hello, everyone and welcome to "amanpour and company." here's what's coming up. >> from the u.s. government shut down to the uk's brexit chaos. why best selling author, anand giridharadas thinks our winner take all society is to blame. i speak to him about the way forward. also ahead, stranded in the arctic, my interview with the danish actor, mads mikkelsen about his new survival movie in the icy wilderness. and ending the stigma around a woman's right to choose, "new york times" columnist lindy west joins our alicia menendez.

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thank you. welcome to go program, everyone. i'm christiane amanpour in london. where the weekends a continued government paralysis and disruption both in the united states and here in the united kingdom. the british prime minister lurched from a historic defeat to surviving yet another vote of no confidence. now she has to present another brexit deal to end the impasse, except opposition leader jeremy corbin says he'll boycott talks until the prime minister rules out the option of a cliff edge exit. meanwhile, across the pond there seems to be no end in sight to another self-made crisis, the longest government shut down ever, nearly a month now over president trump's demand for congress to pay for

argues that the global elites have created rigged systems which favor the very few getting to and staying at the top. analysis and observations have made his book fly off the shelves and he's here in london this week. how do we move to a more just society. anand giridharadas welcome back to our frprogram. >> you'thank you for having me. >> you're here in london, it coincides with one of the most dysfunctional moments in british politics that anyone can remember. what was your introduction to london, you arrived right in the middle of this vote this week. >> i arrived on monday night, and tuesday it was this cataclysmic vote which many were saying is the most important vote in decades in this country in parliament and i had the very extraordinary privilege because of a former journalist friend of mine who's now a member of parliament here snuck me in to the gallery of the house of

commons, they call the mother of parliament to watch the proceedings. i watched a few hours of the debate and i'm not an expert in british politics by any means but watched as an american in parliament, and it was really an extraordinary moment because for a couple of hours before the big vote that theresa may lost, there were kind of testimonies from various members about not just how they were going to vote, what was going on in their constituencies. the factory that went away, the health system that actually didn't work the way it was promised, the kind of dreams of social mobility that people had been promised that hadn't quite panned out. and some swerved towards that's why i want to stay in the eu. the conclusions were varied but i felt this strange kinship with these tales of pain because they reminded me so much of of course of the pain in my country, the united states. >> and of course your book, winners take all is about the

united states. you're not really writing about the rest of the world but here you are seeing it firsthand and you talk about the poignant testimonies of the mps, but also i think you mentioned, you know, the less than stellar reactions from the political leaders, right, i mean, you were not too impressed by theresa may and her counter part, the leader of the opposition, jeremy corbin. >> and to be very clear, i'm not very impressed by the current leadership of the united states either but it was fascinating. you have these tales of whoe an suffering in people's lives, and you here -- hear jeremy corbin, and each trying to be the avatar. and you feel like the -- it's same in the united states. people who feel afraid of the

future, who feel mocked by the future, who they don't know who they can be in the world that is coming, how to make choices that would have foreseeable outcomes, how to plan their lives for their children, and your heart goes out to those people, whichever way they vote, but that kind of moment, that kind of pain, that kind of fear requires leadership to speak to those people, to connect to those people and then lead their anger, channel their anger and pain in directions to lead to the kinds of policies that will actually fix that. instead, what is offered by donald trump in the united states and i fear what is offered here by the brexit is a dream at punching out at polish people, and it struck me watching the debate in the commons that while the government of the united states is currently shut down because of a fantasy of a wall to keep out an outside world that is in my view falsely blamed for creating the miseries of people in the united states, here there's a dream of turning the

english channel into a sea wall that will keep out something else. >> and i've actually quoted you on that because i think it is very very visual and very relatable to people here and in the united states watching this program, but you also say that you feel governments have been captured in a way, that we have to get pack to real, as you said, leadership and real politics, which is the only way to actually change the system. to that end, after you saw that vote, her plan was overwhelmingly defeated, but she herself in the last 48 hours has survived a vote of no confidence in the government, and yet still this unedifying back and forth between the two big leaders, the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, i want to play a snippet of what their latest chat to each other looks like. >> i have just held constructive meetings with the leader of the liberal democrat and to the westminster leaders of the snp. i am disappointed that the leader of the labor party has

not so far chosen to take part. but our door remains open. >> last night, offer of talks with party leaders turned out to be simply a stunt. not a serious attempt to engage with a new reality that is needed. >> so they still have not, either one of them, notwithstandinged to convince me that they are putting company above personal politics or party politics, and i think you agree, despite your condemnation of so many aspects of the political system and the elite system, that it will only be government that can structurally change people's lives and the lives of those people who are hurting. >> you know, brexit, like donald trump and the wall and the shut down, all of these things, are downstream problems. they are the end of a story of approxima problems that we have been having in these societies for decades that too many people,

particularly the winners of our age ignored until they became the level of brexit donald trump, until they became earthquakes that actually cracked their own houses. you know, when he said rebuilding britain for the many, not the few, and that slogan, that's getting closer to the reality of this story. for decades, the world of global sa ization, the world you spent so long covering, globization, trade, the digital revolution that has transformed so much, the area of extraordinary innovation we have lived in has been working for a tiny minority of people and the reality is that the very few have monopolized the fruits of progress. there's a difference between the word innovation and progress. innovation means new stuff. progress has to do with most people's lives getting better and if you walk down the streets in most small towns in britain or the united states, most people tell you while it has been an age or extraordinary

innovation, their lives haven't gotten measurely better. their face in the future hasn't gotten better. the unmistakable truth of it that is uncomfortable for many of us to face is that the people who run these companies, the people who are meeting next week in davos for the big family reunion of the political elite have fought for and built and maintained systems of taxation, labor, the rules of the game that all but assure that they would be the only people to benefit from this future. they would be able to build monopolies and capture most of the gain. 82% of the new wealth in 2017 went to the global 1%. it is no accident that people are angry. that's the upstream problem, and then downstream you end up with brexit, with shut downs, with donald trump, and so i think the people who feel most exciting to me politically in this time, are people are people who solved the

up stream problem, solving the up stream problem of opportunity and people's face in the future. >> i'm going to dig into the new generation of people being elected particularly in the u.s. first i want to ask you this, you know, you just sort of given me in a nutshell the thesis of your group, winners take all, the elite and all the rest of it, but i wonder, you are indian board, your family are indian imdprani immigrants to the united states and globalization did actually work for people in india and in china and in asia, and in africa, and it changed and lifted hundreds and in brazil and elsewhere, i mean, hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. so it's really tough to beat up on globalization because how do you define or differentiate then between actually the good that it's done, and this other aspect that we're seeing mostly in our western democracies. >> this is my third book. my first book was called india

calling and it was all about the extraordinary period of growth and progress in india in 2000s and the complications of it. i think the truth is s most of the positive numbers of people coming out of poverty in the last generation, come out of india and china as you say, but it's a more complicated story than just they did capitalism, they did globalization, and good things happened. you know, those countries led in markets in this period, but the story of india and china, there's also a lot of government action in that same period. you know, india did the largest affirmative action program in the history of the world, in the very same period through past quotas and government jobs and university education in the same period that it opened the markets, so it's a triumph of opportunity in india a story of government action or a story of capitalism. >> does it matter? couldn't both work together? >> i think the stories of india and china unfortunately are once

in a lifetime stories. they both had a lot of policy failures for the 80s and 90s and they reversed some of those decisions. i just don't think they vindicate some easy thesis of history inevitably getting better that the kind steven pinker and others have been spreading, so yes, there's been a lot of good things happening in those places, but unfortunately it doesn't redeem the fact that britain, a country that matters a lot to the stability of the world, the united states, a country that matters supremely to the stability of the world are in a really bad way and that in many western countries, majorities of people, essentially feel mocked by the future. and i think if you were actually living in india and china, your world is less stable when that is true in america and britain. >> so what is the solution for the future? how do you make politics sexy again so that you get people to believe in government and come

out and vote and actually put these demands for structural change where it counts and that's on the ballot box and victory. >> i think the answer to a winners take all world is a world in which winners takeless, and the only way to do that is not by asking mark zuckerberg to be a nicer guy. it's politics. >> mark zuckerberg, not to be a nicer guy, not to put that money into the schools which actually didn't work in new jersey. >> let's talk about mark zuckerberg for a second because he, if you had to pick one person who represents this problem, mark zuckerberg owns arguably the most, the biggest and most dangerous monopoly in our time. >> i'm just letting you say dangerous actually because it's a pretty provocative word and yet it has been blamed with messing around with our democracy, perpetrating fake news, lies, and all sorts of interference. al, steel, things like that, at railroads. i would argue someone with an

algorithm that reaches into 2 billion people's brains at the same time and is the platform for political discussions, for most political discussion for in people makes the carnegies and rockefellers look impotent by comparison. this is a pair that we have actually never seen before in the world. it actually doesn't fall under antitrust laws as we have written them in the past. >> should it? >> absolutely. one of the most urgent things the united states needs to do, europe's a little ahead on this, is rewrite anti-trust laws to cover these countries. mark zuckerberg has this monopoly, as you suggested, mark zuckerberg has also been, you know, i think very credibly accused of compromising american democracy in his refusal, rejection, resistance of journalist scrutiny, and certainly of regulators scrutiny, lawmakers scrutiny, and then turns him around and says i'm giving away all my money to charity. i'm going to get rid of all

diseases. like as if the entire medical profession before him, they were all, they had no idea what they were doing but he, a tech guy, he's going to get rid of all the diseases because they're all idiots. it turns out we don't need mark zuckerberg to get rid of the diseases or fix education, we actually just need him to not do the things he did. >> do which thing? >> compromise american democracy for the sake of his greed and power lust. >> if he changed his business model, with the ads. >> not threatening journalists when they investigate you. the reality is, mark zuckerberg may have 50, 60, if silicone life elongation happens, 100, 150 years left on the planet, who knows. i doubt there's fill lphilanthr that would make up for what he has done to the world. i will tell you there are people who work at the company that speak to me privately that are just as angry what has been done

with their work product and in their name. 2018, there's a whole new set of elections, including the midterms in the united states and the people spoke. the house of representatives which more or less represents the united states flipped, and one of the most iconic members of this new wave is alexandria ocasio-cortez. 29 years old, very little, if any, experience in politics before and she won. here's what she said about why she won. >> we won because we organized. we won because i think we had a very clear winning message, and we took that message to doors that had never been knocked on before. we spoke to communities that had typical been, i think, dismissed, and they responded. you know, when people feel like they are being spoken directly to, i do feel like they are willing, they will do things like turn out for your midterm primary. >> which of course, they did, and she, again, out of nowhere has sort of started to define the political dialogue in the united states. you know more about it.

can her presence be game changing? >> i think it is. and i think it's worth talking about why because i think, you know, she has a particular ideological point of view that some of your viewers will share and some won't. and i think that's part of the package that she represents, but i think another part of the package she represents is more a political style and a way of engaging with people, and the kind of attitude to money and politics, and the people versus power, that actually has nothing to do with the ideology necessarily. you could imagine actually people of different views still running the kind of different campaign that she ran. and the kind of campaign she ran was independent of big money, as you said, centered on organizing. it represented this hybrid between community organizing and this new sphere, her organization was justice democrats, but recruit candidates in the resources, connect them to network, and but

i think part of what she has done in office, it's been a few weeks, let's remember, is change the conversation, which in our social media age is a really important skill. people love to minimize her, and she's a 29-year-old woman of color. u know what, she has managed e to explain to the american public concepts like marginal tax rates that i'm not sure anybody has actually tried to explain in my lifetime watching politics. and she's used instagram and twitter to do it, and you want to laugh at her as many people do, she is changing poll numbers and saying, whoa, so you king actually want to tax the income i might make one day if i make more than $10 million and you actually only want to tax that part of my income that is above 10 million, i'm not threatened by that the way i might be led to be threatened by that. and so she is changing the conversation and what should be

inspiring, regardless of your ideology, and regardless of what country you're in, is that it hasn't taken a lot. it was a pretty small movement that helped her run, that became a big popular movement, but it wasn't some big fancy well-funded organization, and she is one member of congress. she has been there a couple of weeks. she's changing the whole democratic party. >> how? >> because she is creating an attractive standard of ideas. she's literally too young to run for president but now people 20 years older than her who are entering the race who have been at this way longer than her are actually being forced to say, okay, she has laid out three things, for or against. >> so the litmus test in other words. >> there's still okay answers on both sides, but she is driving the agenda, and part of what we learned from donald trump, although he in my view has only used it to hurt people and demean institutions, is that in this age of twitter and social media, there's a tremendous

power in the ability to connect with people directly the way radio was a very powerful way to connect with people in fdr's time, and tv really gave kennedy an edge over nixon. social media is the tool of the time, and there's a reoccurring lesson throughout history that powerful political leaders are people who master whatever the particular new tools of their age are, and she is showing that you can actually speak to some of that same anger and angst that donald trump spoke to, that corbin is speaking to that the brexit people spoke to that is happening in many countries. >> and the far right is speaking to all over europe. >> you can speak to it and lead it to the kinds of policies that might make people's lives better. you can use it to help people punch up at the people who actually stole the future from them, instead of punch out at imaginary enemies from foreign countries. >> you used the word movement, and i wonder where you come down

on sort of creating momentum, because you do, you are quite critical about philanthropists and the rest because you think the whole game is rigged and that it's just sort of a drop in the ocean that they do, which actually it is because it's only government and big structural change that will change the playing field and level it, but tell me about movements. how do you force governments, in other words, to respond? >> i mean, having spent the last few months, spending a lot of time with people talking about the book and talking about the biggest question on everybody's mind, which is how do we actually make change. if mark zuckerberg is not going to lead us to the promised land, if donald trump is not going to lead us to the promised land, if jeremy corbin doesn't inspire us the way we might hope, how do we make change. and i think movement is probably the most important word in that vocabulary. i think one of the things i write about in the book is the story that a lot of young people have been told about how you ma

change in this age defined by the entrepreneur and the story is if you see a problem, start an ice cream company that gives back, start a social enterprise, start a double bottom line fund at a bank, and at a lot of my book events a lot of older people, particularly women in their 70s and 80s will come up to me and say what happened to my children and grandchildren's uni understanding of change. in my generation, when we saw a problem, we got on a bus and registered people to vote in mississippi. why do these people think shoes are going to work. right? i think we sometimes don't realize in our age, how much the idea of change itself has been hijacked and watered down. >> the idea of politics and voting and getting out and doing what these 70, 80-year-olds are telling you they did. >> and i think what they're telling us is movements. when they saw problems, they built movements. how did women get the right to

vote, movements, they founded organizations with official names, they organized people, got people on mailing lists. the history of any important change in most of our countries and in almost no case, i would assure you was the engine of that change some very privileged person throwing scraps from the top of the mountain. it was people organizing and being more powerful than the people in the castle. >> talking about very powerful people and the elite, the people who are probably the target of your book, it's davos next week. >> yes, and the good and the great and the rich and well healed will be there. are you going? >> i am not. >> is that a surprise? you don't want to peddle your book there? >> as very viewers may understand, i am not. i think davos should end. it's a family reunion for the people who in my view broke the modern world. it is a family reunion of the people who monopolized the

future, who designed a world that would only work for them. of the tech sector that built all these amazing tools and promised they would emancipate the world, and in fact built monopolies, compromised democracy and created new spaces for women to be harassed because they weren't enough already apparently. it's the reunion of financial companies that caused the greatest financial crisis 11 years ago and have been the only people really and rich friends to recover fully from the financial crisis. it is the reunion of a kind of elite that has sold us on the story that win win social change, social change pursued through markets and through capitalism and through, you know, buying more stuff is the way we make change and i think what many of the folks who will be in davos probably, if they

don't heed my call to cancel it, need to understand is that i think the world is shifting fairly rapidly. that may not seem obvious now, to a new paradigm in which the aspirations of regular people are put back at the center of our political life. >> and i'm not an economist but people might look at this and listen to this and say, you know what, are you trashing capitalism? are you trashing the market, and if so, don't you remember that there was a massive fight between communism, soviet union, and capitalism and capitalism won. the people have chosen, the people have spoken. >> i don't think this is a conversation about communism versus capitalism. you know, the reality is, which i think people in the united states in particular love to deny is that there are as many capitalisms out there as there are baskin robyns flavors.

germany, norway, britain has capitalism, china has capitalism, mexico has capitalism, the united states has capitalism. no one is perfect. you can like the norwegians, they have relatively homogeneous countries that can be easier managed. the united states does a great job of having entrepreneurs, right, so other countries can learn from whatever we do to create a situation in which people start businesses a lot. great. germany does a great job of having corporate boards that actually factor in other stake holders, like labor and the community and the environment, putting them on the board so we hear the concerns of the community upstream instead of when they vote for horrible things ten years later. that's an interesting idea, we can borrow that, and even people like ocasio-cortez, elizabeth warren, jeremy corbin and others, none of them are pushing for a world in which there are no companies.

none are pushing for a world where your iphone is made by the government, none are pushing for a world in which people can't start enterprises, none of them. i'm not sure who in the political world today in any serious capacity is calling for that. all they are calling for is a world actually in which regular people can have a dream, study something, get into the job market, get a job, have a house, make a life for their children, and maybe realize some of what they hoped for in their youth and that is not anti-capitalist, it's actually humanist. >> anand giridharadas thank you very much indeed. >> thank you. clearly this is one of the most important issues for government and people to figure out. and turning now to one of hollywood's most recognizable villains, you might remember the danish actor, mads mikkelsen from james bond's casino royal, hannibal, dr. strange, but his latest movie arctic sees him all alone as one of the few

survivors of a plane crash trying to make it out alive. i spoke to mihim about what it'e to shoot in one of the harshest conditions, and if he feels he's being typecast, and coming late to the program. mads mikkelsen, welcome to the program. >> thank you for having me. >> this film arctic is really grueling. you look like you went through a really grueling process, either in preparation or during the shooting. tell me what it took to actually play that role. >> well, a lot of painkillers for starters. it was as brutal as it looks. we were nominated to shoot for 30 days and we had a lot of prep as well, but we ended up shooting for 19 days due to the weather conditions. so a long day, cold. >> and it was in iceland, correct? >> it was in iceland, and you know what they say there, if you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes and so that's

what we were stuck with. >> i'm going to play just a little clip. it shows sort of the length of time it took you to do anything, whether it was walking, whether it was digging, just a little clip and then we'll have you talk about . >> so there you were making this massive sos hoping to be rescued and it is obviously about a lone survivor trying to survive in this arctic condition. you lost weight, right? how did your physical self

change during those 19 days of shooting? >> it wasn't planned. the character i play was not prepared to crash land on the ice and neither was i, so we kind of just, you know, dumped me there and we went scouting. during the scouting i think i lost about 14 pounds and i never gained them again. it was just something that happened. >> and what about the idea of your character, never being named in the film, you see the name in the credit, but it's almost kind of not developed in that particular way, and yet it's you and the arctic and the tundra. i mean, your costar are the elements. describe what it's like actually playing that kind of a role with no costars practically. >> one of the things i fell in love with was the fact that we didn't know anything about his background and his past, i was a little afraid that they would fall into the trap of going down memory lane, have some flash

backs. we really wanted it to be you and me, anyone stranded on the ice, we know nothing about the guy, and wanted to identify with this character. >> is it weird to or intimidating or in any way sort of massively stretching just to be an actor with the nature as your costar? >> yeah, it's brutal. one of the biggest tools as an actor is obviously words, language, and then we took that away from me but eventually, there is a second person popping up in the film, and that was like the happiest day in my career, finally i have someone to bounce the ball off again. >> of course, one of the articles says that yet there was a sense of rapt desperation which consumed the viewer, your face and your gestures had to do everything because you basically uttered very few words. >> yeah, that's what we were dealing with. i'm a huge fan of the old silent

movies. i'm a huge fan of buster keeten. i think it's amazing what you can do with an expression, the tinie tiniest smile on his face is opening up the sky, and we have to stick with them. >> the director, joe penna, this is his first major film, before a bit of a you tube star, and you can see how he's filmed it in a gritty, realistic, no frills way. what was it like working with him? >> it was a blast. it's not the first time i have worked with a first time director. they seem to be extremely radical and this is their film, their dream and they are ready to go all the way to fulfill what they want. the script was very radical and the way he insisted on making i

language identity. what do you mean by that? >> i guess i'm fine sitting here and having an identity. you play two characters when you play a character. you play the character and me mads, speaking english and they have to morph together before you're completely free. they are still looking for that. i feel free in the language, there's an identity that's not the same as my danish identity. i'm searching for that until i'm 90. >> you have obviously been in one of the big english language block busters, that's of course james bond, the villain in casino royale. i'm going to play a little clip of that. >> i'm all in. it's up to you mr. bond. i have to go to call his bluff.

>> call. >> call. >> full house. kings and aces. >> you know, it's been said, and you can see it clearly in that clip that your facial gestures, your aside, like oops, are beautifully sort of villainous. did you like playing villains, for instance, the series hannibal, i know it's been discontinued, but it was very very critically acclaimed and, you know, people loved it, and who knows, it may come back. it may be made into a movie. what is it about the villain that attracts you? >> i don't know. i don't think it's only attracting me. i think it attracts the

audience. there's a reason why we have so many fantastic villains throughout movie history. i always say that five minutes after we invented god, we invented satan. we somehow needed that balance, and we've always been curious what's on the other side of the moon. it's fascinating. it's the part of our inner life that we don't deal with every day, and when we see it on the big screen, we kind of get relieved. >> and i guess i want to ask you also because i have asked quite a lot of people who i am interviewing these days, about masculinity, and of course, you know, about the me too movement and femininity when we talk feminism when i talk to women. >> you're going down that path. >> i am. >> let's do it. >> so i guess, masculinity, do you feel, because you do play these very masculine roles, these very sort of, whether they're villains, hunks, endurance travelers, like in

arctic, what would you say about masculinity today and how men are expressing themselves and roles that are coming up for men? >> well, this is a long discussion but first of all i like that you say masculinity, and you don't start out saying toxic masculinity, because those are two very different things. i'm a man, and i tend to, you know, lean up against things i recognize, so i guess it becomes masculinity to a degree, and a lot of women tend to be fem feminine, so i think that we're having a healthy debate about these things these days but we also have to realize we are different and we should embrace it. >> so describe, well, fill in those blanks a little bit because i can see you were glad that i didn't use the word toxic and of course that's one of the phrases a lot of people are using right now. do you feel boxed in or do you feel burdened by the momentum

from the me too movement and times up and all the rest of it? >> no, no, no. not at all. let's get one thing straight here. obviously people are doing something illegal has to be caught and people are really just behaving like idiots. that's not what we're dealing with. i don't feel there's a big wave pushing any agenda. it's a healthy discussion but we have to weigh it. we can't just scream guilty before we've seen any proof. >> which of course leads me to, you know, the next work that i want to discuss which was called the hunt. you won best actor at cann, and your character was wrongly accused of child abuse. you are on the opposite side of this issue. how did it feel to adopt that mind set? i mean, i think you were closer

to saying it was if you scream loud, you're guilty, if you shut up, you're guilty. >> we're dealing with children which is a very very emotional thing. they mean everything to us. if this guy was accused of being a bank robber, there might have been a couple of high fives when he was, you know, when he was acquitted, right. but here the claim will always stick to him, and that's enough to not have life. >> how did you feel playing that role? >> it was brutal. it was a lonely part, just like arctic, i felt lonely. i had a couple colleagues to bounce with but when we shot the film, he was a lost man. he was a very lonely person. >> so your next project is called paula, it's got -- polar, it's got a similar name to arctic, but it's nothing like that. how do you move from the block

busters that we have talked about to the indy things. >> it's kind of easy, i take it plain and start working. i have been very fortunate my whole life that i have done my small budget films in europe, and then i've been invited over here to america and done some bigger things. i love going back and forth, and hopefully i can continue doing that. >> and just quickly a little bit about your own sort of career and coming to acting. i think you were 30 when you came into actual acting. you had already been in the performing arts. tell me what you were doing before and some people say it's late to come to acting. i don't know whether you think it is but what was the transition about? >> it's perfect for me. i was a gymnastic, and we did a couple of dance moves. the choreographer wanted to know if i wanted to learn the craft, so i was a professional dancer

for ten years and i got in love with the drama of dancing and i applied for a drama school and i got in, and i became an actor. >> and that's it? >> that was it. that's the short version, yes. >> mads mikkelsen, thank you so much for joining me. >> thanks for having me. so as mikkelsen recflects o his character's loneliness, our next guest tackles head on, that can leave women socially isolated. lindy west tackles other issues as well including a woman's right to choose. as "new york times" op-ed writer. to add another notch in her belt, her memoir turned tv series shrill is hitting screens this march on hulu and she tells our alicia menendez why so many women's issues are still kr considered taboo. >> lindy, thank you so much for

joining us. >> thank you for having me. >> what is shout your abortion. >> it is a movement i cofounded in 2015 with a friend of mine named amelia bonow. we were just sitting around talking about what can we do to counter act the planned parenthood sells baby parts craze that was going on at the time and sort of called to defund planned parenthood and all of the propaganda and these really malicious bulk narratives that were out there about what planned parenthood does and about what abortion is, and what people who have abortions are like. and you know, we were just like, what can we do, should we have a, i don't know, a story telling night or some, you know, event where we all get together and talk at abortion. what we ended up doing was just putting our abortion stories on social media and it actually was like an instant reaction all over the world.

like so, amelia started by writing on facebook i had an abortion at the planned parenthood on madison street in seattle, and it's an experience that i remember with nothing but gratitude, basically. and she says we're supposed to believe that people who have abortions are to some degree bad people, and i'm a good person and my abortion made me happy in a totally unqualified way because why would i not be happy that i was not forced to become a mother, and i was like, that is amazing, and so i put it on twitter, i added shout your abortion, and then i tweeted my own story. >> was that liberating? >> absolutely. yeah. i hadn't talked about it in public. it was a significant moment in my life, but also not. you know, it was like not traumatic. it was just sort of i was in a bad relationship. i was young, not having a child

with this person. and i didn't think about it that much, but that kind of made it more significant almost. you know, why am i feeling like i can't talk about this thing that's not even a big deal to me. there will be many people who watch this interview and are deeply uncomfortable with the fact that you are speaking about abortion in such a casual way. is that part of the point? >> i mean, kind of. it's not supposed to be flippant. you know, i just said it wasn't a big deal. it was a big deal in certain ways and in certain ways it wasn't. it's just a part of my life, and it's a part of a lot of people's lives. one in four people who get pregnant will have an abortion at some point, and that's a huge number, and so people, a lot of people find it jarring. people assume that shout means that we're bragging, i hear a lot, that people are bragging about our abortions or we're celebrating our abortions, having abortion parties, whatever that means.

and shout just means the opposite of a whisper. you know, we have been sort of conditioned to believe in this anti-abortion stigma that is really a construct of the evangelical right. >> and now shout your abortion is a book. >> yes. so my dear friend amelia bonow who cofounded the movement with me, she thinks 2015 has really picked it up and turned it into like a full-fledged organization, and their latest project is this book, "shout your abortion", which is an an tho of people's art work, and we have pre-roe abortion stories, stories from religious people, stories from people who have children and chose to have an abortion, people who had to terminate wanted pregnancies.

it's a really, like, beautiful nuanced, you know, portrait of how complex and how important this issue is. >> do you think any part of it comes from the fact that the constitutional logic behind a woman's right to choose ends up coming down to privacy, and statement you're using the word shout? >> the fact is that we do have the right to medical privacy and it's not being respected and so if being quiet and not talking about this thing and caving to the stigma which sort of tacitly endorses and validates the stigma, if i'm afraid to talk about it, maybe there must be a good reason. you know, that's not necessarily been politically effective. you can't really advocate for something that you can't say out loud and that's fine if it's not under attack. if the constitutional right is under attack we have to be able to talk about the reality of abortion and the reality of abortion is that people are having abortions all the time,

they always have and they always will, and all we can control is whether or not people have access to abortion and have access to safe abortions you know, i wish i got to exercise my right to privacy and i didn't have to open my personal life to the world. i would love that. i would love for when we talk about sexual assault that victims didn't have to come forward and give the world every lurid detail of the worst thing that ever happened to them in order to be believed which is what we demand people do. if you don't give enough details, people think you're lying. >> one of the things we have seen in the last year is the take down of various men. i can think of one woman alleged of sexual assault, and then a very quick conversation about rehabilitation that follows. >> immediately. >> i do wonder, though at what point there's room for a

conversation about restorative justice and if restorative justice applies in this framework? >> absolutely. of course. i mean, i just think that obviously that's a really important conversation to have. it just doesn't feel like we ever really finished the first conversation about people who are actively being harmed, who are not being believed. whose lives are being ruined and lives are being ruined in subtle ways, workplace harassment cases, it's not necessarily that, like, oh, my boss sexual assaulted me and then i was fired. it's often like a lot subtler tan that, it's like i was uncomfortable in a situation, i was made uncomfortable for a long period of time and eventually i left the industry and never grew to my it full potential, and we will never know what happened to, i mean, we will never know how many of those people there are, and there's this massive wealth of talent and power that's being lost and what that does is

consolidate power among men. you know, disproportionately. >> do you think american society has the language to unpack that distinction? >> american society is very big and complicated. some people have the language to unpack that distinction and a lot of people don't and it's hard. like, it's painful. it's a painful thing to delve into. because, i mean, when me too was like really going, you start to discover that people you really love have done really horrible things, and i understand the sort of instinct to bury it and make it okay. honestly, i understand. i mean, and you have to push through that, and you have to do what's right, and you have to let go of people that you love or at least, you know, enforce consequences against those

people. if you want to really live your values and you want to build a safer world for your kids. >> that has been another point of contention which is when accusations are made against a man very often, one of the first things we see is a letter or public statement of support from all of the women in his life, professional, personal, and it has put women in this precarious situation of saying this is not the person as i understand them to be. >> yeah, just like don't find one of those letters. even if, i don't know, it seems like a bad idea to sign one of those letters. if you really, i don't mean this as an excuse or as an apology, but these kind of gender die m dynamics are really deeply built into our culture, and it really, you know, has been normal for

men to chase and bother women until they finally relent, you know what i mean, and consent to sex or whatever. that was the model for a long time. and so there are a lot of men who i think, i mean, to be really charitable, didn't know that they were violating someone's boundaries necessarily. i don't know if i really want to say that or if i really believe that, but to be charitable, maybe there are people who didn't realize but that's still a problem that we have to deal with, and i think trying to excuse those behaviors that might be just kind of being creepy, or being too forward or being too persistent, things that aren't maybe outright assault but are still a boundary violation, we still have to deal with those, and i think, you know, wanting to jump out and say this is a good man, this man would never do this, is

hindering that progress. i don't know. >> founder of the me too movement recently said that the movement has become unrecognizable to her. she said suddenly a movement to center survivors of sexual violence is being talked about as a vindictive plot against men. >> sure. yeah. i mean, people are desperate to squirm out of accountability. it's not even a new part of the sexual assault discourse model, you know, i mean, even just forever. when just anyone accuses someone of rape, discrediting the accuser is like part of the trial. it's like the lawyer's job. so of course that happens on a large scale and when we have this massive reckoning, we have this sort of institutional voice framing it that way and saying, no, no, no, this is just women being vindictive and trying to

ruin men, and of course, you know, the situation want to perpetuate itself and men hold a disproportionate amount of power, and we have seen, you know, from powerful men fall to the sort of ground swell of energy that me too has brought into the discourse and that's scary for powerful men. because, like i said, a lot of stuff was normal for a long time and it was the way that people operated. >> you just wrapped your new show, filmed a movie. >> yes. >> and somehow you have a new book that you are also working on. what is it about? >> it's a collection of essays about our current cultural and political moments. sort of looking at how we got here. specifically i'm trying to delve into the way that americans especially love to believe lies

about ourselves. and we live in this sort of cocoon of fantasy. the real fundamentals of this country, the fact that we live on stolen land, the fact that we live in a nation built by slaves, that white generational wealth comes from slavery, there are these like really dark realities. just in the dna of this country that we don't look at because it's more comfortable to believe that we did it, you know, like that we're the land of the free and we're like plucky, adventurers, and you know, reality is much more complicated and much scarier to reckon with, and so it's called the witches are coming, which is sort of a me too reference because i think things like me too, things like shout your abortions, these are outbursts of truth. these are people telling the truth about what's happened to

them that they have been told to keep quiet and they have been told to participate in this sort of fictional counter narrative where we're all happy, we're all working together, we're all equal, we're all being taken care of, which is just not true so it's sort of about delving into those fantasies and also taking a look at these movements that are trying to counter them, and how and what happens in that friction. >> lindy, thank you so much. >> thank you so much for having me. >>. outposts of truth, lindy west on how to advance the me too conversation and that's it for our program tonight. thank you for watching "amanpour and company" on pbs, and join us again next time. uni world is a proud sponsor of "amanpour and company."

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tonight on questioned newsroom, four weeks and counting. we'll look at how the longest shutdown in the nation's history is facting californians. also utility giant pg & e is planning to file for bankruptcy what it means for customers, clean energy goals and victims of wildfires. hello and welcome to newsroom. i'm thuy vu. on wednesday nancy pelosi asked the president to delay his state of the union. she said without reopening the government there would be security