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All right, everyone, I think we may as well start and it's always good to be on time. Thank you very much for joining us here today for what I think is going to be a really great conversation as part of Diversity Week. My name is Verity Firth. I'm the Vice President of Societal Impact, Equity and Engagement here at UNSW and I'd also like to acknowledge, of course, we're on the land of the Bidjigal people and pay respect to Elders past and present. So thank you for coming out today. We've deliberately held it at lunch, so hopefully you're not missing anything, and can get, you know, back to your studies straight away. But we're here today with some really fantastic people that I'll introduce to you in a minute to talk about Trump, Trump and diversity. So Trump, that name itself, sends shivers around many a progressive person's spine. And of course, Trump has dominated our politics so profoundly. When I say our politics, I really sort of mean our politics, because it works beyond just America, the impact that Trump has had globally, on the politics in countries such as Australia, but also on the global politics, and what that looks like in terms of geopolitical relations. So what will become of the United States and the people living within it, particularly the people trying to join the community that is the United States. If a second term of President Donald Trump was to eventuate, how will this amazing country that really has built itself on so much that is good about diversity and multiculturalism - how will it be impacted? The USA has had a really long history of polarisation when it comes to political ideology, and this is something that we might ask Nick to explore with us a bit later, and this is especially so when it comes to themes of diversity. For decades, there had been big swings between liberalism and conservatism occupying the Oval Office, and never before, I think, have we seen this play out so quick, so clearly, than in the current US presidential campaign. Though this polarisation is, in fact, a key part of the US' history, to many of us, the concept of a Trump administration, let alone the possibility of two Trump administrations has been quite unprecedented. Americans have normalised and often even embraced the political pivot of movie stars and famous personalities, think Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I think many will agree that Trump, as we know, a known TV personality, a known business tycoon and a known convicted felon, is not your average candidate, and he's not giving up the top job without a fight. So what does this mean for diversity in the US and beyond? And that's what we're going to be exploring today. But first, I'm going to introduce our panellists, and I'm really excited, because we've got a great set of panellists who I think you'll really enjoy getting to know. The first is Nick Bryant. He's sitting in the middle there, a BBC Washington correspondent whose distinguished journalistic career was spent covering US presidential politics, amongst a number of other things. Nick came to be regarded as one of the finest foreign correspondents whose work saw him meet and interview Donald Trump himself. We may get you to dig into that too. He has written for The Economist, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. He's now a regular contributor for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the ABC. He's also authored several books, the most recent of which explores the history behind Trump and his running mate, JD Vance. In fact, he described it to me as the 250 year history of the rise of Trump, and it's called The Forever War. So welcome Nick.

Thank you.

Next, I'd like to welcome Frances Voon. Frances is an award winning advocate for human rights and international refugee law, and is the executive manager at the Kaldor Centre here at UNSW. Frances has extensive global experience in refugee operations through her work with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN World Food Programme and the Jesuit Refugee Service. In 2021, she was named among the 40 Most Influential Asian Australians, winner of the "Community & Advocacy / Not for Profit" category, and she was winner of the Advance Global Australian Social Impact Award in 2022 for her leadership in advancing the rights of refugees. Welcome Frances. And last, but certainly not least, I'd like to welcome Mario Ernesto Lopez. Mario joins us from the United States, where he is the inaugural Chief Diversity Officer for UC Law, San Francisco. In fact, Mario, yesterday, ran the Sydney Marathon. Which, I couldn't believe he was even still standing, like, but he's here with us today, bounced back pretty quickly. Mario was born in San Francisco and is the proud son of immigrants from Guatemala and El Salvador. As Diversity Chief at his university, Mario oversees campus-wide diversity initiatives, including diversity partnerships, implementing campus climate recommendations, first generation programming, the California Scholars Program and diversity recruitment. As a student, Mario interned for President Obama at the White House in the National Economic Council during his third year of law school, where he also served in a leadership role as the co-chair of the Legal Professional Interest Group. Recently, Mario was awarded the 2022 UC Law SF (San Francisco), Latinx Law Students Association, Alumni of the Year, as well as the UC Law SF, Legal Education Opportunity Program, Luminary Award, welcome Mario. So what we thought we'd do is I've organised a few questions to ask to begin with, and then there will be an opportunity for you guys to ask questions as well. There'll also be a book signing opportunity in the foyer later on, so use it as an opportunity to buy Nick's book. But let's start with a sort of fundamental question. Now, when we joined up online last week to discuss what this panel was going to look like and to look at some questions, and that was actually before the debate with Kamala and Trump, a debate which everyone was a bit nervous about, but I must say, having seen it, was somewhat of a triumph for the Kamala forces. But I do want to ask Mario first, how likely do you think a Trump victory is? Because even though it was such a good debate for Kamala, it's still pretty close, isn't it?

Yeah, I think if the election was held today, quite frankly, it's a 50/50 proposition of who wins. This election is really going to come down to about six swing states. If you think about this, we have a population of about close to 340 million in America, and yet this election will come down to maybe less than a million people across the six states, might even come down to a few counties within some certain states. So, the best, you know, one day the vice president could be up, the next day the former president could be up. We'll find out in November.

Nick, what do you think? What does a Trump or potential Trump victory look like for the US and and for the world?

Oh, it frightens me. The Trump effect. It frightens me the prospect of a Trump 2.0. I covered the first version of the Trump administration, and at least in that, he was surrounded by grown ups who tried to moderate his actions. Often, they ignored his orders. They tried to be a moderating influence on Trump. Those people will not be around in a Trump 2.0 and I worry about his effect globally, to be honest, because he is validating a brand of politics that is being embraced by right wing parties around the world. I often think about my coming back to Australia three years ago, in the midst of COVID. We're in a quarantine hotel in the city, and on the Saturday morning, we heard this roar of the crowd down below, and it was an anti-lockdown protest. And I looked on the TV later that day, and those protesters, many of them, were carrying Trump flags. And we saw the parading of a gallows in Melbourne directed against "Dictator Dan" (Daniel Andrews), as he was called by the Murdoch tabloids, adopting, really, the kind of approach of Fox News in America. We saw Scott Morrison do this secretive Prime Ministerial power grab, which defied Prime Ministerial and democratic norms. This became a great cause célèbre for the American right. You had people like Ron DeSantis saying, let's sever diplomatic ties. Again, that's the Trump effect. That is how the Trump contagion has taken hold in America and spread internationally. So I do really worry about the prospect of a Trump 2.0 and as Mario says, I mean, it's a real possibility. I mean, ahead of the debate, Nate Silver, who's the great sort of poll whisperer in America, was giving him a 64% probability of victory. You know, she'll (Kamala Harris) win the popular vote. I'm sure she'll win the nationwide vote. I really do believe there is a sensible majority in America, an anti-Trump majority in America. The problem is, is it distributed in the states that it needs to win? This Electoral College is a real problem. The Founding Fathers have made it a lot harder for a woman to win the presidency.

Yeah. Interesting. And Francis, what do you think that sort of global or geopolitical impact of Trump has been, and potentially a Trump 2.0 could be?

Yeah, I mean, in addition to the effects that, you know, Nick has talked about, in the rise of kind of emboldening, this kind of right-wing populist approach towards a range of issues, we know that there would be a kind of return to many of the approaches that we saw towards immigration and refugees, that under Trump, Trump's first presidency, he's promised, you know, the largest domestic deportation operation ever seen, for example, to bring back and extend upon the Muslim travel ban. So the ban on people traveling to the US from certain Muslim-majority places, and also, during his first term in office, really slashed refugee resettlement and put in place a range of restrictive approaches towards asylum. And you know that has global effects. In the context of global displacement being at world record highs, in part because of the incredibly important role that the US has played historically in the refugee regime. Until Trump's first presidency, the US had resettled more refugees, for example, than the rest of the world combined. So the implications, particularly in the refugee space, are enormous, but also the implications of his approach towards multilateralism and the international rules based order. He thumbs his nose at the UN, he will, you know, withdraw the US from certain key international institutions, you know, that he doesn't agree with. You know, in his first time in office, withdrew, for example, from the UN Human Rights Council, and will likely do so again, and other institutions and processes related, for example, to climate change and so on. And is, and is famously sympathetic to authoritarians. And so we can imagine there being a real rise in impunity for human rights abuses, were he to come into office again?

Yeah, his sort of love of authoritarian figures is really interesting, particularly when you think that the sort of establishment, US military industrial complex, isn't pro- well, maybe you can do it - isn't pro-Putin, isn't pro-North Korea, and yet he's turned that on its head. Do you have anything to say about that, Mario?

You know, I think when it comes to our international relations, everyone in America, the large portion of folks in America, yeah, we're concerned, right? What will this do with our diplomatic relations? Australia is one of our strongest allies and partners. We want to keep that relationship. What does this mean, also with NATO? I think that's the biggest question, quite frankly, is NATO, right? Whether we remain in NATO or not, and if we don't, the ramifications are going to be, unfortunately, very, very tragic for the Ukrainians.

His adulation of authoritarians was deeply worrying, obviously. I mean, he would literally go weak in the knees at the presence of Vladimir Putin. And the way that he trashed allies was also worrying, and a lot of allies just adopted the approach that they were told to by people who were literally doing psychological analysis of Trump, that the best way to deal with him is to flatter him and to sort of play his game. Malcolm Turnbull adopted a very different approach, as you remember in that famous first phone call between them, and it actually worked. He stood up to Trump on the Refugee Deal that the Turnbull administration made with the Obama administration to bring those refugees from the rural Manus Island to America as part of a resettlement deal. He really pushed back against Trump who wanted to reject that deal, and Trump respected him for that. He saw him as a transactional figure. He also liked the idea that Turnbull was a lawyer that had kept Kerry Packer out of prison, as he kept on putting it. He was really impressed by that. That's the way to deal with Trump. You have to stand up to him. He's a bully, and as any bully, they tend to retreat in the face of people actually going toe to toe, and that's the approach. But yeah, I mean, his adulation for authoritarians is is deeply worrying and has consequences all over the world, not just in Ukraine, obviously, with the green light that he'd probably give to Putin and the territorial concessions that any kind of peace deal would involve, but also Taiwan, with Xi Jinping and China's ambitions globally.

Yes. So yeah, well, we're now just also worrying that I'm now, I'm worried we're now going to talk a bit about language, and, you know, and sort of, I suppose, the racist tropes and the racist language that Trump adopts so easily. Again, since we last talked, we've had the debate. And we've had the famous false claim around the Haitian immigrants eating the pets of, you know, Springfield or whatever, which is sort of laughable, like you laugh because it's so insane, except that he did say it, and that it's a genuine trope that's going across the Internet, and that is stirring up a whole lot of racist feeling and behaviour. I'm going to come to you first, Frances, because when he uses these words and phrases, what do we think - is he shaping the opinions of his supporters or just simply reflecting the existing views? I mean, what role, I suppose, in setting public opinion do you think he plays?

It's an interesting question. And, you know, we do have data that shows that, you know, following the first campaign and election of Trump, you know, there was a, there was a rise in the expression of racial prejudice, and the expression and people's propensity to express racially dehumanising, you know, tropes and whether or not that's because he's emboldening people to express views that they may have previously thought were socially unacceptable, or whether he's promulgating that, that is, you know, no doubt, still the subject of analysis. And there are most likely both effects I would, I would tend to think, at play, but, you know, it's important to note the real world effects of this. You know, we know that the use of racist rhetoric is strongly linked to people's, to encouraging support for and actual incidents of bad behaviour, harm and even violence towards people who are the subject of that. And you know, you can see, in the case of Springfield, Ohio, you know, the real world and very immediate effects of that. You know Springfield having had people waving Nazi banners down the main street and bomb threats and so on. And you know, those are false claims that were actively, you know, promulgated by far right white supremacist groups who are now claiming the fact that Trump repeated them in the debate, and continues to double down on it, despite it being proven to be untrue, as a victory, and are using that in their recruitment efforts as well. So you know, the the danger of of these kinds of racist tropes is is very real and present.

Nick, I'm going to come to you, because this is, I'm sure, covered in your latest book, The Forever War, because you actually talk about the history of this sort of, I suppose, right-wing extremism in the US. But is there also a history of these sorts of tropes, these sorts of language being used to stir up?

Oh, yeah, very much so. I mean, the thesis of the book is basically that Trump shouldn't take us by surprise because he's as much a product of American history as Abraham Lincoln or John F Kennedy or Ronald Reagan or Joe Biden or Barack Obama. It's just a history that tends to get forgotten. It's a history that tends to get misremembered. It is a history that deliberately gets concealed and buried because it defies the grand narrative of American history, which is one of advancement and progress. We wanted to believe that Barack Obama was the personification of that advancement and progress, that he moved America towards a more perfect union, which is the words from the preamble of the US Constitution that Barack Obama peppers his speeches with, but there are a lot of white Americans who hated the idea of a black man occupying a White House that was built by the enslaved. Donald Trump made his political name as the untitled leader of the birther movement, which denied the very legitimacy of an Obama presidency. When he launched his campaign for the presidency in 2015, he came down the golden escalator and attacked Mexican immigrants. Racism was at the core of his political appeal. He knows what he's doing here. He knows what he's doing when he accuses the Haitian immigrants of eating cats and dogs, which is a ridiculous claim, but he knows it works, and historically, it has worked. That's the problem. If you go back, the Republicans had a period of domination in presidential politics from 1968 to 1992. The Democrats only won one election in that time. It was Jimmy Carter in 1976. It was the post-Watergate election. You know, they could have run anybody and they'd won. They would've won. But from '68 to '92, they really did play the race card. Nixon in '68 pioneered what was called the "Southern strategy". He was trying to play on white anxieties about racial advance, the advances that we'd seen in the civil rights era. At that time, the Democrat, the South, was solidly democratic. They hated the Republican Party in the South because it was a party of Abraham Lincoln. Nixon saw the opportunity to make big inroads in the South, so he played the race card. Reagan did as well. In 1980, he launched his campaign in Mississippi, just down the road from where the civil rights workers had been murdered, the famous Mississippi Burning murders. And he made an appeal to states' rights. States' rights was code for the white South, that you can, you can do what you want on race, not a problem. 1988, fast forward, Willie Horton, the notorious Willie Horton ad of George Herbert Walker Bush. Both Reagan and Bush had been against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which ended segregation in the South. There's a long history. And the alarming thing is, the politics of race for the Republicans often works. And that's the frightening lesson of history.

I mean, that works in Australia, too, in a lot of ways.. We might do some of that comparison later. Now, Mario, you're a natural optimist, because I've got to know you a little bit about this. What do we do? Okay, so that is the history. You work in this space, in a prestigious US institution. What can we do to actually fight this, change the way things are done, and what roles can universities play in this?

Absolutely. First of all, we're part of that progress right now, having the EDI Diversity Festival here - talking about these issues, continuing to work towards this progress. It's not easy. It never has been, never will be. But here's another reality. It's an idea that's met its time, and yes, there are obstacles. Nick talked about the history of our country, absolutely, but we're moving forward. We have, today, the second, you know, the second woman leading a major ticket nomination who may become the President of the United States. I'll also say she's a proud alumna of my school, yes. And this is not part of an endorsement, just a, you know, just a fact, right? And look at this panel right here, right? You have an Australian, a Brit, an American, also an Australian, right? Talking about these issues. We also have the Internet now. We have social media. It's so much easier for all of us to communicate. Think about some of the global issues, that are now, that folks throughout the world know because of social media. Take a look at Iran, right? When there have been big demonstrations. Imagine those same demons demonstrations 40 years ago, they would not have the same international spotlight. Now, there's still a long ways to go on that front and many fronts throughout the world, but what we have now is a more interconnected world where we're able to do things globally. We're able to do things on the state side. And so to me, that's, that gives me optimism, because it's not just Australia doing this on their own. It's not just America, it's many of us together throughout the world fighting for these issues.

Yeah, I agree. And I liked the, yes, whilst social media can be used by the right, it can also be used by progressive forces, right? And so in your role at UC Law, what is the role you think universities can play?

Yeah, I think we do what we do best is, we research, right? We let the facts speak for themselves. That's why we are research universities. We also provide innovation. We provide solutions with the research that we do. And lastly, we provide opportunity, right? We want folks to get educated, to use the resources that we have here at our universities, to innovate, to be entrepreneurs, to go out and become elected leaders in their communities that will create change.

Frances, do you want to add anything on how universities create change question?

Yeah, I mean, I think that that's a really good point, that there is a particularly important role to be played in the context of a broader debate that is full of misinformation, to be played by, you know, trusted sources of information that can help to correct misinformation and, but I think that the other thing that's important in that is that, you know, how do you win? How do you overturn kind of racist, you know, racism and, and the rise of that, there's a role that all of us can play in that, but you don't necessarily win that by, you know, picking off fact checking individual pieces of misinformation. I mean, that's important, and you know, we will continue to do that because, you know, we need to equip people to be able to identify what is and isn't true out there in the public debate. But you ultimately win by telling a better story about the role that diversity plays in our society and the ways in which it makes us stronger. So you know, Trump's story is the American carnage story, right? A story of a great country that's been laid low by freeloaders, essentially, and political elites, right? And diversity in that is dangerous. Diversity is people coming in and taking away from you in this zero sum game, something that belongs to you. But the better story is that, you know, when, when everybody gets a fair shot, we're all better off. You know, as Obama said at the convention, the better story is that we all benefit from being a part of a society in which everyone has the opportunity to flourish. And so, you know, when we address misinformation, we embed that in that better story, and universities have a role in helping to resource that. That's how we see our role at the Kaldor Centre, at least, not only that we provide reliable, trustworthy information, but that we're resourcing civil society, we're resourcing journalists, and we're resourcing you, members of the general public, to have those better conversations about the issues that matter, including around diversity.

I love the idea of embracing the better story, and I'm always struck by how I think we got Trump wrong in 2015 when he first emerged, because we got that summer wrong. Trump came down the golden escalator on June the 16th, 2015. On June the 17th, 2016, a white racist walked into a church in Charleston, South Carolina, sat in silence during the prayer service and then killed eight or nine black parishioners. There was a racist attack. Beforehand, he cloaked himself in the colours of the Confederacy. His online manifesto said how he wanted to spark a race war. And so remarkable things happened after that. South Carolina, where the Civil War had actually began and the colours of the Confederacy had hung at the State Capitol since the early 1960s, it was literally designed to actually show the civil rights movement, who was in charge. That came down. Nikki Haley, who was the governor at the time, very brave. She brought it down. It was an amazing thing. Barack Obama attended the funeral of one of the pastors, and for I think, the first time, he really embraced the idea that he was, the Black president. He sang Amazing Grace. It was just this extraordinary moment. And that afternoon, he flew back to a White House that was bathed in rainbow colors because the Supreme Court that day had said that same sex marriage should be legal nationally. Now I was watching when that Confederate flag came down. It was, it was, it was joyous. I stood with African Americans who just celebrated that fabric of hate being lowered. And it was tempting, as a foreign correspondent, to see this almost as the final surrender of the American Civil War. And you kind of looked at that summer. You saw same-sex marriage, you saw the Confederate flag coming down, you saw Barack Obama really acting like he was comfortable to finally be the emphatically Black president so many people wanted him to be, and something he'd avoided for so long during his presidency, he didn't want it to be defined by race. And you thought, well, a Black president's going to be followed by a female president. There's going to be progress. And what we are really seeing in that moment was actually the conservative backlash and the rise of Donald Trump. And after we came back from that few weeks of covering that terrible shooting, all of a sudden, hang on a minute, Trump's flying high on the poles, and he stayed there, right, and he won the presidency. And what worries me, just very briefly, what worries me is we'll see a Kamala Harris victory in the same light as a kind of end of history moment. And history doesn't end in America. There'll be another backlash, and the conflict keeps going up.

I want to add something very quickly to two things here. It's about the storytelling and also about the events that you taught. That event when President Obama came back to the White House, and it was celebrating Pride Month. Let's not forget that in 2008, both Democratic nominees did not want to touch the issue at all when it came to LGBTQ rights, when it came to marriage. But just in a short few years, here you have now the President very much embracing the issue. And it goes again, you know, there are some that are going to try to divide us. It works in many ways, politically. It absolutely does. But as Frances said, the better narrative is we all do better when we have an opportunity. We all do better when we have access to an education. And I think those type of things, again, going back to the narrative, really works. But again, I'm the eternal optimist, because history has shown us that we do make progress.

I always think it's a bit, sometimes it's more like two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. So there is progression, but you're always going to have, because it's a it's a power struggle. It's actually about the shifting of power, and that's always going to be contested, but I agree. I'm an optimist, two step forward.

I'm an optimist. I'm an optimist as well. But the story of race relations in America has been one of progress and reforms and significant legal victories that have been followed afterwards by, unfortunately, a regression. And that's true. I often think one of the biggest divides in America, to be honest, is between a lot of people who feel themselves to be casualties of America's past, which a lot of People of Colour who have been discriminated against and their families have been discriminated against, and people who fear they will be victims of America's future and a future that is more secular, a future that is more woke, whatever you want that to mean, a future that is more multiracial. America will be a majority minority country by mid-century, and there are a lot of Americans who just don't like that, and they see Donald Trump as somebody who protects them from that future, and that's part of his appeal.

My next question, speaking about two steps forward, one step back, is the US Supreme Court. Now, earlier this year, they made a landmark ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina to radically restrict the consideration of race in college administration admissions. So I'm going to go to Nick first, because of his PhD. And I remember when we were talking about it, Nick's PhD was on the civil rights movement in the US. And when we were talking off stage, he was telling us a little bit about the history of affirmative action in the US. So my question to Nick first is, whether or not the decision by the Supreme Court, essentially to knock off affirmative action on the basis of race, was inevitable. But then I want to come to you, Mario, and talk about the very real world impact of that decision and what it's had on college admissions across the US.

Yeah, affirmative action was a phrase that was first used in the Kennedy administration, actually, but it didn't really mean what it does today. It meant we should try harder. We should, we should give this a bigger push. It didn't mean necessarily what's come to be associated with it, with as quotas and preferential treatment as the right would argue it. And LBJ (Lyndon B. Johnson) made the case very forcefully, southern Democrat who became president, I mean, he likened it to the starting line of a race. I mean, if you were in the starting line of a race, then you're bound to be slower. If you've been shackled for centuries, as he put it, you know, the white person is always going to beat you in that race because they have been unshackled. And he used the power of analogy in a very strong way, and he made the case for affirmative action. A problem with affirmative action was that it never enjoyed a kind of broad coalition of support within America. In the early 60s, there was a growing majority in favor, obviously, of ending segregation, of granting voting rights, the harder sellers was always affirmative action. The Republicans knew that, and they started using affirmative action as a tool, really, to push back against a lot of the civil rights reforms in the 1960s. Voting rights was a classic. When the Justice Department and others tried to make, tried to increase levels of enfranchisement amongst People of Colour, there were a lot of conservatives who described that as as affirmative action, and it kind of delegitimised that kind of basic, basic right. So there's been a kind of assault on on civil rights, more broadly, using affirmative action over the years as a cudgel. And the Supreme Court, which has been pretty much conservative dominated since the Nixon news, has become extremely conservative dominated now. They have aided and abetted that to a kind of frightening extent, I think.

So what's been the, so when I went to this conference last year, it was a widening participation conference. So that's all around student equity programs globally. And what the Americans were telling me that were at the conference, was that for some states, this has been a complete disaster, like that. One woman was talking about in Florida, how they had to just redo all of their equity programs because the Florida state jurisdiction also backed the Supreme Court decision. But you've said there's been a difference of reactions across the US in terms of this ruling. So can you tell us a bit about that?

That's great, yes, yeah, and it really is a tale of two cities or two states or various states. So when the United States Supreme Court ruled that race cannot be used as a determining factor or, in fact, when it comes to admissions, that was now the law of the land federally. However, many states, including the State of California, where I'm from, that's been our law of the land since 1996, when our own voters banned affirmative action. So for us, it had no effect as a public institution in a state where it already been banned. However, our colleagues at private schools in our state and at public schools in other states where the law now banned affirmative action, we have seen now a decrease in the amount of Black and African American students and some of those top, prestigious Ivy League schools that where they can no longer use race in the admissions process. So there has been a negative impact, unequivocally, for some states. You look at California, quite frankly, we have benefited from the decision, because we've had the infrastructure. So when the Court made the decision, our schools, quite frankly, shifted very quickly and started recruiting students in other states, telling them, no, come to California. This is a place where you're welcome. This is a place that we have an infrastructure ready for you to thrive. And so, it's a mixed bag, and we're ultimately going to see what happens. One interesting part about this, is the Supreme Court made it very clear that this was only narrowed to race in admissions, and in fact, they wrote a footnote in the decision, saying that the pursuit of diversity programs was very much lawful. However, many entities, both in the private and public sector, viewed the decision as also impacting them, or didn't want the threat of litigation to come against them. So many entities, many corporations, have actually scrapped their DEI or EDI programs, which, in my opinion, is a travesty, even though the Supreme Court never said it was illegal to do that. But that has been, in many ways, I think, one of the biggest effects that the decision had.

Yes, this sort of just, cooling effect, that's right. Frances?

I mean, I think it's useful for an Australian audience who might not have necessarily been following this, to understand the way in which this, the policy of affirmative action was being used in admissions and what was specifically challenged. Well, the way in which this was being implemented at Harvard, where, which was the subject of the Supreme Court challenge, is that there was essentially a tip or additional points being added in the admissions process for applicants who identified as Black, Native American or Hispanic, and so that kind of "positive discrimination" is now very clearly disallowed. But the Supreme Court did clarify that universities are still allowed to take people's life experience into account, and that, you know that universities are still able to put in place programs to address adversity. And so, for example, there was a brief conversation between Justice Kavanaugh, who we know is a conservative, and one of the council in the case, about, you know, if a student were to mention in their narrative essay that they were descendant from slaves, could the university take that into account in the admissions and Justice Kavanaugh indicated that he'd be open to that. That doesn't necessarily indicate where the Supreme Court might fall on future challenges, but it does indicate that there are some ways, there are other ways in which universities can try to, you know, improve access to admission for people from historically marginalised groups, and that it might, it might then put the onus onto universities to engage in a more substantive, perhaps more intersectional consideration of the barriers to access that are faced by people from disadvantaged communities, including people from racial minorities.

This was the loophole, I think, wasn't it, in the Supreme Court ruling that candidates can actually include in their essays an experience of race and a lived experience of race and that. But John Roberts, who wrote the ruling, I think, also said, you know, don't use this as a kind of back door. Don't use this as a kind of way around it. Now, I don't know how they kind of figure that out in a practical way. What kind of alarming about the ruling, in many ways, was, was it was premised on the idea that this isn't a problem anymore, that racism isn't really a problem. It was the same premise that they used in what was called the Shelby ruling in 2013. The Shelby ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 of one of its most important provisions, probably legal scholars here who know what preclearance was, it's this idea that if you're going to change your voting rules, if you've got a history of discrimination in your county, you have to get the permission of the Justice Department to change the rules. They got rid of that real safeguard, and again, they said, we don't need it any more because things have improved. Well, things have improved because of the preclearance and things that improved because of the Voting Rights Act. I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg described it as like getting rid of your umbrella because it stopped raining briefly, and that is the problem. A lot of these Supreme Court decisions have been predicate, predicated on the ridiculous notion that racial discrimination isn't a problem in America anymore, and so manifestly it is.

Yeah. Now I'm going to open it up to questions, because I'm sure there are people out there who might want to ask some questions. It's been such a good conversation. If you are interested in asking a question, put your hand up. We have some roving mics, I think, here, and remember a question has a question mark at the end of it - is not just a long statement of your own opinion.

So this morning, it appears the second alleged assassination of Donald Trump was this morning. So that just made me think, as you were discussing, what would be the legacy of Trump if Trump wasn't here anymore, and Frances' point that Trump carnage that we're all seeing at the moment, would that continue if Trump wasn't leading it? Would someone else take it up?

That's a very interesting question. Who wants to go first? Mario?

I think there's an open question to this right, whether Trump is, you know, where he really created Make America Great Again, MAGA, or whether he's really just a reflection of this movement already in America. Now, the hope was, in part that JD, Senator JD Vance, would continue this movement. But, I mean, we don't know what will happen after a second Trump presidency, or if he loses this election, what will happen? I do think one thing that's very important to note is MAGA is not a small amount. It's, I don't think it's a majority within America. I do not believe this, but it's also not this minority either, and so I think the future leaders within the Republican Party will still very much have to address the issues that some, if not many, in the MAGA boom, will have.

Yeah, that's a great question. So I often get asked, does Trumpism survive Trump? And again, I think one of the key things to understand is so much of what Trump has come to embody is a continuum. There has always been racism, there has always been nativism. There's always been political violence. The first House Speaker survived an assassination attempt. Political violence is as old as Congress itself, and when Congress was invaded by the MAGA hordes trying to overturn the election, they were literally shouting 1776. So they saw that political violence as legitimate. They saw that political violence as an expression of a kind of revolutionary ideology. They saw themselves as patriots, not seditionists or insurrectionists. So those things have always been there. Trump - it does require Trump, I think, to harness him in the powerful way that, yes, I mean, so much of it is about his personal magnetism, this kind of shared sense of victimhood that he's managed to sort of create with the with the MAGA faithful, how he's turned this into a sort of quasi religious movement. I mean literally, six weeks after January the Sixth, I went down to a conservative conference in Florida where Trump, I was always almost going to describe it as his political resurrection. It wasn't his political resurrection because he hadn't politically died. He came back on a Sunday, his supporters were gathered outside, underneath palm trees outside, there was even a golden statue of Donald Trump. It was that ridiculous. There was an idol of Donald Trump, and it spoke of this quasi religious movement, of which he is the odhead. And without him, it doesn't work in the same way. It just doesn't. You've got the Trump impersonators trying to be like Trump, but they just haven't got what he's got. So I think there is something about Trump, but also Trump embodies a lot of traits that have always been there.

Yeah. Frances, do you have a view?

Well, I mean, beyond, I suppose, the US context, we know, of course, that the influence of, you know, approaches to, you know, to politicking, that are about just, you know, as it said, spread spraying the field with, you know, misinformation and the ways in, you know, and the success, I guess, of that kind of approach have, you know, the horses out of the gate. And so, you know, with or without Trump, I think you know that is something which we are seeing here, and you know which, will no doubt continue to be something that the rest of the world is going to need to grapple with.

Any other questions from the floor over- Oh, okay, we've got a few. So first, here, second, you. Third, you.

Thanks so much for the discussion. I understand there's two groups that might help Donald Trump get into the White House again, and that's Black men and Latino men. What is Donald Trump offering them? Why are they voting for him potentially?

There's a great point about not regarding voting blocs as monolithic. They're not. There's a diversity within a diverse population, obviously. Ronald Reagan used to say of Latinos that they are Republicans, they just don't realise it yet. A lot of them religiously are very socially conservative. A lot of them are very entrepreneurial. I mean, these are sort of things that lead you naturally towards the Republican Party, as Ronald Reagan predicted, rather than, rather than the Democratic Party. And with Black men, I think there's a kind of manosphere thing going on there. There's a kind of macho thing. And Donald Trump makes the case to them very explicitly. What have the Democrats done for you? Have they improved your lives? You've voted Democrat since the 1930s. FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt) was the first president who really orchestrated the shift from Blacks supporting the Republican Party because of Lincoln to voting for the Democratic Party because they were offering to ameliorate their working conditions. They saved them from poverty during the Great Depression. So that was the moment that African Americans started voting Democrat on mass, and Trump says to them, well, how's it benefited your life and that does resonate.

Do you have anything to add, Frances?

Oh, simply to say that we know that across different contexts. You know when people are feeling insecure, of course, you're in your, you know you're in your lizard brain and and you are far less open, essentially, to kind of being able to share and to approaching and to approaching change creatively and so, you know, that's obviously what's being exploited here. But you know the underlying sense that people are, you know, doing it hard right now, and feeling insecure that, that does make it much more difficult to encourage, essentially, people to be more generous and open towards others.

You spoke a little bit about the Supreme Court, and you also spoke about Trumpism surviving Trump, I'm wondering, Mario, specifically, if you've looked into Project 2025, it seems to be a vast expansion of Trumpism, and what it could mean to diversity programs that might be much consequences as impactful or more of them {inaudible}...

Absolutely. So I'll start with something that Nick said earlier. During the first Trump administration, they had, you know, many, I would say, lifelong Republicans that worked in various areas of government, that were very experienced and really believed in governing, right, in trying to okay, you know, this is an outsider president. How are we going to help him manage this? Well, I think with Project 2025, is okay, we have four years. We're going to get everything we've ever wanted from a very conservative standpoint in, right, and we're going to and they learned the lessons, quite frankly, of the first administration, where it was a little bit chaotic, they don't want to repeat that. They want to, they saw what he could get to during these last four years, and they want to go all out. Interestingly enough, President Trump says he has nothing to do with it. However, there are videos saying he very much has knowledge to it. As it relates to diversity, equity, inclusion, I think it's fair to say it won't be positive. If anything, it'll be scary, quite frankly, right? Many, unfortunately, that have this point of view in Project '25 view diversity, equity, inclusion, or EDI, as it's said here in Australia, they view it as a negative, and they want to do everything to get rid of it. So from that standpoint, yeah, it's not good.

Do you think he had it, so, you know, he's, "I had nothing to do with it". Do you know much more about, I mean, presumably-

I mean, the Heritage Foundation is full of people who used to work for Trump. So, I mean, there's a kind of like, for sure, um, just on the Supreme Court victories. I think one of the key points to make on the American right, right now, is they regard those as victories in battles, and they think the war is still going on, and they want to win further victories. And they regard Roe (Roe v. Wade) in that way, the battle now will be to have a nationwide abortion ban, and then to go after IVF, and then to go after contraception amongst some people on the right and amongst affirmative action, we're already seeing the use of that Supreme Court ruling used as a legal weapon to challenge all sorts of DEI programs in other spheres. So these victories are very much seen as as isolated victories in battles and the bigger war goes on.

Yeah, you had a question?

Thanks {inaudible} ... refer to a poll that might've, {inaudible}... Um my question, related to two of the words that I've seen screen, mainly class, privilege. I just want to call the panellists for regarding, I suppose, regardless of who we wins the election. Perhaps more interestingly, election, but how EDI, is this an opportunity for EDI to broadly to to focus perhaps more on socioeconomic disadvantage as opposed to disadvantage. I'm thinking of disadvantage {inaudible}. I'm thinking of {inaudible's} recent book, talking about {inaudible}

I might go to you first, Frances on this, because, you know how we were talk- so the thing we did have some questions we were going to ask around JD Vance, almost as a diversity candidate himself, like the actual diversity in the context of socioeconomic diversity and social class, do you have any points to make?

Yeah, that's really interesting. Because we do tend to think of, well, I suppose, in the context of this discussion, we have been focusing a lot on race and migration, but of course, you know it's much broader, and you know that the Trump agenda is obviously, you know, hostile to non-visible minorities, you know, LGBTI communities and well beyond. And it, I think it's interesting, you know, on the one hand, there is a playing to, you know, people who might be safe, for example, amongst the working class, working class wide communities. Whilst you know, at the same time, you know, we know in the US context, that you know socioeconomic disadvantage it is, you know, really intersects with with other diversity elements. And so you know, for example, when we talk about the the implications of the Supreme Court decision for university admissions, you know, where a focus on adversity, and you know, may well still be a way in which you can, you know, advantage people from other groups.

Well, I just add to that, if, if you lived in one of the hollowed out communities of the Rust Belt, white privilege didn't mean much to you, and that was the seedbed of Trumpism. You know, I spent so much time in those communities. In 2015, 2016, I was struck by how many kind of elite people in Washington were reading Hillbilly Elegy while they were on holiday at Martha's Vineyard in Nantucket. The best place was always to go to these communities themselves. And they really did feel like castaways in a globalised economy that had left them behind. I mean, Clinton used to speak of building a bridge to the 21st century, this shift from the manufacturing economy to the Information Age. But that bridge felt like a bypass in those communities, because they had not felt the benefits of that at all. You could always tell you when you're in Trump land, because there would be needles, empty, needles in the gutters. These are the communities with the opioid crisis, these are the people that just didn't feel they had any opportunities anymore. And it was in those derelict steelworks and those entry factories that the phrase "Make America Great Again" echo in a very powerful way. And if you're thinking about the ways to solve America's polarisation problem, then you've got to look at the income polarisation in America right now. You've got to come up with an economy that works for everybody. One of the reasons why there isn't a middle in American politics much anymore is there isn't a middle in the economy. I was always struck by these guys who would drive you around the Rust Belt in the Ubers. They'd been hit by automation in the 70s. They'd lost their jobs in the steelworks, so they were Uber drivers, and they were in Pittsburgh. Guess what's happening in Pittsburgh? Uber's figuring out how to do robot driverless cars, so they're about to be hit by the next wave of automation, and it's trying to figure out an economy with the works for these people that will help us solve the political and polarisation problem in America.

 Absolutely. Mario, do you have anything to add?

Yeah, you know, the end of the day, the heart of the work that we do in EDI is opportunity, right? And the more we focus on providing opportunity for folks that haven't had a shot in life, or they've had had significant barriers, that's when we're going to do better. The reality is, the laws are going to change, the names are going to change in there, but if we remain focused on our mission, making sure that folks know, you know, I could be rich, I could be poor, but there's an opportunity out there for me. I think that's how we win. I want to add one last thing on this. You talked about needles, right? There's needles in rural areas because of fentanyl. There's needles in urban areas because of fentanyl, right? This is a crisis that impacts everybody. And again, if we focus on issues, right, where we see each other as human first, if we see each other as Americans, as Australians, right, that's our opportunity to bring people together, find that common ground and lift people up.

Can I just say, I mean, I've been talking in a very pessimistic way about America, but frankly, what gives me hope is people like Mario, and your story. That's what gives me hope, the fact that your parents came from where they did and you are doing what you do now, and America will always, the American Dream works for so many people. It is an animating idea that is so seductive and for so many people, yields extraordinary results, and it's just making that American dream accessible to everybody, whatever your ethnicity, whatever your background, whatever your social academic class. I think that is the key thing, and that hasn't been happening for a long time now.

That was absolutely wonderful. Give everyone a round of applause. Give our panel a round of applause. I'm an avid watcher of American politics, so I really enjoyed this. This was like me listening to one of my podcasts on the weekend. It was absolutely fantastic. So thank you all for coming today. I've just got a couple of things I need to tell you, firstly, on behalf of the UNSW Bookshop, anyone who sat on a chair that has that little, there's a little sort of token, or, you know, a paper token, which is a gift. It's a gift, a free copy of Nick's latest book, The Forever War: America's Unending Conflict with Itself.

It's like the meat raffle.

It wasn't a flyer. So pick it up if you sat on it or kicked it to the floor. It's actually a gift. And Nick can also, he's also going to be signing some books outside. So if you have won that gift, get him to sign your gift. But also feel free to purchase a book and get him to sign it. So thank you again, everybody, I really enjoyed that. Have a wonderful Diversity Week. Go to as many of these panels as you can, and another final round of applause for our excellent panellists.