Chris Hedges "The Politics of Cultural Despair"

[Music] so I titled this talk the politics of cultural despair. I stole that from the great work by Fritz Stern, scholar of fascism, who left Germany when he was 18 and taught for many years at Columbia University. He spent his academic career exploring the roots of fascism, how fascism arose within Germany. And like many writers on fascism, Hannah Arendt included, he felt that the genesis of this distortion was despair.

The physical and moral decay of the United States and the malaise that has spawned have predictable results. We have seen in varying forms the consequences of social and political collapse during the twilight of the Greek and Roman empires, the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, Czarist Russia, Weimar Germany, and the former Yugoslavia. Voices from the past: Aristotle, Cicero, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Roth, and Milan Kundera warned us. But blinded by self-delusion and hubris, as if we are somehow exempt from human experience and human nature, we refuse to listen.

The United States is a shadow of itself. It squanders its resources in futile military adventurism, a symptom of all empires in decay as they attempt to restore a lost glory by force. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. Tens of millions of lives wrecked, failed states, enraged fanatics. There are 8.1 billion Muslims in the world, 24% of the global population, and we have turned virtually all of them into our enemies. We are piling up massive deficits, $3.1 trillion, while neglecting our basic infrastructure, including electrical grids, roads, bridges, and public transportation, to spend more on our military than all the other major powers on Earth combined. We are the world's largest producer and exporter of arms and munitions.

The virtues we argue that we have a right to impose by force on others – human rights, democracy, the free market, the rule of law, and personal freedoms – are mocked at home, where grotesque levels of social inequality and austerity programs have impoverished most of the public, destroyed democratic institutions, including Congress, the courts, and the press, and created militarized forces of internal occupation that carry out wholesale surveillance of the public, run the largest prison system in the world, and gun down unarmed citizens in the streets with impunity.

The American burlesque, darkly humorous with its absurdities of Donald Trump, fake ballot boxes, conspiracy theorists who believe the deep state in Hollywood runs a massive child sex trafficking ring, Christian fascists that place their faith in a magic Jesus and teach creationism as science in our schools, ten-hour long voting lines in states such as Georgia, militia members planning to kidnap the governors of Michigan and Virginia to start a civil war, is also ominous, especially as we ignore the accelerating ecocide.

All of our activism, protests, lobbying, petitions, appeals to the United Nations, the work of NGOs, and misguided trust in liberal politicians such as Barack Obama have been accompanied by a 60% rise in global carbon emissions since 1990. Estimates predict another 40% rise, almost all of it baked into the system in global emissions in the next decade. That means we are less than a decade away from carbon dioxide levels reaching 450 parts per million, the equivalent to a two-degree Celsius average temperature rise, a global catastrophe that will make parts of the Earth uninhabitable, flood coastal cities, dramatically reduce crop yields, and result in suffering and death for billions of people. This is what is coming, and we can't wish it away.

I speak to you tonight from Troy, New York, once the second largest producer of iron in the country after Pittsburgh. It was once an industrial hub for the garment industry, a center for the production of shirts, shirtwaists, collars, and cuffs, and was once home to foundries that made bells and firms that crafted precision instruments. All that is gone, of course, leaving behind the post-industrial decay, the urban blight, and the shattered lives and despair that are sadly familiar in most cities in the United States.

It is this despair that is killing us. It eats into the social fabric, rupturing social bonds, and manifests itself in an array of self-destructive and aggressive pathologies. It fosters what the anthropologist Roger Lancaster calls "poisoned solidarity," the communal intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear, suspicion, envy, and the lust for vengeance and violence. Nations in terminal decline embrace, as Sigmund Freud understood, the death instinct. No longer sustained by the comforting illusion of inevitable human progress, they lose the only antidote to nihilism. No longer able to build, they confuse destruction with creation. They descend into an atavistic savagery, something not only Freud, but Joseph Conrad and Primo Levi knew lurks beneath the thin veneer of civilized society.

Reason does not guide our lives. Reason, as Schopenhauer puts it, echoing Hume, is the hard-pressed servant of the will. "Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked," Freud wrote. "They are on the contrary creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause pain, to torture, and to kill him." *Homo homini lupus* – who, in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

As a rule, this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose whose goal might also have been reached by milder means. In circumstances that are favorable to it, when the mental counterforces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien. Freud, like Primo Levi, got it. The moral life is largely a matter of circumstances. Moral consideration, as I saw in the wars I covered, usually disappears in moments of extremity. It is too often the luxury of the privileged.

Ten percent of any population is cruel, no matter what. And 10% is merciful, no matter what. And the remaining 80% can be moved in either direction. Susan Sontag said to survive, it was necessary. Primo Levi wrote of life in the death camps, "to throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain families and individuals in cruel times." It was, he wrote, a Hobbesian life, a continuous war of everyone against everyone.

Varlam Shalamov, imprisoned for 25 years in Stalin's Gulags, was equally pessimistic. "All human emotions of love, friendship, envy, concern for one's fellow man, compassion, a longing for fame, honesty," he wrote, "had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies during our long fasts. The camp was a great test of our moral strength, of our everyday morality, and 99% of us failed it. Conditions in the camps do not permit men to remain men. That is not what camps were created for."

Social collapse will bring these latent pathologies to the surface. But the fact that circumstances can reduce us to savagery does not negate the moral life. As our empire implodes, and with it social cohesion, as the Earth increasingly punishes us for our refusal to honor and protect the systems that give us life, triggering a scramble for diminishing natural resources and huge climate migrations, we must face this darkness not only around us but within us. The dance macabre is already underway.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans die each year from opioid overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide – what sociologists call deaths of despair. This despair fuels high rates of morbid obesity, perhaps 40% of the public, gambling addictions, the pornification of the society with the ubiquitous images of sexual sadism, along with the proliferation of armed right-wing militias and nihilistic mass shootings. And as despair mounts, so will these acts of self-immolation. Those overwhelmed by despair seek magical solutions, whether in crisis cults such as the Christian Right, or demagogues such as Trump, or rage-filled militias that see violence as a cleansing agent.

As long as these dark pathologies are allowed to fester and grow, and the Democratic Party has made it clear it will not enact the kinds of radical social reforms that will curb these pathologies, the United States will continue its march towards disintegration and social upheaval. And removing Trump will neither halt nor slow the dissent.

An estimated 300,000 Americans will be dead from the COVID-19 pandemic by December, a figure that is expected to rise to 400,000 in January. Chronic underemployment and unemployment, close to 20% when those who have stopped looking for work, those furloughed with no prospect of being rehired, and those who work part-time but are still below the poverty line are included in the official statistics instead of being magically erased from the unemployment rolls. Our privatized healthcare system, which is making record profits during the pandemic, is not designed to cope with a public health emergency; it is designed to maximize profits for its owners.

There are fewer than one million hospital beds in the United States, a result of the decades-long trend of hospital mergers and closures that have reduced access to care in communities across the country. Cities such as Milwaukee have been forced to erect field hospitals. In states such as Mississippi, there are no longer any ICU beds available. The for-profit healthcare service did not stockpile the ventilators, masks, tests, or drugs to deal with the pandemic. Why should it? This is not a route to increased revenue. And there is no substantial difference between Trump and Biden about the health crisis, where 1,000 people a day are dying.

48% of frontline workers remain ineligible for sick pay. Some 43 million Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance. There are 10,000 bankruptcies a day, with perhaps two-thirds of them tied to exorbitant medical costs. Food banks are overrun with tens of thousands of desperate families. Roughly 10 to 14 million renter households – that's between 23 and 24 million people – were behind on their rent in September. That amounts to $12 to $17 billion in unpaid rent, and that figure is expected to rise to $34 billion in past-due rent by January. The lifting of the moratorium on evictions and foreclosures will mean that millions of families, many destitute, will be tossed into the street.

Hunger in U.S. households almost tripled between 2019 and August of this year, according to the Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture. The proportion of American children who did not have enough to eat, the study found, is 14 times higher than it was last year. And a study by Columbia University found that since May, there are 8 million more Americans who can be classified as poor. Meanwhile, the 50 richest Americans hold as much wealth as half of the United States, while millennials, some 72 million people, have 4.6% of the U.S. wealth.

Only one thing matters to the corporate state. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate crisis. It is the primacy of corporate power, which has extinguished our democracy, taken from us our most basic civil liberties, and left most of the working class in misery and the increase in consolidation of its wealth and power.

Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doting into old age with cognitive lapses and no moral cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden? Yes. Is Trump inept and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump more of a threat to the open society? Yes. But is Biden the solution? No. Biden cannot plausibly offer change; he can only offer more of the same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The country's largest voting-age block, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home.

This demoralization of the electorate is by design. In America, we are only permitted to vote against what we hate. Partisan media outlets set one group against another, a consumer version of what George Orwell in his novel *1984* called the Two Minutes Hate. Our opinions and prejudices are skillfully catered to and reinforced with the aid of a detailed digital analysis of our proclivities and habits, and then sold back to us. The result, as Matt Taibbi writes, is "packaged anger, just for you."

The public is unable and unable to speak across the manufactured divide. Politics, under the assault, has atrophied into a tawdry reality show centered on manufactured political personalities. Civic discourse has been poisoned by invective and lies. Power, meanwhile, is left unexamined and unchallenged. Political coverage is modeled, as Taibbi points out, on sports coverage. The sets look like the sets on *Sunday NFL Countdown*. The anchor is on one side, there are four commentators, two from each team. Graphics keep us updated on the score. Political identities are reduced to easily digestible stereotypes: tactics, strategy, image. The monthly tallies of campaign contributions and polling are endlessly examined, while real political issues are ignored.

It is, of course, the language and imagery of war. This kind of coverage masks the fact that on nearly all the major issues, the two ruling political parties are in complete agreement: the deregulation of the financial industry, trade agreements, the militarization of the police and the Pentagon has transferred more than $7.4 billion in excess military gear and hardware to nearly 8,000 federal and state law enforcement agencies since 1990, the explosion in the prison population, deindustrialization, austerity, support for fracking and the fossil fuel industry, the endless wars in the Middle East, the bloated military budget, the control of elections and mass media by corporations, and the wholesale government surveillance of the population. And when the government watches you 24 hours a day, you cannot use the word "liberty." This is the relationship of a master and a slave.

All have bipartisan support, and for this reason, these issues are almost never discussed. The goal is to set demographic against demographic. The stoking of antagonism is not, however, news; it is entertainment, driven not by journalism but marketing strategies to increase viewership and corporate sponsors. News divisions are corporate revenue streams competing against other corporate revenue streams. The template for news, as Taibbi writes in his book *Hate Inc.*, the cover of which has Sean Hannity on one side and Rachel Maddow on the other, is the simplified morality play used in professional wrestling.

There are only two real political positions in the United States. You love Trump, or you hate him. But voting for Biden and the Democratic Party means you do vote for something. You vote to endorse the humiliation of courageous women such as Anita Hill, who confronted their abusers. You vote for the architects of the endless wars in the Middle East. You vote for the apartheid state of Israel. You vote for the wholesale surveillance of the public by government intelligence agencies and the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. You vote for NAFTA, free trade deals, deindustrialization, a real decline in wages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, and the offshoring of those jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in countries such as Mexico, China, or Vietnam. You vote for the assault on teachers and public education and the transfer of federal funds to for-profit and Christian charter schools. You vote for the doubling of our prison population, the tripling and quadrupling of sentences, and the huge expansion of crimes meriting the death penalty. You vote for militarized police who gun down poor people, often of color, with impunity. You vote against the Green New Deal and immigration reform. You vote for the fracking industry. You vote for limiting a woman's right to abortion and reproductive rights. You vote for a segregated public school system in which the wealthy receive educational opportunities and poor people of color are denied a chance. You vote for punitive levels of student debt and the inability to free yourself of those debt obligations even if you file for bankruptcy. You vote for deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations and against universal healthcare. You vote for defense budgets that consume more than half of all discretionary spending. You vote for the use of unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy our elections.

You vote for a politician who, during his time in the Senate, abjectly served the interests of MBNA, one of the largest independent credit card companies in the world, headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden's son Hunter Biden. He was one of the principal architects of the wars in the Middle East, where we have squandered upwards of $7 trillion and destroyed or extinguished the lives of millions of people. He is responsible for far more suffering and death at home and abroad than Trump. And if we had a functioning judicial and legislative system, Biden, along with the other architects of our disastrous imperial wars, corporate plundering of the country, and betrayal of the American working class, would be put on trial, not offered up as a solution to our political and economic debacle.

The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on issues regarding race, religion, immigration, women's rights, and sexual identity and pretend this is politics. But these issues are societal or ethical issues. They are important, but they are not social or political issues. The seizure of control of the economy by a class of global speculators and corporations has ruined the lives of the very groups the Democrats pretend to lift up. When Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party, for example, destroyed the old welfare system, 70% of the recipients were children. Those on the right of the political spectrum – and we must never forget that the positions of the Democratic Party would make it a far-right party in Europe – demonize those on the margins of society as scapegoats. The culture wars mask the reality: both parties are full partners in the destruction of our democratic institutions. Both parties have reconfigured American society into a mafia state; it only depends on how you want it dressed up.

The power of politicians such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell comes from being able to funnel corporate money to anointed candidates. In a functioning political system, one not saturated with corporate cash, they would not hold power. They have transformed what the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a *res publica*, a public thing or the property of a people, into an instrument of pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by the obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes, and have perverted the judiciary, the media, and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to engage in financial fraud and theft.

In the midst of the pandemic, what did our ruling kleptocrats do? They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout, overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves at our expense while tossing crumbs out the windows of their private jets, yachts, penthouses, and palatial estates to the suffering and despised masses. The CARES Act handed trillions in funds or tax breaks to oil companies, the airline industry (which alone got $50 billion in stimulus money), the cruise ship industry, and gave a $170 billion windfall to the real estate industry. It handed subsidies to private equity firms, lobbying groups whose political action committees have given some $200 million in campaign contributions to politicians in the last two decades, the meat industry, and corporations that have moved offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The CARES Act allowed the largest corporations to gobble up money that was supposed to keep small businesses solvent to pay workers. It gave 80% of tax breaks under the stimulus package to millionaires and allowed the wealthiest to get stimulus checks that averaged $1.7 million. The CARES Act also authorized $454 billion for the Treasury Department's Exchange Stabilization Fund, a massive slush fund doled out by Trump cronies to corporations that, when leveraged ten to one, can be used to create a staggering $4.5 trillion in assets. The act authorized the Fed to give $1.5 trillion in loans to Wall Street, which no one expects will ever be repaid.

American billionaires have gotten $434 billion richer since the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added nearly $72 billion to his personal wealth since the pandemic started. And during this same period, 55 million Americans lost their jobs.

Now, the molding of the public into warring factions works commercially. It works politically. It destroys, as it is designed to do, class solidarity. But it is also a recipe for social disintegration. It propels us towards the kind of Hobbesian world Primo Levi and Sigmund Freud warned us about. I watched competing ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia retreat into antagonistic tribes. They seized rival mass media outlets and used them to spew lies, mythological narratives exalting themselves and their ethnic group, along with vitriol and hate against the ethnicities they demonized. This poisoned solidarity, which we are replicating, pumped out month after month in Yugoslavia, destroyed the capacity for empathy – perhaps the best definition of evil – and led to a savage fratricide.

The United States, awash in military-grade weaponry, is already plagued by an epidemic of mass shootings. There are death threats against critics of Trump, including Representative Ilhan Omar. There was an aborted plot by 13 members of a right-wing militia group to kidnap the governors of Michigan and Virginia and start a civil war. A Trump supporter mailed pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and CNN, an effort to decapitate the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, as well as terrorize the media outlet that is the party's principal propaganda platform. The spark that usually sets such tinder ablaze is martyrdom. Aaron J. Danielson, a supporter of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, was wearing a loaded Glock pistol in a holster and had bear spray and an expandable metal baton when he was shot dead on August 29th, allegedly by Michael Forrest Reinhold, a supporter of Antifa, in the streets of Portland. A woman in the crowd can be heard shouting after the shooting, "I am not sad that an effing fascist died tonight." Reinhold was ambushed and killed by federal agents in Washington State in what appears to be an act of extrajudicial murder, not that different from the state executions I covered in Argentina or El Salvador.

Once people start being sacrificed for the cause, it takes little for demagogues to insist that self-preservation necessitates violence. Political stagnation and corruption, along with economic and social misery, spawn crisis cults – movements led by demagogues that prey on the unbearable psychological and financial distress and champion violence as a form of moral purification. These crisis cults, already well-established among followers of the Christian Right, right-wing militia groups, and many of those who back Donald Trump, who look at him not so much as a politician but as a cult leader, all peddle magical thinking and an infantilism that promises, if you surrender all autonomy, prosperity restored, national glory, a return to a mythical past order, and security. For this reason, Trump is the symptom; he is not the disease. And if he leaves office, far more competent and dangerous demagogues will rise if the social conditions are not radically improved to take his place.

I fear we are headed towards a Christianized fascism. The greatest moral failing of the liberal church, which I come out of, was its refusal, justified in the name of tolerance and dialogue, to denounce the followers of the Christian Right as heretics. By tolerating the intolerant, it ceded religious legitimacy to an array of con artists, charlatans, and demagogues, along with their cultish supporters. It stood by as the core gospel message – concern for the poor and the oppressed – was perverted into a magical world where God and Jesus showered believers with material wealth and power. The white race became God's chosen agent. Imperialism and war became divine instruments for purging the world of infidels and barbarians. Evil itself – capitalism, because God blessed the righteous with wealth and power and condemned the immoral to poverty and suffering – became shorn of its inherent cruelty and exploitation. The iconography and symbols of American nationalism became intertwined with the iconography and symbols of the Christian faith.

The mega-pastors, narcissists who ruled despotic, cult-like fiefdoms, make millions of dollars by using this heretical belief system to prey on the despair and desperation of their congregations – victims of neoliberalism and deindustrialization. These believers find in Trump, who preyed on this despair in his casinos and through his sham university, and these mega-pastors, champions of the unfettered greed, cult of masculinity, lust for violence, white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, religious intolerance, anger, racism, and conspiracy theories that are at the core of the Christian Right.

When I wrote my book *American Fascist: The Christian Right and the War on America*, I was quite serious about the term "fascists." Tens of millions of Americans live hermetically sealed inside the vast media and educational edifice erected by the Christian Right. In this world, miracles are real. Satan, allied with liberal secular humanists and the deep state, along with Muslims, immigrants, feminists, intellectuals, artists, and a host of other internal enemies, is seeking to destroy America. Trump is God's anointed vessel to build a Christian nation and cement into place a government that instills biblical values. These biblical values include banning abortion, protecting the traditional family, turning the Ten Commandments into secular law, crushing infidels, especially Muslims, indoctrinating children in schools with biblical teachings, and thwarting sexual license, which includes any sexual relationship other than marriage between a man and a woman.

Trump is routinely compared by evangelical leaders to the biblical King Cyrus, who rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem and restored the Jews to the city. Trump has, in fact, filled his ideological void with Christian fascism. He has elevated members of the Christian Right to prominent positions, including Mike Pence to the Vice Presidency, Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, William Barr as Attorney General, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and the televangelist Paula White to his Faith and Opportunities Initiative. More importantly, Trump has handed the Christian Right veto and appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the federal courts. He has installed 133 district court judges out of 677 total, 50 appeals court judges out of 179 total, and two U.S. Supreme Court justices, and with Amy Coney Barrett's nomination, most likely three out of nine. This is 19% of the federal trial judges currently in service. Nearly all of the extremists, including Barrett, who make up the judicial appointees, have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association.

Trump has adopted the Islamophobia of the Christian fascists. He has banned Muslim immigrants and rolled back civil rights legislation. He has made war on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood. He has stripped away LGBTQ+ rights. He has ripped down the firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches, which are tax-exempt, from endorsing political candidates. His appointees, including Pence, Pompeo, and DeVos, throughout the government, routinely use biblical strictures to justify an array of policy decisions, including environmental deregulation, war, tax cuts, and the replacement of public schools with charter schools – an action that permits the transfer of federal education funds to Christian schools.

At the same time, the Christian Right is building paramilitary organizations, not only through ad hoc militias but through mercenary groups of private contractors controlled by figures such as Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos, and the former CEO of Blackwater. I studied ethics at Harvard Divinity School with James Luther Adams, who had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936. Adams witnessed the rise of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He warned us about the disturbing parallels between the German Christian Church and the Christian Right. Adolf Hitler was, in the eyes of the German Christian Church, an evoked messiah, an instrument of God, a view similar to the one held today about Trump by many of his white evangelical supporters. Those demonized for Germany's economic collapse, especially Jews and communists, were agents of Satan.

Fascism, Adams told us, always cloaked itself in a nation's most cherished symbols and rhetoric. And fascism would come to America, he said, not in the guise of stiff-armed marching brown shirts and Nazi swastikas, but in mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, the biblical sanctification of the state, and the sacralization of American militarism. Adams was the first person I heard label the extremists of the Christian Right as fascists. And Adams warned us that liberals, as in Nazi Germany, were blind to the tragic dimension of history and radical evil, and they would not react until it was too late.

Trump's legacy will, I fear, be the empowerment of the Christian fascists. They are what comes next. Noam Chomsky, for this reason, is right when he warns that Pence is far more dangerous than Trump. For decades, the Christian fascists have been organizing to take power. They have built infrastructures and organizations, including lobbying groups, schools, colleges, and law schools, as well as media platforms, to prepare. They have seeded their cadre into positions of power. We on the left, meanwhile, have seen our institutions and organizations destroyed or corrupted by corporate power and been seduced by the boutique activism of identity politics. FRC Action, the legislative affiliate of the Family Research Council, already gives 245 members of Congress a 100% approval rating for supporting legislation that is backed by the Christian Right.

Christian fascism is an emotional life raft for tens of millions of Americans. It is impervious to science and verifiable fact. The Christian fascists, by choice, have severed themselves from rational thought and the secular society that almost destroyed them and their families and thrust them into deep despair. We will not placate or disarm this movement bent on our destruction by attempting to claim that we too have Christian values. This appeal only strengthens the legitimacy of Christian heretics and weakens our own. These dispossessed people will either be reintegrated into the economy and the society, and their shattered social bonds mended, or the movement will grow more virulent and more powerful.

The Christian Right is determined to keep the public focus on societal or ethical, as opposed to economic issues. The corporate media, whether it supports or opposes the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, almost exclusively discusses her opposition to abortion and membership in People of Praise, a far-right Catholic sect that practices speaking in tongues. What our corporate masters, along with the Christian fascists, do not want examined is Barrett's subservience to corporate power, her hostility to workers, civil liberties, unions, and environmental regulations. And since the Democratic Party is beholden to the same donor class as the Republican Party, and since the media long ago substituted the culture wars for politics, the most ominous threat posed by Barrett and the Christian Right is ignored.

The road to despotism is always paved with righteousness. All fascist movements paper over their squalid belief systems with the veneer of morality. They mouth pieties about restoring law and order, right and wrong, the sanctity of life, civic and family virtues, patriotism, and tradition to mask their dismantling of the open society and silencing and persecution of those who dissent. The Christian Right, awash in money from corporations that understand their true political intent, will use any tool, no matter how devious, from right-wing armed militias to the invalidation of ballots, to block Biden and Democratic candidates from assuming office.

Capitalism, driven by the obsession to maximize profit and reduce the cost of labor by slashing workers' rights and wages, is antithetical to the Christian gospel, as well as the Enlightenment ethic of Immanuel Kant. But capitalism, in the hands of the Christian fascists, has become sacralized in the form of the prosperity gospel – the belief that Jesus came to minister to our material needs, blessing believers with wealth and power. The prosperity gospel is an ideological cover for the slow-motion corporate coup d'état. And this is why large corporations such as Tyson Foods, which places Christian Right chaplains in its plants, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam's Warehouse, along with many other corporations, pour money into the movement and its institutions, such as Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. This is why corporations have given millions to groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to campaign for Barrett's appointment to the court.

Barrett has ruled to cheat gig workers out of overtime, green-light fossil fuel extraction and pollution, gut Obamacare, and strip consumers of protection from corporate funds. Barrett, as a circuit court judge, heard at least 55 cases in which citizens challenged corporate abuse and fraud, and she ruled in favor of corporations 76% of the time. Our corporate masters do not care about abortion, gun rights, or the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. But like the German industrialists who backed the Nazi Party, they know that the Christian Right will give an ideological veneer to ruthless corporate tyranny. These oligarchs view the Christian fascists, the same way the German industrialists viewed the Nazis, as buffoons. They are aware that the Christian fascists will trash what is left of our anemic democracy and the ecosystem, but they also know they will make huge profits in the process, and the rights of workers and citizens will be ruthlessly suppressed.

If you are poor, if you lack proper medical care, if you are paid substandard wages, if you are trapped in poverty, if you are a victim of police violence, this is because, according to the prosperity gospel, you are not a good Christian. In this belief system, you deserve what you get. There is nothing wrong with the structures or systems of power. Like all totalitarian movements, followers are seduced into calling for their own enslavement. As the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels understood, the best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.

The tinder that could ignite violent conflagrations lies ominously stacked around us. It may be set off by Trump's defeat in the election. Millions of disenfranchised white Americans, who see no way out of their economic and social misery, struggling with an emotional void, are seething with rage against a corrupt ruling elite and bankrupt liberal class that betrayed them. They're tired of the political stagnation, grotesque mounting social inequality, and the punishing fallout from the pandemic. Millions more alienated young men and women, also locked out of the economy and with no realistic prospect for advancement or integration, gripped by the same emotional void, have harnessed their fury in the name of tearing down the governing structures and anti-fascism. These polarized extremes are inching closer and closer to violence.

We have three options: reform, which given the decay of the American body politic is impossible; revolution; or tyranny. If the corporate state is not overthrown, then America will soon become a naked police state where any opposition, however will be silenced with draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country have already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the protests through physical force, arrest, tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray. This will become normalized. The huge social divides, often built around race, will be used by the Christian fascists to set neighbor against neighbor. Armed Christian patriots will attack those groups blamed for social collapse. Dissent, even non-violent dissent, will become treason.

Peter Drucker observed that Nazism succeeded not because people believed in its fantastic promises, but in spite of them. Nazi absurdities, he pointed out, had been witnessed by a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government, which entirely pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course. Nobody, he noted, would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.

The poet, playwright, and socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller, who was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship when the Nazis took power in 1933, wrote in his autobiography: "The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done in the last few years? What good have insights and knowledge done us?" After Toller committed suicide in 1939, W. H. Auden, in his poem "In Memory of Ernst Toller," wrote: "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand. They arrange our loves. It is they who direct at the end the enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand."

Once the internal enemies are purged from the nation, we are promised America will recover its lost glory. Except that once one enemy is obliterated, another takes its place. Crisis cults require a steady escalation of conflict and a steady stream of victims. Every new crisis becomes more urgent and more extreme than the last. This is what made the war in the former Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage of conflict reaches a crescendo, it loses its efficacy; it must be replaced by ever more brutal and deadly confrontations. It is what Ernst Jünger called a "feast of death."

These crisis cults, as Drucker understood, are irrational and schizophrenic. They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality upside down. They appeal exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and spectacle become politics. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities and murder, as the federal marshals who wantonly gunned down the Antifa activist Michael Reinhold in Washington State illustrated, become heroism. Crime and fraud become justice. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. What these crisis cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. There is only emotional consistency.

At the height of the Reign of Terror, on March 6, 1794, during the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre announced that the Committee for Public Safety now recognized the existence of God. The French revolutionaries, fanatical atheists who had desecrated churches and confiscated church property, murdered hundreds of priests, and forced another thirty thousand into exile, instantly reversed themselves to send to the guillotine those who disparaged religion. In the end, exhausted by the moral confusion and internal contradictions, these crisis cults yearn only for self-annihilation.

Our ruling elites will not restore these ruptured social bonds. They will not address the deep despair that grips America. They will not respond to the climate emergency. As the country unravels, they will reach for the familiar tools of state repression and the ideological prop provided by Christian fascism. It is up to us to carry out sustained acts of non-violent mass resistance. If we mobilize in large and small ways to fight for an open society, to create communities that, as Václav Havel wrote, "live in truth," we hold out the possibility of pushing back against these crisis cults. We hold out the possibility of holding at bay the brutality that accompanies social upheaval, as well as slowing and disrupting the march towards ecocide. But this requires us to acknowledge that our systems of governance are incapable of being reformed. No one in power will save us. No one but us will stand up for the vulnerable, the demonized, and the Earth itself. All we do must have the single aim of crippling the power of the ruling elites in the hopes of new systems of governance that can implement the radical reforms to save us and the world.

The most difficult existential dilemma we face is to at once acknowledge the bleakness before us and act, to refuse to succumb to cynicism and despair. And we will only do this through faith – the faith that the good draws to it the good, that all acts that nurture and protect life have an intrinsic power, even if the empirical evidence shows that things are getting worse. We will find our own freedom, our autonomy, our meaning, and our social bonds among those who also resist. And this will allow us to endure, and maybe even triumph. Thank you.

So Chris, what would you like from a question period? Do you want to invite people to submit questions? Okay. Um, so we're inviting people to submit questions. Are you ready for the first one? So you were on Jimmy Dore and this person who is viewing said you mentioned the global elite are hollowing out democratic institutions right down to public education. So this is a reference to a specific Jimmy Dore interview. As the only parent to stop a school closing and the creator of the film *We Have Your Kids*, and I guess in general, families and parents, what can parents do to resist the industry's looting of education, such as the fact that they loot 1600 schools a year?

Well, I think the most important campaign is to fight against charter schools. Because charter schools, many of which are for-profit, come with an array of tools, including breaking teachers' unions, that are very useful to the corporate state. They oftentimes focus exclusively on STEM and marginalize or don't even teach the humanities. And I think the assault on public education – let's not forget that Arne Duncan, who was Obama's Secretary of Education, was a huge proponent of charter schools – is one of the most important assaults against our democracy. Our public school system was, in many ways, the crown jewel of our democracy, and its destruction through underfunding, through the attacks – I live in New Jersey, and Chris Christie made open war against the teachers' unions. I mean, the thing about charter schools is, I live in Princeton, and we have one, and no one in the community wants it. It's decided at a state level, and it siphons off money from the public school system. Charter schools, in essence, are a form of educational apartheid because they can select the students they want. So they don't tend to take students on at a low income level, they don't take students with special needs, and they don't take students who need English as a second language, because these are the most expensive students to educate. So, I would say, certainly stand behind teachers' unions, fight against ballot initiatives that seek to either cut or not to increase budgets for public school systems, and mount vigorous campaigns against charter schools.

So this one is about collapsing community. And this person writes, "I live in one of the whitest counties in California. Our voter demographics recently tipped Democrat, but historically it has been staunchly conservative Republican. I don't know how many people consider themselves third party or progressive. The towns in the county were established during the Gold Rush with the timber industries and agriculture. In the 1960s, swaths of people came out of Berkeley during the back-to-land movement, inspired by Heinlein's *Stranger in a Strange Land*, establishing communes, spiritual retreats. We've been able to maintain a congenial balance of good old boys and hippies. That's about the only culture that we have, and it's part of the mystique for Silicon Valley Bay Area retirees. As the American empire collapses, I worry that my community will be faced with assaults based on ideology and not race. At one of our BLM marches, which was met with violent white nationalists, it received honorable mention by Ted Cruz on the Senate floor. In calculating how to maneuver through this time, I wonder if it is better to stay local where there is easy accessibility to self-sustaining communities, or would an urban area be better and be the best bet based on the sheer numbers of people and what I perceive as easier access to mobilization?"

Well, if you take Yugoslavia, I covered the war in Yugoslavia. So you had societal collapse, ultimately a savage fratricide. People who lived in urban areas had a much harder time surviving because when the state breaks down, or in our case, when the state is concerned only with servicing that group, that tiny cabal of global, you know, financial speculators at our expense, they're not – the state won't carry out its traditional role of providing basic social services to the citizenry. We see this now unfolding with the COVID-19 pandemic. So it is imperative upon us to build local structures that are, in many ways, self-sustaining. And that is going to include the issue of food. And in an urban area, it's just a lot harder. So my own experience, for instance, in the war in Yugoslavia, is that those who remained in urban areas had a much harder time surviving than those who were outside urban areas and were able to build successful collectives. That idea of a collective is key because you can't, in moments like that, go it alone. You depend on a small community. So I think it will be hard. I mean, these food deserts which are already now sweeping across the country. At least in a rural environment, you have some capacity to grow your own food and to have alternative food sources as opposed to the commercial food sources that are trucked, you know, by agribusinesses across the country.

So this next one gets at some of the philosophical and religious history aspects of what you are saying. So the person writes in, "Do you feel that the prosperity gospel is an extension of the Calvinist ethic, a constant throughout American history that is just ramping up now, or do you see it as a very new thread specific to 20th-century evangelicalism?"

Well, that's a good question because, of course, Max Weber saw the prosperity gospel as a constant. I think there's an important difference. I mean, the prosperity gospel has always been with us, and it does come out of Calvinism. But you saw powerful socialist movements in the United States in the early 20th century, and it also gave rise to Rauschenbusch's the Social Gospel. And this alarmed the industrialists, so they began to fund, in a big way, Rockefeller and others, an alternative theological viewpoint to counter the Social Gospel. And this revolved around the prosperity gospel. It was given perhaps its earliest, most extreme form by Norman Vincent Peale and *The Power of Positive Thinking*. Which, by the way, Peale – that's the church that Donald Trump went to, to the extent that his family went to church. But that was...

So yes, the prosperity gospel has always, I think, been a stain upon, uh, Christian theology. But it was, uh, massively promoted to counter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel. And then has been given, I think, its most perverted and frightening form by the Christian Right.

The difference between the past and the present, and this really happened around the late '70s, is that there was a switch by those who embrace the prosperity gospel among fundamentalists and evangelicals. I mean, traditionally, fundamentalists and evangelicals called on believers to remove themselves from the contaminants of secular society, and that included not engaging in politics. That changed, uh, in the '70s, in particular, through a Christian Right, rabid, racist, uh, Rush Limbaugh, who argued that Christians had to create the Christian society in order for Christ to return for the Second Coming. And that's when we began to see these movements rise, Jerry Falwell and these figures.

It also coincided with segregation. So many of these so-called Christian entities created Christian schools, which were a way to keep white children from having to be in classrooms with black children. And they received tremendous funding from corporations because if, uh, your theological outlook or your ideological outlook is such that God will reward you if you are a good Christian, indeed, make you wealthy, then you don't need unions, uh, you don't need to challenge the system, you don't need to change regulations or laws or workers' protection. And so there's been tremendous infusion of money. I mentioned some of the corporations, Tyson, Perdue, and others. The Koch brothers is another one. Tremendous sums of money into this movement because they are the perfect ideological cover for the most rapacious forms of capitalism. And we saw millions and millions of dollars handed over by corporations, uh, to support Barrett's, uh, nomination.

So, uh, that's right. It's not that the prosperity gospel has been problematic and has been with us, um, but, uh, it has, I think, eclipsed within the evangelical movement all other, uh, belief systems. Used to be in the Baptist Church, for instance, although they were very narrow-minded on issues of homosexuality and abortion and stuff, they were often very politically left, very pro-union. And Southern Baptist Seminary, which used to be one of the great seminaries in the country, was really taken over by this movement, and the professors were purged. The professors who had a kind of conservative or narrow social outlook but a more liberal, uh, political outlook, they were purged. It didn't matter whether they were against abortion or not. Um, and, um, at this point now, the, the, this movement is so powerful and so entrenched that to defy it. I mean, you see it with these, once in a while, there'll be an evangelical pastor who will stand up and attempt to challenge, uh, the ideology of the movement, and they're swiftly, uh, disappeared, in essence, from the movement, and their voices are crushed.

So, this question is from Kathy online, who asks, "Is this happening as the result of the rise of the populist rise across the entire Western world, not only the US? Do you believe that this is a cleverly orchestrated strategy to depopulate the planet by the top one percent in order to save the environment and to avoid spending for pension and healthcare for an aging population?"

Well, if you're talking about the rise of right-wing proto-fascists, um, you're right. Um, Hungary, Poland. I was in Poland not long ago. Powerful forces in France around Marine Le Pen, within Germany. And I think it's the result of neoliberalism. It's the result of turning huge segments of your population into what the ruling oligarchs consider human refuse. Um, I think the ruling elites are just so out of touch at this point. Remember, they don't live in the same country we live in. They live in a country, a writer for the New Yorker called Richistan. They don't fly commercial airlines. They're on $500 million yachts, uh, they live on palatial estates. Um, they're like, you know, the elites who were treated into Versailles or the Forbidden City. And unfortunately, they have almost unchecked power, but also are woefully out of touch with the suffering and misery that's rippling across the country itself.

You're asking, will they sacrifice? Yes, they, they already. I, there was an article in the Washington Post, I think it was yesterday, about how most people within the Trump administration have opted for herd immunity. What does that mean? It means that we won't attempt to control or check the pandemic. We'll just let it ripple through the population, with health experts estimating two million dead. And those who aren't killed, hopefully, will have antibodies, and, uh, the, the capitalist system will get back, uh, into its, uh, its old rhythms again. Uh, yeah, they're perfectly willing to, to dispose of us. Uh, and certainly perfectly willing to dispose of people in the developing world. That, that's not particularly new. So, yes, that they, uh, you know, they, they care only about their own, and, and the rest of us don't matter.

"What do we do in the event that Trump successfully subverts the American government and establishes a dictatorship?"

Well, all we can do is take to the streets. But any kind of protests, and I'm talking about non-violent protests, will be met with lethal force at this point. Um, we're certainly on the cusp of something very ugly because even if Trump is removed from office, that's not going to solve our problem. That was kind of the nature of the talk. But also, these right-wing armed militias will be green-lighted to carry out savage acts of violence and cited by Trump and his supporters if they're pushed out of office, if he establi-, in essence, establishes a dictatorship. And we're very close to that. At the same time, those of us who protest will become targets. So, it's either scenario is pretty bleak.

"I have a question I want to ask you, but I guess I'll put it in there because it goes along with what some people are writing in. I mean, you reference Primo Levi. Um, so just, I'm just curious, how did you, um, I don't know, did certain Holocaust writers, Holocaust survivors come to you as people to read, given what you had experienced as a war reporter and realizing that the, the mass horror there, when you see it firsthand in other forms, that you know, it's, it's not just abstract, that that it can happen? And looking to somebody like Primo Levi for, well, the reason how you write about that."

I cited Primo Levi and Conrad, who I didn't quote, is that they both understood how fragile social systems are, and how when they collapse, we become, or we carry out acts that make us strangers to ourselves. That, as Primo Levi understood, the line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. He writes quite a bit about the Jewish head of the Lodz ghetto was a monster. And how when we are scrambling for survival, when we are convulsed by fear, when we don't know where our next meal is going to come from, when we face the possibility of imminent death, [Music] we act in ways that are driven by instinctual drives to survive. And I experienced that in war. I, courage is never a constant in war. I was in the Sudan during a coup with another reporter from the Wall Street Journal, very close friend of mine. We turned a corner, it was dark. By mistake, we came towards the presidential compound, and we heard in the dark all of the presidential guards flick the safeties off their automatic weapons to shoot. And my, the other reporter was a few paces in front of me, and I instinctually moved behind him so the bullets would go through him first. It wasn't even a thought. Fear does strange things to you. And, and I think Conrad in *Heart of Darkness*, and also in his short story *The Outpost of Progress*, which is perhaps even more brutal than *Heart of Darkness*, he shows how that, um, veneer of civility, this is another thing that Freud understood, once it falls away, exposes rapacious and frightening human behavior. And so I think that is an inevitable consequence of social disintegration. I saw it in the former Yugoslavia, I saw it in the Congo, saw it in El Salvador. And we're not immune from it. And I think part of coping with what's coming for us is understanding that the consequences of that and our own capacity to descend to that level. And I think when you understand it, and you understand your own capacity to engage in activity that is selfish and brutal, uh, you have more of an ability to safeguard. If you think it won't happen to you and you're immune from it, then you're living in kind of a fool's paradise.

Well, thank you. The legal and political philosopher Roberto Unger states that social innovation in the use of investment capital can address systemic problems. You've talked about the importance of local and regional capitalism. If raised to scale, do you believe that social entrepreneurship can counteract the effects of capitalism in the corporate state, as well as meet the major challenges that you consistently mention with climate change, reintegrating people into the economy?

Not unless capital is heavily regulated. This is the lesson of history. Um, and as I mentioned in the talk, the, the goals of capitalism has two goals: the maximization of profit and the reduction of, of the cost of production, which is an assault primarily against labor or automation. So if capitalism is not heavily regulated, there's nothing intrinsically within capitalism, uh, to stop it from commodifying everything. Human beings become commodities, the natural world becomes a commodity that it then exploits until exhaustion or collapse. This is, uh, Karl Polanyi and *The Great Transformation* writes about this. So, I, I'm not, in that sense, an anti-capitalist, in that I think capitalism appeals to a side of human nature, but it's a dark side of human nature. And unless it's heavily regulated and heavily constrained, it will destroy the society. And that's what it's done, not just to the United States, but to the global economy. Because in fact, we have no control over our own economy. It's been surrendered. Which is why all they ever talk about are cultural issues like abortion, because there's no way at this point that we can influence our own economic structures unless we build structures to remove ourselves from it. Um, and that's the problem. Capitalism is essentially, through a series of judicial and legislative acts pushed by capitalists since the 1970s, been completely unfettered. They don't pay taxes. It's legalized fraud. They loot the U.S. Treasury. They hollow the country out from the inside. I mean, one of the reasons you see charter schools is that the federal government spends about $600 billion, I think, a year on education, and, and the hedge fund managers want it. Uh, I mean, Karl Marx writes about this, that in the late stages of, uh, an empire, capitalists begin to actually consume government spending or government structures that sustain capitalism itself. And that's precisely what we're seeing in terms of the arms industry, in terms of the privatization of intelligence. I mean, we have what I think 16 intelligence agencies, and 70% are done by private contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, where Snowden worked. So we've lost control. Um, and, and that has first created a mafia economy, and now has created a mafia state. So I don't put any hope in entrepreneurs. I put hope in heavy state intrusion to regulate and thwart the power of capital. But in fact, these big banks after 2008 have only become larger and consolidated power. But it really, it's, uh, a massive breaking up of monopoly. Uh, I mean, and until we create an electoral system that's not dependent on corporate money, we're not going to have any change. But that's not going to happen because all of these figures, uh, achieved political office with the power through corporate money. Um, and when, as soon as they, uh, finish their term in Congress, they go straight off to K Street for lucrative lobbying jobs. In the same with the Pentagon, they, you know, all these generals go straight to Raytheon. And when they're not on Raytheon or Halliburton or somewhere else, they're on MSNBC telling us that we should start another war. So, I mean, that leads into a few people asking, "Is there hope? Bernie, AOC, Kashmishala? Do we look for hope anywhere in the system?"

Well, hope isn't going to come through the political system. Uh, you know, Bernie failed us. He failed us in 2016 when hundreds of his delegates marched out of the appropriately named Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia carrying Bernie signs, chanting, "What does democracy look like?" This is what democracy looked like. Sanders missed his historical movement, movement by not walking out with them. We're never going to build what he calls a political revolution in an election cycle. He spent the intervening three years dutifully serving Chuck Schumer, whose power comes because he's the water carrier of money from Wall Street to the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party burned him once again. Remember that a figure like Biden or a figure like Clinton, without corporate money, Bernie would have won. There were all sorts of other dirty tricks using the DNC, making sure that superdelegates, as long as he didn't get a plurality, as soon as you got to the second vote at the convention, Sanders was finished because the superdelegates, who are appointed, who are all lobbyists or DNC members, you can't sit on the DNC unless you're a superdelegate, you know, not allowing independents to vote in primaries. And much of Bernie's young base were not registered Democrats. I mean, so I think Sanders' failure to go after the Democratic Party was made him kind of morally and temperamentally not equipped to lead this fight. And now, of course, he's running around telling us to vote for Biden, just as the last election was running around telling us to vote for Clinton. And the Clinton administration turbocharged neoliberalism, and many of the issues, welfare, Glass-Steagall, deregulation of the FCC, which turned the airwaves over to roughly a half-dozen major corporations, they control about 90% of what was, what most Americans watch or listen to. The omnibus crime bill, which Biden was a major architect of, tripled and quadrupled sentences, including sentences that put people into prison for life for non-violent crimes, drug crimes, usually. The explosion of the prison population, now the largest in the world, 25% of the world's prison population, where less than 5% of the world's population. All this was done under the Democrats. So, and Bernie just would not go after the Democratic Party because he didn't want to pay the price. And I admit, the price would have been severe. They would have mounted an aggressive and well-funded campaign to drive him out of his Senate seat in Vermont. He would no longer have seniority. He sits with the Democratic Caucus, and he, he chose his career, I think, unfortunately, over the battle that has to be fought.

Okay, so this is a homegrown comment with something you may have heard before, which is that your talk was a bummer. That's how it begins. Your talk was a bummer. The left normally does take up the mantle of malcontentism or critique. Your analysis is certainly a politics of despair. But that's not at all what we hear from Trump. And if the pandemic weren't so bad, the Democrats would be chipper too. Do you think that's a barrier to your position?

Well, it's, you know, as a writer, it's not my job to sell you hope. There's lots. The country's awash in advertising and political messaging and Hollywood, and, you know, just about every medium is there to sell you hope. And in fact, I find that kind of falsehood very disempowering. I think that, especially given the climate crisis, we have to recognize the emergency that it is, and we have no time left. I mean, even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, we have so much baked into the system, as I mentioned, that or it's unavoidable, probably, that we'll reach 450 parts per million, which is catastrophic. And the idea that we can adapt is as specious as the idea that climate change doesn't exist. The idea that we live in a functioning democracy, or that the Democratic Party itself functions as a party, is just a misreading of reality. And it is a bummer. I don't find no joy in it at all. But at the same time, if we allow ourselves to be self-deluded, uh, we become utterly ineffectual. Um, we have to make a very rational, cold, and correct an analysis of the forces arrayed against us if we're going to bring them down. And I also, you know, am not going to get up and, and give talks about how we're inevitably going to win and build the socialist, I am a socialist, paradise, when it's not true. It's, that's not my job as a writer. My job is to discern the truth, or as best I can, and lay it out and call for action, uh, because I believe in action against, I would call them these forces of death. I don't think that's too extreme, to save ourselves. I speak as a father. I have children. And, um, I, I, you know, I'm not immune to that kind of despair, but I don't want that despair to overwhelm me and make me either cynical or complacent. Uh, in the end, that resistance becomes a moral imperative. I've often said that, you know, I don't fight fascists because I'll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists. But we can't use the word hope if we don't act. And we have to act against the real centers of power, not imaginary centers of power.

I also wonder if, in your experience, you feel like reactions to the truth-telling that you're weaving in with writers and ways of looking at the reality that's on the ground, if it feels like it falls along class lines or lines in the social divide?

It does fall along class lines, but probably not the way you would expect, because it's primarily the privileged and educated classes who are least able to see privilege, especially white privilege, or especially white male privilege. Is a form of blindness. That's what privilege is. Privilege blinds you. And I spent 20 years of my life in the developing world, in places like Gaza or Central America, uh, struggling as best I could to understand what it meant to be a Palestinian in the world's largest open-air prison, or what it meant to be a Salvadoran or Guatemalan at the height of the wars and the death squads that were killing between 700 and 1,000 people a month. And I speak Spanish, and I speak Arabic, but I learned that as a person of privilege, as hard as I tried to grasp that reality, there was always a divide. There was always an inability, because of my privilege, to fully understand. And as long as I honored that divide and recognized it, I could have very real relationships. I teach in a prison. My students in the prison, these are college courses, they are earning their BA degree through Rutgers, are far more attuned to the reality that I just laid out than students that I have taught at schools like Princeton, because their privilege blinds them. So there is a class divide, but the class divide is one that the supposedly best educated, or certainly those who come from elite educational institutions, are least able to see.

"How are we feeling? So another couple of questions. Okay. Um, this one is another fusion of several comments and discussion points that have been brought up, but, um, and it evidently seems to come from people wanting to feel like, in the wake of your writing impacting them, what do we do? You strongly described how close Trump is to declaring enforcing dictatorship. Isn't that a strong reason to vote for Biden, even if he is far from what we want? I'd rather have the military instructor sharing in the fight rather than just in the streets on our own."

So there are a few comments and questions about that. And, and those seem to fall along the lines of, what do we do? Well, what we do is what Extinction Rebellion is doing, which is use mass, prolonged, non-violent civil disobedience to begin to disrupt and shut the system down. You know, there were a few years ago, 10,000 Spaniards surrounded the parliament. The Lebanese people marched through the streets of Beirut, chanting, "Kullun ya'ni kullun," which means everyone means everyone. The whole system has to go. And our focus has to be against the ruling elites. Um, the idea that Biden is going to make it better. I mean, it's Biden that created the mess. It's Obama that created the mess, elected with a mandate, uh, after the financial meltdown, and the first thing he did was embrace the banking industry and turn his back on the rest of us. Obama's, Obama's assault on civil liberties, especially as misuse of the Espionage Act, was worse than George W. Bush. And the reason he picked Biden is because Biden's basically a Republican. His voting record is Republican. He was picked because he would appeal to the Republican. He had close ties with the segregationists. He goes all the way back as one of the opponents of bussing, and he is completely beholden to the corporate oligarchy. I mean, the corporatists love him, they support him. That's why they're giving him all this money, because they hope that he will restore a kind of decorum and gravitas to the presidency while they continue to disembowel the country and the earth. Um, so I just, I want, I don't want to play their game. I haven't played there. I haven't voted for a Democrat since before 2000, and I was Ralph Nader's speechwriter. I've long, but voting itself is just not that important given what we're up against. If, quote Emma Goldman, if voting was that important, it'd be illegal. So we have to begin to recognize the very real existential crisis before us and react in the way that other mass movements, for instance, the ones I saw in Eastern Europe during the revolutions in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Romania. Romania got a little complicated. But we have to begin to begin to organize like that. And I just, on a personal level, can't vote, uh, for, I mean, I just spent, I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I just can't sell out the Palestinians. Everyone sells them out. Um, I can't sell out my students in the prison. Half of them wouldn't be there if it wasn't for Joe Biden. And I'm, I'm just not going to. I can't contain my bile and my anger enough to to vote for somebody who was so responsible for the destruction of so many lives. Remember, I was in Iraq. I mean, a lot of people I care about, their lives were destroyed, and in some cases, taken from them because of figures like Biden. These are not abstract issues for me. These are concrete and real issues for me. And I know where I stand. I stand with the victims. Uh, and, and I'll stand with them in every way possible, including in, in the voting booth.

So, given that experience, do you see a lot of what's happening with the disintegration here as being, I guess this would probably go without saying, but just to articulate it, and how you see it, as the war come home?

The war machine. Sure, the war machine came home. And that's Thucydides when he writes about the Peloponnesian War. And of course, it destroyed Athenian democracy, as all empires do, because empires require centralized control. Remember that empire is really the external expression of white supremacy. And that's what I saw. Uh, it is the repression, subjugation of people of color, whether in the Middle East or Latin America or Africa. And the military machine, which is perhaps as an institution been, uh, most responsible for the destruction of democracy, consumes so many resources. I mean, these, these wars are catastrophes. Nobody is held accountable. Not only are they not held accountable, they're all promoted and then given lavish salaries to work for defense contractors. And so you divert all of your resources, uh, towards futile and endless wars. We're talking about two decades of warfare now. And meanwhile, the country collapses. And so, as the country collapses, in essence, is being hollowed out from the inside, you import the mechanisms of control used on the fringes of empire to the homeland: militarized drones, wholesale surveillance, militarized police forces, uh, the suspension of basic civil liberties, habeas corpus, due process, etc. All of these are familiar tactics, uh, used by the empire to control what Frantz Fanon would call the wretched of the earth. But they always come back. And that's why Thucydides wrote, the tyranny Athens imposed on others, it finally imposed on itself. That is a characteristic of late empire.

So, you know, so many people wrote in asking, you know, essentially, "Do we vote for Biden?" which you already addressed. You know, given all of the writers who you referenced within the talk, Vaclav Havel, and again, Primo Levi, and what you were just talking about with Conrad, could you recommend to us great works of art to turn to, because perhaps, you know, in confronting these writers ourselves, there could be a sense of the spiritual liberation that's needed to navigate what you're describing is coming for us?

Well, I have a daily discourse with these writers, and that way I don't feel so alone, and I learn from them. I mean, I think it was Mark Twain who said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." I see many similarities between what happened in Yugoslavia, where I was during the war, and what's happening in the United States. Um, I mean, Joseph Roth, who understood by the 1920s where Germany was headed and was a very lonely voice. Um, [Music] Dostoevsky also, who understood the consequence of a bankrupt liberalism, *Notes from an Underground Man*, although all of his books, *The Idiot*, I mean, just about anything he wrote. Um, Cicero, of course, who fought against the destruction in 27 BC with the rise of Augustus of the Roman Empire. [Music] Primo Levi, Elias Canetti. I mean, Conrad is another one. Uh, all, I think all of these writers who, uh, not just chronicled a historical period, but I think more importantly, understood human nature. And that's why I read a lot of literature, because great artists are grappling with that almost intangible aspect of what it means to be human. Um, I mean, I would recommend that you just go to the bibliography. I'm very careful about my bibliographies. If I quote a book, uh, in, in my own writing, it's usually because I admire it. Um, so, you know, there's, there's a lot of people out there to read. Um, um, but certainly don't, don't, I read political science, I read history, but I also remain, I'm actually in the middle of a great biography of Dostoevsky. I remain pretty rooted in the voices of those artists because they capture the zeitgeist of a moment that a historian also misses. When Hannah Arendt, in *The Origins of Totalitarianism*, writes about anti-Semitism in France, she said that to truly understand the nature of anti-Semitism in France, you have to read Marcel Proust. And I've read Proust three times, which is quite an undertaking. So, I, I take great, however bleak those visions can be. Danilo Kiš is a great Yugoslav writer who again saw what was coming for his country and was ignored. I find great comfort in in that writing because I don't feel alone. I feel that there are others who went through similar periods, grappled with what Kant would call radical evil, struggled to fight back. It didn't mean that they necessarily survived as distinct human beings, but their voices are, I think, essential, and they are our patrimony. They are the voices of our ancestors. And this gets to the issue that I addressed in *Empire of Illusion*, is that that severing ourselves from a print-based culture really sets us adrift. It creates a very frightening kind of rootlessness. Um, and so I don't own a television. I'm not on social media. I don't, not on any social media. And I try, and every night I try and read, and partly because I don't want to speak in the language that mass media gives me, even the language. So, yeah, you know, turn off your devices and, you know, read *The Idiot*.

So, can you speak to what you see as the trajectory of the Black Lives Matter movement and how people can support and learn?

Well, I've been very encouraged by these street protests for a couple of reasons. First, because of the courage that it takes to go out in the streets, not only because of the pandemic, but because of the very brutal reactions on the part of these militarized, paramilitary police units. Secondly, I found a political sophistication. They're not being gaslighted the way movements have been gaslighted in the past by liberal elites. They're not fooled by Nancy Pelosi wearing a kente cloth for police taking the knee, or Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, painting in 35-foot tall letters "Black Lives Matter" on a road near the White House, at the same time she calls for a $50 million increase in the police budget and the building of a $500 million new jail. They recognize that the, uh, the reforms that Joe Biden is calling for have only served to consolidate the power of the police and make them more omnipotent and more lethal. And that it is an issue of abolition. It's not an issue of reform. Um, so they get that it's a systemic problem. Um, uh, so I've been very heartened. I mean, I, I think that that is precisely the kind of activity that gives hope, uh, that is going to make possible real change as opposed to cosmetic change. So, yeah, I think these, you know, a lot of these people are young. I think they're out there, and a lot of them are white, and I think that's also encouraging that they've realized, one of the things that I sense they've realized that in in cases like this, it's, it's their role to follow, not to lead. So, yeah, I've been very encouraged by these street protests. I think they're heroes.

An email came in from Eshi Modahar, and given the references to Germany several times in your speech, she writes, "Similar to Nazi Germany, will defeat in a foreign war cause US fascism to crumble?"

There is a difference there with Nazi Germany. Um, I mean, Nazi Germany arose out of the, uh, tremendous suffering that was caused by World War I. And I can't remember the exact figures of dead, but it's, I think two million, maybe five million. I mean, there was tremendous shock throughout the society, societal breakdown. The monarchy was overthrown. Then you had massive reparations. Then you had the 1929 crash. And then you had the liberal elite, after the crash, essentially geared the economy to paying back the banks. So they actually suspended unemployment benefits at a time of mass hunger. I mean, there was. And here, when we wage war, there is no, it doesn't affect much of the population. It affects the underclass, which has no, doesn't have the kind of employment opportunities and is recruited into the military, and then comes back to the society and is discarded, in essence, after their service, also coping with the type of PTSD that comes from fighting in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are prime recruits for these militias. I was in my last book, *America's Farewell Tour*, spent a chapter with these groups like the Three Percenters, in particular. And these are almost all military combat veterans. In the same way that the Freikorps, which was the antecedents to the Nazis, used to suppress the Spartacus Rebellion, that led to horrific repression. A. Toller was part of that, had to flee. Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg are assassinated. So, in that sense, it's different. Will fascism, I mean, I think that the, what the, the body blow to the, uh, American empire will actually come from the dropping by most of the world of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, because at that point, the value of the dollar will diminish. No one knows. Two-thirds, we can look to the 1950s when the pound sterling was dropped as the world's reserve currency in Britain, and that caused a tremendous economic crisis in Britain. But remember, the British Empire, that got slowly dismantled after from the end of World War I until 1956. Um, but I think that will, that could trigger the kind of economic chaos, um, that would see a very ugly form of Christian fascism take place. Um, uh, Germany, uh, through the Nazi Party, engaged in a world war that was, you know, ultimately so self-destructive. I mean, the, I said in the talk about how, uh, these crisis cults, fascism as a crisis cult, they have to ratchet up one crisis from the next. And every time they create a new crisis, they become more precarious. How is that going to play out, especially in an age of nuclear weapons? I, I don't know. I mean, those are, uh, but they're all important factors that we have to be aware of as we, uh, live through the twilight days of the American empire. And the nuclear clock is the closest it's ever been to midnight, of course. Yeah.

Any thoughts on Pope Francis? Someone wrote in on the Pope coming out with the economic critique.

Yeah, I like Pope Francis. Uh, I think he's great. I think he has a lot of courage. I mean, it's interesting that Barrett, who trumpets herself as a good Catholic, kind of theologically embraces just about everything Pope Francis is fighting against. But yes, he's been very good about, especially industrial nations exploiting, uh, the developing world, about the environment. Uh, he's been a, a pretty remarkable figure. I mean, you could argue certainly one of the most, for me, one of the most important world leaders, world figures at this point, one of the very few who, who actually has a moral center.

Well, we want to thank you for being here, Chris. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's quite the thing that you made the journey to be here, even in the pandemic. So, yeah. And I've been a beautiful weaving. So, if anyone wants to write in any more questions, I think that there's still some discussions. You sparked a lot of heating, right? Well, where, where are your masks? So, thank you to everyone. And this will be posted at mediasanctuary.org. Thank you, Chris. Thanks, Megan. You.