The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

Inica underscored the sheer gravity of this country’s current political climate--“Now we’re in a fight over democracy, with the very fabric of America that is at stake. She underscored that we need to be able to sew the fabric back together and repair what was once considered a melting pot of a country. She spoke about how precarious our current situation is if we continue in the direction we’re g...

Isaiah noted that he doesn’t really see how we could have one holiday that truly speaks to everyone. He wondered about how close we can get to a holiday that speaks to everybody--he once thought maybe it was the Fourth of July but then read Frederick Douglass’ What To The Slave Is the Fourth of July. Madeline proposed that perhaps we need to start a new holiday, noting that a holiday about unity,...

“As kids we’ve been manipulated into believing we have a sweet sugar-coated history only to grow up and find out the sugar is rotten," Inica noted in this week's podcast, underscoring the “loss of innocence” that comes with trying to figure out an appropriate response to recognition of the stained history of Thanksgiving and so many other holidays. Should we stop celebrating Thanksgiving? Should w...

Isaiah shared a striking analogy about the distinction between the shining surface of American holidays and the more complex and confusing narratives underlying them, which often run at odds with values that America prides itself on.

Eliza pointed out that if she were an Indigenous person, her feelings about the Thanksgiving holiday would likely be radically different. She also underscored how marginalization gets carried forward to today, for example, in the heightened rates of coronavirus on reservations and lack of access to health care. So while some communities can celebrate the holiday with no baggage, for others, it car...

Inica underscored that the falsified tale of Thanksgiving is part of a pattern throughout American history and many of our holidays. Too often there seems to be a dark truth that has been sugarcoated for children for the sake of portraying America as a nice, happy narrative with everyone getting along and without any kind of racist or sexist past. She pointed to how important it is to recognize th...

Madeline shared her thoughts that Thanksgiving in a modern sense is less about the original event that occurred (or didn’t occur…) and more about the idea about gratitude and family and belonging. Although the idea of the holiday may have STARTED with the idea of Native Americans and Europeans meeting and exchanging cultures, whether in a positive or negative sense, in the larger sense, that’s not...

Eliza spoke about the challenges of the factual inaccuracies underlying Thanksgiving, and the ways many of our families have handled this holiday since we were young, as being about practicing gratitude, visiting our grandparents and cousins, and really warm family traditions. Eliza proposes that we capitalize on the holiday to value competing narratives and to understand that there are multiple p...

Inica shared her growing up reflections of Thanksgiving always being framed as a holiday about putting aside our differences and Squanto the good Indian; however, that was NOT the reality the first holiday was built on. So we have an unstable and falsified foundation that is starting to crumble now that reality is being shown

Our conversation led Madeline to reflect on Columbus. On elementary school, it was a patriotic holiday about celebrating our differences. We weren’t taught the things I learned about in middle school, when my social studies teacher started talking about the violence that occurred as a result of Columbus’ exploration to the new world. she had never previously heard about violence and war between th...

We’re excited to launch our series on national identity, inclusion, and belonging! We’ll be exploring this through many perspectives , starting with this episode on holidays and how what we celebrate does or doesn’t reflect our values. We all know the American mythology of a melting pot doesn’t reflect the complexity of reality and what we’ve seen, both recently and historically, is that not every...

At this week's Round Table, Eliza, Inica, Isaiah, and Madeline reflect on Thanksgiving and, more broadly,  how to grapple with competing narratives about our national holidays. We discuss the ways in which our own understanding of holidays and national identity has shifted through the stages of our lives.  We talked about the importance of understanding history so we can shape a more jus...

Professor Hajnal noted that one of the great problems with today’s media is echo chambers. If we’re a conservative, we’re very likely to be tuning into Fox and online we’re likely to be looking at sites where our own views are being reflected back at us. And when it comes to social media, they’re trying to get more clicks by putting forward more and more extreme and salacious content which may be...

Isaiah asked Professor Hajnal what role he thinks the media could play in voter education. Prof Hajnal noted that there are any number of roles. He shared his concern that so much of media coverage is akin to covering a horse race rather than really delving into issues and policies, which of course SHOULD be driving our voting choices. Providing more real information about candidates and their sta...

Understanding the political implications surrounding COVID is the first step in understanding the challenges that will still face us after a vaccine is distributed. 2020 saw the largest number of voters in a U.S. presidential election in history partly due to the unprecedented events occurring in this country related to the pandemic, but also due to outrage at inequality and to the drastic levels...

Prof Hajnal is skeptical that this year’s high turnout will last. All the barriers there BEFORE the election are still there--the process is complicated and convoluted, there are only two choices, we vote on a Tuesday instead of a holiday--and they affect some populations disproportionately. Professor Hajnal explained how this works against young Americans--we’re more mobile so we have to re-regis...

Our guest Professor Zoli Hajnal noted that we know, based on amazing experiments, that mobilization works, and that good door to door outreach increases the odds of turnout quite significantly. Conversely, we DON’T have any evidence that the billions that we spend on advertising make a difference or persuade anyone. So in his view, we’re wasting billions of dollars on advertising that could be red...

In this week’s conversation with professor Zoli Hajnal, we discussed the measures our nation needs to bring forth to ensure that this year’s high levels of political participation and involvement transcend a single election cycle, with an emphasis on less enfranchised voters.

Towards the closing of our podcast, Laura Wolk turned the (round) table on our podcasters to learn more about our responses. Isaiah shared his avoidance of the media circus. Olivia shared her disappointment in how performative the hearings were, with Democratic senators posturing with their questions.

At this week's Round Table, Divya, Inica, Isaiah, Madeline, and Olivia spoke with Zoli Hajnal professor of political science at the UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. Professor Hajnal is the author of multiple award-winning books and a respected scholar on U.S. politics and policy, with a special focus on how disadvantaged populations are represented in American politics and what...

When asked about her thoughts on judicial reforms such as the recent talks about court packing and eliminating life tenure, Laura Wolk provided podcast listeners with her take on what are becoming fiercely contested conversations about judicial reforms. She shared her feelings about the importance of maintaining nine Judges and the continuity of the Supreme Court through its policy of life tenure,

Laura Wolk expressed concerns about the media’s bent in Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings. She felt there was a deep undercurrent that seemed to suggest that Judge Barrett, or Originalists in general, really want to take people’s rights away--for ex, they want to overturn the ACA. She feels this includes three presumptions about Conservative judges: 1) that they are pre-committed to certai...

Laura Wolk shared a glowing assessment of Justice Barrett’s skills as an educator, addressing pros and cons of every legal question and taking the opposite side to whatever a student is arguing about a case in order to push their thinking

“It’s disappointing to see the media going along with that (character assassinations).” This week’s guest on the Roundtable Podcast, Laura Wolk, senior associate at Kirkland & Ellis, who was most recently a clerk for Clarence Thomas in the U.S. Supreme Court and mentored by Amy Coney Barret at the University of Notre Dame Law School, addressed the undeniable influence the media has on the way peop...

With the Senate’s recent confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, it is particularly important to understand the different philosophies of these two women. Justice Barrett, like her mentor Antonin Scalia, is an Originalist in how she interprets the Constitution and the law that governs the nation’s entirety. Originalism was explained to us by our recen...