LONDON — They’re young, full of ideas — and about to be given the vote. Britain’s government has committed to lowering the voting age from 18 to 16 years — a major extension of the electorate that could have big implications for the outcome of the next race, expected by 2029. It means Brits who are just 12 today are in line to vote in the next general election, which is expected to be a fierce battle between incumbent Keir Starmer and his right-wing challenger Nigel Farage. But what do these young people actually think? In a bid to start pinning down the views of this cohort, POLITICO commissioned pollster More in Common to hold an in-depth focus group, grilling eight youngsters from across the country on everything from social media disinformation to what they would do inside No. 10 Downing Street. To protect those taking part in the study, all names used below are pseudonymous. The group all showed an interest in politics, and had strong views on major topics such as immigration and climate change — but the majority were unaware they would get the chance to vote in 2029.  In a bid to prepare the country for the change, the Electoral Commission has recommended that the school curriculum be reformed to ensure compulsory teaching on democracy and government from an early age. GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER There are few better introductions to the weird world of British politics than prime minister’s questions, the weekly House of Commons clash between Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Conservative opponent Kemi Badenoch. Our group of 12-13-year-olds was shown a clip of the clash and asked to rate what they saw. They came away distinctly unimpressed. Hanh, 13, from Surrey, said the pair seemed like children winding each other up. “It seems really disrespectful in how they’re talking to each other,” she commented. “It sounds like they’re actually kids bickering … They were just going at each other, which didn’t seem very professional in my opinion.” Sarah, 13, from Trowbridge in the west of England, said the leading politicians were “acting like a pack of wild animals.” | Clive Brunskill/Getty Images Sarah, 13, from Trowbridge in the west of England, said the leading politicians were “acting like a pack of wild animals.” In the clip, the Commons backbenches roar as Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch quips about Starmer’s MPs wanting a new leader for Christmas. In turn, the PM dismisses the Conservative chief’s performance as a “Muppet’s Christmas Carol.” Twelve-year-old Holly, from Lincolnshire, said the pair were being “really aggressive and really harsh on each other, which was definitely rude.” And she said of the PM: “It weren’t really working out for Keir Starmer.” None of the children knew who Badenoch was, but all knew Starmer — even if they didn’t have particularly high opinions of the prime minister, who is tanking in the polls and struggling to get his administration off the ground. Twelve-year-old Alex said the “promises” Starmer had made were just “lies” to get him into No. 10. Sophie, a 12-year-old from Worcester in the West Midlands, was equally withering, saying she thought the PM is doing a “bad job.” “He keeps making all these promises, but he’s probably not even doing any of them,” she added. “He just wants to show off and try to be cool, but he’s not being cool because he’s breaking all the promises. He just wants all the money and the job to make him look really good.” Sarah said: “I think that it’s quite hard to keep all of those promises, and he’s definitely bitten off more than he can chew with the fact that he’s only made those statements because he wants to be voted for and he wants to be in charge.”  While some of the young people referenced broken promises by Starmer, none offered specifics. THE FARAGE FACTOR Although they didn’t know Badenoch as leader of the opposition, the whole room nodded when asked if they knew who Nigel Farage was. Although they didn’t know Badenoch as leader of the opposition, the whole room nodded when asked if they knew who Nigel Farage was. | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images “He’s the leader of the Reform party,” said Alex, whose favorite subject is computing. “He promises lots of things and the opposite of what Starmer wants. Instead of helping immigrants, he wants to kick them out. He wants to lower taxes, wants to stop benefits.” Alex added: “I like him.” Sarah was much less taken. “I’ve heard that he’s the leader of the far right, or he’s part of the far right. I think he’s quite a racist man.” Farage has faced accusations in recent weeks of making racist remarks in his school days. The Reform UK leader replied that he had “never directly racially abused anybody.” Other participants said they’d only heard Farage’s name before. When asked who they would back if they were voting tomorrow, most children shrugged and looked bewildered. Only two of the group could name who they wanted to vote for — both Alex and Sam backed Farage. POLICY WORRIES Politicians have long tried to reach Britain’s youngsters through questionable TikTok videos and cringe memes — but there was much more going on in the minds of this group than simply staring at phones. Climate change, mental health and homelessness were dominant themes of the conversation. Climate change is “dangerous because the polar bears will die,” warned Chris, 13, from Manchester. Sophie, who enjoys horse riding, is worried about habitats being destroyed and animals having to find new homes as a result of climate change, while Sarah is concerned about rising sea levels. Thirteen-year-old Ravi from Liverpool said his main focus was homelessness. “I know [the government is] building houses, but maybe speed the process up and get homeless people off the streets as quick as they can because it’s not nice seeing them on the streets begging,” he said. Sam agreed, saying if he personally made it into No.10, he would make sure “everyone has food, water, all basic survival stuff.” Sarah’s main ask was for better mental health care amid a strained National Health Service. “The NHS is quite busy dealing with mental health, anxiety and things like that,” she said. “Maybe we should try and make an improvement with that so everyone gets a voice and everyone’s heard.” IMMIGRATION DIVISIONS When the conversation moved to the hot-button topic of immigration, views were more sharply divided. Imagining what he’d do in government, Alex said he’d focus on “lowering taxes and stopping illegal immigrants from coming over.” “Because we’re paying France billions just to stop them, but they’re not doing anything,” he said. “And also it’s spending all the tax money on them to give them home meals, stuff like that.” In July, Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron unveiled a “one in, one out” pilot program to tackle illegal migration, although it’s enjoyed limited success so far and has generated some embarrassing headlines for the British government. Hanh said she’d been taught at school that it’s important to show empathy, but noted some people are angry about taxes going to support asylum seekers. Chris and Sarah both said asylum seekers are fleeing war, and seemed uneasy at the thought of drawing a hard line. Holly said she wants “racism” — which she believes is tied to conversations about immigration — to end. “I often hear a lot of racism [at school] and prejudice-type stuff … I often hear the N word. People don’t understand how bad that word is and how it can affect people,” she said. “They [migrants] have moved away from something to get safer, and then they get more hate.” Hanh said she is seeing more anti-immigration messages on social media, such as “why are you in my country, get out,” she said. “Then that’s being dragged into school by students who are seeing this … it’s coming into school environment, which is not good for learning.” NEWS SNOOZE Look away now, journalists: The group largely agreed that the news is boring. Some listen in when their parents have the television or radio on, but all said they get most of their news from social media or the odd push alert. Asked why they think the news is so dull, Hanh — who plays field hockey and enjoys art at school — said: “It just looks really boring to look at, there are no cool pictures or any funny things or fun colors. It just doesn’t look like something I’d be interested in.” She said she prefers social media: “With TikTok, you can interact with stuff and look at comments and see other people’s views, [but with the news] you just see evidence and you see all these facts. Sometimes it can be about really disturbing stuff like murder and stuff like that. If it’s going to pop up with that, I don’t really want to watch that.” These children aren’t alone in pointing to social media as their preferred source of news. A 2025 report by communications watchdog Ofcom found that 57 percent of 12-15-year-olds consume news on social media, with TikTok being the most commonly used platform, followed by YouTube and then Instagram. Sophie isn’t convinced that the news is for her. “Sometimes if my parents put it on the TV and it’s about something that’s really bad that’s happened, then I’ll definitely look at it,” she said. “But otherwise, I think it would probably be more for older people because they would like to watch basically whatever’s on the TV because they can’t really be bothered to change the channel.”

EUROPE’S CENTER ISN’T HOLDING ANYMORE Despite recent election wins for moderates in the Netherlands, Germany and the U.K., the far right is stronger than ever. By TIM ROSS in Jaywick, England Illustration by Merijn Hos for POLITICO In recent elections, voters in Europe have given hope to embattled centrist politicians across the Western world.   Donald Trump may have romped back into the White House, but the international movement of MAGA-aligned populists has run into trouble across the Atlantic. At elections in the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania — and in a sprawling vote across 27 EU countries for the European Parliament — mainstream candidates defeated populist hardliners and far-right nationalists.  “There remains a majority in the center for a strong Europe, and that is crucial for stability,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, after the EU Parliament elections last year. “In other words, the center is holding.”   Sixteen months later, that hold is looking anything but secure.    Hard-right and far-right politicians are now leading the polls in France, the U.K. and even Germany. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s approval rating is a dire 21 percent. His French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, is even lower, at 11 percent — and the mood is so grim that this fall’s spectacular theft at the Louvre is being treated by some as a giant metaphor for a country unable to manage its challenges.   Even von der Leyen’s own EU conservatives now rely on the votes of far right lawmakers to get her plans approved in Brussels. One outraged centrist likened the shift to those German politicians who enabled Adolf Hitler to take power. Populists at the extremes, meanwhile, cast themselves as the obvious alternative for populations that want change. And now they can expect Trump to help: In a brutal rupture of transatlantic norms, a new U.S. National Security Strategy aims to use American diplomacy to cultivate “resistance” to political correctness in Europe — especially on migration — and to support parties it describes as “patriotic.” Trump himself told POLITICO he would endorse candidates he believed would move Europe in the right direction. On that rightward trajectory, in the next four years the political map of the West faces its most dramatic upheaval since the Cold War. The implications for geopolitics, from trade to defense, could be profound.   “What [Europeans are] getting from Trump is the strategy of maximum polarization that hollows out the center,” said Will Marshall from the Progressive Policy Institute, the centrist American think tank that backed Bill Clinton in the 1990s. “The old established parties of left and right that dominated the post war era have gotten weaker,” he said. “The nationalist or populist right’s revolt is against them.”  Nowhere is this recent transformation more dramatic than in the U.K.   As the sun sinks toward the horizon over a calm sea one Thursday evening in November, half a dozen regulars huddle around the bar in the Never Say Die pub, a few yards from the beach at Jaywick Sands, on the east coast of England.   Built in the 1930s as a resort 70 miles from London, Jaywick is now the most deprived neighborhood in the country. The area had such a bad image that in 2018 a U.S. MAGA ad used a photograph of a dilapidated Jaywick street to warn of the apocalyptic future facing America if Trump’s candidates were not elected.   Jaywick was named England’s most deprived neighbourhood in October — for the fourth time since 2010. | Tolga Akmen/EPA It is here among the pebbledashed bungalows and England flags hanging limp from lampposts that a new political force — Nigel Farage’s rightwing Reform UK — has built its heartland.   At the bar, Dave Laurence, 82, says he doesn’t vote, as a rule, but made an exception for Farage, who was elected to represent the area last year. “I quite like him. He’s doing the best he can,” Laurence says as he sips his pint of lager, with ’80s pop hits playing in the background. “I’ll vote for him again.”  Laurence freely describes himself as “racist” and says he would never vote for a Black person, such as the center-right Conservative Party’s leader Kemi Badenoch. What troubles him most, he says, is the number of immigrants who have arrived in the U.K. during his lifetime, especially those crossing the Channel in small boats. Soon, Laurence fears, the country will be “full of Muslims and they’ll fucking rebel against us.”  With its anti-establishment, immigration-fighting agenda, Farage’s Reform UK offers voters a program tightly in tune with far-right parties that have gained ground across the West. According to opinion polls, Farage now has a real chance of becoming the U.K.’s next prime minister if the vote were held today. (A general election is not due until 2029).   It’s startling to note that as recently as July 2024, Starmer’s Labour Party won a historic landslide and some of his triumphant election aides traveled to the U.S. to advise Democrats on strategy. Today, Starmer is derided as “First Gear Keir” as he fights off leadership rivals rumored to be trying to oust him. And Reform isn’t the only force remaking British party politics. To the left of Labour, the Greens have also made recent gains in the polls under a new leader calling himself an “eco-populist.”   Farage’s stunning rise from the sidelines to the front of a political revolution carries lessons well beyond Britain’s borders. Europeans raised in the old school of mainstream politics fear that the traditional centerground — their home turf — will not hold.   ‘DURABLY UNSTABLE’   Macron, for his part, tried to counter the rise of the hard right by calling a snap election for the French National Assembly last year. The gamble backfired, delivering a hung parliament that has been unable to agree on key economic policies ever since. Macron is now historically unpopular.   French lawmakers’ clashes over the budget have toppled three of Macron’s picks as prime minister since the summer of 2024. A backlash against his plan to raise the pension age has forced ratings agencies to mull a damaging downgrade. Macron, who himself became president by launching a new centrist movement to rival the political establishment, now has no traditional party machinery to help bolster his position. “He’ll leave a political landscape that is perhaps durably unstable. It’s unforgivable,” said Alain Minc, an influential adviser and former mentor to the French president.  The chaos gives populists their chance. The main politicians making any running in conversations about the next presidential election belong to the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen and its youthful party president Jordan Bardella, who are riding high in the polls at 34 percent.   In Germany, too, the center ground is steadily eroding.   Though Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives won a snap election in February, his ideologically uneasy coalition, which consists of his own conservative bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), holds one of the slimmest parliamentary majorities for a government since 1945, with just 52 percent of seats. That leaves the Merz coalition vulnerable to small defections within the ranks and makes it hard for him to achieve anything ambitious in government. The far-left Die Linke party and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) both surged at the last election, too, with AfD winning the best result in a national election for any far-right party since World War II.  Merz’s attempt to defang the AfD by moving his conservatives sharply to the right on the issue of migration seems to have backfired. The AfD has only continued its rise, surpassing Merz’s conservatives in many polls.   The rise of the far-right is a cultural shock to many centrist Germans, given the country’s deeply entrenched desire to avoid repeating its past. “For a long time in Germany we thought with our history, and the way we teach in our schools, we would be a bit more immune to that,” one concerned German official said. “It turned out we are not.”   Even in the Netherlands, where centrist Rob Jetten won a famous but narrow victory over the far-right firebrand Geert Wilders in October, there are reasons for mainstream politicians to worry. Wilders’ Freedom Party is still one of the biggest forces in the land, winning the same number of seats as Jetten’s D66. He could well return next time, just as Trump did in the U.S.   WHERE DID ALL THE VOTERS GO?   According to polling firm Ipsos, a large proportion of voters in many Western democracies now have little faith in the political process. While they still believe in democratic values, they are dissatisfied with the way democracy is working for them.   A large survey questioning around 10,000 voters across nine countries found 45 percent were dissatisfied, fueling support for the extremes. Among voters on the far left (57 percent) and the far right (54 percent), levels of dissatisfaction were highest of all.   The countries with the highest rates of dissatisfaction in the Ipsos study were France and the Netherlands, where political upheaval has taken its toll on faith in the system.   Anti-riot police officers stand next to a demonstration called by far-right activist Els Rechts against the Netherlands’ current asylum policy, in September in The Hague. | Josh Walet/ANP via Getty Images Alongside the coronavirus pandemic and the aftermath of lockdowns, the biggest drivers of dissatisfaction were the cost of living, immigration and crime, according to Gideon Skinner from Ipsos. Trust in politics fell in the 90s and took another hit in the late 2000s at the time of the financial crash, he said.   “There may be specific things that have made it worse over the last couple of years but it’s also a long-term condition,” Skinner told POLITICO. “It’s something we do need to worry about and there is not a silver bullet that can fix it all.”  Perhaps the greatest problem for incumbent centrists is that in most cases their economies are so moribund that they lack the fiscal firepower to spend money addressing the issues disillusioned voters care about most — like high living costs, ailing public services and migration.  THE INEQUALITY EMERGENCY   The financial crisis of 2008 and the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020-21 left many governments strapped for cash. In the U.K., for example, the economy was 16 percent smaller than it should have been a decade after the 2008 crash if prior growth trends had continued, according to Anand Menon, professor of European politics at King’s College London.   “Crucially, the impact of the financial crisis, like the impact of so much else in our politics, was massively unequal,” Menon said. “Prosperous places with high productivity, with well-educated workforces suffered far, far less than poorer parts of the country.”   Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz submitted a study to the G20 in November warning that the world was facing an “inequality emergency.” Fueled by war, pandemic and trade disruptions, the crisis risks preparing the ground for more authoritarian leaders, his report said.   In many Western countries, the centerground is more than just a metaphor. It is in capital cities like London, Paris and Washington that power and money accumulate and the economic and political elites seek to maintain their grip on the status quo.   The further you travel from these centers out to areas in decline, the more likely you are to find support for radical politics.   As Menon notes, Britain’s 2016 revolution — the referendum vote to leave the European Union after almost half a century of membership — can be mapped onto the culinary geography of the country.   “Pret a Manger” is a smart national chain of sandwich and coffee shops, catering for hungry commuters and office workers in wealthy, successful British cities. “Places that had a Pret voted Remain,” Menon said. Parts of the U.K. where median wages were lower were disproportionately likely to vote to leave the EU.   IMMIGRATION, IMMIGRATION, IMMIGRATION   After the Brexit vote in 2016, immigration slid from the top of the priority list for British voters and Farage himself took a step back. Both have now returned, as Farage rides a wave of headlines about irregular migrants landing in small boats from France.   From January to May this year, there were a record 14,800 small boat crossings, 42 percent more than in the same period in the previous year, according to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory.   For Laurence, in the Never Say Die pub, the small boats represent the biggest issue of all. “What’s going to happen in 10 years’ time? What’s going to happen in 20 years’ time when the boat people are still coming over?” he asked.   A decade ago, German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the doors to hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving into Europe from Syria, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq. The AfD surged in the months that followed, permanently changing German politics. At February’s election, the AfD won a record 21 percent of the vote, finishing in second place behind Merz’s conservative bloc.  “The fundamental failure that is common to the whole [centrist] transatlantic community is on immigration,” said Marshall from the Progressive Policy Institute. “All of the far-right movements have made it their top issue.”   It is the perceived threat that waves of migration pose to traditional national cultures which drives much of the support for the far right. Trump’s White House is now primed to join the European nationalists’ fight. According to a new U.S. National Security Strategy document released in December, Europe is facing “civilisational erasure” from unrestricted immigration, as well as falling birthrates. The analysis draws on the so-called great replacement theory, a racist conspiracy theory. Free speech — in the MAGA definition, at least — is another casualty of conventional centrist rule in Europe, as political correctness veers into “censorship,” the U.S. document said. Protesters demostrate under the motto “Loud against Nazis” in early February in Berlin. After years of decline, The Left party  pulled off a stunning revival in the general election later that month. | John MacDougall via AFP/Getty Images In his interview with POLITICO earlier this week, Trump aligned himself fully with the strategy paper. European nations are “decaying” and their “weak” leaders can expect to be challenged by rivals with American support, he said. “I’d endorse,” he added. In Brussels, the double-punch of the president’s interview and the strategy document left diplomats and officials feeling bruised and alarmed all over again, after a period in which they allowed themselves to hope that the transatlantic alliance wasn’t dying. One EU diplomat was blunt in assessing Trump’s new method: “It’s autocracy.” THE STOLEN JEWELS  Sometimes, it takes a random news event — ostensibly unconnected to politics — to crystalize the national mood. In Paris, the theft of France’s priceless crown jewels from the Louvre provided just such an opportunity, morphing into an indictment of an establishment that can’t get the job done, even when the job simply involves thoroughly locking the windows at the world’s most famous museum. National Rally leader Jordan Bardella called the incident a “humiliation” before asking: “How far will the breakdown of the state go?”   In Britain, just a month after Starmer’s victory last year, riots broke out across the country, fueled by far-right extremists. The catalyst was the murder of three young girls aged 6, 7 and 9, in Southport, northwest England, by a Black teenager wrongly identified at the time on social media — in posts amplified by the far-right — as a Muslim.   At the time, Farage suggested the police were withholding the truth about the suspect, earning him the fury of mainstream politicians. While stressing he did not support violence, Farage railed against what he called “two-tier policing,” a phrase popular among far-right commentators who claim police treat right-wing protesters more harshly than those on the left.  It’s an opinion that resonates in Jaywick. Chennelle Rutland, 56, is walking her two dogs along the beachfront, admiring the view as the sun sets, flaring the sky orange, then purple. The colors catch the surface of the flat sea. “It’s one rule for one and one rule for the other,” she says. “The whites have got to shut up because if you do say anything, you’re ‘racist’ and ‘far right.’”   Far-right activist Tommy Robinson invited his supporters to attend the “Unite The Kingdom” rally in September. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images It would be wrong to characterise residents of Jaywick as simply ignorant or full of rage. Many who spoke to POLITICO there were cheerful, happy with their community and up to speed with the news. But, just as they’d soured on their country’s centrist establishment, they were also tuning out its favored news sources.   In Jaywick, some of Farage’s voters prefer GB News, Britain’s answer to Fox News, which launched in 2021, or learn about current affairs from YouTube and other social media. The BBC — for decades the mainstay of the British media landscape — has lost a portion of its audience here. Right-wing commentators and politicians attack it as biased. Trump has lately joined in, threatening to sue over a BBC edit that he said deceptively made it look as if he was explicitly inciting violence. The BBC’s director general and head of news both resigned. In the process, another piece of Britain’s onetime centerground was giving way.   WHAT NEXT?   There are reasons for centrists to hope. In Rome, Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right Brothers of Italy party has become less extreme in power, and the worst fears of moderates about a group with its historic roots in neo-fascism have not come to pass. She remains popular, and while pushing a culture war at home, she has avoided the wrath of the EU leadership and kept Trump onside.   Populists and nationalists don’t always win. Trump lost in 2020. In the Netherlands, Wilders lost in October this year, though only by a whisker. Romania’s Nicușor Dan won the presidency as a centrist in May, but again only narrowly defeating his far-right opponent.   Structural obstacles may also slow the radicals’ progress. The U.K.’s first-past-the-post voting system makes it hard for new parties to do well. The two-round French system has so far stopped Le Pen’s National Rally from gaining power as centrists combine to back moderates. In Germany, a similar “firewall” exists under which center parties keep the far-right out.   After the Brexit vote in 2016, immigration slid from the top of the priority list for British voters and Farage himself took a step back. Both have now returned. | Tolga Akmen/EPA Even as he enjoys a sustained lead in the polls and wins local elections in the U.K., Farage has not convinced voters that Reform would do a good job. Even some of his supporters worry he will be out of his depth in government.   The problem, for the centrists who are in power, is that a lot of voters seem to think they, too, are out of their depth. And, whether that involves dealing with migration, combatting inequality, or just boosting the security around the Mona Lisa, it’s a reputation they’ll need to fix in order to survive — no easy task given the intractability of the challenges facing the rich world.  The next year will see more elections at which the centrists — and their populists rivals — will be tested. In Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, long seen as the far-right bad boy of EU politics, is fighting to keep power at an election expected in April. There are regional votes in Germany where the AfD is on track to prosper. France may require yet another snap election to end its political paralysis. Trump’s diplomats and officials will be ready to intervene. Farage’s party, too, will be on the ballot in 2026: It is expected to make gains in Wales, Scotland and local votes elsewhere next spring. After that, his sights will be on the U.K. general election expected in 2029, by which time European politics may look very different.   “Of course I know Mr. Orban and of course I know Giorgia Meloni, of course I know these people,” Farage told POLITICO at a recent Reform rally. “I suspect that after the next election cycle in Europe there will be even more that I know.” Natalie Fertig in Washington, Clea Caulcutt in Paris and James Angelos in Berlin contributed to this report.  

The second Trump administration has made tearing down parts of the federal government a priority. And some of those efforts have been literal. In October, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for the construction of a massive 90,000-square-foot ballroom. He’s also given the White House a gilded makeover, bulldozed the famed Rose Garden, and even has plans for a so-called “Arc de Trump” that mirrors France’s Arc de Triomphe. So what’s behind all of this? Art historian Erin Thompson—author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments—says that whether it’s Romans repurposing idols of leaders who had fallen out of favor or the glorification of Civil War officers in the American South, monuments and public aesthetics aren’t just about the past. They’re about symbolizing power today. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “The aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present,” Thompson says. “It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”On this week’s More To The Story, Thompson sits down with host Al Letson to discuss why Trump has decked out the White House in gold (so much gold), the rise and recent fall of Confederate monuments, and whether she thinks the Arc de Trump will ever get built. 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: What is an art crime professor? Erin Thompson: Well, someone who’s gone to way too much school. I have a PhD in art history, and was finishing that up and thought, “Oh, I’m never going to get a job as an art historian. I should go to law school,” which I did, and ended up back in academia studying all of the intersections between art and crime. So I studied museum security, forgery, fraud, repatriations of stolen artwork. I could teach you how to steal a masterpiece, but then I would have to catch you. So is it fair to say that The Thomas Crown Affair is one of your favorite movies? No. Least favorite, opposite- Really? … because they make it seem like it’s a big deal to steal things from a museum, but it’s really, really easy to steal things from museums, as the Louvre heist just proved. I was just about to say, I think the thieves at the Louvre would agree with you. It’s hard to get away with stealing things from museums, which is why they got arrested immediately. So how did you move from studying museum pieces and art crime into monuments? Well, so my PhD is in ancient Greek and Roman arts, and when monuments began being protested in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, people were commenting online, “Civilized people don’t take down monuments. This is horrible.” And I was thinking, “Well, studying the ancient world, everything that I study has been at one point torn down and thrown into a pit and then buried for thousands of years.” Actually, as humans, this is what we do. We make monuments and then we tear them down as soon as we decide we want to honor somebody else. So I thought I could maybe add some perspective. And then having my skills in researching fraud, I started to realize that so many of the most controversial monuments in the U.S. were essentially fundraising scams where a bunch of money was embezzled from people who wanted to support racism, essentially, by putting up giant monuments to white supremacy. So I thought, maybe that’s some interesting information for our current debates. They got got, as they should. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. As somebody who grew up in the South, I would just say as a young Black man growing up in the shadow of these monuments, watching them go down felt like finally, finally this country was recognizing me in some small way. And I was completely unsurprised at the uproar from a lot of people who wanted to keep these monuments up. But when you dig into why these monuments were placed down, a lot of them were done just … Especially when we’re talking about Civil War monuments in the South and in other places, they were primarily put there to silence or to intimidate the Black population in a said area. Yeah, I call them victory monuments. They’re not about the defeat of the Confederates, they’re about the victory of Jim Crow and other means of reclaiming political and economic power for the white population of the South. Yeah. And so talk to me a little bit about the monuments themselves and how a lot of those were scams. I had never heard of that before. So for example, just outside of Atlanta in Stone Mountain, Georgia is the world’s largest Confederate monument, a gigantic carving into the side of a cliff of Lee and Jackson and Jefferson Davis. And that was launched in 1914 by a sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, working with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Klan enthusiastically embraced the project. They stacked the board. They took a bunch of the donations. Essentially, no progress was made for years and years and years until the 1950s when as a sign of resistance to Brown v. Board, the state of Georgia took over the monument and finally finished it. So it wasn’t finished until the 1970s. And to me, the makers said it should be a shrine to the South. It’s more like a shrine to a scam. The Klan leaders who led the project even fired Borglum at a certain point because they thought he was taking too much money. But he landed on his feet because he persuaded some Dakota businessmen to sponsor him to carve what turned into Mount Rushmore. So he defected from glorifying the Confederacy to carve a monument to the Union. So he didn’t really care about the glory of the Confederacy, he just wanted to make some money. So in the United States, how have monuments historically been funded? Well, the American government, both state and federal has always been a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to putting up public art. So most monuments that we see were actually privately fundraised, planned, and then donated to local governments. So they’re not really public art. They were put up by small groups for reasons. If you look, for example, at the Confederate monument that used to be in Birmingham, Alabama, this is a little weird that Birmingham had a Confederate monument in the first place because they were founded as a city well after the close of the Civil War. And the monument went up in two parts, both of which were in response to interracial unionization efforts. So the leaders, the owners and managers of the mines, when the miners were threatening to strike said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. We need to remind our white workers that they have to keep maintaining the segregation that their fathers or grandfathers fought for, so let’s put up this Civil War Monument.” So monuments don’t tell you very detailed versions of history, but also even thinking about history is kind of leading you on the wrong track when you look at, well, who is actually paying for these monuments top people put up and what did they actually want from them? So tell me, just pulling back a little bit, what’s the relationship between monuments and society? Monuments are our visions of the future. We put up a monument when we want people to aspire to that condition. We put up monuments to honor people to inspire people to follow their examples. So that sounds good and cheerful, right? It’s nothing wrong with having models and aspirations, but you have to think about, well, monuments are expensive. So who has the money to pay for them? Who has the political power to put them in place permanently? And you’ll often see that monuments are used to try and shape a community into a different form than it currently has. I live in New York City, for example, and almost all of the monuments put up until the last few decades are of white men. And what kind of message does that send to this incredibly diverse community of who deserves honor? And you said earlier that throughout time we have erected monuments and taken them down. Can you talk that cycle through with me? Yeah. Well, take the Romans, for example. Roman emperors would win a victory at war and put up a big victory monument, a triumphal arch or portraits of themselves. And then after the emperor died, the Senate would vote and decide, was this a good one or a bad one? Do we want to decide officially that they have become a deity and are to be honored forever, or do we want to forget their memory? And it was about a third, a third, a third. A third was no vote, a third were deities, a third were their memories were subjected to what we call damnatio memoriae. And if that happened to you, they would chisel the face off your statues and carve on your successor. The Romans were thrifty that way. They reused sculptures- Wow. So they recycled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Or they would break things up or melt it down and make it into a new statue. So this was a pretty common strategy of, just like we do it in a much more peaceable form, when a new president is elected, you take down the photo of the current president from the post office and put up the successor, etc, etc. So in the ancient world they had a more intense version of this, but you can think about the tearing down of statues of Saddam after his fall or the removal of statues of Lenin across the Soviet satellite states. This is something that we do when there are changes in power, and usually we don’t notice it because it’s more peaceful. There’s an official removal of the signs of the previous regime and a substitution with the others. So what was special and different about the summer of 2020 was the change came from below. It was unofficial. We mostly saw people not tearing down monuments with their bare hands, that’s obviously hard to do, but modifying monuments by adding paints, signage, projections, etc. And that’s exactly like what you looked at in Smashing Statues is the shift that, to me, in a lot of ways had been a long time coming. There had been movements here and there that were kind of under the radar for most people. But then after George Floyd, it’s like it got an injection of adrenaline, and suddenly all over the country you start seeing this stuff happening. Yeah, and I think people lost patience. What wasn’t obvious to a lot of observers was that changing a monument or even questioning a monument is illegal in most of the U.S., or there’s just no process to do so. So I interviewed for the book Mike Forcia, an indigenous activist in Minnesota, and he had been trying for his entire adult life to get the state legislator to ask why is there a statue of Columbus in one of the cities with the largest concentrations of an urban indigenous population in the world? And all of his petitions were just thrown away. So he eventually had to commit civil disobedience, I would describe it, by pulling down the statue. There’s no other way to have that conversation. Let me ask you, just to go back a little bit, how do these monuments shape and perceive history? Because you saying that this is what we’ve always done and the Romans would switch out faces and statues, that’s totally new to me. And so as somebody who grew up with Confederate statues around or Confederate names always around, I think it’s shaped the way I view the world. And also as they were coming down, not knowing that in the long arc of history that this is what we always do, it challenged the perceptions, I think of a lot of people. Monuments are inherently simple. You can’t tell a full historical story in a couple figures in bronze. So I think they communicate very simple messages of this is the type of person that we honor. And they speak directly to our lizard brain, the part of us that sees something, “Oh, something big and shiny and higher than me is something worthy of respect.” So you can’t tell them a nuanced story in a monument, and that is used as a strength. I also think it’s a strength that they become boring. They fade into the background of our lived landscape, and then we don’t question their messages if we just think of the monument as something, oh, we’re going to tell each other, “Meet at the foot of this guy for our ultimate Frisbee game,” or something. So it is these moments of disruption that let us think, “This is supposed to stand for who we are as a people. Do we really want that guy up on the horse telling us who we are?” In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and these statues and monuments are coming down or they’re being defaced, my little sister lives in Richmond, Virginia and I went to visit her. And I’ve been to Richmond several times. And I think I’d seen pictures of the monuments in Richmond being graffiti on them, but I had not seen them in real life up close. And it was kind of stunning to me. Also, what was stunning about it, because in Richmond, if you’ve never been to Richmond, Richmond has like this … I don’t know what street it is, but this long row- Monument Avenue. Monument Avenue, thank you. Has Monument Avenue with all of these different monuments. After George Floyd, they were spray painted, and people were gathering around these monuments in a way that I’d never seen before. I think those monuments went up to create a certain type of community. Monument Avenue was designed as a wealthy neighborhood, and how do you prevent the quote, unquote, “wrong type of people” from moving into your nice neighborhood? Well, put up some nice monuments celebrating Civil War generals. So it’s not- You tell them they’re not welcome. Yeah, exactly. So it’s a community created by exclusion, is what these monuments were put up for. And we actually see that again and again. In Charlottesville as well, the sculpture of Robert E. Lee that was recently melted down was put up to mark the exclusion of people from a neighborhood that had formerly been a neighborhood of Black housing and businesses, which they were condemned by eminent domain and turned into a cultural and park space that was intended to be whites only in the 1920s. So monuments are a powerful course for creating community. But you’re absolutely right that the removal can be a powerful force for creating community as well. And what saddens me is if you go to Richmond today, some of the bases of those monuments are still there. The Civil War monuments have been removed from Monument Avenue, but all of the graffiti has been scrubbed off. There’s no more people gathering there. It looks just like a traffic median again. And that’s true of almost everywhere in the U.S. The authorities are always a bit nervous about this type of spontaneous use of public space, I would say. Yeah. Listeners to this podcast have heard me say this 101 times because it’s my thing, but I just believe that America is a pendulum, that it swings hard one way and then it comes right back and swings the other way. Which means that in the long-term, America sees progress in inches, but the swings are where you can see exactly where the country is right now. And so I think if we look at what happened after George Floyd died, that was a hard swing the other way. I’m curious if what we see right now coming from the Trump administration, and not just like in military, he’s reverting the names or changing the names of military bases back to people whose names have been taken off these military bases, all of that type of stuff, but also he’s planning to put an Arc de Trump in D.C., the East Wing Ballroom, all of that stuff, do you feel like that is the opposite swing of what we saw during George Floyd’s death? Oh, yeah. And even literally, recently the Trump administration said that they were going to reverse removal of statues. So they re-erected a Confederate general statute in D.C., and they’ve said that they’re going to put up the Arlington Confederate Monument, which would cost millions and millions and millions of dollars to put up. So we will see if that actually happens. But just declaring that you’re going to do it is enough of a propaganda victory, I think, in this situation. Right. It might seem silly or not worthy of attention to look into the Trump administration’s aesthetic decisions, all of the gold ornamentations smeared all over the Oval Office and ballrooms and Arc de Trumps, and etc, but the aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present. It’s a way to rally people’s energies. It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not. I think he hasn’t really changed Washington in the way that he’s told his base he’s going to change. The elite are still in control of political power and wealth, but he is literally changing the White House by tearing part of it down. And you can channel people’s attention into rooting for that type of change instead of actual change. And the style choices that he’s making are very congruent with his political message, in that he’s appealing to a vision of the past, which is greater than the present. But in both his political message and his aesthetic style, this vision of the past, you can’t pinpoint it. It’s not an actual time. It’s a fuzzy, hand-wavy, things were prettier and nicer than. And so you can’t fact-check that type of vision. You can’t see if we’ve actually gotten closer to it. And so putting up a gilded tchotchke counts as progress towards that, and he can claim the credit, which he’s happy to do. Yeah. And I think that’s intentional, because if you can’t land on the specific time period, you can’t be held accountable for how that time period played out for the disenfranchised. Or for the powerful of that time period. Right. Right, exactly. Appealing to making the White House look like Versailles. We all know what happened to the French kings, but apparently we’re not paying much attention. And there’s another current right tendency to appeal to the glory of Caesar. Everybody wants to be like Julius Caesar when that’s really not a good life choice, if you want to end up like him. I think the other thing when I think about Trump’s aesthetic, so I grew up in the South but I am originally from New Jersey, and I remember Trump when I was really young, primarily because my dad was from Pleasantville, New Jersey, which is right outside of Atlantic City. And so there were conversations that I didn’t understand as a kid, and Trump was a part of those because he had his casinos and all of that type of stuff. And I just remember being a little kid and seeing a commercial for, I guess either it was Trump’s properties or it was a casino or whatever. And I just remember looking at it on the TV and seeing gold everywhere. That was his thing, gold. And the older I get, the more I realize that the way Trump sees gold and all the fittings that he has around, really is like him surrounding himself what he perceives of as wealth, and what people who don’t have wealth perceive of as wealth. But the actual uber-rich, usually from what I’ve seen, do not decorate their houses in all gold, do not flaunt. Their wealth is present but quiet, whereas Trump’s wealth is present but loud. And that speaks to a lot of people who do not have the wealth. And in a sense, him putting gold around the White House is a secret, in my opinion, aspirational message to poor folks who do not have that, “One day you can have.” I don’t know, it’s just like a theory that I’ve been cooking in my head since I was a little kid. I think absolutely. We have the proverb, “All that glitters is not gold” because people keep needing to be reminded. And yeah, again, in our primitive lizard brains, we think shiny equals good and I want that, and we don’t look below the surface. And I think that Trump’s focus on glitzing up the White House, on making these new constructions now in his second term is not accidental, because you often see populist leaders focusing on aesthetic projects towards the end of their political life. In Hitler’s last days in the bunker, he was still pouring over models for a museum that he was building in his hometown of Linz, in which he was planning to put all of the masterpieces seized from victims of the Holocaust from other museums across Europe. It was going to have 22 miles of galleries, all stuffed full of the artistic wealth of the world. And I think there’s a comfort in this idea. Like, if I make something spectacular and beautiful enough, all of the cruelty that went into making it will be justified. I will be forgiven. So when I’m feeling depressed about the world, I think maybe this focus on the gold now is such an obsession because he recognizes that he’s on his way out. What does it mean to a society that some of the tech leaders are now turning their attention towards building statues? You were just talking about how leaders when they’re beginning their twilight are … I guess they’re thinking about their legacy, and so they’re putting up these monuments and doing other things. But what does it mean for us when we have these tech bros that are doing it now? Well, we’ve always seen this. Think about the Pantheon in Rome, that big circular temple. Across the front of it, you can still see the shapes of the letters that it used to have that was erected not by an emperor, but by a wealthy Roman who was doing so in service of the imperial cause. So big donors making big, splashy public projects have always been realizing that this is a good way to get in with the regime to shape things, to get loyalty from the public to their point of view as well. So today you look at people’s reactions to Elon Musk is very similar, I think to what you were talking about, the idea of, “I can also have this splashy level of wealth maybe someday, so I will follow somebody who I could see as a model of getting wealth, rather than someone who is actually going to do anything that’s actually good for me.” Do you think that the Arc de Trump will ever be built? That’s the thing about these Trumpian aesthetic actions, you can just put out the promise, you can release a picture of the renderings and claim victory, even though you haven’t actually done anything. I very much doubt that this arch is going to go up for a huge variety of reasons, but if it would go up, I don’t understand how it can be justified to spend that much money. When on the one hand you’re saying we are trying to cut government expenditure, there’s no justification for having tens of millions probably going on an arch to yourself.

BERLIN — U.S. President Donald Trump’s overtures to the European far right have never been more overt, but the EU’s biggest far-right parties are split over whether that is a blessing or a curse.  While Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has welcomed Trump’s moral support, viewing it as a way to win domestic legitimacy and end its political ostracization, France’s National Rally has kept its distance — viewing American backing as a potential liability. The differing reactions from the two parties, which lead the polls in the EU’s biggest economies, stem less from varying ideologies than from distinct domestic political calculations. AfD leaders in Germany celebrated the Trump administration’s recent attacks on Europe’s mainstream political leaders and approval of “patriotic European parties” that seek to fight Europe’s so-called “civilizational erasure.” “This is direct recognition of our work,” AfD MEP Petr Bystron said in a statement after the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy — which, in parts, sounds like it could have been a manifesto of a far-right European party — warning that Europe may be “unrecognizable” in two decades due to migration and a loss of national identities. “The AfD has always fought for sovereignty, remigration, and peace — precisely the priorities that Trump is now implementing,” added Bystron, who will be among a group of politicians in his party traveling to Washington this week to meet with MAGA Republicans. One of the AfD’s national leaders, Alice Weidel, also celebrated Trump’s security strategy. “That’s why we need the AfD!” Weidel said in a post after the document was released. By contrast, National Rally leaders in France were generally silent. Thierry Mariani, a member of the party’s national board, explained Trump hardly seemed like an ideal ally. “Trump treats us like a colony — with his rhetoric, which isn’t a big deal, but especially economically and politically,” he told POLITICO. The party’s national leaders, Mariani added, see “the risk of this attitude from someone who now has nothing to fear, since he cannot be re-elected, and who is always excessive and at times ridiculous.”  AFD’S AMERICAN DREAM It’s no coincidence that Bystron is part of a delegation of AfD politicians set to meet members of Trump’s MAGA camp in Washington this week. Bystron has been among the AfD politicians increasingly looking to build ties to the Trump administration to win support for what they frame as a struggle against political persecution and censorship at home. This is an argument members of the Trump administration clearly sympathize with. When Germany’s domestic intelligence agency declared the AfD to be extremist earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the move “tyranny in disguise.” During the Munich Security Conference, U.S. Vice President JD Vance urged mainstream politicians in Europe to knock down the “firewalls” that shut out far-right parties from government. “This is direct recognition of our work,” AfD MEP Petr Bystron said in a statement after the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy. | Britta Pedersen/Picture Alliance via Getty Images AfD leaders have therefore made a simple calculation: Trump’s support may lend the party a sheen of acceptability that will help it appeal to more voters while, at the same time, making it politically harder for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives to refuse to govern in coalition with their party. This explains why AfD polticians will be in the U.S. this week seeking political legitimacy. On Friday evening, Markus Frohnmaier, deputy leader of the AfD parlimentary group, will be an “honored guest” at a New York Young Republican Club gala, which has called for a “new civic order” in Germany. NATIONAL RALLY SEES ‘NOTHING TO GAIN’ In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally has distanced itself from the AfD and Trump as part of a wider effort to present itself as more palatable to mainstream voters ahead of a presidential election in 2027 the party believes it has a good chance of winning. As part of the effort to clean up its image, Le Pen pushed for the AfD to be ejected from the Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament last year following a series of scandals that made it something of a pariah. At the same time, National Rally leaders have calculated that Trump can’t help them at home because he is deeply unpopular nationally. Even the party’s supporters view the American president negatively. An Odoxa poll released after the 2024 American presidential election found that 56 percent of National Rally voters held a negative view of Trump. In the same survey, 85 percent of voters from all parties described Trump as “aggressive,” and 78 percent as “racist.”  Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist and leading expert on French and international far-right movements, highlighted the ideological gaps separating Le Pen from Trump — notably her support for a welfare state and social safety nets, as well as her limited interest in social conservatism and religion.  “Trumpism is a distinctly American phenomenon that cannot be transplanted to France,” Camus said. “Marine Le Pen, who is working on normalization, has no interest in being linked with Trump. And since she is often accused of serving foreign powers — mostly Russia — she has nothing to gain from being branded ‘Trump’s agent in France.’” 

LONDON — Nigel Farage is on the march. And every lever Britain’s prime minister pulls seems broken. More than a year after his center-left Labour Party stormed to victory on a promise of change, Keir Starmer is yet to show voters he is truly in command. With Reform UK’s Farage eclipsing him in the polls, Starmer’s government has now been hit by a series of unforced errors on the issue on which he’s acutely vulnerable on the right: migration. Small boats carrying asylum-seekers continue to cross the English Channel, with numbers for this year already surpassing the 2024 total. In a farcical twist, one migrant, removed to France with much fanfare under the government’s flagship “one in, one out” deterrent scheme, arrived back on U.K. shores by small boat less than a month after being deported.  More damaging still, on Friday an asylum-seeker jailed for sexually assaulting a teenager — and whose crimes sparked a wave of protests in the U.K. over the summer — was mistakenly released from prison, prompting a weekend manhunt. He was eventually re-arrested on Sunday morning — but not before torrid headlines and a declaration from Farage that Britain is “broken.” It’s been “deeply damaging,” a Labour MP in a marginal seat, who had been door-knocking over the weekend, said of the latest events. It is “playing into the hands of Reform that Britain is ungovernable by traditional parties,” the MP, granted anonymity to speak candidly, added.   Unlike some of his centrist contemporaries in Europe battling populist insurgents, Starmer should be ascendant. He has a commanding House of Commons majority, and isn’t due to face an election until 2029. But events last week are “grist to the mill” to Reform’s argument that the British state is “totally dysfunctional,” Reform MP Danny Kruger, who defected to Farage’s outfit from the Tories and its leading its preparations for the prisons system, said. Kruger will make a speech Tuesday and told POLITICO he is calling for “serious surgery on the system.” IN AGREEMENT   The frustration in Starmer’s top ranks is evident. “There is a deep disillusionment in this country at the moment and I would say a growing sense of despair about whether anyone is capable of turning this country around,” Wes Streeting, the health secretary and a close ally of Starmer acknowledged in a broadcast interview on Sunday.  Starmer — who has hit out at the legacy handed to him by the Conservatives from their 14 years in power — has hardly been shy about criticizing the state either.   Keir Starmer — who has hit out at the legacy handed to him by the Conservatives from their 14 years in power — has hardly been shy about criticizing the state either. | Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images His claim last December that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” even prompted accusations from civil service unions that he was using “Trumpian language.”   MPs are not so squeamish. A parliamentary committee on Monday launched a blistering attack on the Home Office — Britain’s interior ministry — which it said had squandered billions of pound on the U.K.’s “failed, chaotic and expensive” asylum accommodation system.  Reform — which, apart from recently gained footholds in local government, currently has the luxury of observing rather than running things — insists it would take a different tack. Kruger said Tuesday’s speech would be “high level.”    He argues the country is facing a “multifactor crisis,” which makes an argument for “wholesale reform” of the machinery of state more “politically compelling and acceptable.”   “Being radical is becoming something that respectable mainstream parties need to do. We’re not diluting our radicalism, it’s that our radicalism is becoming more acceptable,” he said.   While Reform wants to make “quite serious surgery on the system,” the party is not going to come in with a “chainsaw or wrecking ball,” he insisted. Kruger will on Tuesday pledge to reduce the civil service headcount (though he will not specify by how much), make officials directly answerable to ministers, and close some government buildings. When asked on Monday about his own plans for government after the prison release debacle, Farage pointed only to his party’s existing plan to recruit experienced people to develop policy, who could then become ministers in a Reform government. Labour MPs hope a simultaneous racism row in Reform will halt its momentum. Farage on Monday admonished one of his own MPs for saying she was driven “mad” by advertisements featuring black and Asian people. The comments were “ugly” and “wrong,” the Reform UK leader told a press conference.   The Labour MP quoted above said that row had “stemmed the bleeding” for Starmer’s party over the weekend. Labour MPs repeatedly bring up infighting at Reform-run Kent County Council, too, hoping it will demonstrate the challenges the party would face if it’s actually given power. But pollsters aren’t so sure. YouGov’s Patrick English said “any stories which relate to issues surrounding or adjacent to immigration and small boat crossings will move conversations onto grounds upon which Farage and Reform are more comfortable.”   Reform currently leads the pollster’s “best party to handle immigration” tracker by some distance, with 36 percent of the public picking them compared with just 10 percent picking Labour, and 6 percent picking the Conservatives, English points out. Starmer’s predecessor as prime minister, Rishi Sunak, discovered the cost of failing to get a grip on the Home Office and to stop the flow of small boats across the English Channel when he led his party to a historic defeat last year. His former Deputy Chief of Staff Rupert Yorke said the recent debacles were “yet more evidence for the public that the British state is completely broken.”   “Worrying about a lack of vision — which MPs understandably demand —  is missing the point,” Yorke warned. “The government has to instead focus on solving these knotty problems which are so ingrained in the public psyche.   “Otherwise they are in deep trouble, and support for Reform will continue to grow.” Martin Alfonsin Larsen contributed reporting.

The EU should swiftly pull funding from organizations that fail to uphold its values, and do more to tackle hate speech, France, Austria and the Netherlands urged in an informal document seen by POLITICO. Citing a surge in antisemitic and racist incidents following the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza, the three countries call on Brussels and national capitals to “redouble their efforts to combat racism, antisemitism, xenophobia and anti-Muslim hatred” and ensure that “no support is given to entities hostile to European values, in particular through funding.” The document lays out proposals to tighten financial oversight and expand the EU’s criminal and operational response to hate crimes. It calls on the European Commission to fully apply existing budget rules allowing for the exclusion of entities inciting hatred, and to make beneficiaries of programs such as Erasmus+ and CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) sign pledges that they will respect and promote EU rights and values. The document comes just one day before a European Council meeting in Brussels at which EU leaders are expected to discuss support to Ukraine, defense, and also housing, competitiveness, migration, and the green and digital transitions. According to a draft of the Council conclusions obtained by POLITICO, national leaders are expected to stress that EU values apply equally in the digital sphere, with the protection of minors singled out as a key priority. Beyond funding, the document demands tougher measures against online and offline hate speech. It also urges Europol to launch a project looking at hate crimes and calls for education and awareness programs on tolerance and Holocaust remembrance through Erasmus+ and CERV.

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.

LONDON — Nigel Farage is gambling that a hardline stance on migration is a surefire vote-winner. But it’s a risky bet. Amid a spate of protests outside hotels housing some of Britain’s asylum seekers, Farage’s insurgent Reform UK party faces a dilemma. Should it condemn the demos and disappoint voters on the right? Or lean in — and risk alienating the more moderate voters who are now powering its rise? Reform UK’s base is increasingly mirroring the average Briton, according to fresh polling from the think tank More in Common. Just 40 percent of its current supporters backed the party in 2024, and just 16 percent of its current backers once voted for Farage’s old outfit, UKIP. Its gender gap has narrowed, its age profile has evened out, and many of its newest recruits are less glued to online culture wars. That makes Reform’s growth, in the pollsters’ words, both “a blessing and a curse.” The broader the party gets, the greater the risk of being defined by its more radical supporters — and losing the very voters Farage has worked to bring in. Members of the far-right have egged on protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping. What began as a local protest quickly drew in the Homeland party — a breakaway from Britain’s biggest far-right group, Patriotic Alternative — alongside Britain First, and hard-right agitator Tommy Robinson. So far, Reform has backed the right to protest — Farage described people protesting as “genuinely concerned families,” and insisted that violence was caused by “some bad eggs.” “We don’t pick and choose the protest,” his Deputy Leader Richard Tice told POLITICO in an interview. “We don’t choose to support some and not others. We just say lawful, peaceful protest is an important part of a functioning democracy.”  DISTANCE But it’s a careful line for a party that has spent the past year trying to sharpen its operation — tightening vetting rules for candidates and putting distance between itself and overt racism. “They’ve drawn a clear line when it comes to distancing themselves from Tommy Robinson,” said Marley Morris, associate director for migration, trade and communities at the Institute for Public Policy Research. So far, Reform has backed the right to protest — Nigel Farage described people protesting as “genuinely concerned families,” and insisted that violence was caused by “some bad eggs.” | Neil Hall/EPA “That’s actually come at quite significant costs for Nigel Farage, because of its consequences for his relationship with Elon Musk.” The Tesla owner has been a staunch online backer of Robinson, who was jailed in the UK for contempt of court after he repeated false claims about a Syrian schoolboy. Farage — whose party descends on Birmingham for its annual conference this weekend in a jubilant mood — is riding high in the polls, and will be buoyed by polling that consistently puts migration at or near the top of Brits’ list of concerns. But the summer of tense protests risks complicating matters, according to some British commentators. Farage “feels under pressure from the online right,” argued Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future think tank. Over the past month, Reform has doubled down on its anti-immigration pitch — in language critics say edges closer to the far-right. In August, Tice told Times Radio that there should be more groups of men on a “neighborhood watch-style basis within the bounds of the law” to protect women from the “sneering, jeering, and sexual assaults and rapes that are taking place, coincidentally, near a number of these asylum-seeker hotels.”  Pressed by POLITICO, Tice doubled down on this position. “There is already vigilantism going on. No one wants to report it, but that’s the reality of life … It is much better to shine the spotlight on an issue, talk about it … and then government can make better policy.”  Tice likens asylum arrivals in the UK to “an invasion double the size of the British Army.” But the summer of tense protests risks complicating matters, according to some British commentators. | Tolga Aken/EPA “That’s how people talk about it in the pubs and clubs and bus stops and sports fields up and down the country. I know that makes people in Westminster uncomfortable — tough,” Tice told POLITICO. THE CONNOLLY FACTOR The party has also wrapped its arms around Lucy Connolly, a 42-year-old woman who was jailed after pleading guilty to stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers with a post calling for migrant hotels to be set on fire. Reform has painted Connolly as a political prisoner of Keir Starmer’s government, with Farage even flying to Washington this week to slam Britain’s online safety rules and likening the UK to North Korea on free speech.  Cabinet ministers blasted Farage’s U.S. trip as a “Talk Britain Down” tour. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds called it “as anti-British as you can get. More in Common polling shows that while voters are split on whether Connolly’s sentence was too harsh or too lenient, 51 percent want politicians to distance themselves from her, including more than a quarter of Reform voters. “The transnational neoconservative right is a massive danger to the British right, not an opportunity,” argued IPPR’s Morris. More in Common polling shows that many of Reform’s newer supporters view U.S.-style populist figures, such as Donald Trump, negatively. Social attitudes are also shifting, with six in ten voters supporting same-sex marriages, and 46 percent thinking the legal abortion limit should stay at 24 weeks. POLICY PITFALLS While Reform is confidently ahead in national voting intention polls, there is evidence of some unease about its specific policy pledges. A proposal to work with the Taliban to return Afghan asylum seekers got a mixed reception. Some 45 percent of Britons said that giving money to the regime to take returns would be “completely unacceptable,” according to a YouGov poll. The party has also struggled to clarify its stance on deporting children. Chairman Zia Yusuf suggested unaccompanied minors could eventually be removed under the party’s mass deportation plans — only for Farage to row back, insisting it wouldn’t happen in Reform’s first term. “When it came to deporting children, they realized that what they proposed isn’t really sustainable — it seems, frankly, inhumane,” said Morris. “If [Reform] wants to appeal to the wider public, and not just to its base, it can’t just appeal to this kind of narrow group of people.” Tice has since sought to narrow the focus. “We’ve said that we will start focusing on detaining and deporting males first,” he said. “If a husband is detained and deported, if he’s got a wife and children, they’ve got a choice to make. “The children of parents who are here illegally, those children are not British citizens by law,” he continued. “There are bound to be specific cases and things, but as a principle, we’re not going to go through a whole long list of exemptions. If you do that, you actually create a criminal gang focus on the exemptions, and then people try to game that system. So we’re not playing that game.”

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.

NORWICH, England — Outside the vast art deco headquarters of Norwich’s municipal government on a soggy Wednesday evening, anti-immigration protesters gather to make their voices heard. Many in the 120-strong crowd in the Norfolk city in the east of England, 100 miles from Westminster, are either waving — or are wrapped in — the red-and-white Saint George’s Cross or the Union Jack. Some chant “send them home,” while others have harsh words for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and a government struggling to stop undocumented migrants arriving on U.K. shores in small boats.   “I will never stop raising my flag, and never stop celebrating my culture,” Jake, who declined to give his full name citing concern about potential repercussions, said of his motive for bringing along a Union Jack flag. He’s not the only Brit who has been raising the flag this summer.   An online campaign — #OperationRaisetheColours — has prompted a guerrilla movement that has seen St. George’s Cross and Union Jack flags hung from hundreds of lampposts in towns and cities across the country. Red crosses have been painted on white mini-roundabouts, and flyovers along some of Britain’s main arterial routes have been adorned. It’s a striking development in a country where flag-flying is usually reserved for special occasions such as sports tournaments, royal weddings and military anniversaries. And for some, the timing of the initiative in the heat of a politically-charged summer of anti-migrant protests has set off loud alarm bells. The Hope not Hate advocacy group claims a number of the campaign’s organizers have links to far-right activists. Tommy Robinson, who co-founded the race-baiting and now-defunct English Defence League party, has been posting in support of it all on X — along with the platform’s owner, U.S. tech mogul Elon Musk. A sizable chunk of the British public (42 percent) see the flag campaign as a political statement against immigrants, polling conducted this week for the More in Common think tank found.  Three in five of those same Brits polled say they want to see more flags on lampposts and roundabouts. “Whatever the intentions of the people who started this off it’s actually not a campaign that should worry anybody else,” said former Labour Minister John Denham, now a professor in English identity and politics. Flags are not seen as overtly political by the British public, he added. “If you put a MAGA [Make America Great Again] hat on, you are clearly declaring your support for [U.S. President Donald] Trump. If you fly a St. George’s Cross or a union flag, for somebody like me, that’s my flag and whatever the intentions of the person who put the flag up, I’m entitled to see it in the way that I want.”   “I think we should be quite relaxed about this,” he said. TAKING OFFENSE  Back in Norwich, in a similarly sized counter-protest crowd, where two Palestinian flags are being flown, people are not so sanguine. Pro-refugee advocate Caroline, who also wouldn’t give her full name, said the flags had become “political symbols.” It’s a striking development in a country where flag-flying is usually reserved for special occasions such as sports tournaments, royal weddings and military anniversaries. | Martin Pope/Getty Images People in minority groups are “very frightened of that flag,” she said of the St. George’s Cross. “It’s an emotional trigger for some people.” That’s a view dismissed by Sue Hubbard, a 62-year-old living in a village outside Norwich, who was part of the anti-migrant protest across the road. She questions why people flying the Palestinian flag could object to the flag of St. George. “I don’t know why they are offended with this,” she says.  Nigel Farage is, of course, getting in on the action. His poll-leading Reform UK is not behind the movement, but the right-wing populist is jumping on the bandwagon.  While some local councils have been removing flags amid concerns they could be seen as disrespectful or unsafe,  Farage has made great play of promising that his newly-won Reform-led councils will not remove “sensibly”-placed flag paraphernalia. “Union flags and the Cross of St. George should and will fly across the country,” Farage said in a press statement. “Reform UK will never shy away from celebrating our nation.” It follows a furor in May when Reform UK — flush with success from local elections — ordered town hall bosses in areas they had won control of to only fly the Union Jack, St. George’s flag and county flags.   Pride flags supporting LGBTQ+ communities and Ukrainian flags, which had been flown across many councils in support of the country after the Russian invasion in 2022, should be removed, Reform said.   Farage’s potential rival on the right, Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, also appears to see political merit in backing the campaign. He posted a picture of himself up a  ladder hanging a flag, and followed up with an opinion piece in the right-leaning Telegraph newspaper claiming people were “mobilising to restore the country they know and love.”  FILLING THE VACUUM The movement could be a big test for Starmer, the embattled prime minister and leader of the center-left Labour Party. Since taking the reins of the party in 2020, Starmer has been at pains to insist he is “proud of being patriotic,” often appearing in front of a Union Jack flag and pointedly marking St. George’s Day. The British prime minister, who has been on holiday, told journalists through his spokesman on Tuesday that he “supports people who have got pride in our flag and our history and our values,” pointing to the flags which are put up on Downing Street when England plays in international sporting tournaments. But Sunder Katwala, director of the think tank British Future, is wary. He thinks politicians like Starmer should be going further in their response to the Raise the Colours movement — and make it clear that while “pride in place is good, vandalism is bad.” Ethnic minority politicians on the left and the right should also be taking on those who claim the flag is for one group, he says. “They don’t know the history of our country,” he warns of those claiming the flag as their own. “They don’t know the history of our flags, because we know that British identity has always mattered a great deal to ethnic minorities in Britain.” “Nobody feels threatened by the England flag when 65,000 people come out on the Mall to celebrate the [England women’s soccer team] lionesses bringing the trophy home. So I think sort of normalizing its use, rather than it having this frisson is quite an important thing to do,” Katwala adds. Luke Tryl of More in Common agrees.  “Many Brits like the idea of more Union Jacks flying around their neighborhood, and only want the council to take them down if they’re causing a safety risk,” he says. “Guerilla flag installation isn’t a problem for most. But when it comes to acts of vandalism, damage to property or anything that looks like bigotry or racism the public will recoil. For most, it’s lets fly the flag — but do it respectfully.”