AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with Jelani Cobb, acclaimed historian, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His book is just out. It’s called Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here, a 437-page collection of his essays from 2012 to 2025, with a bunch of postscripts.

I asked you about the subtitle, How We Got Here, in Part 1 of our conversation. What about Three or More Is a Riot?

JELANI COBB: That title came to me when I was in Charleston, and I was reporting on the trial of Dylann Roof, you know, the white supremacist who killed nine people in the church, Emanuel AME. And it reminded me that in 1739 there had been a slave revolt, the Stono revolt in South Carolina. And in the wake of that slave revolt, the colonial legislature passed a law that said the definition — effectively, the definition of a slave revolt was three or more Negroes, as they would have been called then, outside the presence of a white man. So, just the mere gathering of three people meant that this was forbidden. And it spoke to the kind of demographic anxiety of that era. And when I looked at what was happening there, what was the animating force behind Trumpism, you know, what was the animating force behind so much of what we were seeing in American politics, it went back to that same sort of demographic anxiety. And so, that’s where the title came from. And it’s Three or More Is a Riot.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to what’s going on right now, what some are calling a MAGA civil war, generated by an interview former Fox News host Tucker Carlson did with the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who praised Hitler many times, had dinner with Trump in Mar-a-Lago in 2022, well known as a white nationalist, as an antisemite, as a racist. Among his comments, and I could choose one of hundreds, a “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed. The Founders never intended for America to be a refugee camp for nonwhite people.” If you can talk about what’s happening here? The attack is that the head of the Heritage Foundation has supported Tucker Carlson in a very sympathetic interview with Nick Fuentes. What this white Christian nationalist movement represents?

JELANI COBB: So, I mean, I think there are a lot of things. If you actually look at the history of the Heritage Foundation, it kind of mirrors the Republican Party. Because I’m old enough to remember when the Heritage Foundation was — I mean, it was right of center. It was a right-of-center think tank, but it was nowhere near — they would not have come anywhere near the kind of xenophobic, antisemitic, overtly racist, Nazi-sympathizing kinds of politic that we see now. And it’s kind of similarly with the mainline GOP.

But what really is the conflict here is that the — and this, you know, goes all the way back to Charlottesville. There’s always been this attachment. From the earliest point of Trump’s emergence, there’s always been this attachment of this neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi element that has strongly and visibly been supportive of him. The problem is that they’re in the midst of their own culture war, in which they have accused the left of being the primary purveyors of antisemitism via any criticism they have for Benjamin Netanyahu, any criticism they have for the waging of war in Gaza, for what very many people have referred to as a genocide, all these things that are happening. And so, it gets in the way, and it becomes a bit of an embarrassment if you are making great political hay by flogging the left for these sins, and at the same time you have in your camp people who are overtly sympathizing with a person who oversaw the mass execution of 6 million Jews.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, where JD Vance fits into this picture? For example, the whole controversy around the text conversations of the white Republicans who referred to African Americans as animals — 

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — talked a great deal about their sympathy with Hitler. While some of them were forced out of their positions, one of them left who was an elected official in Vermont — not so young, by the way.

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: You had JD Vance actually making a statement about “stop the pearl clutching.”

JELANI COBB: Right. Yeah, he did. He said that. He also — the same person who spoke in defense of the far right in Germany, specifically went to Germany to advocate on behalf of the far right. You can’t get a more leaden symbol than that. And so, this is, you know, a kind of playing footsie with these people and wanting to have — you know, for the portion of their electorate that still blanches at this kind of thing, they still want to have plausible deniability. But for — they’ve gone further and further and further. I mean, the poisoning, immigrants poisoning the American bloodstream, all these things that we have seen that are kind of standard textbook fascistic language and that tend to preface some sort of mass violence directed at vulnerable populations, and we’ve seen that become an increasingly prominent part of their rhetoric.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about what happened here in New York, which has really shaken the foundations — 

JELANI COBB: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: —of the establishment all over the country. And I’m not just talking about the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party, as well. And that is the election of the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, winning the New York mayoral race over the disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. Yes, New York will soon have its first Muslim mayor, first South Asian mayor and the youngest mayor in over a century. This is part of what Mamdani said on election night.

MAYOR-ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: The sun may have set over our city this evening, but, as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Zohran Mamdani on election night. If you can talk about the significance of his victory? As he was introduced, a thousand supporters and organizers — and that’s a really key point — of every hue, were there at the theater where he spoke, where he was celebrating his victory. Over 104,000 volunteers went out through the five boroughs, and a number of them were actual organizers working for all of these months to get Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old now mayor-elect of New York, elected.

JELANI COBB: You know, it’s really amazing. First off, that quote from Eugene Debs is particularly apt. If we wanted to play, you know, a probably interesting trivia game, it’d be like: Go back and find the last time that an American elected official quoted Eugene Debs. It will not be any time within — you know, that was recent. It’s certainly not quoting him favorably.

But the other thing that I think is significant here is that Debs, who really was the kind of avatar of American socialism for the moment that he existed in, was also dealing with a point at which the United States population had grown tremendously, largely by immigrants, driven by immigrants, and had been kind of advocating for a socialism that was both tolerant and inclusive and also looking at the common interests of all of these working people. And so, you know, the quote from Debs for a democratic socialist mayor-elect probably could not be more apropos.

The other thing about — thing that I think about it — and, you know, my colleague at Columbia, Basil Smikle, made a really good observation — is that Mamdani has put together, and the team around him has put together, this really broad array of New Yorkers around American — around kind of common interests, common economic interests, and the idea of it being a city that’s more affordable, etc. It’s a counterpoint, and it kind of harkens back to what we heard David Dinkins say in his rhetoric back in 1989, when he was elected as mayor, who kind of famously referred to the “gorgeous mosaic” of the city. With Mamdani, I think it becomes an even more pointed observation about bringing all of these different communities together, because it is a direct counterpoint to what we see in our national politics. And, of course, Mamdani being an assemblyman from Queens and his primary kind of target in that speech, or the person who he has the most pointed criticism from is — directed toward is a president who is, in fact, from Queens, too. And this is a internal conversation, Queens being the most diverse county in the United States, and this is a president who despises that dynamic, and a mayor-elect who embodies it. And I think that’s the subtext that we’re thinking about in this conversation.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, of course, Bernie Sanders endorsed him — 

JELANI COBB: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: — as did AOC. And in Bernie Sanders’ book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, he, too, quotes Eugene Victor Debs, Eugene V. Debs, who says, “The vast majority of Americans recognize that Eugene Victor Debs was right when he said, a century ago, [quote] “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.’”

JELANI COBB: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: And we happen to be speaking, Jelani, right at the moment where the USDA, the Trump administration, is threatening any state —

JELANI COBB: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: — who dares to fill the gap — 

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — to fully fund food stamps, SNAP — 

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — for what? I think it’s one in eight Americans rely on SNAP — 

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — to eat.

JELANI COBB: Right, yeah. I mean, so there’s that. And then there’s the other side. You know, it’s the hand that taketh and the hand that giveth, because of the extraordinarily lenient and beneficial policies that have been directed at the upper 1% of the 1% and the kind of vast accumulation of wealth that’s happening on the other side of it.

And so, I think that, you know, one of the other things I’ll say just really quickly about Mamdani is that it was interesting to hear the criticism that if he were elected, the moneyed class was going to flee the city or that they were going to react in this kind of way. It reminded me of when the NYPD was angry with de Blasio, and they decided that they were not going to enforce laws, but without realizing that this was exactly what people had been saying, that they had been overaggressive in enforcing particular kinds of laws. So, it was like, you’re going to punish me by giving me the thing that I have, in fact, asked for. And that’s not to say that kind of people are supposed to leave the city, you know, kind of flee, or any of these other kinds of things. But it is to say that people made the calculation that, you know, the rent is incredibly unaffordable for people. The subway system, which is our most democratic form of transportation, is severely lacking. Wages stagnate, all of these things that are happening, and we have had years of policies that favored the moneyed classes. And so, what will happen if we don’t have those policies anymore? Like, the things that people are worried about happening are already happening. And so, I think that was one of the kind of more notable things, you know, rhetorically, at least, in that campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about this latest BBC headline, but go broader than that to what’s happening right here at home with the media. And you certainly comment on the media all the time. You follow it very closely. You have the top executives at the BBC abruptly resigning following backlash over the BBC’s edit of a speech made by President Trump, January 6th of 2021, before a mob of his supporters. The BBC is reportedly planning to formally apologize to Trump, who celebrated the resignation, saying on Truth Social, “These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election. … What a terrible thing for Democracy!” Trump repeatedly has defended unfounded claims that his 2020 loss to Joe Biden was rigged. So, you have the BBC top people resigning. You have both CBS and ABC paying $15 million and $16 million to President Trump, when, clearly, in both of those cases — in the case of CBS’s 60 Minutes, editing —

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — an interview with Kamala Harris. If this case had gone to court, it is hard to believe that CBS would have lost.

JELANI COBB: Sure, sure. So, I mean, of course, I mean, you know this probably, as well, better than anybody, that if you have any kind of raw material, you have — there’s an editing process that has to go. If you are — even in print, you know, if you’re talking to someone, and they say “um” 10 times, you’re not going to quote “um, um, um.” You’re going to, like, edit that out. And so, you know, this is generally done, as they will say, done for clarity and brevity. That’s what people will kind of say. And within those bounds, you know, that’s a kind of normal, acceptable thing. The line about the CBS interview and the kind of editing of it to make someone’s point more clear, well, that’s exactly what the point of editing is. And, you know, what I think a compelling kind of counterpoint would have been would have been to show the history of editing Donald Trump’s statements, because, you know, if you have someone who goes and takes five minutes to make a point, and you have 30 seconds for that segment, you’re going to actually try to make the person sound more cogent.

I haven’t seen the specific BBC edit, so I can’t comment on it. I know that, you know, there’s a kind of ongoing thing about it. But I do think the administration has likely been emboldened precisely because American news organizations caved in instances where at least the media lawyers who I have been in contact with and people who I discussed these other cases with, strongly felt that these were cases that would have been thrown out, that these were cases that didn’t really have a whole lot of legal weight to them, and by settling them for multiple millions of dollars, you only enhance the possibility that more news organizations are going to face that same sort of dynamic.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where do you see the media going today in this country? And what gives you hope? I mean, on the one hand, you have this fierce attack. Normally, what bullies do is they go after the weakest, but Trump is going after the most powerful, which is very efficient, because if they cave — and he has to count on them caving — it creates a chilling effect for everyone, because if he’s going to go after the big boys, people who don’t have those kind of resources are really afraid.

JELANI COBB: They are. But also, you know, some of the big organizations have vulnerabilities that other organizations don’t, quite frankly, because the leverage that’s been used against them has been their kind of corporate parentage and the desire for billion-dollar-generating mergers or various other kinds of things that they want to pursue. That was the case with The Washington Post and Bezos’ ownership of Amazon and his space programs and all these other kinds of things. That’s the case with Paramount. That’s the case with all these other kinds of things. Other organizations don’t necessarily have those same vulnerabilities.

And I’ll say that the one beneficial thing here is that the media ecosystem is still diverse, you know, not as diverse as it once was, but there’s still different types of news organizations. There are people like you doing what you do. There are nonprofit newsrooms. There are all kinds of different entities that are still trying to generate a baseline of knowledge for an informed public. And that might be, you know, our saving grace, at least for the moment.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about March 8th, International Women’s Day, though I don’t think that was the point of what happened on that day, but it was the day that Khalil — it was the day that Mahmoud Khalil was arrested. This day had a tremendous effect on you, as well. You were leaving to give a speech, leaving the country.

JELANI COBB: I was, yeah, on my way to — I was on my way to London.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happened on that day?

JELANI COBB: So, I was on my way to — literally, I was on my way to JFK, and I got a message from one of the people who work in the dean’s office that Mahmoud had been arrested the night before. And so —

AMY GOODMAN: He had appealed, by the way, to the Columbia president before that, saying, “I am really afraid. I think” — 

JELANI COBB: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — “I might be taken. Can you help me?” because he was in Columbia housing.

JELANI COBB: He was in Columbia housing. Now, that story is a little bit more complicated than what’s known. And so, the fact of it is that Columbia did not assist in his arrest. I know that for a fact. Like, being, you know, a dean, I was part of those conversations. It did not assist and did not give access. If you notice, the people who arrested him followed someone else into the building, because they were not given legal access into the building.

AMY GOODMAN: I guess the question isn’t so much “Did they help in the arrest?” as “Did they help Mahmoud Khalil when he asked them to help, because he knew that they were closing in on him, and he was a student?”

JELANI COBB: Yeah, I think that if you were to talk to various other kinds of people in the administration, their version of this was that they didn’t give — there was no information given about his whereabouts. There was no access granted to his housing or any of those things. Aside from that, it’s kind of hard to imagine, like, what is in the university’s purview. But that was something that I knew as being a dean, that was part of the — I was privy to conversations surrounding that.

But the other part of it was that I was about — I was supposed to be in London for five days for different events, for a conference, for a talk.

AMY GOODMAN: You were giving a speech at Oxford?

JELANI COBB: I was giving a speech at Oxford. And so I decided that I would go, I would give the speech. I would still keep the thing. I didn’t cancel that event. But as soon as I gave the speech, I would then hop on a plane and come back. And that was what — you know, kind of how we proceeded.

Then we had kind of internal conversations. We talked with our alumni. We talked with, you know, our attorneys. We talked with all these other constituencies about what our students needed to know, what our international students needed to know, what were the vulnerabilities that we had, what were the protocols that we needed to follow. And, you know, we were trying to figure out, like, what our stance would be. We then, eventually — this was a little while down the line. I don’t remember, like, what the exact timeline was. But we, at the Journalism School, put out a statement kind of pointing to Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest being a tactic that would be used to stifle dissent on college campuses, that would curtail the vitality of the First Amendment and academic freedom and so on. And so, we put that out, and we got a good bit of criticism about it that was kind of anticipated, but that was kind of how we began, you know, to proceed and to figure out what we would do. And, of course, we did what the Journalism School does in a moment like that, which is that we started reporting.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you afraid for your international students, overall? I mean, he was an international student who already then had a green card, married to an American, and was well on the way to becoming a U.S. citizen. But there are those who are even more vulnerable, although, ultimately, he was jailed for months.

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the climate like?

JELANI COBB: So, I think that when I went back to that McCarthy example, one of the things that there is a long history of — and, you know, again, it’s like my hat tip to my colleague Ellen Schrecker, who’s written about this extensively — is that there is a long history of using immigration law to suppress dissent in the United States, going all the way back to the Palmer Raids in 1919, 1920. But you go up through the 1930s, '40s, ’50s, and you find people who dissent or who have unpopular political views, and the primary tool for silencing them is to utilize immigration law. So this is not new. It's a replay of an older tactic that is fundamentally undemocratic and fundamentally contravenes, like, any concept of the First Amendment. If you have a First Amendment that only protects you when you agree with the administration, then you don’t have a First Amendment.

And so, I think that that is the grounds that people should look at, you know, the Mahmoud Khalil situation on, irrespective of whether you agree with him or not. It’s the fundamental question of his ability to articulate a viewpoint that may be supported by some people and may be outright despised by other people, but it’s still within the bounds of his right to express himself.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts —

JELANI COBB: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: — who writes an op-ed — 

JELANI COBB: That’s even more overt.

AMY GOODMAN: — in her Tufts newspaper.

JELANI COBB: Even more overt, right, absolutely. I mean, we could just go through the line. There are just, like, instance after instance of this. And that’s why I think it’s important to kind of look and say this is not — this is a kind of habitual problem in American society with the criminalization of dissent, particularly by people who are immigrants or who have immigrant status. But it never — even if you don’t care about that, it never stops there. That always is an on-ramp for stigmatizing the speech of even broader groups of people who are dissenting. And so, there’s that concern, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, Eugene V. Debs was jailed repeatedly — 

JELANI COBB: That’s right. That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: — because there was a law passed that you could not criticize World War I.

JELANI COBB: Yeah, that’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: And that’s exactly what he was doing. And he ultimately would run for president from jail.

JELANI COBB: Yeah, yeah. And what was it? He won 2 million votes or something? I forget what it was. Astounding.

AMY GOODMAN: Maybe a million.

JELANI COBB: Yeah, a million votes, astounding number of votes that he won running his presidential campaign from the Atlanta federal penitentiary, which was, you know, just an astounding thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us how you became a journalist, Jelani. Actually, go back to where you were born and talk about growing up, going to college, what this all meant to you and to your family.

JELANI COBB: Oh, so, I was — I was born in Queens, and I was raised in Queens. And, you know, aside from my family, one of the most foundational institutions in my life was the Queens Public Library, which was right around the corner from me. And I — 

AMY GOODMAN: Weren’t you just honored there?

JELANI COBB: Yeah, I was, actually. I was. It was kind of amazing, because it’s like the full turn of the circle. But I still am astounded that in a country where we have the kind of regressive politics that we often do, we still have protected this institution that is so wildly democratic. We will let anyone walk in off the street and learn something. We won’t let anyone walk off the street and get healthcare, you know, which is terrible. It’s a travesty. But we have been able to protect this institution that lets people walk in — 

AMY GOODMAN: You might want to say this quietly.

JELANI COBB: I know. Maybe I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. I mean, I did joke. You know, the president of the New York Public Library is Tony Marx. And my ongoing joke with him is that, you know, the socialist scheme that you have, they’re hiding it in plain sight. They even have a guy named Marx running the place, and so… But it’s an amazing thing. And that’s where I spent, you know, many an hour in my youth. And I’m also proudly a product of Queens public schools. I went to P.S. 34 and I.S. 238 and — for middle school, and I went to Jamaica High School. And I wrote — one of the long essays in there is about Jamaica High School and its place in kind of American education.

And my parents had come to New York from the South. My father had a third grade education. My mother had a high school education. And they really poured everything into the idea that if I took school seriously, my life could be different than theirs had been. And, you know, it’s very much a kind of immigrant idea. But for them, it was the migrant idea, you know, coming from the South to the North.

AMY GOODMAN: In the Great Migration?

JELANI COBB: In the Great Migration. And that’s been, you know, the real — I have, to this day, an abiding love for libraries, you know, of all sorts, of all kinds.

AMY GOODMAN: My dad sat on the library board of our town for some 25 years, and I — it was down the street from me, and so I was always in the library. My mother was concerned that I had a soft voice because I was constantly hushed by librarians.

JELANI COBB: That’s very funny.

AMY GOODMAN: But you went on to the Mecca, to Howard University.

JELANI COBB: Yeah, to Howard.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the significance of Howard.

JELANI COBB: Yeah, so, I played baseball in high school, and the father of one of my teammates — his father and mother, actually, were alumni of Howard. And, you know, my parents had not gone to college. And so, one day, I’m just talking to him, and he’s like, “Where do you plan to go to college?” And I was like, “Oh, I don’t know. You know, I haven’t figured that out.” And he’s like, “You should go to Howard.” And pretty much, I was like, “OK.” You know? That’s kind of like what I did.

And so, I went to Howard. I was an English major, and, you know, I had this amazing experience with English professors and people and that kind of love of language. And I remember calling my mother and telling her that — you know, I said, “I think I want to be a writer.” And to her credit, she didn’t tell me the first thing that came to her mind when I said that, but years later she said — 

AMY GOODMAN: Which was?

JELANI COBB: When I said, “I think I want to be a writer,” her thought was, “I think you want to be broke.” But she didn’t say it. You know, I mean, it turned out to be true anyway for a long time. But, you know, I figured out that there would be a way to kind of make a living doing that. And the other kind of formative thing was that I had two internships in Washington, D.C. One was at a small community newspaper called One, and the other was at a slightly bigger publication called the Washington City Paper, which was David Carr. The legendary David Carr was the editor at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about David Carr.

JELANI COBB: Oh, David Carr was an amazing person, and he was a complete character. And so, you know, he was self-deprecating, but also one of the most honest people I’ve ever met. And I think his honesty was hard won, because he had — he was very open about his years of drug addiction. I think that his willingness — you know, it became a professional virtue of his willingness to tolerate absolutely no BS at all. Like, he wanted the kind of accuracy and truth, and don’t beat around the bush around anything, don’t hedge. And I think that was partly him as a journalist, but also him as someone who had come through the experience he had with addiction. And so, interacting with him, one of the things that I took — and also, we were interns. I was interns with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Like, we knew each other passingly before that, but we got to be good friends, as in —

AMY GOODMAN: So, he hired the two of you.

JELANI COBB: He hired the two of us, yeah. We were his first two interns. But Carr, to this day, the voice in the back of my head when I’m about to file something, or if I’d ever, like, written something, and he was like, “Do you think this is true, or do you know that this is true?” That is still David Carr’s voice, kind of all these very many years later, kind of ricocheting around.

AMY GOODMAN: I remember that 2011 documentary that premiered at Sundance — 

JELANI COBB: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — Page One: Inside The New York Times.

JELANI COBB: Yeah, that’s right. Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: So, 2012, that’s where your columns begin in your book, Three or More Is a Riot, was your first columns for the NewYorker.com. Explain.

JELANI COBB: Right. That’s right. So, The New Yorker had just made this foray into digital, which was — I mean, now it’s kind of comical, because digital just is what news is. You kind of — but at that point, it was a kind of splashy thing, like digital is NewYorker.com. You know? And that was like a big, kind of sexy detour for this company that had this kind of staid reputation, or this publication that had a staid reputation. And when I — Nick Thompson, who was then the editor-in-chief of the dot-com side, brought me on. I had met David Remnick, and he invited me to contribute to the website. Then, eventually, I met Amy Davidson, who was my primary editor, and then Nick Thompson, who was the editor-in-chief on that side.

And Amy, when we were kind of talking about, like, tossing around story ideas, she said, “Do you — would you have any interest in this story in Florida of this teenager?” And at this point, we didn’t even have like a name attached to it. It was just this kind of news blip. And I was like, “Sure, I’ll look into it.” And that turned out to be Trayvon Martin. And after I filed the story, Amy said, “Why don’t you follow this, just kind of see where it goes?” And on some level, that’s what the next 13 years have been, just kind of following the echoes of that moment all the way down.

AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, take us on that trajectory. Take us on that 13 years. We interviewed you when you were in Ferguson.

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Mike Brown. But start with Trayvon Martin. And it also goes to where we are today with President Trump and his attack on African Americans, on DEI, on white Christian nationalism.

JELANI COBB: Right. So, you know, I covered the Trayvon Martin story. I then — I covered other things in between, but the next big thing was Ferguson, which — you know, where they sent me. And I went back to Ferguson probably five or six times covering that. And then I found myself in Charleston, which is really the kind of center, like the kind of nucleus of that collection, I think. And I went from there and the other —

AMY GOODMAN: With Dylann Roof and the murder —

JELANI COBB: With Dylann Roof and all those things.

AMY GOODMAN: — of the nine parishioners and the pastor.

JELANI COBB: And there were, like, other things and kind of cultural things. I was writing about Black Panther when the film came out, and I wrote about Tarantino’s Django Unchained, which I hated, but that was neither here nor there. And so, I was writing about these other things. And then, you know, the 2016 election happens, and Charlottesville happens. And I started to see a kind of pattern. The Tree of Life synagogue is attacked in Pittsburgh in 2018. And I’m starting to see connections between these things.

AMY GOODMAN: And for people who don’t remember Charlottesville, white supremacists marching —

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — as they chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”

JELANI COBB: “Jews will not replace us,” right, exactly. And so, I look at all of this, and then we got to January 6th and the attack on the Capitol in 2021. I was like, “Oh, there’s a pattern, like these things fit together in a particular kind of way.” And I started thinking at some point maybe I want to collect these things. And I just put the idea away. And, you know, more stuff happens. And then we wind up with another contentious election in 2024. And it occurred to me that, almost like a three-act play, we had — it begins in 2012 with the second Obama administration. Then it follows the things that happened during the first Trump administration, and then Biden, and then there’s a kind of little coda of the 2024 election. And that was the collection.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it is a powerful collection. Jelani Cobb’s new book —

JELANI COBB: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: — is Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025. Jelani Cobb is dean of the Columbia School of Journalism and a staff writer at The New Yorker. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.