richard nixon area nadina lassini talks about becoming an disability rights activist, the chair of the commission to create a white house counsel on boys and men about his latest book the boy crisis and former public radio host veronica record offers her thoughts on how women can reclaim their voice. get your cable guide or a visit booktv.org for a completeschedule of all the programs airing this weekend . >> .. on behalf of townhall and pleased to welcome you to tonight appearance by author anthony began discussing this fascinating new book "shadowlands" this event is presented by townhall as part of our civics series, supported by the foundation, the boeing company, the realnetworks

foundation and enough to say the taxpayers washington state as part of the building for the arts project. i looked all of our funders but especially of public funding for the arts. i'm hoping this might be returned to town hall for some of you are familiar with this building but haven't been back for a couple of years. during the time we've been renovating, this is still a soft launch for the space, different elements like signage and bar and café service have yet to come online so bear with us. september is the real formal launch of townhall with a big festival of programs we recently announced the you can see on our website town hall seattle.org. check us out. we are really happy to reopen and get going with the program especially in the sure which is a new space for us. thank you for being our guinea pigs. i do know and a couple gifts that this is a little cold in here, we have adjusted the thermostats and are trying to make it more comfortable. i'm sorry about that. in the meantime as we are experimenting we are so happy to

host office like anthony began. we wanted to jump on this because he's both a powerful voice and a voice to lift himself to this brilliant important topic for america and for the pacific northwest, identity and using a poetic literary sensibility to intersect with his political and social forces and that's exactly what we'd like to do here at townhall. if this is your first town hall event this is by the type of thing you'd like, please keep in touch with us where members support organization. thank you for the member is in the, membership information is available. the format tonight is going to be a talk which should be but 45-50 minute after which we had time for q&a. we are grateful to the good people at c-span's booktv devere tonight who are recording this. partly for that reason we would love if we can get people with questions as questions on microphone. we have microphone here we will move out when we get to the q&a section. if you're able to make your with

a around their lineup along the wall. after all that's will be a book signing. copies of "shadowlands" available for sale. anthony will be signing afterwards. now what you hear to see tonight. anthony mccann was born and raised in the hudson valley. although i recently learned we were chatting even just a block away away from your in the mid-'90s right before this organization moved in a 1999. he is the author four collections of poetry including seeing music in my garden and i heart your fate. anthony's teaching writing a research institute 19th and 20th and 21st century north american poetry. the lyrical theology, political ecology, native american history, history of the revolution a constitutional and reconstruction eras. ecological history of the american west, cultural anthropology, modern latin

america poetry and anarchist thought and practice as it pertains to art making, politics. that eclectic and pretty faceting list of interest i think can give you beginning sense of why his voice was uniquely suited to lend itself to this story. he is the poet laureate of machine project and also teaches courses at the california institute of the arts as well as university california riverside palm desert program. but as i mention he's here tonight to discuss his new nonfiction book, "shadowlands: fear and freedom at the oregon standoff." please join me in welcoming anthony mccann. [applause]

[laughing] >> careful there in the front row. there's lots of excitability in this story, if you guys are familiar with that. this book, it is a nonfiction book about a current event but it is not maybe in the same vein as many such books. as you just heard in the introduction i come to this not as traditional journalist, but as -- [inaudible] >> as you would in the introduction, i come to this story not from a career as a traditional journalist, but as a creative journalist and as a poet. and that informed of the book, how the project was approached and have the book was written. so i will be sharing a sequence of passengers from the book with you tonight that follow a certain thread through the story

to which important content is a test. there are many strands in many threads to this story. just briefly to explain how it came to be obsessed enough with the story to write this book, i live in the mojave desert and around the time i had moved full-time to the desert. i was writing what i thought was a very different kind of book, maybe a book more associated with poets and poetry, or i thought that's what is doing. it turned out that's not what i was doing. i thought i'd write a book of lyrical essays, interconnected essays about the desert, the extent of the desert and expense of time and expense of history it a place like the desert with the experience of time in society is dislocated. different aspects are highlighted differently. i was particularly interested in ideas about, ideas of -- [inaudible] associate with certain around

the time this event happen that research of the book leading to a lot of reading about native american movement particularly ones that had the place, meaning many native american religion across a whole history of the continent the some of the most famous once took place in the colonial policy and the great basin desert. and around the time i was doing research suddenly i would go to people, a very different messianic credo, occupied the malheur national wildlife refuge at the beginning of 2016 come in an event i assume you guys remember a little bit that got a lot of coverage, a lot of people think a lot of attention to at the time. a lot of things have happened since then. maybe you're forgotten some of the details, but what happened basically was a man named ammon bundy, the son of a nevada rancher he would get all the news a couple years earlier in

2014 over a standoff at the ranch, the bundy from the ranch in nevada over a long stint dispute over management of federal land. new regulations on cattle grazing brought about by adl that the city of las vegas was able to make in order to keep growing after the desert tortoise was listed as an endangered species brought new grazing restrictions to the place where the bundy family raised their cattle and the bundy family chose not to accept those and no longer mechanize the federal government through what many would regard as a creative interpretation of the constitution. which we would get into later. two years later another change involving a rancher, and ranching family caught the attention of ammon bundy and

inspired by the holy spirit as you here in just a second. he felt the need we felt compelled almost against his will, he plan to intervene in this story, and that led to an armed confrontation of the refuge and a whole other sequence of events that have been going for a number of years since then, and which i've been following ever since the story sucked me in in january 2016. so i want to begin at the beginning. with ammon, and give you a feeling for the instigator of the whole drama. can anybody hear me? does everything sound okay back there for you? [inaudible] >> louder? let's see, how is that? >> just don't turn away.

[laughing] >> will see how -- i can shout. i can get really growly. [inaudible] i've got enough water. dear friends, my dear friends,. [inaudible] every time someone hits play from 2016 all the way to the end of the -- [inaudible] along the invisible pathway the virtual tabernacle the world wide web ammon bundy was calling his people to the desert. they called the patriot movement, activating -- [inaudible] it was time, ammon was saying

for what he called a hard stand. there'd been some confusion about what he meant in previous communiqué. he received pushback. he sat down in front of the camera to try to clear things up. he had a cowboy hat. weeks later on a mountain road he wore a western checkered shirt -- [inaudible] he couldn't help -- [inaudible] clean cut to the core. before being summoned to the desert of organ by his god, that folded been enjoying making apple pies for his neighbors using apples from his new orchard and delivering the pies himself. but the quite idle of that audit was already flung over. this was to be its last video

address to his online community before leading the very next day and armed takeover of oregon's malheur national wildlife refuge. a macbook air laptop is open on his desk. it's like undoing it's quite intrepid work to place all our american lives and dreams, even those of right-wing holy insurrection, under its sign. payable in true light comes through the blinds of the window behind him. in the video which he titled dear friends, ammon explains how it was god who it guided him to organ too much earlier, through news of the plight of two county ranchers, a father and son. mandatory federal sentencing that is about to send them back to prison for arson charges. [inaudible] his father cliven is also a rancher. the bundy come had acquired a national profile for the dramatic culmination of the 20 odd years dog with federal

authorities over the grazing rights on mojave desert lakes in southern nevada. that conflict had come to a head in april 2014 in remarkable event. an armed standoff with federal agents who'd resulted shockingly and the seemly victory for bundy claim. this standoff and the families ongoing struggle with the aftermath of the life-changing actions have felt like enough to ammon who would recently moved far from seven nevada two new home with his wife and six children in the sagebrush seven oh idaho at the far northern end of mormon country on the outskirts of boise. he himself was not even a rancher come had not been for years. he ran a trucking fleet maintenance business still headquartered in arizona. it turned out even that moved to idaho would come to seem a part of gods want larger plan for hf and his friends, the county and america. there's been something a a lite strange about the move, even at the time. he and his wife had felt a strong simultaneous urge to relocate. it had been a feeling that had descended as if from nowhere. they couldn't understand

entirely but they followed it anyway and headed out in the spring of 2015 traveling about the in about the west looking at houses. nothing had been quite right but then on the very last of the trip, they come to this very last house in a beautiful valley in emmett idaho and i don't instantly that this was the place. it was one of many decisions ammon would be guided to that year. that guidance in his mind is often providential. how else could clean you end up moving within three hours of remote hunting count organ with the whole premise of which it know nothing about at the time had taken place and now here he was just a few months later barely settled into his new business all asking is a link to join order to take a moment to stand, a stance of the nothing less than a future of american freedom might be at stake. after the move to idaho his next big revelations come late one monday morning on november 2015. on january 1, seated in front of

his camera he told the tale of that night he was online followers. lying in bed in his family's new home, tired after a long day, he received a message on his phone, a link to yet another article about mohammad in the past he'd shrugged off messages about the case. i felt my family was fighting hard enough, explained. we didn't need to go fight some else's battles but this time something was different. an urge quickly took possession of him. a sudden impulse to learn all he could about this family. he searched the internet and read everything he could find about the case. unable to sleep he read on into the dawn. how sunrise is dark night of research was followed by a second urge you to decide he recognized as defined in spy. this was an impulse to expression. i felt this urge again, this society began to write. it wasn't easy at first, writing really is. my emotion about the hammonds after some was happening and found it was happening to them

was the same thing that happened as semi-motions were clouding my thoughts. but then inspiration came to him as it often seems to come, mysteriously and from somewhere outside. i got on my knees and ask the lord and i said lord, if you want me to write something, then please help me clear my mind and show me what i should write. and so among the many other images to come to our story will start with this one. a bewildered and overtaken man,, god written down on his knees begging that unseen power to unclouded mind so that he might write, so they might simply sit down and begin. ammon is devoutly religious, and his religion was born in a mystical lighting performance. the book of mormon original golden tablets, allegedly discovered in the hillside in the famous burned over district of western new york were translated from an unknown ancient town with divine guidance at a cold flare uninspired founder and prophet of the latter-day saints. poorly educated but endlessly

enthusiastic and possessed of remarkable imagination, young joseph smith had dedicate dedih of his adolescence and young adulthood to a local craze, treasure hunting, which seems to have consisted largely of robbing the mysteries native american group announced so, in theory. unaware of the liturgical potential of his first literary work, smith hope his book of mormon would strike lucrative lead into the rich thing of the current mania for theories linking the origins of native americans to the tales of the old testament. his immediate hope seems to bent that the books success might save his parents farm from foreclosure. the book would not arrive in time to save the smith family farm but it came to do so much more, tapping into the current a powerful evangelical savings then convulsing the american frontier. it would utterly transform the light of its author and change the lives of millions and within the history of the young american republic. america loves to make fun of its mormons. so many of the mormon clichés

were already well-worn tropes of american popular religious experience even in the time of the prophet. but the love them often enough to ignore help definitely these elements of religious experience have found themselves reshuffled and newly deployed in hands of smith, a singular font of real american dynamism. smith was a mastic indicator who intuited something bassinet of ultimate and of his times, what to ask for and what was possible in them. he called the ever evolving often cloudy but occasionally crystal-clear understanding god. while ammon's inspirations and intimations may not have matched the grantor of smith, if you did, his understanding of the whispering and emotions at this attempt and whitney kent and something about our time were very much in line with his profits. the two men's interpretation of the divine guidance they felt different only when it come to ammon's emphasis on feeling. smith describe the sensation of revelation as a pure

intelligence that would enter him. it may give you sudden strokes of ideas so that by noticing that you may find it fulfilled the same day or soon. those things that were presented unto your mind by the spirit of god. to ammon on the other hand, this external intelligence seems to present itself and primary as intensity of emotion, urge, obsession, sympathy, outrage, and need. the more you become emotionally involved in the tribulation of this one ranching family from oregon, the more ammon had come since of as as a conduit, a vee for the expression of god ceilings, god feelings about america. i begin to understand how the lord felt about the hammonds he told his internet friends on the first day of 2016. i begin to understand how the lord felt about harney county at about this country. i clearly understood that the lord was not please with what was happening to the hammonds and that what was happening to them it was not corrected it would be a type and the shadow

of what would happen to the rest of the people across this country. mostly it wasn't too writing that ammon conveyed god ceilings directly into the lives of his followers. the intimacy of the facebook or youtube video is it to meeting of the loose cadre of you think that is the bungee revolution. in keeping with the formula anarchic tendencies of social media community has many members, , many leaders and ever shifting priorities and towns over those attached to the bundy caused its single most important focal point and greater source of inspiration, a special feeling happening ammon itself. his life, , his voice, his face. especially his face. there's an earnestness and open us up expression and churches face that's uncommon among men of the american right wing. throughout all his intimate video addresses his beard count is poured out a live stream of concern into the camera in the heart of his viewers. his expression remained

virtually unchanging, open, always open. from beginning to end in his videos his eyes are wide. sometimes wavelengths you could see the delivered my commercial efforts to get his peepers fully open you can meet immediate hezbollah eyebrows are up within inward pointing to the crown of his head hidden under his cowboy hat. this urge to push back his brow thus enlarging his already fairly large and expressive noggin while his hands move in soft emphasis to the slow here r cadences of his twang. otherwise had to sell at a slight sad puppy ductility. there's no limbaugh like apathy, no snide breitbart affect year. ammon is a different state of magically become a right wing for a sensitive man. his public face is a pure stream of real-time concert that he is consistently poured forth in every press coverage conferencm every appearance on the witness stand delivering his payload of sincerity each and every time. few even among source enemies have ever doubted ammon bundy

mostly means what he says that the full power of his direct address comes from his billy to make it clear again and again just how much he really means it. and maybe some poorly for the faithful, just how much to him his god really cares. he urges -- googling and writing were far from finished with him. once god cleared his mind and the writing had, it went only to the filament of the stronger understanding and urges. further revelations of gods desires and irresistible impulse to travel to know the land of oregon first and come to go to the place where all would be revealed. once i got the letter rewritten he told his followers i felt this desire, disparage to go to burns and go to the hammonds ranch. desires, urges come shadows and types. our story begins with huge fields, is for the felix, types and shadows are key figures in mormon doctrine where history is always revealed history and humankind is always unfolding.

the fullness of times. sometimes i i listen to dramate the story, i see the shadows and their precursors, the historical types that cast them the windswept clouds dragging the blots the shade alongside the golden views as he tries on seal in his holy bubble of urge. there he goes tiny now staking along the river, along the al-qaeda root of more than one disastrous wagon train seeking a way around the blue mounds of the organ till the poem as he of crossing over the past and the stinking what amounts into the race in and plan called malheur. the word malheur met misfortune in french with the somatic court he would this information another one a right as he

approached the town of burns. just as you head into the outskirts he received more divine direction again as an overwhelming feeling. sadly he knew he was supposed to change his root, not stop at the hammonds house in town pickets instead he was to drive south over the great right points to soul. that divides burns. cresting the point he dropped now to the huge bowl of wind and distance to which she was about to bring so much human calamity. and calamity he brought. over the next couple months in his efforts to organize a resistance to the hammonds family being returned to prison they been convicted of arson charges or in the middle of the trial they agreed to plead guilty to remaining charges, and they're supposed to be sentenced under mandatory sensing guidelines of the judge in the case decided that those mandatory sentences were too

excessive, and on the last day of his last in the bench, the day he retired he handed out lesser sentences in the hammonds were sent to prison, through the senses, came back but in that time the federal government had appealed the sentencing and they won the appeal so the hammonds being sent back to prison, which is the case that galvanized ammon's will and particularly ammon. he came to town as he was trying to convince the sheriff, david ward, to protect them and not allow them to be returned to prison under an idea that maybe some of you familiar with it has a certain conscious version was called the idea of a constitutional share. you had sometimes, you been hearing having it in washington and oregon emulation to weapons bans, the idea that it often is mobilized around sheriff's refusing to enforce new firearms restrictions. the idea which has -- about

going to now export in the book is the sheriff it's a high scum of the counter ship as highest law-enforcement law enforcement official in the land because it's the only elect a law enforcement official and also, therefore, the true arbiter of what the constitution means about the supreme court. dave ward didn't agree. he refused to do this. ammon discovered he he's goingo have to do something else to save the hammonds family because saving the hammonds family was required by god. and he needs to save america and so, therefore, he did a number of things including creating basically a shadow government in the county of local dissidents to inviting and to protect them. the hammonds, at this point have distanced themselves, didn't want him to protect him. the focus kept getting larger to the point where on the day of a

march in support of the hymns are going back to prison and couple of days, ammon let a breakaway group from the march that without 30, 40 miles out into the desert into the marshland of the desert and took over the refuge. in order to begin the task they quickly announced of returning all the federal public land of america to the people because for ammon it's unconstitutional. i'll talk to, now or read about that day, , that moment when thy did that. the wonderful thing the lord is about to accomplish, ammon was posing much more than that on in his dear friends the address and is on my father knew it even if they did not get what it was. he would publicly announced ana location of his proposed heart stent until an hour before the scheduled march at a diner that double as an antiques importing them nothing was such establishment in burns. the name of the diner added more

grander to what was about to unfold. there in the back rooms included at the last moment for the occasion and hidden away behind all the 20th century brick bric-a-brac, gumball machines and old photographs, antique wagons dangling over it. ammon unveiled the plan the lord had revealed to back in early december. clustered around the table was a group made up mostly of out-of-towners, , some new the bundy family well others in attendance hardly knew have ended up in the room at all. ammon prepared for the lords revelation, i put at his final call to the faithful, robert was already on his way north to join him. bringing ammon's brother along for the ride. proud of veteran of the standoff at the bundy ranch.

he relied his as his party andn will prove to be a one-way road. once in oregon, he almost emerged alongside ammon as of the public face of the occupation and what a face it was. polished by wind and sun and skin always seemed pulled a little extra time around art as if expressive of the ideological intensity of this otherwise welcoming about mormon cowboy. unlike anyone else who joined the bundy and occupying malheur, he was a practicing catholic and he liked to dress the part down to the revolver and the leather chaps. his experience and battle of bunker hill which is the bundy ranch made for a very different narrative on this broadcast on the news and on the social media outlets of the militia types had been there.

his story, , the rifleman on the bridge above the backdrop to what had been predominantly a cowboys stand for freedom. that was the name, one cowboys stand for freedom he later given a website for own monday inspired struggle, a fyke fight initiated with the bureau of land management. .. >> it would have been easier for the boy to assume he'd be left at peace to roam the red rock along with his family and cows the rest of the days. with the proximity to vegas and the issue of the desert would never reach him and his family. that it was even possible for

what had happened to clive to happen at all. that there was any chance of it happening to himself or any other rancher, this seems to have been too much to countenance. and in that time period, the fear in those areas that more national monuments are going to be designated and, you know, seneca was worked up about that possibility. there had been more designated in arizona and utah over the last 20 years. but it was in 2015 he initiated his own -- blm, one cowboy stands for freedom. that year he aannounced his own refusal of blm authority over his grazing allotments. in this and subsequent videos, he proved himself to be the an appealing rural malcontent, sincere and always steadfast and militant. his videos had garnered him a following in the patriot and

libertarian spheres of the internet well before he was turned into an icon. in part one, as he called his first video, or biores were introduced to him if full mode. throughout the video you can hear his spurs jangle and scrape. he's got black and white cow dog die pond. handsome and alert, she pants beside him. she loves it out here, just like her master. you can see the world, it's good out here, he says, inviting us in. the valley is rimmed by buttes and ridges. beyond it you can see more buttes and canyonlands rolling away to the horizon. the camera's mic picks up a gentle breeze, and off in the distance a few of the cows are munching away. it does look good out there,

damn good, rich with the kind of grass that better ranching grasses have become to come back after a few generations of overgrazing. see the grass, he says, look how thick it is, look how green it is, and we're in late summer. he hasn't grazed his public land pasture in six years, he tells us. and these cows, the camera now swoops more closely, are fat and sassy and looking good. and then he's off on a lecture about his e grazing rights, how he owns this grass, not the land, which all leads soon enough to article i, section eight, clause 17 of the constitution which is where i usually get bored and watch him pat his dog and his fat and sassy cows all over again. why am i drawn back to hear la soy talk about his life again and again? i watch it at least a dozen times. it is beautiful out there, but that's not why i'm watching.

i'm watching him talk about his life because he isn't alive anymore. the first time i saw this video was the day he was shot and killed by oregon state police officers after he sat down at a table in the back room of a restaurant to listen to what his friend ammon had in mind. excuse me. one of the last people to enter that room was an ex-mormon turned messianic jew named brand thornton. an hvac specialist by trade, he traced his family history back multiple generations. he's a we werer through and through -- westerner through and through, a dedicated hunter of the mountain west. you're off on a colorful narrative of one of his hunting expeditions failing to track a bighorn and under the cold,

wheeling stars, over rock through the dust and sagebrush into the glorious moment of the kill. the walls of his vegas townhouse are covered with heads, each an epic yarn in the itself. but thornton is not just a jocular sportsman, he is also an amiable ambassador for what they used to call the paranoid fringe. he seems more like a far out jeff bridges character. style makes a difference. since meeting brand one afternoon on the steps of the federal courthouse in portland, i spent hours engrossed by his infusion in which tales of desert exploration mingle with saning brush libber -- sagebrush libertarianism. in the middle of all this, he can drop lines of scripture, old testament, new testament or latter day saints with the ease of a seminary preacher. whether he's explaining the

workings of messianic time, detailing the moment of death of an ancient bighorn ram, a cloud of ticks, or rhapsodizing about his pigeon stew, brand always seems to be enjoying every meaning-filled minute of what he believes to be the final days of human history. he was called to action when the bundy family -- he arrived there a couple days before. he was waiting for the protest march to begin that morning. bored, he'd approached a group of militia organizers and been told to go away, that their conversation was confidential. that's when a mysterious blond-haired stranger gave him a sign. the unknown woman had come up behind him and pointed over his right shoulder at the restaurant on the other side of the parking lot. you're wanted over there, she'd said. without even questioning her, which was strange, he told me,

brand walked over and followed the man he recognized into the restaurant and down the hallway to a locked door. one of the principal figures around bundy at that time. knocked, the door opened, and the two men were ushered inside. i don't think they would have let me in i weren't behind john, brand told me. i wasn't part of the crew. later when he told the everyone about the blond woman in the parking lot, they all thought he was crazy. no such woman knew about this meeting, they told him. in the intervening months brand tried without success to find out who she might have been. he's come to think the stranger may possibly have been an angel. ammon poured out his heart, the assembled were invited to head out into the basin and take over the wildlife refuge, a place most of them had never heard of. lee soy fin couple later

recounted this moment, the video filmed on the occupied refuge. ammon, are you telling me that all these years we've been trying to draw a defensive line pressed here, stepping back, we keep losing ground, are you now says this is a peaceful step forward to reclaim? yes, that is what he meant, ammon said. i said, well, that's what i thought you meant. finnecum was ready to sign on and so was brand thornton. i was the first person to tell ammon i was with him, brand recalled proudly. instantly i knew once the spirit comes n you have a choice. i recognized it, and i had to make a very quick decision to go with it. you have to decide quickly in this kind of circumstance, he elaborated, so you don't lose the spirit. i had to make a quick decision before fear pushed out that revelation. as brand and others in the room understood it, god couldn't act in the world without humans receiving the spirit and

choosing whether or not to follow. it was up to everyone at the table to decide for themselves, and ammon had put it that way the day before, whether i am some crazy person or whether the lord truly works through individuals to get his purposes accomplished, free perm agency was a profound importance. stand, because when you stand the, others will stand with you, and god can't stand with you if you don't stand. once you stand, you can expect the hand of providence to be over you, is how lavoy had explained it at the end of his video before rising from his cowboy crouch and vanishing off screen. mortal souls hung in the balance. the decision had been easier for brand because he hadn't taken advantage of the expedition all that seriously, not at first. engrossed as he was in the spiritual inspiration, he didn't

understand why there seemed to be so much tension in the room about whether or not to follow ammon. he recalls one couple who he assumed to be local ranchers. the man stayed back leaning against the wall. as soon as ammon's plan was revealed, they'd gone out the door. another man, whom brand recognized from pate if rot circles, the idaho militiaman eric parker, didn't go so quietly. brand remembers him objecting strenuously to ammon's plan. he was totally against it, he told me. there was much to object to, he tonight have the support of the local ares, the sheriff, he didn't have any legitimate business doing what he was proposing. brand remembers parker even saying ammon was no better than the feds. he was practically screaming at ammon. he was shaking, he was so angry and pointing his finger. at the time brand couldn't figure out what all the intensity was about. call me stupid the, but i didn't

get it. it's like what's with all the drama with these people? as far as brand was concerned, ammon was just talking about an extension of what we were doing here in town. it might be a little dangerous, but protests always were. we'll go out to this place and we'll leave when the workers come back. i was really naive, he added, chuckling at himself. after the meeting broke up, brand joined the others who had agreed to head out to refuge. this vanguard called themselves the tip of the spear. they assembled in the fairgrounds parking lot at the edge of town without ammon. after they'd kneeled in prayer to consecrate their intention, lavoy pointed at the road. gentlemen, that is the rubicon, and once we cross that, there's no turning back. brand was baffled by the intensity, but he also began to wonder something else. what does he know that i don't?

so skip this part here. we learn more about -- we won't have time for learning about brand's ministry. brand as a messianic jew has structured his religious practice around a show far that he takes with him everywhere, and when he came to refuge and realized what was going on, there's a whole scene where he blows the show far because he believes it creates new material reality and and also bring peace and calms people down because once he realized his friends were going through the refuge with guns clearing it, he became concerned something might happen. but nothing happened because nobody was there. it was january 2nd. the refuge was open but nobody was working there. the crew moved in, and they stayed there for quite a while. they stayed there for three weeks until the leadership was arrested, and the different groups of people who had come and gone, but there's a core

group of people who joined ammon and lavoy out there. most of those people fled, but there were four people who stayed, and they were reined in by the fbi for about, well, another 11 days or so, until mid february. but before all that happened, before the arrests, there was a lot of back and forth and ongoing prop -- propaganda war. lavoy in particular became involved in a back and forth with the people who first brought me into this story, or my first contacts in the story, the burns tribe, the people of hardy county. who, when the group took over the refuge and ammon and lavoy and friends announced that they were there to return the land to the rightful owners who for them were ranchers, in some sense it

would like the people or in other cases actually there was an idea they were going to discover individual family ranchers that the land had been taken from. which is a whole other confusing thing which we won't go into here. but there was a press conference, and oh, interesting rightful owners, we've got some ideas who that might be. we get it, you don't mean us, but we're going to tell our story. and, again, it's a story we're not going to get into in depth here, but it's in the book and fascinating. both horrifying tale but also a tale of incredible perseverance, a group of people were displaced from their land but refused to accept that displacement and is have returned and are still a key part of this community to this day. and were a key part of the eventual defeat of this plan. but lavoy, who grew up on the navajo reservation, seemed to

feel a very strong need to try to connect with the tribe and also to forge an alliance with the tribe. and the back and forth -- there really was no back and forth. his one-way missives to them were, to me, fascinating. right before the culmination of the first stage of the occupation and lavoy's death. so i'll read some of that before we're done here. finnecum's confusion and sincerity can make his january 20th video painful viewing, his first video to tribe about the artifacts that are stored. this is his first video to tribe of the artifacts that are stored on the refuge. in fit we watch lavoy as he goes i through the boxes of artifacts in what looks like a dark basement. as always, he's wearing his big with cowboy hat, he makes clear that this visit is being staged as a reach-out. the rightful owners of the

objects in the room. we're looking for a liaison because we want to make sure these things are returned to the rightful owners. he continues enumerating the wrongs they've suffered. a special outrage is the rodent's nest that's been discovered in one of the boxes. the way i understand it, translates blains cooper -- another one of the occupiers -- is that the blm or whoever is in charge just kind of boxed them up and let 'em rot down here. lavoy, meanwhile, keeps moving through the basement picking up and putting down ancient points and tools. as he does, with the sensitive of the tribe that was -- hundreds of thousands of years ago by who knows how many thousands of native dead. but they're moving in a different time. finish with quiet outrage, lavoy, checking the artifact tags, establishes that sometimes for decades this stuff has just been stating down here, locked

away for nobody but for them, the feds, to look at when they come down here. satisfied he's made his case, he wraps up, reiterating his plea for dialogue, even going so far as to declare a willingness to claims that ryan bundy had recently dismissed before the video concludes with a demand, this time from cooper. the rightful owners need to come back and claim their belongings. it sounds like they're about to be evicted from the or storage space. of course, it wasn't going to be that simple. the boys weren't going to pack up history and hand it off respectfully to the rightful owners. neither was the tribe only concerned about dirt and animals mingling with the objects. it's not just the artifacts, charlotte robert told me weeks after it was all over, we're in the dirt. our history and culture is in the soil. the problem for charlotte and her tribe wasn't so much that there was dirt on the artifacts or that animals had been in the boxes where they were stored, but that the artifacts were out of the earth at all and being

with rifled through on the internet by a man whose words and actions despite his assertions and desire to be respectful with nowhere near appropriately reverent. it gets freaky. it's the like finnecum is surrounded by so many ghosts that he can't see them. they are everything. they are the air he's breathing, the ground he's walking on. they are what's stored in the boxes, stacked on boxes, stacked on boxes, seeping from the objects, chipped by hand, used and discarded for millennia by the people and their ancestors. it's in the nightmare of the settler repackaged as steven king horror. he's about to be ambushed by the silence of the dead, and he can't sense that silence because he's the one tawrks telling his own story about telling -- telling how horrible for the objects sitting in the room

since as long ago as 1980, a time frame with no significance considering the time scapes of native presences and absences of the land. in this storeroom of artifacts, this is nothing. the ground of the honey basin he's walking on every day is full of these belongings. they are buried in the dirt and marsh muck and just lying around on the surface. nobody will ever be able to come by and pick it all up. you can't just leave history out on the stoop for the rightful owners. it's everywhere. it's in everything. he's surrounded by relationship, and he's also in one, one for which he's not going to be able to dictate the terms. the dead weren't the only ones getting restless. neither were the people the only ones watching. after he posted the video of the law enforcement response to occupation took a strategic return. the next day, ammon found 14 messages on his cell phone from an fbi agent who identified himself only as chris. it was the first contact he'd

received from federal authorities from. this point forward, the pressure was on. a formidable military presence of the fbi shifted into a more active mode. i first talked to jarvis kennedy earlier in the book. he's, he was at that time a member of the or tribal council. i first spoke to jarvis on the phone a few days after the fbi had surprised the leadership on the snow bound road in the national forest. you know, he said, we don't think it's a coincidence that finnecum died. no disrespect. we feel for his family. we didn't want that to happen to him, but you can't go through objects like that without protection. whenever we find anything, he said, we bless it, say a prayer, sprinkle some tobacco or sage on it and and return it to earth because it's ours but not ours. i think that's hard for people to understand. often the explanation of

cultural practices and feelings that i've received from tribal members and burns are punctuated with variations of this last phrase. i don't know if you can understand that, it's hard to explain. it's hard for people to understand. these are frames usually coming at moments of intense interest for me, notes when i feel -- moments when i feel very much i understand what's being said have reminded me to be skeptical. inevitably, this was much here lavoy didn't understand which is probably why he was able to imagine that something like a dimension fed into the land and could somehow be boxed up and handed other. a basic misunderstanding involved with the artifacts now extended well beyond the specifics of the bundy can's relation -- bundy's relation. it underpins all the institutions which tribes have to negotiate.

for her, the land feels more like a relative than a good second own. it's a family relationship, ownership doesn't describe that, you can't own your relatives. everyone around here, all the dirt i dig up in my garden, my ancestors are woven through that. i don't know if people can you said. it's hard to -- can understand. it's hard to explain. her traditionally relationship informed her discipline of archaeology. it's a community in the dirt, she told me. i use that word. and when we dig, it's an offense against that community. it's why i became an archaeologist. not so much to participate in this particular knowledge-gathering system of the west, but to minimize the offense that archaeology is to these communities in the soil. she recognizes this as a somewhat quixotic position. devoid of any of the absolute all or nothing when will you stand purity that the bundies

espoused. archaeology has tremendous power over how the land is is immeasurably precious. no choice but to participate and hope that something like what she calls real collaboration. not just adding an indian or two to your team who keep happening. the burned had found this kind of collaboration over the last two decades in the relationship that the tribe enjoyed on the refuge. diane hoped as this kind of collaboration increased, it would form part of a larger development, a more robust transcultural knowledge-gathering practices that might eventually lead to some or all of the artifacts being returned to the dirt communities from whence they came. this is an ultimate goal that can be very hard for people to understand, things that belong in museums, carefully cared for, curatedded, cleaned. if there is dirt on them, then

they are dirty. this is how lavoy had is seen the artifacts. to diane's mind, on the other hand, the objects were still on site, still close to the dirt they'd come from. if they are to be transferred to a museum collection and properly cared for, legally returning them to the soil would become even more difficult. in her scholarly work, diane talks about the inadequacy ideas of western sacred -- with the vocabulary she offers in its stead the language of god and -- can seem both pompous and impoverished. the typical description of a foraging culture like that -- and their religious practices. diane proposes a different understanding of landscape, ever-shifting relations so that in her words an action on a

landscape is not only action on prior events, but also the people who are involved in those activities. thinking like this can also make diane's gardening complex. and not only because the dirt is like a relative, shot through with the material traces of her ancestors, our conversation turned to 19th century shaman and dreamer prophet who played a big role on the reservation and in the rebellion. there was no catechism for dreamers, but he was known to strongly reject agriculture and with it private property as the great dreamer prophet of the columbia plateau had also done. the most complete written record we have of 19th century dreamer doctrine comes from a conversation with the u.s. army ambassador sent to measure his mind and perhaps to convince the prophet to take up farming if and own eship of -- ownership of individual plots of land in

order to become properly civilized. the prophet explained to his guest that both land ownership and what the white americans that his people called bostons thought of as being work were prohibited to dreamers. men who work, he'd said, cannot dream. it's mulholland's vision those who violated the earth are digging deeply in it to cultivate human plants solely for human consumption would lose access to coming world. all the native dead were to return with in the refreshed and plentiful earth alongside lost populations of animals and plants as the dream world merged with this one and purged itself of boston. these ideas had made their way down. i think i can see what he meant, diane told me. there's something very strange the, kind of absurd about taking one part of the earth and saying only this kind of plant will you here, and -- will grow here, and

it's only purpose is to be eaten by me. it does totally go against our sense of reverence and reciprocity. it's so important to acknowledge that nothing exists just for me. if we take a plant or part of a plant, we always make an offering or ask permission. we need to effect plants' liberty. finnecum had a very different understanding of liberty, a somewhat extreme and colorful version of what remains the mainstream american understanding. it is a dispensation that is rarely extended to plants. liberty is for people, or people and their property, corporations and money. to disciple and his prophet, this has been a contradiction. the earth has a very specific purpose. it exists for human growth. for without latter-day saints, our time on earth are earthly sojourns, it's a test we want to pass before continuing on our spiritual way. liberty or perm agency was the

other crucial -- personal agency was the other crucial ingreed center. i believe that the first principle of heaven is perm agency. -- is personal agency. a lot of people think faith is the first principle, but before faith you must have the ability to. [cheers and choose. you must have your liberty. we believe we existed before this life as spirits in a premortal realm. it was his design that we should progress to become more like him. we need to have a body and experience mortal life, and that's what this mortal life is. we are spiritual beings that are here on earth having a mortal experience. when you view yourself as a child of god, you begin to have a different perspective. this perspective meanting that the only league purpose of government is aiding the individual and claiming, using and defending his rights. the government wasn't quite anarchism, a charge ryan and his

friends had to continually confront, but it came close at times. it sounded even closer to interview of the tattooed media guy of militia -- [inaudible] the two men talked of the relation between firearms and freedom and the ideal world they had found in the communities formed by bundy ranch. ed in his novel, also a novelist, he wrote a novel, finnecum presented a familiar fantasy version of the american frontier, an apolitical world of nonrelation where firearms and fences suffice to make good neighbors. regarding firearms, he said, one sword tends to keep another sword in its sheath, and that's exactly where all the guns should be, holstered in their sheaths, and and we should all be neighborly, kind and friendly. lavoy smiling, nodding as he

says this in front of a fireplace. what appears to be the grip of an antique pistol or perhaps the handle of a knife poked up autoof his jeans. out of his jeans. we'll finish here with a little little -- the day before he died finnecum made his last direct plea to the tribe in a video again about the artifacts, and we'll finish our time with lavoy with in this. he's crouching in the doorway of one of the stone buildings of the refuge. he tells the camera about his native bloodlines. he talks about his youth on the navajo reservation and his time among the lakota.

moving on, he assures his videos that their sacred objects were not be handled or mistreated before turning to today's real pitch. it is time, the he says, or he seemed to be saying to everyone in his final days, it is time the people here of the county, it is time for you to throw off the bia, to become a completely sovereign, independent nation without them. he takes off his gloves. he pivots on his heels. i believe in the american people, he continues. i believe in the native americans. it is time for them to stand up and throw off the federal government out of their own nations. now he's reaching his right arm from his heart toward you. you, people of harding county, i hope to see you soon, he says. now gesturing toward the camera, now looking down, looking up. the refrain drops away. we'll be on the same side.

we, we, he stammers, are not enemies. that is all i have to say. i think i'll stop there. there was a whole other bird passage, go out to refuge and spent a lot of time with the birds at the very beginning when the refuge is finally open again after the occupation, but i think this will be a good place to close. and if maybe take some questions if people have questions about either what they've heard or about, about this whole event. or about other parts of the story that you may have followed. anything. >> [inaudible] maybe did interviews with people who were involved in the occupation and how many interviews you did and kind of what that experience was like

talking to them? >> well, you get the sense -- brand, for example, that was all with brand. that's all the stuff was talking the brand. either i spent a lot of time with him at the trials in portland. he came up -- he was never charged. but he testified in the fall 2016 and in the -- well, actually, in the spring 2017 trial he didn't testify because he was afraid he was going to be trapped into perjury or manager. i can't remember what -- or something. i can't remember exactly why he didn't. that doesn't sound right. i don't think he was concerned about perjury, i can't remember why. he didn't testify but he was there, and the defense had an actor read his testimony while he was in the court watching. [laughter] so i spent a lot of time with brand in portland and also on the phone and with a lot of other people associated with bundy revolution.

or a person near named neil wampler was very helper if, one of the occupiers found not guilty in the fall of 2016. and a number of the other occupiers who were out there appear in the book from interviews. often during the trials. and at other events or actions that they took. and then also an important character who comes in later is a man named john lamb, an ex-amish man from montana who joined the group after all of this and became kind of a leader of the group during their period in court and is still an important figure among them. and then i talked to ammon and to ryan after they finally -- after they got out of prison in 2018 when the charges -- they were both acquitted in this case in oregon, and then, but they were arrested on charges regarding the standoff in nevada around that time. so, but hen that case -- but

then that case was thrown out of court because of government malfeasance basically. 3,000 payments of discovery evidence -- pages of discovery evidence were withheld by prosecutors, and the judge dismissed the indictment. that's when i finally got to meet them face to face after working on this book for a long time, and that's kind of at the end of the book. and then did some phone interviews with ryan afterwards. so the quotes about mormon doctrine from ryan come from last year. and i'm sure i'm forgetting some of them, but there's a whole chapter in here too about there was a huge, not -- huge is not the right word, but there was a lengthy protest in the desert in nevada outside a prison run by a private company that used to be called corrections corporation of america. it has renamed as corps civic is their new name.

ammon and ryan were in a private prison with their father for about two years in the nevada desert which became the focus of protests for that community, and they had a camp, and they would circle it every day on they called it a jericho march. and brand thornton would blow the show far on the jericho march. they gathered out there because ammon had -- the bundy family and their friends learned a lot about american prisons over the two years after their arrest. in 2016 including what ammon was doing a lot of passive resistance of prison policies as is his wont, and he ended up -- i said this is a pretty common kind of practice and legal practice apparently in those facilities, he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back stuffed in a shower stall for 13 hours because of his refusal to observe prison policies. and then his followers came and

set up a camp outside that prison which isn't that far from where with i lived, is so i went and visited them there. they were doing this amazing thing, they set up from the dimensions of the shower stall that ammon was handcuffed n they created replica shower stalls out in the desert that they then live streamed themselves in, in the same position, handcuffed so that they could suffer as ammon had suffered. and then they live streamed this and would collect donations for ammon's defense. no one ever made it the 13 hours, one person made it to 10. and these videos were, like, a 10-hour video someone just suffering in a box and talking. it's like they discovered performance art -- [laughter] through the whole, through this whole process. and it was very strange to encounter them coming from the perspective i come from, which

is not theirs in many ways. not the same background in any way and not politically at all coming from the same, same place. but to suddenly find them out in the desert protesting something that had been of great concern to me as well. for a long time. ammon was -- by the time he got out of prison, ammon was advocating the abolition of prisons and the replacement with a system of restitution and rehabilitation. since he's gotten out of prison, i haven't heard him talk about that so much, but that was a thing he was very serious about at that time. they're a complicated bunch of people. more questions? >> this event made me very frightened when it happened and angry -- >> yes, a lot of people did. it made a lot of people -- >> i'm wondering what you think what is the impact of this event, how do you see it as a

historical event? are there waves that ripple out from it, has it energized other militia groups or other land copyright groups? how does it fit? >> well, the thing about historically because one of my main focuses in the book has been how much 19th century history was borne forward by that event and also the tribe's involvement really highlighted, i think made really clear what the occupation, if you think of the occupation also as a performance. it was a kind of restaging of 19th century western white settlement and stealing of land and all that violence, but restaging it as, for the internet. as a community of feeling that provided then all these, like, feelings of belonging and mattering and incredible

significance because we heard at the beginning ammon was offering nothing less. like, you're saving america, and not just america, but you're helping human time be ushered toward this correct end if you come out and do this. but the method to do that was to restage western settlement on land that they didn't know was sacred native land, but of course it was, right? so that aspect of history, i feel like it reverberates backwards, and the story, i feel like, has a great -- i'll get to other part moving towards the future part of your question, because i feel like it also is an image that gives us a picture of so many of the impasses that we face culturally and politically right now. of unresolved history of the 19th century just circulating madly on facebook, right? but then -- maybe facebook, the facebook dispensation maybe brings me to a more proper answer to your question. which would be like i see, the

thing i see as alarming about what they were able to do in oregon, and this is something that the sheriff of harding county will tell you more directly because he experienced it the most directly, is that you have a county out in that's impoverished with a very impoverished public sector, you have a sheriff's department dealing with a county that is the size of massachusetts with 7,000 people and four sheriff's deputies or five depending on the budget and very easily using this community of feeling on facebook that was very horizontal, not very tightly organized at all, was able to instantly challenge the sovereignty of federal and local power in that area by, just by virtue of the amount of inspiration ammon was able to pour into the internet. and i think that becomes, to use kind of ammon's kind of language, shadows and tights, it becomes a shadow of maybe a

larger kind of problem or of future kind of things that can happen when you have broken-down civil society or whatever you want to call it and also, like, a tremendous amount of alienation, a tremendous amount of intense, ugly feelings circulating and also a broken-down public sector combined and that you also have this, the strangeness of the world and the platforms which are a public space that's also privatized, right in and in a sense, automated. intense feeling is poured into a space and then automated and increased. and it has, i feel like this is the most difficult thing to think about with this story. it has a relationship to sovereignty, to political sovereignty and governance that, and that's what feels the most ominous to me. this story seems to me, when i saw a couple weeks ago that facebook and some of its partners announced they were going to create their own currency -- [laughter]

that connection, you know, the connection to this story might feel ten you yous -- tenuous, but i've been thinking about how facebook has created the possibilities, but facebook is also very actively involved in circumventing and undermining different forms of sovereignty and creating through that new forms of -- i don't even know is it sovereignty, governance? i don't know what it is. but certainly the idea of them having their own currency would be, like, outside the sovereignty of -- >> power. >> -- of government, of national governance being able to regulate that currency, right? if -- so that larger concern i see reverberating up from that story, but also more specifically you asked about militia stuff. like, ammon, that group, that world is really disorganized, right? and also right now they're very fractured. actually because of trump and because of ammon. ammon has broken with that

world. i don't know if he would use that terminology, but over the rhetoric around the caravans in 2018 because the militia that had allied with his family is very heavily trumpian and very anti-immigrant. he, he made another video speech like he does at his desk with a different -- but he made another one of his addresses saying that he had done his research again and decided that people from honduras and everywhere that were coming were suffering from real calamities and that it was our duty as christians to welcome them, and that he was very angry, he was very upset about the rhetoric in his world and the rhetoric coming from the president and began to speak of that sounding like nazi e germany and things like this. and then he received a torrent of abuse from people who had supported him before who told him, you know, they wished he was dead or that they hadn't helped him. so he's no longer, he's no

longer a galvanizing force in that community. but, you know, it can always happen that somebody else could be, right in and because of the power of the internet, something like that could happen again. and then i see with things like one flashpoint in the west to be issues about climate change legislation, especially if climate change bills have a particularly intent impact on rural communities that are already intensely suffering economically, and you already have these kinds of discourses circulating about the constitutional sheriff or we didn't get into it today, but the rhetoric of the war on rural america which is a big thing for the oath keepers militia. if you have flashpoints like that, you have the ability in the internet to automate and allow people to organize more of it in a flash mob,.

you have the presence of an incredible amount of firearms in america, and all it takes then is, like, a certain charismatic figure or a galvanizing figure to end up with a very different can kind of american yellow vest kind of situation which i think would involve more guns. and that doesn't, that does feel potentially alarming. and something that, i mean, i think that every, you know, every effort to craft climate change legislation and programs has to take in mind, and why it seems so important that all of those efforts be happening on multiple scales, some local up to federal and be done thoughtfully and nimbly, right? and with all sorts of engagements in.

>> i've been a chief hydrologist for u.s. fish and wildlife. we spent a lot of time on the reservation. >> oh, yeah. >> several years ago. so what really struck me about this which we didn't hear at all that i recall this whole sense of god calling. >> yeah. >> and the whole mormon mess january withic sort of thing -- messianic sort of thing. none of that came through from the media, as far as i know. did i just miss it? i'm assuming that this -- at this present point the media doesn't know anything about church anyway. i'm a clergyman, and i'm always objective that they don't know a

god damn thing -- [laughter] science and religion, all that kind of crap, somebody's missing -- but anyway, just in terms of did the media pick up on that at all? i mean, seemed to me that was fundamental to what you're talking about. the second question is passed along from my son is where do you think the next will happen? he thinks it might be over water rights in -- >> in where? in nevada? >> the cash metals. >> oh, understand. >> when i talked this morning about you coming. >> i don't know about that particular case, but it would seem to me that water rights are going to be the big fights. and, i mean, that then creates different constellations, right? because one of the big places, is it spring valley in nevada? up in the great basin. like, where las vegas is buying up the rights.

so you have environmentalists very concerned and, actually, las vegas is at the heart of this whole story. >> [inaudible] >> this never would have happened without las vegas, frankly. and also the tortoise had to be protected, las vegas had to grow, and that's when they came to deliver the new regulations to cliven, and cliven discovered his special way out. but it would seem to me -- and in harding county too, the water is a huge issue now. they've been in the kind of, if you're familiar, if people are familiar with farming, dry farming practices -- this isn't dry farming practice really, but the issues around pivot farming out in the desert, it creates one of the absurdities we get with the global capital. we have, like, people drilling into aquifers in the desert to make pivot farms where you're growing alfalfa which is then being shipped to china. shipping them out of the country and the water tables are going

down and, obviously, for birds and forking agriculture. but to first part, i think there was a little bit. i mean, it was definitely -- i was definitely aware from coverage that these people are lds because of some of the statements that ammon made very early on got a lot of coverage. but then i don't think it was picked up beyond that. i think the mainstream coverage kind of focused on being a kind of election year thing. like, people left behind. these people are upset. what are they upset about? what is public land. and that was it, right? and then, and then, you know, there were different coverage depending, you know, entirely depending on what political bent >> last question. >> thank you. you mentioned the constitutional

sheriff philosophy a couple times, and in the q&a you even talked about governance. i'd heard from people who were very close in the area at the time, and i bereave you mentioned this, the sheriff of harding county was not -- he was not a posse comb tatas type of sheriff. he really didn't want this occurring in his county, and when the ambush took place, they were going to a public meeting in a county one county over where the sheriff was a leader of this alternate governance constitutional sheriff movement. can you comment about that? >> yeah. he -- that sheriff who makes a brief appearance in the book of grant county to the north of harding county was voted the constitutional lawman of the year, i believe, is the award.

but i'm going to get that, the acronym of the organization wrong now. it's like the constitutional -- it's very long. it's got, like, peace officers and lawmen and whoever it can draw in. and it's basically the oregon of a man named richard mac who is from arizona, and in a lot of ways i think richard mac, i talk about this in the book, and the sheriff talked with me about this a lot in the times when i talked to him because mac also reached out to him. and mac had been associated with ammon and the bundy family though they also broke over -- when ammon was in prison and started talking about prison reform, him and mac had a split. but at that time, that idea, i think, really was really important for ammon, and it really came from mac who is a

latter-day saint, who studied -- whose mentor was a man named cleon who is the persons also who annotated all of the constitutions that, if you've ever seen any of the patriot types, they usually carry a copy of the constitution. very curiously with an oil painting, a reproduction of an oil painting of what looks like a wax sculpture of george washington on the cover. and it's, it's the constitution -- [inaudible] somebody in that psalm sort of john birch -- same sort of john birch milieu brings forward, it's somebody who's like a direct contact and brings forward those ideas, but he also brings forth the ideas where the constitutional sheriff idea comes from. though i think that the way things work, and this is something also sheriff mac told me -- i mean, not sheriff mac,

dave bore told me when he talks to people who have learned this idea, this is not just people amongst who are directly involved with the bundyites, he hears it a lot in eastern oregon, that people aren't aware of the origins of that idea. if you're not -- are you guys familiar? i mean, '60 and '70s, very frightening really, violent, virulently racist and anti-semitic militia and religious kind of christian identity organization. and wayne gayle is, i think, preacher and charismatic figure of that group, very disturbing and strange dude. who one of his parts of his doctrine is the idea of the constitutional sheriff, that the sheriff is the highest law authority and if the sheriff won't defend the constitution -- and this idea filtered into

harding county -- if the sheriff won't do it, then it's the job of the people to hang the sheriff. a lot of people suffered a lot in the course of this study, but sheriff ward in particular was a lot of what happened was focalized on him -- >> coworkers are still suffering. they're in therapy. >> oh, yeah. >> terrible for the rest of their lives. >> and people who followed. yeah, they lost a lot of people from the refuge, stopped working there. the archaeologists moved away. they don't have an archaeologist there now which is a big problem for the tribe. they don't have somebody to partner with there anymore. and it's a huge issue for people working out in smaller communities for federal agencies. like, if you could imagine like

how vulnerable that could feel. yeah. thank you. [applause] >> here's a look at some authors on booktv's "after words," our weekly author interview program that includes best selling nonfiction books and guest interviewers. last week michael malice reported on the far-right movement. coming up, journalist natalie wexler will argue that the u.s. education system can be improved by expanding the curriculum of elementary school students in history, science and the arts. and this weekend on "after words," former virginia democratic governor terry mcauliffe recounts events that led up to tragedy in charlottesville following the 2017 unite the right rally. >> a lot of this started when

president obama got elected, and for many people just the concept of a black president in the oval office, for many, was offensive. but they didn't really act on any of it. they may have done it on social media. and then you have a president who comes in who spent, you know, a lot of time on the birther movement saying that president obama wasn't born in america and then all the other -- he's tweeting, retweeting white supremacist, neo-nazi activities while he's running for president. and then trump comes in and the ban and all the things he's done, i think it sent a signal to people that, wow, the president can come out and say this stuff, i can too. and that's why they felt comfortable coming to charlottesville. if he can say it publicly, so can i. people used to wear hoods, and they used to do this at night. they don't think they have to wear hoods anymore, and charlottesville they came out. this was their big coming-out party, but they got hurt badly in charlottesville. >> "after words" airs saturdays

at 10 p.m. and sundays at 9 p.m. eastern and pacific on booktv on c-span2. all previous "after words" are available as podcasts and to watch online at booktv.org. >> booktv recently visited capitol hill and asked congresswoman dina titus of nevada about her reading list. >> well mostly, unfortunately, i have to read news analysis and policy-like papers and academic journals. but when i read for entertainment and pleasure, it's usually when i travel. i just come back from greece, and so i was reading books east by greek authors -- either by greek authors or about greece. i've been there a number of times in the past and have been through kind of the usual suspects, durell, catson, mandolin, nicholas gage. so i looked for something a little bit different, and this time i rea