Hi, I'm Anna Marie Cox. Welcome to With Friends Like These, the first episode. I started

this show because in my own life, I think like a lot of us, I found that people who I knew

and cared about and in fact loved had some pretty specific and pretty significant differences

from me that we'd just been able to not talk about. We'd been able to just focus on the

turkey at Thanksgiving and talk about football and even if the football conversation got

kind of animated, you know, it was all understood to be within the realm of differences we can

tolerate, although college football sometimes hard for me with bailers specifically. But this

selection revealed some pretty significant fault lines. And it also revealed to me that it was

almost impossible to have conversations with the people I loved about these fault lines. I

think that's because when we talk to people we love it's never just about the topic at hand.

It's also about our love for them and their love for us and whether or not we feel secure in it.

So weirdly, my idea was I'm not going to talk to them, although maybe that'll happen

eventually, but I am going to talk to people I disagree with and people maybe you disagree with.

And I'm going to try and listen and hope they listen to me and see where that gets us.

I don't have a specific goal. I just have an idea that this is the way forward.

So we're going to start with Pastor Christopher Jackson who's a guy that I met via Twitter,

like so many of us meet in the media world. He's a pastor from Wisconsin,

he ministers to two rural counties, Door County and Cawani County. And we'll talk about how they

went for Trump after voting for Obama twice in one county and Obama and Romney just by a hair

in 2012 and another county. And I'm also going to talk to my colleague, Jamil Smith, just about the

news of the week. Welcome to the first show. Thanks for listening.

So welcome Pastor Christopher Jackson to the show.

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