Conversations On the Green

The long-time voice of sports, ABC's iconic commentator Howard Cosell, dubbed it the first rule of “jockocracy” – sports and politics don't mix.  The last thing a nation of couch potatoes wanted to see was a political hot potato on their fields of dreams. Sports, for most Americans, were the sacrosanct refuge where we went to get away from it all, to escape the tension and drama and conflict that colors daily life.  But now many of our most divisive debates about class, race, religion, sex and the raw quest for political power are played out on the field. From the Pee Wee League to the Olympics and the Pros, sports mirror our polarizing divisions with athletes becoming icons of the polarizing debates razing the country's cultural touchstones.  In “Common Ground with Jane Whitney's second show of the season, a bevy of headline grabbing athletes and sports authorities will examine Americans' perception of the appropriate social role of sports and why we increasingly demand that athletes become warrior avatars for our cultural civil wars.

The legendary anchorman of the classic film "Network," Howard Beale, became a cultural icon for the axiom "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." We're all Howard Beales now, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy. If the country has a national mood, it's mad. The fury has become so intense that it has fractured our national psyche and has provoked daily speculation from even the most blasé pundits about whether America is on the verge of another civil war. But what are the roots of the intemperate disunion that pervades almost every aspect of daily life? Where did all this anger come from, why can't we just get along and how can we stitch our splintered country together again? Those are the questions an all-star panel of nationally known headliners will explore as part of "Common Ground with Jane Whitney's" first program of the 2022 season.

Often referred to as “the conscience of America,” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and historian Jon Meacham joins Jane Whitney to talk about how America’s history of overcoming crises makes him confident and hopeful that the country once again will prevail over these tumultuous times.

Former mayor and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg headlines a panel of leading activists, including Jonathan Capehart, Sharice Davids and Danica Roem, to talk with Jane Whitney about the landmark successes of the LGBTQ rights movement and the remaining hurdles of the movement.

Three renowned experts on international affairs discuss America’s standing in the world and the impact of President Trump’s relegation of the country’s traditional allies and alliances. In the face of the country’s most consequential foreign policy election in the post-war era, the trio of preeminent panelists also will debate how to project American power and how to protect the country from foreign threats.

Don’t wait until November to find out who won the 2020 presidential campaign! Or if Republicans maintained their Senate majority. Or what happened in the House. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki will tune up his big board with other nationally recognized prognosticators to explain the election’s dominant forces and how they will determine the outcome. The panel, also including Rachel Bitecofer and David Axelrod, will explain how the major campaigns are assembling their coalitions, which states are key and what voting groups will tip the outcome. But be forewarned: the show carries a spoiler alert.

Three nationally known voices - Maya Wiley, Joy Reid, and Dr. Jason Johnson - come together in Conversations On the Green's third event of the season to discuss the role of race in American politics and how identity issues will shape the 2020 campaign for the presidency and Congress.

The second Conversation of our 2020 season, brings together a panel of renowned legal scholars to discuss the threats to the rule of law, which contains the furious competition among the Federal government's three branches.

In a symposium to benefit charities on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19, three of the nation’s sagest visionaries will come together on May 17 to discuss how the pandemic will indelibly change the country and affect the daily life of every American. The trio of renowned panelists are the historian Douglas Brinkley, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a leading voice on devising national policies to battle the ongoing pandemic.  The forum, which will be moderated by former NBC correspondent and national talk show host Jane Whitney, is the opening event of Conversations On the Green’s eighth season and will be interactive, allowing viewers to participate and pose questions for the panelists. The discussion, “Life After COVID-19: A Brave New World,” is designed to sketch an outline of how the pandemic’s legacy will reverberate through time and grows out of the history of previous contagions. The fall of the Roman empire is widely attributed to the Antonine Plague in the late 100s while Europe’s social order was upended by the Black Death in the mid 1300s. More recently, even less deadly crises - such as The Great Depression, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of Lehman Brothers - sent shockwaves racing around the globe and provoked profound but previously unimaginable changes in the way we live and think. COVID-19 is the latest in this long line of seismic shifts to shatter our preconceptions about our futures. Just as it has destroyed lives, disrupted markets and exposed the incompetence of governments, it inevitably will reorder society and lead to permanent changes in political and economic power.  But the crisis concurrently presents unexpected opportunities: more sophisticated and flexible use of technology, a new commitment to battling climate change, a realignment of the global order, renewed appreciation of personal responsibility, a reduction in materialism as well as fresh gratitude for the joys of rural lifestyles and other simple pleasures.  To help us make sense of these history shaping prospects, the symposium will be headlined by trio of prescient savants:   Douglas Brinkley, a historian and author of more than a dozen best-selling books on myriad social and cultural trends. A Rice University professor, he is a noted student of the presidency and international relations, a CNN commentator and a Vanity Fair contributing editor as well as a prominent spokesperson on conservation issues. The winner of two Pulitzer prizes including one for his coverage of the Tiananmen Square protests, NY Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof grew up on an Oregon sheep and cherry farm, covered economics and presidential politics for the paper and is renowned for giving, as the Pulitzer committee noted, “voice to the voiceless.”  Celebrated as a renaissance thinker, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is an oncologist and bioethicist, a leader in crafting national COVID-19 policy, a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization.

Since the time of the Roman Empire, the fourth estate has been celebrated as a pillar of democracy, a guardian of the separation of powers and a systemic counterbalance of the natural propensity of power to corrupt. But in a challenge to the American system of checks and balances, it has become a recurrent theme of the daily news cycle for President Trump and his allies to marshal their base under the banner of “Fake News” and to accuse journalists of being “enemies of the people,” a phrase with grim historical roots dating to Joseph Stalin and The Terror of the Jacobin dictatorship of the 1700s. All presidents spar with the press. Richard Nixon pioneered the depiction of the media as liberal bogeymen, “nattering nabobs of negativism” in immortal phrase of William Safire, an administration speech writer who later became famous as a New York Times columnist. But a president schooled in the ways of entertainment sleight-of-hand has mutated what was an accepted parlor trick to rally conservatives into a full-blown assault on the American press. The administration has stopped holding regular press briefings and when it does pass out information, it frequently lies; Trump himself has been documented telling more than 10,000 lies, reporters now do their jobs in an unprecedented climate of intimidation and fear. Many are bullied or harassed — online or in real life. And in Annapolis, a man with a gun walked into a newsroom and slaughtered five staffers. In response, the Main Stream Media has galvanized a range of norm shattering strategies as the spearhead of civil society. Once defined by its fierce independence, the press has banded together in collective solidarity, publishing mass editorials. Breaking with tradition, it has done away with diplomatic double speak in calling out mendacity and tries to confront falsehoods with an army of fact-checkers charged with defending delegitimized facts. Jim Acosta, one of President Trump's chief whipping boys in his war against the press, is joining MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle to discuss the trials, tribulations and constitutional imperatives of covering The White House as a headliner of the October 27 Conversations On the Green, "Working Without A Net: On Air In The Age Of Trump."

Once a safe, somnambulant replacement for counting-sheep, late night comedy has metastasized into a crucible for American angst - a cutting, ruthless, running commentary on the nation’s polarized political life. The shift is largely credited to – or blamed on – Jon Stewart, who transformed “The Daily Show” into political satire that amalgamated silliness and substance in exposing the hypocrisy of elected officials and critiquing the superficiality of TV news. He put, one wag noted, the politics into political humor. President Trump’s penchant for norm breaking has given comedians a wellspring of material and has been a fountainhead of national despair. That’s elevated late night hosts into the conscience of a nation – but it also has posed a challenge: how to mock solemn events without making light of them. "'Late Night With Seth Meyers,' which soon will celebrate its sixth anniversary, does this distinctively and brilliantly, by folding barbed one-liners into more shapely structures,” Frank Bruni, The New York Times’ columnist wrote earlier this year in a profile of the host of the eponymously name show. Now Meyers, one the more acerbic of the growing gaggle of late-night comedians, will discuss how he navigates the nightly conundrum between comedy and tragedy as the headliner of the not-so-late night Conversations On the Green, “Late Night: The Divine Comedy.” Meyers will talk about the trials and tribulations of creating a nightly show tied so tightly to daily disaster and the existential fear it provokes. In an informal, interactive conversation moderated by Jane Whitney, the former NBC talk show host, he’ll also reminisce about his years as the head writer and Weekend Update host at “Saturday Night Live” as well as stories of his climb up the comedy ladder and his personal life as a celebrity, husband and father. The 45-year-old comedian was born in Evanston, IL, but raised in Michigan and New Hampshire. He got his start in comedy while attending Northwestern University, where he ran a hot dog stand and joined an improv troupe. Meyers became a SNL cast memberr in 2001 and was heralded for impersonating a host of national figures – John Kerry, Michael Caine, Anderson Cooper, Sean Penn and Prince Charles, among others – and for his recurring characters, including Zach Ricky, host of the kids' hidden camera show "Pranksters"; Nerod, the receptionist in the recurring sketch "Appalachian Emergency Room"; David Zinger, a scientist who often insults his fellow workers; Dan Needler, half of a married couple "that should be divorced," (opposite Amy Poehler); and William Fitzpatrick, from the Irish talk show "Top o' the Morning."  He auditioned to co-anchor Weekend update in 2004 but was beaten out by Poehler. He stayed with the show and became its head writer when Tina Fey departed before the 2006 season. But he won his highest critical acclaim in 2008 when he wrote iconic sketches for Fey, who returned as a guest star to impersonate Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. It was Meyers who created the famous phrase uttered by Fey's Palin, "I can see Russia from my house." He was soon in demand to host award shows. He emceed the 2010 and 2011 ESPY Awards, the 66thEmmy Awards, the 75thGolden Globe Awards and was the keynote speaker at The 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, where his timing provoked retrospective snickers after he joked about Osama bin Laden hosting a CSPAN show even as that the secret operation to kill the terrorist leader was underway. Some have suggested Meyers is partly responsible for provoking Donald Trump to run for president as the comedian, along with President Barack Obama, roasted the real estate developer, who sat stone-faced in the audience, with jokes like, “Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”

Unchallenged for so long, the primacy and legitimacy of the American system of checks and balances came to be accepted as political bedrock, certain to survive even the most severe earthquakes. But the daily headlines show the guardrails of American democracy are under assault and, many analysts now warn, the entire American experiment is in danger of collapse - a majority of Republicans, polls have found, favor postponing the 2020 election if President Trump says it's the sole way to ensure that only eligible voters are allowed to cast ballots. "History does not repeat, but it does instruct," notes the ominous first line of "On Tyranny," one of the hottest historical books of recent years. "The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands." The book's author, the noted Yale Historian Timothy Snyder, will discuss the state of the country's constitutional health at the September 15 Conversations On the Green with two celebrated observers of the American political scene, The Washington Post's illustrious columnist, Max Boot, a CNN analyst and one of the intellectual pillars of neo-conservative movement, and Malcolm Nance, MSNBC’s renowned national security specialist. A former Navy cryptologist and 20-year veteran, Nance is an author and media commentator on foreign policy, counter-terrorism, intelligence, and insurgency. Widely credited with convincing the Pentagon to renounce waterboarding, his most recent book, published last year, was “The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West.” He also is the founder and executive director of the Hudson, NY-based think tank Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Racial Ideologies, TAPSTRI. A finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in biography, Max Boot is a historian, best-selling author, foreign-policy analyst and a respected authority on armed conflict.  A Moscow native and senior foreign policy advisor to the late Senator John McCain, Boot’s latest work of history, "The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam" was praised as an “epic and elegant biography”  by the Wall Street Journal and “judicious and absorbing” by the New York Times. He is also the author of another book released in 2018 — "The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right." Proficient in 11 languages, Tim Snyder’s most recent book, published last year, is “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America,” an unsparing history on the threat to democracy and law. A prolific essayist for leading literary publications, he is the author of a series of sprawling books about war, genocide, and the descent into dictatorship in mid-20thcentury Europe but rocketed to prominence with the publication two years ago of the pamphlet-sized “On Tyranny,” an international bestseller that is subtitled “Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century.” His most recent titles before “On Tyranny,” are “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” which was published in 2015, and “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” published in 2010. Moderated by Jane Whitney, former NBC News correspondent & talk show host. Audience members are encouraged to participate in the interactive town-hall style format.

When Americans awoke the morning after the midterm elections last November, they found the halls of Congress littered by the detritus of broken taboos and traditions. In the most multicultural, multiracial democratic experiment in the country's history, the newly elected freshman class smashed stereotypes by including more women, people of color, young people or LGBTQ lawmakers than ever before.  This class of Democratic freshmen jumped in head first, shattering routines on the Hill and social media. But getting down to legislating was trickier as their first weeks were marred by the longest shutdown in U.S. history; between moving into their offices and finding the bathrooms, they had to endure a crash course in the roughhouse politics of partisan gridlock.  Now five of these outspoken "Freshmen Furies," as they've become known, are joining the August 25 Conversations On the Green to discuss their history making experiences. The five Democrats -  New York's Antonio Delgado, Iowa's Abby Finkenauer, Connecticut's Jahana Hayes, Florida's Donna Shalala, and Michigan's Elissa Slotkin - will talk about what they expected and what they found, the jubilation of their election and the frustrations of the job, what they've accomplished and what's next on their agenda to move the country forward.    The first person of color to be elected to Congress from upstate New York, Antonio Delgado is a Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former Los Angeles-based rapper known as AD The Voice. A rock star among the freshman, his magnetic personality catapulted him to triumph over six other candidates in the Democratic primary of his overwhelmingly white swing district before defeating the favored Republican incumbent John Faso in the November general election.    Abby Finkenauer, who was 29-years-old when elected, is the second youngest person - behind New York's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - to ever serve in Congress and along with Cindy Axne the first women to represent Iowa in the House. The daughter of a welder and a school employee, she won a seat in the state House when she was 25 and defeated two opponents in the 2018 Democratic primary before retiring incumbent Republican Representative Rod Blum in the general election.    The first African American woman to represent Connecticut in the House, Jahana Hayes seemed destined to follow a familial pattern when, like her mother and grandmother, she became pregnant as a 17-year-old and dropped out. But she returned to school and, while working, earned college and teaching degrees before being named 2016 National Teacher of Year. She ran on her dedication to education and her trials growing up in the Waterbury projects, which she said gave her special insight into how policy affects people. "I know what it's like to go to bed to gunshots outside," she said at a candidate forum. "I know what it's like to wake up in the morning to a dead body in the hallway."   A standout in the 2019 class of youthful Democratic freshmen, Florida's Donna Shalala is an academic and Washington veteran who served for eight years as President Bill Clinton's Secretary of Health and Human Services, the longest tenure of any of the department's leaders. The former head of the Children's Defense Fund, she was president of the Clinton Foundation from 2015 to 2017 and headed the University of Miami for 14 years. Previously she was the President of Hunter College and chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and  served as Trustee Professor of Political Science and Health Policy at the University of Miami.    A former CIA analyst and senior staffer for the Director of National Intelligence, Elissa Slotkin said she was spurred to challenge two-term Republican incumbent Mike Bishop when she saw him smile at a White House celebration after he and the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. A native New Yorker, she grew up in Holly, halfway between Flint and Detroit, and graduated from Cornell University before becoming a community organizer. She won the general election with a bare majority of the vote, 50.6 percent, becoming the first Democrat to represent the district since 2001.  Moderated by Jane Whitney, former NBC News correspondent & talk show host. Audience members are encouraged to participate in the interactive town-hall style format. All proceeds benefit: Greenwoods Counseling Referrals, Inc. - Helping members of the Litchfield County Community and beyond find access to compassionate and high-quality mental health and related care. New Milford Hospital - helping to secure the latest technology, attract the best medical staff and provide the compassionate, patient-centered care for which they are nationally recognized. Susan B. Anthony Project - promoting safety, healing, and growth for all survivors of domestic and sexual abuse and advocates for the autonomy of women and the end of interpersonal violence.

Conservatives' 30-year mission to restructure the courts in their own image is culminating with a series of cases that is reshaping the country. Case by case, the Supreme Court is rewriting the rules that have long structured the way we live, how we are governed, how we worship, even who we are. Immigration. Health Care. Political representation. Reproductive and religious rights. . . It's hard to find any aspect of daily life beyond the reach of the court's long tentacles. The July 21 Conversations On The Green will explore the courts' new direction and what it means for the way we live and for the country with three of the most celebrated court watchers.  Featuring: Jeffrey Toobin, Staff writer at The New Yorker and senior analyst for CNN Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, author and SCOTUS authority Joan Biskupic, Journalist, author and Supreme Court legal analyst at CNN Produced by Susan McCone Moderated by Jane Whitney, former NBC News correspondent & talk show host. Audience members are encouraged to participate in the interactive town-hall style format. All proceeds benefit: Greenwoods Counseling Referrals, Inc. - Helping members of the Litchfield County Community and beyond find access to compassionate and high-quality mental health and related care. New Milford Hospital - helping to secure the latest technology, attract the best medical staff and provide the compassionate, patient-centered care for which they are nationally recognized. Susan B. Anthony Project - promoting safety, healing, and growth for all survivors of domestic and sexual abuse and advocates for the autonomy of women and the end of interpersonal violence.

What happens to Trumpism after Trump, whenever that moment comes?  Although the GOP establishment remains firmly in President Trump’s thrall, many traditional Republican constituencies are fleeing the party. The conventional coalitions that once came together to power both the Republican and Democratic national parties are splitting apart as the president casts aside political principles, defies political orthodoxy and sells his personality. That’s turned political angst into the national malaise and left many at both ends of the political spectrum feeling disenfranchised, in effect, politically homeless. “Conversations On the Green” will explore the post Trump prospects of the GOP and the two party system on June 16 with three celebrated members of what once was the Republican intelligentsia: Republican strategist and MSNBC commentator Susan Del Percio, former Republican Congressman David Jolley and Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times. A renowned contrarian and former editor of The Jerusalem Post, Stephens rocketed to fame as the neo-conservative foreign-affairs columnist and deputy editorial page editor at The Wall Street Journal. As head of the paper’s editorial pages for its European and Asian editions, his voice ricochet through capitals around the globe and he earned a Pulitzer for commentary for his 2012 columns “on U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics, often enlivened by a contrarian twist.” He moved to The Times two years ago. Susan Del Percio, a political strategist and campaign advisor, regularly appears on network television as a partisan analyst. The principal behind Susan Del Percio Strategies, a political consulting firm, she has served as a media spokeswoman on both political and corporate campaigns, a special advisor to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014 and a key member of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s administration, where she was deputy commissioner for finance and administration. David Jolly is an attorney, former lobbyist and politician who served for three years starting in 2004 as the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 13th Congressional District, where he previously was the general counsel to his predecessor, Representative Bill Young. He won the race for Young's seat in a special election and was reelected a year later with 75 percent of the vote but was defeated two years ago by former Governor Charlie Crist. Since leaving public office, Jolly has become a leading Republican critic of President Trump and last September, with his wife, left the party.  Produced by Paul Healy Moderated by Jane Whitney, former NBC News correspondent & talk show host. Audience members will be encouraged to participate in the interactive town-hall style format.

As climate change moves from an imminent peril to a deadly reality for vast swaths of the country, two nationally recognized groundbreakers in the debate on global warming, Jay Inslee and David Wallace-Wells, discuss the gaping dichotomy between what scientists say needs to be done to moderate an impending disaster and the political reality of what is possible. “Doomsday Denial: The Politics of Climate Change” is a broad ranging discussion of the science, economics and politics swirling around the alarming climate change headlines. The debate examines what state and local communities are doing to mitigate the congressional stasis, what might break the logjam, how the issue plays in national, state and local elections and the role of private citizens and companies. Moderated by Jane Whitney, former NBC News correspondent & talk show host. Audience members are encouraged to participate in the interactive town-hall style format. All proceeds benefit: Greenwoods Counseling Referrals, Inc. - Helping members of the Litchfield County Community and beyond find access to compassionate and high-quality mental health and related care. New Milford Hospital - helping to secure the latest technology, attract the best medical staff and provide the compassionate, patient-centered care for which they are nationally recognized. Susan B. Anthony Project - promoting safety, healing, and growth for all survivors of domestic and sexual abuse and advocates for the autonomy of women and the end of interpersonal violence.