Chris Hedges "American Anomie"

[Music] thank you as I've mentioned I think every time I've come here I grew up not far from here in Schoharie scary New York on Main Street my father had the old red brick church when we grew up in the house next door I'm a sloughed ER at heart have to be from scary Valley you know what that is the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his book on suicide examine the disintegration of social bonds that drive individuals and societies to personal and collective acts of self-destruction he found that when social bonds were strong individuals achieve a healthy balance between individual initiative self-actualization and communal solidarity which he called a life-sustaining equilibrium these individuals and communities he noted have the lowest rates of suicide the individuals and societies most susceptible to self-destruction he wrote are those for whom these social bonds this equilibrium have been shattered societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the self this collective expresses itself through meaningful work democratic participation worship and even patriotism as well as shared national beliefs and values these social bonds provide meaning a sense of purpose status and dignity they offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the meaningless that comes with being isolated and rejected the disintegration of these social bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress that leads ultimately to acts of collective and individual self annihilation Durkheim called this state of hopelessness and despair anomie which he defined as rule lessness rule lessness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function the belief for example that if we work hard obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable employment social status and mobility along with financial security is no longer true the old rules that were imperfect and usually excluded poor people of color nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States they offered some Americans especially those from the white working and middle-class modest social and economic advancement but the capture of political and economic power by corporate elites along with the redirecting of all institutions toward the further consolidation of their power and wealth has broken the social bonds that held American society together this rupture has unleashed a widespread malaise and self-destructiveness that Durkheim would have recognized when society is strongly integrated he wrote it keeps individuals in a state of dependency holding them to be in its service and consequently not permitting them to dispose of themselves as they wish Society is the supposed to them escaping from their obligations toward it through death the bond that attaches them to their common purpose attaches them to life and in any case the high goal towards which their gaze is turned alleviates the suffering that they feel from life's troubles finally in a coherent and vital community there is a continual exchange of ideas and feelings from all to each and from each to all which is like a mutual moral support so that the individual instead of being reduced to his or her resources only participates in the collective energy and draws on it when his own is extinguished our corporate coup d'etat and failed democracy has freed the oligarchic elite from all legal and moral constraints the state of dis organization or enemy is thus reinforced by the fact that passions are less disciplined at the very time when they need stronger discipline Durkheim noted of the avarice of the rich it is not for nothing that so many religions have celebrated the benefits and the moral value of poverty Durkheim wrote this is because of all schools it is the one that best teaches humankind to restrain itself by obliging us to exercise constant discipline over ourselves it prepares us to accept collective discipline with facility while wealth by exalting the individual constantly risks awakening the spirit of rebellion that is the very font of immortality professors Martin gilens and Benjamin Page in their study of legislative laws wrote the central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy while mass based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence in essence the electoral process is a facade one where as we will see this week we get to choose between the friendly and inclusive form of corporate fascism under the Democratic Party or the raw racist Christian fascism of donald trump's white man's party the economic structures like the political structures have been reconfigured to keep the working class in a state of constant distress American productivity as the New York Times pointed out has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown only twelve percent if the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity the newspaper noted it would be more than twenty dollars an hour not $7.25 some forty 1.7 million workers a third of the American workforce earn less than $12 an hour and most of them do not have access to employer sponsored health insurance a decade after the 2008 financial meltdown The Times wrote the average middle-class families net worth is more than $40,000 below what it was in 2007 and the net worth of black families is down 40% and for Latino families the figure has dropped to 46% the financial crisis of 2008 so the world's central banks including the Federal Reserve inject trillions of dollars of fabricated money into the global financial system the Federal Reserve which is supposed to regulate banks alone handed over an estimated 29 trillion dollars of fabricated money to American banks according to researchers at the University of Missouri 29 trillion dollars Kevin Zeese and Margaret flowers on the website popular resistance wrote one sixth of this could provide a $12,000 annual basic income which would cost three point eight trillion annually doubling Social Security payments to $22,000 annually which would cost six hundred and sixty two billion a ten thousand dollar bonus for all US public school teachers which would cost 11 billion free college for all high school graduates which would cost 318 billion and universal preschool which would cost 38 billion national improved Medicare for all would actually save the nation trillions of dollars over a decade now the Fed and other central banks cut interest rates to near zero and indeed some central banks in Europe instituted negative interest rates meaning they would pay borrowers to take loans the Fed in a clever bit of accounting even permitted distressed banks to use these no interest loans to buy US Treasury bonds so the banks gave the bonds back to the Fed and received a quarter of a percent interest from the Fed in short the banks were loaned money at virtually no interest by the Fed and then were paid interest by the Fed on the money they borrowed the Fed also bought up worthless derivatives and other takla toxic assets from the banks since fed authorities could fabricate as much money as they wanted it did not matter if what they were buying was worthless this fabricated money over the last decade has created a worldwide debt of three hundred and twenty five trillion dollars more than three times global GDP the fabricated money was hoarded by banks and corporations loaned by banks at predatory interest rates used to service interest on unsustainable debt or spent buying back stock providing billions and compensation for the ruling elites the fabricated money was not provided to the victims of financial fraud but the victimizers it was not invested in the real economy products were not manufactured and sold workers were not reinstated into the middle class with sustainable incomes benefits and pensions infrastructure projects were not undertaken the fabricated money re-inflated massive financial bubbles built on debt and papered over a fatally diseased financial system destined again for collapse the criminal irresponsibility of the elites was simply perpetrated on an even more massive scale what will trigger the next crash the thirteen point two trillion dollars in u.s. household debt the 1.5 trillion dollars in student debt the billions Wall Street has invested in a fracking industry that has spent 280 billion more than it generated from its operations who knows what is certain is that a global financial crash one that will dwarf the meltdown of 2008 is inevitable but this time with interest rates near zero the elites have no plan B the financial structure will disintegrate and the global economy will go into a death spiral the rage of a betrayed and impoverished population will I fear further empower right-wing demagogues who promised vengeance vengeance on the global elites moral renewal and a nativist revival heralding a return to a mythical time when immigrants women and people of color knew their place and most probably in the United States a Christianized fascism given the staggering amount of fabricated money that has to be repaid the bets the banks need to build greater and greater pools of debt this is why when you are late in paying your credit card the interest rates jump to 28% this is why if you declare bankruptcy you are still responsible for paying off student loans even as 1 million people a year default on these loans with 40% of all borrowers expected to default by 2023 this is why wages are stagnant or have declined while costs from health care and pharmaceutical products to bank fees and basic utilities keep skyrocketing this is why the federal government further stripped of 1.5 trillion dollars over the next decade by the Trump tax cuts will soon pay more in interest on its debt that it spends on the military Medicaid or children's programs combined within a decade more than nine hundred billion dollars in interest payments will be due annually interest on debt is now the fastest-growing major government expense the cost of interest will hit three hundred and ninety billion dollars next year nearly fifty percent more than in 2017 according to the Congressional Budget Office the global financial system is a ticking time bomb the question is not if it will explode but when it will explode and once it does the inability of the global speculators to use fabricated money with zero interest to paper over the debacle will trigger massive unemployment high prices for imports and basic services and very probably a devaluation of the dollar especially when it is dropped as the world's reserve currency no one knows when this will happen although the historian Alfred McCoy says the American Empire as we know it will no longer exist by 2030 the manufactured financial tsunami will transform the United States already a failed democracy into an authoritarian police state awash in weapons and driven by hate life will become cheap especially for the vulnerable undocumented workers Muslims poor people of color girls and women antique capitalists and anti imperialist critics branded as agents of a foreign power all will be demonized and persecuted for the collapse and the ruling elites in a desperate bid to cling to their unchecked power and obscene wealth will sanction indiscriminate violence against any group or individual they fear could instigate a revolt empires in decay ravaged by widespread enemy embrace and almost willful suicide blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power they retreat into a fantasy world were hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude they replace diplomacy multilateralism and participatory politics with a constant mobilization against enemies real or invented this self delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic blunder in its history one that sounded the death knell of the Empire the invasion of Afghanistan in Iraq the architects of the war in the George W Bush White House and the array of useful idiots and the press and academia who were cheer leaders for it all of whom kept their prominent public platforms knew very little about the country's being invaded we're stunning stunningly naive about the effects of industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback they stated and probably believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction although they had no valid evidence to support this claim they insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East they assured the public that US troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators they promised that the oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction they insisted that the bold and quick military strike shock and awe would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world it did the opposite historians of empire called these military Fiasco's a feature of all late empires micro militarism the Athenians engaged in Mike militarism when during the Peloponnesian War they invaded Sicily suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire Britain engaged in micro militarism in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the NASA nationalization of the Suez Canal and then quickly withdrew in humiliation empowering a string of Arab nationalist leaders such as Gama Abdel Nasser and dooming the British rule over the nation's few remaining colonies neither of these empires were covered empires because they rely on the power to dominate and exploit other countries are in fact very fragile and once this ability to dominate is taken from them they unravel swiftly a year for Portugal two years for the Soviet Union eight years for France 11 years for the Ottomans 17 for Great Britain and in all likelihood 27 years for the United States counting from the crucial 2003 when the u.s. invaded Iraq empires at the same time Hollow themselves out from the inside their cities fall into decay the decline sees the brutality abroad matched by a brutality at home militarized police gunned down mostly unarmed poor people of color and fill a system of Penitentiary's and jails that hold a staggering 25% of the world's prisoners although the America represents only 5% of the global population the population at home like the subjugated population abroad lives under wholesale surveillance public services including public education infrastructure public transportation become decrepit and dysfunctional this rule lessness this enemy is best seen in the two strata of the nation's judiciary there is an aggressive criminalization of the poor while the ruling elites are given virtual immunity protected by high-priced lawyers and non enforcement or rewriting of laws amid selective enforcement of laws in the rule lest society the high-rollers on Wall Street and in wealthy enclaves are not prosecuted for possessing and ingesting illegal drugs but the poor are thrown into prison and must forfeit all their property for being caught with small amounts of the same drugs I live in Princeton New Jersey and I am sure there are as many drugs and probably of better quality in Princeton than there are in Trenton or in Troy but police and Kevlar vests armed with long barreled weapons are not kicking in Princeton doors at 2:00 in the morning to terrorize families over a nonviolent drug warrant hsbc the world's seventh largest bank by total assets after admitting to laundering 800 million dollars for Central and South American drug cartels was slapped with symbolic fines and a deferred prosecution agreement which is the legal equivalent of a get out of jail free card the poor meanwhile are hounded arrested and fined for absurdly criminalized activities such as not mowing their lawns loitering selling loose cigarettes although Eric garner was not when he was murdered selling loose cigarettes carrying open containers of alcohol or obstructing pedestrian traffic which means standing on a sidewalk these fines are used to fill state and county budget shortfalls resulting from corporations and the wealthy fixing the rules to avoid pain meaningful taxes if they pay taxes at all and remember under Eisenhower the wealthiest individuals and corporations paid ninety one percent this virtual tax boycott by the rich has broken yet another vital social bond the idea that everyone contributes a significant portion of his or her income to make the society function the elites who sacrifice nothing for society and are not held accountable for their criminal behavior live in what Matt Taibbi calls a stateless archipelago or what a writer for The New Yorker called richest an they are legally empowered to pillage the nation a mass obscene wealth and wield unchecked political and legal control Brett Kavanaugh aside from most probably being a sexual predator is as Ralph Nader said a corporation masquerading as a human being the result has been the obliteration of the primary social bonds that however biased in favor of the white majority once held the nation together the shattering of these bonds has left tens of millions of American adrift society Durkheim wrote is no longer sufficiently present for these individuals those cast aside can participate in the society as Durkheim wrote only through sadness the self-destructive pathologies that plagued the United States opioid addiction morbid obesity gambling suicide sexual sadism we are pornified culture hate groups and mass shootings rise out of this enemy and my new book America the farewell tour is an examination of these pathologies and that enemy that fuels this self-destructiveness now Durkheim noted that the poor have lower rates of suicide the poor know the rules are rigged against them James Baldwin made much the same point when he wrote that african-american men are less prone to a midlife crisis than white American men because they are less susceptible to the myth of the American Dream most African Americans learn very early in life that there are two sets of rules one for blacks and one for whites but white Americans because of white supremacy are more susceptible to the myth and therefore more infuriated when the myth is exposed as a lie and this I suspect is why nearly all mass shootings and all members of right-wing hate groups along with a majority of supporters of Donald Trump are white men capitalism Durkheim wrote is antithetical to creating sustaining the relationships that are vital to social bonds capitalism rewards those for whom relationships are transactional and temporary relationships under capitalism are mercenary they are part of the scheme for personal advancement and require the oily manipulation of others to advance in a capitalist system it is necessary to build and then discard a series of ultimately hollow relationships these empty relationships and you can see them inside any corporation contribute to the collective enemy and disintegration of social bonds now capitalism may cater to a natural desire among many for self enrichment but you don't want this greed to dominate society capitalism rewards single minded narcissus in often con artists devoid of empathy and incapable of remorse it rewards those focused exclusively on personal gain and self aggrandizement once a capitalist class achieves complete control as it has in the United States it dismantles the structures that make social bonds possible seen in them an impediment to profit the more concentrated wealth becomes as with corporate capitalism the more damage it inflicts on society sending jobs to overseas sweatshops and leaving Americans underemployed or unemployed Karl Marx saw alienation as a positive force one that estranged workers from the means of production and move them to question the structures structures of power educate themselves about their exploitation and ultimately revolt but for Durkheim this alienation or enemy is debilitating it is he wrote a collective asthenia that drains us of energy and will it manifests itself in self-loathing we may indeed understand what is happening around us Durkheim argued but we lack the ability to free ourselves from the despair frustration and rage that crippled our lives our our actions require an object outside of themselves Durkheim wrote it is not because we need to sustain the illusion of some impossible immortality it is because it is implicit in our moral being and it cannot be lost even partially without that moral being losing its reason for existence there is no need to demonstrate that in such a state of collapse the slightest cause for depression can easily give rise to desperate acts when life is not worth living everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it four individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected Durkheim wrote it's suffering inevitably becomes theirs Trump is not a product of the leak of the Podesta emails or James Comey or even racism although he and many who support him a racist or Russian BOTS demagogues always arise from failed democracies plagued by rule this nests by enemy they tell and enraged population what it wants to hear and crudely to the delight of the betrayed ridicule the elites who sold them out removing Trump from office without confronting the enemy that defines the lives of tens of millions of Americans would do nothing to restore democracy in fact it would probably consolidate the power of a Christianized fascism rapidly filling Trump's ideological void Vice President Mike Pence because he is a creature of the Christian Right would most likely as Noam Chomsky has pointed out be worse than Trump if he gained the presidency this enemy as it always does has empowered our own demagogues and demagogues must be understood as cult leaders rather than traditional politicians a disempowered population infantilized by a world it cannot control gravitates to cult leaders who appear omnipotent and promised a return to a mythical Golden Age the cult leaders vowed to crush the forces embodied and demonize groups and individuals which are blamed for their misery the more outrageous the cult eaters become the more they flout law and social conventions the more they gain in popularity cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society this is their appeal cult leaders demand a god-like power those who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will save them Trump has transformed the decayed carcass of the Republican Party into a cult and all cults are personality cults they are extensions of the cult leader the cult reflects the leaders prejudices worldview personal style and idiosyncrasies Trump did not create the yearning for a cult leader huge segments of the population betrayed by the established elites were conditioned for a cult leader they were desperately looking for someone to rescue them and solve their problems they found their cult leader in the New York real estate developer and reality television show star and only when we recognized Trump as a cult leader and many of those who support him as cult followers will we understand where we are headed and how we must resist it was 40 years ago this month that a messianic preacher named Jim Jones convinced or forced more than nine hundred of his followers including roughly 280 children to die by ingesting a cyanide laced drink trump's refusal to acknowledge and address the impending crisis of ecocide and the massive mismanagement of the economy by the kleptocrats his bellicosity his threats against iran and china the withdrawal from nuclear arms treaties along with his demonization of all who oppose him ensure our cultural and if left unchecked physical extinction cult leaders are driven at their core by the death instinct the instinct to annihilate and destroy rather than nurture and create Trump shares many of the characteristics of Jones as well as other cult leaders such as the founders of the Heaven's Gate cult the Reverend son young moon who led the unification Church in David Koresh who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco Texas cult leaders are narcissists they demand obsequious fawning and total obedience they prize loyalty above competence they wield absolute control they do not tolerate criticism they are deeply insecure a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity they are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive they see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment all those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence a cult is a mirror of what is inside the cult leader margaret singer wrote in cults in our midst he has no restraints on him he can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him he can lead people to do his bidding he can make the surrounding world his world what most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play creating a world with toys and utensils in that play world the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his for a few minutes or a few hours he moves the toy dolls about they do his bidding they speak his world's back to him he punishes them any way he wants he is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive when I see the Santa the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as a child creates on a sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies the difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that Springs from inside his own head George Orwell understood that cult leaders manipulate followers primarily through language not force this linguistic manipulation is a gradual process it is rooted in continual mental chaos and verbal confusion lies conspiracy theories outlandish ideas and contradictory statements that defy reality in fact soon paralyzed the opposition the opposition with every attempt to counter this absurdism with irrational such as the decision by Barack Obama to make his birth certificate public or by senator Elizabeth Warren to release the results of our DNA tests to prove she has Native American and history plays to the cult leader the cult leader does not take his or her statement seriously and often denies ever making them even when they are documented lies and truth do not matter the language of the cult leader is designed exclusively to appeal to the emotional needs of those in the cult Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval used Merlo wrote in the rape of the mind they never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next Hitler was never logical because he knew that what was expected that that that was what he was expected to be logic can be met with logic while illogic cannot it confuses those who think straight the big lie and monotonous ly repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason while the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counter-argument to the first lie the totalitarian can insult him assault him with another cult leaders engage in the permanent lie and the permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton George W Bush or Barack Obama the common political eye these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality it was a form of manipulation Clinton when he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement promised and I'm quoting NAFTA means jobs American jobs and good-paying American jobs George W Bush justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction but Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found the permanent law however is not circumscribed by reality it is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it it is irrational those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars traitors and purveyors of fake news they are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power the iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality no matter how transparent reality becomes creates a collective psychosis the result of a consistent and Total substitution of Lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth will be defamed as a lie but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world and the category of truth versus false sword is among the mental means to this end is being destroyed Hannah Aaron wrote the permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism it no longer matters what is true it matters only what is correct and federal courts are being stacked with Federalist Society judges who served the correct ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian Right they hold reality including science and the rule of law in contempt they seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy consistency is discarded complexity nuance depth and profundity are replaced with the simpletons belief in threats and force this is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department totalitarianism wrote the novelist and social critic Thomas Mann is at its core the desire for a simple folktale once this folk tale replaces reality morality and ethics are abolished and as Voltaire reminded us those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities the cult leader grooms followers to speak in the language of hate and violence the cult leader constantly paints a picture of an existential threat often invented that puts the cult followers in danger Trump is doing this by demonizing the caravan of some four thousand immigrants most from Honduras moving through southern Mexico caravans of immigrants are fact nothing new the beleaguered and impoverished asylum seekers including many families with children are 1,000 miles from the Texas border but Trump aided by non-stop coverage by Fox News and Christian Broadcasting he's using the caravan to terrify his followers just as he along with these media outlets portrayed the protesters who flocked the US Capitol to oppose the nomination of Kavanagh as unruly mobs Trump claims the Democrats want to open the border to these quote-unquote criminals and to quote-unquote unknown Middle Easterners who are he suggests radical jihadists Christian broadcasting such as Pat Robertson's 700 club splice pictures of marching to Hadas in black uniforms cradling automatic weapons into video shots of the caravan the fear-mongering and rhetoric of hate and violence as I saw when I covered the war in the former Yugoslavia eventually leads to widespread acts of violence against those the cult leader defines as the enemy the explosive devices sent to trump critics and leaders of the Democratic Party including Barack Obama Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden along with George Soros James clapper and CNN allegedly by say czar Sayaka an ex-stripper and fanatic Trump supporter was living out of his van Herald more violence Trump tossing gasoline on the flames used this assault against much of the leadership of the Democratic Party to again attack the press or as he calls it the enemy of the people it should come as no surprise that last Saturday another enraged American white male his fury and despair seemingly stoked by the diatribes and conspiracy theories of the far-right entered a Pittsburgh synagogue and massacred eight men and three women as he shouted anti-semitic abuse shot by police and arrested at the scene was Robert Bowers who believes that Jewish groups are aiding the caravan of immigrants in southern Mexico he was armed with a military-style ar-15 assault rifle plus three handguns the proliferation of easily accessible high-caliber weapons coupled with the division of the country into the blessed and the damned by Trump and his fellow cultists threatens to turn the landscape of the United States into one that resembles Mexico where at least 145 people in politics including 48 candidates and pre candidates along with party leaders and campaign workers have been assassinated over the last 12 months look south if you want a vision of the future the cult leader unlike a traditional politician makes no effort to reach out to his opponents the cult leader seeks to widen the divisions the cult leader brands those outside the cult as irredeemable the cult leader seeks the omnipotence to crush those who do not kneel in adoration the cult followers yearning to be protected and empowered seek to give the cult leader unlimited power democratic norms and impediment to the leaders omnipotence are ridiculed attacked and ultimately abolished those in the call seek to be surrounded by the cult leaders magical aura reality is sacrificed for fantasy and those who challenge the fantasy are not considered human they are satanic behavior that ensures the destruction of a public figures career does not affect a cult leader it does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented by the New York time or the Washington Post it does not matter that Trump's personal financial interests as we see in his relationship with the Saudis take precedence over the rule of law diplomatic protocols and national security it does not matter that he is credibly charged by numerous women with being a sexual predator a common characteristic of cult leaders it does not matter that he paid little or no income taxes and routinely committed financial fraud it does not matter that he is inept lazy and ignorant the establishment whose credibility has been destroyed because of its complicity and empowering the ruling oligarchy and the corporate State might as well be blowing soap bubbles at trump their vitriol to his followers only justifies the hatred radiating from the cult the removal of trump from power would not remove the yearning of tens of millions of people many conditioned by the Christian Right for a cult leader most of the leaders of the Christian Right have built cult followings of their own these Christian fascists embraced magical thinking attacked their enemies as agents of Satan and denounced reality based science and journalism long before Trump cults are a product of social decay of anomie and our decay and despair are expanding soon to explode in another financial crisis the efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press including CNN and the New York Times to discredit Trump as if our problems are embodied in him alone are futile the smug self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced journalist and politics this crusade attempts to reduce a social economic and political crisis to the person of Trump it is accompanied by a refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy and growing social inequality this collusion with the forces of corporate oppression neuters the press and Trump's mainstream and democratic critics our only hope is to organize for the overthrow of the corporate state that vomited up Trump our democratic institutions including the legislative bodies the courts and the media our hostage to corporate power they are no longer democratic we must like liberation movements of the past engage in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation by turning our eye on the corporate state we expose and name the true sources of power and abuse we expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers Muslims african-americans Latinos feminists gays and others we give people an alternative to a democratic party that refuses to confront the corporate forces of oppression a party which cannot be rehabilitated we make possible the restoration of an open society if we fail to embrace this militancy which alone has the ability to destroy cult leaders we will continue the march toward tyranny thank you thank you Chris wow it's a scary time that we're living in I feel scared but I also feel really hopeful and I feel lucky that I get to spend my days here which feels like a hopeful place when I hear Chris talk it it harmonizes with what we're doing here really beautifully I was I grabbed one of our t-shirts coming up here because this is sort of our like or trilogy right that we've we've kind of owned it's art science and media and these things are under attack and these are this is what we do and it's not a coincidence independent media art transgressive art and science the nature lab Center is an organic output of the people in this community who are creative smart independent thinking and self-reliance and this this is really a project in self-reliance here I look in the audience and I see a lot of new faces but I also see a lot of faces who are not new who are helping us do this work and I want to thank you guys for being part of that organizing effort that Chris is talking about I have not given up hope I do not want to say farewell to America and I think most of you feel the same way and that's why we're here and so I'll just take this opportunity to ask you once again to help us do this non corporate work that it's really hard to get funding to do by giving a little bit monthly sign up to be a sanctuary sustainer there is gonna be an opportunity for questions and answers so if you have some questions you can start lining up right here by this microphone closely since you rode on Wars a force that gives us meaning as I sat and listened to your talk I was reminded of a parable about a river that floods and all of the people who have to deal with the flood are around frantically figuring out how they can save their houses and this and that and someone comes along and says work upstream and I would just like you to comment on how to do that upstream work I think at this point all of the economists that I admire I'm not an economist of course David Harvey Richard Wolff Nomi Prins Michael Hudson are terrified of what's coming and having lived through the economic collapse of Yugoslavia and watched what it did especially when eken ago Slavia fell into hyperinflation the the old power structure which was largely ineffectual for the majority of the Yugoslavs was so swiftly discredited that people turned to figures like Radovan Karadzic who everyone knew was buffoonish in the same way that Trump is buffoonish and we forget that in vimar Germany the Nazis were considered buffoonish I mean Hitler couldn't even speak proper German and you had the old German aristocracy von papen and others assuring the the Chancellor that they could control them and I wrote a book on the Christian Right American fascists the Christian right in the war in America 10 years ago which has become I think very important because the Christian Right is rapidly filling the ideological void that Trump has and many of the antecedents for magical thinking and fake news of course come out of the Christian Right highly organized Pence of course as a product and in the book of course at that time you had a Republican Party that thought that they were manipulating and using to use Lenin's term the useful idiots and I warned in the book that in the end it's the useful idiots who would take over and that's precisely what's happened so we live in a period of relative stability but I think we have to face what's coming every climate change report including the latest one on the oceans that came out that is terrifying it all has the same theme and of course what they wrote in that report is that this was in the journal Nature that the ocean is stored far more heat than we thought which means that it's an even if we stopped all carbon emissions today it's gonna be worse the polar ice caps are disintegrating the weather patterns are nuts and it's bleak and it's frightening and I have children it's it's depressing and the most perhaps the hardest existential crisis of this moment in American history is to face how dire our situation is and then respond but by pretending that it's not there or pretending that we can adapt or pretending that technology will save us essentially replicates the kind of checking out of reality that characterizes late Empire and Joseph Tainter writes about this in length in collapse of complex societies where he studies the collapse of 24 civilization I mean or there's an there several books Easter Island ether Easter Earth Jared Diamond's collapse but they're there it comes a point when reality is so stark that people just can't look anymore but that makes it worse and so yes I think that we we have we have a responsibility to begin to prepare that clearly the already we have Trump inciting acts of violence I think it should be clear that if the Democrats retake the house the violence will get worse and will be directed at mainstream Democratic critics and if they don't take the house it will get worse because Trump's policies are wildly unpopular nobody likes his tax cuts nobody wants him to destroy Obamacare nobody wants them to privatize Social Security nobody supports his refusal to raise the minimum wage and so and of course what he's done is turbocharged the kleptocracy and so he will as we have seen throughout history Hegel wrote it you know the the only thing that he said past civilizations prove is that they know nothing about history we know where it's going to go I mean it's not a surprise collapse societies many of which I covered as a war correspondent have many similar characteristics in fact what's happening now reminds me very much of the disintegration of Yugoslavia so yeah I think that you're right we can't be reactive we have to be proactive because when things become rough the elites will retreat into their gated compounds well that where they will have access to security uninterrupted electricity water and medical service and we'll be on our own thank you very much for your your brilliant use of Durkheim and the overall structure I'm may be wrong but I kind of suspect that there are two names that are missing from your analysis because I think there there were both midwives of the corporate takeover Reagan and justice Powell especially during his time with the Chamber of Commerce yeah well I've written about that I can I can't do in 26 pages what I can do in 250 pages but you're right that that 1971 Powell memo was the blueprint for it was a you know what Samuel Huntington called the excess of democracy talking about the sixties and the elites mobilized the corporate elites mobilized and it's all in the Powell memo to destroy independent media to defame and discredit and marginalize they actually named Ralph Nader in the memo to take over academia it's why economics departments are still preaching the fantasy of neoliberalism David Harvey wrote a very good book on neoliberalism I it's a short book but it's as far as I know the most succinct and most thoughtful study of neoliberalism it's called a brief history of neoliberalism it was cooked up as an ideological veneer for the destruction of democratic participation and the return of wealth and power to the hands of the oligarchy it's not a rational economic system Karl Polanyi and the great transformation written in 1944 writes about unchecked unregulated capitalism and its consequences and as Paul yani said first it creates a mafia economy that's called Goldman Sachs and then it creates a mafia political system and Paul yani is exactly right so yeah Reagan was a tool you know he was like Barack Obama he was pushed out but Cornell calls brought called Barack the black mascot for Wall Street I mean the difference is Reagan was so clueless he probably didn't know that he was being used and Obama doesn't have an excuse but yeah I mean it's been a long process it began in the early 70s John Ralston Saul calls it the corporate coup d'etat in slow-motion that's exactly what happened and it's over they've won in the body of your text I was reflecting on the fact that the in played so little into the initial portion and just a minute ago you spoke a bit more to the environmental collapse that we are about to experiencing according to the UN report roughly at the same time this 2030 and the economic collapse I think personally I'm far more afraid of the environmental collapse than the economic collapse although clearly there are joined but I'm wondering why the press and our culture as a whole doesn't connect militarism and war to the environmental collapse as they are one of the greatest degraders of the environment we know and there PBS is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers groups and people well I speak to don't make that cut or I mean environmental groups are also dependent upon donors it's why environmental groups won't confront the animal agriculture industry which is as egregious in terms of carbon emissions as the fossil fuel industry they won't go there and so what was the big campaign what was that Sierra Club or somebody had like don't use straws I mean you couldn't make this stuff up so most of the NGOs are because they're beholden to wealthy and corporate donors are tp'ed at best and often mendacious I mean moveon.org there is a classic example so I was involved in with dr. Margaret flowers and others about universal health care which Obama conspired in a backroom with the insurance and pharmaceutical industry to make sure was never raised and moveon.org totally supported Obama because they said if we don't support Obama he won't get reelected and that's kind of emblematic of where most of these groups are at so there is a frightening kind of silence about the greatest existential crises that we face financial ecological the social malaise I mean the opioid crisis is staggering and I would imagine almost mi including myself everyone in this room probably knows of or at least has heard of people who have overdosed and probably died and and having written about the opioid crisis in this book and I also wrote about suicide one of the things I found is that large numbers of families hide it so the there may be an opioid overdose or maybe a suicide but they don't allow that information to go public it was probably far worse than we expect and was fascinating about the chapter on gambling which I wrote out of the Trump Taj as I said was that all 80% of all gambling in America is done on slots and slots zone you out you spend six seven eight hours on a slot machine in the same way that heroin zones you out these are all attempts to escape from your reality I was wondering is there any role that that the Christian left may play or I'm not a very good Christian minister I mean my problem with the liberal Church which I come out of my father was a Presbyterian minister although very close to the berrigan's and the Catholic Worker movement is that they've not called out the Christian fascists for who they are they are heretics you don't have to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to realize that Jesus did not come to make us rich or shower us with consumer products and the German Christian Church which was at the Nazi swastika on one side of the altar and Christian cross on the other is essentially been replicated in the Christian right and if you doubt me you should listen to or watch Christian casting because that alliance with Trump people say well how can the Christian Right be allied with Trump and I say well that's a complete misreading of the Christian Right because having been in these megachurches the these pastors replicate the narcissism the preying on the despair for wealth which all of which Trump does the only difference at least as anecdotally that I could tell is that the sexual proclivities of the mega pastor's is probably kinkier than those of Trump and the Christian Church has not call these they don't believe in heretics or the name in the name of tolerance of word Martin Luther King never used they have given these people a kind of religious legitimacy that they should not have and they need to be called out and name because they are I didn't use the word fascist lightly in the book in fact when I finished two years of reporting and I was in the mega churches pro-life weekend's creationist seminars and I sat there through it all I took a evangelism explosion course with D James Kennedy in Fort Lauderdale Florida very predatory you know when we're talking about Jesus we were talking about finding people who their spouse had just died or they just lost their job or they were new to the neighborhood the people you play pray on this despair in the same way that Trump did in his casinos and the Christian Church got all caught up in that boutique activism of multiculturalism and identity politics and like the wider society and forgot about the primacy of economic justice and in particular what was happening to poor people of color in marginal communities they said not a word so they were integrating you know their church hierarchies or their academic departments and they flipped the whole I mean for instance the whole notion of feminism as being and I love Andrea Dworkin and and urge you all the reader she's a beautiful writer but you know Dworkin understood that feminism is about empowering impressed women it's not about a woman CEO or Hillary Clinton who god help us just when we think we put a stake through her heart thinking of running again first of all I just want to say you are one of my favorite American human beings on the planet your or studentís just blinds me I just cannot even understand how you can look into that Malstrom on a daily basis and still even bother to try to do anything about it I really admire you for that but here's one question and it's a question I have pondered for the last 10 years I've read a lot about how people believe things how they don't believe things but what I've come to is that we are as Americans the product pure and simple of American advertising they reduce it down to the simplest most explicit terms just do it coca-cola America and my question to you is because you are so or stupid I mean it I just marvel you're in another planet but here's what I figured out or at least I think I figured out most of the people that are like you are in chairmanships of departments in big universities and they've learned the language that basically only talks to the other 35 chairmen around the country and unfortunately what they know never filters down till the guy in the street my point and what I'd love to ask you because you are the articular genius of my book how do we get people to start speaking in not the same terms as Trump but to at least think and discuss in the simplest terms the simplest language because that's who's out there are there simple people and they have swallowed the simpletons message you you know and I know that they are just disgusted that they're there in a hopeless despair what's-her-name oak and Klaus that strangers in their own land did you ever read that yeah but it's at that point and and and they're just poor people that are getting screwed over but somehow Trump can get underneath there thinking so my you know how do we get to very slam bam thank you ma'am language you I mean it's a good question because you have to grasp at once that those people who are most fervently focused on destroying American democracy what's left of it what's left of our anemic institutions and purveyors of hate are also victims and this was driven home to me on the book and the Christian Right because I went in with although I came out of a religious tradition I went in with the prejudices of the religious left and after hearing dozens of these stories of the followers of the Christian Right in places like Ohio and Mississippi and where their communities disintegrated their families disintegrated sexual abuse domestic abuse chronic underemployment unemployment jail time evictions you you'd be heartless not to acknowledge that very real suffering and it was kind of driven home to me I was in Detroit with Tim LaHaye wrote the endtime series and was a conference on the end times so I was in this church and people were just ecstatic would be the only word to use over the apocalypse and with these incredibly graphic descriptions of what the end times would be like including the rapture which is not in the Bible and the blood boiling and non-believers in their eyes by me and I realized that that what drove that lust for the apocalypse was their hatred of the secular society the reality-based world that almost destroyed them and that what protected them was their magical thinking that's all they had left and you weren't gonna argue them out of creationism the only way in the book that I wrote that we will break this movement is to reintegrate these people into the economy and into the society in essence as Durkheim said to rebuild those social bonds and there's a name for this it's called socialism and that really means destroying the power structure of the corporate state it means nationalizing the banks it means nationalizing the fossil fuel industry it means destroying the war machine and the arms industry it means returning the internet and public broadcasting to the public it means absolutely no money being funneled into our system of legalized bribery it really means destroying the system because we can't we don't have time nor is it possible to tinker with it and you can see it in the whole Democratic campaign at the moment because what is their core message we are not Trump that's it they won't talk about the social inequality that they helped orchestrate that is driving our crisis I mean the whole idea of blaming this on Russian Facebook bots is in nuts I mean if you want to talk about fake news it's called Fox News I mean we've been bombarded by this chunk and the whole idea that Fox News is even considered a legitimate news organization and then you have all the you know sites like Breitbart everything else so we we have to rise up with that kind of radicalism because it's our only hope not just in terms of resting back control and creating an open society but dealing with the ecocide that is now galloping us towards extinction and you know there's a reason climate scientists are so terrified of going above 2 degrees Celsius and it's called feedback loops and they know how feedback loops work because they've studied them on planets like Venus which used to have water and is now 800 degrees it means that this 10,000 year period the Holocene period in which human but since the end of the last ice age is an anomaly in a planet that's 4.5 billion years old that created the temperate zones that allowed us to flourish as a people in the Gulf Stream has not been a permanent part of planet Earth the and where we are destroying the housing we are destroying the this a very fragile peculiar moment climate Airy moment that allowed us to survive and once those feedback loops start ie the polar ice caps are gone the acidification within the oceans the monster storms the flooding everything starts feeding off of each other and climate scientists and you can look it up it's but they've done mathematical calculations that range anywhere between a 70% die-off and complete extinction that's what we're facing and look you know I I don't share American cultures mania for hope I don't I come out of Calvin have a very dark view tragic view of human nature and Hume potential and that's not and I think that's not helpful I mean we have to rest ourselves from the emotional highs and lows as somebody pointed out of consumer culture I asked father Daniel Berrigan once how do you define faith and he said it's the belief that the good draws to it the good even if all the empirical evidence around us says otherwise the Buddhists call it karma and that's a very different understanding I have said it so many times I don't say it anymore because I see so many smiles in the audience when people have heard it but it is true I stole it from Sartre but I don't fight fascists because I'm gonna win I fight fascist because they are fascists that there is a moral imperative to fight for life if you want to go back to the Christian tradition that I come out of it's called bearing the cross and you know we're not here that long we're not and we just lost our greatest contemporary theologian James cone if you have not read the cross and lynching tree don't go on Amazon but buy it and you know he talked he rooted and often called the father of black liberation theology but I would say I would call him the most authentically Christian theologian in America he understood you know that the nature of oppression and that one endures to use Faulkner's words at the end of the sound and the fury and it's not in the end what we achieve but it is the extent to which we are able to stand up and resist and I as if you heard I teach in a prison and I've seen it among my students I taught a class called conquest we read open veins of Latin America bury my heart at Wounded Knee and CLR James's book the black jacobins on the haitian slave revolt the only successful slave revolt in human history which Haiti is still paying for and I was in Montana and I got a phone call in my hotel room I had given them the syllabus and said I won't be there this week and the person on the phone said this is the Special Investigations Division of the Department of Corrections of the state of New Jersey are you aware that your students just let us sit down strike in the prison and I hung up the phone and I just wept because they knew even better than I what would happen which is what did happen every cell was strip-searched every student was interrogated and threatened and you have so little in prison that rec time your job your ability to take a class until they found the leaders and they found the leaders and they sent them to another prison and they are still in indefinite solitary confinement and they rose up anyway because they realized that that act of resistance that moment of resistance was called freedom and I I don't know if we're going to succeed I don't even know if we're going to survive as a species but I'm not going to lie down and let them run over me i sued Obama in federal court the moment he signed into law section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act which overturns the Posse Comitatus Act and you can and watch Trump use it now and nobody thought we were going to win and we won ultimately Obama appealed I mean he and what they do is they deny you're standing in so long story but they you know so it's law but I've met with the lawyers and we said we're just not going to let it go so that so much of our victories may indeed be penultimate and yet whatever hope we have whatever empowerment we have whatever sense of solidarity we have will only come through acts of resistance and whether they succeed or not is irrelevant because we cannot we have no time left to be tyrannize by the practical I have children I may fail but I at least want my children to say he tried and that's our job we have destroyed life for those who come after us and we have a moral responsibility to stand up and fight on behalf of life that's that I think in that sense I go back to my religious tradition and I draw on it and I don't in any way think you should all become Presbyterians I was at Standing Rock I saw the same kind of spirituality of Standing Rock indeed that is what made Standing Rock so powerful and shattering our complacency to carry out acts of resistance you will find will shatter your despair and your enemy you don't do it alone you can't do it alone but I everything's on YouTube I was with 133 veterans a few years ago protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in front of the White House I was the largest mass arrests since the 1960s in front of the White House and there were Vietnam vets Iraqi war vets Afghan vets many in uniform was snowing and at that moment when we walked to the White House fence where we were arrested it was complete silence and somebody was beating a drum and almost everyone was crying because we'd all been to war we know what war is and as we were cuffed with our hands behind our back it turns out that the Washington police most of them are in the National Guard and they would whisper keep protesting those Wars we have far more power they're terrified of us they are there they were terrified of Occupy Wall Street which wasn't I love those kids but they're not quite as radical as they think they were I stopped them from holding memorial for Steve Jobs the middle of the park when he done they're frightened of us because nobody knows how corrupt and game the system is better than them and it doesn't take that many of us I mean three percent I watched it in Eastern Europe I watched five hundred thousand people gather an Alexander Platz night after night and bring down the Stasi state which was the most sophisticated security and surveillance state until our own so we got to stop fooling around with a democratic party and we've got a overthrow the corporate state I'll spell that out for the Homeland Security person in the room oh that's what it is and it's got to be nonviolent I've had as some of you know a constant battle with the black bloc and ante foe over this I just came from the west coast they pick at me with and they're all dressed in black with the you know the handkerchief over and they every single sign reads the same which is fu Chris Hedges which kind of I think is an advertisement for their political sophistication but we're not going there a gift to the security and surveillance state because their goal is to demonize any resistance movement and make people afraid of it and it's going to be ugly and the elites are not going to go without a fight look at what happened at Standing Rock under Obama seven hundred arrests attack dogs unleashed on the crowd the crowd all non-violent water protectors sprayed hose down with in sub-freezing temperatures with water laced with pepper spray constant infiltration sir they'll play dirty but it's the last fight we have and it's one that if we lose then we're not just talking about the collapse of the American Empire the extinguishing of American democracy which let me tell you does not exist at this moment but we're really talking about the eradication of the human race it's that existentialist threat and in theological terms these corporate forces are forces of death and and it is for those of us who care about the sacred we've got to stand up and put our bodies on line for the forces of life so I'd like to echo the gratitude and admiration that the other people in this line have expressed them also a longtime admirer of your work a few questions first of all I don't know if you saw democracy now in Friday morning with Alan Naren and whether not you did his his argument was that you have to vote for the Democrats right now because whether or not there are war criminals in the party and whether or not there are fish cystic tendencies they're less of a threat than what Trump represents and I think many people in this audience of struggling with that same question and secondly I don't know if you're familiar with the work of the political science Cory roben who works at teaches that Brooklyn College but he has expressed some skepticism about the idea that everyone in the Republican Party would like to see a overtly fascist regime come to power in the United States because they've been able to do so much with the political forms of the Republic and in the face of that situation I would like to know your opinion about whether or not the Republic itself is something worth preserving first question first of all I have great admiration for Alan Aaron but I disagree with him because what happens and I listen to the interview as well is that every election cycle we have very I think and he's a person of great courage and moral probity telling us that we have to surrender to the Democrats Michael Moore does this every election cycle the problem is that politics is a game of fear and they're not going to respond until they're frightened of us and every election cycle we capitulate and I as some of you know was Ralph Nader's speechwriter and Ralph and nobodies fought corporate power with more integrity and courage and persistence and Ralph Nader no one in the United States and Ralph locked out of the democratic process remember all those bills twenty four pieces of legislation the mine and Safety Act the Clean Water Act it was all written by Ralph and then push through with a liberal wing of the Democratic Party a lot of it passed by Nixon who was still scared of movements as Ralph says our last liberal president and if there's no cost I mean Ralph said if we get 5 10 15 million people to pull out we will put pressure on the Democratic Party so they'll have to respond and history has shown that that is how third party movements in the United States work many of that ideas adopted by Roosevelt were taken from the Progressive Party even the Communist Party and they were fright we know they were frightened movements because we have Roosevelt's private correspondence where he writes his fellow oligarchs he uses the word if we don't begin to respond there will be revolution those of Roosevelt's words with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s and so we have to give up some of our wealth in order to preserve the system and Roosevelt said that his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism but without those pressures the oligarchs would not have responded we could have gone either way in the 30s there was a strong fascist movement certainly fascist sympathetic to fascism Henry Ford and many many others and we've dropped the ball we fail to make them frightened I mean this is the power of unions I mean look what's happened to the American working class with the destruction of unions and I know unions had their problems but what they've done in the somebody talked about the commercial the consumer society it's hyper individualism and hyper individualism is a form of disempowerment and they know it so you get to express your personal identity while you are being stripped of collective power and I just don't you know I heard Alan say you know if we don't vote for the Democrats we won't be able to save democracy right well I don't believe that we live and democratic system and I also believe that that enemy which is about to get much worse in an economic crisis is the engine that is driving the rise of these authoritarian or fascist movements and figures and cult leaders and that if we don't address the enemy we're finished whether the Democrats take power or not I mean at best the Democrats can throw up some impediments and maybe slow it but it isn't going to stop and with economic insecurity or you know economic crisis these tendencies will overwhelm all of us and the problem is we've not offered working men and women the working poor on this country a meaningful alternative the Democratic Party is not a meaningful alternative I was in Anderson Indiana for this book and with all the old UAW workers this a GM had huge plants there 25,000 union jobs 25 $30 an hour pensions benefits protections of the union's NAFTA's passes they all go to GM they didn't just tear down the plants they actually bulldoze on these gigantic weed-choked Lots the city went into a death spiral the jobs went to Monterey Mexico where they pay Mexican workers $3 an hour without benefits so these people voted for Sanders but they weren't gonna vote for Clinton in the general election they voted for Trump so I'm not denying that that you know he plays to this racist nativist movement and indeed Stokes it but the engine of this which is this social inequality it's what led to Sanders insurgency and how did the Democratic Party respond I think there's enough evidence to say that they stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders and in in all of the one-on-one polls between Trump and Sanders he would have won and you read the Podesta emails I'm an investigative journalist I see nothing wrong with leaking the Podesta emails we got to see how two-faced Hillary Clinton was and how much money she got and how she was telling all the corporatist that she was just playing us we know from the Podesta emails that the Clinton campaign wanted Trump did everything they could to make sure Trump was the nominee so I I'm not saying don't vote Democrat as a block but I'm telling you that it won't make much difference that the engines of corporate power the Democrats are the friendly face of fascism and the Republicans are the racist irredentist Christianized bigots but that's it it's it's how you want it served up what you know do you want your jailor to come from Princeton or from Liberty University there's your choice and you know what Ocasio artis has now become best friends with Pelosi that's not a good sign I mean we've really got a hold fast to what we believe because look we're not going to garner any respect within the society if we're not willing to sacrifice and fight for what we believe and for me that is a complete destruction of the corporate state every that we cannot advance as a society and ultimately as a species until these people are removed from power [Applause] how you doing thanks for being here 33 I I'm one of your disillusioned youth who really don't see much for himself out here but I do feel an imperative to do something about it but I also don't want to be violent so that's where I see the real dilemma with revolution because most revolutions are pretty violent and I was trying to see if you had any advice for a less violent so most revolutions are in fact nonviolent yeah actually Lenin understood this I mean Lenin who didn't have a heart and as Chomsky said mounted a counter revolution against the Soviets nevertheless understood the dynamics of revolution very well and he was constantly trying to shut down anarchist violence because it was counterproductive what happens in every revolution if you read the theorist crane Brinton jeffrey davies and others is that no revolution succeeds until a significant part of the ruling elite defects so for instance I was in East Germany for the revolution that overthrew the Stasi state and Erich Honecker who'd been in power for 19 years sent down an elite paratroop division to leipzig with orders to fire on the crowd the paratroopers got to leipzig and the local communist authorities refused to deploy them in the streets Honaker was out of power within a week the same thing happened in Czechoslovakia once the the Czechoslovakian police would not fire on the protesters in the Velvet Revolution they were finished the same thing happened in Russia people forget yes there was an Turkish violence without question but what broke the back of Tsar ISM were the bread riots in Petrograd they sent the Cossacks who were the enforcers in to crush the bread riots and they refused and they joined the rioters the Tsar abdicated on a railway siding even get back that's how revolutions work and they you know I covered sorry if I'm not a pacifist I was in sorry ever doing the war I covered I used to go to Algeria where you you know walk into the Algiers Airport and would say welcome to Algeria land of a million martyrs foreign occupiers as we see in Iraq or which is us Afghanistan I mean you know the Taliban controls more territory now than they did 17 years ago when we went in I mean it's good for Raytheon and Halliburton and Northrop Grumman was not good for them and is not good for us yeah that's how revolutions work they when a critical mass and what happens within the structures of the elite is that that the foot soldiers will no longer protect them so you had Iran so the Shah fled they had the fourth largest army in the world the head of the Armed Forces goes on and said we will no longer defend the regime it was over that's how revolutions work it doesn't work by you know walking down a street all dressed in black throwing bricks through windows I mean we can't compete in the language of violence I've been overseas I know what special forces we have 60,000 members of the special forces who are called death squads and we we have no hope if we the state speaks that language very very well that doesn't mean that they won't inflict violence as they did at Standing Rock they will but we have to be militantly nonviolent to appeal ultimately to the conscience of not only the wider public but those within the ruling apparatus and at that point they're finished hi thank you for coming tonight I am I agree with much of what up with everything pretty much that's being said tonight and I certainly I had I went to the DMV and had myself removed from the Democratic Party and I'm officially a Green Party voter I voted for Jill Stein and I never thought in a million years I'd ever do that and before then I voted I am supported Bernie Sanders and and actually last year I went on a road trip and I had a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker on my car and a big Bernie Sanders poster on the back of my car and I was going through Kansas and Missouri and people were very hostile to me and I actually one truck driver tried to run me off the road and he ended up with a flat tire so that joke was on him so maybe there is a God but anyway um and most people I meet you know they act like they think I'm crazy when I try to talk about these things they think I'm a conspiracy theorist I'm talking about the men in black and things like that so I just wonder if you know of any or have any ideas and how we could sort of all all those of us who do think this way and are concerned about these issues how we could come together and form communities I know there's there's actually a Facebook group for Chris Hedges Facebook group probably not yours but you know fans of yours but I'm just wondering like if you have any ideas or if you know of any communities that have cropped up that support these ideas where people can come together and talk I mean all resistance will ultimately be local so that's why sanctuary is important and that's why community radio is very important to be able to do you have democracy now and I mean you know the the we have watched as the ruling elite recognizes that the ideology of neoliberalism is bankrupt nobody's buying it across the political spectrum that they have moved quite aggressively against anti capitalist and anti imperialist critics so they've done this by accusing us of being agents of a foreign power prop or not propaganda or not an anonymous website that was featured on the front page of bezos's Amazon / CIA corporation I mean named all major left-wing sites black agenda report counterpunch alternate truth dig which I write 4 as purveyors of foreign propaganda and when the lawyers for TruthDig asks the editors of The Washington Post who was behind proper not they said well we know but it's anonymous but we can't tell you ok we know it is it's your taxpayer dollars at work and and so with that charge we watched Google Twitter Facebook impose algorithms and what they did was that you have something called impressions where if you had typed in imperialism a year and a half ago and I had written an article on imperialism it will come up with anything other anything else that was recent on that subject now it doesn't and so you've watched the traffic or the referral from impressions on TruthDig alone decline over the last 12 months from over 700,000 to below 200,000 as they perfect the algorithms alternate for instance another left-wing site is lost 63 percent of its traffic world socialist website which is pretty good has lost over 80 percent of its traffic and then you have that coupled with net neutrality and I have a show it's called on contact it is on Rt America that's Russia today why because an anti imperialist anti-capitalist critic cannot get a place even on public broadcasting if you went back to the late 1960s early 1970s you could see on public television Malcolm X James Baldwin Noam Chomsky Howard Zinn it's gone and and I'm no fan of Putin obviously but I was in Eastern Europe the only way Czechs could hear the voice of slava Havel was on Voice of America and so and with the abolition of net neutrality these left-wing sites will be even further tiered or you know there'll be a two-tiered system on the internet so they'll be harder and harder to access and that's because the elites don't have a counter-argument and so the critics have become much more dangerous and and therefore already marginalized must now be silenced and we live in a period of relative calm at the moment so community radio is key Pacifica is great anything that is freed from the tentacles of corporate power and not beholden to wealthy donors I mean I've taught at Princeton Princeton's just a big corporation we're a bunch of rich kids or kids who want to be rich go to be branded to get into the 1% I did they had a little Occupy movement at print it was little and they asked me to mostly run by graduate students from Berkeley who had done their undergraduates at Berkeley and they asked me to come speak well what I didn't know I was teaching there was that there was a reporter from The Daily Princetonian there and he did quote me correctly and the next day the paper said Farris professor tells occupy students that the President of Princeton is an over compensated fundraiser that Princeton students are far too deferential to Authority and half of the trustee board should be in prison look it's all true I wasn't invited actually I did teach last year so I think they have a short institutional memory I don't know is that it I think we'll do a book signing before I collapse here one more okay one more question okay thank you I work for Public Employees Union one of the largest in the state well you know what I have to say is that I'll tell you we I worked personally I worked for Bernie Sanders I love Bernie Sanders but I can tell you that most people in most and we represent blue and pink collar workers primarily are very very much don't believe in the Bernie Sanders agenda in other words they think he's pie in the sky they think it's absolutely absurd what he says most of them were not supporting Bernie Sanders our union didn't end up in our union ended up of course endorsing Hillary Clinton but I guess I'd like you to comment on that because I've seen that with most working I don't believe that he would have won against Trump because I think he would have been villainized and because yeah well I had a lot of problems with Sanders I actually spoke to Bernie before he announced I was with Shah misawa the great socialist city council woman in Seattle and we were pushing him to run as an independent the argument being that one we're not going to build an effective counter force in one election cycle and to the Democratic Party is never going to give him the nomination and three they're going to force him out the door and make him campaign for Hillary Clinton which is exactly what happened and I was with Cornel West at in the streets of Philadelphia we marched with several thousand homeless people on to the appropriately named wealth Wells Fargo Center where the Democratic convention was being held and then that night Cornell and I were driving back to Princeton listening to Bernie's speech endorsing Hillary Clinton and Cornell who's amazingly astute said he missed his historical moment which many should have walked out but Bernie when when saw one and I pushed him said I don't want to end up like Nader well he's not wrong the Democratic Party would have mounted everything within their power to destroy and marginalize and discredit him as they have with Ralph and I and for me that was I I want my career I want my seniority in the Democratic caucus Schumer has promised me a committee chairmanship if the Democrats where he can take control I mean trotting him out standing behind Chuck Schumer I mean Chuck Schumer the bagman for Wall Street the cheerleader for moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem I mean and I think what'll happen he was wrong to run again but he ain't gonna work because if you look at the crowds he pulled when he was travelling around the country for Clinton it was in the hundreds instead of 10,000 look anytime you build a radical movement the oligarchs work overtime to divide the society and empower the proto-fascist to carry out acts of violence against the radicals that is true in you know we've seen it even in American history when you look back at the radical unions the Wobblies and the use of gun thugs and Pinkertons and baldwin-felts and company militias so the the fear the ruling elites will create the divisions that you talk about but that should not deter us from speaking truth to power you don't have to speak truth about power power knows very well what it's doing but it will be contentious and these divisions will be stoked I mean we're already watching Trump do it in terms of the union's I mean you look at the teachers strikes and like West Virginian they defied their union leadership who like most union leadership had become junior partners to the capitalist class it was quite an amazing moment so I think we just have to keep speaking to the kind of issues that affect people's lives I mean we live in a country where corporations are allowed to hold sick children hostage while their parents bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons or daughters we live in a country where CEOs are pulling down these compensation packages that are unlike anything we've ever seen in American history including the Gilded Age the economic disparity the economic inequality is greater than it has ever been in American history and workers are still paid substandard wages so I think we have to speak to those issues we have to try and reach out to people whose politics is not like ours and may even be distasteful eat perhaps even repugnant but you're the the we will watch the ruling class and this is true with every ruling class worked very effectively to widen the divisions stoke the hay and demonize the radicals we had the the bloodiest labor Wars in any of the industrialized world hundreds of American workers were murdered so we could have an eight-hour day and an end to child labor and you know the the rapaciousness of the American capitalist class is unequalled and the violence that they inflicted on us in the past they will inflict on us now and and they will do it by green lighting vigilante groups which they have always done I mean that's why weapons are largely criminalized for people of color and you walk into a white you know supporter Trump's house and he's got an arsenal that's not by accident I mean imagine if Bundy and all those people would imagine if they were black or if they were earth first what would have happened so yeah I mean it's gonna be it's gonna be tough isn't easy especially since people don't even speak in a language of class we don't even have the vocabulary to make sense of what's happening to us that's even that's been taken from us Chris we've been going for over an hour with the QA which is awesome thank you for your staying power there's a few other people left I'll leave it to you to decide what to do I would suggest cutting short at this point because we don't want folks who are interested in the book signing to leave early nothing compared to Cornell I do events with Cornell now the guy's amazing I don't know like he stays till the last persons in the room I mean come on Cornell we got like a four-hour drive I didn't know if I was still supposed to come out for okay so I'm just wondering about your I mean you've spoken a bit about Bernie and about past election and so on but I'm just wondering about your impressions regarding the our revolution group which is supporting a lot of you know progressive candidates in the election I didn't know what you most of the founders that group resigned in protest and look it up you know they they felt Bernie had told it turned it over to a campaign manager was a democratic operative in essence mean a lot of things that Bernie did with all his money which mystified me was pay you know I don't know tens maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to mainstream Democratic consultants I don't know what the hell that was about I say well we'll try to I guess I'll keep my question brief although multi part one is talking to a friend on the way up here and one of the issues with voting we've had so much voter suppression and seems like they've been working forever like a hundred and some years but it doesn't seem like the Democrats really even though that would help them get elected really fight for it they're my talk about it but are the democratic or the are the Democrats complicit in some way second question and again you can keep your answer short you know the so the first one was paid so the Democrats really not really want or they kind of like you know enabling intentionally sold out to the powers that be that question is if if pence were to get to be president do you think he would marshal kind of a religious right in the way that Trump has the white nationalist to where it actually grow versus you know the counter for four people guy hey this is too crazy we're out of here well the Democrats suppress lots of votes in New York State in the primary over 300,000 so they also in the primaries refused to allow in many primaries independents to vote who weren't registered Democrats most young people who supported Sanders so they will suppress the vote as energetically as the Republican Party when it serves their interests it was the second question no Pence is truly terrifying because he's a rational fascist and he comes out of the infrastructure yeah I mean he would we already I mean Trump's already doing it I mean Cavanaugh the reason there was this huge effort to put cabin on the court is because the Christian Right I mean in watching Collins a main pretend that Cavan eyes open to seeing roe v-- wade said I mean is ridiculous the whole reason he was pushed on there is because he's going to revoke roe v wade and because he's corporate front but the Christian Right was pushing hard made it very clear to the Trump administration had to put him on so I mean the Pence's entire political career has been funded by the Koch brothers he's a really dangerous guy and yeah he will now whether he will have the cultish aspect of Trump I don't know but he certainly has these Christian fascists behind him is that it okay thank you [Applause]

Channel: mediasanctuary

Views: 501,974

Keywords: Chris Hedges, American Anomie, Truthdig, The Sanctuary for Independent Media, political analysis, Durkheim

Id: HV0cS1TGve4

Length: 121min 7sec (7267 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 06 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/coloradoRay]

I couldn't get past his preacher tone/cadence.

Is there a written synopsis of this somewhere?

[u/agumonkey]

not american only, I think most modern societies have become overheating machines

[u/jongsau]

Chris Hedges is the real thing!

[u/bimyo]

More gloom and doom from the king of bad news. This guy is a fear machine.

[u/[deleted]]

American as an identity is ill-defined, so I think understand the problems with grouping all Americans in a single bin.