Ask Governor Murphy: December Recap

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. WNYC's Nancy Solomon joins us now with excerpts from and analysis of and to take your phone calls about her Ask Governor Murphy call-in last night. She does that once a month and usually joins us here on the morning after. Yesterday, the governor talked a lot about education. He signed a new bill to make it harder to ban books in the state. We'll hear why and what books he thinks are being banned. He's still pushing to lower the voting age for school board elections in particular.

He also had been thinking about how the state's public school system would fare under a second Trump presidency. President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to dissolve the federal Department of Education. Also, you've been hearing about the mystery drones over New Jersey, right? The governor had the latest and he shared his Spotify Wrapped list. That's his most-listened-to songs of the year on the music streaming service. We'll get to all that, including some clips of the governor. Hey, Nancy, happy morning after.

Nancy Solomon: Thanks. Good morning, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you listened to Ask Governor Murphy last night or even if you didn't, New Jersey callers, 212-433-WNYC, on any of those things. Let's start on education, which, as I said, came up a few times last night with the governor. I'll play the clip in a second, but can you explain to us the bill that Governor Murphy just signed into law that would make it harder to ban books in the state?

Nancy Solomon: Right, so until this bill goes into effect, what happens is that this gets decided school district by school district, town library by town library. What the bill does is it sets up a process for all libraries, public and school libraries in the state. If somebody say like a parent wants to have a book banned from the school library, they have to go through this process so that it's not just-- as the governor said, it's not willy-nilly all over the state in different ways. There is a process and parents can raise legitimate concerns about something not being age-appropriate for kids. What he wants to do is shift the focus away from what seems to be a pretty strong vein of censorship around really important issues, lesbian and gay issues, slavery, racism, the Holocaust, that sort of thing.

Brian Lehrer: Is this a hypothetical preventive concern or did he come with examples of schools or school districts that are banning specific books?

Nancy Solomon: Yes, this is not hypothetical at all. There have been fights going on for several years now all across the state. Each one might be a small community and its own fight. When you total them up, this is certainly an issue that has spread across the state. It has fired up conservative voters. It played a role in the 2021 gubernatorial election when Murphy faced a strong Republican challenge. That Republican challenger had made some hay out of getting parents afraid that their children were being exposed to ideas that were not good for them, that children were going to come home and tell their parents they wanted to change their gender based on some book in the library. They were able to whip up a lot of what is unfounded fear basically.

Brian Lehrer: Here is 30 seconds of how the governor framed what the bill would do.

Governor Phil Murphy: We, as the state, at the state level, are obligated now to put a model process in place. Actually, how would you go about determining if a book was inappropriate, et cetera? Then that is intended to be a model for local school districts. Frankly, putting it into more colloquial terms, this just makes it a lot harder to willy-nilly ban a book. You can't use certain reasons, which is a good thing. It will protect communities that have been under enormous assault, especially but not limited to the LGBTQIA+ community.

Brian Lehrer: Here is the issue of at what level are the standards set, right? Is it local control? There's 600 school districts in the state of New Jersey. Does each one get to have its own standards, its own culture, or is there a state-level standard? We'll get into the federal question as well, but it's really a question of how local should control be over these kinds of things. Local culture versus more universal standards of human rights, right?

Nancy Solomon: Yes, and I think it is attempting to set a standard. Exactly. I think that's exactly the aim of the bill. It specifically says books cannot be removed from libraries solely based on origin, background, views contained in the text, or just because an individual finds it offensive. I'm not exactly sure how that plays out and what the guardrails are and whether there is-- The governor did say last night that there is room for parents to make legitimate claims that there are books that are inappropriate for young audiences in their school library, say.

He said it's not going to clamp down on all complaints about all books. I think there was one instance where Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel that is known to be very steamy, racy, that book mistakenly ended up in a school library and it was removed. I think there are always going to be those kinds of instances where there is an appropriate reaction to a book, but they're trying to remove the political ideology out of the whole thing.

Brian Lehrer: Right, so a book that's racy would get taken out maybe by acclamation, but a book that's about race that maybe describes the history of racism and Jim Crow and other kinds of discrimination and systemic racism might become a battleground because some parents might say it might make the white kids feel bad, right?

Nancy Solomon: Exactly. Exactly. I think that's where he's trying to draw the line and provide some of this and, frankly, support for librarians. Librarians have been at the point of the spear on this thing. A lot of them are leaving the profession because it has been so stressful and made their jobs so unpleasant. He has a lot of support from librarians on this and he's trying to do something that can sort out this issue in a more reasonable, systemic way.

Brian Lehrer: Another caller on education to Ask Governor Murphy last night was about what impact the Trump presidency would have on public schools, including public universities. We're going to take a listen now to about a minute of how the governor responded to that.

Governor Phil Murphy: The federal government, if my math serves me properly, funds only about 8% or 9% of the American education bill every year, but that's 8% or 9% of a very large number. Funding will be one piece. The US Government leads, having said what I just said, in a big way, in certain of the titles, Title IX, other titles, where they have a disproportionate presence in terms of funding. Those are, in many respects, for underserved kids and communities. That's a concern. There's thought leadership. There is the notion of public education and what that actually means. For instance, I'm not a voucher guy. My concern would be that would be a policy that would be pursued aggressively. That just takes money out of the system.

Brian Lehrer: Governor Murphy there on the ramifications potentially of the Trump presidency and the possible abolition of the Department of Education. Nancy, a lot of that was not the kind of answer I thought he was going to give. The part at the end was about thought leadership and maybe moving to some kind of national voucher system if Trump and Congress try to implement something like that.

All those funding streams that he brought up, even if they abolished the Department of Education, I think from the right, it's usually about they don't want federal standards and guidelines for the kinds of things we were talking about before with the book banning, right? They want local control, but would it also affect funding for, let's say, low-income public schools in New Jersey and things like that?

Nancy Solomon: I think that's a legitimate concern that he raises. Title I funding is funding specifically for communities that have high concentrations of poverty or individual schools that have high concentrations of poverty. We know that's how schools are-- certainly, in New Jersey, I'm guessing this happens all over the country. Certainly, in New Jersey, we have highly segregated schools. It really is about poverty even though poverty and race, of course, sadly, in this country track together.

What we see is we have many, many schools that have a high concentration of low-income kids and then, of course, many middle-class and upper-middle-class and affluent schools. The Title I funding from the federal government is very key to those particular communities. We're talking about Newark, Camden, Patterson, Elizabeth, Trenton. These are all cities that rely on that funding, so I do think it's a legitimate concern.

Brian Lehrer: With WNYC's Nancy Solomon, who hosts the Ask Governor Murphy call-in once a month on the station and usually comes on with us the next morning, as she's doing here in this case. Nancy, I have to be honest. People are calling and texting saying, "Come on already, talk about the drones."

Nancy Solomon: Of course. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: We'll play the clip in a minute, but you did start the program last night, which maybe we should have done here, with a question about the mystery drones flying over New Jersey. You gave a big list of concerning sightings. Before we play the clip of the governor, what's the background here for people who don't know or haven't seen them over their house?

Nancy Solomon: Yes, so this has been going on for several weeks. They appear at night. These are not hobby drones. These are drones the size of a small SUV. They have flown over New Jersey's largest water reservoir. They've been seen flying in from the ocean and over Long Beach Island State Park. They flew over the Picatinny military base in Morris County. I think it's in Morris County. It's out there nearby. They flew over Trump's golf course, where he has his summer residence. They've also been spotted in Staten Island.

[chuckles] I count myself among the number of people who are concerned about this and a little obsessed. I check the news about once every couple of hours to see if, finally, have they told us what these are. That's what's been so frustrating. The numbers, the sheer numbers, we're talking in the 50s that a series of these large drones flying over somebody's house one after another. Some of them flying in formation, some of them individually, but we're talking sightings of 40, 50, 60 drones each night.

Brian Lehrer: Here's the governor, who told you they weren't a threat. I don't know how he knows that, but he said he is talking to federal authorities about the drones. 30 seconds of Governor Murphy on that.

Governor Phil Murphy: I was on with the director of the federal Department of Homeland Security today, Ali Mayorkas, who is doing everything he can. The FBI, Secret Service, Department of Defense, White House. I'll be on with tomorrow. I think you could say comfortably at this moment based on everything we know. Somebody criticized me for saying, "How could Murphy say this?" Again, folks have to realize, overwhelmingly, the feds have to take the lead here. Based on everything we know, there is no public safety risk that we're aware of.

Brian Lehrer: He couldn't get specific. We have a text from a listener who wonders if they are actually coming from our government. If they are coming from our government, you would think they would tell the governors.

Nancy Solomon: Yes, I'll quote State Assemblyman Brian Bergen. There were several people who represent the districts that have seen the most drones at a meeting with the state police and the Department of Homeland Security yesterday, I believe it was. Brian Bergen said, this is a quote, "No answers, no resolution. They don't know where the drones are coming from. They don't know who's doing it and they don't know why they're doing it. They say there's no credible threat. It was annoying to be there."

Okay, one or the other. Either we don't know and we're going to try to figure it out or we know what they are. No credible threat. The two things don't go together. I pushed the governor on this because it seems obvious to everyone. We got a ton of questions last night. We were getting them online. We didn't take calls on it, but we knew people wanted to know. You can't have both, right? Either you know what it is and you know it's not a threat or you don't know what it is and you don't know if it's a threat, but the two don't go together.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know if you can answer this question, Nancy, but we've got two versions of this question that have come in from two different people that say-- These are texts. One person writes, "Why can't somebody shoot the drones down?" Another person gets a little more specific, "Can't the military or a police authority shoot one of these drones down? Aren't they flying over restricted airspace?" I guess the implication there is that if they shoot one down, then they can inspect it and try to reverse-engineer where they're coming from.

Nancy Solomon: Yes, [chuckles] I feel like I must be making a mistake in my own thinking to think that that's a reasonable suggestion. If there's no life in this vehicle and we don't know what it is and it has no permission to be there and there are 50 of them, why can't we get down one of them and look at it? I think that makes sense. I don't understand why they're not. I pressed Governor Murphy on this. What he said was, "The federal government has jurisdiction over our airspace. We do not have the ability to do that. It is up to them to do that. We're in conversation about it and I understand people's frustration. I'm frustrated. I'm pushing the federal government to take action, but it's not something we can do."

Brian Lehrer: All right. Well, I guess it's going to have to be answered not in an Ask Governor Murphy call-in but an Ask the Defense Secretary call-in or something like that. Interesting. You mentioned the size of a small SUV and that's generating some reaction. One listener writes, "The size of a small SUV? I hadn't heard that before. Thank you, Nancy Solomon. Great work as always," so that's nice to hear, but then--

Nancy Solomon: Let me attribute that because I got that from Tina Kelley, reporter at NJ.com, The Star-Ledger online service. She's the one who said that.

Brian Lehrer: Then somebody else writes, "Those drone reports sound greatly, greatly exaggerated. Highly questionable that drones the size of SUVs are flying around." Is that confirmed as far as you and The Star-Ledger reporter could tell?

Nancy Solomon: Yes, you go online and look. There are videos of them. You can't get the scale, but I don't think this is a hoax. It could be a hoax, but it's not a hoax from the people who are seeing these and reporting them. There are videos online of them.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Let's see. Somebody else writes about that. Where did this one go? Well, I'm going to have to paraphrase it. I saw it was from a listener, Jack in Allendale, who suspects that they're coming from our government, that they are from the US Defense Department. He says if they are from the US Defense Department, well, that's-- Oh, there it is. "If this is our defense contractors, Department of Defense, et cetera, it's not such a bad thing other than the creepiness of not knowing the intent. However, if this was a nefarious third party testing our preparedness, we have failed miserably. They will have uncovered a big hole in our defenses." There's that. Somebody else just writes, "Ask Orson Welles."

Nancy Solomon: [chuckles] I've thought of that. I've thought of that many times over the last few days, remembering War of the Worlds, yes.

Brian Lehrer: People will understand. A lot of people understand that reference.

[crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Nancy Solomon: I'm going to say, the one more thing to talk about in all this is Jeff Van Drew, Congress member from South Jersey, was a Democrat, then pledged his allegiance to Trump, became a Republican. That's what he's kind of known for. He suggested, and he didn't seem to have any real proof of this, that these drones were coming from a, and I quote, Iranian mothership off the coast of Jersey, which many people laughed at like, "What the hell? Where did that come from?"

There was a discussion of it in the New Jersey Politico Playbook this morning that suggested that there was something in the news about an Iranian ship that was a ship that has drones and operates drones leaving Iran and heading out into the world. [chuckles] Maybe that's where it came from. The Department of Homeland Security has said that it's just patently false. The one other thing I wanted to add is that the Picatinny Arsenal, the US military facility that's out in Western Jersey, has released a statement saying the drones are not coming from them. That much, we know.

Brian Lehrer: Although another listener has just texted, "The only logical reason in the post-9/11 era for not having already shot one down is that the drones belong to us, but mystery unresolved." I want to go back to education and on a different issue. We're going to listen to a caller to Ask Governor Murphy last night. This is 15-year-old Eva Joy.

Eva Joy: I'm 15 years old and I'm the North Hunterdon High School class president of 2028.

Governor Phil Murphy: Oh, I love that.

Eva Joy: Thank you. One of the issues on my campaign platform was Vote 16. I was wondering if you could join me at our high-school school board and town council meeting to make the case for 16 and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections. Young people know the issues that affect us best and it would engage them to be involved in the electoral process as early as possible.

Brian Lehrer: Nancy, the governor is for that for school board elections, isn't he?

Nancy Solomon: Yes, he is absolutely for it. He's a big proponent of it. In his response to her, he said that, yes, he would come to her school board meeting and then noted that his staff was going to be mad at him for promising that. We'll see what happens. There is a bill. It's been introduced into the legislature by Democrats, but the Democratic leadership has not put it up for a vote yet.

Brian Lehrer: What happens next or who's against it?

Nancy Solomon: Well, that's unclear. I did ask the governor last night because I had read that State Senate President Nick Scutari, who has the ability to put any bill up for a vote, that he had raised some concerns that he wasn't convinced that this was such a good idea. I asked the governor about it and he refused to go there. He basically said he has a great relationship with him. He believes Democrats support it and he doesn't know what the holdup is. Sometimes it takes a while to get these things through the legislature. Nobody has really come out full-on against it. It's unclear what's holding it up.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a comment on the education and potential abolition of the federal education department topic we were talking about before. Listener says, "Let's go to a complete voucher system where the parents then choose," and I'm summarizing it because it flipped off my screen, but the idea was basically abolish all public schools that the government has to pay for, go to vouchers, let parents decide what school in the private sector system they want to buy into. That will alleviate the property tax crunch in New Jersey.

I wonder if that gets resonance because property taxes are so often the number one issue in New Jersey. They are, to such a large degree, for funding the local school systems. Is there a lot of support for abolishing? I know it sounds so radical, but abolishing public education and going to a complete voucher system for that reason, it's something that the right often wants for ideological reasons. Does property tax burden ever enter that conversation in your reporting experience?

Nancy Solomon: I have not heard that. I agree with your premise of the question that property taxes are the number one issue in the state. They're the number one thing that upsets people and voters. It'll certainly play a huge role in this year's gubernatorial election. We have the primary coming up in six and a half months, so it's certainly an issue. No one is out there making the argument that all public funding of schools should be cut. There are a lot of states that fund their public schools without putting such a huge burden on property taxpayers.

Brian Lehrer: Right.

Nancy Solomon: There are ways to fix the problem. I get that there's a legitimate concern about what it is that the new Trump administration is going to do. I think given everything we know about what Trump has done and what he has said, there are legitimate concerns about some very extreme things happening that really turn federal funding of everything upside down. No one has said, "Oh, let's get rid of the public schools here in Jersey to fix our tax problem."

Brian Lehrer: By the way, even a voucher system, if they're really giving vouchers that would purchase anything like the actual cost of an education, it's still going to be a lot of tax dollars in order to provide those vouchers. Finally, you ask Governor Murphy about his Spotify Wrapped. For people who don't know, that's the music streaming platform Spotify and it tracks what you listen to throughout the year and gives you a summary. I'm more of a YouTube Music user. I get it from them too, but let's take a listen to the governor talking about his favorite songs of the year.

Governor Phil Murphy: I'm obsessed with Chappell Roan. If you all don't know her out there, she's a phenom. She's got this song, Good Luck, Babe! She's got something else, Pink something?

Female Speaker: Pink Pony Club.

Governor Phil Murphy: Pink Pony Club. Okay, but I'm a big fan. Then I did a Jon Bon Jovi, which is an update with Pitbull, who I've met through Jon, which is It's My Life with a new title. Nightshift by Bruce Springsteen, which is a Commodores redo, which he does in concert. It's incredibly mesmerizing. Cher just came out with her autobiography, I'm in love with Cher, so I put Believe on there.

Brian Lehrer: What do we learn from Governor Murphy about his Spotify Wrapped list? I understand, you're going to take us out, Nancy, by setting up a relevant musical selection.

Nancy Solomon: It's his number-one song, but I think Governor Murphy is a legitimate music fan. I do believe that. He talks about music a lot. I've seen him after the show. I've heard music on. After the show, he listens to music. He goes to see live music. He's super excited about this thing he created. He helped create the North to Shore New Jersey Music Festival that happens now each summer.

I do think he is a legit music fan. There was a whole controversy just this week or last week about Congressman Josh Gottheimer, who put out his Spotify Wrapped list. It was all Bruce Springsteen and it turned out to be a fiction. Then he said, "Well, I couldn't put out my real list because I share my Spotify account with my kids, and so their stuff comes up, but I really am a big Bruce fan. I can prove it. My dog is named Rosalita." [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: He is getting ready to try to run for governor next year, isn't he?

Nancy Solomon: Yes, he is running for governor. It helps to have your Bruce credentials out there. That was kind of an embarrassing little moment for him, I believe. Anyway, I think the governor's list, he is enthusiastic. Whether this list is his real list or a made-up list, I couldn't tell you. The number one on his list is called Jersey Anthem. It uses a moment that happened at the Democratic National Convention this summer in the nomination of Kamala Harris. They did the roll call by music and each state had their own music for New Jersey's delegation. It was Springsteen, of course, but the governor went viral in his cringey moment of saying, "We're from Jersey, baby, and you're not." That has become a song, which I believe we can play a clip from.

Brian Lehrer: With DJ Sliink.

[MUSIC - DJ Sliink Ft. Gov. Phil Murphy - Jersey Anthem]

Everybody, I'm Governor Phil Murphy.

We're from Jersey, Baby.

And You're Not.

We're from Jersey, Baby.

We're from Jersey, Baby.

We're from Jersey, Baby.

Brian Lehrer: All right, hip-hop Phil.

Nancy Solomon: He says that's his number one song he listens to.

Brian Lehrer: Why not? Maybe a little narcissistic, but what the heck. Nancy Solomon, thanks a lot.

Nancy Solomon: Thanks for having me.

 

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