It's the Brian Lairor Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone.

Joyce Vance is with us. Some of you see her on TV as an MSNBC legal analyst.

Some of you may follow her very active substack called Civil Discourse, which is largely about

democracy and Trump era court cases.

Joyce Vance is from Alabama, and during the Obama year, she was the U.S. attorney in northern

Alabama, which gives her a perspective many people on the coasts don't have,

and she is a law professor at the University of Alabama. They don't just play football there.

And now Joyce Vance has a book that may surprise you for how optimistic it is called Giving Up is

Unforgivable, a manual for keeping democracy. Joyce, thanks so much for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Thanks for having me. Roll tide. Let's start with a big idea. I knew you bring it back to football

somehow with the University of government. Let's start with the big idea in your book. Then we'll get to

your take on some of the news stories you've been writing about, like why you think

no Kings Day mattered, President Trump's revenge prosecutions, your piece called when they

bouquetelay the courts, and the ice raids in New York and elsewhere, which actually prompted you to

write the question, are we the Nazis now? Yikes, we'll see how much of that we can cover. But first your book,

Chapter 1 is called Don't Be the Frog. Who's being what kind of Frog?

You know, this is the well-used metaphor that describes how people fail to react to dramatic

changes as long as they're applied incrementally. So during the first

Trump administration, we were the frogs in the pot. The temperature was turned up so slowly

that for many people, perhaps not you and me and many of your listeners, but for many of our

fellow citizens, the change was so gradual that they didn't begin to react to it until it was almost

too late. Fortunately, Americans changed course and put Trump out of office at the end of his

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