Lawfare Daily: How the World Sees Trump’s America with Eve Fairbanks and Madeleine Schwartz

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Hi, I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor here at Laugh Fair. You might recognize my voice from our coverage of Donald Trump's New York Criminal trial. A podcast series called Escalation that I co-hosted with Laugh Fair as Ukraine Fellow and Estesia Lepatina or the occasional episode of Rational Security in the Laugh Fair podcast. Here at Laugh Fair we have many unofficial montros.

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Thanks for considering. Just from the very fact that our currency doesn't depend as much on the shift of another currency, I mean, South Africa has to know. So that we have to know about American politics and ways of life and votes and ways of thought. Because their whole economy is swayed by the movement of the United States.

More recently, their politics has been very affected by the intipathy of the current administration. And so they have to know and we don't have to know. It's the law for a podcast. I'm Tyler McBrine, managing editor of Laugh Fair. With e-fair banks, a writer and journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa and Madeline Schwartz,

founder and editor-in-chief of the dial, a magazine of international writing.

“How can Americans now look abroad and look at analogies of what has happened abroad for their own understanding of their country?”

Today we're talking about a forthcoming book, how we see it. The world looks at America in the age of Trump, a collection of essays from the dial, published by journalists from around the world, who probe their home country's complex relationship with the US. Relationships made even more complex under the new administration. So Madeline, I want to start with you to just give us a bit of the backstory of the book itself as a whole.

The dial for me offers such a window into the rest of the world. So it was really interesting to me to see this book come about because it really inverted that relationship, at least for me with the dial.

But Madeline, I'd love to go to you first.

Explain a bit about what the idea is behind the book and where it came from. Yeah, of course.

Now when we started it really in large part to combat a certain kind of American exceptionalism,

“which is to say that we're living through such big historic changes around the world.”

And there's no really a way to understand that without looking internationally. And without, in my view, having a place where writers and reporters can really share what they're seeing on the ground for each other and for readers. The origin of the book comes from an issue that we published in 2024 during Trump's re-election campaign that was of writers from around the world.

Looking at the United States, which, as you say, Tyler is unusual for us.

We publish almost exclusively work from outside of the United States often in translation.

“We've published writing from 85 or 90 countries at this point.”

And so it's rare for us to look at the United States and yet in the history of the United States, it's often been people outside of the country who see our country best. You know, to talk feel being a prime example of that. And that issue was really interesting and we were interested in continuing and thinking about what Americans could learn from how they were being seen. What trends, what patterns, people outside of the country, were really noticing in the United States that were in some ways invisible to those inside the country.

And luckily, we were contacted by the new press, which is a great publishing house, who said that they had wanted to do this kind of book for a long time. And would we put it together? We had about six months to put it together, which even from the experience of crashing magazine pieces and being on deadline. It was a very short period of time to put together a book. But it really exciting and opportunity for us because we got to ask so many of the writers who we've worked with for many years right now to put together longer reflections and think about pieces that would not only be important in the moment that they were being published, but might stand the test of time in some way.

Yeah, it's such a rich collection of essays, and we'll dig into yours more in depth in just a bit, but first I want to ask you how your relationship with the dial started and what your view of it was at first and how it changed. You're not quite a tokenavillion observer of the United States, you sort of straddle two countries in a way.

So yeah, just to talk a bit about how you first came to write for the dial.

Yeah, well, the dial is, I'm the founder of the dial, it's my project and I've worked for many years on different projects that are really about this idea of trying to bring, you know, the world to Americans and thinking about different ways that journalists and reporters can create their own kind of kind of exchange ideas outside of the given pathways. I have my own international background, my father is French, my mother is American and they split on our three months old and I've lived my whole life between different cultures and different countries and have found that that way of that sort of double lens to be incredibly useful in my own work as a journalist and spent most of my career outside of the United States working as a foreign correspondent.

One of the things that happens when you work as a foreign correspondent is that you realize two things, one is the enormous shadow that the United States cast over other countries in terms of people watching it and being aware of what's happening and in some ways taking their cues from that and also just how impoverished even the most educated Americans are in their knowledge about what's happening outside of the country. That seems to me especially difficult right now or problematic right now when democracy in the United States is in such a perilous state.

And we had so many Americans still treat the United States as a quite exceptional democratic experiment that might withstand whatever it's thrown in it. One in fact the kinds of changes we're seeing in the United States have really occurred in all parts of many parts of the world and those institutions in general do not fare as well as one might hope.

“And so that's where the idea of the dial came from and since then as I say you know we've been just extremely lucky to to work with amazing contributors around the world and I think feel that we are less of the exception.”

In the way that we see the world than we were when we started which is to say. I think that our media landscape hasn't many ways become more international. I see that there are lots of new publications that are starting up in a similar vein to the dial bringing together international reporting and bringing it in a way that's different from the old model which is to say you know these are no longer foreign bureaus of American.

Yeah, thank you for that and even I want to turn to you before we get into your the meat of your of your essay in the collection.

“I want to hear more a bit about how you describe your positionality in terms of you know someone who has lived in South Africa for several years observing the US from afar but also you know having a relationship with with it yourself.”

So yeah tell us a bit about yourself you know what you bring to your essay and then I'm also curious how you first started a relationship with the dial as well. Yeah, so I moved to South Africa. Oh, so 16 even 17 years ago now is in my big 20s I had been ready for the new republic and I got a writing fellowship to come down here for two years and consider the aftermath of apartheid. The situation here was that I think this statistic is correct but between 1994 and 1996 so this long system of racial segregation in South Africa which really had a lot of very conscious overlaps by design with Jim Crow and kind of taken to the extreme.

Obviously ended in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as the country's first black president first democratic president and in the next two years something like 70% or maybe 75% of the foreign reporters who were stationed here left out of a feeling that the story had been wrapped up it was over.

“When in fact I think a lot of the people who stayed and certainly South Africans in this I found when I got here. It had kind of just begun in or a new story had begun which was one that.”

Certainly a lot of European countries that are becoming much more diverse the United States is kind of seeing around the bend and grappling with a little bit but not in the sudden immediate way that South Africa did which is.

You have a category of people that were really marginalized second class citizens even almost considered migrants there's a sense in a part that.

The cities were white and black people people of color came to them were like immigrants and then suddenly you were thrust into the situation where. The group of people was starting to tell the country's story run its newspapers dominated its parliament dominate university campuses so a sudden kind of demographic cultural flip of the kind that that many other.

So the Western countries are going through slowly and so for me the opportunity to meet people here and see that and learn about it and watch and understand from people.

Black and white and of other racial make ups and different classes and so on like. How did they experience that was really I really really wanted to to see that and to witness it just as a person as well as a reporter and then I began writing stories about that and doing pretty. Deep interview processes where I would spend months or a year or more years with people traveling back home meeting their elders meeting different generations and really witnessing a lot of things that that surprised me in terms of.

How Black South Africans thought about their power what power they had gained and what they expected to gain but hadn't gained in terms of economic power. These are feelings had changed and why South Africans also after the political situation had changed so the wish for revenge and certain kinds of restitutions altered after that political shift happened. So I began to report a lot on that I was working on a book and then I knew the original co-founder also of the dial Linda Kinsler. And she told me about this new publication which I was so excited about because I was so found and this is going to make me sound.

“Maybe naive but I think many many of us kind of you me you know people who will be listening to this are afflicted more than we think by just really not hearing a lot about countries that we imagine we know about broadly.”

Kind of know the governance there how the population feels from reading newspapers I don't want to ding any particular newspapers coverage but I thought I knew a lot about South Africa before I got here and was just blown away by the extent to which.

I mean South Africa has to know so that it has to know about American politics and ways of life and votes and ways of thought because.

“Their whole economy is swayed by the movement of the United States more recently their politics has been very affected by the antipathy of the current administration and so they have to know and we don't have to know.”

And so it's really really excited about this project and then I ended up writing I loved working with this magazine and it's incredible.

The leaders and contributors so much they've I wrote a few stories for them is before this one one on Elon Musk and how his fabrication said he. Pedals in the United States about his upbringing in South Africa which he's able to do again because people even don't like Musk don't really know how to question. The aspects of how he's portraying his own childhood.

What you're saying which which begins with Irania in just a moment, but but first.

Madeline I want to get to some of the lessons that you see come from this collection of essays especially at the moment at which they were written. And I one of the things that really struck me reading the essays together was they had a sort of as an American reading them they had a sort of.

“The emperor has no clothes I think quality to them at one point you write in the introduction quote one point that almost all of our contributors noted was that the United States presently seems a thread bear society.”

So I want to just hear from you a bit about the benefit of this sort of comparative analysis and you know poking holes in the myth of American exceptionalism. And what you see as as the main lessons from the collection as a whole and feel free to bring in some of the other contributors and their perspectives other than Eves from South Africa. Yeah well the book is a really varied collection we have 12 essays from as many places around the world and when we're putting it together we really wanted to to make sure that each essay brought its own perspective.

And also to make sure that you know that it would sound the test of time and not feel completely outdated as soon as it was published because we're obviously in a period when things seem to be moving very fast. And so one of the questions that we kept returning to was essentially how did we get here and how did how can these different perspectives help. I only don't that and help us better understand what as Americans we may not be seeing about our own society and and I think you know as you say the first of them is that the United States is a country like any other with it with its own flaws on its own flawed history even as.

“Even the most liberal and critical Americans I think like to hold on to a certain image of American exceptionalism and especially American democracy.”

It has exceptional but one of the great essays in the book for example is an essay by a Ukrainian journalist named Natalia Grignuk who is the only Ukrainian journalist to have covered every election in the United States from Obama to Trump and she talks at great length about how shocked she is by the the completely dissonant visions that the people who she talks to have of the United States that you know it's sort of beyond. The idea of fake news but here we are in completely different realities and she she talks about how do you actually have a state that holds together when people.

Just cannot agree on what's happening not only in the United States writ large or in the world but in their own town among their own neighbors and that gets to this second idea that you mentioned as well which is that again and again in the book our.

Contributors really point to how broken the United States is and how broken it seems as a as a society another one of our essays and and they're all amazing so you know.

Please listen to us go out and by the book immediately but another one of the amazing essays it comes from Tommy Roy who's a wonderful writer from Mumbai India who wrote a book about about slums in Mumbai and she moved to San Francisco for. For various reasons and began a project studying almost people in San Francisco and she is shocked by what she sees compared to Mumbai because as she writes in her essay you know she she would use to seeing poverty and reporting on poverty but in Mumbai the people living in the slums had a sense of community and helped each other and the homeless people who she talks to in San Francisco feel such a sense of shame about.

And then the third point and I think this is one that might be an interesting reminder to what you will talk about in her own essay is really the changing idea of American soft power you know American soft power has been such a force over the course of the 20th century and has shaped so much of cultural wide of what we see what we listen to the books that we read and again and again when I was looking over the.

The collection you know in preparation of this of this conversation I was struck by the by the very negative image that people have of the United States.

We have a really really hilarious essay from Rome by an author named Francesco Pacifico where he just complains about you know American tourists and Rome and he compares them to an invading army.

“And I see this to you know in Paris where I live where there's graffiti not in my neighborhood that says Americans go home and I think that.”

Many Americans are not yet have trouble coming to face with the fact that for a lot of the world the United States is synonymous to with. You know politics and a way of being that much of the world really dislikes and that the and that the place of the United States has really changed. By way of segue to the South Africa portion of the conversation I'm I'm reminded of I lived and worked inside Africa in the eastern Cape for a year and one of the first conversations I had was with a colleague who.

I I mentioned I had moved from New York and and the colleague shook their head and said oh it's I would I could never go there it's far too dangerous you know too many guns.

“Which which really struck me as you know someone as an American as a young American coming to South Africa with certain you know priors about the country from when I had read and heard but.”

That is all to say that I want to turn to you eaves I'm very excited to speak to you about this essay. But it's selfishly as I mentioned I'm you know having lived and worked there briefly but also because as you know as you point out in the connections to Jim Crow that there's so many similarities between the US and South Africa. And I want to start where you start which is the all white on clay of Irania with a bit of irony because you know as as you said it was this it's the strange fascination that that foreign reporters have with Irania for sometimes very different reasons.

So you well first of all what is Irania and second of all in my pronouncing correctly and third of all why did you start there.

So my essays a little bit of a inversion of some of the other essays in the book that.

“Do what we really really really need now I think which is to have journalists from elsewhere writers from elsewhere people from elsewhere.”

Come take a look at the United States we do so much of that in in contrast my essays is a compliment to that maybe which is considering how Americans have typically looked at South Africa and used it and then. also South Africans bafflement in a way with how their country is being used as a symbol. To. Proof things that certain people want to prove in the context of American domestic politics somebody said to me recently. I think one thing that we have to understand here in South Africa is that the United States has no foreign policy.

It really only has domestic policy and then the rest of the world is refracted through that and put. You know different countries and populations are drafted into playing a role in this domestic diorama to represent. Some kind of possible future or some potential problem or something that we want them to represent that was a pretty blunt way of putting it I'm not sure I've been thinking about it is is a totally true but certainly in this case. My essay begins with Irania which you did pronounce right which is a small and very static all white town it is formally all white South Africa the government permits this town technically speaking to continue to practice extreme segregation and exclude.

People of color and probably other than Mandela himself and maybe. A few other South African stories it's her own struggle with HIV but it is to me has felt like the biggest story in the American press this town the existence of this town the potential growth of this all white town.

And despite the fact that South Africa has 4.5 million white residents which is virtually the same number so the same percentage of the population which is grown but it's virtually the same number as it had in 1994. And 3 to 5,000 people live in this all white town so eventually small number of people and that number hasn't really grown either have chosen to live in this town but it has this outside place in the American gaze and this includes publications like.

“I think the nation I don't want to speak wrong but but you know publications that we consider left of center going to this town and scrutinizing why white South Africans.”

Can't accept a sharing power sharing their world coming second in in government resourcing adapting to affirmative action for government contracts and some.

And they can't get over the loss of their superiority this is a concept that Americans have that white South Africans just can't do it a can't they can't manage it they can't abide it so they will retreat to this very. A abandoned mining town where nothing's happening in the middle of nowhere rather than except having.

“This is just not true it's not how the South African story has gone after a parted and and I really wanted to ask myself says think about it in the peace and South Africans why.”

In the history of what happened after the end of a partate and one that insists.

A that white South Africans can't adapt they can't manage they won't they ultimately won't be able to give up their privileges even if we morally think they should and and be.

A story that's gotten a lot more traction in the right wing press and has affected the actual policies of the US administration right now that black South Africans are still bent on vengeance.

“And bent on making white South Africans pay for past sins neither of these things. I mean if you read the essay you'll get a fuller sense of this but.”

White and black South Africans are just so perplexed by this story that I write that in a way their reactions to it in their countering of it doesn't get as much traction as it ought to in the US because they don't even know what to say it's so far. The reality of the current country. A real focus finally of this essay is so many white South Africans there's there's not as much polling here writing here doesn't rely as much on opinion polling but. There have been some polls such a such a huge number of of South Africans ones I know white South Africans people that I interviewed were off of Connor in rural areas farmers etc. the kind of people who are portrayed by the right wing press in the US now is extremely endangered and unhappy.

Very often say you know I didn't necessarily support a change in government I didn't know what it would mean to fully in franchise you know I may be felt that there was something wrong with the apartheid government because it was so discriminatory but I really worried about what happened to me and my family. By sort of unleashing undoing a police state and unleashing potential vengeance and tip of the desire for reparations, restitution and people will say I have to say it is so much better despite high crime that exists although it's much lower than it was in the early 1990s despite.

I felt these with infrastructural decay and problems of a developing country it is so much better to have this whole country be free I much much much prefer.

Living in the current South Africa where I have much less privilege economically on paper politically even much less representation. Then living under apartheid which was very scary and retrospect. And as you mentioned this story of Irania not only miss represents the the present in terms of portraying this or miss appropriating this miss representing this gloomy story of South Africa but also a fantastical one of this.

I thought what I thought was really pointing as well is that it also miss represents South Africa's past as well you sort of describe Irania as representing a loss of faith and you write.

“This loss of faith is sad because the real South African story has a different lesson what is often overlooked is in the American fascination with South Africa is the violence the apartheid regime wrought on white people.”

Could you speak a bit about that of how it represents the loss of faith and this idea that this discriminatory totalitarian apartheid regime actually inflicted quite a lot of pain on the privilege class. You know the people it was supposed to protect and and raise up. There's a lot of back and forth in the press to some degree about in the US press about South Africa and on the right you get this depiction of either a genocide or a an imminent one or a very.

“And then you also get depictions of the country that are much less sort of sympathetic to the white minority but that also rely on an underlying premise that I find.”

More similar than we might think which is a story that the white minority was protected, coddled, comfortable and extremely privileged under apartheid.

In terms of the whole legal structure of the country they did have enormous privileges and ostensibly it was a society that was set up to defend white South Africans and I say that there are some.

“In some places in the US media now or or streams of thought that in a less extreme way but they're almost say we have to start setting up certain kinds of protections on.”

How campuses can be run on the resourcing of different types of of projects and media outlets and types of censorship in order to defend.

BATTled white contingent of of the population that was the entire idea under apartheid was to set up a legal structure set up censorship programs, etc. to defend this population. What I don't find expressed that you hear in kaleidoscopic ways expressed here. Many whites of Africans didn't feel protected they felt very endangered by a segregationist society taken to the extreme that claimed that it stood to protect them I'll give you an example at a certain point because of the demographics of the country.

The white apartheid government leaned very hard on the idea rhetorically and legally that black South Africans were terrorists that their goal was to annihilate white people. And so many of the white South Africans that I've spoken to for this piece and even otherwise remember so viscerally how terrified this made them in their childhoods because it was also true that that they lived with black South Africans black South Africans worked in their homes black South Africans sometimes drove their vehicles they were a presence that these young people kids were taught.

But actually behind their eyes, behind their smiles, your mani may want to kill you and there's this terroristic force that endangers you and this idea was propagated so that white South Africans would continue to vote for apartheid and would serve in the military there was a draft for all white South Africans. So it had a sort of a purpose but it also created and it's easy to think that this is kind of like a soft effect that's just psychological but a sense of fear that pervaded every aspect of life one men told me that he was in school in his early teens and a gust of wind shattered a window.

It's and you lived on edge like that all the time.

“And then in order to maintain as the African continent transitioned to out of colonialism and toward black rule in order to maintain this white minority government.”

The country went to war, they partake government got evolved in wars with neighboring black led countries that were often housing exiles from the South African freedom movement. And there was a draft for every young white man and you had to serve in an army that was exceptionally abusive. Really infected you with this idea that you are under existential attack all the time and and made you petrified and turned you against other fellow white South Africans neighbors who had maybe a slightly different view.

The society became extremely paranoid and internally torn and people weren't allowed to to learn anything really about their black neighbors they weren't encouraged and they were explicitly censored all kinds of books you know that Bob Dylan songs about sort of general resistance or you know being a bit against the man you didn't know about them you couldn't hear them you couldn't join.

“Any sense of kind of global culture because because of how the government purportedly was trying to protect you my partner my my husband who's white South African fled the country in 1988 to avoid being drafted to basically.”

Go get put in a tank and terrorize his own country men in this white military he just didn't feel he could do that he didn't want to be in the army anyway so he he escaped the country as many many many many white South Africans fled. And he ended up in Berlin but he couldn't come back he would have been arrested and. Really many aspects of the fall of the Berlin wall sort of surprised him he felt very disoriented because. And then he did students from learning about any kind of resistance movement or anti government movement anywhere it became this very.

“That if they could get out of the country this is white South Africans if they could leave.”

They would there was a joke going around Johannesburg what is a white South African patriot someone who can't sell their house. And this was partly out of a sense of uncertainty about future politics but people were very explicit that they they'd come to fear their own government the one that ostensibly was protecting them against an onslaught of. Terrorists of color and migrants from. The margins of the country and they just didn't feel like they could bear it anymore they didn't want to send their children to the military they didn't want to send their children to universities.

Where they would end up. And they would make it hard for them to get get jobs anywhere else because they were so circumscribed and censored and they had to get out and there was years during which. The US consulate in Johannesburg which is not even the main point of contact was getting 50. Today from South Africans white South Africans desperate to flee apart aid and in the end in 1992 there was a referendum about changing the constitution and effectively annihilating this country.

This country meant to protect white South Africans it was a white only referendum and I ultimately wrote in the piece that.

In 1992% of whites of Africans abandoned the country they fled the country in so far as they voted. To end this system and adopt a system that they knew would give them far less privileges because. And again I want to stress that in no way were whites of Africans the main. Victims of apartheid they weren't its intended victims and they weren't its principal real victims but they were also really victimized. Many black South Africans that I spoke to for the piece and just in general they also understand that they know that well they saw that.

And the reason I I wrote in the essay that whites of Africans ultimately fled.

It's called a quote and hopes to adjust that so I can I think up to 20 or 25,000 this year except.

And certainly there are people living in this country white and black who are very unhappy with its trajectory with its struggles with its economic insecurity with its governance which has had a lot of struggles with corruption after the end of apartheid. But the magnitude of white flight from apartheid South Africa was infinitely greater than white flight now and I just think if we really reflect on that it says something.

“I mean it's it's really really striking and I think really not understood and when I say loss of faith.”

I mean that so many of the people who write about South Africa or who even think about the future of diverse societies like the United States.

I think that there's a little bit of a lot of giving up on on the sense that this could ever really work that well. And particularly that a white population that had an oppressive government that voted for that government at a time that enjoyed extraordinary privileges could ever really. Loosen its grip on those privileges and we just we have trouble believing that the trajectory that we thought we were on can continue.

“That people ever really be able to to give up power and if you look at South Africa this just isn't true you can you can look at a place if you want to the question is what do you want to believe in part.”

You can see a place where that happened and and many many white South Africans feel far more welcomed than they expected and many black South Africans feel that their white fellow countrymen. I don't want to speak for everyone but but many many feel that those people are are making a real contribution to the post-apartid country in a way that they also hadn't necessarily anticipated from knowing how this community had behaved. I don't want to turn to you about this essay what to you are the biggest lessons or takeaways from the South Africa essay what do you see as its role in the book among among the other essays in the collection.

It's a great and powerful essay and I've now read it you know so many times as one does one editing and each time a new pointer and say stands out to me which is just such a wonderful experience.

To me there are really two points that I think that's that's it with me the most the first is that I would disagree with them you know the people who you were talking with and in the course of your own reporting career who who say that the United States doesn't have a foreign policy and you know I think we could be the. The intense of that foreign policy and and its coherence but it certainly clear that especially under this presidency you know the United States does have a very.

“aggressive foreign policy that is often based on very very ideological assumptions and I think that nowhere is that clearer than in the way that that this.”

The administration has talked about South Africa that people on the right have pointed to South Africa it's this kind of cautionary tale as has eve discusses and and so the first question for me is essentially like. How is it that that means. I think it's going to be a very important process of the American right and and you go into that a little bit in your piece of as well and but I think it's really worth thinking about especially as the United States such an internist and aggressive stance on at this this moment because so much of it we have seen.

All over the course of the past year and a half is based off of very particular ideas about what's happening in other countries. It's worth theoretical or a larger question which is you know how can Americans now look abroad and and look at analogies of what has happened abroad for their own understanding of of their country I think.

The reason history and more reason history outside of the United States is to me a more powerful indicator of how quickly societies can change both both for the bad and as if says for for the good and yet often those are not the reference points that that come into the general public conversation and so I think that I came to editing this as a little knowledge of South Africa.

But what he talks about has really stuck with me because it goes so against so much of the often.

Do you realize discourse that I hear about the future of diverse societies and and how much people are willing to get up to to continue them before we close here if I want to ask you another selfish question of whether you have any recommendations of South African writers who you're following who are particularly good at explaining.

“The current moment, but especially vis-a-vis the United States I don't know if there are any key observers of the United States, who you follow in South Africa.”

South African Twitter or ex comically enough because it's obviously owned by a man who was born in South Africa and has pedal to certain version of South Africa.

That's I think is very warped, but it's very lively, the kind of sense that X is done as a platform doesn't exist as much down here in part because social media platforms in South Africa are very expensive to access if they include. Video or images in other words, TikTok, WhatsApp, it's very expensive for a person to download those and so text only platforms like in some degree face, but really X have retained like a very intelligent and interesting and vibrant debate about South Africa.

“And one person I would really recommend, so maybe even if you're not accustomed to going to X much for like solid nuance discourse anymore, you should if you're interested in South Africa.”

But there's a woman named Reedi to Flabi, our E.D.I.T.H.L.A.B.I. who is a journalist and she has intermittently lived in the United States and in South Africa, she's South African. And she both writes longer essays but also provides a running commentary of her impressions of the United States and the ways in which I think, when South Africans say they feel the United States doesn't have a foreign policy, they mean, it guess it has very aggressive foreign interventions, but at least from their perspective, from the South African perspective.

“South Africa is being related to and being sort of held up as like a mirror to the United States as, by certain people saying, if we let certain trends continue,”

if we pass certain laws, if we don't undo certain kinds of laws or trajectories, then we will end up like this, and we must be very careful about that.

In other words, it has a domestic functional, ultimately, you're saying, look at this, we don't want to be like this, we need to change our politics, but the problem is that mirror really has nothing to do with South Africa, it's a story that's just created to serve a domestic function. The problem is that policies being built on it that has a real impact on South Africa in terms of punitive tariffs on the country, impacts on tourism, et cetera, but if you, if you go and look up readings writing, you'll also find her engaging with many American writers as well as in conversation with other South African writers who, you can then follow the threads of them,

and very, very, very lively, funny, incisive takes on the United States again from people who come from a society that's had its own very long experience wrestling with race, with class, with the long term impacts of settlement, et cetera, and so I would recommend starting there, that it's an odd recommendation to say go to X for your deepest reading, but it's a very lively discourse South African Twitter.

We are going to be continuing great work from around the world, one of the things that I'm really hoping to do this year is to continue to strengthen our partnerships with publications whose work we translate in English for the first time we work with publications in Ukraine, Brazil, France, really all over and I'd like to add to that list, I think that.

“And then, you know, as America's power in the world wins the behooves, English speakers and Americans in particular to read more about what people are saying outside of it.”

And once again, the book is called How We See It, the World looks at America in the age of Trump, Madeline and Eve, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, thank you.

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