DYLAN TWENEY


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DAVID BUTOW For The Times

SLACK, above, and other tech firms are working with an agency that applies social-science techniques to the challenge of improving diversity in the workplace.


Too often diversity discussions in business are framed as a zero-sum game: affirmative action versus meritocracy, minority versus majority, them versus us.

There are some hopeful signs that the tech industry is starting to realize that this is not the case. Google, Face-book, Twitter, Apple and Amazon, among others, have all made a point of releasing their diversity numbers, at least insofar as diversity means “g****r and ethnicity,” and have done so for two years in a row, so we can see how little things are improving. At least they recognize it’s a problem.

More significantly, these companies are releasing this data without apology, and with a frank recognition that diversity is a goal worth striving for. It makes companies smarter, it makes them more sensitive to the needs of a diverse customer base, and it’s the right thing to do.

But, as anyone who writes about the topic will discover in the comments on social media about their work, there’s still a sizable contingent of people who believe that companies need to lower their standards to increase the diversity of their workforces.

Not so, says Joelle Emerson, the founder of a relatively new agency called Paradigm that applies data-driven social-science techniques to the challenge of helping companies increase their diversity and manage more diverse workforces more effectively. Clients include Slack, Airbnb, Pinter-est and Udacity.

In fact, Emerson said, numerous studies show that diverse teams are more innovative and better at solving problems than teams where everyone shares the same background, race or g****r.

I spoke with Emerson at a discussion on diversity recently at Draper University. Incidentally, Draper was a great venue for this chat. Every time I’ve visited Draper University I’ve been impressed by the diversity of the students (they are truly a global, multiethnic, mixed-g****r group) as well as their infectious enthusiasm, curiosity and seriousness of purpose. They ask great questions, too, and they are unfailingly welcoming and polite, which is something you don’t always encounter in Silicon Valley. Say what you will about Draper’s goofy “hero” iconography, they are doing something right in this department.

So if diverse teams produce better results, why not just focus on results, and let the diverse teams shine through their own merits?

Actually, Emerson told me, at least one study has shown that the more meritocratic people try to be, the less meritocratic their hiring and promotion decisions actually are. In other words, people are more likely to give big raises to men and small raises to women if they’re told to base their decisions exclusively on meritocratic principles. It’s a phenomenon known as the paradox of meritocracy.

You can see that dynamic at work in Silicon Valley, where investors p***e themselves on their “pattern matching” and “data driven” decision making, but still somehow overwhelmingly prefer to invest in founders that look like them. When venture capitalists are 91.8% male and 77.5% white, that’s a problem.

So if companies want to be truly meritocratic, they need to take steps to make more objective hiring and promotion decisions. That should result in better business performance — and more diversity at the same time, since it will eliminate built-in biases.

One such technique is the blind audition. In symphony orchestras where people audition for jobs from behind concealing screens, hiring managers are forced to pay attention to what really matters: how well people play their instrument. Similarly, blind auditions in a tech company can help managers focus on the work a person can actually do, such as writing or coding, rather than on their look or their self-presentation.

I’ve used blind auditions, with good results, in hiring journalists. However, if you’re forced to focus only on the work, the hiring process becomes more laborious, because you must read every work sample carefully. But there’s no doubt that leads to fairer decisions.

Emerson herself has a handful of recommendations in a smart article on raising the bar in hiring. Her basic thesis: If you fix your hiring process, you’ll wind up with employees who are both more diverse and more talented. She recommends doing that by democratizing the job application process (for instance, by eliminating the advantages that certain groups have, thanks to training on how to interview); focusing on job-related sk**ls; and retuning your “culture fit” questions around aspects of culture that really matter, such as “Would I enjoy working with this person?” rather than “Would I hang out with this person after work hours?”

This being Silicon Valley, there are a number of startups aimed at helping tech companies with their diversity efforts (in addition to Emerson’s Paradigm). Gap-jumpers helps companies conduct blind auditions for more objective recruiting. Textio uses artificial intelligence and natural language analysis to improve the text of job listings, removing words that might discourage women or other diverse applicants. And Jopwell helps connect black, Latino and Native American job candidates with companies that want to hire them.

The bottom line: Diversity is — and should be — good for business. Smart companies will embrace this approach and make themselves not only more inclusive, but higher functioning.

Dylan Tweney is a content strategist and journalist.

His weekly column, Dylan’s Desk, appears on Venture

Beat. dylan@venturebeat.com

Twitter: @dylan20

The civil-rights film inspired Michael Moore to make his latest documentary.




BY AMY KAUFMAN AND STEVEN ZEITCHIK


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JAY L. CLENDENIN Los Angeles Times

MICHAEL MOORE arrives for a screening of his “Where to Invade Next,” which offers “all solutions.”


Let’s be real: Michael Moore documentaries are usually kind of a bummer.

The filmmaker has examined some of America’s more troubling issues: our healthcare system, the war on terror, school shootings. And it started to depress him.

“I’ve made these documentaries for 25 years, showing everything that’s wrong. I got tired,” said Moore, 61. “Why would you give up a Friday night to go to the theater to discuss again why we had 45 school shootings this year alone?”

So he decided to make “Where to Invade Next,” which played the AFI Fest on Saturday night. Moore described it as his “no problems, all solutions” doc — but that doesn’t mean it goes easy on the U.S. The film sees Moore travel to a few countries, exploring what he thinks makes each place great and how Americans can learn from it.

The point isn’t to get down on America, said Moore, who sat in front of a packed house at the Egyptian in Hollywood after the screening.

“We wanted to show things that other countries have been doing for a long time,” he said. “Why not go to some of these places that have done the trial and error... and they now know how it works? We just go and take it.” Which may sound a little naive. But Moore places faith in the power of films to create change. He said it was Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” that inspired him to make “Where to Invade Next.”

“I was so moved and so shaken by the film,” he recalled. “Weeks after seeing ‘Selma,’ we were like, ‘Let’s do something.’ It was very powerful that just us seeing a movie and getting inspired to go make this movie. We weren’t going to make anything like ‘Selma’ — this was gonna be a documentary that dealt with something else — but we weren’t gonna be afraid to say the things that needed to be said.”

DuVernay, as it turned out, was in the audience, later tweeting: “Anger. Awe. Frustration. P***e. Indignation. Hope. WHERE TO INVADE NEXT made me feel all of the above + made me laugh too. Bravo.”

A VR merger of old, new schools

As virtual reality continues to gain traction in mainstream Hollywood, one of the big questions is: How much will it feel like mainstream Hollywood?

Not much, said one of the people involved in the push.

“We are all doing something we don’t know how to do in order to learn how to do it,” Glen Keane said Saturday, citing a Pablo Picasso line about taking on new challenges. “That’s what’s happening in VR.”

Keane should know. The 61-year-old spent more than three decades working as a Disney animator. But he left and branched out to VR years ago, seeing in it new challenges for himself and new possibilities for an industry. He now works at a Google-backed group creating a variety of VR projects, scripted and nonfiction.

Most notably, he’s created the short “Duet,” a touching look at a baby boy and a girl who drift apart and then come back together. The animation is hand-drawn, and it shows how VR can be used for — and might be better at — empathy and emotion than slick storytelling. (At the AFI event, Keane demonstrated the movie by having a colleague capture the action on a smartphone as she moved her eyes around the film’s world, projecting in real-time her experience on a screen in front of the room. It’s still not quite the same as donning the headset oneself, but it’s a better approximation than most such displays.)

What’s notable about Keane, whose videos showing him draw in VR have gone v***l, is that he’s an old-school artist who prefers handmade over computer-enhanced. Keane doesn’t especially like conventional CG animation. He wants to continue producing the kind of rough-around-the-edges human animation that Disney once traded in regularly. Yet even this form, he believes, lends itself to VR.

AFI Fest has been one of a number of Hollywood institutions to embrace “cinematic VR,” the catch-all term for VR storytelling that veers away from the hardcore interactivity of games. The medium is important to the festival and to director Jacqueline Lyanga, who said that amid the display of classic auteur and awards pieces, room should be left to explore the future as well. (In this regard, AFI is in line with Sundance’s embrace of VR, which continued last week with the announcement of a new program.)

Of course, all these efforts won’t preclude challenges in the creation and adoption of VR. The t***sition from flat, director-dictated storytelling to an all-encompassing, viewer-driven one, Keane noted, means moving from thinking “in a linear way [to a] circular way. And not just one circle but two” or more.

The biggest snag in is how filmmakers can ensure that the viewer retains the possibility of looking anywhere without sacrificing a propulsive story.

Keane offered perhaps the best analogy yet in explaining how it could work. He compared it to the experience of a theme-park ride, which offers the chance to actively explore as well as be passively entertained. “No one tells you what you have to look at, but the car is moving down the path,” Keane said. You feel the freedom of movement, he said — “and the joy you’re in a great storyteller’s hands.” amy.kaufman@latimes.com steven.zeitchik

@latimes.com

The Islamic State militant’s British background raises questions




BY ALEXANDRA ZAVIS


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IMAGES FROM VIDEO released by Islamic State show Mohammed Emwazi, a 27-year-old British citizen who was nicknamed “Jihadi John” and internationally notorious as the terrorist group’s executioner.


He is the knife-wielding militant who appeared in a string of macabre beheading videos.

It is not yet known whether a U.S. drone strike targeting a vehicle in Syria on Thursday k**led Mohammed Emwazi, Islamic State’s most notorious executioner. If so, it would be a publicity c**p for the American-led coalition battling the militants, though it is not expected to have a major effect on the battlefield.

Nicknamed “Jihadi John” in the world’s media, the 27-year-old British citizen became the subject of an international manhunt when he was featured in videos announcing the slayings of foreign hostages, including American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff.

Former captives said he was one of several British-sounding guards they dubbed “the Beatles.” Emwazi’s nickname is a reference to Beatles member John Lennon.

“He was one of the worst, who hit and tortured without any restraint,” Didier Francois, a journalist held for 10 months in Syria, told the French radio station he works for, Europe 1.

Born in Kuwait, Emwazi was taken to Britain by his family when he was 6. He attended schools in affluent parts of northwest London, where he was remembered as generally quiet and hardworking.

Teachers at Quintin Kynaston Academy told reporters that Emwazi had faced bullying at school and had difficulty keeping his emotions in check. But they said anger management classes appeared to help him.

He graduated from the University of Westminster in 2009 with a degree in computer programming.

The t***sformation of the soccer-loving schoolboy into the face of Islamic State brutality raised questions in Britain about the country’s role as an incubator of Islamist extremism.

An advocacy group that assists British Muslims in trouble with the law suggested that harassment by the security services helped drive Emwazi into the arms of Islamic State.

Emwazi contacted the group, known as CAGE, when he was detained in Tanzania with two friends in summer 2009 and sent back to Britain, interrupting what he said was a vacation after completing his studies.

Emwazi told the group he was suspected of attempting to join the Somali militant group Shabab and repeatedly questioned by British security officers. On one occasion, he said, he was thrown against a wall, his beard was grabbed and he was choked.

The attention of the British authorities later prevented Emwazi from moving to Kuwait, where he said he had a job waiting, and cost him two fiancees, according to CAGE research director Asim Qureshi.

Court documents obtained by the BBC, however, suggested that Emwazi may already have been associating with suspected radicals. The documents filed in 2011 allege that Emwazi was part of a group that some intelligence analysts called the North London Boys, which had been funneling equipment, funds and fighters to the Shabab.

Emwazi is believed to have left for Syria around 2013. He first started grabbing headlines in August 2014 when he appeared in a video purporting to show Foley’s k*****g, his face hidden behind a black balaclava and speaking in British-accented English.

In the video, he condemns U.S. airstrikes and warns President Obama that any attempt to “deny the Muslims their rights of living in safety under the Islamic caliph**e will result in the bloodshed of your people.”

Foley recites a statement calling the U.S. government his “real k**lers” before he is beheaded off-camera.

Similar videos were released after the deaths of Sotloff, British aid worker David Haines, British taxi driver Alan Henning, U.S. aid worker Abdul Rahman Kassig and Japanese journalist Kenji Goto.

Emwazi was publicly named as their executioner in February; British authorities had already been aware of his identity for several months.

Emwazi’s video appearances earned him celebrity status in militant circles and were a powerful recruiting tool for Islamic State.

But a man who came across Emwazi around that time described him to the BBC as a loner who set himself apart from other militants.

“He was cold. He didn’t talk much. He wouldn’t join us in prayer,” said the man, identified by the nickname Abu Ayman.

“Some love him,” the man said. “Some joined [Islamic State] after watching and admiring him; they take him as an example.”

But others, he said, “think he is showing off.” alexandra.zavis@latimes.com Twitter: @alexzavis

IT WAS INEVITABLE that the terrorism attacks in Paris last week would echo quickly through the U.S. p**********l campaign. Given the stream of nativist rhetoric already out there, it was also inevitable that some politicians’ responses would be highly objectionable, beginning with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s assertion that the United States should accept only Christian refugees from the Syrian conflict. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush sounded a similar note, calling for special efforts to protect Christians in the region; never mind that Islamic State jihadists target fellow Muslims with just as much viciousness.

It’s preposterous that a serious contender for the presidency of the U.S. would bar war refugee status based on someone’s religion. And the suggestion by GOP candidate Ben Carson that the U.S. bar all Syrian refugees for fear that a “sleeper” terrorist might slip in is an emotional, and ill-conceived, overreaction, as are pledges by several Republican governors to resist efforts to resettle refugees in their states.

The United States doesn’t have the same challenge as Europe, whose relative proximity to the Middle Eastern war zone has left it inundated with millions of refugees. And the source isn’t just Syria and Iraq; refugees — both political and economic — from Africa have landed in Europe as well. There are few good options for stopping that tide without first stabilizing the regions from which it arises; a political solution to the Syrian civil war is a crucial first step to achieving that stability.

We haven’t faced this exodus simply because it is so much harder for Syrian refugees to arrive at the border and seek asylum. President Obama affirmed in Turkey on Tuesday that “America has to step up and do its part” in providing for war refugees, which presumably includes moving ahead with his plan to accept up to 10,000 Syrian refugees this fiscal year, up from fewer than 2,000. This page has argued that the U.S. should take significantly more because there are too many for Europe to absorb and because of our history as a safe haven. Nothing in the Paris attacks changes that.

That’s not to suggest that the U.S. should accept any and all comers. What the Republican candidates ignore, though, is that there is already a system in place to vet the refugees. To gain entry to the U.S., a Syrian refugee first must pass rigorous screening by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which verifies personal backgrounds and details before recommending individuals for resettlement to the United States. Then the Department of Homeland Security does its own screening before a refugee is granted entry and protection.

It makes sense to be prudent and diligent when accepting refugees from a region of such threat and instability. But it defies what the nation stands for to deny a safe haven for the persecuted based on their faith, nation of origin, or our fear.

Social media are augmenting activist tactics of the past




By Thomas Curwen, Jason Song and Larry Gordon


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MARK BOSTER Los Angeles Times

STUDENTS AT Occidental College in Eagle Rock occupy a building to protest handling of diversity issues.


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ARNOLD GOLD New Haven Register via Associated Press

YALE UNIVERSITY students and faculty rally last week to demand that the campus become more inclusive of all students.


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DANIEL BRENNER Columbia Daily Tribune via Associated Press

AYANNA POOLE leads a march Friday at the University of Missouri, where the president resigned under pressure Nov. 9, helping to fuel a broader movement.


If the University of Missouri was the spark, then the fire didn’t take long to spread.

Since the resignation of its president and chancellor on Nov. 9, protesters have organized at more than 100 colleges and universities nationwide. Social media sites have lighted up with voices of dissent, and what began as a grievance has evolved into a movement.

Inspired by the marches in Ferguson, Mo., and Black L***s M****r, students are taking to social media to question the institutions they once approached for answers. Calling for racial and social reforms on their campuses, they are borrowing tactics of the past — hunger strikes, sit-ins and lists of demands — and have found a collective voice to address their frustrations, hurt and rage.

Their actions seem to have hit the mark.

Last week, the dean of students at Claremont Mc-Kenna College left the university after students protested her comments to a Latina student with the offer to work for those who “don’t fit our CMC mold.”

Tuesday night, Jonathan Veitch, the president of Occidental College, said he and other administrators were open to considering a list of 14 reforms, including the creation of a black studies major and more diversity training, that student protesters had drawn up.

Students at USC have similarly proposed a campuswide action plan, which includes the appointment of a top administrator to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

Nationwide, complaints of r****m and microaggression are feeding Facebook pages and websites at Harvard, Brown, Columbia and Willamette universities, as well as at Oberlin, Dartmouth and Swarthmore colleges.

Protesters at Ithaca College staged a walkout to demand the president’s resignation, and Peter Salovey, president of Yale University, announced a number of steps, including the appointment of a deputy dean of diversity, to work toward “a better, more diverse, and more inclusive Yale.”

For decades, students have helped drive social change. Campuses, said University of California President Janet Napolitano, have “historically been places where social issues in the United States are raised and where many voices are heard.”

Over the decades, student protests have shifted attitudes in the country on civil rights and the Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation and apartheid, and some of today’s actions are borrowing from tactics of the past.

Although some of the strategies may seem familiar, it is the speed and the urgency of today’s protests that are different.

“What is unique about these issues is how social media has changed the way protests take place on college campuses,” said Tyrone Howard, associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. “A protest goes v***l in no time flat. With Instagram and Twitter, you’re in an immediate news cycle. This was not how it was 20 or 30 years ago.”

Howard also believes that the effectiveness of the actions at the University of Missouri has encouraged students on other campuses to raise their voices.

“A president stepping down is a huge step,” he said. “Students elsewhere have to wonder, ‘Wow, if that can happen there, why can’t we bring out our issues to the forefront as well?’”

Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, agrees. The resignation of two top Missouri administrators, Harper said, showed students and athletes around the country that they have power they may not have realized before.

The protests show “we’re all together and we have the power to make the change we deserve,” said Lindsay Opoku-Acheampong, a senior at Occidental.

“It’s affirming,” said Dalin Celamy, also a senior at the college. “It lets us know we’re not crazy; it’s happening to people who are just like you all over the country.”

Celamy, along with other students, not only watched the unfolding protests across the country, but also looked to earlier protests, including an occupation of an administrative building at Occidental in 1968.

Echoes of the 1960s in today’s actions are clear, said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and author of “Freedom’s Orator,” a biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.

“The tactical dynamism of these nonviolent protests and the public criticism of them are in important ways reminiscent of the 1960s,” Cohen said. “Today’s protests, like those in the ’60s, are memorable because they have been effective in pushing for change and sparking dialogue as well as polarization.”

Although the targets of these protests are the blatant and subtle forms of r****m and inequity that affect the students’ lives, the message of the protests resonates with the recent incidents of intolerance and racial inequity on the streets of America.

There is a reason for this, Howard said.

Campuses are microcosms of society, he said, and are often comparable in terms of representation and opportunity. “So there is a similar fight for more representation, acceptance and inclusion.”

The dynamic can create a complicated and sensitive social order for students of color to negotiate.

“Latino and African American students are often under the belief if they leave their community and go to colleges, that it will be better,” Howard said. “They believe it will be an upgrade over the challenges that they saw in underserved and understaffed schools. But if the colleges and universities are the same as those schools, then there is disappointment and frustration.”

In addition, Howard said, when these students leave their community to go to a university, they often feel conflicted.

“So when injustice comes up,” he said, “they are quick to respond because it is what they saw in their community. On some level, it is their chance to let their parents and peers know that they have not forgotten the struggle in the community.”

On campuses and off, Harper, of the University of Pennsylvania center, finds a rising sense of impatience among African Americans about social change. “As a black person, I think black people are just fed up. It’s time out for ignoring these issues,” he said.

While protests in the 1960s helped create specific safeguards for universities today, such as Title IX, guaranteeing equal access for all students to any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, a gap has widened over the years between students and administrators over perceptions of bias.

Institutions often valued for their support of free speech find themselves wrestling with the prospect of limiting free speech, but to focus on what is or isn’t politically correct avoids the more important issue, Cohen said: whether campuses are diverse enough or how to reduce r****m.

Occidental student Raihana Haynes-Venerable has heard criticism that modern students are too sensitive, but she argues that subtle forms of discrimination still have a profound effect.

She pointed to women making less than men and fewer minorities getting jobs as examples.

“This is the new form of r****m,” she said. thomas.curwen

@latimes.com jason.song@latimes.com larry.gordon@latimes.com

Nope...he reflects bigot thought and he is a gift to the Dems...Hillary 2016.

The educated i***ts are the ones designing everything for the hands on people to have work in the first place because they may be too stupid to design anything of their own to work on. Ever considered that?

BY RANDY LEWIS


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MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ Los Angeles Times

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, left, gets John Legend to accompany him on his song “American Skin (41 Shots)” Wednesday at the Shrine Auditorium for a TV special.


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MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ Los Angeles Times

PINK AND John Legend perform a duet for “Shining a Light: A Concert for Progress on Race in America.”


The idea wasn’t unusual: Gather a bunch of rock, pop, R&B, country and hip-hop stars for a concert highlighting an important cause — in this case, numerous instances of racial strife across the U.S.

The response from the music community, however, was anything but business as usual.

“I didn’t think quite honestly we could afford another ‘Kumbaya’ moment,” said Grammy-winning songwriter, singer and producer Pharrell Williams about the call he got to participate in a concert for unity. “That’s not where the world is right now. The world needs action.”

The push-back by Williams and several of his peers resulted in a concert and TV special that signals an evolution in the long history of pop music benefit concerts

— from a star-studded spotlight on a single issue to a serious effort to explore its roots and search for answers.

“I was a little skeptical of the concert,” pop-R&B singer-songwriter John Legend told The Times. “It’s not like artists of different races don’t sing together. We do that at all sorts of events…. It’s not enough just to come together and sing…. For me it was really important to go deeper.”

The sentiments of Williams and Legend were echoed by other participants in back-to-back specials airing Friday night on all six cable channels of A&E Networks: the two-hour “Shining a Light: A Concert for Progress on Race in America,” filmed Wednesday night in Los Angeles, and the hour-long “Shining a Light: Conversations on Race in America.”

Instead of merely bringing leading lights from the pop music world to one stage for a night, organizers and participants in “Shining a Light” also traveled to Charleston, S.C.; Ferguson, Mo.; and Baltimore. They filmed musical performances from epicenters of violent episodes, and then launched public dialogues in those communities aimed at healing wounds and sparking cross-cultural understanding.

The first indication that something different was up at Wednesday’s Los Angeles taping of the concert portion was that the standard all-hands-on-deck number bringing the evening’s heavy-hitter musicians together onstage came not at the endbut at the beginning.

Bruce Springsteen, joined by Legend and Tom Morello, performed his 2001 song “American Skin (41 Shots),” which he wrote in response to the 1999 death of Guinea immigrant Amadou Diallo, who was k**led by police. The choir behind them included most of the evening’s star performers, among them, Williams, Sting, Smokey Robinson, the Zac Brown Band, Pink, Ed Sheeran, Sia, Miguel, Aloe Blacc, Eric Church, Jamie Foxx, Tori Kelly, Jill Scott, Nick Jonas and Big Sean.

Robert Sharenow, executive vice president and general manager of A&E Networks, which will carry Friday’s show on A&E, the History Channel, Lifetime, H2, LMN and FYI, said that the idea for the concert and special was a response to the shooting in June at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston that left nine churchgoers dead.

“There was a universal reaction of horror from all sides of our company,” Sharenow said. “We’re a big media company. We thought, ‘Is there something we can do to raise awareness? To raise money?’ ”

Musician-led benefits began in earnest in 1971 with George Harrison’s all-star “Concert for Bangladesh” and has continued over the decades with the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts highlighting strife in Africa as well as concerts after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and benefits after natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy.

Musicians, actors and other entertainers often have shifted from advocacy to activism, directly lobbying politicians and other government officials on various political issues. The A&E special brings advocacy artistry and journalism together in a single television program.

“The feeling among the musicians was that ideas that may have worked well in the 1960s and ’70s aren’t enough today,” said Ken Ehrlich, veteran producer of the annual Grammy Awards telecast who is producing the A&E concert special, which will be broadcast on more than 130 iHeartMedia broadcast radio stations nationwide, and co-producing the conversations companion show.

Added Sharenow, “People didn’t want this to turn into a show where people sing songs, we feel good about ourselves and then go away.”

Ehrlich and other program organizers dispatched teams to Ferguson, Charleston and Baltimore to engage with survivors, family members and friends of victims of violence as well as with members of law enforcement, local governments and other community leaders to initiate what Legend referred to as “difficult conversations” about matters of race in the U.S. in 2015.

“I went to Ferguson, and to St. Louis, to talk to a range of people,” said the 36-year-old native of Springfield, Ohio, who sang Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” as part of his visit to Ferguson.

“We met with Michael Brown’s mother, representatives of the young black protesters [at marches in Ferguson after Brown’s shooting death by a Ferguson police officer]. We also spoke to police to get their perspective and to community leaders,” Legend said. “We brought everybody together in a church. It wasn’t supposed to be easy. These are supposed to be difficult conversations. And it did feel uncomfortable. But the conversation was real.”

Alicia Keys engaged in similar discussions with adults and children in Baltimore, and Williams was part of the crew that went to Charleston, where he sang his song “Freedom” in the Emanuel AME Church. After touring the s***e quarters on a former plantation, Williams said during his filmed segment that the experience unnerved him.

Those location segments are moderated by journalists Soledad O’Brien (Starfish Media Group), Michele Norris (National Public Radio) and Byron Pitts (ABC News). Actors and other entertainment and sports figures taking part in other aspects of the show include LL Cool J, Morgan Freeman, Nicki Minaj, George Lopez, Mario Lopez, Kurt Warner, Nick Young and Marshall Faulk.

A&E’s promo clip for the program begins “R****m is real … and we need to have a conversation about it.” Onstage Wednesday, Minaj recited Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” and Freeman quoted South African leader Nelson Mandela’s observation about social and political change: “It always seems impossible, until it’s done.”

Williams, whose upbeat hit “Happy” became a ubiquitous good-time anthem of 2014, said the conversations are intended only as a beginning.

“We can promote talking, and then, yeah, when you add the music to that, it becomes something different,” Williams said. “It becomes a community, a network and musicians all coming together to start the talks.”

Sharenow said the musicians and other “Shining a Light” participants went “above and beyond in terms of what you’d expect from a performer involved in something like this. It’s not a situation where people are showing up in their jets, getting onstage and then rushing off. They are rolling up their sleeves and getting out on the front lines. It’s not a glamorous assignment. It is uncomfortable.”

Morello said the project resonated strongly with him because of instances of r****m he experienced first-hand growing up in Harlem.

“I think everyone who has a feeling of moral outrage of this country’s systemic problem of r****m should speak out about it in their vocation,” said Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and his solo project the Nightwatchman.

“What we’ve got in music is the combination of rhythm and rhyme and meaning that, when it’s done right, feels like the t***h that reaches something deep in our DNA, deep in our reptilian brain and connects people and creates a sense of community. I don’t know that any other art form can do that.”

Still, Morello is realistic about the project’s outcome.

“R****m is as American as baseball and apple pie,” he said. “Will one concert end it? Not likely. But shining a light on r****m is an opening to dialogue.” randy.lewis@latimes.com Twitter: @RandyLewis2

The effect of alcohol on our national story starts with the Pilgrims.




By Susan Cheever


CONSIDER THIS a “trigger warning”: The following essay may disturb and upset your view of American history, a history mostly written by scholarly types who distill vast amounts of research into erudite narratives. The trouble with their reverence and their gravitas is that they tend to leave out the interesting bits: sex, food and, especially, alcohol.

The effect of drinking on our national story begins with the Pilgrims, a desperate group of scrappy immigrant refugees who landed illegally on Cape Cod, although their charter from King James was for Virginia. They had to land; they were running out of beer.

“We could not now take time for further search and consideration,” explained William Bradford, who would become governor of the Plymouth Bay Colony, “our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.” If the Pilgrims had succeeded in going to Virginia, perhaps the American character would be slow-moving and gentlemanly instead of feisty, flinty and Yankee.

Abigail Smith Adams is often hailed as a Colonial stalwart, a smart wife who reminded her husband, President John Adams, to remember the ladies. You may have learned in school that she inoculated her family against smallpox, a gutsy move in the 18th century. But your teacher probably didn’t mention that she was surrounded by alcoholics. Her hard-drinking brother, William Smith, succumbed to liver disease. Two of her sons — Charles and Thomas — died of alcoholism in their 30s. Like most alcoholics, Charles and Thomas Adams destroyed themselves, grieving their families and ruining their finances before they died. Two of Abigail’s grandsons also died of alcoholism.

“Vices are hereditary in families,” wrote a surviving Adams brother, Charles Francis. “Our family has been … severely scourged by this vice.”

There are more upbeat moments in the history of alcohol in America. The tide of the Civil War may, in fact, have turned when Abraham Lincoln got rid of a sober general and hired a man who had been previously fired from the Army for drinking. “What if Abraham Lincoln had not gotten around to replacing the sober General McClellan with the heavy-drinking General Grant?” political philosopher Strobe Talbott asked in his 2008 book, “The Great Experiment.” “Would the Union have lost to the Confederacy and would some distant cousins of mine in Texas be living in a separate country?”

As Lincoln, who did not drink, understood, alcohol might well help a man become a warrior. When advisors complained to him about Grant’s habit, Lincoln replied by saying he would like to get some barrels of what Grant was drinking to give to all of his generals.

One of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century — the assassination of President Kennedy — was also affected by a bottle. The Secret Service agents who guarded the president and the first lady, and who rode in the car behind them in the Dallas motorcade, had been out until the early hours of the morning at the local press club and at a free-wheeling nightclub called the Cellar Coffee House. Some had been drinking. Did this impair their ability to protect the president at a moment that changed American history?

Chief Justice Earl Warren certainly thought so. “Don’t you think that if a man went to bed reasonably early, and hadn’t been drinking the night before, he would be more alert than if he stayed up until 3, 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, going to beatnik joints and doing some drinking along the way?” he demanded of Secret Service head James Rowley.

Warren noted that some bystanders had seen Lee Harvey Oswald’s gun barrel pointed out of the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. How did the Secret Service men miss that, he wanted to know. Wouldn’t they have been more likely to notice what was going on if they were “free from any of the results of liquor and lack of sleep?”

Drinking is often invisible. It is a powerful, mostly unnoticed force shaping history and current events. Because it is legal and because it is woven into the American grain, drinking goes unnoticed even when its effects are obvious. We drink to celebrate, to calm our nerves, to borrow courage, to mourn and just because it feels so good to take the edge off.

There’s nothing wrong with drinking, but its role in human events should be recognized. People’s lives were changed by what they drank, and this has changed who we are today.

SUSAN CHEEVER is the author of several books. Her latest is “Drinking in America: Our Secret History.”

The bureau is contemplating changes that would reclassify some minorities in the U.S.




ASSOCIATED PRESS


ALBUQUERQUE — The Census Bureau is considering changes to its race and ethnicity questions that would reclassify some minorities who were considered “white” in the past, a move that may speed up the date when America’s white population falls below 50%.

Census Director John Thompson told the Associated Press that the bureau is testing a number of new questions and may combine its race and ethnicity questions into one category for the 2020 census. That would allow respondents to choose multiple races.

The possible changes include allowing Latinos to give more details about their ethnic backgrounds and creating a distinct category for people of Middle Eastern and North African descent.

“We haven’t made any decisions yet,” Thompson said in an interview before his meeting Nov. 17 with Native American leaders in New Mexico. “But I don’t think these new questions would diminish anything. It would just give us more information about our diverse populations.”

William Frey, a demographer for the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, says the proposed changes would grant residents more freedom to define their races and ethnicities.

“I don’t know if this will make a huge difference in the 2020 census on w****s becoming the minority, but it could later,” said Frey, author of “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America.”

In the past, “white” was the only racial option available to Arab American respondents, a classification that didn’t truly reflect their social standing and hurt efforts for their political empowerment in post-Sept. 11 America, said Samer Khalaf, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“If you are going to classify me as white, then treat [me] as white,” Khalaf said. “Especially when I go to the airport. So, yeah, it’s inaccurate.”

For years, many U.S. Latinos also checked the “white” box because options were limited, said Lorenzo Cano, associate director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston. But many Latinos are now opting to check “American Indian” to identify with their links to indigenous populations in Latin America.

Overall, “these changes could reduce the number of people who identify as white,” Cano said.

The Census Bureau has estimated that the country’s population will have more minorities than w****s for the first time around 2043 or 2044, a result of higher birth rates among Latinos and a stagnating or declining birthrate among b****s, w****s and Asians.

How much the changes could speed up the moment when minorities will outnumber w****s is anyone’s guess. Analysts would first have to examine the new data — some of which won’t be comparable to 2010 because of the possible new categories, Frey said.

The proposed changes could present a new set of challenges for the Census Bureau. For example, Dee Ann Alexander, a census tribal specialist, said Mexican Americans who check the “American Indian” box could deter efforts to get an accurate count of enrolled tribal members living in cities.

“It’s a concern,” Alexander said. “Around 74% of Native Americans live in urban areas, and it’s a challenge to search for that population.”

In addition, an aggressive push by the census to include Arab Americans in the count might lead to more suspicion because many of them fear the federal government, Khalaf said.

“They think it will put them under surveillance,” he said. “They won’t fill [the census] out because they don’t want to be on any list.”

Still, such new questions could give a more accurate assessment of a changing America at a time when 15% of all marriages involve couples of difference races, Frey said. “And who knows how their children will identify,” he added.

Comments by GOP candidates Carson and Trump bring criticism from several sides.




ASSOCIATED PRESS


COLUMBIA, S.C. — Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson said Saturday that he wants to expand the government’s surveillance operations aimed at potential terrorist threats, even beyond tracking American Muslims, as rival Donald Trump has suggested.

Trump on Saturday tried to back away from his support for a government database to track Muslims in the United States, an idea that drew sharp rebukes from his Republican p**********l rivals and disbelief from legal experts.

Carson, who has joined Trump atop GOP p**********l preference polls, did not delve into constitutional questions about whether expanding government surveillance activities would violate 1st Amendment protections. “What I have said is that I would be in favor of monitoring a mosque or any church or any organization or any school or any press corps where there was a lot of radicalization and things that were anti-American,” Carson told reporters during an appearance at a justice forum in South Carolina. He did not expound on just how an administration would determine what constitutes “radicalization” or “anti-American.”

Carson added that funding for FBI surveillance activities should be increased. He said the agency currently can afford to monitor only “30 to 60 people,” numbers he did not explain before aides steered him away from reporters.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush called the prospect of a registry “abhorrent.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said the idea was “unnecessary” and not something Americans would support. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who has largely avoided criticizing Trump throughout the 2016 campaign, said, “I’m not a fan of government registries of American citizens.

“The 1st Amendment protects religious liberty, and I’ve spent the past several decades defending the religious liberty of every American,” Cruz told reporters in Sioux City, Iowa.

The first reference to a database came in a Trump interview with Yahoo News published Thursday. When asked about requiring Muslims to register in a database or carry a form of special identification noting their religion, Trump said, “We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely.”

Trump was pressed on the idea of a registry by an NBC News reporter Thursday evening while the candidate campaigned in Iowa. Asked if there should be a database system for tracking Muslims in the United States, Trump said, “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases.” The reporter asked if that was something Trump would put in place as president. Trump replied: “I would certainly implement that. Absolutely.”

Trump also told the reporter that Muslims would “have to be” registered.

In an interview on Fox News Channel on Friday evening, Trump tried to clarify his position. “I want a watch list for the Syrian refugees that [President] Obama’s going to let in if we don’t stop him as Republicans.”

He said he had trouble hearing the NBC reporter’s questions. He was not asked specifically if he disavowed a general registry for Muslims living in the country, and he did not condemn the idea on his own.

He once again addressed the issue during a rally in Birmingham, Ala., on Saturday, telling a crowd that reports on his previous statements were inaccurate. “I do want surveillance. I will absolutely take database on the people coming in from Syria if we can’t stop it, but we’re going to,” he said.

JONAH GOLDBERG


A LITTLE OVER a year ago, when Ben Carson was gearing up to run for president, I questioned in this space whether he was ready for what lay ahead. We now have our answer: No.

Carson had a great number of things going for him: his amazing life story, charm, professional accomplishments, eloquence and courage. I had only one major concern: “While he speaks eloquently and passionately about the importance of doing homework in his own life and for children everywhere, it’s not obvious he’s taken those lessons to heart when it comes to politics.”

It’s now obvious that he hasn’t.

In the weeks before the terrorist attacks in Paris, Carson was already having a very rough time. In a development that defied satire, Donald Trump was attacking Carson’s character, which is a bit like Carrot Top ridiculing Jerry Seinfeld’s sense of humor.

But it was smart politics. The rationale for Carson’s candidacy is based largely on biography and character. Take those away and what’s left?

Not too much, unfortunately. Oh sure, grading on a human level, there’s still a great deal to admire in Carson. But we’re talking p**********l politics, not lifetime achievement awards.

Pr********n matters.

In Miami, he was asked about the so-called wet-foot, dry-foot immigration policy for Cuban refugees. “You’re going to have to explain to me exactly what you mean by that,” he replied.

In a GOP debate, he said that the Chinese were involved in the Syrian civil war, alongside the Russians and the Iranians. His campaign had to awkwardly walk back the claim.

The New York Times even found two of his advisors to state on the record that Carson was struggling to get up to speed on foreign policy.

These and other flubs aren’t necessarily disqualifying on their own. But after the terrorist attacks in Paris and Mali, not to mention the de facto declaration of martial law in Brussels, Carson’s soft-spoken ad-libbing about foreign policy doesn’t play nearly as well. “I know a lot more than I knew,” he said, when asked on PBS about his foreign policy deficit. “A year from now, I will know a lot more than I know now.”

That kind of answer doesn’t cut it when Americans feel threatened. That’s why the latest Fox News poll has support for Carson sliding.

In fairness, Trump’s answers shouldn’t cut it either. But Carson is admiringly honest about his shortcomings, while Trump makes up for his with bluster, bullying and bombast. Sadly, that continues to work for him.

Also, Carson’s problems extend beyond foreign policy. He places an inordinate amount of emphasis on platitudes and cliches, particularly about common sense. I like common sense as much as the next guy, and we need more of it in Washington. But common sense isn’t a leather-bound book one takes down from the shelf to find the right solutions to every problem. Presidents who think otherwise are begging to be rolled by the permanent bureaucracy. Nobody would want their brain surgeon to rely on common sense when removing a tumor.

Of course, politics isn’t brain surgery. But it does require a certain foundation that only experience and homework can provide. If you’re waiting until you run for president to get up to speed, it is too late. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker learned that the hard way this year. He simply wasn’t prepared to discuss policies outside his comfort zone.

Carson’s has been an all-too familiar tale in GOP p**********l politics in recent years. Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (in 2008, not in 2012) — all squandered opportunities by not being adequately prepared to leverage their popularity and potential.

The rarest commodity in politics is a genuinely charismatic personality that arouses passion in v**ers at a propitious political moment. Money can’t buy that; just ask Mitt Romney. Doing your homework, meanwhile, is easy. I don’t mean it doesn’t require effort; it most certainly does. But there’s no trick to it: Read books, talk to experts, think things through when you have the time and resources to do so.

If Carson had consulted common sense, he would have known that. jgoldberg@latimes columnists.com

DOYLE McMANUS


DONALD TRUMP is still on top of the polls — defiantly, loudly, implausibly on top, even after saying things that would doom any candidate in a normal year.

A month ago, Trump’s standing among Republican p**********l candidates appeared to be eroding, especially in Iowa, where Ben Carson was gaining support. But since the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, Trump has seized the center of the GOP’s stage and bolstered his lead in both national and state polls. The horrors inflicted by Islamic State have given his campaign a lift.

The would-be president said he would register Muslims in a national database and probably close some of their mosques. He charged that Muslims in Jersey City, N.J., cheered the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001, even though there’s no evidence of such a thing. He warned that President Obama plans to admit 250,000 Syrian refugees next year; the real number is 10,000. He sent out bogus statistics claiming that 81% of white murder victims are k**led by black people; after Bill O’Reilly of Fox News told him that wasn’t true, Trump shrugged and said he didn’t have time to check the facts. And that’s only in the last week.

How can a figure this gratuitously d******e hold on to his place atop the Republican p**********l standings? Anger and fear.

The anger of conservative v**ers has been evident all year, but this week the nonpartisan Pew Research Center released an important study that added new detail to the picture. The headline on Pew’s report was that only 19% of Americans say they can trust the federal government most of the time, one of the lowest levels in half a century. But among Republicans, that disaffection runs much deeper: 32% say they not only mistrust the government but are “angry” with it.

The angriest v**ers, Pew found, are politically engaged conservatives, the Republicans most likely to v**e in primary e******ns. Most of them say an ordinary citizen could do a better job in the White House than a professional politician. Among that group, Citizen Trump scores high.

“We’re s**k of career politicians,” Marenda Babcock, 60, a Trump supporter in Indiana, said at a focus group sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center last month. “We did what we were supposed to do. We wrote the letters, we made the phone calls, and they did not listen. And we’re out to clean house.”

Now add another inflammatory element to the mix: fear. After the Paris attacks, polls showed that terrorism had jumped to first place among v**ers’ concerns, displacing even the economy and jobs.

Trump was quick to take advantage. Not only did he reject Obama’s proposal to admit more Syrian refugees; he called for deporting any refugees who have already arrived.

Other candidates tried to match him — Ted Cruz said he’d admit only Christians, Chris Christie said he’d deny entry to children — but nobody does truculence as convincingly as Trump. Carson, who delivers his conservatism in more soothing tones, sounded uncertain, and lost some of his support.

An ABC-Washington Post poll released this week found that 42% of Republicans named Trump as the candidate they trusted most to handle terrorism, far ahead of any of his competitors.

The public’s heightened fear may not last until next year’s general e******n, but it will surely remain fresh until the Iowa caucuses in January.

Even so, Trump is the preferred candidate of only about one-third of Republican v**ers. By all rights, something should happen to unseat him. But what?

I consulted several strategists for Trump’s competitors — and came up empty.

“I wish I knew,” said the advisor for one candidate, who begged for anonymity to prevent his haplessness from becoming public knowledge.

If only the party could unite around a single alternative to Trump, he said, but “that’s not happening yet.” Maybe the v**ers will wise up, he ventured. “When it’s time to cast a real b****t, they’re going to think about electability, about which candidate can win the general e******n against Hillary Clinton.”

“Watch the next debate,” another strategist advised. “Someone will recognize the need to go after him.”

Or maybe Trump will come in second in Iowa, he continued, and decide to withdraw, because he doesn’t want to look like a loser. “He lives by the polls and will die by the polls,” he said. “Watch him get angry when the Iowa polling shows him drop.”

Or maybe none of that will happen. “Some of these scenarios are really just magical thinking,” the first advisor said. “He has and continues to defy political gravity.”

Trump is still a long way from becoming his party’s p**********l nominee, but by all logic, he shouldn’t even be this close. This campaign, however, hasn’t been governed by logic; it’s been governed by anger and fear. doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com Twitter: @doylemcmanus

RONALD BROWNSTEIN


IN A MEASURE of the crosswinds buffeting the party, more Republican leaders are bracing for a uniquely fragmented nominating contest that divides the GOP among three viable candidates well into 2016.

Previous GOP primary races have usually consolidated quickly into a two-person choice. In almost every nomination fight since the modern GOP p**********l primary era began in 1976, only two candidates generated enough support to carry more than just two states.

The sole exceptions came in 1988 and 2008. And even then, the “third man” in the race (televangelist Pat Robertson in 1988 and Mitt Romney in 2008) fizzled quite short of victory.

Since 1976, the GOP has never picked a nominee who didn’t win either Iowa or New Hampshire, the first two contests.

But many Republican strategists now see a pathway for three candidates to advance deep into the process, each drawing from distinct pools of v**ers.

“Historically we have had two lanes: a center-right lane and an ideologically right lane,” said Tom Rath, a longtime New Hampshire-based GOP strategist. “Now, we seem to have a third lane: the angry, nontraditional lane.”

The prospect of a three-way Republican race is rising partly because the party’s rules require the states holding early primaries to distribute delegates proportionately, making it tougher for anyone to establish a decisive initial lead. But the odds are growing mostly because the party’s biggest groups of v**ers are diverging in ways that crystallize the GOP’s shifting demographic and ideological balance

— and the tensions straining its coalition.

The candidates filling the “ideologically right” lane, like Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012, usually have drawn heavily from evangelical Christians. Evangelical Christians represented about half the total Republican primary v**ers in 2008 and 2012, and they cast a clear majority of v**es in Southern states such as Alabama, Georgia and Texas, as well as in Iowa, whose kickoff caucus usually anoints the evangelical favorite.

Ben Carson established an early lead with these v**ers, but his recent struggles have created an opening for Ted Cruz.

In a Quinnipiac University Iowa survey this week, Cruz narrowly passed Carson among evangelicals. Most GOP strategists expect that trajectory to continue and for Cruz to emerge as the evangelical favorite in Iowa, the South and beyond.

The outsider, or nontraditional, lane relies heavily (though not exclusively) on the party’s growing bloc of working-class white v**ers. Particularly as Carson stumbles, Donald Trump is dominating this competition.

In this week’s national ABC/ Washington Post poll, the blustery billionaire drew a stunning 41% of all Republicans who do not hold at least a four-year college degree.

Trump is competitive with evangelical Christians, but as a thrice-married, formerly pro-choice big-city business mogul, his core strength may be those noncollege Republicans who are not evangelicals. Quinnipiac found him clearly leading among those v**ers in Iowa, with Cruz second. That strength positions Trump to compete well in Rust Belt battlegrounds such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, high in blue-collar w****s but low in evangelical Christians.

Like many GOP analysts, Karl Rove, formerly George W. Bush’s chief political strategist, predicts that “no one will dislodge” Trump from his blue-collar base. “The question,” Rove said in an interview, is “how many of them will turn out.”

The other risk Trump faces is that the increasingly overt xenophobic and racially infused messaging he is using to consolidate his blue-collar support appears to be alienating many in the third big group of GOP v**ers: the party’s mostly college-educated, less religiously devout center-right bloc. In the national ABC/ Post poll, Trump drew only 23% of college-educated Republicans. And while both college-educated and noncollege Republicans in Quinnipiac’s Iowa poll rated him as a strong leader, far fewer of those with degrees said he shared their values or viewed him favorably overall.

The managerial wing’s favorite has usually prevailed in GOP nomination fights; think John McCain in 2008 or Romney in 2012. “The candidate who consolidates the somewhat conservative v**ers has traditionally won the nomination and will stand a better chance in the general e******n,” Rove says.

But Trump in particular has benefited because managerial v**ers remain divided. More secular and affluent than Iowa, New Hampshire usually christens the managerial champion. But center-right v**ers there are closely divided among Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio (the candidate most now expect to ultimately emerge from that group). Evangelical favorites usually struggle in New Hampshire, but that centrist splintering could allow Trump to win there by dividing the v**ers most resistant to him.

If Cruz wins Iowa and Trump beats a splintered center in New Hampshire, the GOP leadership will approach a collective nervous breakdown. The pressure would enormously intensify on “managerial” candidates to quit and consolidate support behind one alternative to Cruz and Trump. But if New Hampshire doesn’t pick a clear favorite among the center-right contenders, that consolidation may not happen quickly, and the chances will improve for Cruz or Trump to seize the nomination, although much of the party leadership still considers them unable to win the general e******n.

RONALD BROWNSTEIN is a senior writer at the National Journal. rbrownstein@national journal.com

Trump fires up the faithful with blunt assertions that are often vague or even flatly wrong.




BY KURTIS LEE


Picture

TY WRIGHT Getty Images

SUPPORTERS SURROUND Republican candidate Donald Trump at a campaign event this week in Columbus, Ohio. His style of rhetoric would be unlikely to play well in the general e******n, political strategists say.


Donald Trump’s campaign trail commentary flows seamlessly but is often vague on specifics, and even facts.

He says he saw “thousands of people” cheering in New Jersey as the World Trade Center towers collapsed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Not true, according to local law enforcement and elected officials.

He is open to shutting mosques, saying there’s “absolutely no choice.” But the 1st Amendment protects the free exercise of religion.

And he has assailed the federal government for accepting “250,000” Syrian refugees. The Obama administration has agreed to allow in at least 10,000 this fiscal year.

It’s become almost standard for Trump in his quest for the Republican p**********l nomination: Make statements that defy t***h or make promises that go beyond the power of the presidency. Yet his rhetoric resonates with supporters, who laud Trump for his blunt and politically incorrect style and have put him atop polls since he announced his candidacy in June.

Nearly 47% of Republican-leaning v**ers both support the deportation of people in the U.S. illegally and oppose the acceptance of refugees from Syria, a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found.

But in a general e******n in which v**ers represent a broader cross-section of viewpoints and the e*****rate becomes more diverse in terms of race, education and age, Trump’s outspoken views would deeply challenge Republican efforts to recapture the White House, strategists say.

“What he’s saying is totally irresponsible,” said Dick Wadhams, a longtime Republican strategist who has worked on state and national campaigns.

Trump’s supporters are extremely dissatisfied with the government but are “not in tune with all that’s going on in the world and how it works,” Wadhams said.

For example, when Trump talks about ending birthright citizenship for children born to parents in the country illegally — a move that would require a change to the Constitution

— or constructing a 1,900-mile wall along the border with Mexico, he’s reaching beyond what appears to be logistically possible, even if his supporters cheer his plans.

“You can’t just say things and think they’ll magically happen,” said Rep. Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), whose district spans a large swath of southern Arizona down to the Mexican border. Grijalva noted that hundreds of acres along the border belong to sovereign Native American tribes such as Tohono O’odham Nation. To construct a wall as proposed by Trump would require appropriations and waivers from Congress.

Trump’s campaign declined interview requests and did not respond to an email seeking comment about details of his policy proposals.

In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks this month, talk on the campaign trail suddenly and overwhelmingly turned to foreign policy.

While many candidates in the crowded Republican field have laid out proposals to defeat Islamic State, the militant group that claimed responsibility for the violence in Paris, Trump has focused on Muslims in the United States. In addition to suggesting that mosques be closed, he also committed to creating a national database to monitor Muslims but has not said how he would implement such changes.

“We’re going to have no choice” but to close mosques, he said during a recent Fox News interview, adding that if authorities believe there is “talk of jihad” in them, then they would need to be shuttered. “There’s absolutely no choice. Some really bad things are happening, and they’re happening fast.”

Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who has organized focus groups of Trump followers, said his support comes from the way he articulates his message.

“They don’t believe what Trump is saying is wrong. They believe Trump is correct,” Luntz said, describing the candidate’s supporters as “working-class underachievers.”

A focus group Luntz oversaw this summer of men and women from the Washington area found that they cared less about social issues than about the national debt, border control, the economy and national security. Above all, they were racked by a sense that the country is headed in the wrong direction.

“He’s the only one out there saying, ‘Let’s bomb the... out of ISIS,’” Luntz said, using a common acronym for Islamic State. “No way any other p**********l candidate would say that, and that’s why people like him.”

And, he added, Trump’s supporters “also distrust the media, so the more of what he says upsets the media, the more his fans like it.”

Trump’s rhetoric is essentially fear-mongering and harmful to the country as a whole, said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington.

“It’s very, very dangerous and detrimental to the country,” Hooper said. “When you’re pandering to the lowest common denominator of your party, it can lead to bigotry and give false perceptions.”

Rivals are taking note. A super PAC supporting John Kasich, the Ohio governor, has pledged to highlight why Trump is not fit to become president in a barrage of television advertisements leading up to the Iowa caucuses in February. The group began a $2.5-million ad campaign this week focused on Trump, who has threatened to sue for defamation.

John Weaver, a chief strategist to Kasich’s campaign, which is separate from the super PAC, said Trump is a “very clever demagogue.”

“He’s playing on the anxieties of some people and in turn receiving support,” he said.

“I love Don Rickles,” Weaver added, likening Trump to the comedian known for his insults and politically incorrect humor. But “I would not want Don Rickles to be president.” kurtis.lee@latimes.com