be.

this morning. i. good morning, everyone. i am not all all-american. an attorney at the law firm singletary. and a long standing volunteer. here we are happy. very, very happy to welcome you to the 41st miami book fair international. we're grateful to the miami-dade college and volunteers and for the support of our sponsors, including the green family foundation, nicklaus children's hospital, amazon, the j.w. maki and brickell, and all of the other sponsor, ers. if you are here for the first time, then i'd like to welcome you to the fair. if you are returning, then another welcome home and a very special welcome to the friends of the fair. are there any friends in the room? good to see you all. good to see you all. and i'd like to invite others to become a friend of the fair, to

consider friends membership as we work to ensure the future of your miami book fair. please. as i said, consider support the fair with a contribution to the next decade. fund. as far as housekeeping is concerned, we will have some a brief q&a at the end of the session and at this time i kindly ask that you silence your cell phone for the enjoyment of everyone here this morning. with that, i'd like to bring up and welcome maria meier, who is the executive director of the women's fund. miami-dade dedicated to creating a metropolis where power and possibility are not limited by gender. the women's fund, re-engineer, support systems for women and girls through grants, partnerships, advocacy, research and leveraging collective impact. with that, i ask maria myra to come up and she will introduce our special guests for this

morning. thank you. right. good morning. bonjour. where does this i look at you all. you all look so warm when it's so cool. so at your women's fund, miami-dade, we have a saying that your focus is our power. think about that. the power of focus. so today, here to give us her powerful insights in mind, expanding focus today is the former eve ensler, the tony award winning playwright, author and activist. her play, the vagina monologues is an obie award winning theatrical phenomenon that has been translated into 48 languages and performed in 140 countries. she's the author of numerous plays, often on broadway and many books, including the bestsellers the apology in the body of the world and today's

focus reckoning. she's the founder of v-day. the 26 year old global activist movement that has raised over $120 million to end violence against women. and that includes gender expansive people and girls. these always about inclusion. she also includes the planet. so that's all of us. she's also the founder of 1 billion rising, the largest global mass action to end gender based violence in over 200 countries. the co-founder of the city of joy in congo and v rights regularly for the guardian. she is in conversation fashion with another superstar, nadege green. miami based writer, community historian and cultural memory worker whose practice and approach to storytelling is deeply rooted in history and first person narratives. she is the founder of black miami dade, a history and

creative studio that honors miami's black history. her writing has appeared in the atlantic and harper's bazaar and often on npr. green is also the editor of the anthology more than what happened the aftermath of gun violence in miami. she's a senior civic media fellow at the university of southern california's annenberg innovation lab. please, let's give a warm miami welcome to v in a dish. good morning. thanks for waking up early for us this morning. so we we were jamming backstage, so we're going to keep it going up here. and i wanted to start with the

idea of naming yourself and what it means to reclaim that self, which, you know, your formerly known as. so can you talk to us a little bit about reclaiming yourself and renaming yourself? i love that you're beginning with that question. good morning, everybody. thank you so much for coming out. i'm so happy to see you. all. and i'm so happy to be in conversation with this astonishing woman. you know, names are so powerful, right? names are so powerful. and recently, people have been coming up to me asking me why i changed my name. and when i tell them they say i never like my name. i always i, i said, so change it. it's your life. like we're not stuck with anything forever, right? i think there's a lot of reasons why i changed it. but the last book i was here with aja monet, we did.

i think it was almost the same room right. was the apology, which was a letter i wrote from my father to myself, basically apologizing for sexually assaulting and beating me. and i wrote it in his voice. and i basically said all the things to myself that i long for him to say. and i kind of went into his story and investigated who he was, how he became the person he became, why he did what he did. and it was really one of the most exhausting and terrifying, liberating experiences i've ever had because i finally realized is at the end of it, when i had come to understand my father not justify him and not i understood him, i realized it had nothing to do with me. i was just in the way of of whatever was going to happen. it wasn't particular or personal. and at the end of the book, and as i wrote the book, my father

really as an ancestor, he'd been dead 31 years, but he was all around me. he was waking me up in the middle of the night telling me to go to the office. he would tell me a story. he was he was writing the book with me, essentially. and at the end of the book, there's a line which is old man be gone. and i don't know if he wrote it or i wrote it or we wrote it, but it was just like old man gone. and, you know, at the end of peter pan, when tinker bell just goes, my father literally went into the universe. and to be honest, i know he's in a better place and he's never come back. and i felt when i was done writing that book, that i was done with my rancor, i was done with my rage. i was done with i was done living in my father's narrative. i was now in my own story. i had left. i had left the realm of reacting to my father, proving to my father, showing my father. i was suddenly in my story. and i thought, i want my name. the next the next years of my life. i'm going to write my story. i'm going to be in and with me

and not in the patriarchal response, reaction mode, right? so these have always been very good to me. i love i love the shape of a v because it's open and it's inviting. obviously, vaginas, you know, and so many beautiful words begin with voluptuous victory. you know, very i mean, there's just so many good, really words. and i thought, i just want to be the and i joke now like i'm down to a letter and soon i'll be nothing and that will be just amazing. but it's like, you know, for so i will say that changing my name changed so much. it just, it just gave me like the second my second wind. it was like i am now going to walk through the world as v and see what that is and not necessarily be identified by everything. everybody knows me as, but by what's emerging and what's about what's becoming.

and i think it's so great to be identified by what you're creating and what's what's in the future, right? so so we're going to stick with names for. the name of this book is called reckoning. and the word reckoning. you call it that in the act of reckoning, an antidote to fascism. mm hmm. and so if you could share a bit about naming this book, but also where this name takes us in the pages when you open it. mm hmm. thank you for asking that question about reckoning and fascism. and that reckoning is the antidote to fascism. you know, i think we can all agree. let's just focus on this country. we live in a country that has never reckoned with anything, frankly. we haven't reckoned with the fact that we are living on stolen lands. we haven't reckoned that a genocide happened to get those lands. we haven't reckoned that we destroy traditions and peoples

in order to seize all that mattered to them and all the ways they knew to protect the land. then we move into 400 years of slavery, where we brought people here. we dragged people here out of their beautiful country, and we enslave them for years and years and hundreds of years. and then jim crow and the mass incarceration which we haven't reckoned with our story, we haven't probed it, we haven't gone into it. we haven't turned it inside out in a way where we feed ourselves from it. and so consequently, it keeps coming back. it never goes away, but it keeps coming back and kind of more serious, more harmful ways. right? racism never leaves white supremacy, never leave sexism never leaves. hatred of the indigenous. it's just it's it's monolithic. right. and i think part of where we are right now is, is is at the at the end of non reckoning, at the end of non reckoning.

you know all those things we haven't dealt with have now come to roost in the story that's unfolding in this new government. but they've been here all along and i think one of the things i feel very, very deeply having been a survivor of enormous violence, having been a survivor of rape, having been a survivor, aware nobody in my family, no one around me would talk about what was happening to me or reckon. and so i was the only person who spoke out about that and lost my family as a result of it for a long time. i know as sure as i know anything that the reckoning i have done personally with my past has freed me to become another person. i'm not the person i was before. i'm not suicidal. i'm not self-destructive. i'm not reckless. i'm not out of control. i'm i'm i'm a different person because i went back to the wound, which is a portal. the wound is a portal.

and if you go to the wound, it will take you to another realm. we are stuck on this side of the wound. we haven't touched the wound. and the wound is pulsing and. and it's it's just pulsing everywhere in this country now. right. and it's given birth to what is being given birth to at this moment. so our work our work is to reckon deeply, not superficially, to reckon with to to, to we we collude, break who we are based on our memory of what has been and not to deny what has been. i can't think of anything more critical that we need to be doing right now. you also invite us to really think about the through lines and how we are connected through this violence from stolen land, but also violence in our bodies. right. from congo to bosnia to here. and also your body as a geography and site of violence,

right where violence has been enacted upon you. and women across the world face this violence. and so there is an idea around also the struggle of global solidarities, right. that you have shown through your work. but you really it's really laid out in this book, the global solidarities around violence and women can use speak to how we struggle with the idea around solidarities, across borders, especially in a world that loves to put up borders as well. first of all, i think that's one of the most important things we can think about right now. what is global solidarity? we can no longer see ourselves as a separate world. we can see that in everything that is happening. and sometimes i think that if we look at the earth as our mother, as the body who feeds us, who gives us water, or who gives us

air, who is the body that we live on there are no borders because everything that happens to the earth happens to all of us. if there's a nuclear attack somewhere in the world, all of us will suffer, right? if there's a leak from radiation, all of us suffer. if there's plastic in the oceans, all of us suffer. we are all connected through one body. our mother, who is trying her best to survive and keep her children without going and think and keep everything intact. so for me, i've always known that if we could find solidarity, particularly as women and vulnerable people with our sisters around the world and our brothers around. but we are a movement of sisters. if we could find solidarity with our sisters in congo, with our sisters in afghanistan, with our sisters in bosnia, with our sisters everywhere, it makes us all stronger because we understand that we are living in a worldwide paradigm of racist,

patriarchal capitalism, which is the bubble we are living in on the planet. at this moment. and so when we start to realize that, like i, i have such a privilege life in the sense that i live in a worldwide movement of women in hundreds of countries around the world where we gather frequently, where we share our stories, where we compare our stories, but where we understand we are all in the same struggle to dismantle patriarchy. i mean, patriarchy, as far as i'm concerned, is at the core of every single thing that is happening right now. you only have to look at trump's picks for cabinet to understand the predatory nature of what is going on right now. like how many sex offenders or sex traffickers, sex abusers have been picked to run. we have a rapist and educated, adjudicated rapist as a president to be. right. so what does that tell us about what people think about women and their bodies and how much we matter to that, that 76 million

people were willing to vote for somebody who was actually a rapist? what does that tell us about our bodies? and then you look around the world and you see the same story of so many leaders who are accused of rape, accused of sexual abuse, accused of this. and then you see in how many countries, one out of three women. i can't say this enough. 1 billion women on this planet will be assaulted or raped. 1 billion. women are the primary resources of life, of creativity, of ingenuity. what does that violence do to women everywhere? it is it snuffed out their life force. it makes them afraid. it minimizes their creativity and their ability to create life affirming, life affirming actions and it desecrates the planet. so. so part of what i see in solidarity is when we are with our sisters in africa, we give each other strength because we're not alone.

when i'm with my sisters in the philippines, we give each other strength because we're not alone. when i'm with women in china who are boldly doing the vagina monologues undercover and building movements and trying to connect, we're not alone. we are trying to create a new world where patriarchy is not suppressing, depressing and erasing us. and i think all of us need to get out of our kind of single focused americanism and understand that our actions impact people around the world. we only have to look to palestine to see how our impacts in gaza and what's happening now. we only have to look to see all the war as we've perpetuated and exported and all the bombs and militarism and things we are sending to other countries to kill people in our name. right. that impacts people. it destroys people, economies where billionaires, where billionaires now don't know. do you know, two days after this election when the markets rally

to ten people in two days,. made $64 billion, $64 billion to bring a rapist to be a president? like, what does that tell us? so part of part of what i feel now is that all of us have to turn to, for example, the philippines to ask them, how did you deal with a person who comes to power, who begins to erase all the constitutional structures, to look to other countries like india, who have just been through this to find out how do people cope and what do people do? what were strategies? people used in the oncoming fascism that we see approaching rapidly, rapidly. i want to stay with that for a moment because it is memory, right? ultimately, and we were talking about this earlier, the role memory plays and memories get

erased. memories get banned out of universities. books get banned. and so the role of storytelling and remembering and reread memory, but also making sure that the stories can be found. yeah. can you say more around finding our stories and finding each other through memory and memory work? i also want to just say how much i admire your work of really holding being the memory keeper of south florida and black stories and black heritage and black because i think the holders of memory are the holders of where we come from and where we come from is so about where we're going right? i have a friend who's creating this piece in in, in london right now, and there's three parts to it. there's the extinction of the animals. the extinction of people, and then there's the extinction of the dead. and i thought that was such a powerful thing, because when we

we, we, we make our ancestors, when we kill off our ancestors, when we make we no longer and communicate asian or a memory of them, we have nothing to guide us in the future. right. and for me, i think we live in a country that has how can i say this? we we have no memory. we just keep erasing. i remember when reagan died. and i'm just going to say this for me. reagan was really one of the big downfalls of america, that it was really it was really a turning point moment when he turned this country into the individualism. and me, me, me, and was telling us the ketchup was a real food. and, you know, he changed the ethics of this country from a weak country to a me country. and we saw the death of the commons. we saw the death of social justice. we saw the death of people caring about each other. and i remember when he died, it was just this, oh, my god,

ronald reagan. and i was like, wait, i was there. this is not the story of ronald reagan. this is not the story i lived through. and it felt like my family telling the story of our happy family when i was living through a nightmare in the same really. and i think when we don't tell the truth about the past, when we don't connect ourselves to the past and understand that even writing that book about my father, i went back, back, back, back, back into his childhood to say what were the things that happened to my father that turned my father into the man he was? and i could see step by step by step what made him. and by doing that, i could understand how he became who he became. and i could understand how i could not become who he became. i could take another path. i wouldn't have to follow the same path. but if you don't learn from the past right, if you don't see the past, if you don't know the stories of the past, if you don't understand them, you're

basically on your own. you're floating in space. you know, there's nothing. connect you or harboring you to some beginning point or a continuum of evolution of thought, of action, of values that hopefully we're doing as we evolve on this planet. so part of it is like, how do we restore our memory to a culture that has quite akeley and obsessively erased? and now with book banning, with the shutting down of thought, with with not looking into the story of black history or women's history, or where we come from, it's the attempt to completely neutralize and completely erase any story of white supremacy, any story of racism, any story of brutality, any story of genocide that this country is founded on. so guess what's going to happen? it's going to repeat again. that's a guarantee. that's a guarantee. so our job is to be memory

keepers wherever we go and remind people all the time where do we come from? who were we? what ground are we standing on? what ground do we need to what reparations do we need to make? that's our work every single one of us, you know, and i think that you're doing it in such an organized way so people can come and see it and touch it and know it is so critical. thank you. that i need that. and so since you just loved on me, let's talk about love, because, you know, bell hooks taught us, right, that to love well, is the task of all meaningful relationships. and i would love to hear how you how love shows up in reckoning and how love has shown up not just in the words of this book, but in your work. like, how do you anchor yourself

in love? it's such a beautiful question. you know, we don't talk enough about love, right? we we we can talk about all the horrible things that happened in the world and all the diseases and all the explosions and all the rapes and all the. but love is. we're also scared to talk about it, right? it's almost like it's it's like woo woo or it's been put over here and and i think at this moment in this country, what we're about to walk into, i think love is the most important thing we can even imagine. how are we going to love each other in the next four years? how are we going to hold each other in the next four years? how are we going to protect each other in the next four years? how are we going to create spaces for each other where when difficult things are coming at us, we don't we don't let go of people. and i really want to say like i think we need to imagine ourselves. i keep saying this i love bees, i live in the woods and i'm kind

of obsessed with bees and just what bees do because they keep us alive in such a fundamental way. but they move in swarms, they move in swarms, they move over here, then they move over here. and if you interrupt their swarm, you can get stung very badly. so i think we need to become a swarm. like we need to become a swarm. and what i mean by that is when lgbtq are hurting, we swarm to them when they're coming from the migrants, we swarm to them when they're trying to erase black history. we swarm to them when they're taking away our reproductive rights. we swarm their we become an understanding thing of almost like a formulation of love that will we will not let anyone fall outside the swarm. right? everybody's in the swarm and there's nobody who's excluded. and there's nobody we let get taken away and there's nobody we let get harmed because if we stand up for everyone and we protect everyone and we are together doing that, it is much harder for them to do terrible things to us.

and i also just want to say that i think, how do we love like what are the signs of love, right? i look at i just want to talk about my sister chris. christine schuler de scrivener, who is the person who's the director of city of joy in congo, and she is one of the people i admire most in this world. she is like a tower of love. she's very, very tall and she's just a tower of love. and she runs city of joy in the congo. and i'm going to get very emotional when i think about her because it's the hardest place in the world. i'm not exaggerating. there's dire poverty there is violence. there's war. i think probably every woman in the congo has been raped at this point. i think the amount of theft of resources, the stealing of copper and cobalt and gold and everything that goes into our cell phones, the child labor that goes into that, the wars that have been designed to destroy women so people can have access to those mines still in

the middle of all of that stans city of joy, right. this like this gem, this lotus in the mud, this this, this diamond rising out of nothingness. right. and she leads this every person there is congolese. every person was professionalized on the job. we're now in our 12th year. we have healed over 2000 girls who come there for six months who are loved and loved and loved. they are healed through therapy. they are taught permaculture. they learn the right. they dance all day, they do theater, they do music, they they are transformed because it is a community, a garden of love. and when i go there, i literally i dance and i cry all day long because i am in the midst of what it looks like when people have turned their gaze, their hearts, their spirits towards the work of loving and not. there are rules that guide the place and everybody follows them

and they've translated those rules into songs that they single day to remind themselves that we never lie, that we treat our sister's life like our own. and when i'm in the presence of that, i know that it is possible for us to create communities of love, to stand for each other, to lift up people who have been broken and traumatized, which if you're not, raise your hand right. everyone in this room has been traumatized. if you haven't been traumatized firsthand by being beaten or raped or bullied or put down or with racial slurs or whatever, you've seen it second hand, which has traumatized you as well. we're living in a world of trauma. love is the antidote to trauma. when you see someone, when you recognize them, when you say, oh, wow, you're brilliant, you're beautiful, their life changes instantly. it doesn't take a lot. it doesn't take a lot to be generous to look at the person next to you and suddenly recognize them and say, wow, you look amazing today.

or you're beautiful, or what are you working on? or i care about you or you mean something to me? and we are so isolated now. i think i think one of the terrible things about late stage patriarchy and capitalism is it's it's taken this it's taken the world to a situation where ten people in the world have everything right and it's getting more and more. so i was just reading the other day how the ten richest people in the world are buying up every piece of land, every building. they're going to own the world and we'll just be like, they're puppets, right when we, the people love on each other, when we support each other, when we give faith and and belief in each other so that people can do their best work and be confident. everything changes. i've seen it. girls arrive at city of joy. they are dirty. they are broken. they have been living in the woods. they are traumatized. they've been exiled from their communities because they've been raped and sometimes mass raped. they can't even speak. and in six months they leave and

they are flowers. they have been birthed into the glory of themselves, to their power, to their ingenuity. and it didn't take more than six months of love of just love, constant daily love. so how do we become practitioners of love in our life and put real conscious energy into looking around us to see who needs support, looking around us, to see who the news of the election has sent into serious triggering and trauma. because there's a lot of people right now who are triggered a lot of survivors are triggered, a lot of gay men who have been bullied or triggered a lot of transpeople who have been threatened are bullied. who are we going to stand up for now and reach out to who we know is feeling like they're going to be excommunicated from this country? and i'll just tell you a little trick. i do, which is really fun. i do one serious, generous act. the day that shocked somebody, you know, like, i'll give you an example. there was a woman cleaning a

bathroom at the airport and i just really looked at her and thought, whoever sees her, whoever sees the work she's doing, and i just gave her a hundred dollars and she just started sobbing. and i said, yeah, it's like that. and i just walked away. and you know what it was? it's the best feeling in the whole wide world. so, you know, one serious, generous act a day, literally keeps your life worth going. and actually changes. somebody makes people believe people aren't awful, makes people believe people aren't bad, makes people believe that maybe there is some hope for human civilization. right. so how do we contribute to that? you know, and i think with love comes bravery. like, how are we brave? how are we not? mm. right. um, i'm sure you get that a lot. you're like, you're so brave for saying this. you're so brave for writing this. i'm sure so many of the women that you have worked with who've you documented their stories. so many of the collectives who have taken this work and built

upon it, we hear brave a lot. what does it mean to be brave? i love you. it's hard to. maybe we could both answer it. um. yeah. so. oh, man, i didn't mean to. to pull myself into this. the joy of being a moderator. you can ask questions and not have to speak. well, bravery in miami for me, is doing black. historic work, right? i think just existing is brave. but i think in a space that loves to cover itself under the veneer of fun, sun and beaches and markets itself as just this amalgamation of latin america and the caribbean, but does not reckon with the legacy of jim crow here, does not reckon with the fact that this was the site of the saltwater railroad where enslaved black people freed themselves to the bahamas and miami. being a site of that.

but you can recite which beaches to go to, but don't know the history of the building of miami, which was built by black folks, 44% of the people who signed our incorporation papers were black men. and so i think bravery is truth telling and truth telling to people's faces and being unapologetic about that truth and that history, because we understand that history is contraband and. right. it is armor. it is a weapon, which is why it's constantly under attack. because what happens when we know ourselves and what happens when we know the space that we're in and not just redesign the space? you know, i joke that people think miami fell on the map in the 1980s because that is often where the stories of miami that those are stories you hear about this space. and so so i think bravery is is what we're doing right is being in conversation being with one another because it is very easy

to be individualistic. it is very easy to think that like what am i supposed to do? so i think bravery is doing something right and. i think so. everything you just said and i think also bravery is really trusting your instincts. i think one of the things that that patriarchy and violence have done to women is they kind of wiped out our instincts because our instincts live in our body and they got us out of our body when they raped and they abused us. but what i'm what i'm realizing lately is like, you know, i'll give you an example. tina ashley is here and she's our new u.s. coordinator. and i was just so i'm just so proud of her and so just blessed that she's with our movement and i just had a really deep instinct that she would be a great leader to lead the us direction. and it was just an instinct but

i didn't really know her that well. i we'd worked together occasionally, but i was like, no, i know if she can do this, i and every woman i've ever like christine, i had an instinct she should leave city of joy. just she she just felt like that's the person to do it. and i've always trusted my instincts, like, particularly with women in leadership, like a lot of people would say. but she does. i'm not about tina, but like, she's never been qualified. she's never done something like that before. and i'm like, yeah, but she can do it. like i know she can do it, like i believe she can do it. so let's let her step into her power. let's let's that let her step into her knowing. and i think part of bravery is also when you see something, you know isn't right, saying it isn't right because. one of the things and there's a there's a term that timothy snyder talks about, which is anticipatory obedience. it's a step in fascism where you anticipate what's coming. so you start to behave, you

start to be compliant, you start to agree with the fascists. you start to say, yeah, okay, we all have to get our brave on and we all have to say no, i don't think it's right that donald trump is hiring all of jax missiles lawyers and putting in his own mar-a-lago lawyers to go and an election probe that is fascism, right? that is straight up fascism. and we need to say that it is not right that matt gaetz was, who is a you know, who is a sex trafficker and and they won't even release his records because they're so bad. it's going to be our attorney general. we all have to be outraged about that. right? when is like, not anymore. not anymore. we know that. but i'm just i know that this believe me, i know this is passed, but i'm just saying, like every single time they come, we have to go back and say no, no, we cannot roll over now. we cannot lay down now. we have to get our fight on and.

we have to raise our own vibration. and i just want to say something about energy. i think you will agree with me my whole life. for me, everything's about energy. i can walk into a room and i know who the people are. i can connect with, with the people who are who will probably have a problem with me, with my politics or whatever. i know where energy is right now. we are in a very low energy vibrate in america. it is very it is being taken over by corruption, is been taken over by people who want to push women's rights back and they want to erase black history. they want to ban books. they want to take us back to the dark ages. it's very low energy. it is our work to our vibration to raise our energy. so we are on the higher level and we can see stuff because when you get up to a higher level, you begin to see and know what you're supposed to do and find out how you're going to raise your vibration by dancing,

by coming together in community and talking, by connecting with each other, by loving on each other, by creating art and going to see art, by finding the ways you can get your energy up to a place where they are not running you over by fear and exhaustion and stress and worry because that's how they'll win the beating us down, just beating us down. and they're not going to beat us down if we stay together and we keep our energy and our vibration high. so that means dancing every day, dance every day. if that means running, if that means whatever it is you do that keeps you high because we can not afford now to let that go. and that's brave. that's brave to keep your energy high in the face of people who want to run you over is brave. right? and i just i want to say one thing, particularly to survivors, because i know i'm sure there are many in this room. it's a very triggering period right now. it's very triggering to think that the predators are in

charge. and i know for many of us who come from places where we were deeply, deeply abused, it feels like they've won. they have not won. it's a pause. it's a pause. and we're going to take it back and we're going to take it back in a better form than we've ever had before, because something great is going to come out of this. and we have to see that and we have to keep focusing on it. but i just want to say, if you are feeling triggered, if you are feeling unsafe, talk to people about it, reach out to people about it. nurture yourself, and don't let sappear.f isolate out a go to community. move away from community because this is the time for you all to be loved on, to be supported because it's triggering to every single marginalized person in america, which is just about everybody but powerful white men. you know what i mean? so, you know, we're all a very triggered period right now. i can say. yeah. yeah. and on that note, i think we

have time for a few questions. i would say that we do have time for one or two questions. and so if there are one or two people who would like to approach the microphone, we already have one there. so we. one more. hi, i've been coming 30 years, maybe every day, saturday, sunday, there are moments and your talks, one of them blessings. so important. i mean, there are millions and millions of people obviously, who are demoralized, to put it mildly. and your talk and your words i think is important. but literally for those millions of people, because hopelessness is, of course, what has taken over the idea. you know, we're in fascism, etc. and you're right, of course, the

question i guess i would pose is and yet were there so that gates's replacement is. pam biondi yeah. and if you've heard what she said, of course she's as bad as gates and so the question is and then i'll sit down. women not only hopeless men, but women. far too much voted for this rapist, etc. so how do you because there's so much solidarity going on, but we've lost. so how how do you how do you approach other women? so the majority prevails. thank you. thank you for that question. you know, i want to say the

percentages are much smaller than we thought. i think he i think it was not a mandate by any means. the new figures are like 120,000 votes, 90 million people didn't vote. 90 million people. those are the people interested in how do we engage those people? how do we speak to those people? what something they feel not a part of this country. they don't feel a part of this political system. i want to know how we reach those people, because i think that's where we should be putting our attention. and i also think a lot of people have bought a product. they didn't know it was going to poison their lawn. do you know what i mean? they they thought it was going to help the vegetables grow. instead, everything's about to die, you know, and they're going to find out soon because everything that's happening is going to be very destructive to working and poor people in this country. so i think it's going to fairly quickly. but in the meantime i think we just need to talk to people on a 1 to 1 basis wherever we go and

say, where are you at? what are you feeling? how do we bring you into, you know, how to just converse sation conversation, not closing doors, not polarizing, not shutting out, just inviting people into conversation. that's what i would say. yes. hi. good morning. thank you for being here. i have a question and i admire the city of love that you and your sister are doing in building what happens to the girls after six months where they return? are they returning to the same environment? what happens is their follow up with them? that's a good question. you know, after girls leave city of joy, they do go home. many of those villages are safe. there are some that are war torn and often we will keep girls if they're being very threatened. but what's happening is that the girls are we you know, we have a thing. we have girls go from survivor, from victim survivors to leaders and with their home, their leaders, their community, they

really have changed. and so they're actually helping communities find ways to economically improve, find ways to end the violence and they are now sending girls to city of joy from those communities. so every community is beginning to have a cohort of many girls who have who have graduated from city of joy, and they're building their new reality in those villages. so you know, yes, the violence continues and until the west stops taking minerals and and exporting and excavating and stealing minerals from the congo, those wars will continue. but those girls are very empowered now. and with that, i thank you all. this was a wonderful session. v and the dash. thank you. thank you, everyone. addressing the guys as the amazing question. thank you.

i think. that. yeah. this is not the america that my brothers and sisters and i who wear the uniform to risk our

lives to defend these people have so completely defied all that we hold dear. and so it's personal to me and to so many others that when we swear that oath to support and defend the constitution, to be willing to lay down our lives, to ensure the safety, security and freedom of the american people. it is not only heartbreaking, it's maddening to see these people in the highest positions of power in our country so completely disrespecting our flag, our constitution, and treating our liberty, our freedom as something that is within their power to give and to take away as they choose. it's almost as though they

haven't read the declaration of independence. it's almost as though they are unaware of the fact that our founders recognized the truth, that our rights and liberties come from god and no one else. and so no one in government. are founders. put these words into that declaration because they wanted to remind anybody who got into power, who had a crazy idea of thinking they could take away our freedoms. this was a reminder that these are inalienable rights endowed upon us by our creator. among them, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. you'll see in my book, i dedicate a chapter to this

situation, this mindset. it's a chapter about god. it's a chapter about where we gain our fundamental inalienable rights from and how dangerous it is when we have people in power who ultimately believe that they are the ultimate authority. they believe that they are a higher authority than god and that they have the power to take these rights away. you can look at examples throughout history, examples in the present day of leaders who believe this and the dangerous actions that derive from those who believe they are more powerful than god. all of the outrage, all of the sadness, all of the fear that i feel it's natural for us to feel

as americans who love our country should motivate us to take action. i don't want you going home tonight depressed. like too late. but you won't go home tonight. feeling depressed because under standing, why the democrat elite are doing what they are doing. it's because deep down inside they know that they are weak. when we take action based on the power that is given to us in our constitution, they know that when we stand united as americans who may have different views on different issues, we may have different ideas on how we solve the great problems of our time, but who stand together united on the foundation of freedom and our ability to live

in a peaceful and prosperous society. we are the greatest threat to their power. and and that's that is the call to action that we have. we just observe memorial day on monday, a day to pause for those of us who have served, for those of us who have lost brothers and sisters who paid that ultimate price. it's a tough day because we remember the times that we spent with them. we remember the jokes and laughter that we shared. we remember those cold nights in the field, miserable. and yet somehow enjoying our bond and our time together. and we have this opportunity to reflect upon their sacrifice and even with the sadness and the sense of loss that we feel,

celebrate it, who they are and ask ourselves, how do we best honor them? they sacrificed their lives in service to a country to defend freedom. how can we defend that freedom? how can we best honor their legacy? it's by not losing sight of what we can accomplish when we, the people, stand together. it's not losing sight of the fact that our founders placed in our hands the power to have a government of, by and for the people that they reminded us that our government only exists with the consent of the governed. so we see our free speech under attack. we have to protect the free speech of all americans. our voices, use our freedom of speech to defend others whose

freedom of speech may be attacked. we have to stand up for the freedom of religion in our country and make sure that our government protects that right. not only the freedom to worship as we choose, but to express that in the way that we choose, whether it be in private or in public. we have to stand up and recognize the fact that our founders passed the second amendment after the first for a very specific reason. they understood the fragility of. this system of democracy and how those in power, unfortunately, are too often tempted to abuse that power. and so they they passed the second amendment after the first in the event of a tyrannical government trying to take away our free speech to serve as that check on that abuse of power.

we have to elect leaders who understand these facts, who are committed to truly upholding that oath of office that they take, who understand that vision that are founders had for our country. on january 27th, in 1838, president lincoln delivered a speech that was powerful then, but is very prescient to the moment that we are facing in this country. he spoke to the young men's lyceum of springfield, illinois, and said, quote, at what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? i answer if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. it cannot come from abroad. if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and

finisher as a nation of free men. we must live through all time. or die by suicide. i'd. so why is it that we have one private company determining the medical school curricula and education of every medical school in the united states? they have a monopoly because they write the exams and they accredit the schools. so imagine if every college had a curriculum and standardized exams written by one private company. what would that look like? you wouldn't see innovative advancements in education. and guess what? medical education is a joke. it's a joke. we are in dinosaur level practices of writing on stone tablets and memorize and regurgitate that molecules of the krebs cycle. five different points in your medical education. why we're teaching technical

skills, but we're not teaching the non-tech skills, like listening and being empathetic and communicating clearly and humility. knowing your limits. that's what makes somebody a good doctor interpreting the literature critically. instead, we beat these highly creative, altruistic young people with this memorize and regurgitate culture. you memorize all these drugs, you regurgitate it. you come out with a reflex, you put your head down, you see things that just are bizarre. they make no sense. they violate every piece of intellectual curiosity in your brain. and you're told, put your head down. just keep memorizing, regurgitate, taking a five centimeter margin for a melanoma in the leg. but a half a centimeter margin if it's on the face and nobody asks, well, wait. imagine if different results are the same results. the average age of puberty goes down 1.5 weeks every year for the last 30 years. kids are having puberty now years prior, earlier than what they had just half a century

ago. is anyone asking why it when pancreatic cancer rates doubled in the last 20 years? is anyone asking why when the first day of anatomy class and i'm curious what your experiences were in the first day of anatomy. i remember we saw the lung the first time i saw the actual lung, and it was black. and, you know, i was appalled. all of us and the instructor saw our reaction and said, oh, that's because this cadaver that we're dissecting was someone who lived in a city and people who live in a city, their lungs are black. but don't worry, it doesn't hurt you. and i just thought it's amazing how dismissive we are on these big topics. string theory glasses of cows milk a day for every adult. that's a recommendation that still goes on to this day. still is anyone in questioning the deeply held assumption we students didn't. but the fact that there's i would argue the fact that the the medical organized medical

profession basically arranged to have a monopoly on the medical school accreditation system and the residency accreditation system has contributed because there's no competition of ways to educate people. it's right now you have david, you had you had the advantage of both getting an m.d. where you got to regurgitate and memorize and then a jd where it was. take both the best argument on each side of an issue. and so that was an interesting. did you have like whiplash that professional socialization is very powerful, but don't assume law doesn't involve its share of memorization and regurgitation as often as the building block to then trying to sort out a problem of look, if medical education has been criticized for a longer than i think any of us have been on this earth, and i remember a long time ago when i was in medical school, you know, the the latest iteration

of people parachuted into try and save medical education, tried to make us m ethical. and there have been previous iterations and there have been subsequent iterations. it's it's a real challenge. the thing to understand about medical school curricula and about law school curricula is people have absolute property rights in getting to teach the same class next year that they taught the preceding year. and they look that way because the people who are making those decisions are convinced that that is what someone needs to learn in order to be a good doctor. whether they're correct or not is a dif very different question than whether they have the ability to