individual and and that these kind of, you know, victim oppressor categories are are default based on your skin critical race theory doesn't say that that's not really what it really actually not about individual racism it's about examining at a systemic level. but as we saw in 2021, that phrase off like wild and you couldn't tune in to a nightly news without seeing a report from a school district somewhere where parents were upset that some in the district was trying to bring in this this scary sounding thing, critical race theory to to basically indoctrinate kids to you if they're white, hate themselves, and to hate america. yeah, it's really interesting how quickly that took and how successful it was because i hadn't heard of it before. before chris rufo kind of made it into what it was, what it

became. one thing i thought was sort of striking the reporting you did in the book was that when conservatives talk about diversity and inclusion or they talk about critical race theory, they're they're always saying is indoctrination by the left. you know, this is teachers trying to indoctrinate kids. but in south like and in some of the communities you wrote about the efforts to create diversity and inclusion programs often followed very real complaints by students and families about racism and bullying and so just in other words, it didn't come out of nowhere. these programs were a response to an actual problem by real students. and so i wondered if you could talk about that a little bit, because it does sort of jarring when you look back at some of the reporting you did and you see really, really awful things that students being told or were hearing or experiencing. yeah, if you watched and if you

just tuned into the news suddenly in 2021 and watched school board meetings, you the message that conservative felt like while they weren't paying attention and some extremely far left people had suddenly come up with a plan to indoctrinate kids with these ideas. and that's how it was kind of framed in south like, you know, the conservatives weren't paying in these leftist came in and suddenly started doing this. so i wanted to go back to the beginning, you know, and see origin of the of the of the plan to impose or create a diversity and inclusion plan in southlake. and what prompted it and it really followed a national pattern that i, i found copied all over the country in the trump era. you know, after president trump was elected in 2016, in a campaign featured a lot of vitriolic language about immigrants and that helped usher

kind of this of or more open embrace of white nationalism. and we saw what happened in charlottesville those kinds of that rhetoric was trickling down into classrooms and schools over the country. so you were seeing if you just did a news search in 2011, 2016, 2017, 2018, you will find dozens of articles about, you know, kids build the wall at the hispanic classmate's or someone, you know carving the n-word and, you know, maga to each other on a school bathroom stall and. and there's data show that these types of incidents were increasingly being reported to the federal government during this period. and so, you know, all of these school districts were dealing with that. and in the era before, the critical race theory panic. and so what happened, carol, in southlake, was it in one of these incidents some students filmed themselves chanting the

n-word in 2018, which then that wasn't the impetus. the video itself, the impetus for action. what followed the video was dozens of parents of black students, parents, lgbtq kids, parents of students coming forward to say, my kids have been experiencing these slurs, hearing slurs and having these kind of racist jokes thrown their way at carol schools forever. and you all need to address this and that and that is what led the district in 2018 and 2019 to put together a committee and they their whole goal was to try to address these widespread reports that they were getting from kids real people. i talked with many of them. they didn't make it up an end. so in 2020, when they released their what they called the cultural competence plan into the midst of this vitriolic period politically and in the

midst of the pandemic, what was it, uh, conservative parents who hadn't really paid close attention to? the, the, the, the racial. report, the reports of racism and kind of that whole effort. they just saw the outcome. they saw this cultural competence action plan, and they saw it in the context, the protests after george floyd's murder and black lives matter. and they conflated the two and just declared like, this is where did this come from? um, and that was, that was happening, that same dynamic out in school districts all over the country. loudoun county, virginia. um you know, outside of d.c., the same kind of dynamic where like there were incidents that prompted the districts to kind of start working on a more inclusive culture in 2017 and 2018. it didn't just spring up out of nowhere in the summer of 2020. um, and that was important to me to try to put that all in context for people who are

reading. yeah, i was really struck it because i, i think if you just had turned on the a couple of years ago, you would not have maybe had some of that content. and instead it sounds as, you know, as you said, that people just weren't paying attention and suddenly, you know, this devious thing is occurring. and one of the things i also thought was interesting in south lake is that the there was initially some support for the plan, it seems, and then with the backlash, it wasn't just we don't agree with this. it the people on the school board must be marxists. you know, they must be far, far left activist, you know, and a lot of them are actually conservatives, you know, from from southlake. and so this idea that you couldn't just disagree about the plan, but that actually this this person that presumably a lot of people know on the school board is actually, you know, your enemy or is actually to do something this this secret plot. and, um, and i thought that was

really striking and in the book that dynamic and i wanted to, you know, one thing that, that i was also sort of struck by is that as someone who's covered school boards for a long time, they used to be rather dull places quite often, you know, unless there was like a sex ed policy or a school boundary change, these were not the most meetings. you know, sometimes the reporter is like one of two or three people in audience. and so, you know, when this idea of taking over school boards became this kind of rallying cry on the right. it was almost jarring and so i just you know, in the book you say allen said the most important elected position in the united states of america is school board. and then steve bannon, a trump adviser, made a similar comment. so why did that take off? why school boards? well, i think that took that took off steve bannon's case specifically because they were seeing the news reports and saw

an opportunity, um and and i think, you know, you mentioned this idea, you know, this school that the school board initially support in south lake for some of these changes. and that was the case like when they initially announced the plans. to try to put together a committee to address these things 2018 and in 2019, there was these community wide gatherings by south lakes mayor and school board president michelle moore. was you there for these? and these city council members were were kind of. yes. we're going to address racism. the conservative republicans across the board white any race they were there was kind of a unified response. i think what followed is really telling. and and i think about the story of of michelle moore who again was the school board president who's a lifelong republican and

she heard all the student complaints and kind of helped lead the effort to try to address these things. and, again, had that support from the mayor, members of city council, from business leaders, and in aftermath after allen west declared the school boards in elected position in the united of america and all of the kind of backlash to the cultural competence action plan was building people who had supported moore turned her and accused of of kind of you know pushing this down onto you know, conservative families. and again, she's she's a lifelong republican. i don't know if she voted for trump, but you know, she's she's conservative. and and but she was described in the media, in local media and by conservatives, kind of like a progressive. this left this kind of left person pushing this policy from left. she was, you know, called a

marxist and all these things. that's another pattern that we see across the country. there's this dichotomy that's being presented in a lot of the coverage of these school board conflicts where conservatives are fighting against liberals for control of school boards. but like the candidates who are being targeted by the moms for liberty type groups often are themselves republicans or conservatives who just have a different perspective. what schools should do to address, discriminate, or how school should address. you know, the history of racism in the curriculum and groups that are kind of rising up to oppose moms for liberty and others are often, you know, pretty diverse terms of political thought. there's moderate conservative voice along with, you know, very liberal people who are opposing this kind of far right incursion into their school boards is a little more nuanced and complicated than what we often

read. i think. right. and it one, you know, one important point i think that you make to is that the education wars aren't new. kind of getting back to what we've we started with in the beginning. but i wondered if you could talk a little bit about the education wars of the seventies and eighties when there was another of buzz word that became, you know, this thing that everyone was afraid infecting the schools and it was secular humanism. yeah. and that please. yeah, absolutely. so this was an interesting this is a little like gap. my education when i came into reporting this, obviously we hear we know the like, you know, the battles over evolution in schools in the 1920s and thirties. we know about the over integration and the civil rights movement. and so we know that schools are often these places and where these fights, these big fights play out. but, you know, i was born in the early eighties, so i wasn't clued into this earlier chapter. and when i discovered it, i was kind of blown. because if you if you go back and read clips from the 1970s

and eighties about about the kind of pushed by the christian conservative to it to defeat what they called secular humanism inside public schools, you could in many cases swap out the word secular humanism, paste in critical race into these articles. and you not necessarily know that they were from the 1970s and eighties. and so what happened is in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and in an era of you know, just like now, in an era of changing cultural norms around gender, you know, the fight for women's rights and all of these things, there was a backlash on the on the kind of christian right against more inclusive curriculum in schools and and a backlash against what they saw as the removal of god from school you know these rulings to prohibiting prayer

and in prohibiting, you know, compulsory bible readings and classrooms. there was kind of this backlash. and so it's much like today they they honed in on this of secular humanism which is which is this kind of the philosophical framework that rejects religion as the sole basis for morality and prioritizes, you know, relying on science and and, you know, fighting injustice of any kind and using relying on logic to fight injustice of any kind. but much like today, the the term secular human humanism can be became kind of a catchall to describe any lesson that might offend a conservative christian worldview. and so you would see complaints that you know, this these language arts textbooks that include black writers, a secular humanist or, if a if a book depicts, a woman not in a

traditional, you know, homemaker gender role, that secular humanism and and they went so far as to like argue that secular humanism was itself a religion and should therefore be barred from schools. first amendment grounds or balanced with explicitly christian lessons. and yet and so some of the same language emanating out of some of the same communities across the country played out across the 1970s and eighties. there was actually even briefly a federal ban adopted by the us senate, by congress that was introduced orrin hatch in the senate that banned any teaching, that banned any federal funds to schools that teach secular humanism. but like just like the wave of critical anti critical race theory laws today, it wasn't really defined. and as a result, it just sort of left educators guessing at what

might count as secular. and it resulted into, you know, in many cases of teachers just kind of self-censoring out of fear. and there's just so many parallels to today. this was this was happening on a smaller scale than what i think we're seeing today in terms the backlash to critical race theory and transgender acceptance and. you know, lgbt library books. but it really what we're we're seeing and offer some lessons. yeah i actually thought about there was a paragraph in one of the chapters about that that had it listed some of the names of books that had been challenged. and, and i thought, you could replace the year, you know, with any of the last few and it would read by current events and i yeah, i thought that was, i thought that was really striking. one of the things that's kind of come out of the current backlash, you know, is that we've seen a lot of i mean, really a wave republican backed

bills to limit how teachers can talk about race and racism and lgbtq history and sexuality and we've also seen this wave of book challenges as what have been some of the effects of, those laws. i mean, you just hinted at it a bit. yeah. i mean, you know, in most republican controlled red states, there are on the books now limiting how teachers talk about racism or the history of racism. america kind of mandating a patriotic interpretation of the nation's origin in some cases, such as florida and texas and elsewhere, prohibiting the discussion or limiting discussion of, you know, people, different gender identities or same sex relationships at, certain grade levels and in some places that's just led to, you know, that's the law. and so their library books are flying off the shelves in florida and elsewhere to try to

comply with those laws. um, but even in places where those laws haven't passed, there's, there's a, i think a culture of among many educators. there was a recent rand survey that was released earlier this year that showed thirds of teachers reported did, uh, censor, wring how they talk about divisive political issues, including issues around race and inclusion, and that in that finding was, was still the case and included teachers who teach in school districts where there are no explicit restrictions, no state laws and no local prohibitions, simply because those teachers don't you know, they reported that they were worried that if they pulled out a picture book to their elementary school classroom, that, you know, depicted two dads holding hands, that the

school district not be able to protect them if if parents get really upset. so they're just because because of it, there's been a lot of reporting recently showing that actually the you know, the idea that the school wars is going to be a silver bullet for republicans to retake the suburbs, which is like, you know, steve bannon's whole pitch. and chris, that it's not really panning moms for liberty and other groups losing in a lot of places. and so they're. they're or they're not winning new suburban voters. they're just kind of taking these national divisive issues and superimpose them on to local school boards. so if your community leans republican or leans trump like south lake does, you're going to going to get a bunch of anti crt school board members. and if you're a left leaning suburb, you'll probably, you know, the progressives will win out. but, um, and so they're losing lots of those races, moms for liberty. but it's still having impact in

those districts because of the state laws and because of just the pressure campaign. the fear a what teacher wants be accused of, uh, trying to harm kids or indoctrinate them. and so that i think we're seeing a lot of in this current moment fear and censorship and self-censorship. right. and teachers, you know, putting away their classroom libraries, which is actually really sad to think about or taking out the that you maybe the district had made an effort to put in to make a more welcoming environment. you know, one of the really sort of crazy anecdotes, the book i think in south lake involves a teacher training. one of these laws passed where the administrator tells teachers that they basically had to teach both sides of the holocaust. and i think i remember the stories that when it happened, because it was so just insane.

but, you know, i wonder if this is one of the consequences of trying to tell teachers, teach history without upsetting anyone or saying have to be neutral. because i think you, one of the teachers that you quoted said, how can you be neutral about the holocaust or about racism. you know, and so i wonder, is that something that you've talked to teachers about this idea of how can you be neutral? you're teaching certain types of history yeah, i mean, this is this is this strikes to the of what we talked to the beginning of this is how do we talk about our history, about the american story, about who we are as and so that incident you talked about in the south like it followed one you know texas had passed its version of anti crt law, even though the law didn't mention critical race theory. it promoted that way and it included this kind of line that's been repeated in the legislation across the country that says if you are if a

teacher is going to discuss or present a currently controversial, they need to present both sides or opposing viewpoints on that subject. now what's open for interpretation is what is currently controversial. and so in south lake, the administrator an administrator gave that instruction of, well, if you have a book on the holocaust, make sure you have one that shows and opposing perspective, which of course, you know, and i had a recording of this moment when it happened, the teachers were just like, what? how can i what's the opposing perspective? am i supposed to put up, add a book to my classroom library from a holocaust or told from the perspective of why the nazis did what they did, you know, justifying it or like it? and how does that apply to say like slavery? am i should i have content in my

classroom kind of making the case for why slavery was a net positive for america which is an argument we see today. and on the right there and what what was stood out to me in that story kind of flew under the radar and the initial kind of backlash and outrage that spread through the country after we published is in the audio you can hear the administrator respond to one of the teachers who's saying what do you have to teach the present both sides of the holocaust and the administrator says believe me, that's come up. and that stands out to me because it what's happening in a lot of these cases these are not widely held beliefs in society but does not represent like this idea that maybe the holocaust was faked. that's not a majority opinion. but if if if if one or a couple vocal parents make it a problem for you, it's a problem for you.

and so these laws combined with the kind of, you know, growing visible ity in our culture to, you know, these anti-semitic views, white nationalist views, christian views, it kind of gives that minority vote or that even just very lone parent a veto power like, well, it might offend that parent. and so we can't tell any of the kids we have to present, we have to it's going to affect how all of the kids learn about these these events. and that's part of i think we've seen in in these is and with the library book challenges to one one parent who's really upset has because of some of the policy changes has the power to affect what thousands other kids at that school read. yeah yeah i was i live in new york and i had a couple of years

ago. i had a one of my kids teachers send messages to ask of the parents if they were comfortable having their watch a movie about ruby bridges and. and i just thought, i wonder if this is related because there's, you know, there's there's so less of that happening in new but i just wondered if this was something that she always did if it was something that was just this kind of awareness that, you know, that maybe it would be best to ask on the end. and i didn't ask her why. i just said, of course i'm fine with that. you know but it it was interesting to me at the time just, you know, knowing what was going on in the country, one of the things that i thought was really in the book is that, you know, you don't want to give away names or anything for people who are going to read it, but but some of the teachers that objected or raised concerns about some of these issues, you know, really had horrible happen to them. and also their livelihood threatened if they were going to continue to be able to teach

work. and so i don't want to give away names, but can you talk a little bit about that that issue of teachers really facing threats? yeah. i mean, is i guess this is the natural consequence of the narrative that was pushed on the right in recent years that schools are working to indoctrinate your kids. they want to teach white children to hate themselves and kind of out of that was idea that teachers are working. they're trying to groom your kids into lgbtq lifestyles. they want they want to push transgender identity onto your kids and and get them to change genders. and these aren't just like some fringe allergy people making these allegations. these these are things like out of the mouths of governor ron desantis in and greg abbott in texas and it only makes sense

that if if that message is the one being projected out into the world, that people are going to believe it and they're going to look for who's doing this. and so in the excuse me, i'm sorry, in the book, yeah, i tell the teacher the story of some teachers and a couple in particular in a librarian also who who became the target of those allegations, baseless, but real in terms of how they you that hey you have books in your classroom that depict lgbtq relationships even it's a kid. it's a kid's book. there's no sex in it. but it shows that and that's evidence that you're trying groom my kid into this lifestyle. you're are you're a predator. you're a groomer. and i, i in the book, you know,

you really start to understand some othese things when it happens. you and so i include in the book a during the midst of reporting on these stories a couple of years ago when one of those allegations was leveled at me, i had done a story about library books, lgbt q library books coming off the shelves in a suburban houston school district. and for that story, i talked with a queer 17 year old high school senior who wanted me to know and shared that because parents aren't accepting of lgbtq people and she's not out to them, but her school library is like this one spot where she feels safe to read and see books and read books and see herself reflected in what she's reading. and now that was under a threat. and so i was just kind of showing the stakes, what's happening in this movement. day after that story ran, my phone started exploding with phone calls and text messages from numbers i didn't recognize.

and one of them finally she texted like, can you get on the phone? i sent my email address and she followed up this parent, this mom who was not connected to that student in any way. she emailed to say, hey, we saw your story. we saw that you spoke with the 17 year old about and, you know, without her parent's knowledge and about her sexual sexuality, this and she said this is one of the first apps toward grooming and we feel this is grounds to file a police report. with katie police for soliciting a minor accusing me of of basically being a child sexual predator. and you know you know, you're a journalist. right. and so we we get hate mail. we get mean that we get mean messages sometimes really mean. but after, you know, nearly two decades of doing this, it you know you kind of let it roll off. and when it's it's when the criticism is in good faith respond. but for the most part, you get

really thick skinned doing this line of work. this hurt me. this allegation, even though i knew it was nonsense, even though i there was no legal basis for their threat and that you know, this would just go away. it knocked the wind out of me. i like i, i remember going down my wife with all my going downstairs and like, feel really emotional and just needing to, like, sit down for a while and tell her what happened. and it made me i felt sick and i felt i felt like, why didn't why am i even in this business for i didn't that wasn't a lasting thought. but i thought like, why am why am i doing this i should i could do something other than this and be accused of being a child predator and then though later, after i kind of overcame those thoughts, it hit me like, oh, imagine how librarians are feeling. some school librarian who who doesn't get used to hate mail, who wasn't it didn't is not a

public figure. it doesn't per put her name on top of her articles and publish in the world who just stocks shelves and tries to hand kids books that they might like to read. how did those allegations affect those people? and i just i know it must just must be devastating to and have a huge impact on their ability to do their job and also make probably makes a lot of them and i know this from talking to them makes a lot of them think maybe i shouldn't be doing this anymore, maybe i don't want to be a librarian. maybe i don't want to be in the classroom. yeah, that's a loss. that's a loss for everybody. yeah, well, and it's scary. you know, i mean, you don't know who might show up at house or, you know, seek you out at work. and it's it's a terrifying threat. and i can you know you can understand easily why someone might back away from at the end of the day what is a job you know and say maybe i should do something else. you mentioned something that i want to back to a tiny bit,

which is this idea that that what started as a lot of claims about crt then sort of morphed over time into being very focused on lgb rights and very specifically transgender rights. and chris rufo, who, you know, it just tends to be rather candid in some of his comments about, political strategy. he said, i think to the new york times that the sexuality issues were more politically than race issues, you know, and i just wondered, how is that also a strategy that is in many ways a callback to the past? you know, it's something we've seen before. absolutely. what was a while researching the book, i i read familiarize myself with a chapter in history that i was just kind of vaguely familiar with in the in the late 1970s, in there was this push by anita bryant, who was, you know, famous for at that point, you know, being a spokesman person

for florida orange juice, i think she's a christian conservative. she she waged an out campaign in miami-dade county to oppose a local ordinance that would have required private employers to not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. the hope and the fear was from her perspective that, homosexuals are going to be in my kids classrooms. she waged, she and her allies waged just a vicious ugly campaign that spread across the country. and they labeled it save our children, which is language we hear. we hear very variations of that today. and they they falsely depicted all gay people as child predators who are out to recruit kids to their lifestyle and and and she got she got a lot of

support but in the end, in the ensuing decades, obviously we we've all grown up in a world now if you're my age where that's shifted that conversation we thought right where you know we saw those audience, those types of audiences preventing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation spread across the country. we saw same sex marriage. in 2015, and i think a lot of people got lulled into. the idea that, yeah, this is why these are widely held beliefs and they are widely held, but that i think a lot of people maybe it was settled and what this what we've seen in this moment is it's not it's not, you know, the the backlash against transgender people on transgender identities is is is reacting some more recent changes in way young people view

gender and how we talk about in society there has been a like a sea change there the last ten years but backlash in schools over books are on shelves. and what teachers talk about isn't just about gender. it's also a lot of you know, anti gay commentary, you know, this this idea that dare you have a book inside the school that shows two male penguins raising a chick together which is a true story because that's going to teach my kid that it's okay to be gay. and that's one of the things we see is, you know, those books are coming off shelves because in these little harmless books that just show the reality of life in america that some of your classmates do you have to moms and we don't make of them for that there's nothing wrong with that families come all different. these are just kind of standard kindness things that are in elementary schools and we're and

the backlash is clearly against that because there's a saying inefficient segment of of our population that isn't on board we're never on board with these changes and and they see this, you know, as an attempt to to take their kids to to change their kids, to, you know, push this lgbtq agenda on to their children. and that's and that's why we see that they're this parents rights. the parents have the right to to decide what their kids should learn or know about. and and for for it ends up being, you know, stripping the rights from from parents who absolutely want their kids to learn those things. yeah, that's one of the things that that struck me also when i was reading is this idea of, you know, parental freedom, parental rights, educational freedom. if that was really for then know

conservatives who favor school choice and who favor parental freedom would have to be also supporting, you know, schools that affirm lgbtq families alongside religious schools because that be the idea of every family actually choosing for themselves. and and it's it seems like that's not really what it's about. you know that that this idea of freedom is really freedom. if you agree with these views. you know, these these views over here that are very clear that we're, you know, yelling about at the school board. it's not actually choice and freedom for everyone. and i thought that was a kind of a theme. yeah. i mean, i don't want to paint with a too broad a brush. there probably are parents who identify with the parents rights movement who mean it and just want opt out policies right. but i can see we can that this is not not everyone actually who says they're fighting for

parents rights or actually committed it. and you can see that in some of the policies. one in particular that always stands out to me is we've seen this proliferated in school districts and in some state legislation that says that teachers. can refer to transgender children, their birth names and the sex referred. they were assigned at birth, even cases when parents have signed forms saying that they don't want them to do that. so basically giving the teachers the right to ignore the wishes of the parents on the teachers, maybe their religious or moral views. that's not parents rights. if a parent has said, this is who my kid is and how i you i want you to refer to them in the school says but you don't have to you can't as journalists, we need to. words mean something and we need to note when the language match reality. and that's a case where it just you can't call that parents

rights. that's that's false, right. and that's that's one of the things that i think about sometimes is who is freedom for who is it choice for? and you're right, there are lots of people who support school choice for for a variety of reasons. but in the in the sort of arguments about it and the language where it makes it sound like such a simple concept, you know, it's it's not really when you start kind of digging beneath the surface a little bit. you know, one thing i wanted to to ask is just, you know, this is not an easy thing to have spent years of your life reporting. and you talked about some of the the attacks on you as a journalist. but, you know, now that you're finished with the book, what is what is sort of the takeaway for you? and what are you hoping that that readers from it? i think the biggest thing that i wanted from the very beginning of reporting on this was to take some of the the temperature down in terms of the allegations and

the narrative end to end to end complicate that with the stories of students and teachers and parents who are real people who mean well, who aren't bad people and just show where they're coming from and to show how all of this really toxic rhetoric and in some false allegations harming real people in communities and needlessly tearing communities and. i think that's you know, that's a bigger lesson just about school politics. but our politics generally, this kind of tribal situation we're in where, you know, the other side is they're not i don't just disagree with them, they are evil. in some cases we're hearing like you're your work, you know, you're being guided by satan is some of the allegations we see here and this is this is dangerous and. it's it's it has real impacts if, you know, if it's just and

not actions, it has impacts people and it makes people feel unsafe in their communities and. and i don't think that a majority of americans want that, actually. and so i that if i could just, you know, share these stories in and, you know, people may disagree on it and there be disagreement on what are the policy solutions and what is the way address these things. but if we could just agree on some basic facts and you know, and show that some of the people have been accused of wanting to harm kids and teach them this horrible things, you may disagree with them on how they on their, you know, politics or their, but this idea that they out to harm kids. i wanted to challenge that and to show the stories of what's actually happening to to thank you for doing that for your and and you know and also i think

that i hope that despite some of the sort nastier things that have occurred that you continue writing about education and working on education. like i said, welcome to the fold education reporters. we will never let you go. so thank you so much for the conversation. thank you for for suchand i bete

here today already knowing who is you do. that's why you're here. you watch your own facts on fox news. you read her articles and impact us. usa today, new york times and a host of other national publications magazines, you name it. she's been published about everywhere. now, most of us in this room are lifelong staunch republicans and we're conservative. and we're used to hearing at these meetings almost every month a conservative speaker, a republican speaker. today we're going to have a slightly different perspective because our speaker today has a slightly different background historically than some of us here in the room she started out as a and avid democrat.

she worked on the campaigns of two of the most liberal senators in the history of california boxer and feinstein she. we forgive you. we forgive you. she worked on the campaign of bill clinton. you that guy back when democrats actually had people that were just left of center and not so far left that we couldn't it anymore. she was a registered democrat in 2008. she said no more she became unaffiliated. but here's the thing even as a registered democrat, she voted for ronald reagan twice. she has voted for every republican candidate since george w bush in 2000. so maybe registered as an unaffiliated, but she voted her heart she voted her. conservative values.

and then she became a proponent and one of the great champions for the conservative. and she just told me a few minutes ago that as of last year is now a registered republican. welcome to the club jamming. tammy is a bestselling author i think you've seen some of her books out there. the new thought police was her first the death right and wrong and her latest work fear itself, exposing the left's mine killing agenda. now, she's a los angeles native. she majored in political science at the university of southern california. i know we cringe when we hear california, but that all back then. now she's going for a ph.d. soon she'll be bruce. and at this point in time, i would like you to give warm carolina welcome to tammy bruce.

thank you you. thank you. and i'm sorry about, all that other stuff. i'm about all that other stuff. thank you very much. i i am it you know, it's i'm a republican now and. it's still because the indoctrination that occurs it's it makes me nervous. but or you know we've i think we've got about 30, 40 minutes here and it takes me that long to say hello so i'm i'm talking and i can't up so i've learned how to make a living at that but i really appreciate being here a certainly carol thank you very much and the republican women of greater charlotte i've never been here before. it's beautiful you've all been

just so lovely. i knew it was different when were rocking chairs in the airport so i got i'm not leaving i'm not leaving. and one of my first scottish ancestors landed in 1600s in south carolina. he john cooper. so he was. but there's many just many troublemaker in my line. and so it's a it's a pleasure and honor. yes primarily new book first one in 17 years and i know also not that anything last night but and i don't want to take too much time addressing the debate but also of course as we've paid tribute to as carol so beautifully september 11th. it is a reminder especially this anniversary that of course everything can change in a moment. we we can't live that way we have to presume we look toward each day regardless of what we face, being these mortal

creatures. but the fact is, is that we are blessed with being americans. we are americans first, as we we're in the south, in the midwest or the north or the west in california. is a beautiful state. but there's a home invasion robbery there of the entire state. and so we we have work to do. and i think that you my being here, what america, has provided someone like myself, having been a push cart pusher, the left and still informed by the by same ideals, the same values at that time, which now i to say was quite some time ago. suddenly that happened. i don't know how, but it was i yeah look 40 years ago 40 that's a long time and yet my i think all of our values now the conservative framework is about personal freedom being able to live lives that best suit us which requires being able to at

least be middle class and not have the government dictate our businesses or in our personal lives. what we can and cannot do. but that also requires, of course, foundational basis of values where we be trusted, where our how we approach life can be trusted. and that, of course, is it keeps government out of thinking that they can interfere with the choices that we make. so, you know, that is an american sensibility. it used to be, as we now see with bobby kennedy jr used to be a democrat value and then that was hijacked as. we know so things do change it's a of being nimble and understanding that i think there are probably a few of you here who democrats and are now republicans that the case you know and so let me let me start and so my timeline and again just a reminder also c-span is

here they just as we know record straight across there'll be a chance for for questions and yet again our timeline is short so if we will just get the direct questions from and i'm as you can tell i'm still i've gotten to my point yet we we will i'm going to do my best to be as concise as possible. enjoy being here. of course, i love my work at fox have been there 20 years now and i've learned how say things in about 3 minutes and then so this gives me a much much enjoy this and i appreciate being invited and being here briefly on the debate you're going to see a lot of different points of views, but from my experience, working on both the left and the right my experience working with candidates my experience in communications to some degree crisis communications and then being in media, which really in 1993 and radio is, my experience

with is never that there is with exception of the joe biden debacle there's some people will done a little bit better than the other person. right but what matters is what's what the impression is true with everything in life? i think and we also all have ideas about and last night could have been an inflection moment. but what i'm seeing is is it's it's not going to move the needle terribly maybe in the betting but emotions drive the betting markets. right. what i can you is that already in one survey of india of undecideds that six are now to vote for trump or are leaning to trump three for harris, one still undecided. so when when we think about these conversations and we saw this in the the afterwards the

you know they have several undecided people in various places in the voter panels immediately after the debate, without exception what was noticed was that she didn't answer the details of the questions that she she was there's a lot of words. there was a lot of stuff going on. but the very first question, what have you done to help? you know, be better off in the last four years? are they better off immediately? she a canned answer didn't? not at all answer that question. and that is the question on everyone minds. it's nonpartisan crosses the partizan line. and she didn't answer it. and i knew what the night would be if the natural follow up would have been. madam vice president, thank you. but you didn't answer. my question when that didn't happen, i knew where what the trajectory would be and what i would hope for. and i believe is that it was so obvious that it was a

distillation of what has already been happening. lots of words other people saying things for her flip flops, distractions, confusions, but in the new york times siena poll from just a few days ago, a majority of said, we we need some details. we we need details on these issues. and i well this is when she put up the cut and of the biden website on policy onto her policy pages no meaning that they notice that and they knew but it still was meaningless. there was no detail. she talks about her plan with no details and my feeling is and we're seeing it unfold, is that they're trying to move independents out. and there's some undecideds that exist. and when we think about pennsylvania is what happened night or tailor endorsement? i don't think that the miners or, the oil workers or the frackers were waiting for

taylor's opinion. all of us have an opinion and that's fine. but bottom line is, while, you know, we all we would done something differently, we would have. yeah, there's all kinds of opinions. the bottom line is, you know trump and what i've always said on the air and on the few i've been able to speak to him directly is that his greatest strength is himself? the thing that separates him out from everyone else is the fact he is himself you know, exact only what you're getting last night was frankly classic trump. he talks about all kinds of things. he is a he's a nice guy. he's been portrayed as not being he is. and he's doing all of this because cares about the country. he of all people, knows what's at stake. and i think the emotional reaction as we get now to my book the emotional reaction is based in what's stake.

we know that our lives are at stake in this election that freedom speech is at stake. the nature of what this country stands for is at stake. elon musk says we're already a bankruptcy process that is unsustainable. and we're hearing the harris camp no plan about and she's part of what has driven us to this point. there's many things you've seen and it's been discussed will continue to be discussed. but i that when people sit down still today nothing has changed. it comes to average americans not knowing if they're going to be able to get to work because of gas, not knowing what dinner will. we are very fortunate. americans are, thank god, because of this nation, but still too many families wondering what will the protein be tonight? what can i do now? kids are going back to school. what can i send with my kid for lunch and? having to decide between and americans now, a new poll saying i have been skipping meals. it is the 21st century and the

greatest country human history. an american citizens are skipping meals unexcelled and of course we know trump has a history and a greatest economy in human history, energy independence, etc. so we know and that's what americans when they sit down tonight and as independents are tending so it seems say oh trump lost the debate. i think that we need to wait and see how this washes out we need to wait and. see i don't look so much at the betting markets because they like all betting goes up go up and down but all of this and let me move to my book now so i am i believe he will win but that has not changed. and i think that issues have not changed. and they will not change. her style will not change. and last night was a distilled of what they've done, which is try to busy you up with noise

and distractions pretend be something they're not while trying to make you afraid of what republican and conservative stand for. that's what their technique is and why i wrote this first time first book in 17 years on the issue of fear being used to control society. so no matter what happens, even the election when we look back, as we look forward, the one thing that is consistent with the left the world is using emotion to control the population and not happiness, right? not the fake joy. but then posting up trump's going to be a dictator on day one. it is an interesting and it's used it's successful. it's an ancient technique hundreds of years it's it's of course used all around the world by people who have nothing else to control you. now, when you're involved and you move through that fear

framework, use your brain, stop using logic and reason because you move into fight or flight mode and then you react emotionally exclusively. you don't stop to think about, well, you know what? the next day going to bring you stay the moment and you're not thinking what else might be possible. so that is been the strategy everywhere. in our case, of course, we saw a great deal of that many people were aware of the power of that during covid. is there a bottle of water. could i get a water or? a glass of water? that would be great. it started. i think americans were educated about the nature of how we saw how quickly. thank you very much. thank you, sir. so americans, we were told immediately we needed to stay six feet away from each other. we needed to wear masks. this was you know, it's you've

got to you can't visit loved ones are hospitalized. you can't see your your family and friends if they're, let's say, in a nursing home. people died alone. women gave birth. i mean, all these stress decisions that we made and where were willing to go in the midst of that, because the government said this is the way to do it and. now, earlier this year, we fought, she admitted that the six feet away from each other, which we knew was absurd, admitted he just he didn't know where came from. i think it was delivered. leprechauns. it's hard to say, but is it? yeah. yeah. that just he said i think his phrase was sort of showed up and that i don't know that a new scientific theorem either that showed up theorem and of course also with the masks he admitted that maybe about 10% efficacy if worn properly i.e. the n95s or whatever were called, but that putting the band around your

face. in other words, meant nothing. right it wasn't just about covering your face. what's important here? that there was no real scientific decision making or drive to that. it was fear. and i think that it managed in this framework of realizing what was possible and how, what could we get done, what weird. what strange rule people follow if they afraid enough. and so that's where many of these kinds of issues began to manifest canada as an example. and you know, the book doesn't just talk about covid there's a elements in in there about covid, certainly. it's also global warming. the other giant boogeyman, which is amorphous, like covid, that it's undefinable, it can be whatever is you describe canada, though, during this period time that it was like a whistleblower, i guess.

but it it was the military had decided see what rural canadians would do if there was a wild pack of wolves on the loose. because, you know, let's see what they would do if they were afraid an program they sent fliers out to residents saying out for the crazy wolves. and then they set up in various rural areas of wolves howling the government in. and the it was this division, the military that was determined see what would how what how could people be pushed under? a framework of fear like this in england during and a whistleblower leaked messages online between government officials involved in the covid response saying that they would hold back about a new variant in order to make sure it had biggest impact possible and that

they needed to scare the pants off of people because the british were not responding. so there's open conversations about using fear or withholding news, releasing it at certain times. and now many groups there acknowledging that what they did unconscionable and manipulate the british people over covid that happened everywhere ever. beware. governments got excited about to manipulate people. so on the issue of fear though, this is what's a conundrum. fear itself, fear per say is not the problem. fear is a gift. friend of mine, gavin de becker, he's the seminal book called the gift of fear. i met him during the oj simpson killings and trials and he's a security expert and his point is fear is a useful thing it but it's meant to be trans jittery

so if you see your aunt in your car and you see a train coming and you're too close to the tracks, you get afraid and you back up. if you see that your door is slightly ajar and you've been out, you know, to not go in your back up and you take action. if you notice something that is your daughter's having problems and not talking to you or physically she's changed or she's lost too much weight or something's going on. fear is an initial reaction. but then you act, it spurs you to take moves that you normally not take, right? there's a man walking on the street, it's street. you're the only other person walking on the street. he crosses the street to get to your side of the street ladies. i think we all experience a situation where our spidey sense, which is the instinct of fear, but it also tells us in the moment when need to make we

need to make a change. we need to cross the street ourselves. we need to not presume. the one time i was mugged was in los angeles when i was much younger and i was on the left and i there were two young men on the street and i was determined not to be and to give them the benefit of the doubt, even though instinct was, don't get out of your car i got out of my car and it was a mistake. i was slugged. i was knocked, i fell. thank goodness. a lawn of a neighbor's home. and as i was coming to had been over me and was reaching for at the time i carried i carry a bag now cross-body bag but it was grasping my bag but the light came on and the house in which the on which i fell, which means i must have made a noise. and eventually i got my bag back. and it was a couple of neighborhood kids were like trying out for the gang and but

my instinct and what the left wants you to do is to your instinct, they want to question your values. they want you to ignore the that we're facing. they want you to think that if you are concerned about children or what's transpiring you're a bigot or you can't be trusted or something's wrong with you or you living in past, or i'd love to live in the past when we have the strongest economy in the world. i'd you know, i'd love to live in the past when we don't have world wars breaking out. but is part of it as well? is the fear. and there's chapters on this as well. the issue of language the of being called a name right. the new woke framework is also meant for you to be afraid of being are being canceled of losing your job. right that is all become normally ized of being publicly shamed and that's all to just keep you quiet. it is a new censorship through fear, by the way.

poverty is also a a powerful censor. if you can affect an economy where people can't come and support their favorite or their favorite candidates. if you can't afford to travel to go to an event, if you can't afford to live in the neighborhood, you want to live in, beg for a school, whatever you are trapped. you're trapped. that is the ultimate censor. you can't hurt. you can't people you want to support. you can't move. you can't leave. that is what the left works. so all of these things rely the fear, the fear. and today the fear is and this is why people think, oh, well, it's a failed economy. it's not a failed economy. if your intention is to keep people trapped is to make them not not able to to, you know move out of a certain state, make people not be able to speak up because they'll they'll lose the two jobs that they now have to have in order pay the rent,

fear of, not being able to pay that rent if something happens. more and more americans, a majority. i still are living paycheck to that is not normal in our society in a society of entrepreneurs and the free market and capital. every 20 years there seems to be problem that puts us on our heels economically. funny enough, every generation kind of gets kneecapped out a little bit and we're in that. we're at that inflection point again with a direction that no talks about when it comes to the economy for next year, and that the bad economy raises fear. so for left and you saw this in the debate, you see this with the rhetoric. the issue is if you're hearing rhetoric about as an example to border, that's worth being afraid. the border is open. we have known terrorists. the watch list coming through. we've got people being imported

into the country that don't embrace the values that that are you know in small towns attacking, park wildlife and eating it you know things that are so that it's worth fear but what being asked to do when you're being told on these things is not to be afraid and retreat. it's about all right on the transitory position what do we do? so the gauge becomes as the as the left tells you and this will be my last point. i know we're out of time as the left tells you about, global warming, there's no real endpoint. there's no real solution. banning plastic straws. i'm sorry. or turning off. they won't. don't use the air conditioner. be uncomfortable. suffer it. don't use cars. fossil fuels, electric vehicles. of course. does electricity come from they don't like. to discuss that so much but it's all about a that makes you

choose strange options or makes it pushes you into a dynamic that makes no sense whatsoever and it costs money and more government. but there's never an endpoint. every ten or 15 years, there's a new, scary that the world's going to end in ten or 15 years. i'd tell it in my book where you look back and every years there's some new thing you. know, aoki's thing was, you know, in 12 years the world is going to end. it's usually 20 years. and that is to have you stop thinking critically. we're going to save the planet. you've got to not straws or dry. and you think, well, okay, whatever i can do what's never addressed china and china being the contributor it's eight rivers in china i think two in indonesia that provide all the pollution into the world's oceans banning plastic straws in the united states is not a solution but of course it makes you think you've done something

and then you retreat from an issue that we all love the environment but it makes you think you've done your part when none of us have done our part. that's the issue and it continues. it will never be solved. fear and this is about killing your mind on every issue. it's to stop your critical thinking. we start and if you do think critically, there's punishments for acting on that criticism and then may even yourself comply they want you to comply because the punishments you don't comply are too severe and it has to be on where like with miss where you don't to talk details. there are no details they can't tell how that solves the problem or with the economy or anything else. so i think that the this is an evergreen book. it can be applied everywhere i go through what happened to

justice kavanaugh in that confirmation hearing what's happened donald trump. j.k. rowling on the issue of gender reassignment surgeries and children that all of those are meant as messages to the rest of you if we can do it to them, we can do it to you. that's my message. that's pretty obvious message. if we can do to them, no one is safe. and that's their point on issues. they're trying to find out. and i hope they're wrong. and we'll take some questions. but on issues like can we get them to say that these agents of the state in schools are better for their children than they are. can we get parents to their children? can we get a dolts to look away when children become objects of sexual politics? and that's what it is sexual politics. sexual ization of children when it's the most innocent time and irreversible situations.

can they frighten you into accepting it for fear of criticism or. that is all of our positions right now. and it's a very weak house. but it can be defeated. and i think that we're seeing it play out in the right now that you're going to be thinking more about for the left, it's about abortion and fear. and for if there's a fear based message where there's no solution, that's the mind killing aspect. if there is a genuine to be afraid of, where there is a solution, like with the border policies dealing with mexico, building that wall, they acting on the solutions that's and that's that's a different framework so it's the weaponizing of an important aspect that leads our lives and left want you to retreat and to be too afraid to engage all of you here are not in that position you're this room this

organization's in that position and it's honor and a pleasure to be here. every day we've. got to talk about these things. so thank you very. and we've got some questions now. jeremy, that was all right. let me make sure this one's on well, you can probably hear me without it, right? okay. but wait now for the c-span, we've got another out there. oh, so there's a different microphones. okay, microphone. great questions. so we surprised you. we started a little bit early so we could have extra with cami for questions. so we have a little bit more time than we than promised her. but here's the caveat. you've all been to that uncomfortable room where the question becomes a speech so we'll ask that you ask questions and then, you know, save comments and just ask the question. so with that, who would like to ask first question? yeah, back here.

so we have a microphone, the field way back to my right. i think it is that one. yeah. i think it's an. all right, here we go. i won't need one. yes. and then, of course, my issue is my answer is 20 minutes long. so i'm going to follow that rule. well, so we can get as many of you here as possible, because it's a national audience. and i think people generally don't from north carolinians, they don't hear from. and it's an important time and i think they deserve to hear from you. yes, sir. hi, i'm jeff spry. i want say welcome to the old north state and where cornwallis met a hornet's nest. here we go oh, my my question is, what news media source is away from our beloved fox news? do you consider reliable and dependable and where you listen for other other information? well, that's a good question.

the all of legacy media is a problem. and we certainly saw that last night. and i think that's going to be the the legacy of that debate. people will remember that kind of behavior of the moderators in the meantime, but think that right now really is i've gotten a lot more active on twitter which is now ex thank god for elon musk and without him we would not be hearing any anything that now is valuable so i'm very active on there there is i've gotten so many other different layers about articles and reporting and course you've got to be able to sort through and you can control the feed. but i'm on i'm on twitter x at hey tammy bruce there's videos now long form videos i put one up just before i came here. there's subscriptions that help creators make a little bit of money they're going to be starting up tv is not going to

stop it's going to be remarkable and and so i think i'm i'm thinking here god man my column is it a group called a mac dot u.s.? it is the conservative alternate tive to the aarp. they also have articles and material and so i'm proud of being associated with them. but in all honesty, unless there is some major change where you want people tuned. fox and i write about them a little bit in the book they have more liberals and democrats listening to fox than they do cnn or msnbc because everyone knows they need information to information a variety of information to decide what you're going to do for your family and for yourselves. so i have to say, i don't have a look, i think about my browser now online where i might go. i where you my channel is on fox or it's on hallmark and and the

magnolia channel and main cabin masters, you know, the true crime and course fox nation, i think is in the top ten of the downloaded apps for for information and news which is fox nation the streaming service so that i to tell you until we see more and things settle down i think right now it's limited and it's social media. yes. hi, kiesha brassington. this could not have been more perfect day to talk about fear. i met with a group of students last week at appalachian state university and that was their main subject. it was fear about taxes. it was fear that they would never be able to buy home. fear that they would never be able to start a family. these are their real fears. so what do you we would say to them, number one, to have them vote. right. but the number two, to alleviate their so that they're comfortable in voting.

yeah, it's a great question because that's we all have fear of what's happening. and that is what then provokes. kamala, the thing is, afraid you can't get a house. so then here is with money from the government for you to buy a house. california. yet gavin newsom vetoed it. but passed a bill that for like $150,000 for illegal aliens, only to buy a house. it's the moment if they create enough or the or the price controls which we know have destroyed every country that's ever implemented them. but left has to because their policies make prices impossible, as we are now experiencing aigs up double digits, 10% for 50%, 80% in some cases. and what's government's answer? oh, here we're going to we're going to price those greedy grocers who are making a 1.6% profit. i mean, if you're a price gouging, you're a very bad one. i mean, at least gouge 10%. i mean, come on.

but it's the excuse use to say you can't live life on your own government has to save you. the answer to young people is, first of all, to not to talk about it with people, to talk about it with their to know that this is not normal. the fear dynamic situation, not having a child of global warming. right. as an example maybe it's your child who will solve the problems that we've all been experiencing. but it's that deep and it's being able talk with people to recognize this is not organic it's not normal and it's unsustainable. we don't want it to collapse. so we're we have to remake the country. we want to stop it before it continues to do damage. and as young people, they're in the perfect position to recognize that they're afraid. and then to decide is the of a decision. i talk about this at the end of the book, the decision to not governed by fear to your critical mind and to then make decisions accordingly and to

presume that what you're hearing, making you so afraid can be changed and that it shouldn't stop you from living your life. a decision each day? yes. first of all, welcome to the tar state. thank you. congratulations. your new book. thank you. fantastic. and in my view, it's a must read as we get into the critical of the election, all of us are going to everyday encounters where we might have an opportunity to speak to an independent undecided. right. if you were to have what i would call like an elevator speech moment, that's not my specialty, though. as you can tell. i have the two hour flight to here moment. yes, but an opportunity to share just briefly with someone who's you. i've listened to both candidates. i'm not political. i'm not following it closely. yes you're a republican or you're going to a republican ticket. why what? what am i missing? what would you say.

all right. i would say, don't think that you're voting a certain party's ticket that. you're voting for the people who have behaved a certain way and delivered on the issues that who has delivered on the issues? forget their parties. kamala harris. and the last four years of the destruction of the economy, world wars, israel being a by terrorists. on october we're coming up to a year on that attack in israel, russia and ukraine. the debacle of afghanistan, which was the key to making bad guys think that they could do what they wanted. i still about china and taiwan and it's like the decision is clear if like the last four years we will go back to reagan if you like the last four years then vote for kamala harris and you'll get it on steroids. if and thank goodness, trump's success is recent enough where you can point to trump's success. strongest economy literally in

human history, energy independence. we were an exporter. that's important because when there's more oil on the market, the price of oil goes down. russia and iran rely their income. the gdp is money they can do things when oil is high, when the price of oil goes down. certainly not relying on tourism. right. like so, france can rely on tourism. iran can't. so it means that's why you have fewer less adventurism? because there's no money for the bad guys. unless, of course, you send them pallets of billions of dollars, as obama did with iran. so and then you shut them out. but the elevator, it's not about parties. this is about who's done what. if you're you're making a choice about who to go out with for a night on the. do you choose the person who got out of jail and who did a home invasion robbery and is has

general life and doesn't tell you the truth and is always lying to you? or do you choose the person who's got a history that proves that they're reliable? it's that simple. people have to the left is major nervous about voting for republicans because hitler right. because hitler. but that's the lie. so it's about. do you want more of this insanity? none of this is normal. it was created on a dime by. by. and the spending, the green new deal spending disguised as the inflation reduction act of. biden admitted it a week or so ago, saying we should have called it what it was. that's the inflation, the billions of spending, billions for electric vehicle chargers across the country. i think was like it was 40 or 50 billion. they built eight chargers, eight. so i'm sorry. that was obviously too rides. i hope that worked all right.

yes, sir. hi, tammy. welcome to charlotte. i'm charlie dunn. and my question is this a great fear that i have? is that the outcome of this election could be dependent. primarily on one issue and abortion. am i justified in my fear. well, you know, the big issue number one is the economy. and this is what i've said to, republicans, because people got upset when when trump took the phrase reproductive rights there to cast reproduction to cast abortion as some of act of freedom is is a lie, 70%. now we know of women who have an abortion. if they had the money to keep

child, they would. seven out of ten abortions are either because they're financially they believe, financially incapable of doing this or working two jobs, or they're also going to school or there's pressure from outside. someone else is saying that to them and pushing them and they don't have. the financial stability or their personal life stability to be able to resist the outside pressure and usually perhaps would be a man or parents. and you can't afford this we can't afford this. don't do this. real to that. how is it having to choose an abortion? because you have enough money in the united states, america to have a child. how is that a choice? it's not. i was the of an affair. my mother was 40, unemployed. not a great maker at the time, having an affair with a married man and she got pregnant.

pre birth control pills and he left. he was involved allegedly with the mob. and she left her and after she had several. i maybe two months along. and a man came up to door and had an envelope of about $10,000. this was in 1962, which was a lot of money when you had to go to mexico or pay a doctor, enough to do it. and they said, okay, here you go. you need to get rid of this. and she said, okay. and then she kept the money and she kept the baby. i'm grateful, but. but that was a choice. she had the. that was a choice. don't have the left. i'm sick and tired of it having the left cast women who are living in an economy that don't allow to be able to address an emergency, a health emergency, a

pregnant c a a child's emergency c because they don't have the money, they don't have the right jobs. and they've lost all their savings and their house is underwater. and birth control failed, which it does sometimes or sometimes you're not thinking. and and things happen. seven out of ten of those women, though would say, i want an economy where women can say, and this is why abortions down during trump's presidency. more than anything else, women could say, wait a minute, i can do this. i want women to say that on every single issue, you want to have a franchise. wait a minute, i can do this or you to move into a house and get out of that apartment. the in the urban area. wait minute. i can do this. you're not going to a millionaire. you're going to just living somewhere else. and you can pay the move. you can? oh, you know, maybe everyone's fighting. you know, they don't want school vouchers because the left wants you in that indoctrination center. and you can wait a minute. i can do this. i can pay for that school with

abortion. the same situation when you're there. my mother, in telling me the story was she got that cash and it was it was like, oh because that's what you're supposed to do. and she was a little bit afraid of his of his group. and then she she had her with her. and my mother said exactly that phrase, you, i can do this. and i am. how many how many are not here because they did not have a choice. don't believe this. pro-choice garbage reproductive rights is a conservative issue because it's an economic issue and more women will have more freedom to make that choice that now women are running around. or to your point that, oh my god, because everything is so awful, but they're going to give me abortion. they've got abortion even, though. i can't pay my rent. and there's on the street and my katzmann stole and and and what i going to do and we don't know if we can where going to live

next week and what about you you have to join the military so that we have some money and then you'll be sent off. you to fight the middle eastern war. i mean, what life is that? but ladies, it's okay. you can have abortion. that is the last. that is certainly not feminist. and now the truth of that has to be called out for what it is, because don't want the government telling them what they can do with their body, which would include food, forced vaccinations in order. keep your job. you want choices. vaccinations. good. we know the history of vaccination, but we want information. we want trials. we want to know what the results are. we you to know what's going to happen to our baby with the vaccinations for children. choice is involve information and not government coercion, which is what abortion is now in this with seven out of ten, that's government coercion like china, which was simply more obvious about it. our government and the left.

the democrats are saying this is empowering no woman that i know who's had an abortion or or has miscarried has ever forgotten that child sometimes. oh, yeah it would have been 12 this year or. yeah i wonder what what that kid would have been doing or it never leaves you. i've never had thank god having go through that, but i've had many friends who've had both experiences and it changes them. and the left is lying because they would say, oh, don't worry you have to live in the city and you don't have any money, but we can get you that abortion. how dare they cast this as some empowerment. i see what happens when you ask me a question because i fought on issue. i fought on that issue on the basis. i don't think the government should be telling us how to live our lives. that informs my conservative ideal to this day about independence and freedom from an overarching government that uses all these other reasons to try to ruin us.

so that was my answer. i'm sorry. i think that's it. but will be the economy. it's the economy that drives this election for all the right reasons. women understand being able to get an abortion means nothing. if i'm living on the street, that's issue. all right. thank you, everyone. thank you very much. appreciate it. fear itself. yeah. oh, we have have somebody who's not following the rules. surprise. sorry. we're out of time for questions. sorry about that. all right, tammy, you so much. that was fantastic. that was really fantastic. come on. a big round of applause for tammy bruce.

♪♪ in partnership with the library of congress, c-span brings you books that shaped america. our series explores key works of literature that have had a profound impact on the country. in this program, milton rose friedman free to choose a personal statement published in 1980 as a companion to their ten part pbs series, free to choose advocated free-market capitalism. both studied at the university

of chicago where milton leaders served as faculty in the economics department for almost 30 years. they cowrote several books together into the relationship was described as an extremely close intellectual fellowship. in 1976, milton friedman won the nobel prize in economics and 1988 was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by ronald reagan. influencing public policy debates he served as an advisor to both president ronald reagan and british pre- minister margaret thatcher. afraid to choose argued for constitutional restraints on the power of government to interfere with free markets and criticized what they saw as wasteful government spending on welfare and other social safety net programs. the book was one of the best-selling nonfiction books of 1980. >> host: and welcome to books that shaped america on the c-span series that looks at how books throughout our history have influenced who we are today. and partnership with the library of congress, this ten week

series has been exploring different areas, topics and different viewpoints and we are glad you're with us for this walk-through history. tonight it's a look at the economy, the role of government, how we teach children and other policy issues, and it's all through the eyes of milton and rose friedman. in 1980, they developed a series for public tv called "free to choose" and turned that into a best-selling book. many of the friedmas ideas were controversial and spaed he did the debat but there because influenced political figures and others for decades. our guest tonight, to help us understand the impact of free to choose is lanny a continuing lecture at uc santa barbara and also the author of this book "milton friedman a biography." let's start with some facts and

figures about the u.s. in 1980. the population was about 226 million about 100 million less than it is today. the president was jimmy cter and of course he lost to ronald reagan later that year. the inflation rate, 14% compared to about six to 9% today. the unemployment was at 7.5%. today about 3%. a 30 year fixed your mortgage about 14% and climbing. there's been a recession in 1980 and another one was to come. how did the economy feel to people in 1980? >> i think the economy was the number one issue in the 1980 campaign between jimmy carter and ronald reagan. there's no question that ronald reagan was very significantly influenced by milton friedman in his policies and program. he ran on the economy for bill

clinton put forward it's the economy stupid, ronald reagan was asking what do you think about inflation and about unemployment. inflation was the issue of the day. the united states had not experienced double digit inflation in peacetime may be ever virtually as far as very shortly during the control of prices after world w ii, but they have in a general peacetime economy double digit inflation and a declining economic growth, the era of oil embargo, the loss of the war in vietnam. these were troubled tes for the united states and i think many people felt that america's greatest days were behind. effective there was inevitably going to be a larger role for government and society that economic growth would diminish and freed men from an

intellectual perspective and reagan from a political perspective tried to trumpet a different direction and that was where free to choose comes in. >> host: what were milton and rose friedman advocating and free to choose? >> guest: essentially, they were advocating a rollback of the role of government that emerged first in the great depression and then even more during the great society programs during the lyndon johnson administration. their opposition was to the expansion of government. they defined freedom as the most limited amount of government possible. they recognized the government has an essential role to play in establishing a free society and establishing a free-market order. but they wanted that society to have as little government as possible. they were in favor of government when it was provided to be at a local or state level rather than

a federal level. if they thought that voluntary associations should be the primary provider of social welfare functions and families as individuals should be strengthened in an order that society would operate in the most productive and harmonious manner. >> host: did their book have an impact on the reagan campaign? >> no question. fr to choose was published first in hardback with the series free to choose public broadcasting in 1980 which was the year of the campaign. which is the addition that ition have. reagan has the first one-word endorsement of the book on paperback edition after he became president.

one-word, superb. they first met when reagan was governor of california. they campaigned on a number of issues. so these ideas of friedman in particular you've got to control the inflation rate as economists distinct from a public intellectual, friedman emphasized monetary policy theory above all else and if you have inflationary circumstances in an economy that in the long run is going to lead to less growth and during these inflationary 1970s when no one seemed to know what to do about inflation and this seems often to be the case people don't know what to do about inflation, friedman would not agree with of the current approach of the federal reserve of trying to control inflation and changing interest rates. for friedman.

without batting an eye he said inflation is a monetary phenomenon. the reason was too much money was being produced and printed by the government in the karma f currency. it wasn't a matter of interest rates too high or too low or access business profits. it wasn't a function of excessive demands but the supply of money. that is the line that he took and reagan adopted and became a lion adopted around the world for the next several decades. i think friedman would argue that was a large source of the economic prosperity of those

decades. >> host: saying that, lanning ebenstein, is free to choose on that list? >> guest: no question. both milton and ros friedman their influence in putting forward ideas consider himself to be a libertarian philosophy but a republican in politics. in 1964 when he was the republican nominee and the leading advisor to richard nixon in 1968 and 1972 he was the leading advocate of an all volunteer army that was implemented during nixon's administration and then he was a leading endorser and supporter of reagan when reagan was elected in 1980 and 84.

i want to be clear about this as i'm trying to present friedman's views but many people would argue that his views on government were not the right approach. >> host: let's quote from a free to choose this is one of the conclusions at the end of the bo we are as a people still f to ether we continue along the we have been following to ever bigr government or to call a halt and change direction. >> the initiative and all of his work and at the public intellectual particularly in the last 30 years of his life after he retired from the university of chica.

if there is an inflation in the society that's going to be detrimental to an economy there for the first thing the government has to do is maintain a stable money supply. the second thing that an economy needs to do, the government needs to work with an economy to ensure that there are relationships and contracts to adhere to individuals. there was an important role to play in defense. he supported some social services, but his basic approach and i think that it may surprise viewers to know he had to the idea of a negative income tax in the 1960s which is very similar to the idea of universal basic income now about we won't

have a whole panoply of social welfare programs and different sorts. we won't have large government employment. rather, we are going to give people the funds directly to spend. he thought that would be a more effective way of running than the government programs. in the area of education he thought that vouchers would permit parents to choose their children's education, what schools they would attend and what programs they want. that would be a way to increase competition and education. >> these are all policy issues we are talking about today? >> guest: they remain topical to this day. there is low tariffs, index, tax rates, so many policy reforms that can be traced in part to milton and rose friedman. >> host: let's go back to free to choose. economic freed is an essential

prerequisite for political freedom. >> that is one of the court ideas is there is a strong connection between economic freedom and political freedom. they are not distinct. you can't say that you can be politically free if government is running all of the economy. both of the declaration of independence came forward and to smith's fall to patients published in 1776 and they emphasize we need to have the economics of adam smith and join that to the political idea in the declaration of independence everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of

happyness. therefore a free-market system free market systemis the centrao a.m. economic system but it's also central to a political system. >> uc santa barbara, another idea we are still talking about today is a quality in the freedom and this again is free to choose. in the sf equalit o outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality and freedom. achieve equality will destroy freedom and of the force for hands of people who use it tothe promote their own interests.

>> saw as an explicit end of government he felt that individuals are different, they have different tastes, different abilities, different experiences and wants, desires, education. for that reason in a just society it's not going to be a perfectly egalitarian society. this is also important by not making a quality indirectly sought after goal one that just emerges from the market but in fact a free-market capitalist system to have more equal outcomes than the economic systems.

if you value freedom and also have a good deal of inequality. here's a portion of it talking about free markets. >> there's not a single person in the world who could make this. remarkable statement, not at all. the wood from which it is made comes from a tree cut down in the state of washington to cut down the tree it took a salt and to make this all it took steel, to make steel it took iron ore. we call it lead but it's really graphite. compressed graphite. i'm not sure where it comes from, but i think it comes from mines in south america. this red top up here, the eraser, router, probably comes

from land where the rubber tree isn't even native it was imported from south america by businessman with the help of the british government. i haven't the slightest idea where this came from or the yellow paint to make the black lines were the glue that holds it together. literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil. people who don't speak the same language and practice different religions. you are trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. what brought them together to cooperate to make this? sending out an order from the central office it was the magic

of the price. of the impersonal operation of the prizes that brought them together and got them to cooperate so that you could have it for some. that is why the obligation of the free market is so essential not only to promote effective efficiency, but even more, to foster harmony and peace among the people of the world. >> that is a classic milton friedman story. >> he is a great teacher and uc it to their. a great human being and as someone that had the opportunity to interview him on occasion, i was truly impressed by him and his wisdom, the warmth of his personality and the genius of his mind. he's able to explain things so

clearly and succinctly and persuasively and when we talk about the importance of the market, what he is saying is that prices are you central to a properly operating market and what the prizes do is register supply and demand. if you only have government control it's going to be inefficient. von mises in an earlier 20th century economist that talked about calculation and socialist economies, how is a government planner going to know if they want to build houses. if you don't have a way to

compare the relative value of different goods, then you don't have rational economy so that is what leads to the production is the ability to fluctuate. that is a very different idea that most have taken through history. the view has been in the period preceding adam smith that milton friedman criticized as far as adam smith did even more so. what it's going to be produced and how. the argument of friedman and other capitalist oriented economists. their primary argument is for the government to make these sort of decisions and efficient

manners. it is to say that in general productivity, maximum productivity at the large free-market economy and on that argument i think that friedman and his friend have won the argument. >> host: as i mentioned at the beginning, in the series books that shaped america is in partnership with the library of congress and about ten years ago the library of congress came up with 100 books that shaped america and milton frdman's free tohoose was on that list. there are all books that have had an impact on our society. with that said about this book, this is what the library of congress wrote in their description of freeo choose. econist milton and rose friedman published this book in

conjunction with their pbs series that a spouse to t viue of capitalism versus other economic approacs. some of those other economic approaches of course communism and some others, but there's there isalso john kenneth galbrr john maynard keynes. what were their approaches and how are they different than milton friedman? >> to look at the systems the communists or social systems and other types of systems, i think fast it's that friedman's real opposition was to communism and socialism in the form of government production of the means of economic production. and he said the classic examples of this are germany and korea. before the end of world war ii, both germany and korea had been united countries and if anything, the more industrial and at the developed part of

germany was at the eastern part of germany and the more developed part. you had a sort of controlled experiment which is difficult to do and they had won a sort of system in the other part of the country and there is no question that west germany was far more productive economically and had a higher standard and that south korea had a higher standard of living at was more productive than north korea so i thought those were the classic examples, so his great opposition was to

very significant government control of an economy. when it comes to john kenneth galbraith or john maynard keynes, he didn't consider them to be merely as negative as a full-fledged socialist or communist system in this sense in the means of economic production. in the case of keynes, friedman's opposition was mostly to the idea that in an advanced capitalist economy there tended to be over saving. the marginal propensity became economically more advanced and therefore you could have an economic equilibrium and less than full production and employment and therefore the

government had to borrow excess funds from the private sector engaged in deficit spending in order to maintain full economic activity. there are vasces of excess saving. together it doesn't borrow money from the private sector. it's going to have to spend that money so the keynesian economic theory in the activity and in general so he was opposed to that. galbraith s probably the most well-known economist popularly.

friedman by no means thought that he was a socialist or communist. maybe they hedged a little bit of direction of socialism but his main concern was they didn't recognize the inherent inefficiency of much government activity a continuing lecturer at the university of california santa barbara. he's been there since about 2005 and is the author of a couple of books, milton friedman a biography and chicago economics which we will talk about in a minute. he's helping us understand the impact of milton and rose friedman's free to choose.

the (202)748-8902 if you live in east and central time zones, 748-8921 if you live in the mountain and pacific time zones and if you can't get through and still would like to make a comment, try the text number (202)748-8903. that's for text messages only. please include your first name and a city if you would with your questions or comments. also want to let you know that we have a cpanion website to theeries. there are teacher lesson plans and aiewer" tab, related videos, the library of congrs is 100 books that shaped america are all contained in that website. c-span.org/books that shaped america is the website. just a little bit about milton and re friedman.

heas born in new york city and went to rutgers the university of chicago and received his phd from columbia. the treasury department from 1941 to 43 during fdr's presidency and he taught at the university of chicago from 1946 to 1977. rose friedman lived from 1910 to 2009 andas born in ukraine. she attended reed collegen oregon, the university o chicago where she did phd work that did not do her diertation. she collaborated o free to choose, the tv series and the book. she cowrotether economic books and memoirs all including capitalism and freedom that came out in 1962 and cofounded the choice with milton friedman's promoting school vouchers. i want to show the original copy of the book that came out in

1980. here is the front cover. but you can see they are both listed on it. but when you flip it around, there is where you get rose friedman on the back. >> i think that rose was from a family of economists. her brother was a leading member of the chicago school of economics in the post-world war ii period at the university of chicago. she herself was an econoc student at chicago when they would also be graduate student there. they were students of frank knight at t time who was a free market oriented economist, and i think that her role wasn't significant in milton friedman's work and technical economics.

she was more involved in the later work in public policy and books such as you mentioned free to choose, capitalism and freedom and other works later after he retired. >> let's hear from some of the viewers before we continue looking at free to choose. this is tim and pearl city hawaii. you are on c-span. great discussion. did milton freeman have any thoughts about the constitutional amendment or how did he think about deficit spending during wartime or national crises. did he have any thoughts on that? his thinking in this area might surprise you. during wartime i would say who therules that might generally ay

should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, so i wouldn't say that he would oppose deficit spending. however even during peacetime, his view was that the deficits were to be preferred to more government spending. he would rather see the government spend a trillion dollars and have a 500 billion-dollar deficit of them government to spend $2 trillion and have them in a deficit at all. so his focus was the amount of spending rather than the deficits and he is really the one that introduced the notion that deficits d't matter. they don't matter economically.

you have an increased money supply. it isn't a keynesian idea. it supported a balanced budget amendments but only if it was in the context of the reduction government spending. not on deficits and as it happens i think that that is also a legacy of his that some may criticize the reagan administration of non-focus on deficits being an important factor of government policy and something that is continued to the present even during the last years of the clinton administration. >> host: please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: thank you for

taking my call. looking at the philosophy i think time has proven and it was a complete failure. in the american dream -- >> host: thank you very much. talk about the issues that alan mentioned. one that prevents friedman's position and as opposed to offer critique of it and what i guess my view is the strength and his fault and also great weakness. i think that with respect to monetary policy, he was accurate with of the importance of low

but not necessarily no inflation. the lack of focus on deficits would not be helpful to our society. with respect to did reagan economics lead to the decline of the american economy, i think that we were talking earlier about the late 1970s were a period of high inflation in the united states, high unemployment in the united states, high interest rates in the united states and that at the time it was considered a relative boom in the economy in 1890s as deflation decelerated. i think that you have to take a balanced approach to friedman's record and as i say, i think that the idea of less government and government inefficiency is a very important idea that i think those who don't recognize

government inefficiency, they are making a mistake. >> host: along with the companion website, we have a companion podcast looking at the lives of milton and rose friedman a little more in-depth. a little bit more from this podcast that as an economist and offering to the founder of the libertarian freedom vest. >> friedman would always advocate less government then more government because it meant it wasn't that it was a negative approach but it was a positive approach because he would say listen, this means that you have your own responsibility in making your decisions rather than someone else telling you what to do and that is essentially an american perspective. we don't like people telling us what to do whether it's during a

pandemic, whether it's in a war. we want to make those decisions ourselves so i think that is the ultimate legacy that milton friedman had. >> you can see on your screen the little qr code. get your phone out and snap a picture of that and then you will get to the entire podcast. the guest talking about milton and rose friedman. claire is in santa barbara. please go ahead. >> caller: hello professor ebenstein, me and my fellow students are cheering you on from santa barbara. my question to you is the young economists that you are teaching, what advice do you have for us or what do you think friedman would have for us in today's current economic state and what do you think

policymakers could suggest? >> host: are you a student at uc santa barbara? >> caller: yes i'm professor ebenstein's student. >> host: and what do you think of milton friedman into the different economic theories, give us a sense of what you think. >> caller: i think that he would be more free market. you might think the government should have less say in economic affairs and i'm not sure if you would agree with how the government is treating inflation and the housing crisis into the homeless crisis. i'm not sure. that's why i met asking. >> guest: thank you for calling in. i really appreciate it. i think your questions are really good. i think that friedman's approach was basically a monetary

approach and one thing we talked about earlier in the program is the late 1970s were and the era of challenge for a number of reasons and although it seems hard to believe now, the soviet union at that point in time seemed to be ascended into the world and the idea of a much larger government role i society advocated by many economists as the inevitable direction and friedman's perspective on that was that was the wrong approach and that as we discussed earlier, the problem with more economic control by government is that it will also erode political freedom. you can't have political freedom without economic freedom or an effective economy without a significant degree of economic

freedom. i think friedman would advocate really considering the advantages of a market economy in trying to evaluate the appropriate societies. that's a question that deserves a lot of discussion and friedman recognized reasonable people of goodwill can draw the line on the appropriate level of government differently and it might be different in different places into different times. in his years as a public intellectual after he retired from the university of chicago he tended to become relatively more doctrinaire in he is no government approach. and from my standpoint, his work as a technical and practical economist where he discusses the

disadvantages of government involvement in monetary policy and other areas is something that is the stronger aspect of his work. i don't think that the underlining philosophy as an economist where he thought he made the greatest contribution was necessarily quite as one-sided as his career as a public intellectual, so as an economist i tried to emphasize his thought during his career which he valued more highly. >> host: as we mention free to choose the best selling book came out of free to choose, the highly rated pbs series. let's return and hear a little bit more from milton friedman. >> the fact is most people enjoy

the early stages. in the swinging 60s, there was plenty of money around. business was brisk, jobs were plentiful. everybody seemed happy at first. but by the early 70s as the good times roll around it started more rapidly. as soon as some of these people were going to lose their jobs. ♪♪ the party was coming to an end. ♪♪ the story is much the same in the united states only the process started a little later. we've had one inflationary party after another, yet we still can't seem to avoid it.

to make us think that we are getting a tax break they are able to do it while at the same time actually raising our taxes because of a bit of magic. that magic is inflation they reduce the tax rates but the taxes they pay have to go up because they are automatically shoved into higher brackets by the effect. a neat trick taxation without representation. the reason we have inflation in the united states or for that matter anywhere in the world is because the accompanying with their counterparts in other nations by growing more rapidly. the truth is inflation is made in one place in one place only here in washington. this is the only place there are

places like these. this is the place the power resides to determine how rapidly the amount of money. what happened to all that noise that's what would happen to inflation if we stop setting the amount of money so rapidly. >> host: we want to thank free to choose media providing the media tonight from the series. we've seen cases in argentina and brazil and some other places where inflation is at 202000% because money is being presented. do we have that issue as bad as

milton friedman made it sound? >> guest: sure and i remember that segment from free to choose very well, this year he is i myself was an undergraduate at that time taking courses in economics. the whole idea of why is there inflation. is it a result of changes in the interest rates? again is it to high profits, too much union demand? in terms of friedman's answer, it was clear and unequivocal. at that segment that shows the printing of dollar bills by the treasury department really makes the point from his perspective which is inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. he would argue that the reason why we've had inflation in the united states in recent years is not because interest rates were too low at some point in time. he wouldn't say it's because during the coronavirus recession

perhaps for appropriate reasons as a result of the extreme exigencies of that circumstance. again, he was not dogmatic with respect to an emergency circumstance for the measures whether they are right or wrong is a different issue but the point is that is not the main point with respect to the inflation we are experiencing now, he would say that when the federal reserve didn't borrow for the trillions of dollars sent to american individuals and businesses and when the federal reserve didn't, congress didn't tax for those dollars but simply the federal reserve increased the supply of money engaged in quantitative easing to the tune of trillions of dollars, that's the reason we have the inflation now. the reason that inflation has decelerated the past year is because friedman thought that there was a lag time between the increase in the money supply and the degree of inflation and

likewise there is a lag time between when the money supply stops increasing as a deceleration of inflation. we've now basically gone through that cycle. it's not surprising that inflation has dropped from eight or 9% to three to 4% and that it will probably continue to drop to two or 3% in the next number of months irrespective of the federal reserve interest rate policy. friedman would have condemned the curtain federal reserve policy of raising interest rates in order to control inflation. he thought that that was a myth, didn't have anything to do with the rate of aggregate prices. his focus was undoubtedly quantity of money. that's the reason there was inflation. if you want less inflation you stop the printing presses and stop increasing the supply of money. it's not a function of interest

rates primarily. >> host: gym in new york city you are on books that shaped america talking about free to choose, please go ahead. >> caller: thank you very much. i appreciate the conversation. my question is on monopolies and oligopolies. first of all what was milton friedman's attitude towards that, and are they created by the government themselves and i will wait for your answer. >> guest: that is a really good question. and friedman's thinking on the issue of the monopolies and oligopolies evolved over the course of his career when he was a young economist in the 1930s and 40s, he basically endorsed the prevailing economic models, which soul a significant amount of monopolistic activities in the econo and this required a lae le for the government because the theory of the free market and its eiciency is

that no one is a price setter, everyone is a price taker and that doesn't exist in the oligopoly or the monopoly, but the period after world war ii together with the others at the university chicago as i mentioned, the director, also george stiegler and others, they examined the american economy closely and they came to the view that there doesn't appear to be much monopolistic activity and the american economy, the view that also tended to become more generally accepted in the economic profession and public policy. that really undercuts the argument for much government activity. so from friedman's perspective, we are not in a keynean system where we have to have government borrowinanthe big role in that way we are not a monopolistic situation where you have to have the government regulation for those reasons either. so he later became not overtly

concerned about monopoly into the private sector. he did think the government is very wasteful. it's the monopoly we have to worry about in its inefficiency in the problem. >> host: text message from michael in hastings nebraska. please compare and contrast the philosophy of milton and rose friedman and ayn rand. you have about 30 seconds for that complex question. >> guest: i would say that the friedman's were much more of the view that there is an appropriate but limited role to play in society whereas ayn rand thought there was no role for government to play in the society. i think that the friedman's fault that there was human diversity and didn't think that there is a basic human equality that individuals have spiritually. i think that the view very much emphasizes great human inequality and i don't believe that was the friedman

perspective. >> host: milton and rose friedman in 20000 were on the booktv program. here's a portion of that program. >> the guest here on our program from san francisco on booktv, doctor milton friedman and his wife who is also here on the cover of free to choose which i guess is your most successful. what do you remember about working together on this particular book? >> it was very easy. we already have the television program notes, and the book is written really from that. so, we each started with one chapter and then handed it to the other person to go over the chapter. we went back and forth that way. in the end we really don't know who wrote which words which is true about all the books we've

written. >> guest:. we wanted it to be available in the program was shown, so we started on it in march of 1799 and we got a publisher they got it published by january when the tv program started. >> host: when you are working on these projects what does she do that you don't and what does he do that you don't? >> guest: we both tired. we use the computer now. >> we talked about aging, both of you 88-years-old. are you surprised at how well you do for those that can't to see these two people, they move around as well as anybody -- >> anybody says when you're bouncing around, i don't feel

like bouncing around frankly. many things i can't do today that i use to be able to do. i don't have the energy i use to have. getting old is no fun. >> is there any advice that you have if they live to be 88 that he would do differently? if you knew you were going to live this long is there anything you would do differently? >> i think we would have lived more extravagantly. we were always saving our pennies. my brother used to say we were saving them for a rainy day that never came. i was saving. i saved my pennies. >> he would say you're saving them for a rainy day living in a perpetual -- [laughter] >> host: just wanted to give a sense of rose friedman as well as milton friedman. edward in dover delaware, please go ahead. >> caller: i want to mention the book capitalism and slavery. thomas soul, i'm reading his

book now called social justice policies and he seems to imply people are poor because it's their fault. and i wanted to ask why are so many poor people in the united states and why are there poor nations as far as capitalism is concerned? what is the relationship between capitalism and slavery? >> host: what you say eric williams and tom soul have the same philosophy? >> guest: that's an excellent question because i'm an anti-thomas soul person because i am an african-american. he's very conservative and i'm relatively little. >> host: what are you getting out of the book that you are reading? >> caller: when he said poor people, it's their fault, i sort of i can't go along with that.

>> host: thank you for calling in. >> guest: i'm not familiar with the williams book but thomas soul i'm very familiar with. he was a student of milton friedman at the university of chicago and he tells the story that when he went to the university of chicago, that is thomas soul, he was a marxist but after being around milton friedman and others in chicago for several years, he shifted to a more free-market view. i don't believe that it's the case that either thomas soul were milton friedman or rose friedman would say that the problem of poverty resides in poor people. i think what they would say is the problem resides in the system and that if you have a system that's more effective, then people experience less poverty, which they certainly supported. with respect to slavery, slavery is the exact antithesis of the

free-market system because the free market system because the free market system in ten that every individual has freedom to exchange as they wish. it's the exchange and function, the ability to exchange as you wish. adam smith's idea the magic of the market and the idea for prizes to direct production in an effective manner that leads capitalist economy, the 1800s, the 1900s to the present are a to greater economic prosperity time of increasing for all. i think that they would argue commiseration, the greatest that the period of the period of prosperity in all history for all people into andstandards of living have been greatly increased. so, i think that they would argue that their goal is the same as yours. they want a higher standard of living for everyone. how you get there again is a question that reasonable people of goodwill can differ. with other works by friedman and others in his school is that the

idea that the government can run an economy which was prevalent around the world before free to choose, that lady that is utterly discredited at this point in time even people that think that there should be more government than milton friedman at this point in time or not advocating complete government control of the economy. bernie sanders is no socialist as socialists were in the 1930s, 40s and 50s were advocating the government should own and run all the aspects of the economy. i think those are some comments. i think you raised some very good concerns and as i say i think the issue of poverty is something that friedman and soul is best accommodated through the free-market economy. >> host: the shock doctrine came out in 2008. naomi klein, canadian author, activist. here's a little of her criticism of milton friedman. >> who's the most angry?

>> milton friedman is pretty angry with the shock doctrine because the book is pretty tough on milton friedman. i would say i think there's probably still the people that are most annoyed with certainly my book. >> host: why did you pick on milton friedman? >> the shock doctrine tells an alternative history of how we ended up with the kind of market economies that we have that's been globalized around the world, and it's a pretty fundamentalist version of the market economics that pretty much everything should be privatized you to the media for the regulation. we have seen on wall street. so the shock doctrine tells the story of how we got here and milton friedman played a pretty important role in the story mainly because he was the movement prime popularizer not because his ideas were so

original. he was certainly part of the chicago school tradition but he took that to the masses. he was the one with the column that did the ten part series. he had that incredible talent from writing economics and bringing it to a popular audience. so he played a very important role. he was a political advisor. but the focus of the book is much less on him personally than on the university of chicago and the particular role the university of chicago played internationally because the university of chicago had a very aggressive program of attracting students particularly from latin america and this had nothing to do with milton friedman. it wasn't his idea. it was actually a decision that came out of the state department where there was a lot of concern in the 1950s that latin

america was moving to the last and moved further and further. the idea was picked up in the head of the program for what became the usaid that they would bring sponsored groups of students to study at the university of chicago economics department precisely because it was so conservative and in fact in this time it was seen as very out outside of the mainstream because the united states was in the grips of keynesianism, all the ivy leagues. the university of chicago was different and they had of this program to bring eventually hundreds of latin american students to study under friedman and his colleagues and that had a tremendous impact on the politics of latin america because when there was the series of military coups in the 70s, there was a, there were

teams of economists that were ready to work with those governments who didn't have any expertise and economics, so they formed a kind of alliance or partnership with the military and these university of chicago economists. >> host: naomi klein, part of her critique was about the chicago school of economics. you've written a book called chicago economics. what are we going to get from that book? >> guest: sure. i don't want to appear to be one of the people that is a milton friedman fan that's upset her for that reason. i just think it's possible to take a different intellectual vi, and i will briefly try to make that argument. ..

and china is a far freer country than it was during the communist regime. again underscoring the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom. so i think the criticism economic freedom does not lead to political freedom is contradicted by the facts. >> host: a theory of the consumption function came out 19 citalism and freedom in 1962 monetary history ofhe s. in 1963 it was cowritten with ana schwartz trney and the status quo came out in 1984. again cowritten with rose freedman. carlos and arlington virginia please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: hi thank you very much for taking my call, during the show. human speaking about government and inefficiency that can exist

to the point of things got better but what about business or corporate inefficiency? will be freeman's perspective on that? are the american film industry. there is a philosophy of corporations too big to fail we have to build about. stuart carlos thank you for the question. >> guest: really good question. public policy is imperfect. but in general if the business is failing at a subnational level i would go out of business or redirect its activity. it rewards efficiency that is the virtue of it.

there may not be that tendency to go out of business from freedman's perspective the private sector was more efficient than the private sector. that mean the private sector is always efficient? nope it is that the public sector is it efficient? no. you should bright try to privatize government function is very much in favor of greater privatization of government activity but. >> host: you side free to choose a pbs series talked about washington and economic power could certainly come to washington i'm impressed all overgrowth how much power is concentrated in the city. but we must understand the character of that power but it's not monolithic power in a few hands the way it is in countries like the soviet union or read it china. it is fragmented into lots of

little bits and pieces. with every special group around the country trying to get its hands on whatever bits and pieces it can. the result is there is hardly an issue in which you won't find government on both sides. for example in one of these massive buildings scattered all through this town bursting with government employees some are sitting around trying to figure how to spend our money to discourage us from smoking cigarettes. in another of the massive buildings may be far away from the first sub of their employees equally dedicated equally hard-working or sitting on figuring out how to spend our money. to subsidize farmers to grow up more tobacco. and one building their figure out how to hold down prices. in another building they got schemes for raising prices import prices or keeping out cheap foreign goods.

we set up enormous department of energy with 20000 employees. to encourage us to save energy we set up an enormous department of environmental protection to figure out ways to get cleaner air and using more energy. now many of these effects cancel out. that does not mean these programs do not do a great deal of harm and there ought not very bad things about one thing you can be sure of the cost do not cancel out the ads together. each of these programs and spend spendsmoney. taken from our pockets that we could bebebe using to buy goodsd services to meet our separate needs. >> host: lanning, milton freedman worked in the fdr administration and the treasury department of world war ii did that influences later views? what's is ironically work for the treasury department during world war ii he was actually on

the team that developed withholding its source on the income tax that would have happened without his involvement but he wasn't early engineer of that expansion of the tax code. but i think freedman's views when he was a young economist were basically set by the higher ups in the department and he took the line he was working for them. that was an early phase of his development but not one that endured. sue went a little bit about his legacy won the nobel prize in 1776 the presidential medal of freedom in 1988. he was a advisor to president reagan and prime minister thcher break or recognition by the economist magazine as the most influential economists of the second half of the 20th century possibly all of it. jasmine santa barbara, california you are on books that

shapes america. >> hello. i was wondering how can inflation be good for the economy especially how it's measured in the 50s and 60s and 70s to until now and how technology is changes so significantly? exit jasmine leo student uc santa barbara to? >> i am a student yes. >> thank you for calling and she one of your students? it's absolutely. [laughter] while you are watching. freedman's thought was inflation has a temporary stimulative effect to economy. that's why his perspective it was if you are in a depressed economy you want to increase the money supply. but, in the long run if you continue increase in the money supply then inflation will begin to have a negative effect on economic growth. so he's out the best policy was have a low inflation rate at all

times and a sble two -- 5% increase in the money supply every year on a year in year out basis. he did not favor changes in policy raising and lowering interest rates he thought that s disruptive to the economy it was thought helpful first truck price stability. dan is in bridgewater new jersey hope all the students are getting a strict credit for watching, go ahead dan. >> led the tremendous pleasure of knowing i don't to comment on the economics because to me economic system or written political science and cosmology. but what i would like to point out is they really care about the people on the short end of the stick. it's a vaccine probably talk

about extensively. it's perceived by many people as a right wing person who did not care about others. they had the jewish ethic especially during the civil rights era. stuart dan, how should the frdm's? >> i was at barkley and got all involved in that and i met him after that. >> are right thank you for calling in. there were other people who knew the freedman's, respected the freedman's this is from the c-span archives here are some well-known politicians talk about milton and rose freedman. >> a winner of the nobel prize milton freedman's technical mastership his profession is unchallenged. more central to his work is its moral component. an idea of human freedom in

which man's economic rights are as vital to civil and human rights. >> we are entering the information age at a time of sweeping change. in the economic and political sphere the decline of communism economic philosophy and the tide of democratic government that is changing the face of the world. all based on the right of the individual to be in milton freedman's resounding phrase free to choose. >> is a great statement by milton freedman he said nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as their own projects prs milton and rose freedman. chris. >> i read gary fackler and spiegel are in freedman and all those guys. >> milton freedman the economist back in the lady said there's only one obligation of corporation has. that is to the shareholders.

to the community they live in, the place they support. >> it's an honor for me too be here to pay tribute to a hero of freedom. milton freedman. he has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision. the vision of a society where men and women are free. free to choose. but work government is not as free to override their decisions. >> host: besides president biden that was quite complementary of milton freedman. where would he fit in today's gop in your view? >> guest: that's a very good question. freedman had a very unusual constellation of views. he was not a social conservative he thought abortion should be legal. he was for gate rates he was for

drug legalization. those are not typically positions one would associate with the republican party today. on the other hand he very much thought government could be an efficient and it was important for government to spend less and to do less. so, i think those positions are less common in the republican party today. it is hard to know where exactly he would stand on the spectrum at this point in time. but i would say i very much agree with the caller who said one that can disagree with freedman's view and he himself changed his views over his lifetime. he emphasized importance of discussion and debates. but i don't think you can question where he was coming from in the sense he really was trying to increase human freedom. capitalism and freedom, free to choose. writers are talk about freedom of the title of their books it's really important to them. maybe he didn't get it right entirely but that was his goal.

>> lenny eban site is a continuing a lecture at uc santa barbara we have heard from a couple of his students this evening. and throughout the series we been checking out teachers to see how they teach the books that we have been talking about. here is patricia cunningham nazareth area high school where she teaches ap courses in economics, government, and politics. >> in free to choose he really takes a chapter by chapter approach breaking down some difficult concepts making them very palatable for students to know and to understand and to see how they are important to their daily lives. the first chapter he's tackling the role of markets and voluntary exchange rate adam smith, the invisible hand, all those concepts can be difficult and uninteresting. he takes seven makes them fascinating by applying a real-world examples and real world scenarios that make them

easy to understand for it even though there are some things i would say are easy to understand who they are also some challenges when it comes to some of the data included in the text. obviously this is written in 1980 so we are looking at 40 plus years ago. some of the data sets are outdated. what i liked with my students is have them update the data themselves. but on their economist hat and to say okay, here's what freedman had to say about the relationship between unemployment and inflation. what is the current rate data set about that we will pop out to the bureau of labor statistics and look at the consumer price index. we will look at the unemployment rates we will compare it to some of the data sets he had in the text from that period in which he has his writing. that allows them to say these theories are not there for a moment in time but they are there over time. so even as it's a struggle at first for students that empowers them to use the tools we have available today to actually

apply the economics and to use current data. what i really love about this piece is that it is going to allow students not to just know and understand the economy, but to know and understand their the within it. how do they see the operations of their workplace? how do they see getting the degree are not getting that degree and how that affects her productive capacity. a lot of what we see the text complied directly to students make it on my favorite pieces to teach in the classroom projects want to thank patricia cunningham of nazareth high school and nazareth pa for sharing some of her teaching methods for free tohoe. if youo to the website span.org/books that shaped erica up at the topeacher resources. this additional videos for eac of the 10 books in ts sies i recommend getting on our site

website especially if you are a teacher. jon and toms river, new jersey please quote your question or comment. >> i was wondering what would you think mr. freedman would say about how china is now? our supplier for steel industry, would industry all industries including food. you see places like bethlehem, pennsylvania where a casinos with a steel mill it used to be. that's hardly any steel coming out of pennsylvania paid all the raw materials will would have done about that? see what job he got the idea. >> guest: great he made out a great freedman's perspective but one area is influential in he was a free trader. his view truly was if china is going to be able to make goods more effectively than in the united states it's beneficial to

allow chinese to make those goods more effectively than in the united states and the united states should not have high tariffs on goods. going to have a more peaceful world people are trading with one another and you have specialization in different areas. his theory was that his nation specialize in the areas they are most productive in and all nations will collectively have the lowest production but i appreciate that to something like that is the case in western pennsylvania. when areas are unemployed. in the long run his view was the advance of technology is the driving force of economic progress and free trade is the best possible policy. so he is not in favor of terrorists not at all. see what let's follow that up with denise from california text message would you comment on how you think milton freedman see how the internet has affected society economically.

>> he lived long enough we can see the start of the internet revolution and the early 2000's. the growth of knowledge is something exceedingly valuable to economic activity, whatever encourages people's ability to exchange is good for the economy for the internet allows us to send information instantaneously anywhere for nothing. it's a great boon to economic activity. he was totally in favor of it. spew at library of congress in 2013 or so come up with a list of 100 books that shaped america. again not necessarily all bestsellers not the best well-known books but books that had an impact that's what our series has been about these past nine weeks and again next week. go to the website books that shaped america is theebsite. if you go theres a viewer put button two steps you can send us the book ttou think

shaped america or had an impact on our society. here are some of the submissions we have received. >> my name i am from northern virginia. the book i think it shaped america is a letter from birmingham jail bite martin luther king jr. but not only is it truly defined are a distinct racial equality boat speaks to the millions of americans was that right. thank you. >> my suggestion for book that shaped america it's a great philosophical work that describes the nature they aren't removed and some civilians from. eggs deemed the real or substantive nature of the world.

it certainly a book. >> hi my name i am from ukraine. [inaudible] what shaped america for me white fang. of native america. >> hi my name is michelle i am from hollywood reason for picking this book is everyone knows the case i think she did an incredible job talking about the perspective we don't normally see. i'm talk what the tribulation she went through. >> i'm johnny from denmark the

book that shaped america and the reason is thomas has a nail on his finger if it gets in the waterbecomes in touch with alie. and i'm from denmark. thank you. [inaudible] might reason. [inaudible] say what if you go to c-span.org books that shaped america use the viewer inputight up there at the top. two quick steps you can send us a book you think shaped america

we may use it on this program. william and florida please go to your question or comment about free to choose. lanny even signed as our guest for. >> hi thank you very much for taking my call. freedman used to say who was not a conservative. >> he considered himself a libertarian in his philosophy but a republican or conservative at the time in his political registration. we went next call is caches in stone mountain georgia. we are listening. >> i have a two-part question. the first is what in your opinion will be mr. freedman's perspective on where our economy is right now and what would you say would be his remedy to reducing the money supply? thank you sir progressive milton

freedman were to give advice right now it would be to stop raising interest rates don't cut inflation by lowering interest rates. you certain sibley hammer the economy he would say we should focus on money supply rather than interest rates on the monetary policy. the federal government should try to reduce its spending to the greatest extent possible. those of the two courses i think he would favor. see went eric in wisconsin since this text or the wonderful aspects of the free to choose a pbs program are the debates in the second half of each episode. some of the luminaries in both debates, it milton freedman personally choose a gas did he know them all personally questioned. what's he did choose the guest. whether he knew them all personally well, that i cannot answer. but a number of the guests hit interact with over the years.

he had a wide ideology hit jon kenneth was a guest he did not have nearly conservative or libertarian speak he tried get another leading liberal at the time. he tried to have a wide range of views. he thought following jon stuart knowledge and truth are furthered he recognized people are imperfect to make the best decisions you can. >> spew atlantic what we are interactions with milton and rose freedman like? >> i will tell you i really benefited with my interactions with melted and rose freedman paid the first time i went to freedman i knocked on the door i set up an appointment one is writing a book i would been a colleague of his at the university of chicago for i asked him if i could interview him he said sure, come on out.

the first thing ask freedman was do you mind if i take the conversation and he said to me and i remember to this d, i've ate single rule what i says to one person i say to everyone. i never say anything off the record but that is the principle if you can live that is a moral principle. i said that greatly influenced me. had an incredibly warm person it was the agreed with him disagreed with him had a great sense of h huge energy, creative, extraordinarily fast and his intellect. great memory. he was someone across the political spectrum he was the most popular professor that more students were into their phd's than any other teacher there. rose was no slouch either. she gave me some papers she had on frank at night she missed

student of frank nights at the university of chicago to use for my work. they were a wonderful couple and they did their best to make our country a better country. see what he attended and graduated from the london school of economics but let's end where we began. what is the impact of free to choose and why should it be included on a book that shapes america lists? >> free to choose is in important book. while it really important books in american history but at signal the move away from government as a solution to our problems to we need to reform government. that iseet bill clinton with anger in the 1990s. this is not necessarily a partisan issue. the general trend toward relying on the market for a time a focus on inflation the quantity of bunnies most important aspect of

inflation. who is thought a very highly by dissidents the former communist country of the soviet union and eastern europe. he is someone who inspired many people to seek a more free society for it again his bottom line was you can't have political freedom without economic freedom and that's part of the argument for economic freedom. uc santa barbara we appreciate being on books that shaped america and push it your input at home will see you next week. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪our club is home to legendary

explorers and it's a physical of the stories of. those who have expanded the margins of knowledge. tonight, we're privileged to welcome a first rate chronicler of such stories and such

explorers a historian, author and journalist including editor at large for outside magazine hampton sides specializes in tales, incredible feats under perilous circumstance from the world war two. survivors of the bataan death march to the in his book, ghost soldiers to the marines at chosun in during the korean war, and his book on, desperate ground the explorer carson and his book, blood and thunder. it was powerful work on the assassination. martin luther king hellhound on his trail. he's previously lectured here in the explorers club, the uss jeannette. in his book under the kingdom of ice. he's here tonight with his wife and a journalist and editor note. and we are so grateful to welcome to tonight's monday night lecture the historian and author and journalist hampton sides.

hello. hello so so wonderful to be here tonight in new york city. i think the only place that captain cook didn't go to, but if he did go here, he would have come to this place, i'm pretty sure, and hung out in this amazing institution. he wasn't a pith helmet guy. he was more of a tricorn, you know, the tricorn hat. but this would have been his hangout, i'm sure. so thank you. it's great to be back here. i was here i think it was nine years ago, and apparently i didn't offend too many people because. i've been re invited and it's a i can't think of a better place to about one of the greatest explorers of all time captain james cook, then the explorers club of of of new york. i was hearing about the bar and we actually got to experience the bar. you have to go down there if for no other reason than that instead of like nuts or

pretzels, what they have is like crunchy protein. yeah that's good stuff. the only the explorers club. so, so, so great to be here. i mean, that was nothing like the kind of food that they ate. and captain cook's voyages. so a little bit about this photo that as you were wandering there in that photo, this piece of. so this is this is depicting the moment when captain cook arrived in hawaii was greeted by the king. hawaii colony, upu. and these two cultures met for the time in a pretty profound, two thriving cultures. that exciting moment of first contact when everything possible before there's before there's miscues and miscues and

miscommunications. there is this electric moment when cultures collide or have at least a possibility of truly understanding each other. and this is a painting painted by a native hawaiian, an amazing man named herb carney, who does a whole series of of historical paintings. so just really kind of gets to the heart of what this book is about. it's a nautical tale, has all the kind of the attributes of, a nautical tale of woe, but also has this electric moment of. first contact when anything is possible and there's a splendor and there's a majesty, there's anything, you know, it's just like any any kind thing could happen. and that's really the the moment repeatedly throughout the book that i try to capture. so let's talk a little bit

about, captain cook. how many of you know a lot about captain cook? it's an explorer's club. come on. you like? not a lot. okay, well, here's the captain. captain james cook, who i'm to argue tonight and have argued while i've been on the book tour, who was truly one of the great explorers of all time, possibly you could argue, i think, quite, quite convincingly the greatest in terms of the quality of his observations in terms of the number of nautical that he traveled, in terms of the wealth knowledge that his voyages produced around the world, in terms of the beautiful and engraved things and the knowledge of and animals that were circulated the world and also in terms of the first

encounters that his produced with native people had never never seen before. he certainly in the pantheon with magellan and i don't know alexander von humboldt and who else marco polo and he is in you have the time i think many americans many americans don't really know much about captain talk a little bit about that a little bit about that. but first i want to talk about this painting, a painting by william hodges, who traveled around the world with captain cook on his second voyage and. it captures i think, more than any other visual, the intensity of captain cook, his nature. this was a first and foremost, a great a, very, very intense dude, very methodical, very

intense. you know, not the kind of guy you really want to have a beer with, but someone who and is capturing, i think his you know so many of the other paintings about cook are official portraits where you there's clearly a pose going on and it's you know it's kind of fake artificial you see you see this is a guy who is somewhat lonely somewhat i think trying to work out a problem. he a problem solver, a puzzle solver. what's interesting this painting is that it was painted in 1776, just before the american revolution, and then it was promptly lost to history for two centuries was found the 1980s and somewhere in ireland. and it really it really captures, i feel like by far better than any of the other pictures of cooke captain.

cook is mixed up with a lot of other real animals. chinnery and i just very go through this, captain kidd. captain kidd, a not a very good looking guy and of course, captain kirk. and captain hook and i, i can't tell you how many people have told me while i've been researching this book, like, how is book coming along on the pirate guy, you know, with a parrot on his shoulder, not, you know, not captain hook and of course, the greatest captain, i think of all i think we all can agree as a bunch of explorers as we can agree, the greatest, greatest captain of all, captain crunch. all right. somebody likes. do you remember captain crunch, this thing called crunch berries and they tore the roof of your mouth open in the stairs.

terrible. all right, back to you now. no more laughing. it serious now. very serious. captain cook, this is the official. it really shows his, you know, all the accouterments of explorer and also in 1776, as he's getting ready for this third voyage, which is subject of my book. you know, i think that captain cook is someone who really belobe pantheon is very in the pantheon of the great explorers, but he's very controversial today. he's controversial for a lot reasons, but mainly because of this. where didn't captain go? okay, these are his three voyages and the blue voyage is the blue dot dotted line is this is is my third. the third voyage, the subject of the book. he went everywhere from the nearly to antarctica to the arctic from realm of of penguins

to, the realm of polar bears and everywhere between and. because he went everywhere and because he was such an amazing mapmaker, such a meticulous mapmaker, he put these places, many of them very places, on the on the atlas of the globe for the first time and really, in a sense, broadcast at the location of these places to the world. and so they are very resentful because that accelerate the process of colonize nation in an unbelievably fast way. so today captain cook is quite controversial all his monuments have been splattered and vandalized and hacked from their plinths. yeah you know he's considered you know very much symbol of colonialism. melbourne and victoria, british columbia, a lot of other places.

and, you know, people ask me my position on that. i, i feel like in many i mean, i certainly understand where it's from because colonialism, imperialism, the whole behind these voyages was was complicated and erratic, these very fragile island. but in some ways, cook just the messenger of modernity. you know, he was just the guy who the first one to arrive, he was the explorer, he was the mapmaker. he was not someone who left anyone behind. he was not a colonizer and he, in fact, incredibly for his time, quite sympathetic to the cultures that encountered and wrote about them brilliantly in his books, in his journals. but anyway, it's a complicated subject we'll i'm sure we'll talk about it a little bit in question and answer but he is

statues are coming down he's been all across the pacific and an interesting development which kind of lean into in the book i try to sort of understand where it's coming from and and try to i mean, i think it makes it more interesting that this guy, 250 years old, the stodgy old british explorer, is kind of, you know, controversial and he he animates people, he agitate people. i think that's makes him more interesting. this is the place where he was killed hawaii and spoil spoiler alert he dies. okay. and he dies in a very graphic and i think very violent way that i think americans, if they know anything about captain cook and not captain hook, captain cook, it's it is this that he died in in this very way. and this is the place where he was killed. and when i was visiting, this is what saw. so you see, he's a lightning rod

for some very large, many larger forces going in the in the world culture. so. okay, so why do we about captain cook, what's important about him? what's his you know, about his voyages very i'm going to run through some of his first things that he observed or his voyages encountered first, starting with this thing. so his voyages were the very first to make use of amazing navigational tool called the chronometer, which had was many decades the making. i know there's a lot of explorers club geeks in here probably know all about the history of this thing. it is a an amazing tool which allowed the chronometer, allowed explorers to know where they were in the world precisely, particularly when it came to the question of longitude, a that had been debated and studied and puzzled over a long, long time. i won't go into the science, but

basically this sea going clock is essentially just a clock, but one that's manufactured to withstand that. all the thanks and bruises and and the vicissitudes of the sea. it would tell you what time it was in greenwich, a reference point greenwich. and of course, we have greenwich mean time. so now we know where we are in the world and that makes huge difference because earlier, like anson excuse tasman from from the netherlands, he had been to new zealand but he couldn't tell you where it was he saying you sail about four weeks this way and maybe three weeks that way and you might find it now. they knew exactly where it was, cook. cook had returned to it the next time, so he had the chronometer on second and third voyage. it is is this the chronometer i

showed you is called the k1. it was invented by a guy named harrison barrett, a guy named kendall figure a way to make it cheaper and do it better. it's here at the national museum in greenwich. an amazing place. how many of you been there. a lot of people answer, i'm going to see, well, not as many as i would have thought. extraordinary. the best maritime museum in the world by far. other firsts. so captain cook was believed to be the first explorer to cross the antarctic circle and. he did so on his first and second voyages in order to find perhaps not find a mythic supercontinent that was widely believed to exist by all the leading scientists of the time. this image shows it. it's you see, at the very bottom of the world, there's this massive, you know, just a huge place that was so widely believed that they put it on maps and they said it was populated by millions of people

and. it had to be there because if it wasn't, there the preponderance of land masses, the northern hemisphere would cause the planet to spin out of control into. outer space. don't laugh. but i mean, i, i, yes, we have to laugh because. it's such a silly science. but that's what the, the, the view was at the time captain cook went down there and decided, you know what, it's not there. it's a myth. there's no such continent. yes. antarctica which he came very close to discovering is big. yes, australia is a big continent, but nothing like that. so he became what they call a hero of negative discovery, meaning he didn't discover a thing that was widely presumed to be there and. so. okay, moving on to other first, it's a nautical tale. okay, we have to have some scurvy talk.

this this expedition, though, i'm i regret to tell you those of you have read the book, there is no scurvy at all. captain cook all three of his voyages. there was never a single case of and this is another reason why he was hailed in his as being a great explorer that he they thought he had conquered scurvy. he, of course, did not understand that scurvy caused, you know was caused by a lack of vitamin. but he did understand in his regimen of food that he made his sailors eat that you had to have fresh fruit eat, fresh vegetables, fresh meat, this sort pork and hardtack diet was just not going to cut it. he knew instinctively that it was unhealthy and he forced this food down down their throats practically. they just would not want to eat it. but scurvy, of course, was a

horrible, horrible malady. it caused all these weird on your body. it caused your body essentially to disintegrate from from within. it caused your gums to become spongy and pull back from your teeth. it was it a malady that caused the death of million of people, sailors over the years and was almost considered occupational hazard of, a long distance voyaging at that time now with with scurvy based conquered the crown realized hey we can do more long distance voyages. we can go all the way around the world, we can conquer the world and to beat spanish and beat the you know, beat the dutch and beat the portuguese. at this game of imperialism. so that's one of the reasons captain cook was so after his first and second voyages. so captain cook, during his third voyage, snapped this

wonderful photograph of surfing. obviously not that true, but his voyages, particularly his third voyage, they we get our first description of the sport surfing. and you cannot believe how in just amazed his are who write about this thing they first of all most english back then most in the navy did not know how to swim, which is amazing in and of itself that they weren't required know how to swim, let alone surf, and they just try to break it the biomechanics down like they oh, you wouldn't believe they get on this, you know, longboard and they, they stand up and they glide across the waves for, you know, miles across the ocean. it's like it's just unbelievable what what what they're seeing. they they can't believe it. and they don't believe that the english back home will believe it. we get it. first description of the whole

concept of taboo. and you know, to the temples of tahiti. what what's allowed what's not allowed all the weird kind rules and regulations, a kind of quasi religious and also legal kind of system of laws like such things as like, you know, if if the shadow if your shadow were to fall upon the king, you could be killed or, you know, women aren't supposed to eat certain species, fish or all kinds of very, extremely delineated specific. but anyway, this concept taboo very quickly enters lexicon of of english society with within a few short years of his voyages. and we talk, oh, that's taboo. you can't do that. you know whatever whatever the taboo might be. so we get that. so massage is another thing that we get from his voyages.

lomi, lomi tahitian massage is something that all of his nearly of his explorers, all of his sailors sailors. experience at some point like captain cook himself was suffering mightily from a condition called sciatic ca, which is, you know, incredibly debilitating thing. and he was, you know, he didn't want to be touched, know he is british. but he he he he undergoes this treatment a. whole army of misuses descend upon him and work on him three days in a series of and his sciatica is completely cured and this very skeptical captain writes in his journal all about how wonderful this was and. this takes off, you know after these things are published in england. so what else we get? our first description of a human sacrifice which had been rumored

to a thing all over polynesia, but in in tahiti, in the third voyage, cook his officers encounter. and then, of course, tattooing tattooing is a big thing i'll, of course, of course. oliver polynesia and cook's men immediately want to have have themselves tattooed. it seems like a cool thing to do of course when they get home to everyone wants a tattoo it goes viral and it becomes this almost trigger thing. if you're a nautical guy, if you're a sailor, you have to have a tattoo. so these are just a few of the firsts that kind of emerge from cook's three voyages. so doing these books is in respects a kind of lonely enterprise. you know, you're just staring at a lot of monographs and manuscripts and going to archives and sitting in a room for years.

but one of the joys of doing them is to the scholars, the people who have devoted their lives, in some cases, to the age of exploration, to to you understanding these various characters, to understanding the anthropology, archeology of these places is and i was, i will just say i could not have done this book without some of these folks who i met along the way. just a quick shout out to some of them. first thing i had to do is get a get this thing right here. very important. i am card carrying member of the captain society which publishes a monthly log called the captain's log and they're called cookies and and i bring this up partly because they really were just hugely, hugely beneficial to my research. also, just to illustrate the fact that there is this enormous

body of literature and there's this enormous body of knowledge that the cook's voyages produce, that it's almost like people who know all about the civil war are all about the revolutions or war, or you name the topic. but captain cook's three voyages and his biog wifi and that all the stories, all the officers who served him it's expansive body of knowledge and it can take you know a person the rest of their life to master all that information and without these guys and here are some them i couldn't have it. they have excellent facial hair. i think you have to recognize two past presidents of society. the guy on the right, a huge shout out. this is a guy named cliff thornton, president of the of the society and, someone who the last probably well-known american writer who's written captain cook was was tony horwitz, who an amazing book

called blue latitudes. and if you have read it maybe a few and cliff thornton crops in that book and he's still at it all these years later an amazing amazing guy who helped me through a lot misconceptions and kept me on the straight and narrow for sure. but they're all over the place and know some of them are you know, they're mostly guys, but there's women, there's polynesians, there's of course, you know, there's anthropologists, maritime historians, all sorts of people who are members of this amazing society. so that's where some of the research comes from, for sure. they're also the collectors, captain cook's voyages produced all kinds relics and artifacts, which somehow ended up in museums in england or, australia, new zealand. many of these artifacts, maybe some of you saw the news

recently. a bunch of spears were recently returned to to the aborigines of. australia. but there's all these artifacts, this this is a spear from cook's third voyage that i believe it's true is a very reputable in honolulu who says that this barb spears, he's on all the provenance on it and it's apparently true i've got to got to hold that just to just think that this is an artifact that captain cook himself held at one point. it's kind of kind of a cool kind of a cool part of the research. and the last thing is you meet a lot of book collectors, manuscript, rare book and manuscript collectors, including this a guy named lou weinstein, who lives on maui and has this amazing collection of captain cook arcane, you know, and original and all kinds of stuff. and just to hold them in your hand, the quality of the of the printing of those the beauty of the art and the engravings, the

maps these are folio sized are huge, huge books. and you just realize you know, it's a direct connection to history is pretty cool to and to enjoy. so going back a little bit just so you a little bit about who captain cook was his early life. so he was from yorkshire, he came from poverty, he came from nothing. his father was a farmer. one of the things i love about captain cook is that the royal navy of that time, most who got to that level were people with connections with money, people who knew the right people? captain cook did it by sheer work ethic, by by an skill for astronomy and mapmaking. he worked his up from from, you know, from literally.

this is ayton, the town where he grew up in the it's kind of the the moors, the the moors of yorkshire and he lived in this beautiful but you know, he was out of his mind. he was a young kid. he was about seven years old. and he at least so goes the the legend that he climbed this place called rosebery. and he climbed to the top of this small mountain, a very high hill, which i did with my wife and and oh, by the and is here shout out to and my wonderful wife wife. we got to the top of it and reason i show this is because at least according to the story, captain cook at seven years old, first saw the ocean. 12 miles away. and he said, you know, what's that like?

want to go there? apparently from very beginning, he just like i got to get out of here. i got you know, he saw a very circumscribed life for as a farmer and he's like i get i get to go over there and he does and he very quickly goes to this town place called whitby in the us, you know, just just on the on the north sea. and he apprentices to some quicker shipping interests there and learns shipping trade he learns how to navigate the of very complicated coastline of england bringing coal from newcastle down to to london. he goes all over the baltic all over the north sea. he masters this trade and he does in these ships. this is an early, early photograph of one of the whitby cats. they're called, and they are you know, they're sleek, they're not beautiful. they're not fast.

but they are stout and solid and, nearly bombproof. and they can carry huge amounts of stuff. they have a square, you a square stern. they these the ships that you learn to navigate. and these are the ships, the whitby cats that he used all three of his voyages around the world. so that's why i showed that photograph. but okay. okay. so the voyage itself was designed to find something the british had been obsessed with centuries, finding the northwest passage, a shortcut over canada from the atlantic to, the pacific, in order to facilitate trade with the east indies. as with, you know, with india, with china. and also while they're at it, avoid the spanish and so the northwest passage was something that i think, you know, i'm sure most of you in the room know a little bit about things did not

ever go well for the british they got stuck the ice pretty soon they're starving and scurvy you know there's their their boots so but they had always it from the east you know from the atlantic side and and nothing had gone well. so the idea for this voyage was to reverse the whole thing and go around alaska a a part of the world. this is a modern map, obviously, showing the possibilities, but the idea was to go around alaska, go up through the bering strait, a part of the world that was not very well understood all and try to find northwest passage from there for the pacific side they never seem to talk about. well, aren't things just going to go horribly from that side, just like did from the other side? but that's a whole another story. so captain cook's voyages, and

particularly this third one, which is the subject of the book, it's important for you to understand that these were not sort of like captain cook had an idea. think i'll just go on a voyage. kind of like dora the explorer, you know, like who do you he had the might and the money and the brainpower of the entire british empire behind him. and i want to talk a little about who some of those prime movers were starting with starting at the king. george king. george the third, the king of england was really into captain cook, into his voyages. big supporter. he is, of course, famously mad king george, right. king george. but he's not mad. he's not mad yet except that he's starting to go a little bit because of certain things that are starting to happen in boston at this time of 1776. but his other thing was he was into animals. he loved farm animals, and he had this idea of bringing to

tahiti a bunch of i don't know, bulls, cows and goats and and peacocks and all kinds of things. so they could create a proper english farm. he thought it was sad that the haitians only ate seafood and, you know, they needed to have a prop proper english farm. so so consequently this voyage in addition to being a voyage of exploration is also a noah's ark kind of experiment full just absolutely chock full animals that cook has to somehow deliver to tahiti. so we get that farmer george they called him the other, you know, another behind all this thing is the royal society, which was a, you know, the preeminent intellectual fraternity, you know, going to sir isaac newton, philosophers and doctors, all kinds of gentleman scientists were behind this voyage, all of cook's

voyages and put up some money for it. and put up their expertise and including and especially this guy, a very famous botanist named, joseph banks, who anyone knows anything about botany, anything who's been to kew gardens in england, will know about him not to be confused with the the guy, whoever the guy was, it came of the cheap that you can get at the mall. that's joseph bank. this is joseph banks, a very, very amazing writer who actually went around the world on cook's first voyage with the endeavor. and he plays a big role in the book. so joseph banks and then last but not least, guy, the most probably the most powerful man in england besides king george himself. this is the first lord of the admiralty, john montagu, the earl of sandwich. very powerful guy, someone who

loved cook was quite a good friend of cook and a big promoter of his voyages. this is his north of england, a north of london. excuse me, and had a great time kind of getting to know lord sandwich. he's an important character in the book as well. he's famous for many things, but probably most famous for the inventor of the sandwich. he's a busy, by the way, this kind of this story actually kind of checks out when he was busy, was kind of a workaholic. he was also a at night he was in a hurry. so got the idea of sticking a piece of roast beef between two slices of bread and, eating it on the on the fly. and so he thus became known as the inventor of the sandwich. it's really i think it's actually okay. so the voyage itself,

something's going on out here. i think a big protest happening. about. so the voyage. this gives you a sense of just this is his third voyage the voyage the subject of the book and you know, again, the ambition of it, the sheer scope of it, the crazy kind of contours of it all, the things that were going on is almost impossible to, for me, succinctly to tell you about what was going on here and what they were trying to do, but we will try. they leave from plymouth in on july 12th, 1776, july 12th, 1776, you know, they didn't have cable or any kind of telephones or so. they didn't know that this was happening in philadelphia. and they was interesting as they leave and they are in perfect

ignorance of all of these developments for the rest, the voyage all four years and yet a constant theme on the other side of the continent where they're exploring you know, they're exploring alaska and the northwest of north america and. all these things are happening. but 5000, 4000 miles away are important. just briefly to say that, you know, is not by any means a biography of captain cook. it is an ensemble story about, you know, 180 men who left in these two ships in july of 1776. and i'm just to pluck out three of them who are wow, this is getting intense out here. i don't know what's happening. is it something i'm saying. so three interesting people on board the ships. the guy on the left becomes a very notorious character, his own right, some later. he's a young mess of the resolution at the time, a guy named william bligh, you know

some people have heard of the bounty he becomes you know he's this incredible ability as a navigator, but he is also an insufferable personality. even on this voyage, you begin to see the the seeds of his mutiny know coming. many years later, he people can't stand him. they just can't him. but he is very, very talented guy in the upper right is vancouver. george vancouver also becomes a great explorer some years later, a young officer on a yacht midshipman aboard and then the guy, the lower right is john legend, an american who i quote lot in the book. he's an important character he's born in connecticut. he went to dartmouth he after cook's voyage ends up exploring all over eurasia all across the entire of russia on port important guy as well.

so just say there's a lot of voices. there are a lot of there's a lot of kind of a different characters that trying to bring into this story. it's not just cook story, because cook is really interesting, but he's a little bit he's a little bit, you know, has to be very what he says because he's everything he's he's writing for the admiralty. so bringing in some of these other voices makes the story a lot more interesting. after leaving, they go around to cape town briefly and then they go to a place called the kerguelen. and i show this to a group of people. here are the explorers club, because it's one of the most remote places, earth. and it was the first place he had to stop way down there in, the southern indian ocean, halfway to antarctica. and the reason he had to go there, because it was rumored that the french had gone to this place anything the did the british had to do it. go check it out, see if there's anything there. and he did.

and then after weeks and weeks of increase, terrible, you know, terrible seas, terrible weather, fog, they find it. and here's what they find it's very remote it's uninhabited it's except for by penguins there's a really great emperor penguin up way by the way you got to check that out. he very quickly they get there on christmas day. he decides, you know what, leave it to french. and it is to this day a french and then they move on to tasmania. they're again kind of rumored that there's a great anchorage there somewhere. he goes to this place called bruny island, which is just a incredibly beautiful part of the and he has his first on this voyage, at least his first encounter experience with in this case, the the native palawan people, the people of

tasmania his expedition artists go to work. they paint his beautiful paintings which become engravings everything goes according to plan. this is one of the rare times where everything goes well. they have a peaceful exchanges in both directions. there's no sexual encounters. so there are there's no, you know spreading of venereal disease. he's there a little over week. he replenishes his ships and writes quite eloquently about these people. the palooka who he admires and. but what's interesting, and i show because exactly, almost exactly one century after cook's arrival and brief stop at bruny island, the palau where people virtually extinct and this photograph was taken of the very the very last full blooded palau a person or at least believed to be a woman named truganini was was was photographed and she

died almost exactly a century. and i show this just to kind of demonstrate like the reason why is so resented all over the pacific is not so much for what cook did or what saw or you know, what he himself brought into their cultures. bububu the the entire imperial d of thing that ensued immediately after his voyages which was the occupiers, the pathogens and the alcohol and the missionaries and i mean the british hunted these people for sport. i mean, it was just unbelief a war that an entire people who'd been there for millennia were nearly extinct within a century. so there's that there's that story. moving on to new zealand, the next stop on his voyage i won't go into and i don't really have it involves cannibalism i'll just leave it at that and i had to do some difficult research

along the way hardship research. i, i sent this to my editor think when i was down there and he's like, what's going down there? there was a lot of research on. this voyage, a research trip, but there was also a decent amount of research and. beautiful places that he anchored. this is the place called ship cove in new zealand, where i spent a while my wife and i, we hiked all over the place. one of the few monuments that has not been splattered with red paint. then he goes on through what we call the cook islands, the island group, a lot of other islands finally moving towards tahiti, another absolutely gorgeous place, the place that was famous among all the of england and all over europe for being a, you know, a beautiful place, beautiful women, great a

great place to kind of get some r&r. in fact, half the sailors on board this ship, they signed on so they could go to this spot, tahiti. this is from my iphone. don't hate me for the fact that i had to, you know, had to go to these places. of course, where he anchored. but he wasn't just there for he wasn't just there for he was there with a mission, a very particular mission from the and that was that had to do with this guy a very interesting young man named mai, who was a major character in, the book, a guy who had come to england on cook's second voyage and had become the first polynesian to set foot on british soil and england. he had an amazing experience, learned english. he learned be an aristocrat. he learned to hunt and played

play backgammon, chess. and you will see he was he was vaccinated for a. he met king george he met, you know, boswell and johnson and all the intellectuals of the time and was held as this sort of a paragon of you know, the savage he overall though had an amazing two years in england and that's big part of the early going of the book is telling his exploits and adventures in england. but after two years he's homesick he really wants to get back to tahiti and king george says we'll you back in king george king says captain cook is the guy who's going to get you back and. that becomes kind of the first big errand of the of the voyage is to return my to tahiti with his belongings he's got now he's accumulated sorts of weird belongings like a suit of armor,

a jack in the box, an electric shooting machine, a little kind of grinding thing that you can. it was based on benjamin franklin's experiments, all kinds of other stuff, including bible and horses, lots horses, which have to you know, they have to bring the horses to tahiti as well. so this is as studied by the great artist, sir joshua reynolds, the finest portrait painter in england at the time. these are studies led to this painting, which was painted in seven 1876, is considered his masterpiece. his favorite painting of all of his paintings and a painting that was recently sold to the getty museum in los angeles. for $62 million. so my famous even to this day can go see him in la probably soon. right now it's at the portrait gallery, national portrait gallery in, london.

so my that's that's another part of the story. he is, is a long but the real reason he went england was that he wanted guns so he could fight against the people of bora-bora who had stolen his land, killed his father and he had this sort of hatfields and mccoys scheme behind the whole the reason he wanted to get those guns and i won't go into anymore but there's a lot going on with my it's a it's a big part of the book he leaves my captain cook does and he keeps going across the pacific ocean expecting next stop be oregon you know what we would call oregon instead. he he stumbles upon this incredibly gorgeous place called kawaihae and he realizes it's part of a much bigger island change island chain, the hawaiian archipelago. he has a very interesting

experience there. everything is basically well. another kind of first encounter experience he realizes this is not on any of the maps. this is a major discovery rediscovery. of course, the polynesians had already discovered the place, but you get, you get you get the idea. this is also herb kind of a a a native hawaiian painter who's trying to describe this kind of first encounter experience. it's really amazing in both directions, the british can't believe it and the hawaiians can't believe it. it's you know, there's all sorts of thoughts that they may have maybe thought they were gods, perhaps that they were creatures from space or from the ocean depths. a lot of oral history about. what what was going on here in this moment of first contact. but what captain is starting to realize by the time he gets to kawai is that there has been

this enormous spread of polynyas asian civilization all over the pacific ocean. the polynesian he has been to easter, he has been new zealand, he's been to tonga and the cook islands. he's he's now, you know, he's been to tahiti. now he's all way up in hawaii and they're all speaking more or less the same language. they're they have the same culture, they're the same people. and he's beginning to wonder, well, you know, how how did they do it? you what was their technique ology? how did within ships that had no metal, they didn't have nails. they didn't have rivets, they didn't have anything like european ships. they somehow managed this, these incredible migrations, all across many thousands of miles of the pacific. and he's really the first european explorers to begin to understand that and begin question their ship architecture. and like, how do they, you know, how do they accomplish this

amazing this amazing feat. he reaches the pacific northwest at a place here called cape fell weather named by. one of the great things about captain cook. he he did not name anything after himself. there are plenty of things named captain after named after him. but he didn't come up with those names himself. that was usually the admiralty that did that. but he he was very literal in naming things. and if he didn't know the indigenous name for it, he just said, you know, the weather was foul today. so cape bellwether, i was flattered by the coast here. i thought this was a port, you know, it was not. so this is cape flattery, washington state. all places you can go to, all know with his names on he's working his way up the coast of the northwest of america. he's beginning to look at every possible inlet, every bay, every to see if could this be the

northwest passage is this it it nootka sound on the vancouver island where i went some of my family my met the last living you quite villager the first nations elder of of nootka sound got some good stories from from ray working working my way up alaska goes past mount saint elias, the second largest mountain in america, which he described as vividly. it keeps going. going prince william sound, the kenai peninsula, many of you been to alaska know some of these names names this is me and my wife on a in the kenai peninsula area they go to cook inlet which again not named after cook are not named by cook but named by admiralty, a place that has the second largest

title differential in the world that basically mudflats much of the time and they nearly get stuck here decides this is not northwest passage. they poke through the aleutian islands into the bering sea, work their way all the way up the west coast. alaska charting the coast the whole way, encounter i get through the bering strait up into the area that we would call like basically barrow alaska you know way at the top of alaska where he encounters ice and he encounters impenetrable wall of ice. polar bears, his men hunt walrus. i think most people think of captain cook as being a south seas guy. you know, polynesia, warm weather, but he spent so much time in the arctic and also in the antarctic and.

this this shows that they're the hunting polar bear. i mean, hunting walrus and is they're trying to hunt them to eat them. but they're terrible eating absolutely terrible. they they kill them. they told them overboard for two days. they them ashore. they boil them three days. they fry them in greece and still just not edible. but anyway, so that's the arctic that that that captain has he realizes he cannot pass over canada to atlantic he realizes there is no northwest passage, at least not this season. but this is the unusual thing about captain cook. he says he well, instead of going home why don't we wait an entire year? come back next summer and do it all over again? maybe the ice will be different next.

so that's what he decides to do. so i show this kind of a before and after photo of his arctic experience. so this is the map showing the this was the map that captain cook had to with on his voyage up there. it sort of came out of bering's expeditions, but it's it's very, very wrong, cartoonishly wrong. it shows alaska up there as in the little up in the upper right corner. it is i don't know where to begin to say just wrong and and captain cook discovers realizes that a bad map worse than no map at all but to the right of alaska island there is a there's there's a waterway and that is what the admiralty really wanted him to check out more than anything that maybe is the northwest passage.

well it wasn't obviously it wasn't at all. but this is what he was given an this is what his produced. this is a german publication of his english map. but you begin to get contours of alaska how he did this in the fog in the heavy seas over you know never coming almost never coming ashore, doing from his ships. we get some sense of the you know what it really looks like and this is probably, i would say, his greatest quality ability to produce these maps on the fly while while, you know, while fast over over the coastline. so he decides, right, we're going to come back and do it all over next summer, but let's warm up for the winter. let's go back to that amazing place that we stumbled upon, the

hawaiian chain and so he does he comes to hawaii, he circumnavigate the island, and comes ashore at this extra place called kealakekua bay. and have you been there? probably a lot of you know, not that many, but best snorkeling in all in all of hawaii. and this was the this is what it more or less look because he happened to arrive this thing called the marquee hickey a festival to celebrate the god lono and apparently this has been debated endlessly by by anthropologists. apparently they thought he was god lono. he happened to arrive the festival in the right direction. these big ships with these big sails. and there was just unbelief, energy and rapture around captain cook's arrival. he they bowed down him. they called him lono. they brought him into temple and worshiped him, it seemed like. and that is the story that, you

know, happens the first couple of weeks is his expedition. artists come ashore and they do these amazing pieces of art. everyone's happy, everyone's having a time. this is what looks like today right at the place. things go badly for captain and. then three weeks later, we get this and this is how i end the story. i you to, you know, read the book. i want you to buy the book. i don't want to tell you how get to this spot. but the question is how did such a disciplined this most disciplined of explorers end up dead on the lava flats of, the big island of hawaii this who really i think legit, smartly prided himself on his understanding of polynesian culture and polynesian behavior and polynesian ways. how did he demonstrate such judgment that he ended up in this situation, a, that has

been, you know, documented and it's become really part of the iconography of exploration artists. hawaiians artists, english artists have all tried to capture this moment. so that's really the last sort of 50 pages or so of the book is trying to tell you how that all happened, what sort of miscues and miscommunications escalated to create result, which is an incredible graphic, incredibly violent story of where first contact kind of goes awry and why does it go awry? what were the what were the reasons that so with all in mind how are we doing on time do we have some time for questions? we got about ten.

i would love to stay for questions. so maybe if we do about 10 minutes a question. okay. that's all right. okay. all right. all right. well, thank you for the talk. oh, with all the material that's there on captain cook, what drew you to this story, the third voyage in particular. well, i realized captain cook's third voyage was far the most dramatic. the it was the of his voyages, you know, in terms of the duration and nautical miles. but it was also the most american. and, you know, with an american america, you know, i'm an american. i was trying figure out what does an american have to say about this, you know, quintessentially british and realizing that they left in july of 1776 and they had all these americans board and the officer who ends up bringing the ships home to england in.

1780 is from virginia. and he you know, he asks, decide as he arrives in england, am i american or am i english and and you know, they finally get the news what's been happening with the revolution. so part of it also just think it's one of those classic stories that needs to be revisited by every you every so often by different generation of writers because i'm really interested in the reckoning that we've been seeing going on across the world in terms of getting the indigenous point of view across. i think at every place in this, i try to bring in the oral history and some of the and archeology. so we begin to get a little at least the two the the best of my ability a sense of the kind indigenous polynesian point of view and the indigenous point of view of the story which has been under your under served, you

know, throughout the literature of of of cook. but it is a voluminous body of literature you know, it's like it's it's both a blessing a disguise because i had i just developed an aneurysm trying to, you know, you know, absorb all this stuff and trying to understand, you know, what what is my contribution to the literature. but great question. thank you. yes, thank you for your great presentation and revelation about this great adventure of your. but it's still contemporary. but we welcome all the new visitors, our club and this a place where ideas are and often the surprise and having is a sea captain of all around there and studied cook's quite a bit and may confirm or know that before he left portsmouth on his third voyage, he complained about

royal navy short, the ship's expeditionary supplies rigging to pitch line, even sailors to go over and deal with those in. the americas and some have that had he been properly equipped, he would not to go back from the arctic to hawaii to be re rigged and go through that whole terrible ending of his life. and he would have lived on to be a governor or leader of the society and made made better of the consequence ences. so in a way, his demise due to a storm yankees causing so much trouble. yes, it's our it's our fault. glad to hear that it's our fault, you know, so the the deptford dockyard on the thames were overwhelmed rigging and outfitting and repairing ships that were destined to put down the revolt in boston and that is true and so the resolution cook

ship got short shrift it didn't get the attention deserved it was not properly cocked the masks were rotten you know the focus was somewhere. it's like, this is wonderful the captain cook's going on his third voyage. they said. but you know, like they were clearly preoccupied with this other thing that was going on. so he barely got out in time. i think if he waited a couple of more weeks or a couple of more months, they might have said, nah, don't even go at all, because we really need to focus on what's happening in boston. so yeah, i think there's something true about what you just said. yeah, absolutely. let's blame the americans is our fault. but one interesting thing, benjamin franklin put out this thing to all the captains of all the british american ships, whalers and merchant ships that if you encounter captain anywhere, let him go don't arrest him. even though we're at war with

england, because captain cook's voyage is so important and scientifically so so important to humanity, let him go. so he had passport, a free pass. oliver american waters so that's kind of interesting. let's say maybe one or two more and then we're going to sign some books out here and add one more shout out for the bar. apparently the bar, this brand new bar was really good, have to say. yeah. two questions, actually, by the way. thank you very much a great story, great book. one of the questions i had is fees a very voyages. right. and they last for four months and months and months. what was the of the crew going through. so many ordeals and i don't mean what they got there but they were doing the voyages because as a captain, it must be quite, quite hard to keep everybody in line. so that was first one.

and then based what you were saying about you already answered that questions about how hated captain is today. obviously he left a great legacy and he helped a lot of people understand that the world was open to people who just they know that normally in england that back and were through his voyages so what was their first reaction then in a few look back at history what imprint has he left without the this other stuff that's going today or the last ten years or whatever what the local population or how do they see him through history instead of through today's feelings so what they think happened. well, some some big questions there. well so the first one is, you know. yeah, these voyages were very long and. there were there was a lot of misbehavior. and captain cook, famous for being quite fair but very stern

by the third voyage, he was showing some cruelty something was actually wrong with captain cook on his third voyage. that's a whole thing. i didn't even talk about is kind of a what was it was it that's sciatica that i mentioned. did he have some sort of parasite that was causing him to have some mental some people have said he had polar, you know, some of them we might describe is disorder. of course, he did go the arctic and antarctic. so by definition, he's bipolar. but i'm sorry i'm sorry. but he you know, there was something wrong with the captain and he was much quicker to dispense the sort of typical justice that you had back then in in the navy you know captain was the master and commander as soon as you left shores he was a tyrant or could be if he decided to be. and he was famous not being tyrannical in his first two voyages. but by the third you start to some changes.

the other part of your question is that like much more expansive, it sounds like you're asking essentially when you take away kind of the current, you know, criticism that we're seeing of cook around polynesia and the world. you know what were his true contributions? what what what is his i guess just say this. you know, we're in a room here, the explorers club and a place devoted to exploration and a place devoted to the idea of travel and idea that it's good, you know, it's good for us. hopefully it's good for the people that we visit, that the cross-pollination of knowledge and ideas is good. i believe in that. i've believed in that. i think i think we can also probably all agree in this room at least, that it is innately part of the human. condition. it's part of our dna to explore what's next, what's over the

next hill, what's over the next. you, what's over the. and i think, captain cook believed in that. and i believe polynesians believed in that. they of all people were the voyagers who who populated the entire pacific. so i think you could ask the question legitimately. all right. captain cook came in some very things happened after his touching at these islands, but it was going to happen. it was going to happen one way or another. and i think that what you have with captain cook is, that he was a messenger, modernity. he was the guy who brought the modern world to these very distant places for, better or worse. and it could been a person who was much less sympathetic much less interesting, much humane and understanding those cultures. but happened to be this guy, captain cook. and so although i understand where the protests are coming from, i certainly understand that we have to really rethink

the whole imperial mindset. i think in some ways they got the wrong guy. it's just much easier to pin it on one dude than it is just to pin it on an entire system, whole paradigm. and so, i don't know, i end up defending captain cook from the from his at least his biggest detractors. i think he was an extraordinary human being, an extraordinary explorer. and. thinker and. if we want to understand the modern world and how it got to be the way it is, we do have to understand. and these explorers, these this is the golden age of explorer exploration. and you could argue captain cook was the greatest of them all. so i'll end on that will sign some books. i hope to meet you. thank you. so in conclusion rich real quick before you rush out to sign books, just want to thank you

for all of you for coming tonight. you know, as as he mentioned, bringing this history to life is part of it. it's important that we reexamine this stuff and each generation and when you look around the room that's a sledge from peary i love how you were talking about polynesia is the kon-tiki flag the that accompanied thor heyerdahl. that's a flag from byrd there in the corner these are all artifacts but they only have meaning if we're here to do it. so thank for bringing history to life on behalf the club. thank you to all of you too, for coming to bringjessica is a accd

writer. journalist speaker and community builder. her book coming out as, a dalit one, u.s. academy award, 2020. it india's national academy of letters, young authors award. i would like to also share you that this event will be moderated by our friend sonia rachel shailendra is a scholar

at comparative literature and asian languages literature at northwestern university university. we as a cast and risk collective, will like to celebrate dalit history month, and we want to it on an auspicious day of babies lives. the birth anniversary on here on a display you can see this websites which bharat i mean book literally changed my life you know i was the man who was a part and parcel of rss to came here that changed my life it demolished me and helped me rebuild self once again so this is a book and our wonderful friend yogesh mitra who himself is a journalist editor and his wonderful work by panther's ball is on a display. i will recommend you, you know, go this books they are just

amazing. a quick plug that we are looking forward start a reading circle in south side chicago where we will be discussing ideas of babasaheb for liberty. so through my in all the great leaders who talked about human liberation and human emancipation in a in a fundamentally radically new way. so without further ado i would like to welcome yoshiko and thank you for coming here. thank you, jim, joe, t.j., savitri. so yasuko going to read to us first and then we have a couple of questions and, then we're going to open that up, right? so this is the sort of flow of our the next sort of 2 hours that we can spend together. so do you want to sort take us to your book and read and then i

can follow that up with questions? absolutely. well, deb, everyone, i am so excited to be here. it's it's a charged time and the fact that all of you took time out of your monday to come and listen to me, it really means lot. so thank you to each and every one of you. i hope you take something from this conversation that stays with you for a long time. you learn about and discuss politics. you learn about dalit lives. you learn about our resistor and you think about how solidarities are interconnect it. so i'm going to read from coming out as dalit this the latest addition this is not hardcover this is just what i had this a new edition that was only in the united states. i published this book in 2019 in india and where it won the city academy. upar and it took me five years to get this book, so maybe that

should tell you something about how difficult it is for dalit stories to find a on a global stage, even the united states, where the narratives our lives are so prominent. so i'm going to read a little bit from the prolog first that hopefully sets the stage as the prolog talks about what it feels like to live a hidden identity and a little bit into. rohit lamela's life. rahul it was a 26 year old phd that let's her who was forced to his own life because he was calling out institutional discrimination at his university think this is a really conversation especially to be had right now so i'll start with the prolog and i'll go a little bit into the new chapters that have been specifically added for the us edition. these extra chapters focus on

caste in the united states and, caste in tech. so without further delay. prolog prolog hiding one aspect of your i is like a double life. you don't feel like. you belong anywhere. you create masks to wear in each of your lives and switch artfully between. the two eventually the two blurred together and you know, remember who were pretending to be from a cast that's not dalit is something like that. and there are so of us who are living this lie. we avoid talking about caste, hoping to somehow find a place in the world of upper caste. this that has been forbidden to us we create upper caste

identities, stolen badges that help us gain entry to space that will reject us the moment it finds out it's it finds out who we really are. we nervously flash ids any time we are grilled about our origins, those who fail to exhibit satisfactory signs of upper caste ness and those who refuse are punished for for being where they don't belong. discrimination, humiliation, oppression. our all penalty for not being upper caste or simply for being dalit our balance is imprinted onto us through the burned bodies of our children the suicides of our ph.d. scholars and college students, rapes of young girls and women, asphyxiate, arson of our mantle, scavengers and the honor killings of lovers.

these penalties are so that they aren't even considered worthy of shock and outrage. newspapers either. skip these stories or r r in the back pages between the sports and the city sections. hipster bars don't flinch before announcing a music group they call bungee jumping and show little remorse after being informed about its offensive undertones. this next spot is from chapter 14, which called the reckoning of caste in tech. the history of caste in. the united states is written in two parts before b.c, before the school case and ac, after cisco case, starting from the 1700s,

when immigrants from the indian subcontinent first came to the country until 2020, caste as it existed among south asians was coded as an ancient relic from a remote country that, sometimes made the headlines, but was often dismissed as an intra community micro dynamic. not especially relevant to everyday americans. however, a single case of workplace discrimination changed that when californians department of fair employment and housing sued silicon valley giant and. $51.6 billion company cisco systems for failing to prevent discrimination against its dalit employee by dominant caste brahmin managers. this was different from earlier cases of discrimination of lower class individuals, dominant caste perpetrators like the stomach churning case of lucky to deepali reddy, who was

arrested in the year 2000 for sexual slavery and human trafficking. dalit girls, some of them young as nine years old from the state of andhra pradesh in india. reddy, one of berkeley's richest landlords, who owned close to a thousand properties in the city, was known for his extensive philanthropy, exploited and, slaved young dalit girls after bringing them over from his home state in india on false. pretenses of employment, he forced them into sexual servitude and into cleaning and maintenance, his restaurants and rental properties. the case broke in november 1999 when a 17 year old girl, jonty pratt, 50, died from carbon poisoning at one of his apartments. this led directly to khalifah nia's first law, setting higher

criminal penalties for human trafficking and grabbed national headlines. months as american reporters descended into bellbottom, his native village in andhra pradesh, to cover the story, however, lost this conversation were the brutal dynamics costs that not only allowed abuse of the dalit girls to continue for close to 14 years between 1986 and the year 2000, but also led to the inhabitants of bellbottom defending reddy even after the abuse was discovered. thank you so much i feel like this there would brief insights from different parts of the book, but there was so much in each of them both sort of historically for us to dwell on and also for you to sort of share and open the space with. so i want to begin this talk clearly by asking you what brought you to writing and what specifically brought you

writing. this book, this memoir, what brought me to writing? i think what brought me to writing was the fact i wanted to be able to write english. english is called the colonizers language india. but that statement carries a tremendous amount of hypocrisy because the entire elite in the indian subcontinent takes place in english. so while there are people who belong to dominant castes, want to cast out the language as that lower costs or people from low income backgrounds shouldn't engage with they themselves to keep their dominance over that. so for me to be able to write in english was a form of resistance to be able to write in language that carries an immense amount of respect, regardless of which background you come. i come from north india, where

if you just go and speak english in a place people live for a moment. forget what cast you from. they won't forget your gender, but they forget your caste and you will get the a glimpse into the kind respect the dominant caste people naturally only receive everywhere they go. so for me, writing in english came naturally because i remember growing up and my parents saying, you have to sit down with a dictionary and copy word onto the page. this is something that a lot of dalit and families share because their parents whether they speak english or not, they make them sit with a newspaper, make them sit with a dictionary and say, just copy this article and learn how the language flows. learn how to send a sentence is created. so for me, that's how i to write in english, because i made myself be good at it. i practiced hard to make sure that i could mask myself as a dominant force person, and

writing in english was just a natural segway into knowledge that i had gained since childhood. yeah, that's mean. i think that's very interesting because you're saying that you wanted to interview in some kind of like anglophone media space, but also you didn't choose to write a novel. you didn't choose write short stories. you to write a memoir. and there's historical reason to that. like there's a historical trajectory to the autobiographies, but yeah, what was so promising about, the form and the genre of the memoir you. i don't i had a choice as a dalit journalist who had only spent two years in the us at that time was just beginning to write about caste. i was eager to get the word. some of you might that i had launched this tumblr, which is no functional called documents of discrimination.

and it was a way it was the wake of the death of rohit vemula who left this powerful testimony behind in form of this letter, which i hope each and every one of you have read and those of us who are listening, i would encourage you to read that letter that he left behind, which, in my opinion, is one of the most significant pieces of literature in english ever written, because it how we talked about caste on a global level. and when i was reading that letter and when i read that letter for the first time, i never realized impact that would have on me. so i decided create a space where. we could have open conversations, what it meant to be a person, what it meant to survive as a person in dramatic system of caste that we are forced to live in. and as a result, i. i needed to come out myself.

i couldn't ask people to share their testimonies with cost if i wasn't being honest, who was i otherwise? so i came out as dalit and i writing a ton of stories because the note that i wrote on facebook order to come out is it went viral and a lot of indian media outlets since i, a journalist, were interested in having me write more stories and soon i had a book deal. but we know that dalits are not considered experts until show our trauma and show how much we can bleed. we have to be able to show our wounds to them on display for people, believe us. which is why people end up writing autobiographies and memoirs, because who else will us as an expert otherwise? so the form that came me the proposal and i didn't you know in a lot of conversations folks would be interested in asking how did you end up writing this book. i didn't set out to it came to me and it was as a memoir.

they wanted to know the story of my life, which was known to be traumatic, which carried a lot of sadness and a lot of pain. and i realized that if i needed to get my story out there, that was the only way to do it. and so i think that's very interesting that before it was a book it was a blog. and then after that it was a facebook post, right and then it was. so how how do you think that your narrative itself has moved these different mediums that very different constraints in of like formal constraints about like word limit, but also very different ways interacting. and the first story, like the first sort of form that it's about of that discrimination was like fielding stories from people. and this is also like it is a memoir in that you've written about your life. but there are several stories that you're telling within it those of your family, people who have sort of like influenced you and coming to your own sort of consciousness.

so yeah, like how is process of should we call a translation or adaptation from like different forms worked for you the facebook post happened naturally because i mean a lot of, you know, facebook doesn't carry a lot of gravity in us, but in india, people live and breathe on facebook in a way, organic way. so for me if i were to solicit stories is about caste from dalit people. facebook was the way to do it and it was also where some of you might be aware. i discovered that rohit vemula sent me friend request just a couple of days before. he was forced to take his own life, so it seemed the natural medium for me at the seeing his profile. looking at the profile photo, remembering and making that connection that i'd seen it somewhere before and sort of feeling this, you know, are from the subcontinent. we believe these many lives and

felt like there was a connection that was being made. and that it was almost i wouldn't call it a calling, but it wasn't really on me. i had to do something. this connection that was out there. and that's how i ended up writing the post on facebook and tumblr i thought was a great, cheap, free way to solicit these stories to have controls because i was also one of the online editors at hindustan times when i was in new delhi and saw how people reacted to stories about caste, all stories caste would be filled. comments about denial about affirmative action or reservation and about telling people that people are making their trauma, that they're lying about their lives. and i wanted to create a safe space. i wanted people to not be told they're lying about the truths of their reality. so tumblr was in effect a way to do that. and similarly, when the book

happened now that was a big because until then, the longest piece of writing i'd done 15,000 words, which was mysis grad school and had to really think about how do you write a book and i kid you not i went into barnes and noble at union square and picked a copy of how to write a book for dummies. well, because had no formal training. i mean, i had the stories but i wanted to make it the kind of book that wouldn't be easily dismissed. and when you talk about the different forms that my book has taken it's memoir but also story of my family and the stories of so many people. i wanted to make this. the kind of book that couldn't be cast aside. people don't believe it, which is why i decided to infuse it with journalism, to infuse with the kind of reporting that i'd just gotten lot of training in and had spent years in india doing. so i could collect stories, yes, but i could also show why those

stories existed. i could show that when i going through an event or a catastrophe, that atrocity or trauma, that it didn't occur in isolation, that it was a universal for that exists in india where people have similar experiences all across country. and that's how i attempted to link it with, you know, facts and figures analysis because like i said, i didn't want people to dismiss. i wanted to write the book in english, the language that caste people most respect. and i wanted to make it ironclad. i wanted to my argument so strong that you could not say, well, i read this book. and i still don't believe caste doesn't exist. you have to believe that caste exists in india, in indian societies. once you've read this book and that's the book i wanted to write and i think the beauty of this is that in a way, career in journalism, least through the book, was not solely about reporting on caste issues.

but you experienced some like fashion and you have experiences like in of what the sort of consumption that's considered, i guess like, light weight and lifestyle journalism, your narrative journalism and lifestyle journalism. and then you formalize that and in one way and that becomes this book that we have with us. right? and i think that's also just like to give a broad of like the different points which you've like framed yourself as writer is pretty remarkable through this journey. and and i think that brings me to this other question is that you a lot the discussion in this book is actually around education and educational institutions. you have an entire chapter devoted to mandela, i think by far is actually one of the most parochial, unlike the mandela debates that i've seen a long time. you have and it's actually quite hard to do that because it's relative elite like race and subject, but it's also the dispersal of that and various forms of violence is something

that we actually don't take of. so i'm like, and i think you feel very passionately about what it means be educated, what it means to sort of the sort of tools and weapons that being in certain institutions can give you, right? so yeah, like how is that how have you sort of talked with education institutions? why has that been important for you? yeah, if we could just hear a more about that, that's a really question because we are at a current time in the where institutions are being challenged and rightly so the power of their their autocracy being is being challenged. but as a person coming from the background that i come from growing up in a small town having access to these institutions when i was a child meant everything for my mother she and she is one of the central character she is the central character in this book. she always told me, you have to go to the best college because

only when you go to the best college, you'll be taking a seriously as someone who has gone to not that college or a college that doesn't rank as high. so i had to go to st stephen's which one of the elite colleges in india. not because i wanted to be specific in an elite space. and of course that, too. but also because what it would mean for the discrimination that i would face. so once was at stephen's that dag would go further and kind of in some way a little bit negate it. my alertness. and that was the idea of coming. columbia for me meant the same thing. i never had the opportunities to be able to come here, come to the united like what you mentioned, being for me is a fluke as well. i didn't i've written in the book, i did not have the money to buy the ticket to come to the us and i was helped out by an editor like what a dire issue. nobody in my family imagined that somebody from us could go

and study in america. so it meant a great deal. come to columbia and to be here and to be a part of what is known in arguably or arguably one of the best, most well known journalism schools across the world. so it meant something to my mother that i was among the best of the best that that somehow in her mind, despite being from among a community, which is a man who cross-community her, was in these institutions and, of course, ambedkar belonged to columbia as well. so that was something that matter to all of us when you were applying? no, i not. i found up much and that that speaks how removed ambedkar from so many of us. some of us who are growing up in these communities, in places like rajasthan where disclosure ambedkar did not exist until very recently. we had no way to access who he was what his writing was and much what you said his writing

changed me and changed my life completely. right. yeah. that's i mean, that's just like there's an amazing record that to follow. and i know recently you had also commented on the special relationship that a place like columbia has for its community and how heartbreaking it is to be in this time and to see the kind of that we're witnessing to student movements because also, guess one of the subterranean history here is that there's a history of student movements, of the history of like dalit students mobilizing and that is like really sort of pivotal to how we're about, yeah, history. so i want to now focus a little on the title of the book. it's a very charged title. it has so different balances. it has, you know, it speaks differently. i think it has queer reasoning answers. it has racial and caste resonances. yeah.

and what and it's specifically, i think seated in language specifically and situated in english in a very specific way. so how did you come to that? but before you answer that, i actually want to say that this has a longer history and that a autobiographies i have with me the. otherwise bharat, which is one of the first like autobiography, is coming out and i'll just read one sort of small section out it from the prolog. so you all probably see how of yashica dutt also intervening this sort of literary way. i am a literary scholar, so i'm always going to refer to like six other texts while i talk. that's just the bane of my existence. so yeah. so one of the things that there are right is. give me one second. yeah. so he's talking to his shadow in

this part of the memoir, right? he's talking to a figurative shadow of himself. and he says, i cannot tell you if you will meet this me in the story, the reflection of. a man in a mirror does not know the whole of the man and is reflecting. consider this my real name is the guru you've forgotten, right? so have i. but that's the name you'll see in the school. no one in the city knows me as the guru who knows whether. even my wife and children know this name. since my childhood, i hated this name. shakespeare may say, what's in the name, but tell me why, should this name fall to my lot? it's a smack clod on which a claude was born. look at your names cuts there, which conjures up don't there. which suggests warns if by some chance someone to name his child got them, it would be shot and go there. the man was has a list of names for children. it requires that our names

reflect society's contempt for ourselves. brahmin name signify learned ness. the devil, for instance shall three. our name suggests valor like vicious can have name after the goddess of wealth. say lakshmi gone and should dress for us names like sura or matanga names to declare a locust status. i your pardon? that was the order of things for centuries. so i thought it was very interesting that actually there was this like i don't know if you consciously did or you unconsciously did but there was this like range of what it meant to out. was this like almost intertextual conversation that you would participate in? but how did you come to this term? that's thank you for that reading and that is such a powerful testimony of how universal the experience of caste are, what our names to us, because they carry this immense charge. for those of us who are new to this conversation, one of the ways that we can find someone's

caste is through their last name. the way i was able to pass as a dominant cast person for a very time is because my family dropped the cast marker from our last name and an adopted these obscure names. my and my dad had to complete different last names because they had just chosen them for themselves. so the power and the charge that scary in the community is immense and. i obviously was thinking it in those terms because what is the language for experiences of hiding our names. where was this in indian media, indian culture, even around us. where were we seeing stories of the people who had changed their identities and who were living as interlopers in these dominant caste spaces? what were their experiences like? that was experience, and i

wanted to identify that. i to give a name to it. and i was thinking about what caste means? and to me at that time, i'm also a queer person. caste looked like a closet. the closet of caste very similar. the way i thought of it, the the closet of sexuality. this is 2016. in 2015, supreme court in the united states had passed the gay law, making it federally legal in the entire country. so the discourse around sexuality whether it was academic whether it was in journalism, was extremely prominent. we were getting all these ideas, what the spectrum of gender and sexuality means. and obviously being here in the united states, having the freedom for the first time to be able to objectively think about my caste made me wonder about these questions as well. and i sort of cast as a closet and i also wanted to evolve or

push back on the idea of language you know in india we just don't have the right words for so many things. the concept of bussing, which is so understood and mainstream here in the united states, we don't necessarily have that language back home in india. and i don't mean just in circles, but of course, everybody knows bussing is. but outside of that, people are engaging in this practice without knowing that there are others like. so i wanted to name it give it a name and. also identify it so others who see it knows that there is somebody like them out there. so that is why i thought how, do i make this of me revealing my caste into a momentous thing? because it was filled with so much gravity. it was filled with so much seriousness. it was almost ceremonial.

far as i was concerned, i was revealing the secret that i had carried me my entire life through that facebook post that i mentioned, i was telling you, telling world that i was hiding my costs by living among you as of you. but i'm not. i have dined with you. you have dined with a man scavenging. casperson, you've invited one of us to your home, and you don't know about it. i wanted to also think of it in terms of a victory, in terms of an f-you that look at you, look at all you, us. you hate us so much. but here am. you thought i was one of you. but i not. and how do you sort of understand and or underscore our community the importance of this moment? by giving it a name. and me, that name was coming out as which is my title my note. today i'm coming out of it. okay. okay. i actually didn't know that that was the name of the note, but i think that like actually me to

think that. are there ways which you think and recast thought and anti-gas like practices in general has queer potential that there is something anti-christ about queer queerness itself. i think that's a really great idea. and i completely agree. so the way we understand queerness and the way bell hooks talked about queerness is not just who you have sex with, but how you are in relation this world. how do you have to create a space for yourself when you're constantly opposition to the mainstream idea of what it means to be a person in the terms of the indian subcontinent, what it means to a person is to be an upper caste, dominant caste indian man. that's that heteronormative either in terms of sexuality, whether in terms of cast that is the model of what exists. and of course that brahmin, upper caste women who are the model for women. so when you are a dalit person,

you are queering your existence, especially if you live your life in opposition to what is deemed as acceptable. so i definitely agree. being an outcast is queer idea in that sense. but i also want to mention that this is not an isolated conversation. you know, in terms of dalit art in terms of dalit literature, that has been inherently queer because we have been oppositional to the modes of literature and that is acceptable in india. look at the dance that you know, that has come from the country, look at dalit literature. it has always been touted as being too vulgar, too profane, too filled with abuses. you know and now that conversation is finally happening. there is a brilliant episode i would encourage you to watch minus where my podcast literally out a week ago sacred, the

profane and what constitute art. so when you look at examples of dalit art, they inherently present themselves as queer. but if you take this conversation and you put it on twitter, for example or x or you put it on a social media platform and you say to be is to be queer. you will get so much backlash because there is also and, sadly enough, latent homophobia within our communities. so the word queer carries some amount of disgust even within us. so i tell a straight dalit man that being and take us to square. can one imagine what the reaction would be? it could be a great reaction, but it could also not be because when i was outed as square or forced to admit the fact that i'm queer without my consent, a lot of the feedback that i got from some older bahujan men was

people the government should figure out who is queer and are not. you should not be able to have the decision to announce yourself as queer. so that also within our societies where we can see being anti caste is inherently a kind of queerness, but how far will that idea go? our own communities is also a question we need to think about. and i feel like perhaps inversely so as well of what might be the gospel of queer sociality is also, i think worth sort of about. yeah. and i think i want to sort of bring it back to this edition, particularly because this is two new chapters that have previously existed before and they are new terrain for us. you have read from it for us a little bit but your making an expansion into is first. you're talking about caste, the diaspora and secondly you are making some kinds of comparative gesture towards black radical

history in the us and how you sort of found and you've like sort of, you know, cited in various instances. so what do you make? i want to first ask you, what do make of this comparison, which is very like predominant our times? we are hosted by the customary collective today. so i want to ask you first about this comparison and how the how that sort of influences your take on how to look at caste, the diaspora. i think i mean we have to admit as the people that there are incredible solidarity that exists between caste discrimination and racial discrimination. both our systems of discrimination that have existed, both have been denied. there is so much between one and the other to learn from each other in terms like busing. for me, that clicked that there was a, you know, that there was already a precedent for this kind of behavior.

after i learned about the experiences of black people and there is so much that we have gleaned and learned black scholars because they truly have paved the way about how do we think about this oppression and the society that we live in. and because of the position aditi of the united states as the country that it which has been first world for a very long time versus india which is still struggling to shed its third world status there, is a lot for us to look at it. however, i would also be wary of saying gostin on the same because that flattened the nuances of both. caste is invisible. race is not. caste has a very different way of being detected. you have to really be a part of the community to know that caste discrimination is happening that can be conversations around food habits that can give or be someone's caste the in the case

of the dalit engineer going back to the case. one of the ways that he is brahmin managers found out that he was lower class by was by tapping on his back to see if he had the brahmin sacred thread. and this is a very common practice within tech spaces in the united states. they will have both parties. so you see, if men, brahmin or not and it sounds ridiculous, but it is true. and this of nuances might or might not exist in the racial context which is why we have to position each individual systems of oppression and see how we can learn from each other instead of equating them seeing cost as race and vice of work. so we can build solidarity in a parallel way in without putting on top of the other. yeah and i think that's also like very important because you do significant work in sort of calling out the anti-blackness of the south asian american diaspora.

well, which of you're saying is like feeding into some these caste as habits, right? and yeah, that's like an important sort of introspective gesture. here as well for us. but just sort of broadly, how is sort of writing these two chapters being different from the entire book and was this a strategic move? was this in bringing it to the us so i need two more chapters or was this something you really saw develop over your time here that you also needed to be written in the way the rest the book needed to be written? i think. i mean, you have sell books. we're in a bookstore. let's be honest. you know, if i didn't have the new chapters, this book might not have had market, which is not to say that there an anti-gas movement had been brewing. we've seen in the past four years, the radical that have happened, the cisco case happened in july 2020. isabel book caste with which put

the word caste on the mainstream map released in september 20, 20. since then, dozens of universities across the country included caste as a protected. the city of seattle included class as a protected category. last year in february, fresno did it in california right after the state of california could have been the first state in the country to have caste protections added. so there is a lot of movement and development that is happening around caste. and i felt that a book about caste that is releasing in the us needed address those issues. obviously but i also wanted to bring in a sense of journalism to that aspect, to look into not just, you know, a lot of journalism around and it's very well-meaning, but happens around. let's find five dalit people and ask them what the experiences of cost are about. i wanted to find find common cause people and observe their

experiences, caste, and that could only be done for me in a book in of new chapters. and also, i'm different person when i wrote this book in between 2016 and 2018, i was different person. now, since i this these chapters in 2022 and 2023, i'm a different completely. so i think i needed to register that as well. if you notice in these chapters, a lot of the memoir aspect is not present as much which i'm saving for the next book because i have to. i have to write a new book soon. beacon press has commissioned me two books to write, so i have to start working on the next book soon. but i wanted just put this out there because books take a long time and wanted the text to exist in the world. so mean. next is a very good sort of segue into my next question, which is like, what do you think is the future of the underclass movement in the us? and i think i want to push you a little here and say like, is there a horizon us beyond

representation that? we're striving for? and what what might that look like? i think the future of the anti-gas movement and lies with people on the margins of the anti-gas movement. you know, the anti-gas movement is not new in india. it has existed for of years, but it has been dominated by men. if you look at the gas theorists, the dalits, many of them happened to be. there are that have a lot of men which are important. but i think we need to reduce the number of and have more represent nations. and this is just about representation at this point because when it comes to the anti-gas movement, that is where we are we we're at the stage where we have first fight for representation. we need more dalit women. we need more dalit non-bio people, more dalit trans voices

in those spaces and need to look inwards. a lot of the movement, in my opinion, in my humble opinion, because i'm not born in the movement, i've come to it in my late twenties. i think we need to be able to look towards folks and see where their ideas are going where our ideas going instead of just being attached to an idea that has been developed in the past 20, 40 years. i we have to be able to move forward. the future of the anti cost movement lies with building solidarity across movements. it lies building solidarity with the pro-palestinian. it lies with building solidarity. black movements with native movements because we can't exist in isolation. this is a different world than existed in 1990. we are in 2024. global solidarity is matter. so i think if we just focus, you know, there is an idea within

within some people's we just have to concern ourselves with cost and we don't have to focus anything else that is not going to work any more because the silence will not protect us. and the iconic words of audre lorde you know, we have to none of us are free until all of us are free. and that is not just the saying. it truly true. because why anybody care about the anti-gas movement if you don't care about other marginalized people and their struggles and you know, speaking about representation, i think we have to obviously go further than that. but we also have to be mindful that we are at this nascent stage of the movement, putting in the rest of the world. so we have to start with first seeing how we can get to voices and then we can look at for the dismantling the structures. i'm not that has to happen. one after the other. the representation that comes from trans folks, from non-binary people, from women is

looking dismantling structures already. and that goes hand in hand with. yeah, i feel like that's such an excellent sort of close this like moderated q&a with me. we would like to open up for questions. how much time we have with the we have a group we have so much time for questions. um please. the mic when you do so and try to try to make them questions not comments. you know, um. yeah just throw them away. this must have been an excellent conversation that i know i just covered all round sunday. yeah. thank you so much, sonia and ashika also, as i wanted to shout out before end to thank

global studies department at u chicago cos us community books for hosting this event. my question was about your time in journalism and if you could share a little bit about what in the newsrooms were like in your in journalism and how how did you find your voice or struggle to find your voice but with a limitations you faced already with the friendships and solidarities you found in. and also another moving part. your book was the theme of friendship and of i'll be very curious to hear about friendship as an article practice as well. so those two those two questions, wonderful questions. thank you for that first one. my time in journalism wasn't that long ago i think in the newsrooms have evolved a little bit since i was in india working as a journalist the way i survive in journalism was to stick to subjects that would not

give away my cost. by that i mean being in lifestyle, journalism, lifestyle is often ignored in india. it's often a woman's territory. women cover fashion. women cover lifestyle. women cover beauty, makeup of those subject. but also homes are our even those subjects are covered by women and also those spaces, especially fashion happen to be overwhelmingly dominant costs. there is no question that in fashion, if a person is either covering the subject or is a designer or working in those spaces, they will be dominant cost people that that's not something we even talk about. so that was a good way for me to hide. that was a good way for me to be concealed within those spaces. and of course, i stood out. i mean, for for a while in hindustan times and even before

in asian age, i was covering nightlife life and it was really opening to be in extremely wealthy parties where. people would spend the kind money that one can only dream of in one night on, just entertaining their friends. and of course would be covered in the lifestyle section and that really built me who i am as a person, being in those spaces and obviously out because if you are a lower cost person, you come from a lower income background, you can piece an outfit together with thrift store clothes, but your identity, india will always be a giveaway. so i think the way i survive was by trying to put my head in the sand and pretend like no one's looking at and just keep moving. and of course, i was fortunate that i worked with who saw the fact that i could do a good job at something and i had to like the look. people often always i had to work twice as hard to be able to

do that. and i was successful so in terms of staying away from politics, staying away from serious conversations staying away from election coverage, those are the beats the juicy beats that come to people who are almost always dominant guests. and so that's how i was able to while being in journalism. indian newsrooms have always been inherently caste, blind or caste, just spaces. the newsroom that i was in the section of the newsroom was caste blind. we just never talked about caste. if he talked about caste, it was about about the behaviors dominant caste people in terms of, you know, how certain are good at making food. what are the food recipes look like? costs are brahmins learned what what is there experience and the history with books you know so those were the kind of stories we were covering. and the second question that you asked, which is incredible

question about friendship as a mode of, you know, being in the anti-caa space, i think my friendships have survived me completely because i have been able to find friends who are queer, who i mean, a lot of my we've all come as queer and authorities and and we've just been friends for a very, very long time. and i, you know, the overlap between queerness and being an antagonist, ally think can be very powerful. it's not always the case in india that. the queer movement in india has fully co-opted by dominant caste so very who don't want to entertain dalit people's presence. but in my my friendships have been extremely powerful in just being a mirror to my struggles but also being large spaces of nonjudgmental where i be who.

i was talk about caste and not necessarily feel the burden of being marginalized. but that was because i chose good friends. i've been very selective about who i was choosing to let be close to me and part of my circle. i hope that answers answers. more questions. i can you hear me? okay. thank you. i haven't. i was invited here. i haven't read your book, but. but i'm so struck your quote from bell hooks and actually about six or so months ago i wrote a paper out of bed bell hooks. and one of the things i was distill reading both of their primary works is how they call out oppression within oppressed

community in such direct ways and something i hadn't considered really within ambedkar's writings because doesn't dive into it. so but of course bell hooks does within black radicalism and black feminism is how dalit communities oppress within communities. and i wonder if you could just say more. i'm so intrigued. started taking notes at my phone. it's really the first time i'm hearing this particular conversation and the way you're surfacing or privileging trans identity women's voices, younger voices. if you could go into some of your observations your own a little bit deeper i would i'm going to take more notes i'll be grateful. well i've had i have a story for you guys. yes. think first of all, oppression within oppressed communities

exists, especially with caste. dr. ambedkar calls. it a descending order of contempt. the law we go on the scale of caste. the higher the contempt for the people who lie there and. my cost, which is from the man scavenging community as talked about earlier, lies at the bottom that so inherently the identity of the name of my cost is bungie. bungie is slur. it's called the b-word in india. now these days it's a constitutional slur in india, which means that you call someone a punk. you can face or you can face jail time, you can face charges. you can you can a penalty. you can be taken to court a legal offense and that becomes the identity of the people who inhabited it also with a great deal of shame, it comes with a great deal of being othered within other spaces.

so in terms of the story that i have for you last year in august a show on amazon prime called made in heaven took my story, my likeness and, presented it on screen without, my permission, and also without any credit and. the show is about weddings and it features as brides from different dimension inns and backgrounds of indian societies. and one of the brides happened to be a dalit woman writer who has studied at columbia. is a talk at columbia is, has written a book that talks about coming out in the context of being dalit and is speaking the same things that i've spoken in many of my interviews. that's where the similarity ends. you know, she goes on to get married. she's marrying a dominant caste. how her family reacts.

i'm not married. so that's not my story. but the likeness was mine. and i was informed of that because friends of mine saw the show and started texting me and my dms started getting filled with. hey, do you know there's a show that's based on you? and when they told me the name of the show, i knew it was based on weddings, and i was like, what are you talking? not even married, but when i saw the and i realized that this was my and i searched credits and i found that there were. that was pretty heartbreaking. and it was heartbreaking. the episode was was directed by a dalit person. it was directed the director. now, of course, production house was is owned by two dominant caste women, one of them happens to be a muslim woman, but they come from pretty influential bollywood families and. they are they epitomize what, you know, powerful people in

bollywood represent right now. and i had broken because i was expecting my name to be there if nothing else that the end credits and when i for that first the first response i received was an instagram post where they listed out the rattled a list of references about who that episode have been based on. and then name. and i just decided wasn't enough because it took me a lot to put my story out there. one of the interviews that i gave was where i talked about how my grandmother to clean toilets and the shame that comes with admitting that on a public stage is immense. it took me a lot of therapy and a lot of courage to be able to sit among people and admit something. a secret that my had tried so hard to protect her entire and for that to be taken from me felt it was a wound it was

deeply hurtful and as a response to my demand for credit the people in the show decided to launch a hate campaign when you were talking about the dimensions of the words coming out as dalit, i was told that those words have nothing to do with me because they have already existed in text. and then bollywood directors went on media outlets. six or seven of them gave multiple interviews. me narcissistic and a liar and opportunistic because i couldn't think for whole community this was supposed to a moment for the entire community and not me. therefore i should forget that my story has been stolen from me. just be content. and that was a very pivotal moment that made me understand that even within our communities, those who lie at the absolute margins me being adult woman from a bungie community, i will not be looked in the same way as someone who

belongs to a different community and happens to be a man. and that's was instrumental and instructive in me thinking about how the oppression exists within own that response that hate campaign that lasted 7 to 8 weeks. one of the articles that covered that whole piece called it yashica dutt seven weeks of hell in a very dramatic fashion. you it talked about why i had been punished so severely. i had been punished because i allegedly was not thinking the collective good and i should have been okay with having my stories stolen, having as writers, we make no money and lives our life stories and a life's work is all we have. i should have been okay with having that taken from me. it was good. it was. and this is where we see the limits of representation so the

descending scale of contempt really was true. it rang true for me within those weeks and and months of diary that unfortunately was coming from some other dalit people because they felt that this was against collective good. me saying. this is my story. everyone's, everyone can see it. can you please my name there was against good so i hope that kind of answers the question. i think we have time i would say 15 minutes more so probably like two more questions. thank you, asha. such a wonderful exchange of ideas. i just, i want to ask this question like before coming to the us, i was working with the bojinka community, specifically the obcs and what i found is there is absolute invisibility

of obc women when it comes to their narrative of speaking history, cultural and their assertion or bases are like for the people are not from the indian context. obc is are the other backward classes they are the one of the largest populations of india out of every two indians. one is obc. so approximately percent of global population are. so imagine the 50% of there are about round about mathematics. 50% then 85 6% of the global population. other obc women. and what i found so staggeringly abhorrent that government of india is not recognizing the cost which are happening on obese women who are also nomadic tribe women. they notified women. do you know if a tribe woman who has the stigma of like so-called call by a criminal tribe's in colonial era and also face the cost discrimination and they don't have any documentation on

national crime record bureau. so we have zero data on that. we have got census data on obc, including men and women, whereas the government of india routinely conducts the course. the census of animals, including pigs and the you know, cows and the buffaloes. so what i have seen is our women, the bahujan obc women don't have kind of a language so far to up about their i think what i have interesting is that our progressive group of friends, female friends who are from the dominant caste and few wonderful dalit of ours who happen to be girls or coming from different margins, they can talk that they are getting that language. but this larger section of obc women are still deprived of that. so what we can do as a as a scholars, as a policymakers, as an artist, what we do to open up

that pandora's box. and when i say all because, it's also the shura council committee as well. and also some women on abortion communities who are also a part and parcel of land owning costs. they are also snatched away from their agency because of the patriarchal system with caste patriarchy within their households, communities. so could you just shed a light about what you think about that and how we can be a kind of a catalytic agent to open up that discussion as well within obc communities and obc women specifically. thank you. yeah no, thank you for that question. i, as you rightly pointed, i think there is a huge section. women who don't have access to not the language, but even the awareness in that deep sense, how to counter this caste, patriarchy that they experience and caste, misogyny that they experience in their everyday lives. i think what we can do is keep telling the stories and as you mentioned, you know, there are

dalit, some dalit women that we are seeing now. and of course, dominant caste women have now had access to language. but more than language. i think language the one that we talk about is english english is not accessible to a large, large chunk of women that you mentioned, the nomadic tribes. but i come from around this time there is a huge list of nomadic tribes that that could be obc, that could be dalit that have no access to education, that have no way of having access to these ideas that we can speak about in academic circles. i think to start there, we have to think about how do we reach like that and come out of our sort of bubbles that we live in, you know, we can talk about language here, but if you speak to somebody comes from the community who like dances for money, you entertains for money. these are local entertainers. they have no specific context for what are saying.

you know, those are full and maybe who is the bandit queen india, who was from delta community. you know, when she about how her sexual assault and how she experienced it and when that story got a lot of attention you know for those of us who don't know plan b was a female bandit in india from a lower cost who phenomenal and who captured the imagination of the entire world at that time the late eighties and early nineties. and then finally she surrendered to the indian police on her own terms and went into politics and she faced an intense amount of sexual in her lifetime because the course that she came from so she was getting a lot of media attention was getting attention from dominant reporters from delhi and mumbai reporters from the us and they would ask her to describe a sexual assault. and she told them, you think of

sexual assault is what is life for me? we don't think about assault and rape in the terms that other western societies think of. it's just the way of being so have to include voices from those communities and be community with them and to ask them how do we make sense of their lives how do we we have to give them the leadership we can speak for people that. we have, you know, folks that have lived those lives. we don't have those experiences. i don't have that experience. i will never be somebody can say that i speak for them if i had the upper community to work in those spaces, i would rather listen to them and elevate their voices. i think what we can do, elevate their voices and instead of saying, how do we give you access to language? how about we break the mold of language so that they are able

communicate and how how their reality shapes their lives. they are able to tell us that in their own words, if that makes sense. let's take one last question here. we can take a look to. oh, hi. thank you so much for being here. my question has to do this is something i spent some time thinking about being. an international student here is an especially given that you're bringing your book to the us. i feel there's sometimes some kind of pressure as to thinking about how you want to present your culture or represent your culture within the context western audience and what you should be mode and what people expect to hear. and i imagine that that's even that goes much for you given the nuances of your and so the question really is how have you

sort of sought to protect yourself from that and then, you know, bringing the book, how do you protect yourself from maybe like some sort of sensationalizing of your story that might be happening and really like bringing out the true essence of what you're trying to say, while at the same time like you feel a pressure to conform expectations of what a westerner thinks, your experience be. yeah, no, that's a terrific question. i think like i spoke about earlier, i has to be seen to be believed. and there is especially in western societies, you know, maya angelou was talked and toni morrison has talked about it how white supremacist culture is need to feel superior and they need to feel that they're saving us in order for us to feel any benefit. so i think that trap always exists. but at the same time, i see a lot of south diasporic people, people who are immigrants or people who have been raised here trying to imagine judging what

their culture is. a western consumption or western. so we see a lot of information. -- dockery. is and i agree it's about yoga about defending culture, defending hinduism in terms that it has nothing to do with caste or trying to negate and ideas just to in order to instill a sense of pride in the culture. one goes so far that you become fastest. and this is something that we are seeing more and more whether it is with holistic spirituality, whether is with you know a lot of people have now and fairly so we see a lot of white women posing as yogis so why shouldn't you know indian do that and i think that's fair and that is a valid argument and critique. there but i think when there is such a blind spot that exists around caste, it can very easily go into a store into a territory of denying costal together.

so the way avoid that trap to just have an authentic story i in terms of this is the reason my book took so long to be able to publish here because books that i was seeing at that had something to do with the indian imagination. what an indian person is like mango cooking valuable and you know and marigolds those were the troops and my book had nothing do with it. and i think it takes but it is in the end worth sticking to your guns and portraying yourself as the authentic person you are. but i think, yeah, we when get to questions assignment am enslaved. okay you know you can ask your question let's like take questions perhaps then you can like respond to them together with work. yeah. let's take two questions together and then respond to them back.

you okay? hi. i thank you so for sharing your story and. you mentioned that, you know, there's this expectation that you rehearse your trauma when you write these memoirs and so on, when i when see your instagram posts so you know, your media presence here today, you exude this kind of joy as. well, so when we think about antagonist, you know, politics, esthetics, and especially in terms of queer love, what kind of love queer and guess love do you imagine for yourself, for everyone here, both romantic and yeah, wonderful question. i think you should go for wonderful doc. so my question is more about like from what all we have discussed till like intersectionality and like solidarity is oppressed within oppressed like as your book also talks about like from your introduction to ambedkar to the contemporary times where like communities other dalit communities also started

appropriating, they're taking blue flags their hand and constructing as a messiah. so conserving all this are how do you look at like a contempt times and it goes legacy when like ambedkar was introduced to you to till now yeah thank you thank so two incredible questions and i'll try my best to answer both them. so your question was about and thank you for mentioning my instagram and, recognizing that i tried to fuze it with joy because it is important to me i feel that while our existence is political, it can't be just simply constructed around trauma. it can't simply be constructed around miseries. you know, there is, especially in black communities, talk about, you know, we are whole people. we live, we breathe, we celebrate. don't just, you know, we not just facing brutality. we are not just facing violence. and i think that same goes dalit

communities as well. you know, what does anti cost love look like? think it and i will again therapy has been very, very important and crucial to me in recognizing who i am and being able to live that in a complete and authentic way. one of the ways that i think, i feel, joy, is by feeling shame, you know, because a lot of my life a lot of my existence as a man scavenging community person, as a young woman, has been infused with shame. it has been marked with feeling terrible about who you are, knowing that don't have any worth and always trying to be someone else. so can consider yourself worthy. so now i truly my life in this body which not skinny, which is brown, which you know in opposition to the norm in so many ways, or by not feeling shame. and i think that's very

important for me. show up authentically as i but also understand that not is going to like you when you are hiding your identity and you're trying to pass as the person you're very invested in having people accept you but also like you and i am done with having people like me if they do it's great. if they don't but that's on them so that works for me and and your question about you intersectionality and appropriation of ambedkar. i think that's really important. now after the dalit communities, especially the communities, my real struggle to power and across the they have kept them alive. they have kept his legacy, whether it is through printing presses and publishing his works, distributing them for free. there are people we know all for dalit communities, bogan communities who will not eat, but they will ambedkar's works and they have that for decades.

the mainstream establishment in india completely ignored that. but now when we are at this moment with dalit voices finding recognition, there are people who feel that there is an opportunity for them to, have a stake in this conversation. and i that's important. i think everybody should able to speak about ambedkar but. we also have to be able to understand and and recognize the privilege of those communities some dominant caste people can speak about ambedkar call him messiah like you mentioned and how incredible he was. and no consequences. whereas dalit people across the country will be for having a ringtone that has ambedkar's name on it. they will be shunned. mumbai pride parade for carrying flag that says jab him right in his name. so those consequences of dalit people associating themselves with ambedkar have to be talked about. we see now ambedkar's biography

and ambedkar's life has become an industry that have been 6 to 7 books that have been published in the past two three years, about ambedkar's life. and that's fantastic. applaud that and i celebrate. but at the same time, we also have to understand that not everybody has access to him. i did not have access to a maker. not just because i didn't know about him, but because if i celebrated ambedkar, that would give away my secret. that would give away the fact that i was hiding my caste identity. because now we are called jp barley, we are called bheem. that's right. that's the slur people use against us. so here's identity when it is used by dalit people has become a slur but it is used by dominant people is celebrated. it's very to how we see in the united states when white people or speak in in ebonics or in black language vernacular, they celebrate it. but when black people do it, they are shunned they have to code switch.

so it's very similar. and i think what we are seeing right now is renaissance of ambedkar, but we have to make sure that we don't develop people who kept his image alive behind in that. yeah great all we have time okay great guys thank so much for coming. i just want to pitch. i just want to pitch that i guess because are here so please like purchase one feels like community of books is like a worker owned co-op. so by sort of buying these books also help staff be here and they're doing very important work in organizing for palestine and, giving space for organizers of palestine also going to encourage you all to go to the encampments that are there and support the communities right now especially students and yeah thank you coming and free palestine and i think. oh yeah she got a sign so she is happy yeah line. with your book if that's okay. absolute yeah.

yeah. there you go. get back to here. and you can also preorder here on acongratulate us on the book.

i really enjoyed reading it. thank you so much. i'm excited to talk about it. yeah, i am. i wanted to start with a quote from, the start of the book, which i thought really kind of sets up the conversation and what the book's about. you wrote america's public schools since their very creation have become ground zero for this country's most divisive battles over politics and civil rights. from theights over evolution

and segregation to those over sex ed and school prayer. and i just want to start with, you know, why is that? why do americans fight so much over education? well, first of all, i'm very excited to be having this conversation with you. i'm a big fan of your work and i'm grateful to have this platform to talk about the reporting. i guess it makes sense. you know, i came into this reporting mostly looking at the ways that very, very divisive national politics was kind of being imposed into local politics at the local level, all the way down to like my my way in suburban houston, where, you know, in the summer of 2020, we were seeing, you know, this vitriolic backlash to the pandemic and to the protest for racial justice. and so i came to this report and just looking at the ways in which these really divisive national fights were playing out

at the local level. and i ended up that story led me to schools because that's that's where these fights ended up. and it makes sense because, as you mentioned, the schools are where we were society in parts, knowledge to the next generations where we we wrestle with what is the story of this country, what are the what's true and what's false, what are the important details from our history that are that are worth emphasizing and memorizing and which ones do we forget? and so the schools repeatedly throughout our history, especially right now, end up becoming sort of a proxy in a bigger fight. and the fight is over. what is america? what do we stand for? what are we proud of? who are we? and that's what we're seeing right now in school districts. and in state legislatures all over the country. and i wanted to ask a colleague

of mine told me thththe not an education reporter when you started this work. yeah. so if that's true, i'm just wondering, you know, how did you find the story in south lake and why did you think it was important? you know, you spent four years on it, i think, yeah, i. i still don't consider myself an education reporter, even though i have had so much respect for education reporters. because i what like i said, i was looking at a cultural fissures in america. i was looking at divisive, ugly politics has affected. real people in you know, intangible ways, kind of moving beyond kind of the, you know, the headlines over, you know, whatever trump said that day. but looking at how those kinds of comments and politics and policies were affecting regular people, it just so happened that at this moment in our country's history, once again, as we've

seen it repeatedly throughout history, those fights led me to classrooms, to schools, to school board meetings and the way i got started on is just like that. i, i again, in the summer of 2020. i think if any of us dare to remember that year, there was a lot going on in the country. things were really tense and in my neighborhood, 20 miles northwest of houston, this was like a suburban little. neighborhood where, you know, there's not a lot of controversy or conflict and yet on my neighborhood facebook page, i was seeing posts from neighbors that summer warning that they that they thought they saw antifa at a nearby sporting goods store and that in the midst of all the racial justice protests, antifa was planning an attack on timberlake estates, which when i read it was like, what are they talking about? but it wasn't just one neighbor. there were people in the comments replying, saying, yeah,

you know, maybe, maybe they're planning for the 4th of july to masks the, you know, the shooting under the sound of fireworks and that was just one example of this really intense fear that was emanating in these communities where there wasn't like there was no tension in the streets in my neighborhood. we didn't have sidewalks. and so in the midst i set out to kind of tell that story, how the suburbs, which, you know, you know, through your reporting on school privatization suburbs really exist or retreat aided in some instances to. create an outlet for white parents who wanted to send their kids schools that aren't desegregated. and so, you know, there's there's a whole history of of zoning policies and exclusionary zoning that helped create that situation. but what we've seen in the last. 30 years is these suburbs have

gotten muchrse. right. and so the reporting i out to do is really to look at how those changes in demographic fix combined with this this kind of ugly national politics, was turning suburbs into the front line of our ugliest political divides. and in the midst of reporting that story is when i got on the phone with texas gop allen west and again in 2020, i was asking him at that time donald trump was going around the country saying that if joe biden is elected, he's going to abolish the suburbs and he's going to let antifa run wild and destroy your communities. and so i was asking allen west, what do you make of that kind of language? do you think that is, you know, safe to be telling people, what do you think the impacts of that could be if and do you think people actually believe this? and he said, well, let me tell you about this town called south lake. and that was really my introduction to this affluent

suburban community in north texas outside of fort worth, where it turned out that parents there had begun revolting against attempts to address complaints of racism in the school district. and so i scribbled a note on like a little post-it note saying, like, look into what's happening in south lake and kind of set it aside for a few months. but that was the beginning of me, as you said, spending four years becoming an education reporter apparently. i love the the post-it note just because so many stories start way and i, as a journalist really related to that. but one of the things i wanted to talk about is just why you thought what was going on in south lake was important, because you could view it as just this one small community, you know, and not see it as representing a larger fight. and so i was interested that you saw that, or at least i think you saw that early on, that this was sort of something that spoke

to a larger issue going on in the country. so i wonder if you can just talk about that a little bit. yeah. i mean, i think i think it ties back to what i was experiencing in my own community and in my family. and i do think, you know, some of the best journalism comes from when we feel or experience something in our own life and ask questions about it. and so, you know, in the midst of what i was describing is like this kind of acrimony in my neighborhood where things were really kind of kind of ugly. and the social media page in there was just, you know, the politics was visible everywhere with, you know, competing yard signs. and in the midst of that, my my wife, who is a biracial black woman. put put out a black lives matter sign in our yard in suburban houston. and it was just at the time, you remember like 2020, the march, the protest for racial justice, black lives matter had for like a brief window, felt like, you

know, universally accepted as a repudiation of systemic racism or the history of racism in america. and so it was a small a small kind of gesture to say, like, oh, we live here, too, or for her, i live here too. and that resulted in weeks of targeted attacks in my yard where someone was coming with their four wheeler and doing donuts and digging up divots in the yard and that felt so personal. hearing that kind of that rumble of that engine night, weekend after weekend in the middle of the night while my kids were sleeping, it felt threatening and i didn't realize at the time but my what it made my wife who's had a much different experience to me, feel feel like they don't want me here. i don't feel safe in my and that's a that's a very distressing feeling. and so when i started reporting

initially on the story in south lake and talking to parents of black students there and and students themselves about what they were experiencing, they were saying some of the same things, feeling unwelcome, feeling unsafe, and, you know, i can i as i had those conversations once both for work and with at home i realized like this is something bigger and and i my hunch was going in that what was on in south lake was represent of something much bigger and that what was happening at my house was representative of something much bigger in the country. i don't think i knew that for sure when we started reporting it at at most i that we had a compelling story about a local fight and and those are worth telling. it wasn't until after we published an initial story about, you know, the blowback

and the political battles in south lake that my colleague antonia hylton and i who who made it a companion piece for nbc nightly news in the aftermath of publishing those, we realized, oh, this is much bigger because then we were hearing from people in communities all over the country saying, hey this fight over diversity, equity, inclusion in the south like school district. that's the story of my town, the suburbs of philadelphia or that's the story of my town in outside of columbus, in ohio. or that's what's happening down here in in florida. we got literally dozens of those messages when we published that story in early 2021. at that time, maybe most people probably had never still not heard of this idea of you critical race theory and hadn't clued in that that these fights were coming. but we our inboxes were kind of like previewing what was about to happen across the country. and so then it became like we need to keep going on this.

that's probably a pretty good sign when you start getting emails from all over people saying, this is my town story that i think that's really powerful. one thing i just want to do before we go too far is to define critical race theory. and then also just how that term has been used by conservative is in the last few years because i think that's important context for for people watching. yeah. yeah. i mean maybe some folks watching now have forgotten about critical race theory because it has since been i guess, replaced in the conversation in the dialog. the national conversation on the right you're now hearing more about diversity, equity, inclusion. dti is kind of the buzz word, but we may remember in 2021. suddenly all you can hear about in the news was that critical race theory was being imposed on kids across. the country in critical race theory is is really just somewhat complex legal and philosophical framework for understanding how, you know,

systemic racism persists in america or in other in society, even in spite of laws that discrimination and. so it's really it ties back to, you know, this kind of growing school of thought that emerged out of harvard in the 1980s. it was really kind of looking at in the post-civil rights era, why are we still seeing huge disparities? why why does race why do racist persist even though racism, explicit racism is no longer in the law, it's been prohibited through the civil rights and other legislation. and a great example actually, of of, you know, what a critical race theorist, you know, might look at is. one of the things i found in. on south lake and in other suburbs is, again, in the era brown v board of education required schools to integrate and after, you know, laws were

passed prohibiting schools and communities from explicit lee discriminating on the basis of race communities like southlake passed policies through their zoning code that had the effect of of walling black families and other minority families out of the community by requiring homes be built on on one acre of land right and not allowing for multi family housing. basically ensuring that only wealthy people can live there. and in america wealth is often a proxy for race. and so south lake, for most of its history, was almost all white. and so, yeah, critical race theory means kind of looking at that and understanding how these race neutral policies might lead to racist outcomes. that's critical. race theory happened in 2020 and 2021. is an activist conservative activist named chris rufo kind of seized on that framework which nobody very few people were familiar with. and he kind of defined it and

rebranded it is what he me as a way of describing things that make conservative white people feel uncomfortable. and so you if if a school district was, you know, working on diversity equity and inclusion plan like south was that plan was branded as critical race theory. and that came to mean they're going to teach white kids that they're oppressors, they're going to teach black kids, that they're inherently victims. and kind of language you heard over and over again, this is what critical race theory. donald trump picked it up and also described it as this kind of toxic ideology that's that labels says that race is the most important thing about any individual and and that these kind of, you know, victim oppressor categories are are default based on your skin critical race theory doesn't say that that's not really what it really actually not about individual racism it's about examining at a systemic level. but as we saw in 2021, that

phrase off like wild and you couldn't tune in to a nightly news without seeing a report from a school district somewhere where parents were upset that some in the district was trying to bring in this this scary sounding thing, critical race theory to to basically indoctrinate kids to you if they're white, hate themselves, and to hate america. yeah, it's really interesting how quickly that took and how successful it was because i hadn't heard of it before. before chris rufo kind of made it into what it was, what it became. one thing i thought was sort of striking the reporting you did in the book was that when conservatives talk about diversity and inclusion or they talk about critical race theory, they're they're always saying is indoctrination by the left. you know, this is teachers trying to indoctrinate kids. but in south like and in some of the communities you wrote about

the efforts to create diversity and inclusion programs often followed very real complaints by students and families about racism and bullying and so just in other words, it didn't come out of nowhere. these programs were a response to an actual problem by real students. and so i wondered if you could talk about that a little bit, because it does sort of jarring when you look back at some of the reporting you did and you see really, really awful things that students being told or were hearing or experiencing. yeah, if you watched and if you just tuned into the news suddenly in 2021 and watched school board meetings, you the message that conservative felt like while they weren't paying attention and some extremely far left people had suddenly with a plan to indoctrinate kids with these ideas. and that's how it was kind of framed in south like, you know,

the conservatives weren't paying in these leftist came in and suddenly started doing this. so i wanted to go back to the beginning, you know, and see origin of the of the of the plan to impose or create a diversity and inclusion plan in southlake. and what prompted it and it really followed a national pattern that i, i found copied all over the country in the trump era. you know, after president trump was elected in 2016, in a campaign featured a lot of vitriolic language about immigrants and that helped usher kind of this of or more open embrace of white nationalism. and we saw what happened in charlottesville those kinds of that rhetoric was trickling down into classrooms and schools over the country. so you were seeing if you just did a news search in 2011, 2016, 2017, 2018, you will find dozens of articles about, you know,

kids build the wall at the hispanic classmate's or someone, you know carving the n-word and, you know, maga to each other on a school bathroom stall and. and there's data show that these types of incidents were increasingly being reported to the federal government during this period. and so, you know, all of these school districts were dealing with that. and in the era before, the critical race theory panic. and so what happened, carol, in southlake, was it in one of these incidents some students filmed themselves chanting the n-word in 2018, which then that wasn't the impetus. the video itself, the impetus for action. what followed the video was dozens of parents of black students, parents, lgbtq kids, parents of students coming forward to say, my kids have been experiencing these slurs, hearing slurs and having these

kind of racist jokes thrown their way at carol schools forever. and you all need to address this and that and that is what led the district in 2018 and 2019 to put together a committee and they their whole goal was to try to address these widespread reports that they were getting from kids real people. i talked with many of them. they didn't make it up an end. so in 2020, when they released their what they called the cultural competence plan into the midst of this vitriolic period politically and in the midst of the pandemic, what was it, uh, conservative parents who hadn't really paid close attention to? the, the, the, the racial. report, the reports of racism and kind of that whole effort. they just saw the outcome. they saw this cultural competence action plan, and they saw it in the context, the

protests after george floyd's murder and black lives matter. and they conflated the two and just declared like, this is where did this come from? um, and that was, that was happening, that same dynamic out in school districts all over the country. loudoun county, virginia. um you know, outside of d.c., the same kind of dynamic where like there were incidents that prompted the districts to kind of start working on a more inclusive culture in 2017 and 2018. it didn't just spring up out of nowhere in the summer of 2020. um, and that was important to me to try to put that all in context for people who are reading. yeah, i was really struck it because i, i think if you just had turned on the a couple of years ago, you would not have maybe had some of that content. and instead it sounds as, you know, as you said, that people just weren't paying attention and suddenly, you know, this devious thing is occurring. and one of the things i also thought was interesting in south

lake is that the there was initially some support for the plan, it seems, and then with the backlash, it wasn't just we don't agree with this. it the people on the school board must be marxists. you know, they must be far, far left activist, you know, and a lot of them are actually conservatives, you know, from from southlake. and so this idea that you couldn't just disagree about the plan, but that actually this this person that presumably a lot of people know on the school board is actually, you know, your enemy or is actually to do something this this secret plot. and, um, and i thought that was really striking and in the book that dynamic and i wanted to, you know, one thing that, that i was also sort of struck by is that as someone who's covered school boards for a long time, they used to be rather dull places quite often, you know, unless there was like a sex ed policy or a school boundary change, these were not the most meetings. you know, sometimes the reporter

is like one of two or three people in audience. and so, you know, when this idea of taking over school boards became this kind of rallying cry on the right. it was almost jarring and so i just you know, in the book you say allen said the most important elected position in the united states of america is school board. and then steve bannon, a trump adviser, made a similar comment. so why did that take off? why school boards? well, i think that took that took off steve bannon's case specifically because they were seeing the news reports and saw an opportunity, um and and i think, you know, you mentioned this idea, you know, this school that the school board initially support in south lake for some of these changes. and that was the case like when they initially announced the plans.

to try to put together a committee to address these things 2018 and in 2019, there was these community wide gatherings by south lakes mayor and school board president michelle moore. was you there for these? and these city council members were were kind of. yes. we're going to address racism. the conservative republicans across the board white any race they were there was kind of a unified response. i think what followed is really telling. and and i think about the story of of michelle moore who again was the school board president who's a lifelong republican and she heard all the student complaints and kind of helped lead the effort to try to address these things. and, again, had that support from the mayor, members of city council, from business leaders, and in aftermath after allen west declared the school boards in elected position in the united of america and all of the kind of backlash to the cultural

competence action plan was building people who had supported moore turned her and accused of of kind of you know pushing this down onto you know, conservative families. and again, she's she's a lifelong republican. i don't know if she voted for trump, but you know, she's she's conservative. and and but she was described in the media, in local media and by conservatives, kind of like a progressive. this left this kind of left person pushing this policy from left. she was, you know, called a marxist and all these things. that's another pattern that we see across the country. there's this dichotomy that's being presented in a lot of the coverage of these school board conflicts where conservatives are fighting against liberals for control of school boards. but like the candidates who are being targeted by the moms for liberty type groups often are

themselves republicans or conservatives who just have a different perspective. what schools should do to address, discriminate, or how school should address. you know, the history of racism in the curriculum and groups that are kind of rising up to oppose moms for liberty and others are often, you know, pretty diverse terms of political thought. there's moderate conservative voice along with, you know, very liberal people who are opposing this kind of far right incursion into their school boards is a little more nuanced and complicated than what we often read. i think. right. and it one, you know, one important point i think that you make to is that the education wars aren't new. kind of getting back to what we've we started with in the beginning. but i wondered if you could talk a little bit about the education wars of the seventies and eighties when there was another of buzz word that became, you

know, this thing that everyone was afraid infecting the schools and it was secular humanism. yeah. and that please. yeah, absolutely. so this was an interesting this is a little like gap. my education when i came into reporting this, obviously we hear we know the like, you know, the battles over evolution in schools in the 1920s and thirties. we know about the over integration and the civil rights movement. and so we know that schools are often these places and where these fights, these big fights play out. but, you know, i was born in the early eighties, so i wasn't clued into this earlier chapter. and when i discovered it, i was kind of blown. because if you if you go back and read clips from the 1970s and eighties about about the kind of pushed by the christian conservative to it to defeat what they called secular humanism inside public schools, you could in many cases swap out the word secular humanism, paste in critical race into these articles.

and you not necessarily know that they were from the 1970s and eighties. and so what happened is in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and in an era of you know, just like now, in an era of changing cultural norms around gender, you know, the fight for women's rights and all of these things, there was a backlash on the on the kind of christian right against more inclusive curriculum in schools and and a backlash against what they saw as the removal of god from school you know these rulings to prohibiting prayer and in prohibiting, you know, compulsory bible readings and classrooms. there was kind of this backlash. and so it's much like today they they honed in on this of secular humanism which is which is this kind of the philosophical framework that rejects religion as the sole basis for morality and prioritizes, you know, relying on science and and, you

know, fighting injustice of any kind and using relying on logic to fight injustice of any kind. but much like today, the the term secular human humanism can be became kind of a catchall to describe any lesson that might offend a conservative christian worldview. and so you would see complaints that you know, this these language arts textbooks that include black writers, a secular humanist or, if a if a book depicts, a woman not in a traditional, you know, homemaker gender role, that secular humanism and and they went so far as to like argue that secular humanism was itself a religion and should therefore be barred from schools. first amendment grounds or balanced with explicitly christian lessons.

and yet and so some of the same language emanating out of some of the same communities across the country played out across the 1970s and eighties. there was actually even briefly a federal ban adopted by the us senate, by congress that was introduced orrin hatch in the senate that banned any teaching, that banned any federal funds to schools that teach secular humanism. but like just like the wave of critical anti critical race theory laws today, it wasn't really defined. and as a result, it just sort of left educators guessing at what might count as secular. and it resulted into, you know, in many cases of teachers just kind of self-censoring out of fear. and there's just so many parallels to today. this was this was happening on a smaller scale than what i think we're seeing today in terms the backlash to critical race theory and transgender acceptance and.

you know, lgbt library books. but it really what we're we're seeing and offer some lessons. yeah i actually thought about there was a paragraph in one of the chapters about that that had it listed some of the names of books that had been challenged. and, and i thought, you could replace the year, you know, with any of the last few and it would read by current events and i yeah, i thought that was, i thought that was really striking. one of the things that's kind of come out of the current backlash, you know, is that we've seen a lot of i mean, really a wave republican backed bills to limit how teachers can talk about race and racism and lgbtq history and sexuality and we've also seen this wave of book challenges as what have been some of the effects of, those laws. i mean, you just hinted at it a bit. yeah. i mean, you know, in most

republican controlled red states, there are on the books now limiting how teachers talk about racism or the history of racism. america kind of mandating a patriotic interpretation of the nation's origin in some cases, such as florida and texas and elsewhere, prohibiting the discussion or limiting discussion of, you know, people, different gender identities or same sex relationships at, certain grade levels and in some places that's just led to, you know, that's the law. and so their library books are flying off the shelves in florida and elsewhere to try to comply with those laws. um, but even in places where those laws haven't passed, there's, there's a, i think a culture of among many educators. there was a recent rand survey that was released earlier this year that showed thirds of teachers reported did, uh,

censor, wring how they talk about divisive political issues, including issues around race and inclusion, and that in that finding was, was still the case and included teachers who teach in school districts where there are no explicit restrictions, no state laws and no local prohibitions, simply because those teachers don't you know, they reported that they were worried that if they pulled out a picture book to their elementary school classroom, that, you know, depicted two dads holding hands, that the school district not be able to protect them if if parents get really upset. so they're just because because of it, there's been a lot of reporting recently showing that actually the you know, the idea that the school wars is going to be a silver bullet for republicans to retake the suburbs, which is like, you know, steve bannon's whole pitch. and chris, that it's not really

panning moms for liberty and other groups losing in a lot of places. and so they're. they're or they're not winning new suburban voters. they're just kind of taking these national divisive issues and superimpose them on to local school boards. so if your community leans republican or leans trump like south lake does, you're going to going to get a bunch of anti crt school board members. and if you're a left leaning suburb, you'll probably, you know, the progressives will win out. but, um, and so they're losing lots of those races, moms for liberty. but it's still having impact in those districts because of the state laws and because of just the pressure campaign. the fear a what teacher wants be accused of, uh, trying to harm kids or indoctrinate them. and so that i think we're seeing a lot of in this current moment fear and censorship and self-censorship. right. and teachers, you know, putting away their classroom libraries,

which is actually really sad to think about or taking out the that you maybe the district had made an effort to put in to make a more welcoming environment. you know, one of the really sort of crazy anecdotes, the book i think in south lake involves a teacher training. one of these laws passed where the administrator tells teachers that they basically had to teach both sides of the holocaust. and i think i remember the stories that when it happened, because it was so just insane. but, you know, i wonder if this is one of the consequences of trying to tell teachers, teach history without upsetting anyone or saying have to be neutral. because i think you, one of the teachers that you quoted said, how can you be neutral about the holocaust or about racism. you know, and so i wonder, is that something that you've talked to teachers about this

idea of how can you be neutral? you're teaching certain types of history yeah, i mean, this is this is this strikes to the of what we talked to the beginning of this is how do we talk about our history, about the american story, about who we are as and so that incident you talked about in the south like it followed one you know texas had passed its version of anti crt law, even though the law didn't mention critical race theory. it promoted that way and it included this kind of line that's been repeated in the legislation across the country that says if you are if a teacher is going to discuss or present a currently controversial, they need to present both sides or opposing viewpoints on that subject. now what's open for interpretation is what is currently controversial. and so in south lake, the administrator an administrator

gave that instruction of, well, if you have a book on the holocaust, make sure you have one that shows and opposing perspective, which of course, you know, and i had a recording of this moment when it happened, the teachers were just like, what? how can i what's the opposing perspective? am i supposed to put up, add a book to my classroom library from a holocaust or told from the perspective of why the nazis did what they did, you know, justifying it or like it? and how does that apply to say like slavery? am i should i have content in my classroom kind of making the case for why slavery was a net positive for america which is an argument we see today. and on the right there and what what was stood out to me in that story kind of flew under the radar and the initial kind of backlash and outrage that spread through the country after we published is in the audio you can hear the administrator

respond to one of the teachers who's saying what do you have to teach the present both sides of the holocaust and the administrator says believe me, that's come up. and that stands out to me because it what's happening in a lot of these cases these are not widely held beliefs in society but does not represent like this idea that maybe the holocaust was faked. that's not a majority opinion. but if if if if one or a couple vocal parents make it a problem for you, it's a problem for you. and so these laws combined with the kind of, you know, growing y in our culture to, you know, these anti-semitic views, white nationalist views, christian views, it kind of gives that minority vote or that even just very lone parent a

veto power like, well, it might offend that parent. and so we can't tell any of the kids we have to present, we have to it's going to affect how all of the kids learn about these these events. and that's part of i think we've seen in in these is and with the library book challenges to one one parent who's really upset has because of some of the policy changes has the power to affect what thousands other kids at that school read. yeah yeah i was i live in new york and i had a couple of years ago. i had a one of my kids teachers send messages to ask of the parents if they were comfortable having their watch a movie about ruby bridges and. and i just thought, i wonder if this is related because there's, you know, there's there's so less of that happening in new but i just wondered if this was something that she always did if

it was something that was just this kind of awareness that, you know, that maybe it would be best to ask on the end. and i didn't ask her why. i just said, of course i'm fine with that. you know but it it was interesting to me at the time just, you know, knowing what was going on in the country, one of the things that i thought was really in the book is that, you know, you don't want to give away names or anything for people who are going to read it, but but some of the teachers that objected or raised concerns about some of these issues, you know, really had horrible happen to them. and also their livelihood threatened if they were going to continue to be able to teach work. and so i don't want to give away names, but can you talk a little bit about that that issue of teachers really facing threats? yeah. i mean, is i guess this is the natural consequence of the narrative that was pushed on the right in recent years that schools are working to indoctrinate your kids.

they want to teach white children to hate themselves and kind of out of that was idea that teachers are working. they're trying to groom your kids into lgbtq lifestyles. they want they want to push transgender identity onto your kids and and get them to change genders. and these aren't just like some fringe allergy people making these allegations. these these are things like out of the mouths of governor ron desantis in and greg abbott in texas and it only makes sense that if if that message is the one being projected out into the world, that people are going to believe it and they're going to look for who's doing this. and so in the excuse me, i'm sorry, in the book, yeah, i tell the teacher the story of some teachers and a couple in particular in a librarian also

who who became the target of those allegations, baseless, but real in terms of how they you that hey you have books in your classroom that depict lgbtq relationships even it's a kid. it's a kid's book. there's no sex in it. but it shows that and that's evidence that you're trying groom my kid into this lifestyle. you're are you're a predator. you're a groomer. and i, i in the book, you know, you really start to understand some of these things when it happens. you and so i include in the bo a during the midst of reporting on these stories a couple of years ago when one of those allegations was leveled at me, i had done a story about library books, lgbt q library books coming off the shelves in a suburban houston school

district. and for that story, i talked with a queer 17 year old high school senior who wanted me to know and shared that because parents aren't accepting of lgbtq people and she's not out to them, but her school library is like this one spot where she feels safe to read and see books and read books and see herself reflected in what she's reading. and now that was under a threat. and so i was just kind of showing the stakes, what's happening in this movement. day after that story ran, my phone started exploding with phone calls and text messages from numbers i didn't recognize. and one of them finally she texted like, can you get on the phone? i sent my email address and she followed up this parent, this mom who was not connected to that student in any way. she emailed to say, hey, we saw your story. we saw that you spoke with the 17 year old about and, you know, without her parent's knowledge and about her sexual sexuality, this and she said this is one of

the first apps toward grooming and we feel this is grounds to file a police report. with katie police for soliciting a minor accusing me of of basically being a child sexual predator. and you know you know, you're a journalist. right. and so we we get hate mail. we get mean that we get mean messages sometimes really mean. but after, you know, nearly two decades of doing this, it you know you kind of let it roll off. and when it's it's when the criticism is in good faith respond. but for the most part, you get really thick skinned doing this line of work. this hurt me. this allegation, even though i knew it was nonsense, even though i there was no legal basis for their threat and that you know, this would just go away. it knocked the wind out of me. i like i, i remember going down my wife with all my going downstairs and like, feel really

emotional and just needing to, like, sit down for a while and tell her what happened. and it made me i felt sick and i felt i felt like, why didn't why am i even in this business for i didn't that wasn't a lasting thought. but i thought like, why am why am i doing this i should i could do something other than this and be accused of being a child predator and then though later, after i kind of overcame those thoughts, it hit me like, oh, imagine how librarians are feeling. some school librarian who who doesn't get used to hate mail, who wasn't it didn't is not a public figure. it doesn't per put her name on top of her articles and publish in the world who just stocks shelves and tries to hand kids books that they might like to read. how did those allegations affect those people? and i just i know it must just must be devastating to and have a huge impact on their ability to do their job and also make

probably makes a lot of them and i know this from talking to them makes a lot of them think maybe i shouldn't be doing this anymore, maybe i don't want to be a librarian. maybe i don't want to be in the classroom. yeah, that's a loss. that's a loss for everybody. yeah, well, and it's scary. you know, i mean, you don't know who might show up at house or, you know, seek you out at work. and it's it's a terrifying threat. and i can you know you can understand easily why someone might back away from at the end of the day what is a job you know and say maybe i should do something else. you mentioned something that i want to back to a tiny bit, which is this idea that that what started as a lot of claims about crt then sort of morphed over time into being very focused on lgb rights and very specifically transgender rights. and chris rufo, who, you know, it just tends to be rather candid in some of his comments about, political strategy. he said, i think to the new york

times that the sexuality issues were more politically than race issues, you know, and i just wondered, how is that also a strategy that is in many ways a callback to the past? you know, it's something we've seen before. absolutely. what was a while researching the book, i i read familiarize myself with a chapter in history that i was just kind of vaguely familiar with in the in the late 1970s, in there was this push by anita bryant, who was, you know, famous for at that point, you know, being a spokesman person for florida orange juice, i think she's a christian conservative. she she waged an out campaign in miami-dade county to oppose a local ordinance that would have required private employers to not discriminate on the basis of

sexual orientation. the hope and the fear was from her perspective that, homosexuals are going to be in my kids classrooms. she waged, she and her allies waged just a vicious ugly campaign that spread across the country. and they labeled it save our children, which is language we hear. we hear very variations of that today. and they they falsely depicted all gay people as child predators who are out to recruit kids to their lifestyle and and and she got she got a lot of support but in the end, in the ensuing decades, obviously we we've all grown up in a world now if you're my age where that's shifted that conversation we thought right where you know we saw those audience, those types of audiences preventing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation spread across

the country. we saw same sex marriage. in 2015, and i think a lot of people got lulled into. the idea that, yeah, this is why these are widely held beliefs and they are widely held, but that i think a lot of people maybe it was settled and what this what we've seen in this moment is it's not it's not, you know, the the backlash against transgender people on transgender identities is is is reacting some more recent changes in way young people view gender and how we talk about in society there has been a like a sea change there the last ten years but backlash in schools over books are on shelves. and what teachers talk about isn't just about gender. it's also a lot of you know, anti gay commentary, you know,

this this idea that dare you have a book inside the school that shows two male penguins raising a chick together which is a true story because that's going to teach my kid that it's okay to be gay. and that's one of the things we see is, you know, those books are coming off shelves because in these little harmless books that just show the reality of life in america that some of your classmates do you have to moms and we don't make of them for that there's nothing wrong with that families come all different. these are just kind of standard kindness things that are in elementary schools and we're and the backlash is clearly against that because there's a saying inefficient segment of of our population that isn't on board we're never on board with these changes and and they see this, you know, as an attempt to to take their kids to to change

their kids, to, you know, push this lgbtq agenda on to their children. and that's and that's why we see that they're this parents rights. the parents have the right to to decide what their kids should learn or know about. and and for for it ends up being, you know, stripping the rights from from parents who absolutely want their kids to learn those things. yeah, that's one of the things that that struck me also when i was reading is this idea of, you know, parental freedom, parental rights, educational freedom. if that was really for then know conservatives who favor school choice and who favor parental freedom would have to be also supporting, you know, schools that affirm lgbtq families alongside religious schools because that be the idea of every family actually choosing for themselves. and and it's it seems like

that's not really what it's about. you know that that this idea of freedom is really freedom. if you agree with these views. you know, these these views over here that are very clear that we're, you know, yelling about at the school board. it's not actually choice and freedom for everyone. and i thought that was a kind of a theme. yeah. i mean, i don't want to paint with a too broad a brush. there probably are parents who identify with the parents rights movement who mean it and just want opt out policies right. but i can see we can that this is not not everyone actually who says they're fighting for parents rights or actually committed it. and you can see that in some of the policies. one in particular that always stands out to me is we've seen this proliferated in school districts and in some state legislation that says that teachers. can refer to transgender children, their birth names and the sex referred.

they were assigned at birth, even cases when parents have signed forms saying that they don't want them to do that. so basically giving the teachers the right to ignore the wishes of the parents on the teachers, maybe their religious or moral views. that's not parents rights. if a parent has said, this is who my kid is and how i you i want you to refer to them in the school says but you don't have to you can't as journalists, we need to. words mean something and we need to note when the language match reality. and that's a case where it just you can't call that parents rights. that's that's false, right. and that's that's one of the things that i think about sometimes is who is freedom for who is it choice for? and you're right, there are lots of people who support school choice for for a variety of reasons. but in the in the sort of arguments about it and the language where it makes it sound like such a simple concept, you

know, it's it's not really when you start kind of digging beneath the surface a little bit. you know, one thing i wanted to to ask is just, you know, this is not an easy thing to have spent years of your life reporting. and you talked about some of the the attacks on you as a journalist. but, you know, now that you're finished with the book, what is what is sort of the takeaway for you? and what are you hoping that that readers from it? i think the biggest thing that i wanted from the very beginning of reporting on this was to take some of the the temperature down in terms of the allegations and the narrative end to end to end complicate that with the stories of students and teachers and parents who are real people who mean well, who aren't bad people and just show where they're coming from and to show how all of this really toxic rhetoric

and in some false allegations harming real people in communities and needlessly tearing communities and. i think that's you know, that's a bigger lesson just about school politics. but our politics generally, this kind of tribal situation we're in where, you know, the other side is they're not i don't just disagree with them, they are evil. in some cases we're hearing like you're your work, you know, you're being guided by satan is some of the allegations we see here and this is this is dangerous and. it's it's it has real impacts if, you know, if it's just and not actions, it has impacts people and it makes people feel unsafe in their communities and. and i don't think that a majority of americans want that, actually. and so i that if i could just, you know, share these stories in and, you know, people may disagree on it and there be

disagreement on what are the policy solutions and what is the way address these things. but if we could just agree on some basic facts and you know, and show that some of the people have been accused of wanting to harm kids and teach them this horrible things, you may disagree with them on how they on their, you know, politics or their, but this idea that they out to harm kids. i wanted to challenge that and to show the stories of what's actually happening to to thank you for doing that for your and and you know and also i think that i hope that despite some of the sort nastier things that have occurred thatatattinue writing about education and working on education. like i said, welcome to the fold education reporters. we will never let you go. so thank you so much for the conversation. thank you for for such

♪♪ in partnership with the library of congress, c-span brings you books that shaped america. our series explores key works of literature that have had a profound impact on the country. in this program, milton rose friedman free to choose a personal statement published in 1980 as a companion to their ten part pbs series, free to choose advocated free-market capitalism. both studied at the university of chicago where milton leaders served as faculty in the economics department for almost

30 years. they cowrote several books together into the relationship was described as an extremely close intellectual fellowship. in 1976, milton friedman won the nobel prize in economics and 1988 was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by ronald reagan. influencing public policy debates he served as an advisor to both president ronald reagan and british pre- minister margaret thatcher. afraid to choose argued for constitutional restraints on the power of government to interfere with free markets and criticized what they saw as wasteful government spending on welfare and other social safety net programs. the book was one of the best-selling nonfiction books of 1980. >> host: and welcome to books that shaped america on the c-span series that looks at how books throughout our history have influenced who we are today. and partnership with the library of congress, this ten week series has been exploring different areas, topics and different viewpoints and we are

glad you're with us for this walk-through history. tonight it's a look at the economy, the role of government, how we teach children and other policy issues, and it's all through the eyes of milton and rose friedman. in 1980, they developed a series for public tv called "free to choose" and turned that into a best-selling book. many of the friedman's ideas were controversial and sparked he did t debate, but there because influenced political figures and others for decades. our guest tonight, to help us understand the impact of free to choose is lanny a continuing lecture at uc santa barbara and also the author of this book "milton friedman a biography." let's start with some facts and figures about the u.s. in 1980. the population was about

226 million about 100 million less than it is today. the president was jimmy carter and of course he lost to ronald reagan later that year. the inflation rate, 14% compared to about six to 9% today. the unemployment was at 7.5%. today about 3%. a 30 year fixed your mortgage about 14% and climbing. there's been a recession in 1980 and another one was to come. how did the economy feel to people in 1980? >> i think the economy was the number one issue in the 1980 campaign between jimmy carter and ronald reagan. there's no question that ronald reagan was very significantly influenced by milton friedman in his policies and program. he ran on the economy for bill clinton put forward it's the

economy stupid, ronald reagan was asking what do you think about inflation and about unemployment. inflation was the issue of the day. the united states had not experienced double digit inflation in peacetime may be ever virtually as far as very shortly during the control of prices after world war ii, but they have in a general peacetime economy double digit inflation and a declining economic growth, the era of oil embargo, the loss of the war in vietnam. these were troubled times for the united states and i think many people felt that america's greatest days were behind. effective there was inevitably going to be a larger role for government and society that economic growth would diminish and freed men from an intellectual perspective and reagan from a political perspective tried to trumpet a

different direction and that was where free to choose comes in. >> host: what were milton and rose friedman advocating and free to choose? >> guest: essentially, they were advocating a rollback of the role of government that emerge first in the great depression a tn even more ri the great society programs during the lyndon johnson administration. their opposition was to the expansion of government. they defined freedom as the most limited amount of government possible. they recognized the government has an essential role to play in establishing a free society and establishing a free-market order. but they wanted that society to have as little government as possible. they were in favor of government when it was provided to be at a local or state level rather than a federal level. if they thought that voluntary

associations should be the primary provider of social welfare functions and families as individuals should be strengthened in an order that society would operate in the most productive and harmonious manner. >> host: did their book have an impact on the reagan campaign? >> no question. free to choose was published first in hardback with the series free to choose public broadcasting in 1980 which was the year of the campaign. the 1981 was a paperback edition which is the addition that i have. reagan has the firstneord endorsement of the book on paperback edition after he became president. one-word, superb. they first met when reagan was governor of california. they campaigned on a number of

issues. so these ideas of friedman in particular you've got to control the inflation rate as economists distinct from a public intellectual, friedman emphasized monetary policy theory above all else and if you have inflationary circumstances in an economy that in the long run is going to lead to less growth and during these inflationary 1970s when no one seemed to know what to do about inflation and this seems often to be the case people don't know what to do about inflation, friedman would not agree with of the current approach of the federal reserve of trying to control inflation and changing interest rates. for friedman. without batting an eye he said

inflation is a monetary phenomenon. the reason was too much money was being produced and printed by the government in the karma f currency. it wasn't a matter of interest rates too high or too low or access business profits. it wasn't a function of excessive demands but the supply of money. that is the line that he took and reagan adopted and became a lion adopted around the world for the next several decades. i think friedman would argue that was a large source of the economic prosperity of those

decades. >> host: saying that, lanning ebenstein, is free to choose on that list? >> guest: no question. both milton and rose friedman their influence in putting forward ideas consider himself to be a libertarian philosophy but a republican in politics. in 1964 when he was the republican nominee and the leading advisor to richard nixon in96 and 1972 heas the leading advocate of an all vonteer army that was implemented during nixon's administration and then he was a leading endorser and supporter of reagan when reagan was elected in 1980 and 84.

i want to be clear about this as i'm trying to present friedman's views but many people would argue that his views on government were not the right approach. >> host: let's quote from a free to chsehis is one of the conclusions at the end of the book. we are asple still free to choose which way we should go whether we continue along the ever bigger government or to call a halt and change direction. >> the initiative and all of his work and at the public intellectual particularly in the last 30 years of his life after he retired from the university of chicago.

if there is an inflation in the society that's going to be detrimental to an economy there for the first thing the government has to do is maintain a stable money supply. the second thing that an economy needs to do, the government needs to work with an economy to ensure that there are relationships and contracts to adhere to individuals. there was an important role to play in defense. he supported some social services, but his basic approach and i think that it may surprise viewers to know he had to the idea of a negative income tax in the 1960s which is very similar to the idea of universal basic income now about we won't have a whole panoply of social welfare programs and different

sorts. we won't have large government employment. rather, we are going to give people the funds directly to spend. he thought that would be a more effective way of running than the government programs. in the area of education he thought that vouchers would permit parents to choose their children's education, what schools they would attend and what programs they want. that would be a way to increase competition and education. >> these are all policy issues we are talking about today? >> guest: they remain topical to this day. there is low tariffs, index, tax rates, so many policy reforms that can be traced in part to milton and rose friedman. >> host: let's go back to free to choose. economic freedom is an essential prerequisite for political

freedom. >> that is one of the court ideas is there is a strong connection between economic freedom and political freedom. they are not distinct. you can't say that you can be politically free if government is running all of the economy. both of the declaration of independence came forward and to smith's fall to patients published in 1776 and they emphasize we need to have the economics of adam smith and join that to the political idea in the declaration of independence everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of

happyness. therefore a free-market system free market systemis the centrao a.m. economic system but it's also central to a political system. >> uc santa barbara, another idea we are still talking about today is a quality in the freedom and this again is free to choose. in the sense of equality of outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality and freedom. to achieve equality will destroy freedom theor good purposes will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. >> saw as an explicit end of

government he felt that individuals are different, they have different tastes, different abilities, different experiences and wants, desires, education. for that reason in a just society it's not going to be a perfectly egalitarian society. this is also important by not making a quality indirectly sought after goal one that just emerges from the market but in fact a free-market capitalist system to have more equal outcomes than the economic systems. if you value freedom and also have a good deal of inequality.

here's a portion of it talking about free markets. >> there's not a single person in the world who could make this. remarkable statement, not at all. the wood from which it is made comes from a tree cut down in the state of washington to cut down the tree it took a salt and to make this all it took steel, to make steel it took iron ore. we call it lead but it's really graphite. compressed graphite. i'm not sure where it comes from, but i think it comes from mines in south america. this red top up here, the eraser, router, probably comes from land where the rubber tree isn't even native it was

imported from south america by businessman with the help of the british government. i haven't the slightest idea where this came from or the yellow paint to make the black lines were the glue that holds it together. literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil. people who don't speak the same language and practice different religions. you are trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. what brought them together to cooperate to make this? sending out an order from the central office it was the magic of the price. of the impersonal operation of the prizes that brought them

together and got them to cooperate so that you could have it for some. that is why the obligation of the free market is so essential not only to promote effective efficiency, but even more, to foster harmony and peace among the people of the world. >> that is a classic milton friedman story. >> he is a great teacher and uc it to their. a great human being and as someone that had the opportunity to interview him on occasion, i was truly impressed by him and his wisdom, the warmth of his personality and the genius of his mind. he's able to explain things so clearly and succinctly and persuasively and when we talk

about the importance of the market, what he is saying is that prices are you central to a properly operating market and what the prizes do is register supply and demand. if you only have government control it's going to be inefficient. von mises in an earlier 20th century economist that talked about calculation and socialist economies, how is a government planner going to know if they want to build houses. if you don't have a way to compare the relative value of different goods, then you don't

have rational economy so that is what leads to the production is the ability to fluctuate. that is a very different idea that most have taken through history. the view has been in the period preceding adam smith that milton friedman criticized as far as adam smith did even more so. what it's going to be produced and how. the argument of friedman and other capitalist oriented economists. their primary argument is for the government to make these sort of decisions and efficient

manners. it is to say that in general productivity, maximum productivity at the large free-market economy and on that argument i think that friedman and his friend have won the argument. >> host: as i mentioned at the beginning, in the series books that shaped america is in partnership with the library of congress and about ten years ago the library of congress came up with 100 books that shaped america and milton friedman's free to choose was on that list. there are all books that have had an impact on our society. with that said about this book, this is what the library of congress wrote in their description of free to choose. economist milton and rose friedman published this book in conjunction with their pbs series that a spouse to the

virtues of capitalism versus other ecom approaches. some ofho other economic approaches of course communism and some others, but there's there isalso john kenneth galbrr john maynard keynes. what were their approaches and how are they different than milton friedman? >> to look at the systems the communists or social systems and other types of systems, i think fast it's that friedman's real opposition was to communism and socialism in the form of government production of the means of economic production. and he said the classic examples of this are germany and korea. before the end of world war ii, both germany and korea had been united countries and if anything, the more industrial and at the developed part of germany was at the eastern part of germany and the more

developed part. you had a sort of controlled experiment which is difficult to do and they had won a sort of system in the other part of the country and there is no question that west germany was far more productive economically and had a higher standard and that south korea had a higher standard of living at was more productive than north korea so i thought those were the classic examples, so his great opposition was to very significant government control of an economy.

when it comes to hn kenneth galbraith or johnayrd keynes,e didn't consider them to be merely as negative as a full-fledged socialist or communist system in this sense in the means of economic production. in the case of keynes, friedman's opposition was mostly to the idea that in an advanced capitalist economy there tended to be over saving. the marginal propensity became economically more advanced and therefore you could have an economic equilibrium and less than full production and employment and therefore the government had to borrow excess funds from the private sector

engaged in deficit spending in order to maintain full economic activity. there are vast sources of excess saving. together it doesn't borrow money from the private sector. it's going to have to spend that money so the keynesian economic theory in the activity and in general so he was opposed to that. galbraith was probably the most well-known economist popularly.

friedman by no means thought that he was a socialist or communist. maybe they hedged a little bit of direction of socialism but his main concern was they didn't recognize the inherent inefficiency of much government activity a continuing lecturer at the university of california santa barbara. he's been there since about 2005 and is the author of a couple of books, milton friedman a biography and chicago economics which we will talk about in a minute. he's helping us understand the impact of milton and rose friedman's free to choose. the (202)748-8902 if you live in east and central time zones,

748-8921 if you live in the mountain and pacific time zones and if you can't get through and still would like to make a comment, try the text number (202)748-8903. that's for text messages only. please include your first name and a city if you would with your questions or comments. also want to let you know that we have a companion website t the series. there are teaer lesson plans and a viewer" tab, related videos, eibrary of congress is 100 books that shaped america are all contained in that website. c-span.org/books that shaped america is the website. just a little bit about miln and rose friedman. he was born in new york city and nt to rutgers the university

of chicago and received his phd om columbia. the treasury department from 1941 to 43 duringdr's presidency. and he taught at the university of chicago from 1946 to 1977. rose friedmalid from 1910 to 09 and was bor in ukraine. she attended reed college in oron, the university of chicago where she did phd work that did not do her dissertation. she collaborated on free to choo,he tv series and the book. shcoote other economic books and memoirs allncding capitalism and freedom that came out in 1962 and cofounded the choice with milton friedman's promoting school vouchers. i want to show the original copy of the book that came out in 1980. here is the front cover. but you can see they are both

listed on it. but when you flip it around, there is where you get rose friedman on the back. >> i think that rose was from a family of economists. her brother was a leading member of the chicago school of economics in the post-world war ii period at the universityf chicago. she herself was an economic student at chicago wn they would also be graduate student there. they were students of frank knight at the time who was a free market oriented economist, and i think that her role wasn't significant in milton friedman's work and technical economics. she was more involved in the later work in public policy and