Tressie McMillan Cottom: It’s a real pleasure.
Brock Colyar: Happy to do it.
Spiegelman: According to the most recent Harvard Youth Poll, one of the most defining shifts among young people is a loss of perceived agency. Half of them feel like people like them have no say in the government. There’s a feeling that what they do has no impact on what happens next. And that feeling — that lack of agency in the face of the world — is really what I want to talk about: how it affects us, how we move through it. As of this recording, here are just a few things that have recently happened:
Donald Trump created a $1.8 billion slush fund that could benefit the Jan. 6 rioters. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. We’re still at war with Iran. How do you react? How do you feel when you read these headlines, and how do you process these emotions?
Colyar: I just left lunch with two people and I asked them how they were feeling, and the word I hear the most often is “numb.” I think sometimes, during the first administration, I was almost more emotionally worked up, even though it wasn’t nearly as bad as now. Like, you had to just get used to this man being omnipresent in our lives, and now we’ve been dealing with Trump for so many years that it just doesn’t feel — I don’t know. I rarely react to anything with too much feeling. I think when ICE was taking over Minneapolis, that felt really intense for me for whatever reason, but everything else, you just kind of read it and — yeah.
Spiegelman: Why do you think that the ICE raids in Minneapolis felt particularly activating to you?
Colyar: I mean, this sounds horrible, but there was a sense that it could happen, it could impact your life soon. We’re in New York. The question was, is he coming to our city next? Is he going to that city next? You know, there was something, like, I’m really just worried about myself, and how my life is impacted in that fear. But it just felt like, oh, he’s literally taking over a city, and that’s freaky.
McMillan Cottom: Yeah. I don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on what Donald Trump is doing, or I really try not to. I have tried to limit my exposure to, like, exactly what you just did, that weekly roundup I have. I subscribe to some services that’ll give me a brief on the day, on the week, and that helps me not spiral out into the details of all of the intersecting global scale crises that seem to be ongoing in our lives.
To Brock’s point, Trump 1.0, I think, felt different than the current administration, in part because it felt like an anomaly. That if we could just sort of solve for X — meaning Donald Trump, and also X in the sense of the former Twitter.com — we could get back to regular life.
