a state action.

So the First Amendment doesn’t have any answers for us. That’s why I sort of issued this call to action for us as citizens. The courts have their part, and I don’t want to underplay that because there are issues—this John Bolton book is one that has arisen just today, where we need to guard against government overreach and muzzling speech. But that’s not going to be enough to keep our free speech protections and civic discourse robust and open. We have to take action as individuals.

DARZNIK: I have a question from one of the viewers, which is whether conservative critics have a point on cancel culture. What’s your opinion of that?

NOSSEL: I think the term cancel culture is used so elastically as to be almost useless. It’s everything [from] a Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, where I think, yeah, most of us could agree these people have committed egregious criminal conduct and it’s perfectly fair perhaps not to want to associate with them or watch their movies or television shows.

On the flip side, somebody who makes a bad editorial decision, puts out an ill-considered tweet, says something questionable in the classroom and is confronted with calls for discipline, removal, firing. There’s an incident at Skidmore College this week where a professor attended a rally on behalf of the police. So that it’s not even clear that he was a participant in the rally. He may have just been sort of an onlooker checking out what was going on, but he was seen there and there’s now a movement to boycott his classes.

And there’ve been calls by students to get him fired from his position at the university.

The university sort of issued this rather tepid statement in response, which we criticized.

It comes to that kind of thing where to me cancel culture really can go too far.

In the book, I have a whole chapter devoted to sort of conscionable call outs, because I think there is a place absolutely for rejecting and speaking out against noxious expression.

We talked a few minutes ago about hateful speech, and when someone uses a racial slur or says something that is degrading, it is important to speak out. It’s important that people who are victimized by that feel the sense of support. It’s important that the speaker hear back that this is not acceptable, that people are not just going to be silent and look the other way. But the right way to do it depends on the circumstances. There are some circumstances where you could approach someone privately to say, “Hey, you know, your phrasing in the email was sort of problematic. It might be seen as dismissive to a women or to a particular community.

You might want to consider rewording that,” or, “Your last tweet really rubbed me the wrong way, and here’s why.” If you think the person might be receptive, if they’re not a serial offender, if you believe the offense was unintentional, that call-in can be a much more effective, less confrontational way to respond that doesn’t put the person into a defensive crouch.

There are other situations where I think a public call-out is warranted and where even canceling somebody is warranted, but we’ve gotten into kind of a climate where in the minds of some, the answer to all noxious speech is that the person becomes sort of permanently untouchable. Even if the offense is relatively minor, it can carry this lasting stigma. It’s not like you’re canceled for six months and then it expires and you’re back in good graces. It can be sometimes difficult to work your way back.

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89TH ANNUAL CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD WINNERS THE ANNUAL CALIFORNIA

Book Awards, which began in 1931, recognize the state’s best writers and illuminate the wealth and diversity of literature written in California.

Monetary prizes are given in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, juvenile literature, young adult literature, first work of fiction, Californiana and notable contribution to publishing.

You can watch the entire 89th Annual California Book Awards program, which took place August 28, 2020, at commonwealthclub.org/videos

GOLD MEDALS FICTION Your House Will Pay, Steph Cha, Ecco FIRST FICTION Home Remedies, Xuan Juliana Wang, Hogarth NONFICTION The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer, Riverhead JUVENILE A Place to Belong, Cynthia Kadohata, Atheneum YOUNG ADULT Frankly in Love, David Yoon, G.P Putnam’s Sons POETRY Magical Negro, Morgan Parker, Tin House Books

I

SILVER MEDALS FIRST FICTION Last of Her Name, Mimi Lok, Kaya Press NONFICTION Know My Name, Chanel Miller, Viking POETRY A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom, Harmony Holiday, Birds, LLC SPECIAL AWARDS CALIFORNIANA The Dreamt Land, Mark Arax, Knopf CONTRIBUTION TO PUBLISHING Jim Marshall: Show Me the Picture, Chronicle Books

“Our Non-Fiction Gold Medal winner, n late August, The Commonwealth Club of California announced the David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded winners of the 89th annual Cali- Knee, is at once an incisive history of Nafornia Book Awards. Book lovers tive America from 1890 to the present and a deeply moving memoir of from around the life as a member of the Ojibstate—and around Even in this time the world—got to hear of social, political, we Tribe.

“The Non-Fiction Silfrom the winning authors economic and ver Medal winner, Chanel and publishers themselves Miller’s Know My Name, is in a live-streamed program public health challenges, the an extraordinarily powerful on August 28. memoir of sexual assault and “The California Book awards testify the failure of the American Awards jury is proud to to the creativity justice system to punish it. announce our 2020 medOur Fiction Gold Medal alists,” says Peter Fish, chair and ambition of of this year’s awards. “Even California writers winner, Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, is a taut, rivin this time of social, po- and publishers. litical, economic and pub- They remind us of eting, unsparing look at the ways race, class, and history lic health challenges, the the vital impordivide families and a city.

California Book Awards “Our First Fiction Gold testify to the creativity tance of literature Medal winner, Xuan Juliand ambition of Califor- in helping us ana Wang’s Home Remedies, nia writers and publishers. understand our is a brilliantly kaleidoscopic They remind us of the vital world in all its short story collection that importance of literature in difficulties and ranges from Beijing to Paris helping us understand our to Manhattan’s Chinatown. world in all its difficulties complexities.

The stories in our First Ficand complexities. This year, we’re privileged to give medals to an es- tion Silver Medal winner, Mimi Lok’s Last pecially impressive roster of books and of Her Name, are equally adventurous, gracefully leaping from World War II-era authors.

Hong Kong to contemporary London.

“Our Young Adult Gold Medal winner,” continues Fish, “is David Yoon’s Frankly in Love, which combines sweet romance, goofy humor, and keen anti-racism in one warm, intelligent, life-affirming book. Our Juvenile Gold Medal winner, Cynthia Kadohata’s A Place to Belong, brings a tragic period in the American past to heartbreaking life today. In Poetry, our Gold Medal winner, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro, features deftly crafted poems that blend rage and despair with razor-sharp humor. Our Poetry Silver Medal winner, Harmony Holiday’s A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom, is innovative, funny and brutal.

“Finally,” Fish says, “each year the California Book Awards gives two special awards. Our Californiana Award goes this year to Mark Arax for The Dreamt Land, an epic history of the San Joaquin Valley’s rise from 19th century wilderness to 21st century agricultural powerhouse.

“Our Contribution to Publishing Award goes to Chronicle Books for Jim Marshall: Show Me the Picture, a stunning compilation of Marshall’s unforgettable photographs of 1960s and 1970s rock stars, jazz musicians, and civil rights leaders.”

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

39

The Commonwealth Club organizes nearly 500 events every year on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports. Programs are held throughout the Bay Area in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Marin County, and the East Bay. Standard programs are typically one hour long and frequently include panel discussions or speeches followed by a question and answer session. Many evening programs include a networking reception with wine.

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INSIGHT

DR. GLORIA C. DUFFY, PRESIDENT AND CEO

Coming Soon

W

atch this space . . . a new InSight column will be posted within a few days!

Photo courtesy of Gloria Duffy

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THE COMMO N WE AL TH

PDT Join us for an inspiring hour of powerful and engaging conversation with some of the Bay Area’s favorite thought-leaders and celebrity guests.

Your vital support ensures the Commonwealth Club will be able to continue to keep you and our greater community informed and connected throughout 2021.

One lucky attendee will be the winner of a door prize valued at $2,000 and all donors will receive a digital goodie bag with discount codes for restaurants, wine & spirit shops, and other local businesses in your region.

Registration is free! To quickly register or donate text Club1Home to 41444 or visit www.commmonwealthclub.org/virtualgala A HOME FOR IDEAS

URGENT PROGRAMMING

BALANCED PERSPECTIVES

UPCOMING HIGHLIGHTS Find these and more programs at commonwealthclub.org/events

WEEK TO WEEK CALIF. ELECTION SPECIAL

CNN’S FAREED ZAKARIA

GOV. ANDREW CUOMO

PAOLA RAMOS

MARIA BARTIROMO AND JAMES FREEMAN

U.C. PRESIDENT MICHAEL DRAKE

OCTOBER 7

OCTOBER 28

OCTOBER 19

OCTOBER 28

OCTOBER 20

NOVEMBER 4