Merchants of Fear: Stirring Hatred for Political Gain

In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. 

As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name.

The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now?

In this live episode, we hear from Siddhartha Deb, Ralph Eubanks, C.J. Janovy, and Patrick Phillips with responses from Eliza Barclay and Jenny Casas.

Siddhartha Deb, author of Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open prize and the 2024 Anthony Veasna So Fiction prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Dissent, The Baffler, N+1, and Caravan.

Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape, Ever Is a Long Time, The House at the End of the Road, andd When It’s Darkness on the Delta: An American Reckoning. His work focuses on race, identity, and the American South, and has appeared in Vanity Fair, The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and The New Yorker. He is a 2007 Guggenheim fellow, a 2021-2022 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award.

C.J. Janovy is the author of No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas, which won the 2019 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ nonfiction. She is director of content at Kansas City’s NPR affiliate, and spent a decade as editor of the city’s alt-weekly. Her work has also been published by Switchyard, Catapult, NPR, New Letters, Ms., and the New York Times.

Patrick Phillips is the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, which was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian. He is also the author of four books of poems, including Elegy for a Broken Machine, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is a recent fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. He teaches writing and literature at Stanford.

Eliza Barclay is the climate editor for New York Times Opinion where she commissions and edits guest essays on climate, environment and food issues. In 2024, she curated and edited the series “What to Eat on a Burning Planet” about how lawmakers, scientists, farmers and consumers can confront and solve the growing strain on our global food supply and the natural systems it depends on. She was the science, health and climate editor at Vox, where she co-wrote and co-edited the award-winning “supertrees” project.

Jenny Casas is a senior radio editor for Reveal. She was previously a narrative audio producer at the New York Times. Before that, she reported on the ways that cities systematically fail their people, for WNYC Studios, USA Today, City Bureau, and St. Louis Public Radio.