>> there are a lot of places to get political information but only at c-span do you get it straight from the source, no matter where you' are from or where you stand on the issues, c-span is america's network, unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. if it happens here, here, here, or anywhere that matters, america is watching on c-span powered by cable. >> i'm the managing librarian of the brooklyn heights branch of the brooklyn public library, temporarily offering lobby service out of the new center for brooklyn history as we anticipate the opening of our new branch this fall. it is my pleasure to introduce the cpl presenter tonight,

fatima shaik and jennifer egan on "economy hall," the industry of a free black brotherhood. i'm excited to be given this honor in part due to the connection between the friends of her brooklyn heights library friends group and it is a robust group that supports the brooklyn heights library in so many ways. i have a connection with fatima shaik and was asked by deborah how if as a branch we would be interested in supporting her in a virtual book launch for economy hall. after discovering the story behind the book and seeing the glowing review in the new york times i jumped at the opportunity to host a program sharing this monumental book but as the accolades and publicity grew, so did the importance of this program and then fatima shaik brought her friend jennifer egan on board, the author of manhattan beach, this has become a presented event and we knew it.

within "economy hall," fatima shaik shares with the world the free black brotherhood of new orleans founded in 1836 that supported the community through the civil war, reconstruction, white terrorism and the birth of jazz. this now fiction narrative is american history that needs to be shared. it highlights voices that need to be heard and is a deeply personal story for fatima shaik herself as a new orleans native and descendent of the very community the brotherhood served. i'm deeply excited about the conversation we are about to enjoy between fatima shaik and jennifer egan on "economy hall," the hidden history of a free black brotherhood. please take it away. >> hello. hello, everybody, thank you for being with us. i'm incredibly excited to have

a chance to spread the word about this remarkable book which i have been talking with fatima shaik about for some years now but which has surpassed my every expectation in being a work of history that is an enormous sweep, covers a lot of ground, has tremendous importance and is so readable and fun. so it is a very complex work and i thought maybe the best place to begin would be where you begin in your introduction, tell us how this book came to be, the story that begins with your father. >> guest: thanks to everybody for being here. my father found some journals in the trash in the back of a dump truck and brought them home and put them in the closet, and i was already a writer but looking at something

new to write about, all these journals, and realize this is a really important part of history. >> host: can you describe what are the journals and what is the organization that produced them? >> the journals, the associative economy society, the only association of black men that started in 1836, when i realized -- realized after reading the journals this was the most influential and prosperous organization to restore our efforts. >> what used to the journals cover? >> the journals themselves cover from 1836 to 1935, the

organization lasted at least until the 1950s because that is when the journals were doing that. they cover that 100 year period, some are missing, around the civil war is missing, the journal from 1842-1857 is missing so there are a few gaps that i was able to fill out by doing some research. >> you talked about the fact that your father always pronounced in the french way, economy. could you explain what this organization did and what its role was in the community that it served? >> at the time it was a mutual aid society, mutual aid society takes care of its members, their health, if somebody gets sick they pay for the doctor bills, they buried people, if somebody died they would take care of burial expenses and give the widow some money but it grew over the centuries as politics became more important

so that they became much more politically active and around the civil war they became very involved in what was going on in the united states and the world. >> you described growing up in the 1950s in new orleans amidst a kind of erasure of your community's history in which you were told stories by people with various memories for the past or stories they had heard about the past that somehow did not quite connect with the official history, there's a beautiful quote from your book that i want to read, you said of the people telling these stories, each spoke of the past with the passion of a man wrongfully accused of a crime who repeats it over and over his account of the moment but proves his innocence. i love that and i thought could you explain to us what were

these stories trying to assert or to prove, to use the analogy you give us? what was missing from the official histories? >> the history itself basically was missing, the history of any sort of community except the white supremacist narrative, you have to understand i went to segregated schools and in those schools we knew what was going on, our elders would set us down and tell us about the friend you just brought home is this person's grandchild and his grandfather did such and such, we learned it like that. when i went to high school and we were the fourth class to integrate at catholic high school i room for asking a nun giving the white supremacist

narrative asking her what about the black people? what did the black people do in new orleans? she said nothing. so i know, i had to write this as pervasive. >> host: what was interesting to me was a distinction you explained, two different definitions of creel that existed in new orleans as you were growing up. can you talk about that? >> yes i can. there are hundreds of definitions of creel depending who you are talking to. in my time you figure white supremacy started rearing its ugly head post reconstruction, it got verlyn to 1890s to my time, 1950s. we heard the cry all meant white where the daily newspaper wrote about you hear about

crayola food and creel natives but creoles are white, not negroes. this went against our understanding because my mother spoke french, people around me spoke french and one thing i make clear, it is not the color. sometimes people think if your white skin, it means creel but it doesn't. it means the all world and the new world met in louisiana and blended into different things so you have people of african descent like my people who could be any range of color and they are creel. there are white people who just married europeans who are what they call white cradle -- creel. we felt it was the mixing of the old world and the new world and we weren't into race and color anyway.

>> host: talk a little bit about your own history and how you came to be born in new orleans, some fun stories. >> guest: really complicated. my grandfather, i have the name fatima shaik. my grandfather came from india. one of the first indians to come to the united states in 1890, he came to new orleans, married a black creole woman, a black woman who was born in new orleans, she was the granddaughter i believe of an enslaved person, and enslaved person in louisiana who was purchased by her husband and then freed before she had children. that is different from the other side of my family, the

great-grandmother of whom my great-grandmother had children by her owner, they were born enslaved and they were enslaved until they were at least 20 years old and i remember asking my grandfather, who is your family? he said who wants to know? he wasn't going to tell anything about his family. because of that history of slavery that he wasn't proud of but his father was a slave, they met in new orleans. >> guest: >> host: what you same years what you describe about the community, that the economy was serving which was in the 19th century, multiethnic and incredibly inclusive. i was very struck by the fact that the economy welcomes jews, put out an offer to chinese who

might want to join and i would love it if you could explain to those of us who don't know that much about the south, what did multiethnic mean in new orleans in the 19th century? >> don't know if they use that terminology but what it meant was you were white because the people who had privileges, living in a segregated system, there were places that were white only and everyone who was not white or was nonwhite, or colored, you are nonwhite essentially, people who came into the community and to tell you the truth if you look at many communities, black communities in the united states you will see nonwhite people go right into the black community often. where they take their first businesses, where the black community tends to be quite inclusive. in the south essentially it was very inclusive because people needed each other, worked

together and they didn't believe in racism, just didn't believe it, the premise, didn't make any logical sense to us. >> "economy hall," your title, comes from an actual place. i wonder if you could talk a little but about that place and its history and also just about you are very eloquent in your book about the importance of actually having a place to hold meetings. let's talk a little bit about the actual place of "economy hall". >> guest: "economy hall," in 1836 they bought a small house, in 1867, 20 years later decided to build the home, they heard other organizations -- we will build a huge hall across the street from the original building.

it became a center of the community. there were balls there and performances and theaters, opera and as the civil war approached it became increasingly political, people talked about suffrage in the 1860s, about having love oh, voter registration drives, very important to the community. that community survived until my generation. my father when he discovered those journals on the back of the dump truck discovered them, because of the economy society. and he said the fall had been sold and they were getting rid of everything that was in there and these books went to the dump so this sort of storytelling, more than 100

years. >> guest: let's talk about the physical document. your father took command you describe beautifully his building a cupboard to put them in, sustaining it and very luckily having a house that was elevated enough of that katrina for example did not damage these documents which were already water damaged because you mentioned your father put them out in the sun to let them dry because they had gotten rained on. it is painful to think about, but many years past and you became a journalist and a fiction writer and writer of children's books. and talk about your return to these books that you had not had deep contact with until then it seems.

>> guest: i knew the books were there the whole time because as a child they said once the books got into the house, everybody said don't touch them, they are too important. when i come home, never could make anything else seem like much trouble. after i had been away for a long time, and seen the way history was interpreted and knew that this was there i wanted to read and see what was in them and when i saw the handwriting, just the handwriting alone tells you these were people that were very educated. i was drawn, the person who you saw his signature, i grew up around bo deal, my cousin's cousin, i knew the name and to find out luker had been a schoolteacher and involved in the freedmen's bureau and all

sorts of things that was really fun to find out. >> host: it was surprising to me to see the beauty of some of the excerpts from these documents, these are minutes of meetings which i will read one short excerpt. love is a beautiful dream. the aspiration of the known to the unknown, the diving ray ravished by prometheus, god created the world only because he needed to love. not what you expect to find in meeting minutes. would that we did find such things so it is striking that in a sense these are literary documents. were you surprised by what you found in from and the hold they

ended up taking over you and your own literary life. >> guest: i was surprised by how literary they were. as i knew my father and my father's friends, they were always telling each other you can do this. i write in the little book about how you can get a phd in the united states so we were driving to canada every summer. you couldn't live in a place without segregation. one of his friends told him you don't need to stick around here, get out of the country for a little while. when i saw these guys writing these encouraging words, these inspirational words it was surprising that i saw it written but it wasn't surprising that they did that because i had almost heard the same language exactly but i had heard the spirit in my community and in my life.

>> host: what about the language of these documents? you mentioned that a friend of euros described it as french american. what is the language like, and how is it different from just french, or american english? >> guest: it's not english until 1936. it is broken french and broken english, by 1926 they wrote in english. the french -- i am no french scholar. but the way the french red the sentences, the sentence construction was like english construction or for example when they started to get around americans around the time of

the civil war, when they got around the americans they started using words -- just beautiful because it means dear. >> host: i am curious about the process of the enormous undertaking of synthesizing 100 years of documentation into a historical work. i guess i would love to share the timeline of how that occurred. simply reading these journals must have taken you quite a while. where were you in your life at the time, when did you fold the scene, when did it become a full-time project, take us through your interactions with

them. >> guest: you're making me laugh because only now is a full-time project, full-time job. it was about 20 years ago that i started trying to read the journal and i would go through the journal and try to summarize. when i came to something i couldn't understand because the french were too difficult and involved, at st. peter's university, speak something like 16 or 18 languages so to ask him whether this - these journals -- these journals were in french, some of the journals i had to do were in spanish. so he could read french and he could read spanish. that took about 5 years. after i did that i started

seeing and sort of as i went along with isar names of my neighbors, and people who live in the neighborhood. that made me closer to it and sometimes having spiritual things happen. there was a fellow who committed suicide. he wrote a suicide note. i was in the library, didn't know who this guy was. i saw someone i hadn't seen in 30 years, saw her sitting at a microfilm machine and i said do you know who these people are, have you heard of these people, she said that is my ancestor. and she didn't know he had committed suicide, that was the first time she had seen a letter in his words. maybe i'd better just continue this, took me 20 years.

had i known i would work on one book for 20 years i would have given it to somebody like you. i don't think i would have worked that long on it. i did little children's work, had a full-time job as a teacher, did a couple books of short stories which are possible in short periods of time. that is the timeline for me. >> guest: a tremendous resource was your own community who had been giving you innocence the oral history component of this story even when as you said as a kid you didn't always want to listen to them so what degree did you reengage with that community and the role of oral historian as you try to fill out this picture and what were those experiences like?

>> guest: that was the most fulfilling experiences i had because a friend of mine who married into my family, we are all cousins, about 100 years old and somebody else who is 80 years old advanced economy hall, her mother dan said economy home, so when they told me about the music being played there and that their parents didn't want them to go sometimes, really rich, really rich stories. >> host: did it further enrich your relationship to your own community? >> guest: yes. you don't ever leave, we are always -- we can live somewhere else.

and with that, more people -- to know how i was connected like i found out that my friend and i had been connecting and found out her parents who had met, her parents were members of economy hall. in 1850. so that became more fun. i will area -- always carry new orleans around with me as you have seen. >> guest: it's like he began the project that you did, in the sense that you caught a moment where more of this existed in living memory than i am guessing does now. a lot of these stories are fading and it is so crucial to actually get to people and record them while they are

still here. >> my mother's friend has passed, the hundred-year-old woman and her daughter have passed, none of these people are still around so i was very lucky to talk to them. i talked to them, the second step when i started seeing the names of people that i knew, then i started reaching out to some of them to see if i could talk to their older families but i really was like -- this whole process was luck. it was like my dad found the book, it was luck that i was a writer and found something in the book which it was luck that i would bump into these people. there are séances in the book. >> there are séances recording in the minutes.

how many meeting minutes include the presence of ghosts? >> guest: what was fun was to find out some of these historically events and i would look and séance journals and there would be a ghost talking about this real thing that happened. i could quote the ghost. it was great. >> i'm curious about how you, the fiction writer and journalist undertook the mammoth job of trying to synthesize and crystallize the sonorous amount of history and material into a story and you make some bold choices, one of them, you alluded to earlier, you choose to focus your gaze on one particular person. blue guard --lugard bogille.

>> host: he is a fascinating figure with an amazing history. i would love to hear about if you can tell us about him and what it was about him that made you feel like he would be the one to lock in on for the story. >> there were many things going on. i had a person to hang the story on for it to move and not to be just a historical account. i am a fiction writer so i wanted it to move like a novel. and luckily he lived from 1812 to 1892 so i had a very long life to work with. he was also present in so many things at a time -- he had a school and he had taught

someone on the side. then he became part of the reconstruction government. he was the grand marshall of emancipation day celebration, it was also covered by the new york times so they didn't mention him but they mentioned the celebration. he was instrumental, so full of poetry. 's friends were poet so he had this beautiful handwriting. everyone's in a while the minutes would say that he gave a spontaneous poem. how can you resist if you are a writer somebody at a men's meeting who gives a poem. that is wonderful. he was politically active and he named his children after

writers. he had one child named homer. all of his boys were named after poets or writers. it was really fun to follow him. >> host: a combination of his sensibly, literary awareness, the fact that he was present for so many historical events and so deeply involved in the economy, that made him the guy that could bring you all the rest. >> guest: he was the go to guy. when he took the minutes he was very precise about the way he took the minutes. every time they did something new he would number them and then he gave a content speech so you could look at the content and see what was going to come up in the minutes.

that made it easy, clear to me. he also if anything important happened would make underlines and exclamation points or capital letters. he was very hers -- easy person to follow and he is one of these people, a senator or president -- he's a person who lives in the community. more than one hundred years. >> host: it must feel as if you know him. you know his personality. you know what mattered to him. he was a helpmate for you. >> guest: he was a lot of fun. at one point, they get in

arguments at certain points, it was one point one summer, didn't agree with another one and saw him on the street and hit him with his cane. the two men came to the meeting and talked about this, one set i'm still bruised in the face because of your morocco cane and bruce, because of your insulting your morocco cane and then he writes it word for word, everything. at the end, the other one says it is not my apology i want to give you. it is my arm. they embraced so closely. it was beautiful writing. >> host: i want to take this moment to say that in the chat, my links are appearing for this book. these are pretty amazing

anecdotes, remarkable, it is a very fun book to read and i urge all of you to buy it for yourself and your loved ones. another thing, for sure, he is a big part of what makes this book so readable but the other parties you, because you bring us into these moments with a fool array of scene setting tools that i think were honed in your time as a fiction writer at a journalist, you bring us clothing, smells, you put us in the moment and it is tremendously compelling and i am wondering because you also have a gigantic quantity of footnotes and you were relying heavily on sources but also on your own imagination. if you can talk about the craft challenge of deciding to draw the line about what you were

willing to imagine and how you negotiated those questions. >> guest: there is imagination in the setting of a scene. the scene itself is true. let me put it this way. someone had a meeting in economy hall talking about the vote for black men. it was november. i looked at the weather in november 18, '63, looked up the time of the sunset on sundays so i was able to say -- -- the speech -- you have to walk into the room because he didn't give the speech from outside so i can say that the meeting began at 7:00, if sunset was at 6:00, now i know so i can say he

walked into economy hall just about the time the sun was setting so the room was warm because everyone had their overcoats on and it was crowded. something like 600 people so you figure hundreds of men packed in a room studying the plaster walls. i can do that because it is fact, not imagination, any of the words in there are the words that were in the newspaper or the quotes that were in the journals, basically everything. i had an editor who would not let me get away with anything, she asked me, there was one

street that the economy was on, when did it become a street? when was it an avenue? was hidden avenue in 1862 or was it an avenue in 1865? i found 5 references that said different things. so everything has been checked out. >> guest: it is not so much imagination is using your tools as a writer to connect the factual dots in ways that bring the sensory quality of it to life in the moment. >> guest: right. fiction itself -- i have to feel fiction. that's the type of reader i am. the way i take in information and fiction is through my senses. i have my 5 senses and that is how i get my information so to feel anything like everybody feels is through senses so for

my reader to feel anything they have to know what it smells like and how it tastes, what the sound is that they are hearing. those are things are brought from fiction and also a little bit through journalism, narrative journalism. if you want to read something else i have some pieces after katrina that are very sensuous, not sensuous like sexy but sensuous in talking about what it felt like after katrina. >> host: you mentioned katrina and i want to jump on and ask you a question. i was surprised to hear you right in your book that in a sense the biggest disruption of this community that you are tracking going back to the

early 19th century was katrina. that event that has really fractured the community in certain ways. that was shocking to me that in all those years, an event of this century is the one that has been so disruptive. can you talk about that? >> yes, most of these people, the generations i'm talking about lived in downtown areas of new orleans where the levees broke. so the flood came into our neighborhoods and a lot of these people lost their homes, elders were in their 70s, 80s, 90s, lost that connection. a lot of them, there was one couple you read in the book who were very close to the economy home. most of our elders were evacuated. my cousin evacuated and took them out of town but they were

getting heart attacks and strokes, they were out of their environment. more than 80 people who were in new orleans at the time of katrina were born here. it is a city where people stay, they don't leave. the vast description of having all those neighborhoods flooded out, losing those elders, from one thing or another, that really did us in. >> host: you also mentioned the diaspora that has resulted with a number of people leaving the city who have not returned. i believe it was almost one hundred thousand. >> guest: yes, almost 100,000 have not returned. you can read some things on the website about this because there was the diaspora. the houses were flooded.

it was very difficult. let's follow this white supremacy down the road. we are a redline neighborhood. how do we get enough insurance to pay for our houses and rebuild our houses and having all kinds of problems like that but couldn't get back to the neighborhood. who could get it? a lot of people with money? usually from out of town. what we could not rebuild are being built back up by corporations, standards, people with a lot of money who can come in, $200 or $300,000 for a house. that is the process. people who bought the house for $5000 and the house now is worth $300,000 and can't get a loan because they are retired. so they will go to houston or

atlanta and they will say the lifestyle is better, i will stay. >> host: it feels like that is what the economy was there to do, to hold the community together, to find a tangible way for people to help each other and that is what we don't seem to have any more where the community does not seem to have it anymore. >> there are still people holding it together a little bit and they get together and stuff but we lost a lot because the economy was operating in a time of inflation, so part of their goal was to help one another. what else would they do? they educated each other, to get a house built, they escorted their friends. i will tell you something.

the new part of our house i remember the day relatives and friends built the back of the house. they cooked and the guys came and then there they went. >> host: i don't know -- the next person that had a house to be built everybody went on saturday to their house. that is how this community was built. >> host: i am wondering how your community reacted to this remarkable contribution you made which synthesizes so much history. >> guest: they like me a little bit more. what can i say? i think they like it. i think they like it.

>> host: so funny. it is that personal. in the book. exactly what is going on. if they are not in the book, why am i not in the book? >> host: that is so funny. a measure of how diffracted my past is. i can't imagine being part of a community like that. that is so telling, and so human nature. my ancestors were given their proper due. >> guest: exactly. i have to remind everybody. you are not responsible for your ancestors and don't get benefits from your ancestors. so if you don't want to claim

them and can't claim them, you have to make a choice you do something on your own. follow your ancestors. >> host: you are in new orleans right now. is this the house where they grew up? >> guest: this is the house where i grew up. it is the porch -- this is the house i come to. i lost my dad. we were able to keep the house. the book is special to me in many ways. >> host: special to be in the house with you. something we wouldn't be able

to do, the virtual nature of the meeting, silver lining, where so much of this took place. so i am going to look at those and we will hear from some of you. >> guest: let's get some questions first. >> host: okay, you can hold that whenever you want to. what is the connection between the economy and the church? >> guest: there was a connection. they were very attached to the catholic religion because the catholic religion gave them what the government would not. the government did not recognize the marriage to be in slaved. they get married in the church

and married people and they were attached for a while. after the civil war, when white supremacy, near the end of reconstruction when white supremacy took hold, the guys in the economy, many of them broke away, going towards spiritualism and the protestant religion, the catholic church was segregated too. lots of them left. >> host: if you stay close to your computers, when you lean back, some people are having trouble hearing. and then we have a question vote i love, what you just said about the family connection to

your book. do you know the family? >> guest: yes. frank crum with a musician, like that. >> host: was bogille almost killed by a mob? >> guest: yes. trying to get suffrage for black men. the constitution at this time, and lincoln want to the southern states back into the united states as fast as possible, the 10% solution, louisiana came back, without the right to vote for blacks.

many blacks decided -- was at that convention. the police came and killed everybody they could in that room. so were several economy members. his son was 9 or 10 years old. they shot out his iraq, he was almost killed when he was trying to come out of the building, trying to get out of the building. he was almost killed but they grabbed the man in front of him. he made a statement that the floor was slippery with blood. the thing i would like to mention. we think that history, everything we do is moved and it is not.

voter registration, they were trying to stop voter registration. that is pretty familiar right now. there was police violence. a lot of police remember white supremacy. there were militias that tried to kill elected officials, legitimately elected officials that were mobbed so if you can learn something from this book i don't want to be preachy but realize there is a playbook for white supremacy and it happened in the 1860s and you can see things that have come downside right now and do something because you will know when they start denigrating people, using police to kill people, mobs taking duly elected people and threatening them, something is going on.

>> host: how was "economy hall" related to plessy versus ferguson. >> guest: they were probably one of the first, one of the mutual aid societies in the 1830s. there were many more, many of them supported the plessy versus ferguson case. the president of the economy society was a member of the citizens committee. who were involved in taking the plessy case to court. so the economy raised money for it and the president says it impressed but i know many of

you are in support of the legislation against jim crow law. they were very much against the jim crow law in plessy versus ferguson, what you don't know is the case that was taken to the united states supreme court to prevent separate but equal. >> host: i wanted to ask one more question and maybe we will end fairly soon but i wondered if you could talk about music. so many of us associate new orleans with music, with jazz in particular and you write a lot about music. can you talk about the economy and its relationship to music over time? >> sure. if you go there you will see attend called the economy tend,

based on this particular hall, because the economy had music all the way through and the last incarnation of music was jazz. the same people who used to come together to build houses, when they were driven out of jobs, white supremacist, when of the places they played music was in economy hall. they raised money with the party and paid musicians that way and it would go to the poor people were the nuns and the money would circulate in the community so if and when you read the book you will see we armstrong was discovered in economy hall. the people who came to economy hall were the first to take the

strategy. >> host: did economy hall have members enslaved as free people of color? >> guest: they did not. they did not. these people were millionaires. they had homes in italy, france, louisiana, they didn't mix any more than society mixed with the people in new york society. the second thing and more important thing is it was against the law. when there was slavery, free people of color and slaves could not mix. they started -- don't want to go on too long but the fear that free people would incite slaves to vote as they had, so

there was a good reason to be afraid. the police did not want free people of color and enslaved, that was more they would go to jail and they started defending their meetings in the 1850s so they didn't do it, decide the social class thing. >> i urge you to look at the chat, other people who know other people, means more to you than it does to me. we are out of time but i am going to ask one final question, tough one which is a quote you quoted in part from the economy's mission to help one another and teach one another while holding a protective hand to suffering humanity.

you can't shoot much higher than that. we live in a moment of such tremendous division and racial tension and political strife and i wonder what economy hall can tell us if anything. that's a lot of weight to put on you but what can this story tell us about how to improve our own situation? >> me i quote you from economy hall? i wasn't expecting that question but i want to read to you something that was said to the members in 1858. the blood that runs in our veins, all of our crimes whether those living unjustly, or compatriots they must follow the path to eternity and come out of the isolations our oppressors applaud for they

would like to see us forever disunited, tearing each other apart having only hatred in our hearts for one another. we cannot have hatred in our hearts for one another, come together to fight the oppressor. >> host: it has been a pleasure to talk with you and continue the conversation. thank you so much for joining us and please, i urge you to buy this book. >> guest: thank you so much. i hope you've enjoyed this conversation with fatima shaik and jennifer egan. if you haven't had the honor of being able to read this book, "economy hall," the hidden history of a free black brotherhood i absolutely urge you to. it is a treasure. thank you so much again and i hope you all have a wonderful

night. >> during a recent program, james o'keefe, founder project veritas, talked about his career as a journalist and the state of the profession today. is a portion. >> a lot of incredible people coming to us. one recent one is documents from the defense department. don't know if you saw this story, we have whistleblowers everywhere, sources everywhere, and the pentagon papers, i don't even know, did the new york times publish these days, to make it look bad? i don't know but a lot of these sources have nowhere else to go? they don't have anywhere to go so they come to us in these documents, you have revelations about gain of function research

that was approached, darpa was approached by eco-health alliance to do research on bat born coronavirus is and was rejected because it was too dangerous according to the department of defense, documents say that anthony fauci was approached and approved under his leadership. these documents are accurate that would mean anthony fauci lied under oath. this was offered by a green core major named joseph murphy at the permit of defense, he was not the source of the document but did arthur them and actually issued a statement to me when we approached him for comment, listen to what this marine corps major who wrote these documents, not the source of the information, listen to what he said to us. >> james o'keefe asked this person would you like to make a comment about this video and here's what this marine said. >> i offer no comment on the investigation on marine corps

deliberations lose for a brief comment to those who desire answers, to those seeking answers i offer encouragement. there are good people striving for the truth, working together in and out of government and they succeed. to those that withhold, i pray for you find the moral courage to come forward, don't let a lie be our legacy. people will forgive. a commitment to truth is in the heart of this. >> really powerful. what's interesting about his statement i found is there are good people, his words, good people striving for the truth, working in government. in other words, i have seen this, there are good people at these places, necessarily all good institutions but i would say the vast majority of them are good people just following orders. what we must do is appeal to their consciences so they can

do the right thing. if we don't do that, there is no hope for the country. >> to watch the full program watch james o'keefe, american muckraker, booktv.org. live sunday, september 4th on "in depth," uc berkeley governmental study scholar stephen hayworth will be our guest to talk about leadership, ronald reagan's political career and the american conservative movement. .. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history

tv documents america's stories, and on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 come from these television companies and more including cox. >> homework can be hard. but squatting and a diner for in network is even harder. that's why we're providing low income students access to affordable internet, so homework can just be homework. cox connects to compete. >> cox, along with these television companies, supports c-span2 as a public service. >> my name is erwin chemerinsky. and the dean of the law school at the university of california school of law. it's my great pleasure to be here today with richard hasen his professor in political science at the university of california irvine school of law. we are here because rick has written a terrific new book, "cheap speech: how disinformation poisons our politics - and how to cure it."