because of the hostage crisis. >> how is jimmy carter celtic? >> it is remarkable. these 94 in october, october 1. he notes three years ago he had melanoma and we thought it was the end. i went down to see him and was a day or two before he got immunotherapy which is a new precision medicine that is not like chemotherapy but activate the immune system and three years later, knock on wood, he's as good as ever. he travels and articulate and given a new lease on life. it is a wonderful way -- [applause] >> well, we've not had time for questions because we ran out of time but i hope you think it was an interesting story. i highly recommend this book. stuart eizensta on president carter, thank you. [applause]

>> this year but leave marks the 20th year of bringing you the country's top nonfiction authors and their latest book. find us every weekend on c-span2 or online at booktv.org. , one. >> hello, all. good afternoon. it is good to have you here. thank you for coming in. this is a discussion and a production of the kepler's literary foundation. i'm a member of the events team here at kepler's. kepler start or, kepler's .org, kepler .com, nonprofit organization that brings literature and enlightenment and enhancement of life to everyone here and out to the schools and in various venues across the peninsula. thank you for all your support by virtue of being here you are

supporting kls. thank you for that. i have to ask is it someone in the audience has the bumper sticker downstairs, i work and pay taxes for the wealthy don't have to? [laughter] you are starting us off on a good note. i will ask you to please turn down your cell phones. you don't have to turn them off and if you like to treat we are at kepler's but it's time to introduce our guest. we will do that with a quick review of headlines. purdue pharma is the company produces oxycontin and that is a key player in our opioid crisis. in fact, purdue pharma is being sued by 1000 different entities, cities, towns and individuals for their contribution to our opioid crisis. the billionaire ex-president of purdue pharma is now working to profit on the other side of the

mess. helping to pass formulas that will help wean people off oxycontin. another headline. from 2000 and inmate paid a dollar an hour to fight california wildfires. now the san francisco chronicle has been covering the construction of a playhouse by unpaid san quentin prisoners for a high-ranking present executi executive, who is now properly out of a job. there are a lot of new stories you can read that might strike a chord with you once you read americans farewell to her. with her after another chris hedges document the ills taking the country don't hate, heroin, sadism, magical thinking and just a few. then he shows us how to build a backup does not record that. it will be hard. many of us will fall by the wayside if we choose to do that work. he does not want us to go into that line. chris hedges is a journalist,

calmness, tv show host and presbyterian minister. he teaches in prisons, writing has won multiple awards including a pulitzer prize leader times where he worked for 15 years as a foreign correspondent. americans farewell tour is a sporting book. please welcome, chris hedges cormack. [applause] >> thank you. >> you're welcome. you have white no caps there in your hand or you are sitting on them at this point. this is the time to ask questions and make comments for us. i would ask that you keep them concise and well-written and on point and during our one hour discussion will get as many of the questions and comments as we can. the way those get up here is after you write them out hold them up and andrew or jean will pick them up and get them up to be. we will wrap them in as we go along. we will test your microphone. >> how is this? >> you have to do more than th

that. [laughter] >> perfection of a kind was what he was after in the poetry invented was easy to understand. >> that sums it up. [laughter] let's dive in. i have to do for you, reading the book, i got two chapters in and i found it so relentless a new there would be for the end so i cheated ahead to the last chapter in knowing that their stuff we can do and knowing that everything is not all over i found it easier to go back and read the rest. i wonder about if you knew the tone could be intimidating? >> well, i think on purpose. because i don't share the american cultures media for hope. that comes out of spending two decades as a work were corresponded. we made cold, calculated

assessment of what the weapon systems were around us and responded and we also understood that so many of our victories were pure and during the war i covered the war in el salvador and often the roads would be blocked after the salvador military had a massacre and we had to walk in a great danger and this was also true during the war in the low and the serb snipers often fired on the journalist who walked in. there was a sense or feeling of euphoria when we were able to document the atrocities. these atrocities they had sought to hide from public view, the lives they had extinguished and hoped would never be recorded, i was able to be on the front page of "the new york times". don't mean to wake up tomorrow and have to do it all over again.

indeed, that was usually the pattern. coupled with the fact that that work was dangerous and many of the people i worked with, photographers and war reporters over the decades, including my closest friends are dead but they did not make it and that baseline and it comes somewhat out of my education as a seminarian steeped in calvin and not only i have a dark view of amenity but a touch view of life. ...

our time is to grasp reality and yet, resist anyway. but i just am not willing to -- and i don't think it's beneficial to give people exits. from how bleak it is, both in terms of what we're doing to the biosphere, and this concentration of wealth in the hands of the global elite. where it's not -- and it's not just economic ramifications, 70% of this country is living pay check to paycheck. but of course it has political consequences as karl -- writes in the great transformation, which is his book of unnatured, unfettered capitalism. he says you create a mafia economy, but eventually you create a mafia political system, which is of course what the trump white house is.

>> i of course am going to get into the guts of the book, but i'm taking the way the world has informed your view of it and the fact that you're a father. and i wonder how you have those two things together that the world is bleak, and let's not do artificial hope so, what is that you offer your children to let them get up in the morning? >> well i have younger children and older children. i'm pret frank with the older children, and the younger children are certainly aware of climate change. but one doesn't pommel a 10-year-old with the details of the melting of the polar ice caps, and the consequences of going beyond 2% celsius, and feedback loops, and -- but i'm very worried. i'm increasingly

worried in a culture that unpollution itself from the real world. i see within our commercial media a kind of walking away from responsible journalism for endless carnival, endilous burlesque, which is what cnn is. i come out of the old newspaper world and the idea that repeated reports or interviews with a former torn star, and a lawyer that wants to run for president, and a former reality television star who was in the white house -- this is it's pt barnum all the time. and there are extremely serious things happening around us including the debacles that we are engaged in the middle east, 17 years olfutile and endless war that just go unspoken. we don't even have a rational

discussion in the mainstream about the nature of corporate capitalism and how it works. and so -- >> as soon as you say corporate capitalism i think there's a large part of the populous who says it's crazy liberal old hippy, whatever. i think that the very phraseology. >> i'm neither a liberal or a hippy so -- [laughter] >> i think that's an honest. when people say corporate capitalism? >> if you scai corporate capitalism to the farm families and the town in upstate new york where i grew up, whose farms have all been foreclosed upon and have suffered a rash of suicides, and deep economic distress they know veerer very well what corporate capitalism is. if you go to it can talk to the old uaw workers who are in

monterey, mexico, paying mexican workers $3 an hour without benefit, and they're town has become a wasteland, like all the former manufacturing centers they get corporate capitalism. i think the victims get it. >> let's start there. let's start with anderson, and it's emblematic of a number of cities where it used to be based in factory work or that kind of everybody goes to work together, there's a union. >> right. >> it's a company town. >> compleelt, anderson was. >> and when the company goes away you're left with people who have nothing. these are -- that and the latest factory that went out. >> scranton was another city. >> scranton, pennsylvania. when you talk to those people in those towns, what do they say about having loss, and i'm picking a point to start on. what do they say about losing

their unions that they might have expected to protect them from this. >> well, once you passed nafta, you opened the door for gm to do what they did, which was the move their plants overseas. that hadnic to do with the union. the corporate managers were often speak to blame the yuns, because they were paying union workers 25-$30 an hour, and providing benefits. >> god forbid. >> and a pension. and you could support a family on one salary. and you could send your kids to college, and you could own a home. and they will argue quite incredibly that of course it's far cheemp for them to produce vehicles in monterey, but that's not the fault of the union. the compensation packages for these corporation executives has reached utterly obscene

appropriations. in the 1950s, i think the ratio was 30 to # 1, or 50 to 1, in terms of worker. now it's 600 to 1, and so the staggering income and equality, which is the worst in american history. it is now outstripped the so-called gilded age, has not just economic consequences, but political consequences. as every political theorist going back to air stoppal understood. and it -- i go back to the former yugoslavia, the vulcan bureau chief for the "new york times." the economic collapse of yugoslavia, brought up the -- who like trump ridiculed with

the same kind of vulgarity, and also i should mention the same insightment to violence, and the same racism, they ridiculed and established elite that was ineffectual. in terms of dealing with the legitimate grieivance and surface v suffering of the mass of the population. that is trump's success. in that however crude and repugnant he was and is, he never the less expressed a rage, and i would say a legitimate rage on the part of in particular the white working class towards the elites like the jeb bush's or the bill and hillary clinton's who betrayed them. and they did betray them. >> why did that message resonate when we're talking about a guy

with whom everything is gilded. everything you know -- is very hi-end. everything is all about. . >> reality is delivered now a television screen and he is complete led connected with unfortunately a large percentage of the american public for whom the television screen is the lens by which they interpret and understand the world around

them. so, trump, like all celebrities, has a manufacture erred personality. we know from his business report he was pretty much of a disaster as a business person, multiple bankruptcies, defrauded his investors, he refused to pay his contractors, especially in atlantic city, many of whom went bankrupt. and so he goes on a reality television show and they create this fictional persona of him as this business titan, and then he uses this fictional persona to sell himself to the presidency. but all of this comes through television. all of this comes through make believe. and with the ability to deliver these electronic hallucinations in 24-hour streams and hand-held

devices, we are as i think it was neil gabler wrote the most illusioned society on the planet. because all of this is constructed. it's not real. >> it's interesting to me we're already getting a slew of questions how to talk to people with whom you don't understand, for example, i remember during the election, there was a slew of people who said, how can you look at trump and not get his business record? how can you not get his inauthenticity and that's to me where the divide really started making itself evident between the people who could have benefited by looking at the corporate underpinnings of everything. instead, you had trump, and we didn't understand why they didn't look at trump the way we did. a lot of people are asking about how you talk to someone who is that far apart from you? >> i would say that those who

have -- are part of the -- in tick white elite in live in places like menlo park have the luxury of dismissing trump. when you're desperate, when the established elites of the two main political parties have lied to you, successively, over years, and betrayed you, and destroyed your family, and destroyed your community, extinguished you your hope and thrust you into despair the heightest rates of suicide in the united states are middle aged white men. the lies of the republican and democratic party establishment were slicker, were more carefully packaged, were delivered in a tone of

reasonableness, and the lies of a trump are crude and vulgar, but there is a desperation. as you know i traveled all over the country for this, from utah to scranton to -- at one point actually literally sitting around a bonfire? upstate new york near binghamton with white brate groups playing that none of them would google me. [laughter] >> which didn't always work abuse you had your contact information exposed. you have been attacked from a lot of angles. people talking about whether you were engaging in playingerrism. a lot of -- >> guest: if you want to bring that up. the person who made that charge is the head of anarchists for trump. >> host: that's what i'm saying. >> guest: you can fine anything you want on the internet.

>> host: understood. that's part of what i'm saying. if you have someone who is speaking something they don't want to hear, they being anyone that you're exposing -- then there are ways to good after you personally. >> guest: right. >> host: the messenger. >> guest: "the new york times" just reviewed this novel and the whole column is about me, largely and not at all but the novel, and they did to me just what the new yorker did to glen greenwalds cho is pant you as angry and messianic, and that backs a way to marginalize, if not delegitimize what it is you're writing about and i would just for the record admire glen. so that's standard. and i think that part of the reason that an establishment liberal organization like the new yorker goes after someone like greenwald or someone like

me is because we call out the hypocrisy of the liberal class. and you end up not having many friend at all when you're critiqueing the establishment, whether the establishment -- the establishment -- the democratic or the republican establishment, and i am quite fierce on both. so, that inevitably makes you a very lonely, isolated and often reviled figure but that's the price of at least from my spiff, that's the price of trying to be as honest as you can, and in that sense, i went to hard vatter divinity school and luffed in a housing project in rocksberry for two and a half years, across the street from the housing project and ran a church there and i always say that two and a half users i lived in -- i learn to really

hate liberals. all of those people at harvard who like the poor but didn't like the smell of the poor, sat around talking about empowering people they never met. going back to your earlier question, this knee-jerk response that you're a liberal. or that just becomes a way to attach a particular label, in this case completely incredible, a particular label to you and then use that label to essentially shut down what it is you have to say. that's a very standard technique. when i denounce the war in iraq for which i had a clash with my then-employer, "the new york times," "the wall street journal" ran an editorial calling me a liberal pacifist. am no a passiveis. i was in sarajevo during the war and being hit with 2,000 shells

a day, and i like everyone else in sarajevo understood if you did not man the trench system around the city, the serbs would break through and slaughter a third of the population and push the rest into displaysment and refugee camps and that wasn't conjecture. that's what the did in the valley. it done save you from the poison of violence. this was just a way to -- i mean, i'd also been in the middle east bureau chief for "the new york times" and speak arabic. these were informed decisions but by using the labels, it becomes a way to dismiss what you have to say. >> host: an audience question, every a place or necessity for violence to protect our children from disastrous leadership? that are moments when there are forces and the serb forces surrounding sarajevo would be a good exam --y those forces seek the annihilation of potentially

your family and yourself, and you are faced with that awful choice of having to pick up a weapon. my first book, war is is a force that gives us meaning, is an attempt to explain the culture of war and the danger of using violence. the people who first organized the defenses in sarajevo were largely came out of the criminal class, people who had access to weapons and a penchant for violence and when they weren't holding back the serbs they were looting the paper offered the ethnic serbs who remained behind and in some cases not only stealing everything they had but killing them. that's the dark world you are sucked into once you employ violence, even in a supposedly

just cause. but, yes, i moon i cover the war in el salvador. there were peaceful, huge peaceful matches in san salvador, the capital, and the military and the police set up machine guns on the roofs and fired into the crowds. that made peaceful resistance impossible, and we got this tragic civil war. but it's always the oppressor who determines the response, and when the oppressor or those in power refuse over a long period of time to heed the cries of the oppressed, and they use harsher and harsher forms of control, then they provoke counterviolence. >> host: let go into some of the areas of escape and decay you look at. i'm picking out chapter headings to give us an andre. heroin, work, sadism, hate,

gambling and freedom. heroin is an interesting one because it starts out as something of an escape, and then, of course, once you're addicted, there you are. we have seen so much death. deaths have will be -- almost doubled since 2006, and i think it might be a surprise to some people to look at that and see corporate underpinnings. can you explain how corporations there -- in fact if you want to respond to that story i mentioned about what the purdue pharma to. >> guest: the family is one are he largest drug pushers in the country and have made billions off of people who are addicted by hushing heroin derivatives, oxycontin and setting up doctors are complicit in setting up pill

mills. where are the said up? they're not in menlo park or prince ton. there's in places that are suffering deep economic dislocation and despair, of course. southern west virginia. and these pills were given -- you had a backache, suddenlyout got a heroin derivative, oxycontin, percocet and they're highly addictive and they're expensive and eventually you town heroin because it's cheap. six dollars a bag. and the bags are now often laced with fentanyl, and they kill you. so, -- >> host: which oddly makes the heroin more attractive. >> guest: i wrote in the book, they all -- it's death by marketing. so, somebody dies of an overdose

and everybody wants that -- these bags have names. i don't know, red star or something. so, they all want it because it's just kind of nuts but shows you how perverse that world is, and heroin -- this book, dreamland, which is quite good, and he writes how the molecules -- can't wash it out of your body. so a year later you can feel as if you're dope sick, even though you have been clean for a year. it's a really pernicious drug, and that's what makes what they family did through perdue pharma a criminal. >> host: there's an interesting opinion you make. when rats get an extra dose of open noticeses they increase play and tickle each other. when row depend are allowed to he socialize freedly rather than remain isolated in steel cages they voluntarily avoid the opiate laden bottle from the bars in the cage. already got enough. what does that tell us about

humans. >> guest: tells us -- the mold for this booking dirk himes' study of suicide, the breakdown of social bonds led to a desire for self-annihilation, and as dirk himes understood, that lest to commit death is at its core about self-annihilation. so you see it in these nihilistic mass shootings. ride out dylann roof because he left a written record. so, it's a -- i think very revealing study for what happened. the social decay that -- what dirk i'm call the that has propelled people into activities that are deeply self-destructive. the book is about those pathologies. gambling -- i didn't know a lot about it until i spent time in

the trump taj majal before trump announce head would be president it and was -- gone through several bankruptcies. there were rodents running across the dining room floors. went into the bathrooms and they had plastic bags over the urinals saying, out of order, the tiles were falling off. there was mold in the ceiling. many of the rooms have been michigan balled. kind of a wonderful image for what he is going to do to the country. and what was -- and a professor at nyu wrote, tainted by design, very fine book, and worked with the industry about how 80% of gambling is done on slots and these slots replicate the kind of zombie-like state that one gets when they take a depressant like heroin. people -- it's called time on device, and the way they monitor these people -- many of the

tactics in terms of building profiles that now the security and surveillance state and, thank you, google and facebook, should say, for complicitness, build on -- about us were pioneered win the casino industry because they wanted to -- they did, they built projections as to how much addicted gamblers would actually spend during their lifetimes. they could trace when they would get frustrated and show up in give enemy free cup coupons at the slot machines to keep them, and gambling addicts have the highest rates of attempted suicide or suicide of any addiction. but it replicates the many other forms of addiction, which are really about unplugging yourself

from the world around you because reality has become so difficult to bear. >> host: there there was only one place in the become i was reading felt a strong disagreement with you. when you were talk us about prostitution and you interviewed some women who are activists against prostitution and some women who frankly victimized by prostitution, the only thing that rang wrong to me is the dismissing of women who say that they are voluntarily making a living and okay with being in prostitution, okay with being paid for sex. and the difficulty i had with that was there was, well, the women who are saying that don't realize they're victimized, don't realize the psychology going on, and i feel women are told an awful lot that they're wrong about the truth they express about themselves. when they state their reality, someone said if you were more keyed in, you under what you're saying isn't true.

that was the only thing that hit me wrong. >> well, statistically we know that most of the women who engage in -- i'm actually writing about a very extreme form of prostitution, about the bdsm community out of kink.com in san francisco. which is torture. there's just no other way around it. i took classes at kink.com, sitting in a base. room with a bunch ofdom dons and we know a huge percentage of these women were seeks lull eye abused often as children -- sexually abused, often as children. i i've interviewed a lot of enemy my longer chapter on the porn industry to know it was economic distress that pushed them into this industry. also, the ptsd -- when i first started interviewing women who had been in the porn industry, i

remember the first interview i did think started speaking, i instantly recognized the ptsd that i carried from 20 years of war. so, that's the first point. the second point is that the vast majority of women who are prostituted, it's not -- what was that woman, pretty woman -- not like that. they're usually women of color, and if you go to europe, they're all women of color or women from eastern europe who are trafficked. and i do break with the left. you talk about bag liberal. this is not a liberal belief but one i hold actually that we have to decriminalize the act of prostitution i.e. the women are note criminals but the traffickers and the pimps and

these figures should be criminalizes. >> host: and the customers? >> and customers and johns. so i think that's a very rational model. think it's compassionate to the women but we should be building a society whereby that is not the only economic alternative a woman has, i quote a woman who was a prostitution in ireland and she is quite graphic about describing having sex with repugnant men and she calls is big raped for a living there are very he vocal voices in the quote-unquote sex industry but i encourage people to look where the funds come from el most of the woman i sought out who had been in the prostitution industry or porn industry, they don't want to talk. they suffer the same kind of trauma -- weapon, not the same but a similar form of trauma

that those of white house come out of war suffer -- those of white house come out of war suffer. i would also add, as a war correspondent, the only thing that wars produce in greater number than corpses are prostitutes. these are widows, women, girls, in refugee camps. prostitution was endemic in every wore i covered, and it gets into the the commodity commodityication, and human beings are come. s that we exploit, and -- comedy commodities we explode and not just human life, the sacred, i -- this is just something i can't support. >> host: let's move over to the

alright and alt-right and altlight. >> trump is kind of the alt-right, there's good people on both sides. but it funneled people into the alt-right where is the picture of stephen milner the white house. so it is normalizes and maybe legitimizes racism, as we said before, incitement to violence. it has the affect of demonizing the vulnerable, and in protest o'fascist or fascist societies the vulnerable pay. the whole idea that 11 million undocumented workers, most from mexico and central america, are at fault for the economic

decline of the united states is patently absurd. but as things devolve and we're headed for another economic crisis -- "the new york times" had a very chilling editorial that said this and they had an article a week ago about how the fracking industry would be the dot-com crash because it's on project profits, not actually -- the fracking industry loses tremendouses amounts of money. and in a moment of instability, then you have already mainstreamed islamophobia, already mainstreamed racism, attacks against poor people of color, and the elites -- this goes back yugoslavia -- will direct the rage towards the vulnerable, and allow this inco hate anger to express itself

through violence as if these people are responsible, and the -- one of the things that disturbs me -- two thing that disturb me particularly about trump. one is the poisoning of civil discourse, but also that characteristic which i write about in the book of the permanent lie, which is different. all politics lie. was a report. they all lie. there's no exception. obama lies, clinton think all lie. but clinton, who sold us nafta, and sold us nafta by promising it would mean millions more in american jobs, doesn't continue to tell us that nafta produced millions of good american jobs. the permanent lie, which trump engages in and which all demagogues, dictators and all

totalitarian systems engage in, is spouted regardless of reality. reality doesn't -- the -- we're just watch hogue the -- watch hogue the ticked the picture, the park service edited the pictures of the inauguration. that's extremely dangerous because it's what you see in front of you is being denied be the megaphone it and creates a kind of schizophrenia, and unfortunately we are a society awash in fake news, which done come out of moscow, it comes out of fox news. it comes out of breitbart. comes out of these -- the whole idea that fox news is now considered a legitimate journalistic enterprise is stagger. >> host: britain treats fox news us a unreliable. >> guest: it's propaganda.

>> host: you're on rt, russian news outlet. >> guest: yes. >> host: could be taken as a conflict of interest to say it's not a fake news machine other. >> guest: i didn't say russia is not a fake news machine. i don't trust any government, including the russian government. but if you are an anti-capitalist and an anti-imperialist critic, you have nowhere to go anymore, and so i know very well why rt allows my show. it's the same reason voice of america but haval on during the communist regime. i was there every night in prague during the velvet revolution was a socialist, didn't support americans a adventurism in vietnam or anywhere else -- he didn't have anywhere else to. tis is about the corruption of

our media platforms and in particular our public television. if you wasn't become to 1960s on public television you could see malcolm x, noam chomsky, the greatest intellectual who has been completely black listed. howard zen. james baldwin, and now because they've slashed the funding, because pbs is dependent on corporate donations like npr, it's -- it's this con stricture of seasonable opinion, and of course the koch brothers are big investors in public broadcasting now they're destroying the crown jewel of democracy, public education. that concon stricture has left us without a vocabulary to forward the class warfare being waged against us by a global and

criminal class and that's by intent and so the elites understand that -- this is across the political spectrum. nobody is buying their ideology of global capitalism, not buying it on the right 0 or the left. and so the elites have gone after over the last year, those critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism who already exist on the margins of the internet, and how have they done that? well, google, facebook, have imposed algorithms that block those people out. so, i write a column every monday for the web site, truth dig, run by robert cheer, one of the greatamerican journalists, and so they have what they call impressiones. if you had gone to goingle and type in imperialism and i had recently written a story on

imperialism, then it would be there with others. now it's not there. and so we have watched at truth dig alone the referrals from imperialism decline from 700,000 to below 200,000, as they perfect the algorithms. all the sites, black agenda reports, counterpunch, alternet which lost 603% of the traffic. world socialist web site, 80 something% of the traffic. couple with the an o'legislation is of net neutrality and they've further push their critics from reaching the public because they have no credibility left, and that loss of credibility is what led to the insurgency in the democratic party with sanders and what led to the insurgency in the republican party with trump. and the elites are kind of

scrambling. >> host: when the right started being backballed from the websites, there was a strong unified response that said, you're shadow banning us, taking our right to speak. it was an impressive display of unified message. whether it was accurate or not they knew how to play that cart. ... >> but then in your acknowledgments you thank the foundation. >> well, i did. i thanked the wallace action fund, which is about as left-wing as you can get, number one. [laughter] and, number two, probably about the only foundation that would -- and they didn't, they gave me $25,000 for a research assistant. we're not talking about, i wasn't wallowing in cash. [laughter] >> you haven't catched that soros check, have you?

[laughter] >> no, soros wouldn't give me money. [laughter] >> you were talking about the politicians and some of the changes that have been coming within the republican and democratic party. folks in the audience are asking what do we make of the rise of populism and democratic socialism? is and you with actually say in the book that even though there's encouraging people coming up, they still will be compromised because they're politicians. >> sure. every politician's compromise toed. i mean, that's the poison of power, and that's why movements are absolutely vital. and our movements, the movements that protected the american working class, have been destroyed. in particular, labor unions. we go back and look at the history of the united states, and the united states was founded as a closed system for male, aristocratic, slave-holding elites. and it has been a long fight since the founding of our country to open up democratic space, and many americans have paid for it with their lives. we had hundreds of american

workers murdered by gun thugs, pinkertons, baldwin-felts, state police like pennsylvania who were called the pennsylvania cossacks. and they gave us the eight-hour work day. they ended child labor, the minimum wage. and we saw it in the struggle for civil rights by african-americans. we saw it with the suffragists. it's been a battle. and those movements have quite consciously been targeted and destroyed. we saw the powell memo in 1971, the attack on the free enterprise system where the business interests reacted to what the political scientist samuel huntington called the excess of democracy. by making war and by seizing control of the press, the major political parties, academia.

i mean, go into an economics department in any major university and find me a marxist economist. i'm not a marxist, actually, but marx's analysis of capital is probably unsurpassed. i don't buy his solution which is, i think, utopian. so -- >> [inaudible] very good for economics. >> yeah. he's great. and that analysis is almost impossible to hear. certainly within the mainstream, it is impossible the hear. >> right. he's on pacifica, naturally. >> yeah. yeah, yeah. i've been on that show. >> talk about trying to decide who it is that we can partner with if we're going to save the country, if we're going to form alliances. you talked about the industrial areas foundation which i had not heard of before -- >> that's the old saul alinsky foundation. >> yes. and you're talking about people who come together who may not otherwise merge on thoughts.

>> sure. >> you know, people who come out of churches going with people who are atheists, but they all recognize a common need. >> well, that's the point. and, you know, i'm very opposed to writing off as irredeemable or deplorable trump supporters. i've been in -- you know, in happened -- anderson, most of these old uaw workers voted for sanders, but in the general election, they voted for trump. they weren't going to vote for clinton the, not after nafta. impossible. and maybe it comes from my stock, small town maine where most of my relatives held political views that were pretty repugnant and drove around literally with gun racks. but it gave me a window into their struggles. and the only way that we're going to advance is to build coalitions around major economic

issues. i mean, if you went into a walmart and said i'm here to organize -- i mean, walmart the, the walmart family, the walton the would never allow you to even get in walmart. i mean, they're the great union-busting corporation of america. but if you could get into a walmart and said we're here to organize for a $15 minimum wage, you would certainly have people of various political persuasions who would join you in that cause. and i think we have to -- i am very critical, as you know, of the politics of multiculturalism and identity politics divorced from economic justice. and i think that, you know, there was -- i think it was lord or salisbury said there's no, there's no permanent alliances, only permanent power. certainly it was how saul alinsky worked in chicago. we have to organize around issues that affect the lives of working men and women and the

poor and, you know, who they voted for, if they voted, you know, whatever. i mean, i think we have a right to ask them to respect everyone around them, but we're only going to build significant change by making these alliances not falling into the trap of the class divide by splitting the working classes along racial, you know, or ideological lines. that serves the interests of the oligarchs. >> doesn't it turn a little bit problematic, i'm thinking specifically of when bernie sanders was on the trail, and there were some black lives matter act visits who got up at one of his rallies and said, you're not listening. we're being shot in the street. you can talk about giving us more jobs, about making more money available to us. right now we're being killed and need to focus on that. and i think that when you put the blanket of identity politics

on that, it can the sound -- especially from a white guy -- kind of -- >> i don't look at black lives matter movement as identity politics at all. >> forgive me. i misunderstood that. >> i'm talking about places like princeton where i teach. >> when you said racism, i thought you -- >> well, no. i'm a strong -- i write in the book i'm a strong supporter in the last chapter of the black lives movement. >> right. >> and, in fact, interview activists from ferguson who i admire immensely. >> yes. >> no, they're responding to police terror, police murder which happens in marginal communities every single day in this country. and they have done so with immense courage. and i will also add that i found bernie sanders, especially at the beginning of his campaign, tone deaf on the issue of race and racial violation. i teach in a prison, so i'm, you know, i see up close what we have done to poor people of color. our system of mass incarceration, which is one of

the great human rights violations of the industrial world -- 25% of the world's prison population, we are 5% of the world's prison population, 94% of these people never even had a jury trial. this is about social control. it is about -- and we saw it. and clinton, you know, go back to 1994 omnibus crime bill where he pumped $300 million be into the prison system, expanded the prison population from about 700,000 to 2 million. you left are deindustrialized pockets. there was no hope for them to make a living within the legal economy. they're not producing money for the corporations on the streets of these industrial wastelands. but you lock them in a cage, and they can produce 50 or $60,000 a year for the prison contractors, for allmark which runs the food

service, for global tel-link which has these horrible four to five times what our phone rates are. and that makes me extremely angry because for children the only way they can have contact with their parents is, incarcerated parent is through the telephone. the privatization of medical services, money transfer. it's billions in terms of predatory activity. and dos the toy jeff sky -- dostoyevsky says if you want to understand the heart of a society, look in their prisons. look what they do to most vulnerable. and now we have almost a million prisoners who work for for-profit corporations. >> and there are cities and counties who tell prisons, if you build here, we'll keep the cage full. >> and their lobbyists pass laws to to keep the recidivism rate over of 0%.

system -- 60%. we just have had this prison work stoppage, commissary boycott, even hunger strikes within the system because they fully understand that the only way to end slavery -- and we're talking about states like georgia where people 40 hours a week for nothing, or they work for 20 cents an hour -- is to stop being a slave. because if you, if you paid the minimum wage within prisons and you don't have to under the 13th amendment, the prison system would not be sustainable. it would just be economically too costly to sustain. so you look at marginal commitments, you stripped people of their rights, you engage in police terror, and they replicate the condition of the stateless. and the danger is when you have a section of your society who can be stripped of their rights -- in essence, rights become privileges -- then in a

moment of unrest or instability you have both a legal and a physical mechanism by which everyone can be stripped of their rights. and so, i mean, just from a kind of human point of view, i'm incensed at what we do to poor and in particular poor people of color. but also as somebody who has covered disintegrating societies, i'm frightened by the normalization, including lethal police force. i mean, an average of 3.3 americans -- almost all of whom are unarmed -- are murdered by police in the streets of our cities every day the. and if you think it won't affect us, then you don't know anything about history. >> right. you quote malcolm x. i found this to be a or very interesting quote. don't run around trying to make friends with someone who's depriving you of your rights. they're your enemies. treat them like that, fight them, and you'll get your freedom. after you get your freedom, your

enemy will respect me. i don't have any hate, i've got some sense. i'm not going to let anyone who hates me tell me to love him. the reason that's particularly intriguing is we talk about the corporate, the elite, the people who have all the power and all the money benefiting when we fight amongst ourselves, when the lower classes fight amongst themselves. and it's easy to look at the people who want to ban abortion, who are doing the preppers and anticipate they're going to have to shoot everyone, it's easy to say that's the person who hates me, the person i don't want to be friends with. so make that distinct with us. >> well, malcolm understood the nature of power. and, you know, i do come out of a divinity school background, and power is the problem. and so when people wield power to carry out acts of radical

evil, when they seek the extinguish life and they are through the fossil fuel industry seeking to extinguish life for all of us and our children, then one has to react exactly the way malcolm pointed out. but by admire malcolm x quite a bit. -- i admire malcolm x quite a bit. i think malcolm was, like martin luther king, one of our great prophets. and, i mean, malcolm wrote about white southerners, and he actually had a great quote where he said, you know, i'd rather have a white southerner call me the n-word than deal with a white liberal. malcolm got power completely. as did the king, you know? and when king moved on at the end of the civil rights movement towards economic justice, those white liberals walked out on him. he was all alone.

because, yes, they could handle desegregation. but as king and malcolm understood, there would never be racial justice in this country until there was economic justice which means reparations. and the inability on the part of the white ruling heats to face -- ruling elites to face the monstrous crime against humanity that they carried out in order to enrich this country both against native americans and african-americans has created the mythical version of america and american virtues and american innocence that is embodied in the face of donald trump. >> i want to go back to the fact that so many of our audience members are are asking about how you talk to people with whom you have opposing views.

i'm thinking about the person how interviewed in the book hughes view of -- i can imagine what he'd say about reparations reparations -- about there's actually more black on white crime, slaves were happy, slaves were sad when their masters died. and i'm -- >> that was dylann roof, but -- [laughter] >> but it's an attitude that's out there. i mean, how would you, subtracting dylann roof, how would you talk to someone when you're trying to explain, for example, reparations? when you're trying to talk about generational loss with something -- >> well, you can't speak to people who are not engaged in the real world. i spent two years writing a book on the christian right called "american fascists: the christian right and the war on america." i look at them as christian heretics. they have fused the iconography and language of the christian religion with the iconography

and language of the state which is farrism for me. fascism for me. they are not about love, they are about hate. they are biblical -- they are selective literalists. they don't the actually know the bible. when i was with them, i a was always up front about where i came from. and as soon as they realized my father was a presbyterian minister, they never wanted to talk about the bible with me. they were too frightened, because they only know what they were fed that buttressed their peculiar ideology. so you're never going to argue someone like that out of creationism. it isn't going to happen. and the reason is because the real world, the world out there, the world where magic jesus wasn't watching out for them almost destroyed them. and the stories in that book are also heartbreaking. and they -- and i was move by them. so your substance abuse, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, unemployment, evictions, i mean,

their lives were just ripped apart by the disintegration of their communities, their families and the economic blockages that prevented them from reaching their hopes and aspirations. and i came at the end of that book to conclusion that we're not going to argue them out of any of that. the only way to blunt that movement, which i wrote that book ten years ago which it's now gotten worse because these christian fascists are rapidly filling the ideological vacuum around donald the trump -- is to reintegrate them into the economy. so you asked how to speak to them? i sat for hours and interviewed them about their lives, about what they suffered, about what they endured, about -- and those stories engenderedded in me a very real and legitimate empathy, and they felt it. and the other thing is i never,

ever -- and this comes out of being a reporter for many years -- i'm always completely honest with the people i interview. i never pretend to be something i'm not. i never use a pseudonym. and when i did the christian right, they knew i came out of the liberal church. they knew i went to harvard divinity school. and i think that when you have that kind of honesty coupled with the capacity for empathy, you can actually have meaningful considerations. and what was -- meaningful conversations. and what was interesting was there were people in that book on the christian right whose world view was almost diametrically opposed to mine but who afterwards contacted me because i had told their stories with compassion and respect. and so i think that when you ask how we speak to them, we speak to them about their suffering, and we empathize with that

suffering, and that is the start of a relationship, and with we grasp that they have retreated into a form of magical thinking out of despair and that trying to dissuade them of that magical thinking rips down the last protective cover they have. and so i didn't pretend that i believed in creationism, and yet i didn't try and argue them out of the idea that in six days god created all living beings including t-rex who was in the garden of e den with adam and eve, which they believe. >> right. >> and they have a t-rex with a tadding in kentucky -- [laughter] -- with a saddle in kentucky -- [laughter] it's funny in here, but when you're sitting with to 40 people who believe it, it's not funny. it's chilling. and the guide was saying i wonder why you all are wondering

why -- i know you all are wondering why t-rex had such big teeth, because he used them to open the coconuts. [laughter] but that shows you how they've disengaged with the real world. and that is, anthropologists call it crisis cults. that is a characteristic of every society. none of us are immune from it. but it is a symptom of a society in deep, deep distress. >> i didn't realize til i read your book that there are silicon valley preps. that even at the highest -- >> yeah, sure. let's not get started on silicon valley here. [laughter] the great enabler of the security or and surveillance state. [laughter] >> actually, we're too short on time, but we promised we would get into some of your last -- i enjoyed in this from one of the audience members. okay, i haven't read the last chapter of the book, what can be done? talk about burdoch house.

>> so i -- we have to regain communities that have been destroyed to pit power against power. we have to build alternative systems that sever us from the tent the cls of corporate power. -- tentacles of corporate power. we have to turn off our electronic that hallucinations. if you are sitting alone in i your room furiously writing on your computer screen, you know, some diatribe against state authority, you are doing just what the state wants which is sitting alone in your room in front of a computer or screen. we have to build relationships the only way relationships can be built, and that's face to face. the fact that i had real relationships with members of the christian -- not the leaders, you know? these people who run these megachurches, they are, they're all like trump. people say how can the christian right ally with trump? and that gives the christian

right a morality it doesn't have. these mega-church pastors in term the of sexual pro cliffties, they're doing things trump never dreamed of. and they're making money off of people's despair, which is how trump made his money. so they're complete, they're two peas in a pod. they're the same. but the fact that i could have relationships -- we have to build those relationships. and that comes with listening, it comes with empathy. that doesn't mean that, you know, i was quite up front if they made a particular comment about a racial group or homosexuals, i didn't let it pass, but it doesn't mean you can't -- if we don't rebuild those relationships and if we don't rebuild structures the pit power against power, then in the next financial crash -- which is coming -- and moment of

instability, they will play us many in a very frightening way. i mean, trump is not a product of just our decayed political system. boris johnson, orr bonne in hungary, it's happening where the wreckage of neoliberalism has destroyed, has concentrated wealth in the hands of oligarchic class and destroyed democratic institutions. and we are watching betsy devos destroy public education. and why? because the department of education spends $63 billion a year on education, and the hedge funds want it. and they're going to get it. i mean, the pillage won't stop until we make them stop. >> burdoch house. >> burdoch house is an example of that. former catholic kids in their 20s. they buy an old warehouse for

$25,000, they recondition it, refurbish it to have rooms. in the backyard they hold -- the i found it quite moving -- people, these kids trapped in these low-wage, menial, you know, deadening jobs come and read poetry. one of the guys i interviewed was quite a talented blues musician, was playing i blues. and look, that -- we have to get many touch with those non-rational forces that the technological society seeks to diminish or extinguish. what are those forces? beauty, truth, grief, search for meaning, the struggle with our own mortality. this is what makes a complete human being. and it's why the technocrat ec state makes war on the humanities and culture. and it, you know, the buddhists say you can memorize as many sutras as you want, it will

never make you wise. and we have to recover wisdom and the capacity for transcendence. the understanding that there are human lives and systems of life that have an intrinsic value beyond a monetary value. and that -- as was said, that are sacred. and the society, the consumer society, the technocratic society at its core has made war on the sacred. and our only hope is to recover it. because it gives us a sense of self, our place in the universe. and most importantly, it connects us. and that atomization, in that alienation, that isolation is not only deadening to our souls and thrusting us into despair, buts an effective political technique to keep us captive. >> last question.

the messiness of democracy, with all its paralysis and reverses, keeps revolution alive and vibrant. do you want to expound on that? >> sure, because this is karl popper's understanding that a open society you have mechanisms by which piecemeal and incremental reform is possible. the new deal. you have the collapse of capitalism. roosevelt says, look, if the private9 sector or can't create jobs, the government has to create jobs. he created 12 million jobs. social security. and when that capacity for change is, becomes calcified as it has become in our corporate state, then you redirect. when you redirect all of the wealth and the systems of power to a cabal -- in this case a

corporate cabal -- you leave behind the majority of your population to fester and to express in very self-destructive ways the pathologies that i write about in this book. and, you know, what i fear is that this time around when capitalism goes down, we won't have the progressive party, the old cio, an independent press, labor unions, you know, wobblies. we won't have any of that. and, you know, in the 1930s europe went one way, italy, germany, spain, and we went another. and i just see especially with the rhetoric coming out of the white house and the rise of these trump mini-mes in places like florida, you know, and the transformation of the republican party into a kind of party built around a personality cult.

i worry that we will swing -- we have the potential to swing to a kind of corporate-backed, christianized fascism. >> on that hopeful note -- [laughter] [applause] thank you. thank you very much. [applause] it's been such a pleasure. i thank you for that. >> thank you. >> and if you have your books and would like to have them signed, they're going to be signed back there by the staff sign. so if you'll give chris just a moment for andrew the get him over to that table, and then take your place in line to get your books signed. thank you so much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] ..

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