Opening night of the fourth annual New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University featured The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Equal Justice Initiative’s founder, Bryan Stevenson.
Three days prior, on March 24, Goldberg was accidentally added to a private Signal group chat with top Trump national security advisors, a major breach of national security. The scandal led to a last-minute change for opening night – instead of Goldberg interviewing his staff writer, Anne Applebaum, their roles reversed.
The crowd rose to a standing ovation the moment Goldberg entered the state, eager to hear from the journalist all of America is talking about. He modestly sat down and awaited the inevitable.
“There’s been some news,” Applebaum said, kicking off her interview. Applebaum referred to the scandal as “Signalgate.”
The group chat Goldberg was added to on the encrypted app Signal included members of the Trump cabinet, such as U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance. The screen behind Applebaum and Goldberg displayed screenshots of the texts, including specific details about the bombing of Houthi targets in Yemen. Goldberg, a civilian, learned of these bombings two hours before they happened.
Goldberg said his first reaction to receiving the accidental message was that he was forced into a situation he did not want to be in.
In response to the group chat, the Trump administration has publicly called Goldberg a “sleazebag” and his article a “hoax.”
“It’s a serious breach in national security,” Goldberg said. “They had an opportunity to just accept that they made a mistake,” but instead they went on to “attack the messenger.”
Before publishing the details, Goldberg prioritized the safety of the people threatened by the mistake: American service people.
“The last thing that I want to do is put American service people in harm’s way,” he said.
Goldberg and his team consulted with several government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, before releasing the screenshots – which they did yesterday – to ensure that no classified or potentially harmful information would be shared.
“The goal of people who are authoritarian-minded is to force compliance,” Goldberg said. “So if you carry a dose of reality that you can inject into the system, into the cognitive system of the United States, well then you should do it.”
Though the conversation took a dark turn into America’s path toward authoritarianism, Goldberg managed to bring levity to the room.
“I’m trying to repress my desire to make jokes about this whole thing,” he said.
Goldberg tried to explain why President Donald Trump is different from any other American president. He used an example from 2016, when Trump revived the slogan “America First.” The roots of the slogan in the U.S. go back to World War II, when the America First Committee, filled with antisemites and Nazi sympathizers, campaigned against American involvement in the war.
“Remember when people said, ‘America First, oh, Donald Trump, you can’t say that, that was a pro-Hitler thing, that was what the Nazis were saying,” Goldberg said. Then to political analysts’ surprise, Trump continued to use the slogan and the country seemed to accept it.
Then Goldberg turned to a recent example – Trump’s recent attacks on big law firms and universities.
“The question for me is why people are still surprised when this administration does things that other administrations haven’t done before,” Goldberg said. “Universities … big law [were] not prepared for what’s going on.”
Later, three Atlantic reporters joined the stage alongside Applebaum and Goldberg: Adam Serwer, Elaina Plott Calabro and McKay Coppins.
Applebaum modified the classic “frog in boiling water” to explain how America seems to be sliding towards authoritarianism without complaint. But it is happening in the U.S. at a faster and more intense level than it happened in the autocracies of Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela, she said.
After The Atlantic team left the stage to another standing ovation, the audience rose again as Stevenson was joined on stage by his friend, Laurene Powell Jobs.
Powell Jobs introduced her long-time friend to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his best-selling memoir “Just Mercy,” detailing his journey to found EJI, an organization dedicated to the legal defense of the underserved.
Earlier this month, Stevenson was awarded the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Citizen Leadership, a medal also awarded to John Lewis.
“In 1816, after he had written the Declaration of Independence and served two terms in the White House,” Powell Jobs said, “Thomas Jefferson reflected on our country. ‘The most sacred of the duties of a government,’ he wrote, ‘is to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.’”
That same year, Powell Jobs said, Jefferson submitted an audit of his possessions. This tax audit included 74 slaves.
“Two writings, many contradictions, in a man and in a country,” she said.
Stevenson was born just a few years after the Brown v. Board of Education which outlawed racial segregation in schools, so most of the older people in his community were never given the opportunity to get their high school degree.
“I started my education in a colored school,” he said. When schools were finally integrated, Stevenson said, it was not due to a sense of justice on behalf of the schools – it was due to a commitment to the rule of law that prevented the schools from defying court orders.
Stevenson said that people usually credit his immense success to drive, intelligence or tact, but he attributes his successes to something else – proximity.
“There are songs that are being sung, and if we have the courage to get close enough … to hear these songs, not only can we do something to change the justice culture, we can do something for ourselves and find purpose and passion and clarity.
