newsmax chief white house correspondent james rosen author of school leah rise to greatness 1936 -- 1986 talks about the first of the two-part biography of the late supreme court associate justice. >> click school leah recalled for the excesses of the student antiwar movement the unrest. taking into their hands the sensing of debate. all that shaped him in ways that made him a better judge in a better justice. so you can really understand how we got to be justice scalia without understanding his academic career projects james rosen with his book scalia sunday night q&a part you can watch q&a all of our podcasts and free c-span now app. ♪ healthy democracy doesn't just

look like this. it looks like this. americans can see democracy at work citizens are truly informed. the republic drives for get forgetinformed straight from the source. on c-span unfiltered, unbiased, word for word nations capitol to wherever you are is the opinion that matters the most is your own. this is what democracy looks like. c-span powered by cable. >> already, welcome everyone welcome to powerhouse arena. thank you all for coming. [cheering] we are very excited for tonight's event. what a great turnout. yes, so excited we are obviously here for malcolm harris. so yes. [applause] to start off malcolm and patrick

harrison who is the audiobook narrator are going to be doing a reading. then he will be joined and read junior. for a little discussion. after that we will do q and ai will pop back up yourth after that. thank you all for masking up. enjoy it. [cheering] talks all right. thank you all so much for coming out. this has been a very successful release as you can see from all the people here. i can't believe it. my heart is bursting with angst and also for wearing a mask. i know they are a pain. i appreciate you all so much for doing that. it allows me too set up without a mask which makes a huge difference reading. thank you all for me, thank you for everyone else in theyo roomo not get sick i appreciate you. i am going to be reading with the patrick harrison the

audiobook narrator many of you will begin a book from incentive for me. going to be reading not for my book per site. but a section for 1901 novel the octopus a california story by frank norris which is quoted extensively in the book but because we've got patrick, here it's the occasion to a dramatic dialogue was irresistible to me. and so we are going to judge pretty quick were going to try to keep this whole thing kind of quick we can get down to signing books for all of the many people here. a little bit about this book, this book is written in 1901 about a conflict over the settlements of california. settlers come in and are offered land at a certain price by the railroad has long as they settle the real set of occurrences. the owner of the land happens to be stanford then changes his

mind they change their mind site no that's improved alanna belongs to us you can buy it back from us. this triggers an insurrectionary battle with the settlers who want to claim their land the story is fictionalized by frank norris in the octopus which is a noted work of early early california novelistic history. it is also really great. it's got some amazing sections. so in this section there is a presley who is he socialist poet and author stand-in, eight naïve guys written this poem he goes to see played by patrick obviously. who is an amalgamation of the railroad barons of fictionalized. presley talks his way on this surreal i scene. talks his way into thed back office the only really talk to them he has read his poem's got

a critical take on the socialist poem on this naïve socialist poet finds himself in conversation directly with capitol that is a conversation we are going to be having right now, as soon as i take a sip of water. >> i suppose you believe i am a grand old rascal. >> i believe answered presley, i am persuaded he hesitated searching for his words. >> believe this young man exclaimed when a thick pole for a forefinger on the table to emphasize his words. try to believe this. to beginin with, that railroads build themselves.

where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply. mr. derek, does he grow his wheat? the weeds grows itself what does he account for?at does he supply the force? what to i count for? do i build the railroad? you are dealing with forces young man when you speak of wheat and the railroad. not with men. there is the weeds, the supply. it must be carried to feed the people. there is the demand the weeds is one force, the railroad a nether when there is the law that governs them.

supply and demand. men have only little to do in the home business. complications may arise. conditions that bear hard on the individual. crush him maybe. but the wheat will be carried to feed the people as inevitably as it will grow. if you want to fasten the blame on any one person, you will make a mistake. blame conditions not men. butts, butts, faltered presley you are the head. you control the road. >> you are a very young man. >> controlled the road? can i stop it?

i can go into bankruptcy if you like but otherwise if i run my road as a business proposition, i can do nothing. i cannot control it. it is a force born out of certain conditions. and i, no man can stop it or control it. can your mr. derek stop the wheat growing? he can burn his crop or give it away or can sell it for a cent on the bushel justice i could go into bankruptcy for but otherwise his wheat must grow. can anyone stop the elites? then no more can i stop the road. >> presley regina in the street his brain in a whirl, this new

idea this new conception dumbfounded him. somehow he could not deny it. running with the clear reverberation of truth. was no one then to blame for the horror of the irrigation ditch? forces, conditions, law of supply and demand, with these and enemies after all? not enemies there is no malevolence in nature colossal indifference only. a vast trend towards appointed goals, nature it was a gigantic while, and vast cycle opinion power. huge, terrible, a leviathan with a heart of steel no ink no compunction, no forgiveness, no tolerance, crushing of the human adam standing in itswa way with nirvana calm the agony of destruction never ajar, never the faintest tremor throughout the wheels and cogs. he went to his club in asia supper alone and gloom

education. thank you. [cheering] [applause] >> you can see why people have been buying the audiobook, right? i don't make the bestseller list because of that guy. now if you can put your hands together for melissa and ed as they come up and join me? [cheering] [applause] are right we are going to keep it to a couple questions. you want to get you all involved two. so we've got to make them good guys. >> first of all i feel like we are being haunted by the ghost of stanford picnics we cannot stop at the. >> know we can't we t cannot stp the trade literally cannot stop the train. i don't know maybe we should start with him. i feel like there are two roads

in the book and i want them to converge and perhaps they can converge as metaphors. we have the railroad itself and then we have the internet which i feel there is a whole pet like mark zepp or birgit, you go into a much deeper and more materialist understanding of what that is. i'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about leland stanford as an avatar's yes leland stanford is not as smart as shogren. shell graham is based on huntington and a couple of other guys. leland stanford who is the most prominent of the railroad building capitalists in the west really gets that job because he's not the smartest one other for them. in fact he sort of the airhead out of the four of them. so at the time of international class conflict as well as

tighter government observation of contractors like these associates. these four guys were building the railroad aggregated in the man we just man that patrick was playing were making their money illicitly off the construction of the railroad as land developers or land contractors et cetera they did not the governments look to close of tho government did look too close they wanted them to find leland stanford they wanted to blame leland stanford this is an opening for leland hope most of his life kind of a bone he's a really lucky guy who happens to be born at the right time in the right place looking the part he ends up a petty capitalists in california which is an overseas colony of the united states. and there he is elevated into thisac grand character we are familiar with and we have met in the story.

that is the leland stanford we know. it's because he's kind of a goofball that he gets this job and he has these weird ideas throughout his life. he's a capitalist who normally supports co-ops. in the same light we see silicon valley billionaires have some advanced social ideas or whatever that seem to have nothing to do with what they actually do all day. and he is a man, this is the concentration of forces, forces not men that end up being substantiated and yields palo alto which he founds to escape the class conflict his sub- buddies have subjected into. he is living in nob h hill which is a hill the biggest hill in san francisco, a nice place to live except everyone knows where you live so that workingman's anparty will show up outside of his house and yell at him and threaten him all the time. and so he did what you are

supposed to do when you're living in the city ofty the rich guy and you are scared of the working people around you which is moved to the suburbs. except in the 1870s the suburbs do not existso yet so he has to create a suburb in order to find a suburb to escape the city to pre-december be found to escape these tensions is key names palo alto. that is the foundation of the story. the railroad creates the west as we know the guy who is responsible is the head of the radio. at the same time throughout the book you're doing with forces not men. even the character of leland stanford's amalgamation of forces that could turn into palo alto. >> also want to read it one bitou that's a perfect line fore

that could apply to leland stanford ticket also apply to all the other founders that we eventually meet in the book. giving amount of what's going on the others may have made the considered decision of the big o stand in front for the camera. so he could take the blame but also become the great man. what's with the gets away with it is a smart move by the other three associates hopkins, crocker and huntington but not as haunted is sanford's end up being he basically dies before the government soaked investigating how the contracts check out he more or less gets away with it. i does have a conflict which is what the octopuses based on he goes in and tries to negotiate with the confederate veterans who are the settlers. and then takes off to europe with a start shooting out the

lights. >> for a lot of the book you hone in on the industrialists, investors, founders who are hailed for creating technological innovations that made the modern world and always more prosperous, better connected more productive lives but also constantly plugging ann how a lot of technology was developed primarily militaristic. those consequences those more productive or helpful outcomes are secondary to their intention. at the time was there also a same sort of -- of the simpler discussion or argument of discourse we are seeing today were some people push back and say palo alto has been not good

for humanity because so many bounties as opposed to the misss of the military tech. or the poisoning of the land and the waters. no, all that stuff. they are called externalities, okay? we see these cycles. silicon valley is a holster of cycles and loops and spirals. they usually talk about bubbles but i don't think it makes sense to talk about bubbles unless we talk about the bubble machine under the bubbles because it keeps happening. at that point inside a bubble at something else is another mechanism. these tensions between the two between false promises of silicon valley was actually going on close all the big back to the conflict we were talking nabout and frank norris.

the problem with seeing these guys as like the inventors themselves instead of the amalgamation of social courses aswo you end up thinking the wod is a product of rich guys personalities. so we live in the world we live in because steve jobes is the guy steve job's is. that is not true that's just false. steve jobs is the guy, that is a tongue twister. [laughter] because social situation called him into c being and the settlement called someone like stanford into being. there been critiques of these people the whole way through. somebody talk about in the book is michael malone classic astern of siliconon valley classic columnist a great writer underrated i think in some ways compared to some of his peers.

he talks about early apple he's got a great critique of early apple he says behind all this howdy doody steve jobs is a network of filipino housewives who are wiring these boards together in their unventilated d kitchen. this is the real apple the truck that unloads those and picks them up at the end of the day, not the clean circuits some like steve jobs would have you believe. when people think of steve jobs now they think of the black blackturtleneck steve jobs and holding the ipod which by the way he did not invent. but when i think of steve jobs up to during this research i think of 80s steve jobs if you google 80s steve jobs doesn't look like tucker carlson he looks exactly the same as tucker carlson i'm not exaggerating i'm now convinced doctor carlson has bases whole look on 1980s

steve jobs. that is who he was a conservative businessman taking advantage of the new efficiencies that globalization allowed. i see code for new world order to be established in the postwar situation. america had these production enclaves including domestically people driven out of their countries and to low-wage wave labor. these critiques have existed the whole time but people do not know that about apple. nobody knowsmp that it all about apple they're completely based in their history this was the original value proposition wasn't that they had the best computer for the best thinker or any of that was a manufacturing network and that continues to be the basis for apple the entire time. and yet we have to rediscover the critique every 10 years or so because silicon valley is really good at selling

forgetfulness. >> i appreciate having time to remind us about steve jobs wrote the book are going to be read the history everyone is very clear. >> i think maybe like these was in the bay area. you talk a lot about the history of the oakland chapter of the black panther party. you run that alongside sgt perlis again you run that alongside the tech development of the time that also get sort of swept up or mythologized as part of the counterculture imagining steve jobs he was dropping acid and coming up with apple computer. >> like he did that pig. >> did not happen. but in reality including people inside the stanford machine who were resisting all of that.

that is a history not so well known. i'm wondering if you could say a bit about that moment 1969 -- 1970 people shooting up with computers for. >> this was one of the most exciting parts of the research was discovering. i don't say discovering scholars to work on theses, questions. recently a lot of early computer publications have been digitized and put online. and so ie got to go through thoe and look at the history of bomb attacks. attacks on u.s. data processing infrastructure. that's what they called them back then data processing. not the internet or whatever is data processing infrastructure. student radicals around the country mostly student radicals because most of these computer systems and computer labs were at universities. constantly blowing up computers the new left to try to blow up every computer in the contract pretty straight up.

the most famous one is the army math research center in wisconsin because a person was killed in the explosion. that was the only person killed in this wave of attacks but the new left blue up computers around the country and especially in california and bank at computers like bank of america suffered a bombing every month for two years attacks on their data processing. this really flies in the face of the standard history of this time and i place i think you get two versions of it: the john markoff version in the california ideology versione the first one the hippies invented the computer that is cool. the second was the hippies invented the computer and that is bad. both sites associate this counterculture new left they complete the counterculture and the new left with these emerging

individual technologies and theirti critique of conformism largeness the state and this ends up producing, depending upon who you ask, the wonders of the personal computer age or the terrors of that neoliberal age. it's kind of a mean history and blames the new left people and says you are too stupid to know what you're doing and you did exactly the opposite of what you're trying to do. but when you go to the history that's not it all what happened pray that is not. they had a very, very tight understanding of what these technologies did. what they were used for. where they were located. and the important role they were playing and u.s. state policy what that u.s. state policy was. they intervened on the side of the north vietnamese army. it's not like they're trying to stop the war like we were trying

toar stop the iraq war. they were trying to win the war and they did win the war. it's interesting we talked about the yippies trying to levitate the pentagon people know the story theype tried to levitate e pentagon it's a classic story of new left goofiness and hubris. it was supposed to be like descriptive anecdote. we don't talk about when bomb the pentagon to get out computers heated air targeting over vietnam for two weeks. this is the most profound ethical act and the americans take through the hole. dramaticallys successful they evade prosecution get away with that as well the question of why we told the story of trying to levitate the pentagon we don't tell the story at all about bombing the pentagon. some people are more interested in the first history than the second one but i am not one of them i much more interested in

the second period we'll do one more question and then to audience. >> why do you think that steward of his geography persists? you see strains of it emerged last year end the year before when books about the history of nonviolence and h sabotage with the world a pipeline and then looting came out there is a lot of argument and pushback against the idea property damage was a lviable tactic than both of the books were history showing how successful it was and how important it was there's a lot s of pushback some people insisting the only way to achieve the ends is working towards reform the slow-paced reforms inside of the system you also talkk about in the book those come up against.

what is attractive about this idea of only doing nonviolence and attacking things attacking property, tacking infrastructure as some form of violence as well? or could just how to blow up a pipeline fictional movie cominge out. i saw the tagline is like nonviolence is not an option or something. on one hand that'ss really cool to see, i agree. on the other hand.up a pipeline is not violent like extracting oil from the ground is just as violent as blowing up a pipeline. this situation i'm talking about in the book about the new left of their's advertising computers that are doing bombing targeting. they were bombing the computers that were used for bombing. and inspired the world. in germany there watching stuff happen.

looking at the americans run up against the barriers of reform and resistance thinking through what to do next it's globally important. there is something very appealing obviously for the powers that be and ruling out any sort of disorderly conduct. venice ultimately how they stop irthese activities in the 60s that was her solution at the time was draw a really hard line like democratic participation and which you can riot if you don't like what's going on is no longer acceptable. you step out of the line we are going to get rid of you. and they start pursuing a strategy of separating out radicals, clustering radicals encouraging them they do it very, very successfully for decades. we are still living in the wake of that counterrevolution.

i talk about the new left experience of some victories and overall defeat. i think the story of the book's rule of the story of how capitol handles things it can no longer handle. whenes it hits the limits how ds it work around those limits? palo alto is the name of one of the strategies. that is working around those limits. palo alto is tasked with separating out the new left. building defenses from people in society going forward. i think it is funny and i went and talked about this book and talked about it there are a number of people who were upset i did not credit the countercultural history of palo alto more. there is a countercultural history of palo alto for sure. i was more interested in the new left in writing what i thought

was the historical wrongs. maybe i come out a little harsh against the counterculture separating it from the new left. but if that needs to be done is to beg done. the important thing is to understand the grateful dead the band the grateful dead was not the most important thing happening in the world at the time. they are not mentioned in the book. i am sorry if t there any gratel dead fans for the most important thing in the world was the cold war was a struggle over u.s. imperialism and that of the air is a product of another facebook is about. never going to do if your question from if you do mention grateful dead in the book you credit them in the galley anyway. i do know guys, so you credit them with heavenly forethought cannot go on stage with open mic records that is right. they saw the stones. >> thank you all for that great conversation. thank you for the reading as

well. i'm going to be passing around a start looking for hands of his back i might he hands the take me a second to back there. firstly okay. maybe i will make my way over there sorry. okay. simulates his bombing data centers in technological is no longer possibl

because of the cloud et cetera. what he think practical questions to ask? does not live there. those are data centers those are connected data centersthe time

ithat a do any safer than they were inthere any particular

thinkers you draw inspiration from when approaching the task of compiling a

ortant historian when i was writing this book and i reading back her stuff. i didn't know she was working on the line at fairchild semiconductor and like organizing labor actions as a like tech worker in the bay area and so locating history of that tradition has ended up being a really important part of the project for me. and i definitely found myself within it and reflected in it, and i hope to do more with it in the future right. i think we could use a california communist reader that lays out this history all great. let's see here else and the other questions back here. i'm trying to figure out how i can get it down here. yeah, exactly. toss it back and forth if you can come. right over here. i have quite a long arm.

i hope the phenomenal question. that'd be good. so what are one of the sort of cycles that comes right as you're pretty consistent describing leland stanford is not a super bright guy and then at the end of the book, you multiple occasions describe the current of silicon valley overlords as not that impressive specifically compared to the earlier two or three generations right like the world one world war two immediately after those guys technically sharp and i'm just kind of curious what the significance or if you think there is anything difficult to that sort of reversion to the mean like why is it that have people who are just kind of like

eyes can get so far ahead whereas it seemed like in that sort of middle period they at least had to have sun like the people are called for also had some skills behind. they weren't just some guy who happened to be there. yeah, fdr right. that's that's what you're describing is roosevelt ism. and so there's this period where and this is the period when you talk to people about silicon valley, they're imagining of them, imagine the sixties and the fairchild guys wearing their suits and these guys were brilliant. these were like extremely sophisticated physicists who were coming up with like new ideas and chemists and dealing with very complex scientific thought and pushing the bounds of human knowledge. and they were selected for spots

not sort of impersonally by the forces of but really by state agencies. and this is at a time where the i describe it as shuffling deck of the country's white men in terms of i mean, it was it's a real thing that happened, right, that this a consequence of the roosevelt years and you see in fairchild's semiconductor which is this very important company with these led these eight guys who are recruited by guy bill shockley from around the country and some of them even in europe, brilliant dudes. and they were selected for spots by a government bureaucracy that was interested in winning world war two and knew that they had to find the best scientists in order to do that. and they weren't just the best scientists, obviously, or they wouldn't all be white guys, they were the ones who fit a particular mold. and so these guys were not smart. they were also really well liked and. they were like, you know,

homecoming king types. i think a really good example is david packard, who in addition to being the of hewlett packard and an advanced, you know, radio engineering student was a six foot five football player and, you know, handsome dude and the school picked very intentionally to start this firm, not necessarily because he was the best mind who was probably hewlett packard had to pull along with him. but because he was this golden boy and something changes and the historian charles peterson i don't think he's in the audience, but some people might know charles talks about the shift from bureaucrat to nerd masculinity that happens. and i think it's a it's a great line. and i included in the book because that's what instead of being picked by, uh, professors by generals right in your, in the military for your job within scientific industrial complex, it's guys who went to the right private school at the right time and that's bill gates, paul

allen in particular. that's how microsoft ends up coming. and they're not learning to use computers on government machines. they're not going into the military, no one's picking them except for their parents who happen to have the resources to put them into a school that had an unusual amount of access to computer time. and that's how they get picked. and so you talk about the different kind of guy that gets selected and recognize we're talking about guys in the first place and the selection of guys, right? so none of this is meritocratic per say. the mode changes and we've seen like further farcical of that change. so like steve jobs was not a particularly sophisticated technical guy that was wozniak famously. he was the the guy who was good at yelling at everybody to work faster, which a very important job at the time and continues to be but the guys now if you look at someone like uh i'm going to

say names on tv, whatever i'm angered the techno lords. elon musk right. like no one pretend no one in tech has to pretend this guy is a brilliant technical mind for coding. never mind that he could, like, win a nobel prize in physics or chemistry or something. like they might imagine that to themselves. he's really rich, but no one, they're not having those guys, the companies anymore. like that's not how it works now. now you get the guys who the third level fast school version of steve jobs right get the guy dressing up like the way they think jobs dressed up his whole life. but it's structural, right? it's not just some guys came along and that's what the book tries to investigate is what is behind these structural changes? great. great. i think have time for one more question. yeah. okay. so. hey, i also have kind of a methodological question, sweep

and you know, something that i really admire about the whole project is that you're doing the work of a historian outside of academy. and so i guess i'm curious if you can reflect that and maybe if you could give us some insight into your process like how you're doing all of this outside the walls, what kind setting your work is done in, if not institutional, communal or relational, something else. and do you have any insight into how that kind of independent scholarship could flourish in the future that's great question. i wish i had a better answers for it. so i wrote this book starting in like march 2020. so like the pandemic hit hit. and so all the plans that i to interview people and go to archives.

got screwed up immediately. right. but i still to write this book and in fact i had to write it times as long as i had sold it on the same deadline because i'm a smart guy. so i did most of the actual writing between my room locked in philadelphia and like the park down the street where i would sit with a stack of books all day for months at a time, which is great. it was wonderful. i feel so privileged to have done it because not that many people get to do that kind of work. not being a trained historian, not having taken a history class since i was 16 years old, made parts of it kind of challenging. and i relied on historians friends that helped point me towards parts of the california history canon. i was also aided by the fact that the california history canon is like in california history itself is, way shorter than other parts of american history. so i couldn't have written a

book boston like this because there hundreds of years more history that you'd have to handle and i just didn't have to handle those periods whole centuries that i didn't deal with. this starts in the 1870s, which is not that long ago in terms of the history and also western history itself, people argue people better informed than i do argue it's thin even within american history, it's under-discussed and underwritten. and so i could write this book at a comprehensive history of palo alto and say, no one else has tried to write this book because. no one else has tried to write this book, which is surprising and was surprising me and invited the project. but i think the real advantage to me about not being trained and not having like professors in my head i was writing this book for is i could work between disciplines and there are certain periods of history that certain disciplinary techniques are i think more useful for and others. i really couldn't have written this book without the studies that come out of the ethnic studies revolt at san francisco

state i write about in the book. and then put the work of that revolt to work in the book because there have been a lot of really important studies of the bay and of palo alto specifically within chicano studies, native studies, black studies ethnic studies, in a wider sense, and so feeling like i could go into these different and engage with those authors, read that stuff without worrying that i was crossing some boundary or someone's going to get mad at me. made that part easier. i think i didn't get to work as many people as i would have liked when. i was writing it just because i was like quite literally quarantined quarantined. but my dear friend max fox, who is not here but is a brilliant intellectual, the editor of sexual hegemony and that it or pinko magazine was my neighbor and sometimes roommate this process and so he thank you max for listening to me rant after

i'd been reading for 7 hours about herbert hoover i i really owe him a lot so thanks max. but yeah, i think that's that's the story i was definitely relying on a lot of recently digitized archival stuff. palo alto, really good at digitizing stuff, not so good at reading stuff. and so there's a lot of great material that digitized and then like left alone and not used for these histories, even though they end up repeating the same historical material from the same five interviews in book after book after book, or they'll go interview the guy and ask him to repeat the story from that other books he can put in this book. and so finding of that history, oral histories that been recorded that like cal has a really great stock of oral from the tech industry. um, so i really got to like play around with sources and this is

the product. i hope you all like it. great. let's have him around the books, stuff. and a second round for the conversation. the object