A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

If the ICE officer who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week is not prosecuted criminally, or even if he is, can he also be sued? Legal experts have different takes. Last week I spoke with a police misconduct attorney in Minnesota who seemed hopeful about the odds that Good’s family might face in court. Others I spoke with were somewhat less optimistic. Winning lawsuits against cops who kill “is challenging by design,” as Michelle Lapointe, legal director of the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights advocacy group, wrote on the group’s website. To flesh that out, I caught up with Lauren Bonds of the National Police Accountability Project, a national group that works with civil rights attorneys to file lawsuits over police misconduct. Our conversation below, edited for length and clarity, explores the legal hurdles to beating an ICE officer like Good’s killer, Jonathan Ross, in civil court. It’s notoriously tough to sue police, but it’s even harder when the officer is federal. What are the challenges? You’re absolutely right: All the problems you have with suing a regular law enforcement officer exist, and then you have additional barriers. There are two distinct pathways to sue a federal officer for misconduct or excessive force: One is a Bivens action—a court-created pathway that allows you to sue federal agents for constitutional violations. And then there’s the Federal Tort Claims Act, a statutory provision that allows for these lawsuits to move forward. The problem with Bivens is it’s been really, really narrowed in recent years by this particular Supreme Court. First there was Hernandez v. Mesa, a 2020 case where a Border Patrol agent shot and killed a child on the other side of the border in Mexico. And the court said it didn’t fit within the narrow confines of Bivens. And then there was a case in 2022, Egbert v. Boule, that foreclosed any new Bivens action: Basically the court said that this type of civil rights violation is something you can pursue under Bivens, but if it’s anything new, we’re not going that far. The Federal Torts Claims Act (FTCA) is where more people are going to get relief for violations by federal officers. It basically says that any tort that you would suffer under state law [such as false arrest, assault, or battery] you can sue the federal government for—with vast exceptions: There’s one that comes up a lot for law enforcement cases, the “discretionary function” exception, which says an officer can’t be sued for anything that he or she needs to use discretion for. Courts have done a good job of interpreting that to mean discretion in terms of policymaking decisions, but some courts get it wrong. So those are the two pathways—they’re both narrow, and they’re both complicated. There’s the issue of qualified immunity for police officers, or even sovereign immunity for the federal government, right? Sovereign immunity [a legal principle that says the federal government can’t be sued without its consent] wouldn’t come up in an FTCA case, because it’s a statute in which Congress waived sovereign immunity and agreed to be sued under certain circumstances. It does come up as a defense when [the government is] saying, Oh, this case falls within an exception, but they can’t assert it otherwise. If you were to file a constitutional claim under Bivens, they could invoke qualified immunity, another protection that law enforcement officers have; it asks whether there is case law in the circuit that would have put the officer on notice that their conduct was unconstitutional. [If not, the officer is essentially off the hook.] A lot of courts have taken that requirement to an extreme place, basically saying it’s got to be identical facts—like there are cases that have been thrown out on qualified immunity because a person was sitting with their hands up versus standing with their hands up. That level of granularity has been applied to defeat civil rights claims. And so it’s a difficult barrier to overcome. Given how hard it can be to sue, what about criminal charges? It’s definitely possible. There isn’t any immunity from criminal prosecution that federal officers are entitled to, none that I’m aware of anyway. I know this issue came up when some ICE raids were planned to take place in San Francisco back in early fall, with the DA of San Francisco asserting that she did have authority to pursue criminal action against ICE agents if they broke California laws. What about the Supremacy Clause? It protects federal officers from state prosecution if they were performing their federal duties, right? The Supremacy Clause protects federal officers when they’re engaged in legal activity, and so if their conduct is illegal, they wouldn’t be protected. So in Minneapolis, if the officer engaged in a Fourth Amendment violation, he’d be beyond the protection of the Supremacy Clause. This issue has come up with California, too. The Trump administration is suing California over new state legislation that would create a crime for wearing a mask and obscuring your identity if you’re a law enforcement officer. And it’s suing Illinois [for a state law that allows residents to sue ICE agents in certain circumstances]. Those lawsuits have asserted that the Supremacy Clause makes these [state] laws unconstitutional—that you can’t take any action against federal law enforcement officers under state law. Have you heard of cases in this past year of ICE officers being sued or prosecuted for misconduct? I haven’t seen any prosecutions yet. In terms of lawsuits, we’ve seen an increase in FTCA cases against DHS agents. Regarding the recent killing in Minneapolis, what do you see as the main path to accountability, and the main challenges? There’s going to be all the standard barriers that we talked about, including the Supremacy Clause defense, particularly because you have so many high-ranking federal officials, including the president and Secretary Noem, who are saying that this shooting was the right thing to do and was consistent with him carrying out his obligations. On the civil side, this could be a potentially difficult Bivens or FTCA case. I would note, since we’re on the heels of January 6: Ashli Babbitt, the woman who died during the Capital insurrection, filed a FTCA case, or her family did, and got a $5 million settlement from the government. It’s hard to factually distinguish these cases. The federal government has authority to settle a case like that, but since the Trump administration is taking a very opposing position against Good, the woman who died in Minneapolis, I would be surprised if they would be willing to put money on the table.

Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective.  “At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Masters believed in that until his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The 17-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which doctors later attributed to the Taser. Masters’ training had led him to believe something like that could never happen.  This week on Reveal, we partner with Lava for Good’s podcast Absolute: Taser Incorporated and its host, Nick Berardini, to learn what the company that makes the Taser knew about the dangers of its weapon and didn’t say. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2025.

After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis this week, firing his weapon as she attempted to drive away, protesters have amassed around the country, many wondering: Can that officer be taken to court? The Trump administration, predictably, says the agent, Jonathan Ross, is immune from prosecution. “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Thursday. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.” But what do independent attorneys say? After the shooting, I reached out to Robert Bennett, a veteran lawyer in Minneapolis who has worked on hundreds of federal police misconduct cases during his 50-year career. “I’ve deposed thousands of police officers,” he says. “ICE agents do not have absolute immunity.” Bennett says the state of Minnesota has the right to prosecute an ICE agent who commits misconduct. But, he adds, that might be difficult now that the FBI has essentially booted the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension off the case—blocking access, the BCA wrote, to “case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.” In the conversation below, edited for length and clarity, Bennett discusses how the shooting in Minneapolis unfolded and the legal paths forward. When you watched the videos of this shooting, what did you see? You saw what could be easily identified as four ICE officers. And they’re all experiencing, to a greater or lesser extent, the same set of operative facts, the same factual stimuli. But only one officer, seeing the set of circumstances, picked up his weapon. None of the other officers did. That’s a bad fact [for Ross]. Also, the officer walked in front of the car, which counts against him in the reasonableness analysis. If you look at the recent Supreme Court case of Barnes v. Felix, that’s problematic for the ICE agent. What happened in Barnes v. Felix? It’s a shooting case where the officer walked around the car, [lunged and jumped onto the door sill], and put himself in harm’s way. You can’t bootstrap your own bad situation [to] allow a use of force. What did the court find? They sent it back to the trial court to consider it. But there’s good language in there. You said it’s bad news for the ICE agent, Ross, that his colleagues didn’t pull their weapons. Can you talk more about that? Sure, we’ve had several other cases. There was a tactical semicircle, a bunch of officers aiming their guns at a couple fighting over a knife; one officer out of the eight or nine fired his weapon, none of the others perceived the need to. And that’s important because it suggests the officer who fired wasn’t reasonable, right? Under federal law, an officer can only use deadly force if they had a reasonable fear that they could otherwise be killed or harmed. It’s an objective reasonableness standard. So it’s not whether you were personally scared out of your wits and fired your gun. It’s: Would an objectively reasonable officer at the scene have fired his weapon, believing he was in danger of death or immediate bodily harm? In Ross’ case, there was a previous incident—Ross had shot [with a Taser] through a window before at somebody in the car, and the guy hit the gas, and Ross had stuck his arm through the broken window, and he got cut [and dragged about 100 yards]. And so he was supposedly reacting to that. He’s not an objective officer at that point. The Trump administration has suggested that Ross is immune from prosecution as a federal officer. Why do you say he’s not? There’s plenty of case law that allows for the prosecution of federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE. And it’s clear under the law that a federal officer who shoots somebody in Minnesota and kills them is subject to a Minnesota investigation and Minnesota law. Now, the feds just took that away this morning, and they’ve already decided who’s at fault. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was going to do an investigation to find out. But I can tell you, the federal code provides that when there is a state criminal prosecution of a federal officer in Minnesota or any other state, the officer has the right to remove the case to federal court. So if Ross was charged in Hennepin County, he could remove the case to the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, have a federal judge deal with his case. The code is explicitly predicting such a prosecution could take place. If there was immunity of an absolute nature, you wouldn’t need that section, right? The administration seems to argue that Ross is protected under the Supremacy Clause, which essentially says that states can’t charge a federal officer if the officer was acting within the scope of his duties. Do you think killing people is acting within the scope of their duties? What if they decided to kill the 435,000 people in the city of Minneapolis while they were here, would the Supremacy Clause give them a free pass? I don’t think so. Also, if there was an actual independent investigation, and you apply the actual federal case law to this, and you concluded that Ross violated her rights by using excessive deadly force, he could be indicted federally. Now, nobody believes that would ever happen now: For a guy who talked a lot about rigged things, this [investigation] is rigged. Kash Patel took over the autopsy, so who knows, maybe they’ll say she died of a heart attack when she was backing up. If the officer isn’t charged criminally, the other route is a lawsuit. What are the challenges there? My team and I think there are ways to do it. I hope that her mother, or her next of kin, calls us and we’ll figure out a Bivens action or a Federal Tort Claims Act case, or something else. If you look at this case carefully, it has all the hallmarks of cases we’ve either won or settled for amounts of money no reasonable person would pay us if we weren’t going to win. It is essentially a garden variety unjustified use of deadly force case. And that’s based on the facts we know now; I bet the case is going to get better.

The first pilot episode of Reveal exposed how the Department of Veterans Affairs was overprescribing opioids to veterans and contributing to an overdose crisis. Journalist Aaron Glantz explained how he received—surprisingly quickly—a decade’s worth of opioid prescription data from the federal government.  “Sometimes, you have to sue to get the records,” he said. “I have to think that there were some people over there in DC who were as concerned as we were about this.” After that first show was made, host Al Letson didn’t know what to expect. “We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” he said.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Congress held hearings during a government lockdown, and there’s been a sea change in the way veterans are prescribed painkillers. And today, the show is on more than 500 stations.  This week on Reveal, we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired.   This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in March 2025.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Hamm v. Smith, a death penalty case that will decide whether intellectual disability can be ruled out on the basis of IQ tests alone. Long before he was convicted of murder in 1997, Joseph Clifton Smith was placed in schooling for an intellectual disability. Smith had five documented IQ test scores by the time he was tried, all around the bottom five percent of the population—four of which, his legal team has argued, fall in the range of mild intellectual disability. The state of Alabama disagrees: anyone scoring 70 or above on one test, its attorney general contends, is intelligent enough to execute. In 2022, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument—setting the stage for a Supreme Court turnaround on IQ and capital punishment. > “If you tilt your head just right and squint…without considering anything > else, then you get the result [Alabama] thinks you should get.” The Supreme Court has previously stated that IQ tests alone fail to holistically determine intellectual disability, in 2002’s Atkins v. Virginia—which also established that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the Eighth Amendment—reaffirmed in 2014 in Hall v. Florida, and most recently in 2017’s Moore v. Texas. But Atkins and Hall were close decisions, and the Court’s conservative majority has since grown. “It’s important to have a holistic assessment of the person,” said Shira Wakschlag, general counsel and senior executive officer for legal advocacy at The Arc, such as educational records and other documentation from childhood. IQ scores are a factor in determining intellectual disability, Wakschlag said, but they vary, and the tests don’t always offer consistent results. An amicus brief from the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and Alabama Psychological Association in support of Smith’s case similarly argued that “because the diagnostic inquiry is necessarily holistic and requires the exercise of clinical judgment, no single datum—such as IQ test scores—is dispositive of intellectual functioning.”  An October filing by Alabama’s Department of Corrections commissioner, John Q. Hamm, pushes for a very narrow definition of intellectual disability defined by an IQ below 70, and argues that “the ‘holistic’ rhetoric’ is ‘just window dressing’ for a novel and indefensible change in constitutional law.’” “If you tilt your head just right and squint, and apply this particular statistical principle in isolation, without considering anything else, then you get the result that [Alabama] thinks you should get,” said University of New Mexico School of Law adjunct professor Ann Delpha, whose work focuses on intellectual disabilities and the justice system. “That’s not what intellectual disability is about.” “The court has said repeatedly…at different times, that intellectual disability is determined through clinical judgment, through a comprehensive analysis,” Wakschlag said. “It is not a number.” The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case is perhaps unexpected, given the clear precedent in its rulings that IQ tests are not enough to establish intellectual disability, and may signal a likely break with precedent. A decision that effectively overturns the Court’s past rulings on intellectual disability and the death penalty would encourage states to define down intellectual disability, and any safeguards that come with it, in their criminal justice systems—in line with a wider push, echoed by conservative proposals like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to strip disability protections from schools, workplaces, and other sites of public life.

Though it was hardly a national focal point of the 2025 elections on Tuesday, Maine became the twenty-second state to adopt a “red flag” law for regulating guns, with the approval of nearly 59 percent of voters. Starting in January, Maine will allow families to petition a judge to remove firearms temporarily from a family member who appears to pose a threat to themselves or others. It’s a notable development in a state with a strong gun and hunting culture, where even the Democratic governor, Janet Mills, opposed the measure.   The new policy stands as a clear response to the devastating mass shooting that took place in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023 at the hands of a profoundly troubled man, whose worsening condition had long alarmed those around him. As I reported previously: > Army reservist Robert Card, the 40-year-old suicidal perpetrator who killed 18 > people and injured 13 others at a bowling alley and a bar on October 25, > displayed numerous warning signs far in advance. His erratic behavior going > back months included complaints he was hearing voices, angry and paranoid > claims about being smeared as a pedophile, punching a colleague, and > threatening to shoot up the Army base where he worked. Some of his family > members and supervisors sounded the alarm. After a two-week stay and a > psychiatric evaluation in July at an Army hospital, Army officials directed > that Card should not possess a weapon or handle ammunition. Despite the fact that people close to Card felt he was becoming dangerous, they had little possible recourse; at the time, the state had a weaker “yellow flag” law in place that allows only law enforcement to seek removal of guns—and only after the person of concern has been given a medical evaluation. As Card’s case showed, though, that is a high bar to taking action. A few weeks before the massacre, as I further reported, “the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, which had communicated with family members and Army authorities since May, attempted a wellness check at Card’s residence.” Unable to locate him, they alerted other agencies that he was “armed and dangerous” and should be approached with “extreme caution” based on his reported behaviors.    In other words, opportunity for intervention at an earlier stage of Card’s downward spiral, flagged by family members and others, was already gone. An investigation later published by the New York Times revealed that Card had suffered from serious brain injury connected with his military service. As red flag laws have spread throughout the country in recent years, research in California and beyond has shown that they can be effective for preventing suicide and mass shootings. (A majority of mass shootings culminate with the perpetrators ending their own lives.) California led the way with the policy in the aftermath of a 2014 mass killing near University of California, Santa Barbara. During my recent two-year investigation into that notorious case, violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office told me that in the decade since, the state’s red flag law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of, the threat management cases that we’ve worked.” Evolving policy nationally on gun regulations and violence prevention remains a mixed picture, particularly since Donald Trump returned to the White House. He quickly issued executive orders aimed at rolling back years of progress on red flag laws, “ghost guns,” and more, and he has gutted key violence-prevention programs within the federal government. Some Republican allies of Trump at the state level have moved in a similar direction, including in Texas. That state has suffered several of the worst gun massacres in recent memory, from a Walmart in El Paso to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, but nonetheless, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the state GOP’s Anti-Red Flag Act into law in June. In stark contrast to Maine’s new policy, the use of such violence-prevention strategies—once backed even by Abbott himself—is essentially no longer an option in Texas.

Months before hundreds of federal immigration agents raided a rundown apartment complex in Chicago—some even rappelling onto the roof from Blackhawk helicopters in the early hours of September 30—local law enforcement had repeatedly visited the building to try to remove some immigrants living there, according to a longtime tenant. The immigrants, many from Venezuela, had fallen behind on rent, and the landlord, a real estate investor from Wisconsin, wanted them gone. During multiple visits, officers from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office locked some of the people out of their units, says Cassandra Murray, 55, a US citizen who lived on the building’s fourth floor for about a decade. The place was in dire need of renovations—mold, mice, broken elevators, and a putrid stench were common—but despite the barely habitable conditions, some of the evicted families returned soon after the deputies left. “I felt sorry for them, especially the women with children, because I could tell these people had nowhere to go,” Murray told me. The raid at 7500 S. South Shore Drive became a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s militarized effort to detain and deport immigrants. Nearly 300 federal officers from Border Patrol, the FBI, and other agencies arrested 37 people, forcibly separating children from their parents and pulling residents into vans outside. Afterward, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who criticized the operation, urged state agencies to investigate whether agents had used excessive force against kids in the building or infringed on people’s rights But the story of the raid is not only a story about aggressive agents; it is also a story about the struggles asylum seekers face while seeking safe and affordable housing. Some of the Venezuelans at 7500 S. South Shore were reportedly in the building without a lease; others had moved in with temporary rental assistance from a state program, but that funding ended and city-run shelters for immigrants had closed. “They were all just looking for somewhere to stay,” says Murray. To understand the raid, you need to rewind to 2022, when Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott began busing migrants to so-called sanctuary cities, including Chicago, to protest the Biden administration’s immigration policies. At the height of Abbott’s political stunt, 12 to 15 busloads of immigrants were arriving in Chicago every day—about 28,000 people by late 2023, and 50,000 by late 2024. Many slept on the floors of police stations or at O’Hare airport, waiting for space in shelters. Resettling the new arrivals was a financial strain: In November 2023, Chicago’s City Council allocated $150 million and the state chipped in another $160 million, on top of the $176 million that had already been given by the city, state, and federal governments. The funding would go toward an intake center and winterized tent shelters that could hold 2,000 migrants for up to six months at a time. But these were temporary solutions: By late 2024, as border crossings from Mexico plummeted, the city prepared to close the shelters in January 2025. Instead, Chicago announced a new “unified” shelter system that would house migrants together with non-migrants experiencing homelessness. “This will help to ensure that we have a single and equitable shelter system for anyone,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said at the time. > “That building was fucked up before the raid,” says a tenant organizer. “Now > you’ve got this horrific thing that happened.” There were downsides: Migrants who had been in the United States for longer than 30 days were no longer eligible for placement in a shelter. And there wouldn’t be enough beds for everyone. “Could this lead to people on the street?” Johnson added. “I don’t want to see anyone lose, right? But the harsh reality is that we can do what we can afford. We’ve been stretched to the limits.” In 2022, the state had also created a program to help transition immigrants from shelters to apartments; the Asylum Seeker Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ASERAP) provided up to six months of rental assistance. But this, too, was temporary. In 2023, six months of rental assistance was reduced to three months, sparking concerns that people might be forced back onto the streets if their immigration cases stalled and they didn’t have work permits yet. Three months “is such a short amount of time,” Charlotte Long, then a housing specialist connecting migrants with apartments, told Block Club Chicago. By mid-2024, ASERAP, which also relied on federal funding, was no longer taking applications. The Illinois Department of Human Services told me that the program assisted more than 6,600 households from 2022 to mid-2024. The state did not track what happened to immigrants after they were placed in apartments and their financial assistance ran out. But some were clearly struggling. In 2024, Injustice Watch reported that Illinois officials had placed recent Venezuelan arrivals in an apartment in Woodlawn that city officials had taken to court over unsafe conditions, such as rats and flooding. Others wound up in the South Shore neighborhood—the “eviction capital” of Chicago, as organizer Dixon Romeo, from the group Southside Together, put it to me. In fact, WBEZ reported that asylum seekers receiving state rental assistance were more likely to end up in the 60649 zip code, which includes South Shore, than anywhere else in the city. Broken and boarded up windows at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. Federal agents raided the building during the early morning hours of September 30. Residents were awaken by flash-bang grenades and helicopters.Joshua Lott/The Washington Post/Getty The apartment complex at 7500 S. South Shore was in disarray long before federal agents tore it apart. For years, tenants’ maintenance requests were ignored by management. In 2024, Jonah Karsh of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization started helping residents demand improvements, including having their gas turned on so they could cook. But it was an uphill battle. City lawyers eventually sued the owner’s companies for a long list of code violations, noting in court documents that fire extinguishers were missing and “all stairways are filthy with strong smell of urine.” “It’s difficult to walk through without swallowing a gnat,” reporters for WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times wrote after they visited the site. “It’s dimly lit inside and completely dark in some corners. A stray cat roams the second floor, likely hunting the mice or cockroaches that residents say infest the building…Elevators are out of order and filled with garbage…Water pours through the ceiling of one unit, pooling below.” “That building was fucked up before the raid,” says Romeo, the organizer at Southside Together, who has canvassed tenants there. “City, state, county, federal government—everybody has a role in why that building looks like it does. Now you’ve got this horrific thing that happened and there’s a lot of light on the situation,” he adds, “but there are buildings like that in every city in America, whether they’re raided by ICE or not. There are housing issues here.” > According to news reports, one resident saw someone he believed to be a worker > from the building photographing units “where the Venezuelans lived.” The 130-unit complex is owned by Trinity Flood, the Wisconsin real estate investor, who purchased it in 2020, along with two other distressed South Side buildings. After the sale, she sued the previous owners, alleging they’d overcharged her and hadn’t informed her about all the renovation needs, or that the apartment required 24-hour security, which Flood claimed would cost $15,000 a month. (The suit was settled in 2023, according to The Real Deal, a real estate news outlet that examined the property’s history of code violations.) The building had failed the past 14 annual inspections, per city records, and in April Wells Fargo sued to foreclose on the building. Both the bank and the city have requested that a court-appointed receiver be put in charge of the complex, but litigation is ongoing. Murray, the fourth-floor tenant, says conditions took a turn for the worse after Flood assigned a firm called Strength in Management to manage the building in 2024. The new company did not hire security for the building prior to the raid, even though the front doors didn’t lock. (Neither Flood nor Strength in Management responded to my requests for comment.) “The building was wide open, like we lived in a barn,” says Murray. Anyone could walk in. As a result, the unhoused population grew, driven in part by immigrants, including some whose rental assistance had run out. Murray estimates there were more squatters in the building than paying tenants. (Some had stopped paying rent in protest of the abysmal conditions.) Strength in Management filed 25 eviction cases in 2024, more than in the prior four years combined; sheriff’s deputies came around multiple times this year, Murray told me, but the squatters kept coming back, or new ones would arrive. “I remember hearing on the news about how the shelters shut down for them,” she adds. (The Sheriff’s Office declined to comment.) In August, a city attorney told a lawyer for Wells Fargo that Strength in Management had been unable to “re-assert control over the building” after it was overrun by “armed occupants.” The Department of Homeland Security, too, claimed its agents targeted the building because it was “known to be frequented” by members and associates of the Tren de Aragua gang; prior to the raid, a 25-year-old resident of the building was charged with murdering someone in the neighborhood. (DHS has since admitted that only 8 of the 37 people arrested in the raid had a criminal record, and only one was a verified Tren de Aragua member.) Murray says her immigrant neighbors weren’t causing trouble, and she never saw any gang activity or other behavior that scared her: “Even though the building was open the way it was, nobody ever bothered nobody—the building was quiet.” When some immigrants first moved in two or three years ago, she says, she felt frustrated that not all of them were taking their trash out, but they were receptive to her complaints and ultimately proved to be friendly neighbors: It was the Venezuelans who put up lights in the dark hallways, she says—not management—and they swept and mopped the floors and cleaned the stains off the stairs.   Debris and personal items belonging to Venezuelan immigrants were strewn in a hallway.Jim Vondruska/Reuters/Redux In the early hours of September 30, while residents were asleep in their beds, hundreds of federal agents stormed the apartment. Rodrick Johnson, a US citizen, told Block Club Chicago that he heard “people dropping on the roof” before FBI agents busted through his door. Officers handcuffed occupants with zip ties, then led them outside to vans, where they sat for hours wondering whether they would be arrested. It’s unclear who tipped off the feds for the raid. Chicago officials said they didn’t have advance notice about it or collaborate on the operation. Days earlier, according to WBEZ and the Sun-Times, one resident saw someone he believed to be a worker from the building photographing the units “where the Venezuelans lived.” After the raid, reporters found a map crumpled up in the entryway of the apartment that labeled each unit as either “vacant,” “tenant,” or “firearms.” The units designated as “vacant” had been raided—tape was left over their doors, labeled with the letters “PC,” according to a video I was shown of one hallway and a photo from WBEZ. Most units designated as “tenant” appeared to have been left alone, leading to questions: How did federal officers know about the building’s layout and occupancy? Karsh, of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, notes that the landlord or property management would have likely possessed that information. Had federal immigration agents, he wondered, been deployed as an extralegal eviction force? After the raid, a small moving crew told Block Club Chicago that they were clearing out the now-empty units, but they didn’t say who hired them. “Doors were boarded up,” the outlet added. “In one room, there were zip ties and blood stains on the floor next to baby shoes.” As journalists came by, seeking more information, property management informed tenants that it would finally lock the front door and hire armed security. Murray, who just moved out, is frustrated about the timing. “Now they have security because they don’t want them to see the real truth,” she says. “But we have been asking for security for years and couldn’t get it.”

When Trymaine Lee began writing his first book, he didn’t realize that the gun violence he was reporting on was such a central part of his own story. But then he began digging into his family history, only to fully learn about a series of racially motivated murders involving his ancestors. Lee’s book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, soon became more personal than he’d planned. He realized he needed to “speak honestly about what I now know to be crushing down on me, which is the weight of this family history.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 2 of a conversation about generational trauma, the challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how learning about his family’s history has changed how he writes and reports on Black Americans killed by violence. And if you haven’t listened to part 1, you can find that conversation here. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: You have this book that you finished right before this massive heart attack and then you dive back in to make your edits and to polish it up, but your experience just changed the whole trajectory of the book. Talk to me about that Trymaine Lee: Yeah, man. More than that, when I first turned that 90,000 word manuscript in it was really super rough. The book it is today is honestly about 25% of what it was into what it became. Initially, I was always going to hold the reader’s hand a little bit and speak to my own experiences. My grandfather’s murder in 1976 is this massive space in my life. It occupies a massive space in my family’s life. Two years before I was born, growing up seeing my family’s portraits of better days and people talking about his voice and his sense of humor and just how he moved through the world, I always knew that part. So part of the storytelling was even your friendly neighborhood journalists who you’ve come to know telling these stories has been touched by this thing, and here’s what it cost my family. What I had less of an understanding of was that my grandfather’s was not the first murder in our family. Going back to the rural South, Jim Crow Georgia in the early 1920s to discover that my grandmother, who was a baby at the time, had a 12-year-old brother who was shot and killed in a sundown town where the men came together, and this is documented in the newspaper, came together in Fitzgerald, Georgia to outlaw Black labor and Black voting in this community in the late 1800s, ’cause that sparked my family’s journey into the migration to Philadelphia first and then South Jersey only to have a second of my grandmother’s brothers shot and killed by a state trooper, and to for the first time look at those headlines where it says, trooper’s gun kills youth, as if this gun just hopped up and shot a Black teenager under these weird circumstances. Then 20+ years later, my grandfather’s murder. A prospective tenant. They owned an apartment in Camden, New Jersey and were going to rent it to a guy. He disappeared after leaving a deposit, wanted his money back, and my grandfather said, “No, I’ll see you in court.” He came back and murdered my grandfather. 20 years after that, my stepbrother’s shot and killed in Camden. A girl put a bullet in the back of his head. In the early 2000s, another cousin killed in Atlantic City. So, the psychic residue of what’s been passed down and me grappling with telling these stories that Black families across the country experience in terms of the violence of police in the system and the violence of the community and the systemic violence, again, that binds us all, wraps us all up, this became so much more personal. As you know, for a long time I was trying to be somewhat arm’s length, even though I was very close to telling these stories. Now, was time to drop all of that and speak honestly about what I now know to be crushing down on me, which is the weight of this family history. Yeah, as you were talking about it, it just made me think about my own family history and think our stories are so similar. My great-grandfather, the reason why my family ended up in New Jersey is because something happened to him in the South, and there are no records of it, but family lore is that he was lynched. I don’t have anything to prove that, but the family lore is that he was lynched and then that moved my family to New Jersey, and then all sorts of violent incidences happen there as well, and it just kind of seeps into you. The funny thing for me is that I had no idea about any of that until I started reporting on a story and I thought, let me look into my genealogy and just think about … and when I saw it all, I was like, wow, I am reporting on the story of my family and didn’t even know it. Time and again. Time and again. Time and again you find yourself in these horrible stories, sad stories about people that look like you and then you find out they are you, and it’s a heavy weight to carry. At Reveal we worked on this series called Mississippi Goddam, and I get choked up when I talk about it. I remember … ooh, God, man, I’m so sorry, I’m getting choked up. No, man. I remember feeling like it was going to kill me. My blood pressure was ridiculous. I would check my blood pressure in the morning and I thought to myself … literally the blood pressure thing would tell me to go to the hospital, because it was that high, but I couldn’t stop, because I had to turn in this story. I had to turn in this story and I felt like I … and I did. I don’t think this was wrong, but I felt like I owed this family and I owed the young man that I was telling the story about like I had to finish it, but also when I look back, I owe my children to be around if I can. But I couldn’t see it then, I just was like- Of course not. … “You got to get through this thing.” Oof, man, I’m so sorry. No, of course, man. But every time I sat down at that computer or to write these episodes and listening to this tape and looking at autopsy reports and all of that type of stuff, and graphic photos of this young man’s death, I felt like I had to keep doing it. The more I did it, the higher my blood pressure went, the more I thought … I literally would think I’m going to stroke out, but I don’t have a choice, I have to finish this, I have to finish this. I mean, just to be honest, Reveal, especially at that time, most of the people in that workplace were white, and I had worked so hard and championed the story for so long that I was finally getting a shot, and I knew I couldn’t drop it and just the amount of pressure and time it took. Then afterwards I realized like, bro, you acting crazy, so I went to a therapist that guided the therapy and I took three months off from Reveal. I just couldn’t do it, ’cause I thought it was going to kill me, and I think by the grace of God it didn’t, but carrying that, oh my God. Brother, that same feeling. Again, I feel like I’m looking into a mirror and I’m hearing a echo bounce from me to you and back to me. Those early days especially, there’s nothing like arriving at a crime scene and seeing someone that looks just like you, dressed just like you, got some Air Force 1’s fresh just like you with their brain matter splattered across the pavement. Yeah. The family and that look in a mother’s eyes that could be your mother, there’s zero things in this universe like that pain, and that we are the burden bearers of that and we have to be and we have always had to be. Ida B. Wells did not like this season either. Yeah. Her blood pressure was probably through the roof- Absolutely. … but it’s a reminder that we cannot report our way out of the pain, we cannot educate our way out of the pain, we cannot drink our way out of the pain. No. When you’re a young man, you can’t run around and have sex. You can’t sex it away, we have to engage with it. Until we have those conversations about what it means to carry that weight when you have to carry the weight, because no one else will and no one will care when we die of a heart attack, because it happens every single day, right? Yeah. No, absolutely. What you got me doing here, bruh? What you got me doing here? You got me. That’s what we need though, that’s what we need. [inaudible 00:09:49] Hey listen, I’m just mirroring you, bro, ’cause I’m sitting here talking to you with tears in my eyes trying to be like, “Brother, calm down. What are you doing, Mr. Letson?” So, to go back to trauma- Yeah, let’s do more. Yeah, let’s do more. One of the things in your book that I think about a lot, and again I’m giving so much personal information here. So my oldest son, I had no idea he was born. I didn’t find out about him until he was five years old and he lived all the way across the country. We had no communication or contact until I found out when he was five and I was 23. So I was 23, I was a kid when I flew out to get him, I was taking him home back to Florida and I didn’t know what to expect. I’d seen his picture, this was long before the days when we had video calls, so I talked to him on the phone a little bit. Back then my thing was with him when I found out about him, I started writing postcards and sending him … ’cause he was a kid and getting mail’s a big thing, right? I was a flight attendant, so I’d be in different places and sending him stuff. Anyway, I go to get my kid, first time meeting him in-person, and the thing that tripped me out is that he was so much like me at that age. I mean, things that he would say were things that I … really specific things. I’m a little bit older than you, but when I was young, we had this saying, I think it went something like up your nose with a rubber hose or something like that, right? I remember the first time I’m meeting my kid, he’s like, “Up your nose with a …” I was like, “What?” Then I brought him home to my mother and my mother who likes him more than me was like, “This is you as a kid.” He was so much like me. I tell that story to just say that I believe that DNA is way more powerful than we talk about. Yes, yes. That I believe that our family’s history is encoded in our DNA and we carry both the good, but also the trauma. You can’t get away from it, it is in you. It is in your blood, it is in your bones, it is who you are. I think especially for Black folks in this country whose ancestors have experienced a crazy amount of trauma, you carry it with you every day. So when you talk about going into your grandparents’ home and being at the spot where you know your grandfather died, can you talk to me about that? Yeah, man, there’s the ways that these moments reshape the way we raise our children and the way we move through the world, how we teach them to survive in America and teach them to carry a bit of this trauma, that’s one thing in a practical way, right? This moment changes everything, there’s the emotional pain that we experience. When you think about those epigenetics and that post-traumatic slave disorder, that we’ve arrived at that moment after a long series of these cuts and slices. There’s one part of the book that I had to shrink down for the sake of the story, but it’s the guns for slave cycle and a psychic connection to the violence and the pain. Not just a genetic one too, but there’s this other one, this ethereal psychic trauma that we carry from being bartered for guns, and that Europeans plied these regional African powers with guns and some would only trade in guns for enslaved people to create war instability. So this idea that we were forced out of Mother Africa with a muzzle of a gun at our back, and then we arrive at the hell of the Western world and experienced all this other violence and trauma that we then pass down for five, six, seven, eight generations to arrive on the South Side of Chicago, to arrive in Camden, New Jersey, to arrive in West Berlin, New Jersey where my grandfather was killed and stand in that spot, and then read in the newspaper about how the blood was smeared on my grandmother’s nightgown and what it means. How do we disrupt that? Is there any disrupting that? I think acknowledging it, that it exists and it’s not some sort of fantasy of our Hoodoo, Voodoo imaginations that we’re carrying that, but I think it’s something that we have to acknowledge it, because it’s there, and we know it’s there. We know it’s there, and I just don’t know how we reconcile that. Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right is that the key is talking about it, ’cause America will convince you it is not there. We’re I wouldn’t say the beginning, but maybe America has always been in the process of the great forgetting. America loves this idea of collective amnesia that it continually pushes on people, and so if you’re pushing the collective amnesia, we’re not engaging with all the things you just talked about. That’s right. If you don’t engage with it, it just gets bigger and it begins to guide your steps in the future, because you don’t know it’s there, so you have to talk about it. That’s right. One of my guiding, and this is a guiding principle for my journalism, but also for this book in particular, because this is not a very prescriptive book, this is not a policy book, this is about how we’ve been shaped and our experience with the violence, but it’s that ain’t nothing wrong with us. Ain’t nothing wrong with us. If you want to understand what’s wrong with us, let’s look at this machinery around us. Right. Right? Let’s look at what we’ve carried in us, what was sparked by this white supremacist violence and a society bent on our breaking, that’s what’s wrong with us. So even though the gun is certainly the vehicle and that kind of violence is the vehicle, for me it’s like this is how we arrived at this moment, this is how we got here. But ultimately there is nothing wrong with us except for how we’ve experienced this country. So, this country is moving. I’ve heard people say that this is unprecedented what we’re seeing right now. I would say that we saw all this at the end of reconstruction, and this is a rerun of reconstruction. Just the writers of America season five are pretty bad. This season- They really jumping the shark, man. This is crazy. This is like, what are you doing? We need new characters. But as we are living in this time period, and given all that you have reported on and gone through personally, where’s your work going to take you now that we’re here? You know what? I’ve been having these conversations a lot lately with Black men in particular, but Black people in general. Not unlike those post-reconstruction days when the nadir or the nadir … I’m from New Jersey, I say nadir. Yeah, right, right, right. I might be wrong. Nadir just sounds right to me, so nadir. But beating back our efforts at nation building and institution building, and finding for the first time some fullness, some fullness of what it means to be an American and solidify this conditional citizenship that we’ve had. I think now is the time that we build and collaborate and double down on telling our stories and telling the truth. So for me, I think this book is an important bridge for me. For more than 20 years, I’ve been a journalist in the newsroom, in print, in digital, in broadcast, in podcasting, now I have my first film coming out on the anniversary of Katrina on Peacock, I have the book coming out, I want to [inaudible 00:19:12] ways in which we speak to the Black American experience. This is not new or novel, but I think now is the time to continue to build in that catalog, because what’s going to happen is as they continue to try to erase us and erase our story, in 100 years when they’re on the fourth nadir, when they’re on the fourth burning down of any kind of reconstructive efforts, they have to understand that this is not unprecedented, that this is precedented, that this is the default position and this is how you survive it. Yeah. This is how you survive it is to look it square in it’s face and tell the truth as they’re renaming military bases after these fake Robert E. Lee. They’re so bent on making sure they honor- It’s so ridiculous. … the heroes of [inaudible 00:19:55] Can we just talk about the ridiculousness of white- That’s Robert Jenkins Lee. Right, exactly. Thing about this. We’ve been around long enough, we are just now comfortable enough to say white supremacist system, white supremacy. Oh my God, absolutely. We couldn’t say that- No. … we’re just there. It’s just that America’s understanding of what it means to be Black and how we see the world and experience the world, we haven’t caught up and journalism absolutely hasn’t caught up. Even among our friends and friends of the truth, there is an acceptable level of anti-Blackness in this country that is okay- It’s okay. … even among people who wish it would be different. Yep, it’s okay. But we’ve accepted it, it’s part of what this is, right? So that’s why you have to have an argument about whether the founders of this country, these transnational human traffickers are white supremacists or not. But the idea that my ancestors’ lives didn’t matter. One of the things that our friend Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about a lot is that you can’t have this history and it matter, and suddenly this history doesn’t matter. That’s right. It doesn’t make sense. That’s right. It doesn’t make sense. You got to own the whole thing America, you just got to own it. That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Our friend Ta-Nehisi Coates, you can’t have the credits without the debits, right? Exactly. It has to be both, but also the idea that our existence and experience is kind of inconsequential when we are foundational in all of the ways. We were the economy- Absolutely, exactly. … we were our flesh. Exactly. But the fact that we’re still fighting to tell these stories. Exactly. You’d imagine a great nation would say, look how far we’ve come, and when we couldn’t do the right thing we did. Certainly this founding was A, B, C, or D, but we are such a great nation where look at the strides. The strides were made through bloodshed and sacrifice. Absolutely, absolutely. Come on. The truth, as we know, is so dangerous though, because the idea that … especially with Black people, this idea of liberation, but that America itself will be freed, finally freed, that’s a very dangerous proposition for those who don’t believe in our equality or humanity. Yeah. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Trymaine, is there anything that you wanted to hit on the book before I let you go? I don’t think so, just that this truly is my life’s work. I have joked that this book almost killed me, which it did, but it truly is my life’s work and it finally became what it was supposed to be. I hope people not only find an understanding about how guns have shaped us and the industry that profits while there’s so much pain here, but that there is a healing and power and strength in facing down the hardest parts of what we harbor within, right? Confronting the violence, the silent, quiet violence from within. As men in particular, but in general, finding the strength and courage to face that down and live freely and live happily and find peace. That’s why this matters, because it hurts so bad what we’ve experienced, what we’ve carried in our genes, the psychic residue of the violence that we’ve experienced, the systemic violence and the actual violence. What it means to finally find peace within that, that to me I hope is the great strength and power of this book, and I hope it finds the audience that it deserves. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee was in the middle of writing his first book when the unthinkable happened. At 38, a massive heart attack nearly took his life. That near-death experience forced him to reckon with the toll his reporting has taken on his life, including the years he’s spent chronicling gun violence involving Black men in America, as well as his own family’s history marred by slavery, lynching, and even murder. “What I was feeling was death,” Lee says of his heart attack. “And that moment changed the book certainly, changed my life, but changed the way I view the violence that I had been writing about. I had been writing about bullets. But this blood clot in my heart was just as violent.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 1 of a very personal conversation about the moment Lee thought he might be dying, the many challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how his brush with death redirected the focus of his new book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So this is your first book. I should say that as a journalist, you’ve been on this beat for a while. Obviously we know each other. I’ve been following your work for a minute, so how did it turn into this book? Trymaine Lee: No. The earliest seeds of this book were planted when I was just an intern at the Philadelphia Daily News in 2003. I was covering a case of a young brother who was 17, 18 years old, and he got shot in the back of the neck during a robbery. So some other guys tried to rob him for his Allen Iverson jersey. They ended up shooting him and he ended up being paralyzed. And I found my way into the hospital and this brother, despite being a quadriplegic, he couldn’t feel anything from the neck down, was so hopeful and so optimistic, and he told me that he had dreams about walking again and he’s like this hopeful bright light in the midst of what was clearly like a very dark moment for him and his family. But as he’s talking, I looked across his bed and I see his mother there, her eyes welling with tears and both realized that he would never walk again. And then she started to tell the story of what it would take to get him home. She said, “We need a new ramp. We need an ambulance, a van. We need a wheelchair. We need new outlets.” And they’re just a poor family from North Philly. And this idea of the great cost. Obviously he lost his mobility, he lost a certain kind of future, but also there was this financial cost. And so I started to think about this idea of nobody cares about that young brother or young brothers like him, but maybe you care that every time a bullet hits flesh, we’re all paying a price somehow some way in a literal dollar amount. And so I had this idea that I was calling Million Dollar Bullets, and so I had Million Dollar Bullets in my head and I pitched it. Everywhere I worked I was trying to pitch this story and I just couldn’t get it done. Until many years later in 2015, a book agent had approached me and said, “Listen, if there’s ever anything you want to do, come talk to me.” And so I pitched the idea and then it just made sense. The timing was right. It was right after Trayvon and Michael Brown, and so we were grappling with how violence is heaped upon young black men in particular, and there was all this gun violence and Freddie Gray, all this stuff was happening and it just felt like it was the right time. Now the book changed dramatically from those early seeds, but that was the beginning. I’m listening to it to the way you describe it, and it broke my heart. Literally we’re in this interview and I’m trying to piece my heart back together because it is just so sad to me that we as journalists have to think about angles to make people have empathy for, in this case specifically for young black people. We have to think of an angle and say to you, well, this bullet economically costs you money and maybe you will care more about the economics of this bullet and want to stop this stuff because clearly you don’t care about the people that are being impacted. That’s right. This idea … And you and I both know this well, the gut-wrenching exercise of humanizing our people, humanizing our people. Finding ways where other people, white people, white society might connect, might have some compassion for the violence that we experience every day, the literal violence, but also the systemic violence that keeps this whole thing together. It’s a terrible dance we have to do, but we have to do that because things are as they are, not as we want them to be. Right. Absolutely. That’s the work itself. It is what it is. And for people called to do it, that’s just the burden you have to carry. But still sometimes you just pull back a little bit and it’s like, “Wow. I have to make an economic case in order for this to matter to the general public.” Which is just wild to me. So you’re putting this book together, it’s your passion project and you’ve been working hard on it, and right after you turned in your first draft, life took a turn that you just did not see. At the age of 38, I had a heart attack eight years ago this past July, and it was one of those moments where in the midst of it actually happening, I wasn’t clear it was a heart attack, but I was clear my life felt like it was ending in that moment. For a few days, walking to the train … I live in New York and I was walking to the train and I feel a little pressure in my chest and I thought it was one of those times where I was just a little more out of shape than normal. I’m a former athlete and I usually stay in shape, but it was one of those times where I had been out the gym for a while, and so I didn’t think much of it. And then the day of the heart attack earlier that day, I went to have coffee with a friend of mine at work and I walked down the steps to meet her and I felt like I was going to pass out. And so I said, “I’m going to go to the clinic at 30 Rock at NBC just to get checked out.” And so I go in there and they listen to my heart and they put a little EKG thing on me and they said, “You know what, the left side of your heart is a little enlarged. At some point you should go see someone. A cardiologist. But it’s not like you’re going to go home tonight and drop dead.” Verbatim. Wow. I’m not going to drop dead. Then later that night I go home and my wife was cleaning the bedroom and so I was on the sofa sleeping and she woke me up and I went to the bedroom three minutes after I laid down this enormous pressure in my chest. The world was spinning, cold sweat, nausea. It felt like my entire body was breaking down, and in fact what I was feeling was death. I had a blood clot in my left anterior descending artery that was starving my heart. And that moment changed the book certainly, changed my life, but changed the way I viewed the violence that I had been writing about. I had been writing about bullets, but this blood clot lodged in my heart, lodged in my artery was just as violent. Before we go to the book, can you just talk to me about the weight of the heart attack and how it played out with your family. I just want to hear about the personal journey through that. So we’re at that age where … I was talking to a friend of mine recently and I was like, “We’re at that age where if you have kids, they’re still needing your guidance. If you have parents, they now need your guidance. Work is crazy, the economy is going nuts, you’re feeling crunched and you’re just trying to get through the best you can, and then something like this happens.” I’m sure it has to change your perspective about life. It sounds cliche to think that in that moment I was thinking about everything that I would miss. My daughter, who was six years old at the time, was this beautiful little inquisitive girl who is like my buddy to this day. She’s turning 13 this summer and to think about not … Yeah, man. Take your time. To think about not being able to walk her to school. The science project. She wants to be a journalist like us. So talking about the five W’s and having little conversations with her and seeing that she’s beginning to piece an understanding together and that I would miss that. It brought me to my knees in so many ways, but it also coming out of that, that I did survive, that I did live, it was an opportunity to live more fully and more honestly. And so in the beginning it was like, “You know what, let me get physically right because it’s going to take more than that to get me.” Definitely going to have to hawk me down. Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve been through enough. I said, “You know what, I’m getting on this bike.” I started to meditate. I started to really be just mindful. But it also forced me to engage with a weight that I had not fully unpacked that I was carrying because my six-year-old daughter was asking me tough questions. How and why? And with no family history, no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol I had the misfortune of some soft plaque just breaking off and the clot filled this place. But there was another weight on my heart that I had never fully engaged with. As a journalist for my entire career operating on the edge of death and survival, black death and survival in particular, and a family history packed with early death and violence I had to engage with that in a way that I had never expected to fully. And so again, re-engaging with how I’m living, the idea idea of mortality also though. There was a moment was freeing in a way that though every night for years I went to sleep not knowing if I would wake up. And that was scary a little bit because it was like I started traveling again for work and I was like, “I don’t want to die in this hotel room.” Or if my wife had to go to work, I don’t want to die, my daughter comes in the room and finds me. That was one side. But the other side was this clarity that we know tomorrow’s not promised, but it truly is not promised. So how are we going to live? After that wave of a few years, I can honestly say that I haven’t experienced stress in the way I understood it before. I ain’t worried about nothing now. I’m really truly not. Come on now. So I feel free of some way where it’s like, man, it’s going to come at some point hopefully far down the road, so I’m going to do everything I want to do. Man, I’ll be fishing every chance I get. I’m chilling. I’m going to Martha’s Vineyard right now. Last year was my first year. I ain’t grow up with nobody going to Martha’s Vineyard. Give me the finger sandwiches. You going do it. How you pronounce this? Let me get some of that please. So as scary as things have been, honestly, there is a freedom, and I think in the reshaping of my life and the reshaping of my understanding of life and death and the reshaping of the book, there is something … I think clarity is the word. There’s a clarity now, man. With the story I was trying to tell in my life. A filmmaker that I know has a movie. It’s a movie, but it’s like four hours long. It was on PBS. But the title of the movie, it was based off an African proverb That was, you never know how alive you are until there’s a lion in the room. That’s right. When I go through stuff … Recently, one of my kids was really sick and it was really scary and he was in the hospital for almost four months. And that saying, I felt it. I felt it so deep. I understood it before, but when you are sitting in the room and you feel like death is on the other side you know there’s a lion in this room, and I got to squeeze life and get everything I possibly can out of it because we are not promised tomorrow. It is like you could walk outside now and it all be gone, or the people you love be gone and what did you do in the meantime? And we are not promised the nightfall. We are not promised that. No. So one more question about the family stuff. How did you explain this to your daughter? Because six is that age where they are beginning to understand life, but I don’t know if they truly have an understanding of death at that part. They understand life in the terms of life is good, mom and dad are here, we get to have fun, we do this, we do that. A little bit of sense of self maybe, but the idea that it could all go away is so foreign at that age. Well, two things. I think one, I don’t think most adults understand mortality because we don’t live as if it’s going to end. We don’t. And even when you have a proximity or a proximal relationship to death, you’ve experienced it through people and that’s a certain kind of pain of that loss. It’s hard for us to understand that we might not be here one day. That’s harder to fully conceptualize. And before I get to my daughter, I want to say one thing that was a moment. So the whole time … I just want to backtrack a little bit. Yeah. Please. So the heart attack happens and for about 10 minutes it feels like I’m separating from my physical form. This crazy … I can’t even explain how it felt, but I’m separating myself. And then it passes. Then the ambulance comes, the MTs, they take my vitals, they say, “Everything looks pretty good to us. Do you want to go to the hospital?” And I said, “My daughter has camp in the morning.” And this is how men … This how we … I said, “My daughter has camp in the morning. My wife has a trip. I’ll wait into the morning to get to the hospital. I don’t want to inconvenience my family. You’ve been in the hospital. I don’t want to have my baby in the hospital and my wife.” And so all night long I’m tossing and turning on the sofa with a 98% blockage in the main artery giving my heart blood. The next day we dropped my daughter off at camp and I go into urgent care. I don’t know why I’m going to urgent care, but I’m doubled over across the street. Bro, I tell them what’s going on. They said, “Yo, go to the emergency room now. What are you doing here? Get there.” So we get there and they’re still like, “You look so young.” They’re not sure what’s going on. After seven or eight hours, they finally take a blood test and find troponin, which is a compound or protein that’s released if you have heart damage. They said, “We think you might’ve had a heart attack. We’re going to prep you for the cath lab tomorrow.” So mind you, I still haven’t gotten in the cath lab yet. So they’re like tomorrow. And then fortunately my cardiologist, who is my cardiologist today said, “You know what, let’s get you in there now.” And so I’m on the table, there’s a big screen over my shoulder and they’re threading whatever it is through my wrist in the vein. And he’s tooling around in there and he pulls it out. He said, “You are a very lucky man.” He said, “You almost had a complete blockage. I put two stents in there to clear it.” And he said, “Where’s your wife? Let’s go talk to her.” And in that moment I started to smile because I was like, “Yo, your boy was almost out here.” I was so happy because I had had a heart attack. I survived it though. So I’m actually feeling pretty good, literally dodged one. But then the next day … And there’s another one of those moments that I get choked up thinking about, it’s my wife, my brother, my sister, my mother, and we’re all in the room. And I made a joke to my wife. I said, “Man, you almost became a thousandaire.” And then I was like, she almost had to collect death benefits from me, and I broke down sobbing like a baby in my mother’s arms because the reality was, again, all of that crashing down on you, how close of a call that really was. And then my family would have to collect benefits on me. So I’m in the midst of all that, and I still have this precious, beautiful little girl, this little smart little girl who she had been watching me in Ferguson, Missouri. She had been watching me in Baltimore. So she’s attuned and we have real honest conversations, as honest as you can possibly be with a six-year-old. And I was trying to explain that what happened to daddy’s artery is like a pipe with some gunk got stopped up and it almost stopped my heart. And that wasn’t good enough for her. Because she was already starting to ask about God. She started to ask about Jesus and religion a little bit. And I’m trying to be honest, like baby, I don’t know. I don’t know. Here’s the story. Here’s the thing, and we’re tapping into something bigger than ourselves, and I’m trying to … But with this, it really forced me to acknowledge what was bearing down in my heart. The stress of telling these stories of black life and death and survival and the spectacle of death. But also a family history going back a very long time to realize what we’ve inherited. But we never fully process as a young journalist running and gunning and hanging out and drinking. And when I was single, we’re dating and we’re moving around and we’re hitting the deadlines. And then after that we’re hanging out. Never fully engaging what it means to carry this specific kind of weight that black people in this country have had to bear. The violence certainly of the bullet, but the systemic violence that is necessary, that is a requisite for these ecosystems in which we experienced that other violence to actually occur. And so it blew my mind in that like, yo, what almost killed me was being black in America and that changed everything. I think as we turn to talk a little bit more about the book, that being a black journalist, especially in the time that you’re talking about in the time of Ferguson, in the time of Trayvon Martin, that reporting on it carried a weight for black journalists that I don’t think we talk about enough. I don’t even think we really acknowledge it. Because here’s the thing about acknowledging that working in journalism is that as a black journalist, this is just the truth. You have to be better. You can’t talk about you’re having trauma about this or that or the other thing. You have to just do the job because you talk about that type of stuff you’re not going to get work, you’re not going to get the jobs. You’re not going to be able to keep doing the reporting that you feel is important because nobody does this type of reporting because they want to. We do it because we’re called to do it because we see Mike Brown and we see ourselves, we see our cousins, we see our brothers, our sisters, all of that. When I see Breonna Taylor, Breonna Taylor looks like she could belong in my family. So for me, it’s like I got to tell that story because if I don’t, who will? So you’re drawn to it, but you also experience the trauma of it in a way that you can’t talk about really, except with other black journalists. And then we tend to not talk about it publicly because again, we want to get the job. I remember as a very young journalist, there was the Jayson Blair case, Jayson Blair, young black journalist from New York Times, who was perhaps one of the most fabulous plagiarists of all time back. He was saying he was in Oklahoma- Talk about setback. He was saying he was in Oklahoma and was in the sports department and it was just a mess. And there was this ripple effect I remember, a chilling effect of what it means to be black. Now are they going to see us like that? And other people saying the kinds of jobs that we were taking, some people didn’t want the so-called ghetto beat, which meant you were covering urban affairs and black life in cities. But I think for some of us, that’s the reason why we’re doing this, is to not just shine light in dark spaces to remind the world of who we are and tell our story because no one loves us but us. And that’s the bottom line. No one cares about us. We’re still grappling with the negro problem in this country. And so the weight that comes with of navigating these white newsrooms, it’s like the plantation. And every day we have to walk into the big house with our nice clothes paid for by the plantation and convince them that what’s happening in the back corner of the plantation matters. That every day when it rains people are getting sick because stuck in the mud and every day it can’t get the kids to school because the school, they got the hole in the roof because y’all haven’t … And they’re like, “Hmm, I know some black people back there, and I don’t know if that’s true.” And then you got to go back to the plantation and they’re like, “Man, you’re looking real clean. I see you in the big house. Look like you eating well.” And you’re like, “Yeah, my grandma and them from around here. Y’all know me.” I’m trying to tell them. So this dynamic. It is not just the dynamic of having to code switch and leave a part of you behind to go into this space and specifically be able to advocate for the stories that you’re trying to tell outside the space, it’s also coming to the space and them looking at you like … I don’t know. I don’t know. And you’re right, we haven’t fully talked about it. And all of us who as black journalists who tell these stories, who are mission-driven, who are purpose-driven, who our North star is telling the whole truth about how we experienced this country, there is also this assumption or this perceived bias. Because we understand the experience so well there has to be a bias. We have to have some jaundice vision because we see it too clearly. And so you have to be so good. You have to be so sharp, and you can’t make any mistakes because you will find yourself without a job. No. It’s a lot, man. But especially then, because there was this emotional heat of the moment, but there was also this fire. So we’re engaging with America tearing at its threads and what it means to value black life. And people say, enough is enough. And how do we cover that through the mainstream lens has never been easy. And I’m not sure we figured out a way to do it, except for to go out there time and the game and tell the truth. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.