Juan Williams' son on why he became a Republican

Son of civil rights journalist is a model for the kind of voter the GOP wants

WASHINGTON – After the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee vowed to do better in the next presidential election with younger voters and minorities.

Its leaders dedicated millions of dollars to begin working in minority communities that had not seen a Republican representative in years. And they hired several new minority staffers.

One of the RNC’s hires was Raffi Williams, the youngest son of veteran Washington journalist and pundit Juan Williams. Author of a highly praised book on the civil rights movement, the elder Williams is now best known as a fixture on Fox News, though he spent most of his career at the Washington Post and National Public Radio.

Whereas the elder Williams became known for holding a handful of conservative views mixed with traditional Democratic ones, Raffi  the youngest of his three children  isn't hedging his beliefs: He's a proud Republican. 

And while his dad cut his teeth on covering the civil rights movement and metro stories in Washington, the 26-year-old Raffi is taking up the conservative media portfolio for the RNC. It falls to him to grapple with websites like Breitbart News and the Daily Caller that have come from nowhere over the past few years and now play a significant role in reflecting and shaping the zeitgeist of the conservative movement online. 

Raffi Williams agreed to talk with Yahoo News about why he is a Republican, why he ended up in a different political party than his father, and what he thinks the party can do to attract more people like him. Here is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for brevity and clarity:

Yahoo News: You’re 26 years old, the third child of Juan Williams and his wife, Delise. Where did they meet?

Raffi Williams (courtesy of Raffi Williams)
Raffi Williams (courtesy of Raffi Williams)

Raffi Williams: They met here in D.C. My mom is a local, a native. My dad was a beat reporter for the Post. They met at a nightclub.

YN: Do you know the name of the nightclub?

RW: I don’t. I think it’s long gone at this point. But they met dancing. 

YN: Your dad was a city desk reporter at the Washington Post. What was your dad doing when you were born?

RW: When I was born he was either  he was at the White House for a little bit with the Post, but I think he was done with that. I think he might have been working at the Washington Post magazine by that point. He was still in that organization, though. 

YN: So maybe describe for me in your own words: Who is your dad?

RW: That’s obviously a deep question. I think he’s a straight shooter, he tries to be honest with his opinions and views, and he has years of experience just knowing D.C., knowing sources. And I think at the end of the day I see him as my dad before I see him as a reporter. A great example of this is when I was in college when the NPR stuff went down, when he got fired from there. I didn’t realize he was as big a deal as he was. I just saw him as Dad. And I was up at college  I had a lacrosse game that day...

YN: Which was?

RW: Haverford College. And my mom was up to watch the game, and after the game we go get dinner. She gets a call from my dad like, ‘I just got fired.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh God, is everything OK?’ My mom was worried. And the next day I just go about my life as is. There’s nothing I can do about it. And the next day it’s a front-page story in the national newspapers. And my friends come running up to me like, ‘Dude, we hung out last night. Why didn’t you tell me this was happening?’ My girlfriend was pissed at me at the time because I didn’t tell her. And I was like, I just didn’t think it was a big deal. I didn’t realize people knew who my dad was. And that’s when it dawned on me that he’s actually a very public figure. People know who he is. I’m not sure if that answers the question.

YN: It does. Another way to get at the question is, what’s been your first-hand observation of your dad’s political views? He was at NPR. He certainly has never identified as a conservative. 

RW: No, no, no. My dad  I would call him a blue-dog Dem if I had to classify it. He definitely is more liberal than I am. But I think it has to do with his life story. He was an immigrant from Panama, came here when he was 3, grew up in the projects of New York. He really found opportunity through scholarships to schools, so he sees the value of having a social safety net. And then he sees the good that the government can do in his eyes, but he still thinks you have to work to take advantage of it and to make the most of it. That’s why I think he’s supportive of things like Obamacare or having welfare and that kind of stuff. So he lives his American dream in that, and I think seeing him achieve his American dream made me be conservative because I think there’s a lot of personal responsibility that leads to that, that leads to success. And I think that it’s not a bad thing to have a social safety net  I think it’s important  but I think that having one that is too big does not push people to be the best they can be, does not encourage success in the way that I think is important. And I think his parents played a large role in encouraging him to have personal responsibility and personal drive. 

YN: What did his parents do?

RW: His mom was a seamstress, and his father was a boxing trainer. 

YN: Were there any political figures that were influential in his life?

RW: Not that I know of. 

YN: He probably covered [former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion] Barry, right?

RW: Yeah, and Barry did not like my father. One night he came back from being out or whatever and our house was tossed, and on the bed was a meat cleaver. He wrote an article about this after Barry died for American CurrentSee, that Ben Carson mag. He wrote damning pieces on Barry calling him out for the cronyism and corruption, and Barry sent a clear signal to my father. It didn’t stop my father but...

YN: Your dad just wrote a piece in a Ben Carson magazine?

RW: Yeah. The American CurrentSee. 

YN: Why?

RW: They asked him to do it. Armstrong Williams and Ben Carson run the magazine. 

YN: That’s it. OK. 

RW: They asked him to write it because he covered Barry. 

YN: OK. So when did you become politically aware? Was it in high school?

RW: I was always around politics. The conversation at my dinner table was always about politics. My brother was very politically aware. He ran for office. He worked for [former U.S. Senator] Norm Coleman. He’s much older than I am, so I was always the young kid at the table, so I did not set the conversation. But I didn’t really know where I stood until high school, when I started to think about it more and understand what it was. And for me it came down to, I was raised to be fiscally responsible, to put family first, to go get what you want  go achieve your American dream, no one’s going to hand it to you  and my dad’s very religious. My family’s religious. So when I took my personal values and looked at which political spectrum I fell on, it was clear that I was conservative and a Republican. 

YN: And you decided this in high school?

RW: Yeah, my first internship was in high school actually, for [former Republican presidential nominee] Rick Santorum when he was still in the Senate. I worked under Robert Traynham, who was his communications director at the time. And so that was kind of my first taste, and then the next summer my brother ran for city council here in D.C. So I was his little campaign intern, I guess. 

YN: So your brother was a political influence on you as well? 

RW: Oh yeah, there’s no doubt about that. I think you have a combination of family values, what my parents taught me, my brother being a conservative and shepherding me along in that regard, and also growing up in the '90s in D.C. You see the dangers of big government, you see how it fails in terms of...

YN: How?

RW: — the city just wasn’t operating in terms of garbage getting picked up. You talk about the crime rate being high, being afraid to go out at night some places, and you still see us spending like crazy and not addressing any of these problems. And having conversations with my dad about what was going on in the city was not good things and the danger of big government.

YN: What was your dad saying at that point about the city’s dysfunction? Where did he pin the blame? 

RW: I think he saw  you’d have to take his word for it over mine  but from my memory, he wrote a large feature piece on the fact that a kid graduated from D.C. public high schools and couldn’t read. And it was a long four-parter or something on this kid. And a lot of it comes to a lack of accountability in D.C. city government which starts at the top, and I think it started with Barry. 

YN: Did he have any favorable... I guess not, since [according to Williams] the guy left a meat cleaver on his bed.

RW: Well, I think my dad respects what Barry did during the civil rights movement when he was a member of SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. But I think he was a guy who shows you that some people can’t handle power, and that sums up Barry I think pretty well. When he got it, he wasted it. 

YN: Do you and your dad debate politics?

RW: All the time. Our family does Sunday dinners every Sunday. I see him it depends usually on how busy I am  but usually more than once a week, and the topic of the conversation usually is whatever the issue of the day is, and we go at it a little bit. 

YN: What do you generally disagree on the most? Where do you see the world differently, politically?

RW: Obamacare is a big one, so we actually don’t debate Obamacare anymore because we got in a huge... Usually it’s very congenial and just like, ‘This is what I’m hearing; this is what I’m seeing.’ And with Obamacare, I think we got very upset and it became a little more personal than we usually like, so we just don’t debate that anymore. I think we disagree over [Wisconsin Representative] Paul Ryan’s budget. He did not like it, and I really was a big fan. Those are the two biggest ones, though he does like what Paul Ryan is doing in terms of reaching out to the black community, going out and doing the listening tours. He respects that. And I think he thinks it’s a good step. Whether he agrees or disagrees with the guy’s policies, he does agree with the way he’s doing that. 

YN: Is there any way since going on Fox that he’s been more conscientious to try to make sure he doesn’t become instinctively conservative and just repeat what other conservatives are saying, to make sure he maintains his credibility as a moderate or a quasiliberal?

RW: My father has been with Fox since the beginning … I think the Fox people are very  happy with him being the moderate or the liberal at the table. He has not felt the need to become more conservative.

YN: No, my question is whether he’s felt the need to become more liberal?

RW: Oh, I don’t think so. My dad truthfully believes what he espouses on Fox. 

YN: Where did you go to high school?

RW: I actually did five years of high school. Two years at Georgetown Day School here in town, and then I decided I wanted to become a hockey player, so I went up to boarding school, repeated my sophomore year. It’s a normal thing usually to do in boarding school, so I did three years at Hotchkiss up in Connecticut. 

YN: So you obviously grew up  your father was the son of immigrants  you grew up fairly privileged and went to a really quality high school and then a boarding school. Do you think that’s impacted that political philosophy at all, just even being around other people who are generally more privileged?

RW: So, at the boarding school they were definitely more conservative. A lot of the sons of Wall Street and daughters of Wall Street type of people. But Georgetown Day School was uber-liberal. You’re calling your teachers by their first names there. In my class, you have Zach Beauchamp who was at TPM [Talking Points Memo] for a while. It’s a very liberal school. So I don’t think it influenced my politics in the sense of it influenced my understanding of the world, it influenced what I read and the people I was talking to ... but if GDS impacted my politics, I’d be a liberal right now.

YN: When you were at GDS, did you already consider yourself a conservative? 

RW: I don’t think I had a leaning when I was there, really. I think I was too young, really. It wasn’t until I got to Hotchkiss. And then Haverford College is uber-liberal as well. 

YN: Were you politically active in college?

RW: No, I volunteered for the McCain campaign when I was in college. I voted Republican when I was in college. But there wasn’t even a college Republican club on my campus. That club didn’t even exist. I think they’ve started it since I’ve left. I was not, though, doing debates with Democrats.