look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the others in the near future on book tv on c-span2. >> monday evening at 7:00 p.m. james comey will be live on book tv on c-span2 in primetime with his best-selling autobiography, a higher loyalty. he will discuss several of the issues he spaced as fbi director including the russian investigation, hillary clinton's e-mails and his views on present drum. watch james comey live on book tv c-span2 in primetime monday at 7:00 p.m. eastern.

>> author garrett is next from book tvs coverage of the annapolis book festival. he reports on the emergency evacuation plan for high-ranking government officials. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. welcome to the school in the

annapolis book festival. the name is steven and my sons went here and i continue to serve here on the board of the schools. it's great to see them sponsoring this event for the community. i am here today with garrett graff is the author of a book called raven rock. the story of the us government secret plans to save itself while the rest of us die. it's a sardonic book and makes amusing and instructive in frightening major issues of the government preparedness for continuity after a war, especially a nuclear war. garrett knows what he's talking about and writing about and he is an historian who is specialized in national security and author of a great book that has come to my class at the naval academy to talk about

called threat matrix: the fbi wore in the age of global terror. he also has written for a number of journals but edited two of them. now he has turned his attention to the whole archipelago across this part of the us where there are shelters for the government to seek out in time of rate national emergency. how did you decide you would write such a book? >> thank you. it's great to be back here. i think this is my third time at the annapolis book festival and i don't know how the organizers do it but every time i've been here the weather is phenomenal and the key school has a great advertisement for spring in annapolis. this book -- raven rock is the

main pentagon's main bunker. it's in waynesboro, pennsylvania. it's one of the three main sites that the us government would retreat to in the event of a nuclear exchange or catastrophic attack on washington. these plans are as steven mentioned collectively known as continuity of government, as the cause plan. when i cover national security in washington you would bump up against these from time to time and talk to people would been evacuated to one of these sites on 911. i talked to people who were part of these plans in the bush and obama years and there was a designated helicopter that would find them wherever they were in washington and swooped down and

get to the closest landing zone and take them off into the mountains. one morning when i worked at the magazine a colleague of mine brought in a us intelligence officers badge that he found on the floor of one of the metro subway working grudges. this was on his morning commute. he said hey, you cover national security i bet you can figure out how to get this back to the guy and i bet he's having a really bad day at work having, as we no, commuted all the way into work and then discovered he did not have the badge to get into the office. i'm looking at it and turn it over and as it turns out it has evacuation instructions written on the back of the badge. i get on google maps and google

satellite and start following the out of dc into virginia out into west virginia and then up the side of this mountain and on google satellite you can see the road going up the side of the mountain and there's a chain-link fence, guard shack, and 50 more yards of road and then these massive concrete blast bunker doors and the row disappears into the side of the mountain. mountains totally unmarked and not on any map in it's not a facility that i have ever heard of. i'm like, wow, i've heard of raven rock in heard of the norad bunker in washington and we've seen in the greenbrier which used to be the congressional hunger during the cold war with this big secret place for the house and the senate to meet underneath a luxury resort but i had never heard of this other

facility. in many realize that there that it's worth going back to figure out what was this world really like and what was the history of it and how did it come about. it ended up being -- i started the book in 2011 when nuclear war in russia very much seems like a history book and then it came out in the last year when unfortunately it seems like a how-to manual of what the government would actually respond to a nuclear exchange in an emergency in washington. >> i remember our next-door neighbor when i was a little kid back in the 1950s he was the guy that he did rent a backhoe and dig of hole in the backyard and made himself a bomb shelter.

it still in the business. it's not just 1950 relics. there are guys who still are building these. >> yeah, that's one of the things that has been strange for america to re- remember over the last year as we have seen this era of heightened tension with a nuclear armed north korea is that nuclear war actually used to be very much a part of american society and it's something we wrestle with and talk about as a society and culture. as a certain generation they will remember back in elementary school the duck and cover drills like if you get under your desk in the elementary school you will be able to survive nuclear war which was relatively decent advice for that particular period of the 1950s and 1960s. you may remember getting in schools brochures like this that

you would take home to your parents that would have some useful tips here what you should stock in your fallout shelter and how you should respond to what the warning signals were that you should listen to and how to protect yourself from fallout at home or at the office. this really was part of what i discovered as i researched and embarked on the journey of writing this book this incredibly complex reimagining american society in the 1950s when the war first began through the 1950s there were big annual national nuclear war exercises known as the operation alert that were the president

and his cabinet would disappear into the virginia mountains to practice nuclear war for three or four days at a time. new york city would host evacuation drills where everyone where the buses the new york city buses would pull over and people would practice fleeing in fallout shelters. the new york stock exchange would shut down as part of the city of portland oregon conducted of full-scale dress evacuation of portland, oregon, 200,000 people. 1000 square blocks of the city practiced evacuating out of the city to appoint miles out of the city limit in order to prepare for what this nuclear war would be. part of this the us government

had to reimagine what the world would look like after nuclear war. you could probably still spot them around this fading orange and black fallout shelter sign. as is and city halls and what that meant the cold war those were stocked with supplies and those were pre- designated that the government put food water and sanitation supplies and everything you could need to survive for two weeks in the basement and in those makeshift bunkers that you quickly to an event of his prize that this included the mass production of the all-purpose survival biscuit

which was america's designated food for nuclear war. it was a usda project, a survival crackers, biscuits and manufactured by kroger in nabisco and 160 million tons of these biscuits manufactured in the united states sealed up within tins and 434 biscuits for every ten hidden inside these fallout shelters across the country ready for the sustenance necessary to survive nuclear w war. >> that is too grim. if people have been through a nuclear war you could spring for chocolate chip. [laughter] >> so, what i love about the biscuits is they came with an instruction manual. i love the idea of the 1958 some usda employees sitting down somewhere to write an instruction manual on how to eat a cracker.

[laughter] the instruction that came with a cracker said every adult gets six crackers a day, 125 calories every cracker. if you're doing that math real quickly in your head that's not a lot of calories. the suggestion in the instruction manual was that you should break that into six separate meals over the course of the day because there wasn't a lot else to do in the fallout shelter so if you broke it into six, one cracker meals that maximized the entertainment value of the crackers and then after the two weeks when the crackers iran out the fallout would have, in theory, lessened and then we would flee out of the following shelters and out into our national parks. the idea that the national parks would not be targeted by nuclear war and so the friendly

neighborhood park rangers would have sent those two weeks while everyone was hiding out in the shelters eating their biscuits setting up refugee camps across the country in places like yosemite and blue ridge mountains and that you would flee out there and when you arrived you would receive this which is form 810 from the post office and the safety notification card and it's the agency in charge of registering the dead and figuring out who was still alive in the united states. the post office been the agency that has the best records of who lives where and so, you know, you would address it to someone you wanted to tell who had survived nuclear war and on the back of the safety education card you would fill out your

name and the names of any family members or friends who had survived with you. the government would collect all of these and begin to tally the dead. what is great about it is a postage was suspended after the nuclear war so you do not -- when you go home today you could take the forever stamps out of your bug out kit because the government had thought this all the way through and this was what was so amazing about going back that the government had thought through every aspect of this and the irs had its full plan for how they would levy taxes on america on the apocalypse because if the one thing didn't get you the other of life's inevitable's would still be there and so you would still be confronted with the taxes and of course the irs had

a text force who sat down and study this and they decided that income taxes or property taxes would be inequitable because people would have had fared differently in nuclear war and it wouldn't be fair to charge you on the prewar value of your destroyed property. we would switch as a country to european-style back tax and a consumption -based tax that would fund the government going forward and every aspect every aspect was bought through and steven and i were talking about this for the panel but that's a unique sense of decision-making that the government had. the federal reserve man a bunker in mount pony, virginia that had room for the federal reserve chairman and the board of governors and the key federal

staff they had $2 billion in cash which was the amount of money that the government had estimated the country would need in order to survive the 18 months it would take the bureau of engraving and printing to resume printing currency again. the $2 billion was largely into dollar bills. if you remember, in the 1970s when the government reintroduced the thomas jefferson 2-dollar bill it turns out americans didn't want a 2-dollar bill. rather than pull the preprinted currency they shrink-wrapped it and put it in the bunker in mount pony virginia and figuring that after nuclear war we would all be a lot less choosy about our currency. and so, all of these plans make total sense on the one hand and then make no sense whatsoever on the other.

that's it. >> it has a macabre side and the other parts of the book what you been talking about primarily are like what stanley cooper should have known when he did his homework because it's all real but it's also bizarre. >> yeah, so the most famous line probably of doctor strangelove is worrying about the minded shaft gap that sounds like the movie is literally the most absurd thing that you could think of but as it turns out america's worrying significantly about the mine shaft gap and we sent boy scouts out across the country to map the nations caves and abandoned mindset as part of their merit badges in order to come up with the network of the

fallout shelters that we would use around the country in the event of nuclear war. >> it all has a camp aspect when you think about it from the 1950s but as i read along and realized no, when there was the attempt on reagan's life john hinckley a lot of this continuity of government swung into being and in september 11 the we renovated the stuff and then i get to the point where you say there are planes now at air force base named nightwatch that engines are on and spinning as we speak 247 ready to sweep the president into the air so we can carry out a nuclear war. >> and this is the steel of the totality of the program in these programs would boggle your mind that at the peak across the country there were more than 100

federal government bunkers hidden away for various agencies for various government officials ranging from raven rock, mount leather, the presidents mean bunker in the norad bunker in cheyenne mountain colorado made famous by the movie wargames with matthew broderick. those are freestanding cities built inside hollowed out mountains. capable of supporting thousands of people inside of raven rock in mount whether and norad. there were dozens in scores of smaller bunkers hidden around the rest of the country. fema, the agency that runs most of these programs during the cold war and still today, has bunkers in places like denton, texas and thomasville, georgia

and bethel, washington, denver colorado and these bunkers would serve as regional hubs around the country beyond the bunkers we had a fleet of navy ships and the uss northampton the presidential floating white houses want a converted aircraft carrier and one converted cruiser and one of them always off the atlantic host sometimes in the chesapeake and sometimes off the atlantic coast through the 1960s and 1970s ready to receive the president if he was evacuated by helicopter from washington, staffed with nuclear war officers able to carry out war at sea for months on end. >> i'm glad to hear about this because it sounded like something the aircraft got to do but this is a navy town.

>> navy had its role and the air force had a plane or there were four of them known as the nightwatch planes, the presidents doomsday planes can for did 740 sevens in the most expensive plane that the aircraft runs. it's these massive airborne command posts that the president would use for nuclear war and one of these planes is used as we are sitting here saturday in april 2018 and 1 of these planes is sitting on a runway off at air force base fully staffed and its engines are turning in a good turn out take off in less than 12 minutes and could rendezvous with the president wherever he is and lead war from the sky and three days at a time. if the president can't make it aboard the nightwatch planes from 1961 until 1992 we kept

another airborne command post in the air 24 hours a day 365 days a year for 31 years and there it was known as the looking glass plane. it was three planes, not the same plane flying for 30 years. aboard each of those eight and half hour shifts for 355 days a year there was a one star general who was designated to be at everyone else in every decision-maker and every policymaker on the surface of the planet was killed the one star general aboard the looking guess plane would still remotely launch all of the nations surviving's icbms and provide the launch orders to the nations suffering hidden around the world. the. >> these are the pilots that

have a patch over there i increase there's a nuclear flash that would blind the exposed i they could still switch over and fly. how do they get me one of these cards? >> this is -- what is so fascinating is diving into this history how quickly these plans would break down. they look look well carefully thought out on paper but what turns out is that the plans were in almost every instance kept too secret to be much use. people working in adjacent offices wouldn't necessarily know who was part of these plans and who wasn't. i tell the story in the book of aaron sorkin who was doing the

research for what ultimately becomes the american president in the west wing he meets with george stephanopoulos, itasca medications director, and george shows him what aaron first thanks is a bus pass that he carries in his wallet but the nuclear war in evacuation card that tells him where he should go to be picked up by helicopter. it is his get out of nuclear war free card. aaron incorporates this into an episode deputy chief of staff josh lyman gets one of these cards and spend the day or the episode worried about what happens if i go and my colleagues to go. onset is a taped episode dede myers who was the press secretary and a consultant on the west wing pulls aaron aside and says i want you to know that this episode is baloney because no one has these cards in the

white house and aaron is sitting there like weight, you never knew you weren't going to be saved in nuclear war and your boss, george, was? [laughter] >> i understand that we need to have continuity of government and know about the 20th amendment and who it passes to and so on but who will provide for continuity for the justice system and so on? they are fighting the nuclear war but keeping the domestic piece. >> yeah, this is one of the things the becomes so interesting is taking about the way the modern presidency and our modern government has been shaped by planning for nuclear war in ways that we don't really understand. the 25th amendment in the presidential succession act a creation of the cold war and the

recognition that the united states can no longer afford to be in a position where we do not know the nex president in line . for the first 150 years of american history we didn't have a very good presidential successor system. for more than 40 years rather than four decades we didn't have a vice president in place. either the vice president had died or the vice president had succeeded into the presidency and we didn't have a mechanism for replacing the vice president midway through a term so the vice presidency would sit empty and if congress was out of session and no speaker in the house then it's entirely possible that if something happened to the president we wouldn't know who had been

president. you have these moments where, you know, the communication and continuity around the president didn't exist. in 1935 when fdr goes off to dedicate the hoover dam his motorcade gets lost on the way back to las vegas and the president disappears for the afternoon. no one knows where he is, how to get in touch with him or where within a three state radius he might ask to appear. it harry truman in 1925 takes over as vice president and the vice president didn't receive any secret service protection. they wandered unnoticed and unmolested around washington on his own schedule because no one could imagine needing a vice president very quickly. as long as you could get in touch with him later in the day, maybe tomorrow morning, how quickly can you need a vice

president? that begins to condemn this time and space around the presidency and begins to condense as nuclear weapons arrive in decision-making and communication tool require us to have minute by minute hour by hour awareness of the president and the becomes quickly clear that after how tenuous that line of succession is. we think of the president as a person we elect on the first tuesday after the first monday in november every four years. the office of the presidency actually encompasses about 300 people and so the vice president and president and speaker of the house and president pro tem of the congress each of those officials have their own line of succession and sometimes 15 or 25 people long. in the event of a catastrophic attack on washington you would end up with this odd assortment

of people popping up across the country declaring themselves the new leaders of the united states. people like the un ambassador or uk for the ambassador to the uk and people like the us attorney for the northern district of texas in the top federal prosecutor in north texas and the head of the department of energy savanna river operation center in savannah, georgia. these are the people who would lead the noted states in the event of an attack on washington. it would be a surprise to most americans as you can name any of the officials that i just named like you are ahead of about 99.9% of america. there is this whole shadow government that still exists ready for the attack that we

hope never comes. raven rock, mount weather, norad, all still staffed 24 hours a day, through 65 days a year and many of these facilities have been updated and expanded and in some cases pretty dramatically since 911. hundreds of millions of dollars of new communications and staffing equipment and you have these odd tension in these facilities between these incredibly secret classified government facilities and the fact these are regular government office buildings. the raven rock cafeteria is run i the choctaw indian tribe as part of a minority government contract set-aside program. at the norad bunker in the

center of the mountain if you get all the way inside the mountain there is a subway best food franchise as part of the food court for the staff and in my mind the guest movie part of the book focuses on the food worker survives nuclear war because it happens to be his or her shift that day and keeps making a 5-dollar-foot longs as the missiles rained down around them. >> better than survival biscui biscuits. >> exactly. [laughter] >> i will not get into one of these shelters but the liberty bell is. >> this is part of a becomes so fascinating about this is what you learn about the character of a country as they think about these plants. almost every major country has

some version of these plans and the uk's system their bunkers scattered across the united kingdom all had boxed china tea sets inside the bunkers does not even nuclear war would stop the british tradition of high tea. canada in their main monger in canadian forest outside of ottawa it looks similar to one of these american bunkers huge multi -- hundreds of people includes a vault for canadian national bank gold reserves as well as a cbc radio station that would be the main link to the population. -- >> as well as maple syrup. >> and in the station after

nuclear war you just don't want to hear nuclear war so they had a fully stocked vinyl jazz record library that someone sent down and pulled out what are the jazz records that we should have for the people of canada after nuclear war. in the united states you end up with some of these same exercises going on and what are the things that we want to preserve for the future of the country. when we begin to talk about how do you save america in a becomes this extra essential question of what is america. are you trying to save the president or trying to save the three branches of government or are you trying to sav preserve e historical totem that has found us together generation by generation. at the national archives they decided that they would save the

declaration of independence before they save the constitution which is a fascinating moment to stop and think about what america means and it's the declaration and not the constitution. at the national gallery of art they rank the order of the nation's paintings and figure out what are the paintings that we should preserve in the event of a surprise attack on washington. the top one being the one leonardo da vinci that exists in the western hemisphere. at the library of congress they come up with a list of their artifacts and archives and documents so they know that they will save lincoln's gettysburg address before they save george washington's military commission. as you said my favorite detail in the entire book is that the

cold war there was a specially trained team of park rangers in philadelphia. it was evacuate the liberty bell. i love again the idea of the park rangers driving off into the mountains of appalachia with the liberty bell singing in the back and arriving at mount weather or wherever they word me and no, no, i swear the crackles they are before we left philadelphia. [laughter] >> the national difference is that the popular first thing to do in beijing is to go around tiananmen square and in the shops there are big doors and steps to go down and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people could dive down under the farm if there was going to be a nuclear war with russia or america but in china there was meant that everyone got coverage never had more than about a few thousand shelter.

>> and that has become the part of the ark of the cold war for us. the macabre joke in the books title of the government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of us die is that we did start out in the 1950s with these incredibly ambitious plans to save most of the country. we would have the survival biscuits and the backyard paula childers and some of your parents had followed shelters remember neighbors who did from going up in the 50s and 60s. what happened was nuclear weapons got faster and went from bombers to missiles and went from atomic bombs to thermonuclear bombs and we went from a few hundred in a few thousand two ultimately tens of thousands of warheads and by the end of the cold war in the 1980s it was illogical to think that any meaningful chunk

of the population would be able to evacuate into these bunkers and so the government plan and mission shrunk from what they were doing eisenhower days to this big national attempt at evacuation two of the plans really are still today which is a very small number of high-ranking government officials whisked away to these bunkers. by the way, without their families -- this is one of the things that becomes such a tension over the course of the cold war is this gap between what the plans look like in the paper and how we as humans would probably respond to these situations that by the way this is not an unforeseen but a problem that was literally printed out in the first

evacuation drill operation alerts 1954 when the president, his cabinet and other secretaries took off for about a rather and the wives of the cabinet state back in washington to play rummy for the afternoon. i found a newspaper article that described it as a very chilly game as the wives waited for their husbands to come back from the nuclear war that they were not going to attend and this becomes something that pops up regularly through the war where warren when became's chief justice of the supreme court a young officer comes over from the office of emergency planning and hands him that stephanopoulos get out of jail free card with his evacuation instructions and says i don't see a card here for mrs. warren

and the person breaking them says mr. chief justice you have to understand you are one of the 2000 most important leaders in the united states so you get the card. he says i have good news then for the 2001st most important person because i'm not going to evacuate enhanced back his card and never danced to participate. this is still true today. i had someone that i talked to for the book was part of the during the obama years we had the helicopter that would find him wherever he was and evacuate him and me i've got two young daughters and people think that i'm going to is that helicopter lands at my daughter's soccer game on a saturday morning or the school that i'm just gonna

wave goodbye to my family and hop on the helicopter and disappear and i was like, what this sounds like is when that evacuation order comes you have to be really sure that it will be nuclear war if you going to evacuate because regardless of whether it is or isn't there is not much of a family for you to come home to "after words". >> is a way around the neighborhoonavalacademy some coa motto if you want peace prepare for war and this is clearly preparing for war and maybe it's a constructive thing to prevent war although in another slogan could be if you prepare for war you will get what you prepare for. >> i do think that i talk about this in the book there are these fascinating moments where the presidents drilled this constantly during the cold war. every president during the cold war went aboard those nightwatch

planes and would sit there and go through a nuclear war drill and they would go to these bunkers and this these executing the nuclear football and it's something the president is trained on before their sworn in so they spent the morning of january 20th before their sworn in going through the nuclear war plans and getting fully briefed on it because at 12:01 you have to be ready to launch nuclear war if that's what comes. what becomes so clear over the course of the cold war is that this planning these drills really caused presidents to reckon with how terrible nuclear war actually would be and that the key moment in the cold war like the cuban missile crisis and like the early 1980s of incredible tension in the reagan

years that the idea of how bad nuclear war would be in the idea that gone from these drills really has caused them to take a step back from nuclear war and this becomes one of the things the scenes of the book that i like is the way this has shaped our modern world in ways that we just don't imagine and that our modern world today both in the physical world and the mutual world is primarily a product of the nations nuclear war planning of the cold war and the internet grew out of the pentagon's desire for decentralized communication system that would control and survive nuclear war and that the interstate highway system and the physical backbone of the united states was originally entitled the interstate and defense highway

act. eisenhower wanted to speed the evacuation of urban areas and to speed the nation's ability to move material around the country but the first chat message program, the forerunner of aol instant messenger, facebook messenger, the runner up to her in texting began in a fema bunker as a way for the government to communicate about stockpile limits and conditions across the united states that the reason that it started out as character limited and the original 140 character limit was put in place because having worked in government the coders didn't want government people to write memos in the chat programs

so they set a character limit on it to ensure that you are only communicating the absolute critical information. >> beautiful. i love the meticulousness of the research and i'm sure the audience has a lot of questions i see a microphone right in the middle there. the book is raven rock and it's got a great logo on the front that shows a tunnel going into the mountain and a really dark looking raven perched over it. it couldn't be more telling and that was the governments on simple -- >> that's the actual symbol for raven rock. >> wonderful. do you have any questions besides what the hell? [laughter] >> mike, ray back there. >> this was an entertaining

discussion. i wonder what sort of constraints and obstacles you face with a classification of all this material because i can imagine the stuff being classified beyond our ability to comprehend. >> yeah, what is fascinating about this is most of this is declassified now and these facilities in the history of them has been declassified but what is so interesting about it is all of these plans still exist. the book is a history of what these plans used to be and so the question is what are they today and what do we know about what the modern analog of these

plans are in the answer is very little. the most secret level of these plans in the modern contact is what is known as enduring constitutional government. ecg, it's the wave of the three branches of government would function together after an emergency and there it's only been within the last couple of years that the phrase ecg has been declassified as the we have no sense of what these plans are except we have little hints and suspicions and one of them is that the emergency plans today super empower some incredibly small group of congress and perhaps a small as one member of congress to act on behalf of the entire legislative branch in an emergency and we know this only because we are familiar with the idea of the presidential designated survivor and the kiefer sutherland about what happens with the member of the cabinets ends up as the president and congress actually also hides away the congressional designated

survivor and under normal circumstances there's no reason why it would be worth saving one member of congress and one member of congress can't do anything and whether 535 can accommodate anything as a separate question but we know that under normal circumstances one can't do anything. there must be some special power that gets vested in that person we don't know that would be in order for an emergency to happ happen. >> i have a two-part question. what event and what kind of event would trigger the evacuation like how sure they have to be in part two is is there district make that decision? >> it's an interesting question because the answer is we don't know it could be anything. we have this -- a national

emergency is whatever the government declares it to be and that is one of the villa challenges in these programs, civil rights perspective we don't have a good sense of what might and how these powers might be activated and what the appeals process might be for how they could unfold. one of the things we do see in these plans is that the -- there is a central tension at the heart of it between the role that we expect of a head of state in the role we expect of a commander-in-chief. you saw play out on 911 where actually president bush did exactly the thing that the president is supposed to do. he was whisked out of the booker

elementary school in sarasota and rush to force air force one and disappeared for the day. he received an enormous amount of criticism on the day because what the country wants is rudy giuliani marching straight down to ground zero and pounding his fist and shaking his fist and declaring we will get you back instead what the president did was he was hidden aboard air force one and whisked from one military base to another and did not appear publicly in the united states until about 9:00 p.m. that evening when he gave a speech back from the oval office. the optics of that for him were terrible that day and yet that

was exactly what he was supposed to do and the military and the secret service wanted him to do that and i talked to the pilot of air force one and talk to the secret service agents who were aboard and they said the president wanted to go back to washington from the first moment that we put them out of the elementary school and he pushed all day to go back but it wasn't his call. we did what we were supposed to do to protect him that day. they were like thank god he never gave us a direct order to take them back to washington because we don't know what we would have done if we were confronted with a direct order from the commander-in-chief to do something other than what we were trained to do and this becomes this real central tension throughout the cold war of the presidents who would be encouraged to stay at their desks until the last possible minute to remain in command and the deputies who would be whisked off and the actual

successors in an emergency. >> and secretary of defense i recall when out of the pentagon and picked up a stretcher and started serving as a stretcher barrier and he's remembered with admiration for doing the wrong thing. >> but donald rumsfeld stayed at the pentagon that entire day which was something that he received enormous applauds for and bonded him with the military. he literally went to the rubble and helped carry people out of the rubble and he was the exactly wrong thing for the secretary of defense to do and it wasn't until about three hours later that the deputy secretary was with text off to raven rock by helicopter. it was far outside the 15 minute evacuation window that we think of these plans operate through

the cold war. i think we had time for one last quick question. >> two minutes left. >> the really quick question is do you have any idea of hourly rate for running for making sandwiches inside the facility is? >> depends on before or after the war, i would imagine. [laughter] >> but i was wondering if we know anything about people who were brought out to these facilities now just in case things like -- i have a family member who always misses the inauguration day because he's stuck somewhere and i was wondering how many people qualify off-site just to just in case -- >> in round numbers is about 10000. incredibly small and also incredibly large and obviously

far more than just the presidents and the cabinet and if the support personnel and military personnel and the key figures from across the government agency. >> it's not a matter of if this happens or if you think this is eminent but sometimes it is just something is happening today and in case it's incredibly expensive as you can see from me talking about this. this is literally a product that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of the cold war and involves today in rough numbers we don't really know somewhere between two and $10 billion a year of black classified spending. >> i love to our conversation because it left out a

fascinating detail in this book which is loaded with superb research so thank you very much. garrett graff -- and raven rock. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> that was a look at the emergency evacuation plans for high-ranking government officials with garrett graff, author of raven rock. were watching the tv on c-span2, live coverage of the annapolis festival. we will be back with more shortly. >> for nearly 20 years in depth on the tv has featured the nation's best known nonfiction writers for life conversations about their books. this year it was a special project we are featuring best-selling fiction writers permit the program in depth fiction addition. join us live sunday may 6 at noon eastern with thriller fiction author, david but dottie. his other novels include endgame, the six, absolute power and became a major motion picture. he's written six novels for younger readers which included the finisher, the keeper and the

width of the world. during the program we will be taking your phone calls, tweets and facebook messages. a special series in depth fiction addition with author sunday may 6, live from noon eastern on the tv on c-span2. >> is a look at the authors recently featured on the tvs "after words": ...

the 16th paragraph, the 16th pay portrayed as a dominion -- the encounter he said he was one of the gentleman, and -- that's the -- to me it's like robbing a bank. it's so dishon. when i was with the "washington post" during watergate, i would have been fired if i did anything like that. no question. that's how the media have changed, and what i do is i present specific examples, whether it's about the collusion

allegations or any other issue. and on collusion, the "washington post" ran a story, august 14th last year, which quoted e-mails that had been turned over by the white house to congressional committees, among the various campaign aids, manafort, pop top louse was trying -- pop don louse was trying to get them to go to russia and meet russian leeway and manafort said, no. and this disten said, we're not going to do this, and manafort said we have to warn trump nod to do this, and manafort said i want this guy to make sure that nobody in the campaign has anything to do with russians. >> i never read that until -- >> unbelievable. >> have you seen that anywhere? >> no. it's ignored. by the "washington post" and even the "washington post" story headlines, trump aide tried to get aides to good to russia.

not the real story, which was trump aides don't want to have nothing do with russia. >> "after words" airs on booktv every saturday at 10:00 t 9:00 p.m. eastern and pacific. all previous"after words" programs are available to watch on the web site, booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> beginning now from the annapolis book festival, you're going to hear from author amy sis sin, author of -- siskind talk about temporary politics.

[inaudible conversations] >> hello and walk to the i aannapolis book festival. we're going to have a discussion of politics here in the trump era, and then we'll take some questions from you. to my right is jacob hacker, who is a professor of political science at yale. the author of a number of books, but american amnesia is the book we'll be touching on today, and amy siskind, who is the cofounder of new agenda, chase

nonprofit that is dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls, and she is the author of "the list," and we're just going open up the discussion now and see where we go. jacob, i want to start with you. your book, american amnesia, is about a mixed economy. the importance and the success of active government in improving the lives of americans. we have seen over the last year or so now a really systemic effort to degrade government institutions, but also at the same time, paradoxically, one of the things you talk about in your book is the power of these

corporate institutions, the chamber of commerce, but at the same time we're seeing on the one hand the epa being hollowed out. the state department being hollowed out and also seeing the priorities of institutions like the claimber of commerce, whether it be tariffs or other things, fall by the wayside, too. what is happening in how do you as a plate cat scientist who has written this book begin to make sense of what we see happening in the world right now? >> thank you, judd, and thank you for coming out. judder didn't mention but i believe he is a graduate of the key school, which is wonderful. i wrote by american amnesia "with my co-author paul and came it back in 2016. and at the time i was around talking about it, i always used to tell people that sort of the famous line about book publishing, which is the period behalf book is published is the calm before the calm.

and there was a little but of storm but then, of course, a tsunami hit, the election of donald trump, and paul and i have been working on it afterwards for essentially the last year. we wrote a version in september and then just seemed like two -- things were too much in forward-looking statements and we finally at the point where we feel like we can take stock of what happened since trump was elected. i want to make a couple of points that are really important. as judd said the book is basically about why you need government to be a rich, healthy, happy society. the important role it plays, and why the system that we have in the united states has become much less effective over the last 30 or 40 years, and the story can be basically summed up as the republican party has gotten increasingly extreme and has managed to still get elect despite that.

for a variety of reasons, and the business community, partly bus of the republican party's move to the right, has become much less willing to support and invest in positive sum solutions, much more out for itself, whether that's the chamber of commerce, whether it's individual sectors, the koch brothers who have been pushing aggressively to try to move the republican party to the right, and as we say in the book, the koch bars -- it's a story basically not of them coming to the republican party but the republican party coming to them, and to their antiregulatory, tax are -- tax-cutting agent mitchell sense if you look at the first -- my sense if if you look at the first year and two months 500 days -- feels like a lifetime in many ways -- i'm reminded of an evaluation i received when i was a new assistant professor at yale and again promsingly,

professor hacker, if i had 15 minutes to live i'd want to spend it in your class. because that way it would seem like an hour. in. [laughter] this 500 days seems like a millennium, and all i would say is that really briefly, is that the -- what we have seen is what i increasingly have been calling plutocratic populism, the priority the congressam g.o.p. have dominated what congress has done, or almost done as in the case of trying to repeal and replace the affordable care act. the populism, yes, coming back in the form of more saber rattling around trade and of course it's always been there in the form of aggressive moves on immigration, but the populism often takes the form not of substantive policy but of the

ginning up of outrage. think what make -- i think we underestimated -- we kind of got the basic story right about what happened to the g.o.p. and the business community, but i think we underestimated the degree to which this rested on a lot of ethnonationallists appeals that trump basically -- if we had dog whistle politics on race, now trump just got out and managed to get out the bullhorn, and so that kind of ethnonationallist and anti-immigrant appeal, those basically have become more important in some ways in holding together a fragile coalition, the donor part of the g.o.p. and the white working class vote whore were the key to trump's victory. i think it's scary for a couple of reasons. one, the nature of these

appeals. frightened me. second of all it means i think a lot hinges on the selection because to the extent that the congressional g.o.p. is signed this faustian bargain -- paul ryan has signed the faustian bar begin with trust and there's not much puck barb on the threats he posed to democracy or the more extreme elements of his agenda, and so if we don't have an electoral correction, i think we'll have a really hard time working this out within our constitutional structure and our already weakened democracy. >> thanks. aimy, kind of pivoting off that. your book is quite extraordinary to read through because it's literally just a day-by-day recitation of everything that happened in the first year in 2017, and i think that jake was kind of referencing the idea

that it seems like the time kind of moves slowly politically, it seems like -- as you read your book you against the sense, it could have been that long, and also seems like a long time prior that these things happened. and i think one thing that a lot of people struggle with, because of the pace of the news, is how they should interact, how informed should one be be on day-to-day basis some as someone who comp piles this list -- your book is called "the list." you're doing that. what do you think for your average kind of informed, concerned citizen, how closely do you think people should be following this and there is a danger in following this -- what is happening to door closely?

>> thank you. first off, just to set the table, started keeping the list just after the election so the first 52 weeks are captured in the book. what caught my attention and led for me to start to write things down was that some of the things you described as well, that the uprise of trump reminds me of of the uprise of history explore the populism he had very effectively, start withing the first campaign event, calling the mexican rapists and galvanizing people and as he was talking after the election, as he was having his victory lap, just to take you down a very not nice memory lane, the very first week of the list he was attacking snl and the cast of hamilton, and there were record number of hate crimes being reported by the southern poverty law center. so, already in that first week or so, people were reacting as

sort of an affirmation of the worst of us, that this was now okay. what i read about when i read but a authoritarian regimes is what the uprising would feel like and what our country would undergo and i use the analogy of us bag frog in water coming to boil, degree by disease, -- by degree and when you read the book you'll say, my god, this actually happened. to capture is not the news. that was confusing when i started doing the list of people, talk about the republican versus democrat over, say, the fight to repeal obamacare. this is capturing everything that is not normal. this is the real world example how we normalize thursdayings, laweek was tax day and last year people screamed bloody murder for not filing his taxes

and he is still the first moder den day present not file and this year it bare lay whimper. can give you hundred examples of how we normalized the not normal. so this is the construction between democracy and becoming an authoritarian state and all the maximum has taken to deconstruct what turns out to be a very fragile democracy. so much we learned about in high school history class, these checks and balances, that we studied about, were more norms than laws and things like a candidate filing their tax returns, because everybody else has, was a norm and not a law. there are things underway now after this is over to change that and codify things and applied that, but in terms of the media and how we concern the news and that's the importance of the project and i do it at theweeklylist.org and the first

week's entry was nine items. the second week was 18 items, and now we're up to over 160 he. i thought it was a good idea to do it. the list now provides what our media is notice providing is a very granular view of things that are not normal and a trail map back to normalcy. and the things that our media tends to do, for example, two weeks ago when all the news was breaking but pruitt, it's very exciting, i'm sure, if youer in the media to get the next scoop what he did do and didn't do. so spent a whole week in the media, two weeks other, 80% of the news coverage was on the pruitt scandal and that week was one over the longest, 156 not normal items and only 20 of them had anything to do with pruitt. the number one that i put on that week's list was on the quiet friday, trump's department of homeland security announced they were going to keep a list

of journalists and bloggers, and that happened on a friday afternoon, as many of the stories do, and got almost no major media coverage the follow can week and that is a hallmark of authoritarianism. the other thing the media has not covered well and it put at the start of the lister is whatting happening to marginalized communities, women and people with disabilities and this is also a hallmark of author tear yawnism. understand has disappeared on climate change and science and gradually making people that aren't white, straight, christian and male, disappearing. two weeks ago he took down the information on breast cancer and low-income health care availabilities for women. he has taken the lgbtq out of -- are acts week after week to hide the marginalizes communities and why does he do that? because if you don't exist and you don't have a voice you don't

need rights and protections. sessions is trying to takeway the word sexual orientation from the 1964 silverado rights act. -- civil rights act. we are going back have a century to remove rights. and we have seen the staffing of our executive branch, which is now only half full, and even those people he is firing and constantly trying to replace with people that are less qualified, if that was possible. but the people that are running our executive branch are basically deconstructing the agencies they run from within. mick mulvaney is asking for a budget of zero for the consumer protection bureau. almost agency has called for a drastic cut in their bug and a grass drastic cut in staffing and all the corruption in each branch. so slowly what trump has don on

a broader scale -- and the media covers this but tan general sally. they tangentially. they'll cover sinclair broadcasting and then forget. it capture how media has been shut down, moved into conservative hands and things have been silenced, basically what trump is doing, if you look from 10,000 feet back down -- and i to the his out rhetorically at my book event -- what's the republican agenda for in the next six months? they don't have one. that's not normal to our democracy. even if i don't philosophically agreed with the republicans, want them to show me their vision and policy agencies and have the argues considering that and come to a conclusionful right now it's party of one deciding everything that is going on in our country in his regime. i-if people don't agree with him, like cohn 0, mcmaster or the long list on rachel mad yous

war, they're gone. he i surrounded by sycophantses and they tell him he this greatest. you're the greatest communications director you don't need to replace hope hicks. the thing that will probably save us all is he also thinks he is his own best lawyer so we can talk about that at the end. [applause] >> one thing that seems to motivate your work is the necessity of being clear-eyed out about what's happening to not feel like really things that aren't normal, are normal. do you think that, though, there is a risk if things seem too chaotic of just really people kind of cowering and seeking to distance themselves from it and

maybe at the end be less likely to participate and engage and how do you resolve that tension? >> so that was my biggest fear in the early months when people were still saying, give him a chance, and our media, every time he was reading off a teleprompter without vomiting on himself was saying, now he is president. that has stopped, and the american people to our credit, i had great fear that it would be like the naomi schulman poem, of nice people watching the jews get taken down the street by the gestapo. instead our country has had a major uprising and the first signs of that were the women's march, where 4 million people showed up and another million people showed up this year. people asked me, trump must have done something good in your book in his first year, and i said, yes, he started the #metoo movement and also started the great -- second huge social

movement, what is happening with our teens and gun violence, so, there's a "washington post" article two weeks ago that one in five people in our country have marched since trump took office. people are engaged, and i think like my become, the construct of that engagement is not around democrat versus republican and that's why the media is be thing election so wonk it's not just dem crams and republicans showing up to vote. see people at the polls i never see show up to the poll. people who are not engaged in the political system, who likely didn't even vote in 2016, are engaged and not as republicans, democrats per se but as a fight for our democracy and our values. people are generally upset by the attacks on muslim americans and this is how trump keeps the 35% engaged. first the muslim ban, then the transgender military ban and then the mexican rapists and the

caravans. the country has an idea what is wrong but the 35% does not. the reason a lot of people vote for him is because they wanted to be white america of the 195s and it's not going to be. but i think our country has had an uprising, and i think people are engaged, and i think the opposite of what might be intuitive is being enengaged and reading information and being active in an indivisible group or reading on facebook or twitter is actually empowering, not disempowering. people who cower are disempowered. >> jacob, turning back to you. kind of pivoting off of what amy was talking about, about the sort of counterreaction to trump and what we have seen. one thing that's been interesting to me and saw it in the election with bernie

sanders, who identifies as social e socialist, rather than a democrat, at least in between the elections, and then also sort of a nascent rise of the democratic socialist party. there was a representative in virginia in the mid-year -- the off-we're election who won running as a socialist. how does that fit into what you're talking about in your book? is that going -- are some things being suggested there going far their that essentially you're positing is the optimal level of government or is that part of what you think is a -- the response or the correction that does need to occur? >> well, i think -- i would say two things. one is it's been

really striking how unequal the polarization of the parties has been. republicans have moved dramatically to the right on all the educators we have, and whenever i give talksly to out graphs showing this. then i think, it's just -- who are you going to believe, the statistics or your own lying eyes, right? it's abundantly clear the party was become much more conservative, and paul ryan, you know, just stepping down, and apparently taking umbrage at the part of the bible that talks about social justice. he was considered the -- no one could say moderate with a straight face, he was an establishment. if grew back to leader before him, boehner, one of the most conservative people when he came in and when he left he was constantly in tears because his party was not lit -- listening

to him and the party has moved to the right and gotten away with it because of the use of these appeals. amy's list is so powerful, but we should understand that this is rooted -- this predates trump. the -- trump has taken it to a new level and poses a new threat but it's possible because he is building on this transformation that had been taking place. on the left, really quickly, i mean, i don't think of -- what i think you should understand is that the populist surge is a worldwide -- among rich countries is a worldwide surge and takes both right wing and more progressive variances, and reflects the reality that most persons on both sides feel that the political system is not responsive to them but instead responsive to interest groups and elites, and so i think there's actually a lot to be said for this critique, and

sanders brings it -- makes it in terms that are obviously much more small d and large d democratic. what i would say about where the parties are going so far i have not seen really much sign that this progressive shift within the democratic party has gone in crazy directions. for example, the idea that these tax cuts were way too skewed toureds the affluent seems pretty straightforward the fact that medicare is a much more effective program than delivering health care that is for aable than private insurance seems undeniable. so, arguing -- here i think i would just say one thing bat what amy said about the democrats and republicans arguing about health care is normal. but republicans trying to essentially take health care away from millions of americans

through a whole series of legislative subterfuge, it's not that normal, and the two most unpopular piece offers legislation of the last 40 years are the tax cuts that passed, and the healthcare bill that didn't pass. by comparison, the affordable care act was 20 points more popular than the republicans' repeal and replace bill. there's plenty of room for progressive al concerns and amy said that's not fundamentally what is driving this mobilization, it's less policy than trying to ensure our democracy is vibrant. >> giving the stakes as someone who has followed this for some time, have you been surprised there haven't been more

organized and effective opposition within the congressional republican caucus? there are more people objecting even when -- i think it's probably not reasonable to expect them to object to toe the tax cut beam, for example, which is in line what they have beens a vow indicating for, for many years -- advocating for, for many years. when you have the tariffs which were just oppose -- or things that trump might talk about along the lines of his plans for -- his ideas about social security that might be a little bit different, at least rhetorically, than the -- have you been surprised there isn't more resistance to that and more people speaking out or is that something you expect? >> well, when i first started writing about the porlarization of the party wise have been surprised. at this point it's very hard to surprise me on this front. i do think it's worth noting

that the democratic party basically had a huge internal pushback within the party, the democratic leadership council, that had essentially all of the biggest stars of the party, al gore, bill clinton, of that era, involved with it, and when i talk about this, i often say, then there's the republican leadership illinois and show an empty slide. there's no one there a think call the main street partnership, run by a wonderful historian who wrote a great op-ed basically saying the party needs to really propose measures that will help working americans,, and there's no truth behind that vision. so it is worth asking, why has there been so little pushback within the party? so i think with regard to policy issue think it's a story about how the -- those who really believe in these conservative

policy aims are organized and have been able to shape the primary election, have put a lot of money on the table. there's the koch network is essentially a shadow republican party and in a context in which republican heards an electoral edge which worries me for the fall, they were table do this. what you're asking is why have republicans allied themselves so closely with trump. why is the the only politicians that are pushing back are politicians that share in common they're either retiring or have retired already or are ensconced in think tanks and the answer, i think, is that there's a logic to this. essentially for the party to get its policy pry ores done, it has to work with trump and at the same time trump has really solidified and activated this voting base that has always been

there but is much to stronger and it was important to the key party rice as well. i think just there's a logic to it. if trump goes, the g.o.p. goes, and so i think they're kind of -- they're bound in this kind of -- could be a suicide pact but they're bound in this really tight kind of jump together, coalition, and i think it's why the democratic threat is great, is because our whole system of government relies on congress being the primary means of providing accountability for the presidency, and when there is no accountability there, it only can come through elections and the movements around them. >> i'd like to answer your question and maybe we can take questions from the audience. i don't see this has a -- i disagree this is a typical republican sticking with trump and democrats. i think this is a period in time

when starting the early weeks of my his when jason achieve fit -- achieve fit said he wasn't going to run again and then literally left town. and then followed by darrell issa, followed by gowdy and then paul ryan. all these top republicans are literally leaving town, which you have to ask your, why is that happening? over 40 house republicans are not running, and it's not as if their work with trump on aning a. when i throw out the question, there's nothing moving through congress that indicates the republicans are accomplishing anything. so the question becomes, why are they not putting in that check and balance, things that are happenings to dissolve or government? why is mitch mcconnell pushing back on grassley when hey wanted to put michigan? place that trump canned fire

mueller. these -- can't fire mueller. these things keep happening again and again. they're like characters in the book. lindsey graham within with amy klobuchar and john mccain to assure our allies because since trump has taken office we have alienates our allies and cozying up to authoritarianism. and we have a defunct state depth. so all these things are happening and it's not as if the republicans are feeling lick they're in the right of things and i they stick with trump it's going to work. they're literally not running, and some of them are leaving early. so, i -- you can hypothesize now and see why later on, but it could very well be that some of these people have taken large amounts of russian money in the past and that's heavily detailed in my book as well.

that gets reported and then in the chaos, we forget about it. or the fact that russia also has e-mails of every republican that ran, and they didn't choose to use those and weaponize them the way they did with the democrats. we have to ask a fundamental question this election, this is not but to the issues. this is really about a very important check and balance because our government, our legislative branch, has largely let us down and they might be personally gaining on nut the margin, but maybe not. a lot of them are just leaving shop aling to because -- altogether about the don't want to be affiliated but the stink will stay with them. we cannot characterize this as republican and democrat. >> if anyone in the audience has a question for either of our panelist, you can make your way.

there's a microseven towards the back of the room. but amy, at someone who has been tracking dismiss continues to continue it and you mentioned the scope of the number of things on your list has changed. do you think that there has been fundamental changes to the nature of the trump presidency from the beginning? is it fundamentally different today than it was on day one or is it just there's been more time to -- for more things to happen? i'm just interested in your perspective on this. >> trump carries but two things. staying in power and making money. everything he does is about those two things. and the first week of the list he was attacking snr and "the new york times." he still attacking snl and the "new york times." still calling done using the mexican rapist metaphor to

excite his base. he has not changed but he has been successful in deconstructing the checks and balances around him and the norms where he can get away with more and very quickly he -- as i mentioned, he has seized power and there's just right now literally if you think about what is being discussed, the tariffs, bombing syria the he did a week after saying we should pull out the syrian troops and then a week of bad news cycle -- he does this often -- he bombed syria which he had didn't exactly 51 weeks before and what happened that sneak a bad news cycle. so there's one person making decisions now. and that should alarm us all because it's not how our democracy functions. >> well, we have a few questions go ahead, sir. >> yeah, this i'd like to nye what professor hacker and missies kin's thoughts about -- missies kin'sedy that the pollutecratic movement has been going on plutocratic has been

going on long before trump came into office and it's been a boa constrictor tyingenning in and whether trump is just a puppet of -- autocracy, and dominating the country. >> i don't think he's just a puppet. as you rightly said, this has been going on for a long time. paul and i wrote a book above american am niece should, calls winner take all politics, how washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class the basic idea was there was a big shift in favor of those at the top, and that this had just affected both parties, though it was much more

intense within the republican party. this plutocracy does bind and explain some of what is going on. a big part of the money that's behind republicans this fall, though i happily agree with amy the movement of people that we're seeing is a powerful counterweight and remains relatively optimistic. we can talk more but that, about the election. also is the reason why -- so i agree with amy that a lot of this is dinktive to distinct to pumps policies and demands and republicans were more likely to work with them because he was key in achieving deregulation of finance and other sectors, notely with regard to the environment, and tax cuts for the affluent, and cutting back and repealing the affordable

care act. those aims were -- trump couldn't achieve his core legislative goals without those members of congress either. finally, though -- this the side i don't think gets mentioned as much -- to the extend they're pursuing an agenda, which is manifestly unpopular, it means they're doubling down on these kind of appeals. so we can understand the eggth ethnoimaginist appeal and showing a torn internal conflict is partly understandable because of the fact that they're pursuing such an unpopular agenda. that's the dark side pluto thattic populism and you mention ed mick mulvaney, he said i only met with lobbyist is they contributed to my campaign and that's the system that existed.

there's a really important way in which this is a really intensification of that. when he said that, i was remind are to the joke that a gaff is when a politician tells the truth. >> i have a slightly different point of view and this pert of time and how unusual it is. one thing i have been keyed off -- i made the political -- i -- cambridge analytica and what role they played and now the news coming out is that in 20 4 bannon and the mercers cost out a role and the idea was to use the deep state and finding a strong man and testing the appetite for a strong man. first they tried to cavs -- cried with cruz and crust lot of

and then they trite trump. trump is rising up from and the people he has gravitated to are strong men. from the time he took offers, and to more recently, if you think who our allies now and who he form his alliances with and who he is comfortable with, it's people that are dictators or authoritarian regimes. look at it slightly differently. he is comfortable devising thump woe until spheres, put put -- putin has this sphere, and the chinese said we won't have term limits and he thought that was a good idea and congratulates el-sisi for winning the election, and he called putin when he was told not to call tut putin and congratulated turkey. he doesn't want democracile. i look at it look the lines staying? power and making money.

i don't think it's like a diagram. they coexist with the republicans, like the tax bill that heavily benefited him personally and then he's in on it. and beyond that, we're not even talk us about totally atypical to our democracy is he and miss family are doing business deals all over the world are benefiting from and using the power of our government to advance his own interests and enrich himself, be in panama we they took away the lion of one his hotels and then donald junior going to give a strange speech on foreign policy. how he is doing that, an expert for the u.s. government. and then we find out that part of their properties of are having problem width getting necessary licenses in india. this is a huge clip come trace and our government is being run

by -- autocrats, trump and his family doing much of the powers of our government. so i tend to see this in a different lens of just the normal stuff that the republicans. again, the koch brothers are getting a certain benefit, the mercers get a certain benefit and they overlap. this is well beyond that. i think that's important to recognize. >> okay. i think we're ready for the next question. >> good afternoon, i want to start off by saying for missies kin -- miss siskind i have been following you on twitter with the list and i congratulate you in doing what is clearly a lot of hard work and research. [applause] >> thank you. >> so thank you. i hope you don't wind up feeling lice the historians during the fall of rome. >> what happened to that? i don't want to know. >> me question is, you brought up the sense that the media is not getting it right and that they're following the latest shiny object and neglecting to

pay attention to the deeper troubles that we should be paying attention to. my question is, have you considered engaging media outlets to include parts of the list on a weekly basis as part of what they present to the public? >> you know, i know they all read it. they always send me stirs and say, did you see this? will you include it in the week's list? i think it's used as a tool. i think it's hard, although there's been some change, and i suggest you follow jay rosen, a critic of the media and cal us them out. this ties much of following this as a republican versus democratic construct and it's nos. and people are america are screaming, stop gaslighting us. this is a new time they don't know what to do and there's also

fair amount of hubris. mostly i think "the new york times" has still not taken on their culpability for the article us they wrote leading up to the election, and their coverage has been really arrogant and kind of strange. i think generally -- i think the "washington post" has done a go job, they're trying and they have too cover the news and i have to ask, do i really have to cover his tweets? yes, it's not normal he calls obama, cheatin' obama and lying bill and he is -- this is not normal and we can't lose track of the fact of not being normal. i don't know that there's a way other than the media reading my list and wanting to be part of that and seeing what they missed. i think they're in a period of transition but what they're

missing are the broad themes. we touched on sinclair broadcasting, there's a whole bunch of sinclair broadcasting type themes -- talk about the fact that net neutrality is being dismantled. cambridge an lick to and it's gone -- analytica. and that's gone. and the ickesless was not fair, people slowing up to to vote in north carolina in blue districts and they're voting resulted were not proper and the next district over they were fine. i see these broad themselves. -- themes. they it's the chaos. and they're improving and doing the best they can but it's unusual time. >> okay. next question, please. >> i think that was a really good one, actually. a good answer. i i get angry listening to npr

think can, just call it lying. just say, he was lying. and i'll feel so much better, and the rest of the time i'm like, but i can't turn it off because i need to hear this. which goes to -- thank you for getting me to go back to my psychiatrist and get better medicated and have my hands stop shaking on a monday morning, when it was still coming from medium and the weekly list. okay, it's time to get help. thank you. i do think that the left versus right is more important in a little way but the individual has become more important. the topics you have been talking about. individuals have been standing up and doing a lot more, and i

went to go -- my district is right next to -- in virginia, and i went to go -- when i found out she won issue win to get a hog and i meet a democratic socialize who had just won out in manassas and i've been to the women's march and hi daughter asked me shy could go to the violence march, thant gun violence march because she really wanted to meet emma gonzalez or see her, at least. and i was at -- i'm not trying to toot my own horn but i was as events like dulles airport, and welcoming home my neighbors. and i think that whether you call yourself or republican or democrat, i think it's becoming less important but i've been motivated to do in a way that i

never was before, and i act and i open doors for people and i see that -- >> we have a couple more people. so if you have a question -- >> sorry. guess my question is, does the democrat and republican -- how they represent themselves really matter as much as the day-to-day influence and effect of knowing what is going on around you? >> do you want to -- >> no. i mean, i think the one thing i would say -- is let us hope that this kind of mobilization you discussed will create what george w. bush famously called an accountability moment, and all i would say about the larger

picture here is that we do have to recognize that -- i think the other social movement that has happened recently that drives this home is the teacher strikes. we have to recognize the vital role that government plays and has to play and that in our understandable revulsion at the way a government is being used, let is not forget that is so fundamental to or transformation, from a society that was poor, relatively unhealthy, and relatively uneducated, into one with a high standard of living, long lives and high levels of education, and we need to reclaim that on better terms that's all i would add to the eloquent things you said. >> i would just add, in the forward, which sarah wrote, and she capture -- why you're

feeling how you're feeling and many of us are feeling this way -- when kellyanne conway got on the news and said the crowd size was bigger, i it wasn't just about the lie but them letting us know the control the truth and information, and because we have set anything the stew of gaslighting and lies and fake information and let's just -- the whole countries screaming inside their head, that's a really strange feeling for us, and it's a good thing that the impulse of that is instead of running away and shutting down, people are choosing to fight, resist. [applause] >> go ahead, sir. >> okay. first of all, thank you for the enlightening discussion. this atwo-part question. how are we going to put it back together again and can it be put

backing to again unless you stem the flow of money to k street and getting the american people to motivate themselves and become their own lobbyists. >> hear, hear. >> i wanted to say, i think that the -- this was an argue immigrant head with my editor, we had this perfect democracy and trump came. we did not have a perfect democracy since trump came that is what left to trump. we took our country from the native americans, rose on slavery, things in our country that are less than perfect. what i'm hopeful for is the thursday really low point in america, one our country and our democracy irunder attack, we're going to come out with a new vision of how things should be in place, and sometime iowa need these steps backwards to realize all the things that were broken to get thus to begin with. and i think that the most

encouraging aspect of all this is the uprising of the american people and what will help in the next election, and wont be only that election. i think for me -- people ask, trump gets impeached, pence is worse than trump and as a gay woman i'm not excite evidence but somebody who wants to hang all of us. we have to take back our democracy. have to get rid of this regime and get back to normal and that's why hope my book does in reminding you what our rights we have lost. what mulvaney did, the things he has done to take away the funding for elizabeth warren's consumer financial protection bureau, he stopped going after all the banks. so these are kind of things that there's ten of them a week for mulvaney and the rest of them. we need to look at undoing. >> we have two minutes left. can we sneak in the last

question. >> me question as short one. how big an impact do you think what is going on in america, the fox bubble has had, since there are so many people who think they're informed but as a trainer of hypno therapy they've been brain washed. >> i'm strike struck by the research down on the role of fox. fox is now the moderate alternative to the much more extreme forms of social media that people are consuming, and i do think that bubble and the degree to which it's this toxic stew, it's intensifying these feels of resentsment and hatred and outrage, just very fundment al to the story. the economic review published a study that show that fox was responsible for a three to

six-point additional g.o.p. republican mary inin the 2004 and 2008 election, and that is a pretty remarkable. they used the fact that fox is a different points on the cable dial as a way of sort of random variation, because it turns out that if -- i don't get this -- if you're low on the cable dial, people watch more. that's like a measure of americas unwillingness to move their fingers, i guess. so, apparently you watch 2.5 minutes more of fox if it's on the lower third of the dial a than to the top third of the dial. and they discovered it has this pervasive effect and that's people just on people who are persuadable and to lazy to change the channel and people on the stream, whatever the rest of the immediateways doing, this portion of the mediaing praying

into the same dynamics. fox is fundmental and we tend to neglect that, and i don't if know if itself takes political science to tills anything but it seems to be tell us it really matters. >> i'm more concern about whatting happening beyond fox news with sinclair broadcasting, reaching 72% of homes and for many horn. hes, it's their only sores of information and everything forced propaganda tv. i'm concerned about billionaires buying up web sites in l.a. and the l.a. weekly and web sites in new york, the dma gotham, and gotham isn't shenutting them couple. i'm concerned the coach brothers own tnt and trump is holding up the cl the purchase of cnn and this little thing.we're losing information. information is disappearing

online. and net neutrality has repealed. can't underestimate how important that is because theme who need to see the information don't have the money and they will see sinclair broadcasting and have no money to have internet access. >> on that happy note, i think we'll have to wrap up and i want to thank jacob and amy for being here. thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations]

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depth" has featured the best known nonfiction writers. this year we're featuring best sell fiction writer knows program, dep depth fix -- "in depth" fix. we'll have david baldacci, with the book, fallen. his other novels include end game, the fix, absolute power, which became a major motion picture, plus over 30 novels. ...