It is now my great pleasure to introduce our guest tonight, chris hedges. Hes a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has reported on wars and insurgencies in central the persian gulf and the balkans. He became, the New York Times middle east bureau chief in 1991, and then the Balkan Bureau chief for the times in 1995. And because war is our topic tonight, its worth saying that chris has been held captive, has experienced the full force of war firsthand. What maybe fewer people know is that he is also an ordained presbyterian minister who, for many years now has been teaching inmates in new jersey prisons and who works tirelessly, tirelessly on behalf of those inmates in and when they are released released. His recent book, our class and transformation in an american prison, which you can see in the back there, comes out of that experience. Chris is the author of, many other bestselling and often prescient books. These include american fascists, the christian right and the war on america america, the farewell tour and death of the liberal class and of illusion. The end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle. But the book that most with war, the greatest evil, which is bringing us together tonight in which we will hear about and talk talk about is war is a force that gives us meaning from 2002. I urge you to read these two books together the central tenants are summed up in their titles and each contains the other as its premise. If nothing can morally redeem the fact that, war divides the world into lives that matter and lives that dont, where also creates deep bonds among those fighting it. It simplifies, simplifies and elevates their sense of purpose and violence has the perverse power to intoxicate chris. His new book is, vehement and unequivocal in its condemnation of the military Industrial Complex and those who profit by it and money and power he tells the story of the suffering inflicts on its victims. Those victims include all those who fight the wars and are broken in body and spirit by them. And he does this often in their own or their loved ones words all the while, the book is backlit by. The knowledge that, as chris writes and i quote, the line between, good and evil runs through all hearts. Please help me welcome hedges to love and. Thank you, daughter and i always. Have to acknowledge behalf of my students that the 1000 book library in East Jersey State Prison is a gift from labyrinth. Cliff. Let me ransack the and hopefully the d. O. C. Isnt watching tonight. I didnt actually have permission to bring the in. I would load them in boxes and go to the mailroom dressed like this and wax. If the corrections officer didnt have the appropriate letter. And prisons are so confusing we just got them in box by box when the last box got in, i told my students, well, good news is i have now got you a research library. The bad news is i picked out every book myself myself. A lot of noam chomsky. I did not want to write another book on war writing war, a force that gives us meaning, which was drawn out of my own experiences. A war correspondent for 20 years, five years in el salvador, seven years in the middle east. I covered war in sarajevo and kosovo and then of conflicts in between war and sudan. I was with the spla in the southern sudan, i six weeks in the punjab at the height of the fighting, the the civil war in algeria, civil war in yemen. I was in the south on the losing side and were certainly days when i couldnt write at all. I was just overcome emotionally. It wasnt cathartic. It wasnt. I still to this day, cannot reread the book but i felt that given the familiarity with and the peculiar subculture of war, i had a response ability to set it down. The book was published by public affairs, a small publisher, the advance was rather modest. 25,000, and we didnt expect to sell. It exploded hit that particular zeitgeist with the inception of the war in iraq, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and then other publishers came to me since its all marketing to have me propose writing other books on war which i refuse and i didnt want to be ghettoized as a writer but i also didnt want to dilute what i wrote over the last 20 years. I did write about war, but not my own wars. I wrote about other peoples wars. I did a book immediately after war as a force modeled on an anti war book published at the end of world war one by harold shapiro. He was a lawyer who represents every grievously world war one veteran. And as investigated, what happened the war, he realized that the American Public had no conception of what trench life and trench warfare was actually like. So he published this book called what every young man know about war in 1937, it was used army documents and studies to talk about what happened if you were gassed, this kind of stuff at the inception of world war one fearing that would perhaps affect recruitment. He withdrew book from circulation was never republished i had to get my copy from the library of congress and i did an updated version that the military is very good about itself. Those studies often not very easy to get. But i hired team of graduates students from columbia at the of journalism and published that book. I fought the price to 11. I wanted to get in the hands of kids who probably wouldnt read. War is a force that gives us meaning and i did that by giving away the royalties or surrendering the royalties and it is used this day in anti recruitment tables by quakers is its intent at the inception of the war in, iraq all nationalism and i first encountered the disease of nationalism, the poison of nationalism when i was in buenos aries covering the falkland war from buenos aires, not from the falklands National Public radio. So i was in argentina before, they invaded the falklands or last, and the military junta was utterly discredited and loathed, about to collapse. I was a giant demonstration that shut down the center of buenos. Indeed, i was the i and the other protesters were enveloped in clouds of cease gas, which is extremely unpleasant. Only were we blinded. But your skin feels like its burning the the argentine had blocked off the ends of the streets and were charging the crowd on horseback. People were actually dropping from the windows above on of the police and. And then suddenly we wake up and last, maybe innocent argentinas and it was not a word i permit myself use in my writing but it was kafkaesque in the sense that poison of nationalism just was ingested by the entire society. The flags came out they literally were pulling leaders of the protest, labor leaders were badly, so badly beaten. Their faces were bruised and bloodied to go on the television and repeat this mantra of last mal being a song argentinas. And that was the lesson of nationalism. What is nationalism at its core about self exaltation and the flipside of nationalism, of course, is racism and, bigotry. And it is a disease as great writers Randolph Bourne and many others have chronicled this is why born, of course, calls war the health of the state. And so i just read adam hawke shields book on an the american midnight, that whole period where wilson uses espionage act and the sedition act that very few there were very few german spies actually actually caught. But of course was ruthlessly used to shut down the left. Eugene debs the socialists, the iww, the wobblies and of course its now been used extensively courtesy of the Obama Administration against whistleblowers. And then courtesy of the Trump Administration action against, i think, the most courageous journalist of our era, julian assange. So national ism is a and a very dark elixir. And, and the of iraq of course i watched it raise its head in american and and reacted by working on a long investigative piece for the nation with the reporter leila alarian, where we interviewed 50 combat veterans from iraq who had either participated in or witnessed atrocities and and put together this book, collateral damage, which was largely ignored by the media, but received wide publicity in europe with many european newspapers running, large extracts from it. So over the last 20 years, i go back and revisit my own experiences in war. Those are something i prefer not to resurrect, but i did do many interviews, people about their own wars and once again, especially after the 20 year debacle in the middle, suddenly ukraine was used quite effectively as a way to restore the the the myth of american virtue. American prowess and goodness and of course, raised the familiar bile within me. And i wrote a few columns about it i was in Eastern Europe in 1989. I covered the revolution in east germany, czechoslovakia. It was in the Magic Lantern theater in prague every with vaclav havel and then romania, the fall of ceausescu. And so i was acutely aware as a reporter of the promises that had been made to gorbachev not to extend beyond the borders of a unified germany. Indeed, we we all, i think naively thought that we would finally see the peace. They called it after the end of the cold war, gorbachev himself wanted to build a security and alliance with the United States and europe, something, of course, yeltsin picked up on and people forget. So did putin. In the very early years. But the arms industry and the American Military establishment was determined to make moscow an enemy. Whether they wanted to be or not. And why. I think two reasons. One, we began hear this talk of a unipolar that meant that with the end of the cold war, there was only one superpower, the United States would dominate the globe militarily and economically. The hubris of empire, they felt they could do anything they wanted, and if they wanted to extend naito up to the borders of russia, there was nothing at this point russia could do. And then profit in order to convert soviet military equipment to be empowered. These these militaries to be compatible with naito that that meant they had to spend billions upon billions in arms for enriching. Of course, the arms manufacturers, raytheon, everyone else and those. The two primary reasons and the protest actions by moscow of which there were many were just dismissed and ignored promises were broken, i think 14 countries now we forget ukraine after 2014 when they and there were certainly u. S. Complicity there thats without question we know from a leaked phone conversation. Victoria nuland, with the ambassador, they overthrew a government in, ukraine, that was good relations with moscow and that precipitated started the conflict in ukraine thing from 2014. But its also a heavy infusion of nato equipment and in many ways ukraine became a facto narrow country along with military advisors. And so i wrote a column which is in the book called chronicle of a war foretold. Now, that does not what russia did, preemptive war under post nuremberg laws as, a criminal war of aggression was a crime but so was the invasion of iraq. And ive often said i have no problem with carting Vladimir Putin off to the hague. I just want George W Bush to be in the cell to him. That kind of double standard, which is, i think, often lost on the American Public, is not, by the way, lost on the rest the world. And when we talk about egregious acts of military abuse and occupation, we forget the palestinians and i covered the the i was in the middle east for seven years and spent much of that time in gaza. We forget the yemenis so it gets that distinction that noam chomsky and hermann makes their book manufacturing consent between worthy and unworthy victims. So, for example, i was 1984 in covering the war in el salvador and, a polish priest was killed by the communist government. And this became a kind of cause celeb for the reagan administration. And yet in el salvador we had four American Church women raped and murdered by the Salvadoran National guard. And of course, we Archbishop Oscar Romero assassinated. And later we had six jesuits who i knew, all of whom were assassinated at. The uca two main Catholic University in san salvador. And if you read the responses to in particular the murder of the church women, you have a defense of the killers by jean kirkpatrick. She was the u. N. Ambassador, alexander haig, who suggested that they probably just ran a roadblock. So, again, those victims that are worthy and those victims that are unworthy. And thats not to say that the ukrainians are not worthy. They are and not that their suffering real. I know i you know, ive been in enough war, especially covering the war in sarajevo, to know what its like to, be shelled by heavy artillery. But all victims are worthy. I think for those of us who have spent as long i have overseas the hypocrisy of selecting victims are going to celebrate and lionize and then ignoring other victims because they dont fit our political agenda is deeply disingenuous and also erodes the rule based world. To quote condoleezza rice, who should probably be the hague with the rest of them, but erodes that the the rule of law by which we can mitigate kinds of conflicts. There is a cynicism i think, to ukraine in the sense that the purpose is not essentially the ultimate purpose is to degrade russia and perhaps remove putin from power, but its going to be ukrainian. There wont be much left of ukraine as there isnt much left of afghanistan, which of course we have all forgotten about. And so i was approached to do a another book on war and initially said, no, but. I went back and looked at what had written over the last two decades and there was so much material on war that i could piece together, although its not, its there arent it . Certainly the my own experiences inform the book, but unlike war is a force that gives us meaning. Im writing about other peoples experience in war, including thomas young. Thomas young was, paralyzed in and and then. As he deteriorated was became a quadriplegic and decided to unhook his feeding tube and commit suicide. And i went and saw him in kansas and he wanted to write a last letter, bush and cheney, he couldnt hold a pen so he dictated. I wrote that his story is in the book, the expert of jess goodell, she was in the marine corps in the Mortuary Affairs unit. And so she processed the bodies of 18, 19, 20 year old marine. One of the things you see in and i went into kuwait with First Battalion first marines i actually have a kind of affection for the marines. But what i dont an affection for is the hazing, which is very common in elite units. Rangers do this kind of stuff. And if youre overweight or youre just kind of goofy or whatever, you are really mercilessly hazed and. Thats where the suicides come from. So part of job was to go in the porta johns and scrape the brains off the side where these people had put the barrel of their automatic weapon under their chin and blown their brains out. I write about a father who whose son is killed and when hes also marine when the marines come to the house to tell him that his 20 year old son has been killed in iraq. He goes to garage and gets a can of gasoline and goes out to the marines van and puts it up in a pours the gasoline and sends it up in fireball. He then around the country with coffin with a picture of his son as a kind of protest protest. I have a section the book on. On orphans and i do a long interview with a friend of mine who i just in brooklyn a couple of weeks ago who was a 14 year old in auschwitz. Orphans are her brother and her father killed in the ghetto and then on the death out, she was with her mother, who was very ill and she couldnt hold her up and her mother was executed in front of her. So it really was i think the point of this book was to show the human detritus of war, all those who are cast, those these lifelong wounds, this lifelong grief. Because war is not, as clausewitz said, politics other means. War about the destruction of all systems. Thats sustain and nurture life. Familial, economic, political, social, cultural one of the first buildings to be shelled in the war in sarajevo was the magnificent Ottoman Library in sarajevo, and and the pages of the books were floating upwards into the sky because the raging fires that were delivered, the always in war, the the the goal is you first destroy your own culture through this nationalist cant and then destroy the culture of those who are fighting against and any deviation from this nationalist can seize you instantly become a pariah. So my own opposition to the invasion of iraq was met with exactly that kind of ferocity. I even though i had been the middle east bureau chief for New York Times, even though i had spent months of my life iraq, i somebody came up to here, somebody here, and was at a talk i gave where i was heckled during that period. But it was even worse than that. The my phone bank at the New York Times, my message bank filled with Death Threats and which and there werent more because they ran out of space and there were written Death Threats. And then i was booed at everything on youtube, but i was booed off of a commencement stage in illinois at rockford college, was giving the graduation talk. And i denounce the war and and that was picked up by right wing media rush. Limbaugh denoted devoted days of this and they they lynch you they did my great friend jeremiah wright, if you remember. And they obama they select a certain just a tiny segment and then just pound it over the airwaves. Even the wall street journal, an editorial denouncing me as a left wing pacifist. Half right. I am left wing, but im not pacifist. Nobody was in sarajevo under the siege as a pacifist. Those were not discussions we had doesnt save you from the poison violence. Of course. But we knew if the broke through the trench system, there was a trench system surrounding the city. A third of the city would be slaughtered and the would be driven to displacement refugee camps. That wasnt conjecture its what happened in vukovar in the green valley and other places. And so at that point, you dont have an option. But of course that those who have a penchant for violence and an access weapons, which was especially at the beginning, the war in sarajevo, largely the criminal caste. So before i open it to questions, im just going to read the last part of the book, and i call it a coda because if id called it a prayer to frighten everyone away. I carry within me the smell of decay and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, the shrieks of children, the sound of gunfire, the deafening blasts, the fear, the stench of cordite, the humiliation comes when you surrender to terror and beg life. The long alienation, the numbness the nightmares, the lack of sleep, the inability to connect to all living things, even to those we love the most the regret, the absurdity, the waste, the futility. It is only the broken and the maimed that no war. We ask for forgiveness. We seek redemption. We carry on our backs. Awful cross of death for the essence of war is death and the weight of it digs into our shoulders and eats away at our souls we drag it through life up hills and downhills along the roads into the most intimate recesses of our lives. It never leaves us those who know us best, know there is something unspeakable in evil. Many of us harbor within us. This evil is intimate. It is personal. We do not speak its name. It is the evil of things done and things left undone. It is the evil of war. War is captured in the long vacant stares and the silence in the trembling fingers in the memories most of us keep buried within us. In the tears it is impossible to portray war narratives, even narratives make the arash rational. They make the incomprehensible, comprehensive. They make the illogical illogical they the despicable, beautiful, all words and images, all discussions, all films all of war, good or bad, are an obscenity. There is nothing to say. There are only the scars, wounds, those we carry within us. These we cannot articulate it. The horror, the horror. I wander life with the deadness of war within there is no escape there is no peace. All of us who have been war know an awful truth. Ghosts, strangers in strange land. Who are our brothers and sisters . Who is our family . Whom have we become . We have become those whom we once despised, killed. We have become the enemy. Our mother is the mother grieving her murdered child. And we murdered this child in a mud walled village, afghanistan, a sand filled cemetery in fallujah or mariupol. Our father is the father on a pallet in a hut, paralyzed by the blast from an iron fragmentation bomb. Our sister in poverty in a refugee camp outside kabul, widowed desperately poor, raising her children alone. Our brother . Yes, our brother is the taliban and the iraqi insurgent and al qaeda and the russian soldiers. And he has an automatic rifle and he kills and he is becoming us. War is always the same plague. It imparts the same deadly virus. It teaches us to deny humanity worth being and to kill and be killed. There are days i wish i was whole. I wish i could put down this cross. I envy those who their innocence believe in the innate goodness of america and the righteousness war and celebrate what we know is despicable. Sometimes it makes wish for death, for the peace of it. But i know the awful truth as James Baldwin wrote. People who shut their to reality simply invite their destruction. And anyone who on remaining in a state of long after that innocence is dead, turns himself into a monster. And i would rather maimed and broken and in pain than a monster i never be healed. I cannot promise that it will be better. I cannot impart to you the cheerful and childish that is the curse of. I can tell you to stand up to pick up your cross, to keep moving. I can only tell you that you must always defy the forces that eat away at you, at the nation. This plague war. Sometimes i feel like a motherless child. A long way from home. A long way from home. It is death. I defy. Not my own death, but the vast enterprise of death. The dark primeval lust for power and personal. The hyper masculine language of war and patriotism them used to justify the slaughter of the weak and the innocent. And mock justice. I do not use these words. We cannot flee from evil. Some of us who have been to war have tried through drink and drugs and selfdestructiveness. Evil is always with. It is because we know evil our own evil that we do not let go. Do not surrender. It is because we know evil that we resist. It is because we violence, that we are nonviolent and we know that it is not about us. War taught us that. It is about the other line by the side of the road. It is about reaching down defiance of creeds and oaths in defiance of religion and nationality. And lifting our enemy up. All acts healing and love and the defiance of war as an affirmation of love. Allow us to shout out to the vast powers of the universe that, however broken we are. We are not. However much we despair, we are not without hope. However weak we may feel. We will always, always, always resist. Thank you. Chris. Thank you for the talk and for reading that to us. Are there questions in the room . This one here. Thank you. Thank you for your talk, mr. Hedges, id like to have you comment on what do you think happened in the capital two years ago. January was that the prelude to a civil war . And do you think garland will trump responsible . Well, nobodys held trump responsible. The guy should have been impeached the first week and. There were all sorts of crimes that he committed, starting with the emoluments clause that would have justified that impeachment. The problem is the constitutional scholar bruce fein has pointed out is that for most of his impeachable offenses, the democrats have also been guilty. What happened january six . Well, i think you should read my book, american fascists the christian right in the war on america. Thats what happened on january six. The connecting tissue was this christian and i dont use the word fascist lightly. In fact, before i published that book, i spent several hours with two of our greatest scholars of fascism. Sterne, who wrote the politics cultural despair, himself a refugee from nazi germany, fled when he was. And Robert Paxton wrote anatomy of fascism, the great scholar at columbia on vichy, saying that if they could argue me out of the use of that word and, at least to my mind, they did not. In fact, stern, i dont think he ever did it publicly, but embraced it and i think because i come out of seminary and come out of the church, my father, both my parents were seminary graduates. Mother was a professor. My father was a presbyterian minister. I, of course graduated from Harvard Divinity School. I was acutely aware of how they missed , the bible to perpetuate or sacrifice the worst elements of white supremacy, imperial capitalism and and then i was also tipped off as a young seminarian by my great mentor, james luther adams, at harvard, who he was bilingual in in 1935 and 1936, was at the university of heidelberg in, germany. He dropped out and he joined niemoller and the confessing church until. He was picked up by the gestapo and expelled from the country. But he saw in and he was he called these people fascists in them a parallel, the socalled german christian church, which was pronazi and. When i wrote the book, which was about a decade, i received a lot of heat, including some professors here because they were they, i think mistakenly, were giving these christian fascists the kind of religious legitimacy that they shouldnt have. And they not calling these people out for who they were. You dont have to spend. Three years at Harvard Divinity School to figure out that jesus didnt to make us rich. But they did not want to take on that battle. And i think its one of the great failures of liberal that we didnt fight that fight when those of us who biblically literate should. So i think that, you know, i have been very of the Democratic Party for its complicity in the social inequality that has given rise to political deformities like desantis and trump and ted cruz and everyone else. And i the same similar distortions in yugoslavia. The war in yugoslavia was not caused ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic meltdown of yugoslavia which vomited up Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic and franjo turgeman the same way we vomited a trump the same way that after. 1929 in weimar you vomited up these figures around hitler their buffoonish killers and until address that social inequality, John Ralston Saul calls the corporate coup daytons slow motion that took place in the United States. Were not going to free ourselves from this march. A kind of christian fascism and unfortunately. The Democratic Party in the Biden Administration cannot themselves from corporate money, and they dont give where they give that money, they expect something back. I mean, of course, they write the legislation so that inequality goes all the way back to aristotle. I mean, aristotle said that when you social inequality of that on, the kind of scale that we now have, the only two options are tyranny or revolution. And all for revolution. But i dont i dont see the forces of revolution. I think the left been so systematically weakened. Going all the way back to wilson in the twenties but also mccarthy and theyve just been effectively in the powell of 1971 where lewis powell essentially mobilized corporate to blow back against the in terms of pushing back against the gains made in the 1960s. So were in a very precarious position. We have a question here. Chris. Is it not true that the neocons who got us into iraq are actually now behind the engineering of the current war in ukraine . Yes. And there is a chapter here called the pimps of war trying to reach out to them because of the same people i dealt with going all the way back to the wars in Central America, in particular, Elliott Abrams and robert kagan, who was working for him in the state department. And it doesnt matter how wrong they are, and we know wrong they are, because there are all these promises about implanting democracy in baghdad and emanating out across the middle east and what all of the fiascos that they have orchestrated . Theyre never held to account for number one. And number two, their platforms always secured because, of course, theyre funded by the war industry, all of their think tanks, brookings council, are awash in the money from the weapons industry. And of course, they have a lock on the media. So i you know, lets go back to the first iraq war. So i speak arabic seven years in the middle east, covered it for the New York Times. But because i didnt repeat, the care of the dominant narrative, the socalled expert, its who were trotted out. I dont they could find most countries in the middle east on a map they certainly didnt have anywhere near the experience that i had in the middle east. But that and that kind of censorship is now it doesnt matter whether. Its msnbc or fox or its wholesale. So, yes theyre the same people and theyre and know you go back and all go all the way back to the wars in Central America where their primary job was to discredit what. We were reporting on the ground. Thats what kagans was. And abrams was. Special to be polite, but thats their job and and they are beating drums of war in ukraine now i it pains me to be here and agree with Henry Kissinger but in fact he was right on ukraine this is extremely dangerous and even the New York Times wrote an editorial this idea that zelinsky is going to all of the territory in ukraine, including those parts that have the ethnic russians, is a fantasy. This is the New York Times. So they wrote an editorial, i think in may saying this. And kissinger said of it correctly that, we we cant corner and humiliate putin. Hes a major power. And there has to be it doesnt excuse what putin did because as i said before, it is a crime. But as George Kennan said of the expansion of naito that it was the greatest. It took the exact quotes in the book. It was the greatest blunder of the postcold war era and it was so there to be this war is not going to stop as long as we are pumping billions. I mean, weve given more in terms of military and economic assistance humanitarian assistance to ukraine than we spend on the state department. Over 60 billion. And and where does it end and whats the goal . It reminds me of the wars in the middle east. They never knew what they were doing. They never knew what they we know that from the publication of the afghan papers in the Washington Post that Washington Post obtained, they all knew was a debacle years ago. In the same way they did in vietnam. And yet they the thing going because there were powerful segments in American Society that were making a killing making a lot of money. I mean, war is a business. Theres nothing new there. But the problem, theres no regulation, no oversight, no accountability. And thats extreme, dangerous. And we just lost a great father, Michael Doyle in camden, 50 years. Wonderful. And you can read a little profile wrote of him. Its the good priest. He was of the camden 28 that was arrested for burning draft records. But michael correctly tied the appalling poverty, including hunger in camden, to the war industry. Cannabis. Thats what king did. And his april 4th, 1967 speech at riverside church. We have one more question here. I know military industrial is predominantly a merit can, but arent there other countries are in on this . Yes, it russia. Sure. Sweet, real israels big. Israel is a big arms race, sweet entanglement of the of the the econom mes of those country is in manufacturing weapons is it just is so in terms of trying to put a righteous to this agenda. Yeah or on all sides. Sure very troubling. Yeah i mean the problem is. There are omnipotent. I mean, they and youre right, its not just the united, although we dont make much else anymore weapons. Seymour melman wrote two. Very good. At least two good books on permanent war economy. I think the name is one i cant. But he talks about how the militarys just destroyed mean even Bernie Sanders cant really go after the military because they make f35s in vermont so it all becomes about jobs mean theyve been quite good about spreading this out throughout the country and that liberal wing of the Democratic Party the old proxmire was and mcgovern who i got to meet at the end of his life i mean those figures that were willing to stand up to the military Industrial Complex were pushed out of the party. Mcgovern being the last 1972 president ial candidate. I had dinner with him and i told him that i guess i was about 14. I somehow convinced my parents to let me work in the mcgovern headquarters for the summer and and i you know, as usual, youre working 10 hours a day and and he made a comment about, losing 48 or 49 states. And i said, but as a george never sold me out. Nobody can say that about richard. You never sold out. And thats why im here now. So we had henry. Wallace was destroyed. Mcgovern was destroyed by both parties. Remember, it was . A there was a fusion of the Democratic Party elite in the Republican Party elite that that coalesced to destroy mcgovern. And then the those senators i mean, im very good friends. Ralph nader, i was naders speechwriter and ralph a point where he realized there because he worked with that ralph worked with that liberal wing of the democratic when it existed. I mean, 24 pieces of legislation the, mining safety act. Oh, that was all written by ralph and then pushed through. But he watched this largely done. Tony coelho and clinton took corporate money and did corporate bidding. I mean, clinton did it as much destruction as ronald reagan, maybe more nafta, fcc, glasssteagall and everything else. So destroying 70 of the original recipients on welfare were children and and and ralphs argued, you know, if we can pull five, ten, 15 Million People away, thats the only mechanism we have left to put pressure on the democrats. But of course, that didnt happen. And im very frightened where we are and whats coming, i think informed by i went through in yugoslavia that unless that, you know, the rage these Trump Supporters while expressed in very frightening ways, is not illegitimate. They have every right to be enraged. Um, unfortunate only that rage is being directed. It often is by demagogues the vulnerable towards scapegoats and. And so lets hope i there is the New York Times has reported that there have been contact with putins security advisor. Lets hope for negotiations lets hope that the Russian Troops with draw there is some kind of ceding of land for peace because we just had a either a missile, some kind ordnance slammed in poland, four miles inside poland. And you know, anybody whos read. Barbara tuchman, can tell you once you open that pandoras box of war, you dont the evils that spill out and we dont want a war with russia we dont and and at least the obama president obama who said that this was russias sphere of influence we shouldnt meddle at least he had that right. Maybe thats a good place to end. We dont want a war with russia or any we dont want any anywhere or any war or war. One thing we always get from a talk with chris is a long reading list. And for me thats thats a good place. Go with all our questions and put at the top of it. Chris so new book, can i just ask do you have time to sign . Of course. So maybe if you do want a book sign, you can meet chris back by the book table. But first, lets thank him