Steven

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements.

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Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. So my guest today is Sam Coppelman. Sam is a bestselling author and top speech writer for many prominent politicians.

Sam just co-wrote a book with former attorney general Eric Holder called Our Unfinished March, the violent past and in parralled future of the vote.

In this episode, we talk about voter fraud, voter ID laws, voter suppression, gerrymandering. We talk about the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the so-called GUNNING of that Act in 2013. We discuss great replacement theory and much more.

As you'll see, I'm skeptical of the narrative that voter suppression is a huge problem that voter ID laws are racist and so forth. While Sam doesn't quite go that far, I think there is some distance between his position on these topics in my own.

And as we near the midterms, I'm going to have a few more guests like this that deal with electoral politics. So that further ado, Sam Coppelman.

All right, Sam Coppelman. Thanks so much for coming on my show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I just had our mutual friend Yasha Monk on and the three of us have hung out several times and talked about the topics in Yasha's book, the topics in your new book and a lot of other stuff. So it's great to finally get you on.

Yeah, no, this is exciting. I may fan it a pod and glad to be on it.

So you've written a book with Eric Holder about voting rights, voter suppression, democracy, electoral security, voter fraud, all of these interconnected issues. But before we get to that, can you just give a little background of who are you?

I know you've been a speech writer. You've done all kinds of things you've written book with with various high profile figures. So who are you and what was the path that led you to co writing a book with the former attorney general of the United States?

Yeah, you know, I worked on my first political campaign. I was like 16. And for some reason, I guess I learned about John Favreau, Obama's Chief Speechwriter, like as a figure in the culture.

And I thought he seemed super cool. Like he was this young guy writing speeches with President Obama. That's pretty awesome. So he showed up at my internship. And I was like, I'm going to be a speech writer. And they were like, what are you talking about?

And they had me read a speech. I'll never forget this on affordable housing in New York City. And I was like, bet. And I wrote the speech 25 minute address for mayoral candidate, then com troller, Bill Thompson. And obviously they threw it out. And it was horrible. Like just unreadable, not a good sentence and the thing.

And I never got to write another speech on that campaign. Obviously crazy. They trusted me even right one mayoral campaign sir extremely short staffed. But when I got to high school in college, I was writing a bunch of columns on different political stuff and never really wanted to give up on the speech writing thing and on Hillary's 2016 campaign.

And I was a volunteer surrogate speechwriter, which meant they've got all these different dorsers of the campaign. They all got to deliver speeches at different events. And so like I chipped in and would ghost right for all sorts of random big celebrities or senators or congress people or whatever.

And then I ended up getting on that campaign full time with the ghost that youngest writer on that campaign. And your listeners may or may not know this, but Hillary Clinton did not win that election.

So I went back to college. I had this column for the Harvard Crimson full of a bunch of heinous columns as well, just called for shutting down the football team due to concussions, which was great for my social life, but even better for my social life.

Calling on shutting down the final clubs were these organizations that hosted every single good party on campus. So those were a couple of bad decisions. But.

So did you want to shut those down because you weren't getting invited to that? No, were you invited to that?

It's a slightly cooler story with a slightly sadder ending where I wrote the piece because they like invited me. I don't know if you've seen the social network, but you know, there's that thing they punch you to join.

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