The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Noam Chomsky

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

In this episode, Lawrence talks with public intellectual, linguist, and political activist Noam Chomsky. Together, they discuss topics ranging from American exceptionalism and foreign policy, to North Korea and Brazil, as well as free speech and Donald Trump. See the exclusive, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com   Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm Lawrence Krause. What's left to say about Nome Chomsky? He's known throughout the world as perhaps the most important living public intellectual. And his writing has been cited more than almost any author in their arts and humanities over recent decades. And he's literally the father of modern linguistics. Nome served as a role model for me since I took a class from him in U.S. foreign policy while doing my PhD in physics at MIT, and I watched him speak throughout Cambridge with generosity and intelligence.

We did a dialogue on stage three years ago for the Origins Project, and we discussed a host of things from language and consciousness to politics. That was before Donald Trump and Brexit and all that, however, and I was happy to have the opportunity to update our dialogue.

As always, he was incisive, informative, provocative, and brilliant, as well as providing a unique treatment of issues when simply does not hear discussed in the U.S. media, making it incredibly important to hear from him today. Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program immediately at patreon.com slash origins podcast. I hope you enjoy the show.

Noam, it's great to have you back here. You and I had one of my favorite conversations before the public, I think three years ago now. Three years? I think it seems, it's hard to believe. But I time it by knowing that it was before Trump was elected. So I, because it seems, that's what's amazing. In three short years, it seems like so much has happened.

It's something to be. BT and. 80, that's right, exactly. And, but that's not just all Trump. I mean, all the things happen is what's happened, North Korea and Syria and Israel and Venezuela. Brazil. All over. It's just amazing that what seems to have.

happen in those three years and even in our own countries. There's free speech debates. There's all sorts of things and I'll want to talk about some of that. But at the same time, the more things change, the more they remain the same. So there's all sorts of new issues, but the underlying causes and impact may not be so different. I wanted to, and you know, when I was thinking about that, I was looking at what we said to each other. And then I was reminded of a book I had been reading recently, which is an old book from 1960s by Richard Hofstadter called Anti-Intellectualism in America. And it was interesting for me to read that because it was written in response to McCarthyism. It was written in 1961 or so.

And I thought I'd begin to put this in context in a quote at the beginning of that book from 1961, where he quoted Emerson, who wrote, Let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. great men, great nations have not been bolsters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life and have manned themselves to face it. So I thought I'd ask you to comment on that, and then we can move into recent politics.

Well, Emerson was a very interesting thinker, but in many respects, he unfortunately illustrated the things that he's criticizing. I agree. So take, for example, something not irrelevant today, his attitude toward the civil war. At the very beginning, he was a pacifist. In fact, he was, in a sense, in favor of the war. He thought it would break down the states, would break down state power, so maybe it would be beneficial. After the Battle of Bull Run, he became an enthusiastic super patriot.

very much the way intellectuals do all the time. As soon as the conflict begins, we're enthusiasts for our own side. In fact, if you look back at the Transcendentalist, his group, some of the most distinguished intellectuals in the United States, certainly, maybe anywhere, one didn't go along with the tide. Nathaniel Hawthorne.

And he was kind of excluded. In fact, there's a very interesting article you might want to read if you have it in the Atlantic Monthly. Hawthorne, towards the end of the war, about 1964. 1864. 1864 decided to just travel through the South to see. By then, the outcome of the war was reasonably clear. And he wrote an article which was supported. of the North, you know, but skeptical.

For example, he interviewed southern prisoners of war in a fairly sympathetic way. He said, look, these are just rural farmers. They're not war criminals. They were brought up to defend their homes and so on. We should treat them decently. Anyway, the interesting thing about the article is not only his commentary, which is interesting, but the interpolations. The editors agreed to have it published, but only if they were allowed, and this is the liberal intellectual journal, if they were allowed to interpolate comments criticizing what he wrote along the way.

So there you have Hawthorne's moderately sympathetic view to people who are defeated and suffering, and the liberal intellectuals interpolating. So, no, you have to be a super patriot. You can't say these things. It's very instructive about intellectual history in many ways. In fact, if you look at the history of intellectuals, it works very much like this. So shortly after this period came the Dreyfus trial, which actually is the first time that the word intellectual starts being used in its modern sense. And it's very interesting that today we honor the Dreyfuss trial.

arts, Emil Zoli, and so on. Sure. Not then. They were bitterly attacked by the immortals of the Academy Frances. How dare you mere writers and artists criticize our grand institutions, you know, the state, so on. Fas for, Zola actually had to flee the country. Yeah, sure. Let's go forward to not long before we met late 60s, 66.

67, roughly then, McGeorge Bundy, former Harvard Dean, leading intellectual national security advisor for Kennedy and Johnson, had an article in Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal in which he said, he discussed the criticism of the Vietnam War. He said, yes, there are legitimate criticisms about the tactics and so on. Then there are what he called the wild men in the wings, people like Hawthorne and Zola, who are not only criticizing the tactics, but are raising questions about our motives. I assume you were one of the wild men in the wings. Absolutely.

Very far out of the wings. This is a theme that runs through basically all of history. You go back to classical Greece, who drank the hemlock, the guy who was corrupting the youth of Athens, by asking too many questions right up to the present. So it's interesting to raise the question of Emerson. It was a very distinguished,

honorable figure, but not immune. Well, no, and I like that quote because of the many-sided aspects of it, because of his background, and also this notion, of course, great nations have not been boosters and buffoons, which sort of resonates in some ways

in the current times. And this idea of whether anti-intellectual It has been prevalent, and to what extent it's good or bad. It's a good question. So, for example, there are several kinds of intellectuals. There's the wild men in the wings, and they're the what are sometimes called the stenographers of power. Yeah. And one has to make up one's own mind, but I think you can certainly have different attitudes towards them.

Well, you know, we were talking about lunch that I learned from you, and the first time, time we met, which was when I was sitting in a course in American foreign policy when I was a student at MIT, a shocking fact, which to me just surprised me because I'd always kind of revered academia and it's been a part of my life ever since. But the realization that in some ways during the Vietnam war, the last group to accept the immorality of that war was, were the academics, which I always thought, maybe because I knew of you, but I'd always thought somehow the academics were leading it, but it was the students, it was the public, maybe you can go into a little bit. Well, I would broaden it beyond academics to the general intellectual community, with some

exceptions. There always are the Mel Zolos and the Nathaniel Hoffman. And the Nozjohnskys. But by and large it's true. In fact, you get a kind of a vivid picture of it. First of all, remember that opposition to the war was very late in coming. The war actually started in the early 50s. By 1960, maybe 60 or 70,000 people had been killed in South Vietnam

just by the repressive government we were supporting. Kennedy escalated the war in 1961 and 62. He authorized the U.S. Air Force to start bombing rural South Vietnam under South Vietnamese markings, but nobody was fooled. Authorized Napalm began, and this was very serious, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock, to try to drive the rural population into concentrated areas, called strategic hamlets, where they were being protected against the guerrillas who the U.S. government knew very well they were supporting. We know this from internal documents that have been released.

It was no protest, none. In fact, just to give you an example, when 1965, I guess, I would, 6465, I happened to be spending a year at Harvard, as a visiting fellow on Cognitive Science Center, February 1965, the war against South Vietnam had already half destroyed the country. But the O has escalated the war to the north. and the individual who was primarily responsible for this was McGeorge Bundy. National ski, you recall after a plea coup and so. Yeah. A couple of students.

Bundy was being invited, had been invited, to be the commencement speaker at the June commencement for Harvard. And a couple of students initiated a very mild petition asking whether it's right to invite someone who's just, launched the war against another country without provocation. Since I was there, they asked me to see if I could get some faculty signatures. Virtually impossible. That was 1965. By that time, the war was already far advanced. In fact, in October, 1965, there was an international day of protest.

you were probably in elementary school at the time so you didn't know about it Yeah, I was still in elementary school and in Canada, that was also amazing. But it was an international day of protest. It's interesting because, you know, so this was 65. Yeah, because one thinks of the protests

as being later, of course, but already and maybe the American media, maybe you're going to get that. Well, what happened is interesting. I'm talking about Boston, maybe the most liberal city in the country. Yeah. We decided to try to have a demonstration in Boston to join the international demonstrations.

We went to the Boston Common, you know, the standard place. I was supposed to be one of the speakers. Totally broken up by counter demonstrators, mostly students, incidentally, coming to smash up this demonstration. The Boston Globe, maybe the most liberal paper in the country, you look at the front page the next day, it was denouncing the demonstrators. How dare you.

very much like the mortals of the Academy of Frances, how dare you attack our noble institutions and so on. This is October 1965. By then, there was another international day of protest in May, in March, I think, 1966. We decided we can't have a public meeting. We'll have a meeting in the church, or on St. Street Church, church was attacked. At that time, Vietnam had literally almost been destroyed. At that, just to give in Bernard Foll, who was the most respected military historian, Vietnam expert.

No dove, incidentally, but cared about the Vietnamese. He wrote at that time that he doubted that Vietnam would survive as a cultural and historical entity under the most serious attack that had ever been launched against an area that size, words roughly like that. And that was at the point when we, in liberal city of Boston, we couldn't have a demonstration in a church without it being attacked. Well, after that, finally, an opposition movement developed, mostly young people, students, and so on. But let's fast forward up to 1975 when the war ended. As soon as the war formally ended, of course, everyone had to write about it. Yeah, yeah.

What did it mean? And you look across the spectrum of public expressions, public media, major media, and they kind of break up into the hawks and the doves. So roughly, the hawks saying we were stabbed in the back, we didn't fight hard enough. If we'd fought harder, we could have won and so on. The doves are always much more interesting. They set the kind of limits of possible thought this far, but not a millimeter far. So you go way to the end, say Anthony Lewis, the New York Times, strong critic of the war.

Yeah, I remember. I remember. A very interesting article. He said, the war began. He said with blundering efforts to do guns. good, blundering because it didn't work, to do good because that's a totology. You don't give arguments for that. That's kind of like saying two plus two equals four.

Yeah. He's not a wild man in the wings. They said by 1969, it was clear that it was a disaster. We could not bring democracy to Vietnam at a cost acceptable to ourselves. So it was really a terrible mistake. Now, up to the present, about as far as you can go to the critical side, is to say it was a mistake. Very interestingly, at that point, public opinion was being carefully sampled. Chicago Council on Foreign Relations does extensive studies of public opinion, very scholarly.

They're in 1965, 66, roughly then. Their report also, of course, asked questions about what would you? think about the Vietnam War, and the answers were interesting. About 70% of the population said it was not a mistake. It was fundamentally wrong and immoral. Now, that question kept being asked for another 15 years or so, up to about roughly 1990. The answers were all approximately the same. They stopped asking it after a while.

Yeah. The last time they asked at the Distinguished Social Scientist's Series, scientist who was in charge of the surveys, John really, asked the question and comments, what do people mean when they say this? And he said, well, what they mean is too many American lives were being lost. Well, that's possible. It would have been possible to find out to ask another question. Exactly. But the other possible answer, namely, they meant what they were saying, is just unthinkable. Totally discounted. This is the history of intellectuals.

Well, you know, okay, well, and we'll come back to that because I want to circle around to that eventually in a different context. But let's, and one of the reasons I was happy to start with historical perspective is, of course, it's always, it's always good to look at the present in that context. I was just reading what is now one of my favorite quotes of Mark Twain, who said that history may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes a lot.

And I want to talk about, in that context, what's happening around the world, both what's really happening and the perceptions of what's really happening from domestically to foreign wars. I mean, we could talk for hours about that, but we'll see if we can limit this. But let's pick what's going on.

You pick your favorite. We could start with Venezuela, we could start with North Korea, we could start with Israel or Trump. I want to sort of go through these and see what we're hearing and what's really there. Because this notion of,

of American exceptionalism, which just seems to be so prevalent, part of it is the notion, which again brings me back to when I first met you, to this notion that somehow the United States is different because we always want to do good. Other countries have been imperial powers, but their intentions were not to do good.

And I remember you asked saying at the time that if you asked a five-year-old, is it likely that America's foreign policy is governed by anything different than anyone else throughout all of history? They'd say it's unlikely. But somehow the perception is, that intentionality is that the United States really is altruistic

and its interventions around the world, which may have been, had bad consequences, were really well intended, but they were misplaced. And I kind of still get, I still kind of see that in the interpretation of much of what's going on. Well, bluntering efforts to do good. Yeah, yeah. And notice that the five-year-old,

who you invented, agreed with 70% of the population at the end of the Vietnam War. So let's take today's newspapers. Yeah, okay. There's an article by David Sanger in New York Times, one of the leading security analysts. Yeah, sure. It was an article about how to deal with the Russian aggression,

the new forms of Russian aggression and intervention. And there's some interesting lines in it. So, for example, there's a sentence, It's not just somewhere in the middle, nothing special, saying it's about time for, he's quoting somebody positively as saying it's time for NATO to enhance its defensive capacities at the Russian border. Does that strike anyone as funny? I mean, is the Warsaw Pact enhancing its defensive actions at the Mexico border? Yeah, yeah. Well, no, we're exceptional.

If we happen to have forces at the Russian border, that's because it's defensive. If we have ABM installations at the Russian border, which do actually have dual-use capacities. Of course. And there's an article in the bulletin, the atomic scientist, the lead article by Theodore Postal recently pointing that out. And even if they're defensive, that's a first strike. weapon. Of course. I mean, it's one of the concerns, yeah, as being involved in the bull to the long time, that's what I've been concerned with. And we have them there, as President Obama said, in order to protect Europe from Iranian missiles, which don't exist. Exactly.

And always amazed me about this notion that we were protecting Europe from missiles as don't exist, which it just so happens that we're all. But it's defensive, notice, at the Russian border. At the Russian border. It so happens. They're pointing at the, potentially, at the, yeah, exactly. If I were. But you won't see a comment about this. I'm sure, because it's kind of common sense. And then, well, I mean, you know, when you say that, of course, one thinks about whether maybe putting missiles in Cuba might have been defensive. Well, in fact, it was. There's very good scholarship on this by now.

And it's pretty well agreed by mainstream scholarship. What the reasons were for Khushchev to make this very reckless move, there were basically two. one was just what you said the United States was carrying out a major terrorist war against Cuba a very serious terrorist war and if the Russians may not have known the details

but they certainly roughly knew what was going on certainly Cuba did in August 1962 Kennedy issued a national security memorandum which called on the terrorist operations, Operation Mongoos, to be enhanced leading to an effort to create an insurrection in Cuba, which would lead the U.S. intervention in October 1962.

Well, that's when the missiles went in. I don't think Castro and Khushchev read the internal documents, but you could see what was happening on the ground. That's one reason. There was another. Hirschoff, when he took office, recognized something pretty obvious that Russia could not compete economically with the United States. It's far more advanced. In fact, Western Europe alone counterbalanced Russia easily, let alone the United States and Canada.

So what he urged was a reduction, a mutual reduction. a mutual reduction in offensive weapons in order to allow Russia to move towards economic development. The Kennedy administration considered this, rejected it, and instead, though they knew they were way ahead militarily, launched the biggest arms built up in history. Yeah, it was a very, exactly. And shortly after this, one of the reasons for Herschel,

of placing the missiles in Cuba was to try to somehow minimally balance this. Notice, incidentally, that there was a crucial issue that almost led to nuclear war. The United States was surrounding Russia with missiles with nuclear weapons, of course. That's like our defensive behavior at the Russian border, including missiles in Turkey, Jupiter missiles in Turkey. And Kennedy actually didn't know about this. He made some comment to Bundy saying it's as if we had missiles in Turkey. And Bundy said, well, Mr. President. Turned out they were obsolete missiles.

A withdrawal order was already in process because they were being replaced by essentially invulnerable Polaris submarines. So much more lethal and invulnerable. So they were being replaced. obsolete. Herschf put missiles in Cuba to sort of try to nowhere near a balance, but to compensate slightly for the overwhelming U.S. advantage and its refusal to not only refusal to go along with his offer to reduce missiles, weapons, but even enhancing them. Through the crisis, as you recall, this issue of the missiles in Turkey became critical.

Yeah. October 27th, peak moment of the crisis, Herschf actually wrote a letter to Kennedy saying, let's get out of this before we blow the world up. We'll remove the missiles from Cuba. You remove the missiles from Turkey. We'll do it publicly and it'll all be over. At that time, Kennedy's subjective estimate of the probability of nuclear war

was reported to be about a third to a half, you know, utterly outlandish. Yeah. He refused. This is considered his, and then Christchiff basically backed down. Yeah. So they made a kind of a secret agreement, but nothing public. Yeah, a secret agreement.

The meaning is we have a right to keep on the Russian border obsolete missiles, which were replacing by even more lethal ones, but they don't have a right to have. anything anywhere near us. Very similar to today. So we have the right to enhance our defensive capabilities on the Russian border, which are already enormous. But if the Russians dare to send anything to Venezuela, we're going to blow the world up. History rhymes. And it's useful to think about it. Yeah, well, in fact, it's a nice segue way. I'm glad you, because I was going to go to Venezuela. will. But at the same time, it's also worth mentioning that in terms, that the United States also

was very, by that point, I think it had subsided. But the United States, especially during the period of extreme military superiority, were very seriously considered first strikes as a, in order to. We've never renounced first strikes. Most people don't realize that we still have that. We've never said we won't strike first. But what we've, But at the time, there were serious discussions of a real first strike in order to, before Russia, or the then Soviet Union, was able to catch up. Well, these, Dan Ellsberg's book, which I'm sure you read. Well, that's later on my list. But yeah, yeah.

In fact, I read it because of you, so I want to come back to that. So we'll come back. But I think you made the perfect segue, because I wanted to hit Venezuela. In this concept, I mean, here we are trying to, quote, unquote, at least if you read the papers, do good in Venezuela. and whether it's blundering or not. So I would like to hear your perspective of our doing goodness in Venezuela. Well, what we're doing in Venezuela

is imposing extraordinarily harsh sanctions which are cutting off virtually the entire income of the country and strangling the population. The population's opposed to the sanctions. The leading economist of the opposition, A serious economist, Francisco Rodriguez, one of the most serious commentators on this. He's opposed to the sanctions. He says they're turning a serious problem into another catastrophe.

But we keep doing it because we're trying to do good. We want to put into power our own guy, Guido. Nothing much is known about him except that he's a strong supporter of the neo-fascist. fascist Bolsonaro, who was just installed next door in Brazil. It's another story. So all kind of criticism of the Maduro government, which are quite legitimate. Yeah, I was going to say one should criticize. I mean, that government is not.

I think it's very repressive. It's carrying out horrible economic policies. A lot wrong with it. But why do we have the right to impose the government of our choice by strangling the population into submission? Well, there's nothing new there. I mean, that's what we're trying to do in Iran, right? I mean, and doing the same thing in Iran?

I mean, the idea is who's getting hurt by sanctions in Iran? Well, the population. But again, what right do we have to do that? In fact, you could ask the same question about China. It's taken for granted across the board. I can't find an exception. That it's legitimate for the United States and Europe, in fact, mostly the United States, to try to impede China's economic development.

They're trying to move forward with a particular form of economic development. Say, we don't like the way they're doing it. So we'll try to block their economic development. Is that legitimate? In fact, there are other questions. The sticking point in the negotiations right now, according to Trump, is intellectual property rights. They are not observing intellectual property rights. What that means is exorbitant patent restrictions radically opposed to free trade built into the world trade organization system to protect U.S. corporations.

So we want Bill Gates to be the richest man in the world. So therefore, there's essentially monopoly for windows. Pharmaceutical prices have to go out of sight. So, therefore, there's huge patent restrictions for pharmaceuticals. Suppose China decided not to observe them. Who suffers? Well, Bill Gates will have a little less money. Users of computers will be able to find better programs than windows.

Pharmaceutical corporations, instead of having, you know, trillions of dollars will only have a few trillions. people will be able to buy cheaper drugs. I mean, it's argued that this would cut back innovation. But if you look into it, that's not the way innovation takes place, takes, say, Windows. I mean, I don't have to tell you, the development of computers, software, internet, and so on, that was all a taxpayer, most of it, a taxpayer expense for decades.

The same with pharmaceuticals. There's a good reason why, if you walk around MIT, you see Pfizer all that. They're all there. They're kind of feeding off the

creative scientific work at the laboratories mostly at government expense. If you'd gone back there 50 years ago you would have seen Raytheon. When I was a student there, those were the big...

And that's because electronics was kind of the cutting edge of the economy. Now it's biology. And this is at every research university in the country, not just MIT. Sure. So going back to China and the intellectual property,

why should they observe the intellectual property rights, which are rammed through by the United States and other rich countries? Now let's look at a little history. How did England develop by stealing technology from more advanced countries, like India or the low countries, even Ireland? had the United States develop by stealing technology from England. That's why we got a textile industry,

steel industry and so on. Of course, it wasn't called stealing then. It was just that's the way you develop. Every single developed country has developed that way. Then comes something that economic historians call kicking away the ladder. First you climb the ladder, then you kick it away so nobody else can do it.

Well, that's kind of what lies behind. All of this lies behind the effort to try to impede Chinese economic development by things like demanding intellectual property rights. Do you see any discussion of this? Not in the mainstream media that I can. Of course, you can find some. Dean Baker, a good economist, he writes about it. But it's basically out of, off the agenda. Now, since one would have.

assume that, since American isn't exceptional, except sometimes maybe exceptionally bad in certain cases, but what's happened? But is the reverse happening? I mean, and how does the United States respond? I mean, I assume other countries are trying to do the same thing in the United States, impeded economic progress in the United States. There's a couple of things wrong with the concept of American exceptionalism. The one is the facts, you know.

Yeah. Okay. The other is it's not American. Yeah. Every great power has had the same exceptionalism. Britain, when it was virtually genocidal all over the world, was praising itself on its magnificence. Sure. France had the civilized mission while the French Minister of War was calling on the army to exterminate the population of Algeria.

If we had records from Matilla the Hun, he would probably be just overwhelmed with good The fact that every country's thought that they've been the unique source of goodness because of their powers. There's nothing exceptional about American exceptional. Well, but since it isn't exceptional, what about is the reverse? You give me examples. Are other countries, I mean, other countries are trying to assume, and lead American economic progress? And what's the response here? How can they impede American economic?

Well, I guess, I mean, let me just, let me give you, I'm not an economist. My ignorance is going to show here, but I'm assuming, for example. You should know better than to judge except special. Socialist judgments. Yeah, I know. Exactly. But, I mean, to some extent, China can impede American progress by being able to produce the same goods and services much more cheaply. But who's producing them in China?

U.S. corporations who want a function work in China. If U.S. corporations don't like Chinese rules, they can invest somewhere else. By the way, there was an article in today's New York Times that said exactly that, right? The response to some of the pressure of Trump, one might say is, I don't know. if you saw this article, but it was basically saying there's some impact to what's going on, and some companies are stopping having made things in China, but what they're doing is not bringing back the United States. You're just finding another place to do it, which is, yeah. But the idea that it's unfair for China to impose technology transfer restrictions or partial ownership

restrictions on, say, Boeing is, it's not a question of national policy. If Boeing doesn't like that, nobody's forcing them to invest there yeah okay so what right do we have to punish them for trying to do that quite apart from the fact that the whole that's how we develop how England develop how everybody developed

let's hit some other hot button issues we won't spend the whole time in foreign policy because I want to as in our last style like I want to cover a broad area and I want to do it around books actually so I started with Emerson just for fun but let's hit North Korea I think I'd like to talk

with North Korea, Syria a little bit. And maybe Brazil, because we're talking about it. And interestingly enough, I think, because it's something that I haven't read about before. And so that may be my ignorance. But anyway, so what about North Korea? Well, actually, Trump is not my favorite person, as you know. Yeah. Yeah. But on North Korea, basically, I think he's doing the right things. And he's attacked for it on all sides. Whenever he does something more or less right, why, I don't know, maybe he's shooting arrows randomly and some of the mites at the dark, whatever the reasons are. But let's take a look at North Korea on just the recent history.

April 27th, I think it was, 2017, the two Koreas met and negotiated and issued a very serious document, a historic document, Pondam Jum, the Declaration. Very serious. In fact, a good article about it in foreign affairs of all places. For the first time, they not only made rhetorical commitments towards denuclearization,

towards integration, and as foreign affairs pointed out, made concrete proposals here, we'll do it step by step. And then it said the two Koreas, will do this on their own accord, crucially. On their own accord, meaning leave us alone. We know who they're talking to. Yeah.

Okay. Trump is the one leading figure for whatever reason, who's more or less observed this. The Singapore summit for which Trump was bitterly denounced by the liberals, the conservatives, by everyone. He basically said, well, you guys go ahead on your own accord. Yeah. He even took steps towards reducing what he recognized to be provocative military operations,

American military operations in South Korea. Remember what's going on. And these operations, the U.S. is flying nuclear. capable aircraft bombers right at the border of a country that the U.S. wiped out, literally wiped out back in the early 50s. I mean, by the time the war settled into a kind of a stalemate, what was happening was the U.S. just bombing massively. They couldn't find any more targets.

You read the official Air Force history. They describe how, well, we're nothing to bomb. We'll just bomb the dams. which is a huge war crime. Yeah. And then it discusses how it's interesting to read how euphoric they were about bombing this huge dam and a massive flood of waters, swamping all this area and Asians, a little bit of racism. They depend on rice and they're fleeing and they're screaming and so on.

This is the country that we're now flying nuclear-on bombers right on their border. So, yes, it is provocative. and Trump said, well, let's cut back some of this. I mean, I'm not saying what he said was wonderful, but it's basically in the right direction. Well, except what he says and what he does are not always exactly the same. I mean, and, you know, the one thing, it's interesting to me that after all this bluster, the foreign policy is somewhat coming back to what might have been considered more realistic. I mean, the last dialogue broke off because once again, the United States said,

unless you totally disarm, we're not going to reduce actions, which just seems to me to be completely unrealistic. Well, that's, I think, you know, I don't know the inside story, but it looks like Pompeo and Bolton. Yeah. I mean, it seems as if Trump's instinct was to say, well, go ahead, but he was kind of pushed. And remember, he's under attack from all sides.

The liberals attack him even more sharply than as sharply as the Hawks. but as I say of all the major political actors here he seems on this issue to be the one who's closest to being what I would regard as taking the same position letting the two Koreas proceed on their own accord as they've asked you and I think that that's what's going to my own opinion I guess agree is that that's what if it's going to if this quote-unquote crisis is going to resolve itself it's going to happen to some extent internally if we allow it to be the case that's the way to that's the only hope North Korea is going to powers cannot help. Yeah, and North Korea, I think,

realizes that greater alliances with South Korea will be beneficial debt. And South Korea... Well, I think President Moon is following a pretty reasonable path. Well, let's say, okay, since you mentioned the T word, let's talk, we'll come back to foreign, but let's talk about Trump, because, of course, that's all anyone seems to talk about. And discussions of Trump dominate all. everything else. We don't hear about any other issues. And I wanted, maybe we can talk about that

a little bit. Well, Trump is a very effective con man. He's doing a got to praise him for his achievements. Yeah. A narrow set of skills, but he's using them very effectively. He's got the major media completely wrapped around his little finger. He manipulates them totally. One crazy thing, after another, they talk about that. Then they say it doesn't make any sense, and everybody's forgotten because he's on to the next one. So one day it's, let's eliminate the whole health system. Everybody attacks that.

Two days later, he says, let's stop all traffic across the Mexican border, which, of course, would shut down the economy. Everyone points that out, and then the next day it'll be something else. Meanwhile, he's carrying out a very effective job. You probably saw the article in the New York Times a couple days ago about how he's totally taken over the Republican Party from top to bottom. It's now his party. And remember, two years ago, the Republican establishment hated him. Yeah.

Okay. Now he's taken over the whole party. And he's carrying out something pretty, first of all, this should not be much of a surprise. If you look back the last 10 or 15 years, even a little beyond, during the neoliberal period since basically Reagan, both parties have shifted to the right. The Democrats are kind of what used to be called moderate Republicans. The Republicans have just gone off the edge. Norman Ornstein, Thomas Mann of American Enterprise Institute, describe them plausibly as a, radical insurgency, which is given up parliamentary politics.

Yeah, I mean, the health care plan now is, and Reagan's time would have been Reagan. No, way off. Like, if you read Eisenhower now, he sounds like Bernie Sanders. Yeah. I mean, we've gone so far literally. Okay, so what's happened? Even Barry Goldwater.

The Republicans are so, I mean, both parties are essentially business parties, but the Republicans just with abject subordination to wealth and corporate power, can't get votes that way. So they've been forced to try to mobilize constituencies, which in the past weren't really major political constituencies, and to try to get them to be the base of the party on what are called ridiculously cultural issues. So gun rights, abortion, religious fanaticism, xenophobia, whatever it may be. And this has been showing up in the primaries. for quite a while. So over the past years, in every Republican primary,

when somebody comes up from the base, they're out of, you know, they're way out of the outfield, Michelle Backman, Rick Santorum. Exactly. And the establishment has been able to crush them, get their Mitt Romney types. The difference in 2016 was they couldn't crush them.

This time the crazy guy from the outfield got in. Now, the base, he's got the base behind him, and he's controlling them. And he's carrying out a very effective policy. How much he understands what he's doing, I have no idea. Maybe it's just megalomania. But he's got two constituencies. He's got to keep supporting him. The primary constituency is the one of the Republican.

party. The very rich, the corporate sector. So, okay, we hand that task over to Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, ram through the legislation, which stuffs pockets with even more dollars, shafts everyone else, and so on. That's going beautifully. The rich and the corporations have profits zooming. They don't know what to do with them, trillions of dollars. They can't spend the wealthier doing magnificently. The tax, the tax. The taxpayers are doing magnificently. The tax, The one legislative achievement, we don't have to talk about it. Yeah. So that's one constituency.

Meanwhile, you've got to control the voting base. How do you do that? Throw them a little red meat to build a wall, keep out the rapists and murderers, a shift, you know, love Israel, shift the embassy for the evangelicals, one thing after another. He's carrying it off. The base adores him while they're getting shepherds. while they're getting shafted. I mean, that's always been the remarkable thing

is how people can always vote against their own. But it's doing very well. And what are the Democrats doing, helping him? Exactly. Like the focus on the Miller investigation, which was tactically crazy. It was obvious from the beginning that if anything's going to come out of that,

it'll be that Trump was trying to build a hotel in the red square or something, some minor corruption. I'm not saying that in retrospect. I've been saying it for a long time. What they've done now is probably maybe even hand Trump the 2020 election by just instead of the real issues like, hey, you're destroying the environment for future life. You're building up your nuclear posture review is greatly extending the likelihood of total catastrophe.

You're pouring money into the pockets of the super-rich and issuing regulations and executive orders and legislation, which is harming the working class and everyone else. Instead of that, Trump is going to, Mueller is going to show that the Russians interfered with the election and you helped. You know, the Russians couldn't. I mean, if the Russians interfered with the elections, it was undetectable. I mean, it's trivial. I mean, there is, after all, massive interference with the elections. Yeah. Like they're bought.

Yeah. You can predict the outcome of Tom Ferguson's work is the main work on this. There's a correlation. What he calls the investment theory of politics. With remarkable precision way back right through 2016, you can predict electability for executive and Congress simply with the single variable of campaign spending, and that's just the beginning.

Is that interference with elections? Yeah, it means that as for good work in the academic political science shows most of the population is literally unrepresented. Their own representatives pay no attention to their preferences. They listen to other voices. Do you think the Supreme Court decision in that regard in terms of money, spend on elections,

was significantly changed it or not? It's changed, but it's changed something that already existed. Yeah, it certainly is good. You go back to 1895, Mark Hanna, who was the famous campaign manager, was asked once, what does it take to run an effective campaign? He said there are two things.

The first thing is money, and I've forgotten what the second one is. That was 1895. Of course, you know, the recent decisions, Buckley Valley, and Citizens United, have enhanced that enormously, but it goes way back. Well, the other thing that, so if you're talking about history and statements,

and I forget whether it was Geringer Goebbels who said that if you want to, if you want to get people to do what you want them to do, it doesn't matter whether they have a democracy or dictatorship, just make them afraid. And that seems to also, in some sense, being effective, this whole notion of immigrants being the greatest danger

facing the United States. The opposite of most of American history, in fact, is, I'm finding it kind of amazing to see how effective. It works. And again, there's a long history. Hofstadter talked about anti-intellectualism. Another kind of striking feature of American culture from way back is that although this is the most secure country in the world by any objective

standards. Lucky you have oceans around it. probably the most frightened. Yeah. It's a very frightened country. That lies behind. Partly, there's a lot more, but it's one of the things that lies behind this kind of in crazed gun culture.

Why do you have to have 25 assault rifles in your closet? They're coming after me. You know, I've got to protect myself. Yeah, and again, it's an issue that I hope we're going to cut when we come back in some sense that, but, you know, this recent book by John Hayden and others, by the coddling of the American mind. I've argued that that level of being frightened affects people's behavior on a microscale as well. The notion that every time your kids leave the house, they're in danger. And they should never be in danger and never be in risk.

Somehow comes into the notion that they should never be uncomfortable. They shouldn't be uncomfortable in school. They shouldn't hear ideas. They don't want to. Everything is a threat. And it is true, I think, that I remember when I spent a year in Switzerland, when at the, at CERN, when my daughter was younger, she was, my daughter was our member at eight or nine or ten, and she was really afraid

of going outside the house on her own in living where we lived at the time. And it was remarkable to see when she was in Switzerland that, you know, I would drive my car and I'd suddenly see her and her friends

downtown. And so this notion of every time you leave the house, the world is terrifying really does seem to be an American kind of... And it's recent. I mean, when I was a kid in the 30s and early 40s, when I was...

I lived in Philadelphia. Yeah. When I was maybe 12 years old, I used to take the train by myself to New York and spend the day walking around anarchist bookstores. My parents didn't know what I was doing. That was the problem. That was there. You see if they just control you. But it was not considered anything like that. I grew up in Canada, but it was still the same for me.

In Toronto, I used to take the subway car down to the L'C baseball game. When I moved into the suburbs when my kids were little, and this place, I mean, you can't imagine a place. that's more safe. Kids were playing in the streets. They'd go into each other's houses and so on. You go to the same neighborhood now. You don't see a child. Either they're inside looking at video games

or they're being driven somewhere for organized activities. Kids, it's been, in fact, studied. Children don't know how to play spontaneously. Everything has to be controlled. They have to be watched all the time. If they're, you know, somewhere maybe in, you know, Oregon, a kid got kidnapped.

Everything in the country has to close down. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the dangers back in the 30s and 40s were far greater, but it just wasn't an issue. Yeah, no, it's very interesting. But this business of the Trump knows what he's doing when he builds up fear of the rapists and murderers and Islamic terrorists. Just to give you an example, a couple of weeks ago, Steve Bannan. You know, his kind of respute came down to Arizona, where we live in Tucson. And there was a meeting.

He ran a meeting at a very luxurious, gated community south of Tucson, not too far from the border. You know, guards, gates, very rich and so on. He had a lot of nice people there, like Chris Kobach, this guy who's trying to keep people from voting. There was a good report of it in kind of an independent Tucson newspaper, Tucson Sentinel, had a reporter there. The goal of the meeting was to try to raise private money to build the wall. Because Congress is run by communists. They're not going to do anything. So all these super rich people are pitching in money to build the wall.

But the discussions were interesting. people were describing how frightened they are. I mean, if there's anybody in the world safer than them, I don't know how you'd find them. Yeah. But these are people who are frightened. We've got to protect ourselves. In fact, there was one legislator there who said,

I'm not only in favor of the wall. I think we ought to have a wall from the border, right along the Arizona border, against California all the way up to the Canadian border because these people are going to come in from California. We've got to protect ourselves. And maybe we need an army to protect us around the gated community. And when Trump talks to the public,

at least according to the reports that come up, people resonate. Yeah, no, it really works effectively. I never know with Trump whether it's an accident or whether he really knows what he's doing, whether he just latches on by luck to an issue that seems to resonate and he uses it, and then pick it up. He just tests to the water. He's doing that very, but meanwhile,

you have to remember that his primary constituency, corporate power and the wealthy, he's serving them with real dedication. Would you say that in terms of, you know, I mean, I don't want to harp on this too much, But in terms of the greatest danger, if there is one of Trump being president, many people feel that the fact that he's a loose cannon, the fact that he does no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no reading, no knowledge about details about the world around, or it certainly doesn't read or listen to his advisors. We do say that's a bigger danger than the fact that effectively he's apparently, um, implementing underneath all the noise, uh, the, the, an agenda that, that, that you worry about or not? I mean, uh, there's a lot of things. with Trump. The worst one, which overwhelms everything else, is the dedication to destroy the environment. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that just swamps everything else. That ought to be a screaming

headline every day. Well, I'm surprised that if private money wanted to build the wall, $8.6 billion is not a lot of money that could easily be done. I mean, more than that spent on elections. But interestingly enough, when you put it in perspective, talking about the environment, talking about progress, $8.6 billion, which is what he's asking for the wall, is more than the entire amount, the entire budget of the National Science Foundation. I mean, if it talks about what is better for our security in the future. How about the subsidies to the fossil fuel industry? Which is much bigger than that.

How about the subsidies to the financial institutions? There's some good technical studies, IMF and others, who point out that the financial institutions, which are pretty much predatory, they barely help the economy, they may harm it. And they're a huge part of the economy. It's huge. They are maintained effectively by public subsidy, by the implicit government insurance policy, which raises their credit ratings, gives them access to cheap money. When you count all of that, it's pretty much their profits. I mean, compared with this, the wall and the National Science Foundation aren't even visible.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's, I mean, it's interesting to think about that. I mean, and similarly, when we come to the climate change and those issues. That's the two things that ought to be emphasized by the political opposition, if there were one, are this dedicated commitment to destroy the prospects for organized human life within a short period. and the radical intensification of the already extremely dangerous arms, military confrontation. I was going to hit that. Those, I think, I know that from our discussions, those are the two biggest challenge.

I think there's another danger that we shouldn't forget. I was personally very relieved when the Miller investigation didn't come up with much because if they had come up with something that really implicates Trump, we would have been in deep trouble. I mean, he's a narcissistic megalomaniac. He's kind of like the magician behind the curtain and the Wizard of Oz. He knows it's a very thin cover.

If anything breaks, he could go for broke. There's plenty that he could do it. I know people are worried about what, you know, and I don't know who said it, in fact, that, well, maybe it's James Comey, not someone who's, I agree with all the time, but that he was worried that exactly that would happen and it would lead to some kind of, and there would be violence that would.

Well, he's already indicated his dog whistling is worth listening to. So take his attacks on John McCain, which people are wondering, why is he attacking John McCain? Well, there's a very good article on this by Bruce Franklin, very good analyst, who's also the leading specialist on the P.O.W. mythology. You know, there's a lot of the country still believes that the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese are holding all sorts of American POWs and the terrible thing. And McCain is one of their villains because he's part of the myth is that he's the one who sold people out and helped keep our brave American boys. Their Rambo has to go in and

rescue them and so on. That's a pretty big thing in a sector of the country. A sector the country that Trump openly talks to. When he talks about how his bikers are tough guys and they're going to really cause trouble, that's who he's talking to. When he attacks McCain, he's talking to them. He's throwing them the red meat. This is clever politics and very dangerous. This is a very violent country.

There are militias all over, probably better armed than the national. guard, you know, a lot of desperate, angry people. People have been hit by the stagnation of the neoliberal period. There's economic distress. There's concern that somehow the white population is, as they put it, facing genocide, meaning we might not be a majority in a couple of decades. All of this is very real. And when these dog whistling attacks,

on McCain and the hints about the Mexican rapists overcoming us and destroying us. All of that's talking to a sector of the population that's very real, is under a kind of distress stemming largely back from economic policies that right at the top that are creating the kinds of situation, which we now are. There's something similar in Europe. All of this converges. And when you get this, again, narcissistic megalomaniac,

who's a clever politician sitting right at the top of it and pulling the strings, it's a fragile system, but it's working and very dangerous. Okay, well, since we're on an uplifting area, and let me try and think of any buttons we haven't pushed yet before we move on. And I think we probably should push this button at least once. So let's talk about Syria and Israel for a little bit and see if we can alienate the part of the public we haven't so far. So Syria, Israel?

Well, Syria is a total disaster. The country's been virtually destroyed. We can look at the history. But here again, I'm afraid I disagree with many of my friends on the left on this. One of the Trump proposals was to leave a small contingency. of troops in the sector of northern Syria, which is mostly Kurdish. The Kurdish, yeah. I think that's a good idea.

Anti-interventionists just block out on this. We've got to take them out. They have no right to be there and so on. But think it through for a second. The Turkish army military is carrying out again. It's done worse before. serious atrocities against Kurds in Turkey itself and in the areas of Syria that they have occupied, recently Afrin. If they move on to Rojava, the other mostly Kurdish areas, that will just continue.

What's stopping them? Small contingent of U.S. troops which are confined to the Syrian areas and are not intervening elsewhere in Syrian affairs. I don't like U.S. troops to be anywhere. But in this case, I think it's not out of humanitarian goals, whatever the goals may be. It may be helping to avert a serious catastrophe. I think those are things that are worth thinking about, not just kind of an axiom that says, get them out, get the troops home, period. You have to think about what the meaning is.

It's not like a justification for humanitarian intervention, which is always a fraud. Yeah. This is a matter of assessing the actual. situation that exists. Independent intentions, whether it has a good impact. Totally nothing to do with intentions. It's those we can put aside.

The intentions we know, I mean, up until under Obama, until about 2015, the U.S. and its allies, incidentally, France, England, were believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Assad regime and were committed to doing so. Finally, I think it was around 2013. In 2014, the U.S., the CIA sent advanced anti-tank missiles to the opposition, which by then is mostly jihadi run, which did stop the Syrian army advance. Predictably, the Russians intervened with more force, started sending the Air Force, took out the tow missiles, sawed army went on. At that point, pretty much the West accepted the fact that, like it or not, this monster, and he is a monster. will probably control most of the country.

And since then, whatever planning or negotiations are taking place are mostly out of the West's hands, it's Russia, Iran, Syria are pretty much running the show, like it or not. And there's not a lot that U.S. can do about that, even if it should. But with regard to Israel, there's a lot. lot to say about this, but the support, what's called the support for Israel here is very reminiscent of old-fashioned Stalinism. It's extraordinary when you look into it, up to the level of books published by university presses, which are just full of outlandish lies and fabrications at denouncing anybody, me, of course, who dares to raise a minor criticism about the Holy State, the

level of lying is spectacular could go into examples but it's not worth it. Okay, go on. It's not worth talking about that. But there's a kind of a desperate effort now on

the part of those who supported the, who called themselves supporters of Israel, I don't think that's the right term. I think they're supporters of Israel's moral degeneration and maybe ultimate destruction, but that's another story, who called

themselves supporters of Israel since the 1970s have increasingly been finding their backs to the wall because public opinion is changing strikingly, especially among younger people. Polls are very clear, even personal experience is very clear. So like up till maybe 10 years ago, if I gave a talk about Israel Palestine at a university, even my own university, I had to have police protection. The police had to follow me out to my car because meetings were broken up and nobody was worrying about free speech at universities.

Yeah, well, we'll get to that. Yeah, that's changed. That's changed. That's changed. In fact, among people who identify themselves as liberal Democrats, actually support for Palestinian rights is even higher than Israel at this point.

Support for Israel has gone to the most reactionary parts of the population. evangelical Christians, xenophobes. The Democratic Party used to be the base for, as a sport for Israel. It still is, but nothing like the Republicans. They're extreme. Trump, of course, is. I mean, at the same time, with a recent discussion about, you know, the Golan Heights,

I read it and I heard that there was some concern, but then I didn't see any big outcry. Well, it's pretty interesting. I mean, the Golan Heights have been recognized internationally, including the United States as occupied territory. The U.S. signed, supported the Security Council resolutions, declaring that Israeli efforts to take over the heights, and in particular their annexation of the heights, which they did, is absolutely illegal, has no basis international law, can't be accepted.

That was true up until Trump. a couple of weeks ago he just reversed it okay now they're allowed to take it over anybody talking about it I was amazed I mean people mention it and I never heard so much and I'll cry about it after you say well maybe it's not tactically good might alienate somebody

then the idea is well Israel needs this for its defense this is outlandish I mean the Israeli military overwhelms everyone in the area combined You know, they're quite apart from the fact that they have a big nuclear arsenal. But they're the military force in the region. Yeah. One of the major, the Golan Heights, it's not defense.

They want it because it's a nice territory. You have, it's economic, it's a very nice area. You have the ski ski loat skis on the Mount Hermon, build agricultural communities. It's a nice place to visit and live. They want it, okay? there's no military threat there. Well, they'll always say, I suppose it's a buffer. I mean, when people say,

Hezbollah is at their border. Chisbalah is not an insignificant military force, but the only respect in which there are a threat to Israel, the only respect, is if Israel attacks Lebanon, they'll fight back. And that is a threat to Israel. So, in fact, if Israel were to proceed with its case, occasionally announced plans to attack Iran.

Probably the first thing they do is wipe out Lebanon just to prevent the deterrence of Hezbollah missiles. So, yes, that's a threat, if you like. We might ask the same question about what the Iranian threat is supposed to be. Who is Iran threatening? Suppose Iran had nuclear weapons. Where's the threat? I mean, if they dared to arm a missile with nuclear weapons,

the country would be wiped out. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's... In fact, U.S. intelligence is pretty clear about this. If you look at their presentations to Congress over many years, they've pointed out that basic picture is that Iran has very low military expenditures by the standards of the region, well, well, the United States. But its strategic posture is defensive, trying to set up to ensure

that it can react to aggression sufficiently so diplomacy will take over. They say if it were to develop nuclear weapons, they would be part of its deterrent strategy. Well, I've always, I mean, as someone who's always been concerned about missile defense, which is an oxymoron in so many ways we could go into, it doesn't work, first of all.

But that came back to what you said. In Europe, I've always been remaze that the people say that we're defending Europe from Iranian missile. What possible purpose would Iran have to launch missiles at Europe, right? If they only had a suicidal impulse. Yeah, yeah. Because, of course, the country would be white.

But I've never seen that question. And that's the liberals, remember. That's Obama. Yeah, no. He was the one who was putting the missile installations on the... Okay, well, we've gone on foreign affairs and Trump more than I might have, but I think it was important in this context. But let me take it back because you raised something interesting that you can,

you're finding you're able to give talks without police protection on certain issues. At the same time, I actually had a quote from one of your books which I think I used in our last dialogue, which was originally, I think, a quote that was said from Catholic priests in South America talking about the educational system. And they said educational systems are oriented to maintaining the existing social and economic structures instead of transforming them. And this notion that we started with, the notion that, intellectuals and elites aren't necessarily

are sort of by the party line almost more than anyone else. But I see another issue that's really become more pronounced since we last had our dialogue, which is this issue of free speech. And in this case, free speech on campuses. You may be able to speak more freely, but one is finding more and more two things that are remarkable, interesting, and maybe to some extent disturbing.

That is, first of all, that we're seeing, more and more speakers, especially on the right to some extent, but almost every subject area being stopped from speaking on campus, not by students in this case. The notion that there was a lecture that was happening in a university in the West

where the speaker was going to speak about due process and free speech, and safe rooms were set up on campus so that students didn't have to hear discussions about this. Yet it's an issue that seems to now be adopted by the right. That there, if you look at and saying who is speaking out, and again, one of the, you know, Trump's executive order may be impotent, but the notion that Trump would put an executive order saying universities can't get federal funding unless they promote free speeches is kind of interesting. This notion that the left in some ways is now being seen as not promoting free speech. So I thought we should have that discussion a little bit. Well, I'd question the notion of the left, but it's certainly happening.

Yeah. And it's wrong in principle. And beyond that, it's just tactically insane. It's the best gift that you can give to the right. Yeah. If some right-wing speaker tries to go to a campus and is blocked, it's a gift. They love it, and you can see the way they're using it. This is, oh, okay, we're the good guys.

We're defending freedom of speech. You guys are Nazis trying to protect. So if you want to give enormous gifts to the right wing and the far right to the neo-fascists, that's the way to do it. Exactly. But it's even broader than that, I think, that there's some concern. And, you know, two people that I obviously am not a fan of Trump. I'm not a fan of Betsy DeVos.

I've written about how opposed many of them. of our aspects, but she, but there's another aspect of this notion which comes back to the people being afraid in the United States, this notion that words have to be protected, that words are scary, that there needs to be safe zones. It's like trigger warnings. Trigger warnings that when you, when you would think, and I've always said this in the context of science, but I think it's true more generally, one of the purposes of education, I used to say it of science, but one of the purposes of education is to make people uncomfortable.

Because if you're comfortable, you're not pushing, you're, you're, you're, You're not pushing the boundaries of what you know, understand. And if we, if we, I was just at a lecture where people were saying they've changed their curriculum because they're, if they upset students, they're worried that universities will remove them from teaching. And that seems to me, especially in an environment where our, at least our higher educational system, has been very effective in educating students more so maybe than the public school system. I'm as concerned about, I think the fact that the right is usurping an issue that will come back to haunt others is one thing, but I'm equally concerned about the fact that people are afraid of ideas or discussions that make them uncomfortable.

First of all, that's always been true. But since it was always the mainstream, who was fighting off the wild men in the wings, nobody noticed it. Now we're noticing it. And it was wrong then, and it's wrong now. It's even worse now with the idea that somehow, like what you said, you have to have special places where students won't hear things. This is totally crazy. I mean, if a speaker comes in who you think is extremely offensive,

first of all, you don't have to go to the talk if you don't want. Exactly. But the same thing to do, which sometimes is done, is to use it, use the opportunity as an educational opportunity. go listen to them meanwhile set up alternative forums where you discuss the issues you think about them

you look at the pros and cons nothing is ever 100% obvious let's go through it let's come out with a reasonable position we'll have a basis if it's the great outcome to oppose their positions not just shout them down

saying well we're so scared of them we can't even hear exactly shout them down play music so they can't talk even if they're allowed on campus. I've had enough of that in my own experience, but that's not the reason. It's wrong. Whoever does it. When the right wing is targeted, it's tactically crazy.

When the left is targeted, it doesn't matter because nobody pays attention anyway. But when those who have some basis in power systems are attacked, then it's tactically ridiculous because it's giving them an enormous gift. Well, what I never see is this recognition, well, I very rarely see it of the fact that the whole purpose of free speech is to protect the speech of those you detest. In principle. That's what a democracy is supposed to be. In principle, but the people who have upheld that have always been bitterly denounced on every issue. Well, and but you know what's...

I can give you many examples. Yeah, but I'm pretty scared. I mean, as someone who sort of grew up in the 60s to see that the people that I used to think of as progressive are now. supporting exactly the opposite. Yes, but that was the 60s. And remember the 60s was the period when even the Supreme Court, really for the first time, took strong positions in support of freedom of speech. That's not American history.

It's worth remembering that. First of all, the First Amendment does not protect freedom of speech. It prevents prior restraint. Yeah. But if I give a talk criticizing the government, First Amendment permits them to put me into jail as long as they didn't stop me from saying it in the first place. First Amendment is a very weak barrier to repression. And in fact, freedom of speech issues didn't arise at the court level, Supreme Court, until the 20th century. And if you look at the history, it's not uplifting.

The first protections of freedom of speech sort of were during the First World War, the famous dissents of Holmes and Brandos. Notice, first of all, they were dissents. Secondly, they were very limited. So in the Schenck case, the first case, where Schenck's guy was being sentenced for having written pamphlets against the war, the dissenters, Holmes, voted in favor. of the decision. They said, well, you know, too far, it's got to have a little freedom of speech, but nevertheless did it.

It's a very mixed record up until the 60s. The first strong defense of freedom of speech by the court was actually in 1964. It's Times v. Sullivan when it was a civil rights issue, when the state of Alabama declared that they were being liable by the Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement because, you know, racist

sheriffs were being intact. Kind of technically they were right by the thinking of the framers, but the Supreme Court overruled what's called sovereign immunity, that the state is protected from harmful speech, which holds in most countries, incidentally, including Canada, including Britain. They still have them. Yeah. But the United States struck it down. Then there was even further decisions, Braddorke v. Ohio, took a very strong position in favor of freedom of speech.

That's 1969. It's not American history. So, yes, there is a modern tradition of protection of freedom of speech, but it's not deeply rooted or sturdy. And when, say, Clarence Thomas recently said, we got to review these decisions because that's not what the framers had in mind. he's not wrong, you know, if you really look back at the history. But nevertheless, it's true that among the countries of the world, the United States is probably supreme and protection of freedom of speech. Yeah, I know.

That's one I grew up in Canada, and I used to do history of Canada. Yeah, it's amazing to see how those protections were more effective here than in Canada. Well, remember the Salman Rushdie case? Uh-huh. When this came up in Canada, there was a question debated about, whether he was attacking the state religion. And they finally decided he wasn't, so it was okay because it was some other religion. In fact, in Britain, that same case, remember, this was when he was criticizing Islam.

It went to the House of Lords. They considered, they said, well, he isn't liable because he was condemning Islam. If he'd been condemning the Anglican church, it would have been a different story. that's Britain. We're not talking about Nazi German. Yeah, yeah, no. So these are very thin reeds. And like in France, for example, there are laws.

I mean, I'm bitterly condemned for having criticized them, but there are laws in France that grant the state the right to determine historical truth and to punish deviation from what they determine. And that's been used, okay? and the French left intellectual support it. We've got to stop the speech we don't like. Yeah. And this stuff is very thin.

And the United States, by and large, has comparatively a good record. But the things you're pointing out are hitting away at some of the best things that have happened here. And unfortunately, it is coming from students, young people who just aren't thinking through what they're doing. Not thinking through and have been brought up to, I think, to fear. Anything that... That is a little bit uncomfortable. It makes them a little bit uncomfortable. But again, in the sciences, I mean, the whole history of the sciences is people challenging

common sense. That's what exactly. It's what science is all about. If it wasn't, you know, if we weren't uncomfortable, we're not making progress. Yeah. So I think, okay, good. I'm glad we got that at least, because I'm critically concerned about it. And anyone who's being at universities, I think, is seeing it in a way I've never...

But remember, it goes on all sides. Like, I teach at the University of University of it. Arizona, right now, there's a legislation at the state level requiring that at the University of Arizona, if a department invites a speaker, or if a faculty member invites somebody to come to their class, they have to inform the legislature. Yeah. So if I invite somebody to talk on theoretical linguistics, I've got to inform the legislature, make sure there's no communist infiltrators there. Yeah, I know.

Yes, was it when I found something similar when I moved to Arizona. Okay, let's see. I want to come back to another book. The two books I wanted to mention that, in fact, were books that you got me to look at. One was Daniel Alisberg, which I think I'll come back to after. The other one was this book by Catherine Nixie, The Darkening Age. It's an amazing book. It shows basically how Christianity effectively, in a way that makes ISIS look tame, destroyed the classical world.

And I bring it up because we've had this discussion before, and I'm known for my concerns about religion in many ways. And I remember you saying to me that one of the first times we talked that you didn't, it wasn't what people believed that. bothered you is what they did. And I countered by saying that's true. But I think what they believe radically affects what they do. And when I, and I was thinking about that book recently with another article about Mike Pompeo and how his evangelical Christianity has affected his role as a secretary of state and exactly how he approaches not just the Middle East everywhere else. And so I continue to think that there's this insidious impact of, of religion. in this case Christian religion,

but it happens obviously in the Islamic world. And so I wanted to talk to you about it. It's a mixed story. I mean, it's a complicated story. We can't get a couple thousand years of history in a minute. But if you think about it in a broad,

superficial picture, Christianity in the early days was radical pacifist. And Christians were persecuted. As Nixie points out, a lot of it was purposeful martyr. Yeah, unbelievable. Because the classical period was fairly tolerant. Unbelieving.

It was polytheistic. You know, you believe in that God. I believe in this God. We'll just add another God. It doesn't matter. And, but nevertheless, there was persecution. Sure. When Constantine turned Christianity into the religion of the Roman Empire

and the cross shifted from being a symbol of persecution, to being on the shield of the Roman legionnaires. Everything changed. First of all, the radical Christians, it went on a rampage. As you say, it makes ISIS look pretty tame. They virtually destroyed the rich, complex, pretty tolerant, classical culture, statues, paintings, literature, philosophy, everything had to go. And they instituted the Dark Ages. of totalitarianism, literal, for a millennium,

it's not small, you know. There was a totalitarian God who not only controlled you, but looked into your mind, you had to do what he said. Yeah. I don't want to over-exaggerate. There were exceptions, but it was a real kind of totalitarian era for a millennium. And it's a God who not only manages you

while you're on Earth, but for eternity. Yeah, I forget Augustine, St. Augustine's phrase, something like merciful terror or something like that. Because we have to have terror to destroy all of this, but it's merciful because it's saving souls, you know. Well, and when I looked at, well, I interrupt for a second, when I looked, because I want to hear the completion, but in that context, after I read that book, I looked around me, because you see how effectively in a few hundred years they can completely remake the world. It was a world where there was, you know, philosophy and, and, you mean, religion. It was amazing. And then where every place became dominated by a church.

Took a century. But we still live in that world, in a sense, every town I go, I think how effectively amazing they were. Everywhere you go, you don't mind that cities are just full of churches, and they did it very effectively. Okay, but let's go on. This went on pretty much until, you know, variations, but pretty much until 1962, when Pope John the 23rd called the Second Vatican Council, which was a very important event in modern history, very important. The Second Vatican Council, under Pope John,

tried, among other things, to reinstitute the Gospels. Horrible thing. The Gospels have a radical pacifist message. He said, the theme is what was called the preferential option, for the poor. This was picked up by Latin American bishops who supported it. Yeah. And pretty soon priests, nuns, laypeople were going out into the poorer areas, countryside, starting to organize what were called base communities in which often illiterate peasants would start thinking about the gospels, listening to what they're saying,

starting to get to see if they could take some control of their own lives, not just be Latin American particular poverty and inequality is extraordinary and repression is extraordinary. I know you're a big fan of Latin American, of the progressive aspect of Latin American theology, but at the same time the Gospels do sort of say, you know, it's okay to be poor because in the afterlife you'll be fine. So except the state, don't talk to. about, don't confront the state. What these activists were doing was saying, you can take care of your lives.

We can listen to the preferential option for the poor, but do something about it. That was the important part. And it was important. The United States went to war against the church, starting then. And a lot of the recent history of Latin America reflects that, maybe by coincidence. But in 1962, Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from hemispheric defense. It's kind of anachronistic holdover from the Second World War to internal security. That has a meaning.

It means war against the population. He sent a military mission to Colombia where the worst atrocities were going on, and led by Greenbury General, which came back with the report. It recommended paramilitary terror, that's the phrase, against known communist adherence, which is a very broad category in the Latin American context. The director of counterinsurgency for Kennedy and Johnson. Charles Macheling had a very very... very strong critique of this. He said that this turned tolerance of the repacity of the Latin

American military into support for activities that are reminiscent of the stormtroopers of Hitler. You had government after government falling under neo-fascist, neo-Nazi military regimes, brutal murder, plague spread all over the hemisphere, all the way to Central America. under Reagan, lots of religious martyrs, including the Archbishop in El Salvador, finally, 1989, the murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals at the university in El Salvador, Jesuit priests. And finally, finally, what you have is the School of the Americas, which trains Latin American officers, has what are called talking points.

We advertise our achievements. One of them is the U.S. Army helped defeat liberation theology. That's a substantial part of the history. So it's like a lot of things. The story is complicated. And it's interesting that the Latin American priest who became a pope was in fact not, as far as I can see, not a liberation theology, but in fact,

I think if you look at his history in Latin America, it's a very striking part of the history. The point was, when there was an effort to go back to the message of the Gospels and to interpret it as meaning do something about your own lives. The hammer came down very hard. Well, but now the hammer is somewhere else. And I wonder if you're as concerned. I am, I think both of us in different ways have been attacked. I certainly when I've stated this. But, you know, recently one hears that one is there's much more, it's certainly in domestic terms of the United States, in other words,

more concern among police organizations about right-wing terrorism than Islamic terrorism. Oh, it's far worse. It's far worse. Take a look at the FBI records. Exactly. But here we see this incredible connection between evangelical Christianity, not just in Mike Pompeo and in our foreign affairs, but the White House in a way that has never been, I mean, it may have been implicit, but now it's incredibly.

incredibly overt. Well, it's more than that. It's planned. Yeah. So it goes back to what we were talking about before, about the parties going to the right and the Republicans going off into outer space. They had to organize new constituencies. This starts with Nixon and the Southern strategy.

Since Democrats were associated with civil rights, Nixon and his associates figured, okay, We can pick up the southern Democrats, the southern working class on racist grounds. Then comes the recognition that they can pick up northern Catholics, Catholic workers, who voted Democratic, by pretending to be opposed to abortion. I stress pretending. You go back to the 60s, Republican leadership is what we call pro-choice, Reagan. George H.W. Bush, who was supposed to have some principles. The whole stream of them were thought, yeah, this is none of the government's business.

Women's right. Paul Wyrick, you know, the Republican strategist in the mid-70s, figured out that if the Republicans pretend to be anti-abortion, they can pick up the evangelical and the Catholic vote. Pretend. by now, if you're a Republican in Congress or the president, you've got to be passionately anti-abortion in principle. Total cynicism, but it worked. They picked up a large part of the Catholic Northern Working Class vote, the evangelical vote. The evangelicals are now the primary base of Trump's electoral voting code.

And this is connected very closely to Israel again. The evangelicals have a very interesting position on Jews and on Israel. They're the most extreme anti-Semites in human history. Their theology, if you look at it, is that it's not 100% of evangelicals, but a leading part of it. We've got to look for Armageddon, then the second coming, Christ comes. What happens when Christ comes back? Those who are saved go to heaven. Everybody else goes to eternal perdition.

What happens to the Jews? Yeah. Actually, according to one of the denominations, 160,000 can convert in time. The rest go to eternal perdition. Did Hitler call for that? No, I mean, this is the most extreme. But this is part of the support.

for Israel. We have to support Israel because that's going to lead to the battle at Armageddon between Israel and whoever the next enemy is, shifts from time to time. And after that will come this wonderful thing. In fact, the Israeli government has a very interesting policy towards these guys. It kind of welcomes them because it wants the support. You know, they want the embassy in Jerusalem and so on, but it's afraid of them, because these are crazed lunatics who go up to try to blow up the Temple Mount. They've got to stop them before they do it, you know, because they are super anti-Semites. And way beyond, like there's an article in the Times today about anti-Semitism on the right

and the left. Yeah, yeah. What they call anti-Semitism in the left is, say, Jeremy Corbyn being critical of policies of Israel. That's anti-Semitism on the left, the right, of course. neo-Nazism, Holocaust denial, and so on, you know, shooting, blowing up synagogues, that's the right. But they don't talk about this, which is the most extreme anti-Semitism in human history.

There's nothing like it, you know. I mean, just think it through for a second. Well, that's what I mean by beliefs, influence actions, and that's why that's, I guess, ultimately, why, if every man was an island or every person was an island, I would argue it doesn't matter what people believe, but it produces actions. It affects national policies.

And ultimately, that's why I think we have to be wary about the impact of organized religion. But the one thing on which we perhaps differ is I think there are other strains that can develop. Oh, yeah, no, look, I mean, the point is, I mean, Martin Luther King's an example. I mean, religion's been used for lots of... And so is liberation theology.

Yeah. It's a very interesting development because it did lead to a war against the church with many religious... smarter and forgotten. Yeah, that's interesting point. Who can even name the Latin American intellectuals who had their brains blown out? Yeah. None. You can name

every dissident in Eastern Europe, but not these guys who we killed. In this regard, when we talk about we talk about dangers of, say, evangelical terrorism and versus the threat of Islamic terrorism, which we both argue, but I've certainly argued at one point in other,

in terms of the day-to-day life of Americans is not a big deal. We've both been attacked, but particularly I was dismayed by Sam Harris's virulent attack to some extent. Because I know Sam, and I've worked with him in different ways, but the one statement he made that concerned me was a statement that I was a statement that I was surprised when he said that, you know, he would prefer Ben Carson, someone who clearly is so no concept of how the world works,

no concept of science. Oh, he has a sense, but he knows how poor people ought to be treated. Yeah, okay. Yeah, but he says science is the work of the devil, that climate change, everything is, you know, that evolution is the work of the devil. But Sam, who's a, you know, otherwise in my mind, it said many reasonable things.

I said he'd prefer him as president versus you because at least he understands the threat of Islamic terrorism. And that's a statement that concerns me. So I thought I'd bring it up because... Well, let's take the threat of Islamic terrorism. Let's look at the history. Islamic terrorism, the modern period. It begins basically in Egypt against the government in 1970s.

It was an internal Middle Eastern phenomenon until basically until the reaction to 9-11. The reaction to 9-11. At that point, Islamic terrorism was pretty much confined to a tribal area in the Pakistan-Afghan border, the region where al-Qaeda was sheltered. That was the center of Islamic terrorism. Where is it now? everywhere in the world.

How'd that happen? We did it. The invasion of Iraq, intelligence agencies predicted across the board, this is going to increase terrorism. Turns out by U.S. government records that Islamic terrorism increased by a factor of seven after the Iraq war. Yeah, you smash people in the face, they react somehow. Now it's all over the world. every time you go after it, it's like a hydra, you know, create more. You carry out drone attacks in northwest Pakistan or Yemen.

Somebody sees their family blown up by something. You think they like it? Okay, how do they react? And in fact, if you want to think about this in some depth, there's another book I'd recommend, great book, by William Polk, who's fine, a scholar of, mainly Middle East Islamic Studies, but also has a strong background in the government. He was on the National Security Council for Middle East Affairs, right through the Cuban Missile Crisis, in fact.

He's the guy who sort of organized for the negotiations between Israel and Egypt. Very important background. A very smart and interesting guy. He has a book called Crusaders and Jihadis. It's a very interesting book covering a... thousand years of history from the Crusades to the present. What he points out is that this is largely a war of the North against the South, and a large part of the South is the Islamic South.

It's a war in which the North has continually attacked the South, brutally, viciously, destructively. The Islamic world has tried all sorts of ways to respond, negotiations, accommodation, one thing or another. Everything's been smashed down. And finally, they've turned to Islamic terror. Okay. That's real history, the kind you have to think about. It's not history is bunk. Well, it's also, but it's not untrue that in some sense, from a religious perspective, there is a religious justification that is used in the Islamic world for violence. Well, I take a careful look at that.

So there's been a lot of careful study of the jihadi groups, Scott Atron. Yeah, I know Scott. Okay, you know, what he and others point out is that the Islamic element of it is very thin. Yeah, yeah. Most of the militant jihadis have just essentially no Islamic background. They picked it up after the commitment. Okay, but the commitment comes from other things, the kind of things that William Polk is talking about, and the repression and so on, or even just things like peer pressure. What I wanted to argue is that there's nothing new about that.

In some sense, there are newer religion, but the Crusades were Christian crusades, but there were political. Oh, God. And what's more than, they were hideous terror. Of course. They were hideous terror in exactly the same way, but it was 600 years earlier, 700 years earlier. Well, Islam's a religion that's 600 years younger. It's not too surprised. But again, there are there that we're political...

It has its own history of violence. Yeah, of course. But the picture that Polk presents is fundamentally correct. It is a North-South War. A thousand years. The North wins all the time. It beats back now and then, and it just gets more and more violent and destructive.

That's a persistent theme. Can't forget that. Let's continue with it. I want to try and conclude, well, in a few minutes, we could go on for a long time. But I want to go back in terms of this thrilling and uplifting theme we have of violence and destruction, it seems, to the book by Daniel Alsberg, the Doomsday Machine, I think it's called. That's an incredibly important book should be read. And some of the things in it are really startling. This is his discussion of things he discovered when he was right on the inside, starting in the 50s.

Incidentally, as he points out, he was a hawk. He believed it all. You know, it's just appalled by the things he was discovering. One of them was that the Psiops, you know, the strategic plans for nuclear weapons, called for killing 600 million people, if we decided, you know. Yeah, it was amazing. targeting the structure was such that if there was a confrontation in Berlin, we would wipe out China, literally. Why? Because we can do it. You know, China's vulnerable. We've got all these ships and missiles there. So if the Russians do something in Berlin, we'll wipe out China.

And this was just, this is not the hawks. This is everybody right through. Probably still the case. Then comes his discovery that under Eisenhower, the authority to use nuclear weapons was sub-delegated under Eisenhower to admirals and generals. But the logic was, well, if the top gets decapitated, somebody else has to do it. And that logic happens to proliferate. So if it goes down to generals, what if they get killed? Okay, you have to permit it down to lower levels. Turns out it was all the way down to pilots. If you look at the memoirs of the Cuban Missile Crisis,

people who are flying the so-called Chrome Dome missions, B-52s were all over the place ready to wipe out the world, at the shot of an arm, the commanders of a B-52 plane could have decided, to do it. Now, in theory, it took two of them to agree. Yeah. Suppose one of them was asleep or something. Yeah.

I mean, it's just mind-boggling. Stanley Cooper was... And as he points out, you know, Herman Kahn fantasized about doomsday machines, but we have it. The system is a doomsday machine. If anything goes wrong, you just blow up the world. And once we've learned about nuclear winter, you know, you can debate the details, but something's there.

Well, it's really, it's particularly serious, I think, for Americans who think that, I mean, who become complacent about nuclear weapons, but think, well, probably the most dangerous place where nuclear weapons might use is India, Pakistan, where there really are two states that really are and war that really hate each other, that both are nuclear states. And what is important to point out is that, is that it's not isolated, that a mere use of 200 nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan will produce a climate change that will probably kill a billion people in terms of the agriculture over the course of a decade. So there is no, it's not as if a local, there's not even an option. It's not even an option. You can't think about it. Yeah. And meanwhile, the Trump administration is escalating the threat. The so-called low-yield nuclear weapons. I mean, you know, who the people can think about this. You can't even imagine what's in their minds. I suppose you're the opponent. and somebody launches a missile which you say has only low-yield nuclear weapons on it.

Yeah. How do they know? They're going to react by massive violence, and you're done. Yeah, no, I mean, the idea of usable nuclear weapons is a fallacy. And it's unfortunately the notion that if they're small enough, they're indistinguishable from, we have to overcome that. But that's the, as far as I can see, that's the myth that's happening now. And that's why the Ellsburgh book, I think, is important because it points out. People have become complacent because we've had 75 years of not using them against civilian populations.

But you took a look at the record. We've come. So close. Close. So close. It's frightening. Command and Control, a wonderful book about how close we've come to domestically and internationally. And it's not going to last.

That luck is not going to last forever. I mean, case after case, we've come within a couple of minutes of using them. Well, look, before we do go to a different area, because I know, particularly, I know because your wife was interested in, who's from Brazil, wanted us to talk about Brazil a little bit. Let's talk about it a little bit. Well, Brazil, remember, is the most important country in the hemisphere outside the United States, not a small country. It's been called a hundred years ago. It was called the Colossus of the South, potentially. Yeah.

So what's happened in Brazil? I won't go through the whole history, of course, but just recently. In 2003, they elected Lula da Silva, the president. He's an uneducated union leader, a very remarkable person. I knew him back in the 90s, followed him closely. He's a very remarkable person, very effective. You don't take my opinion. The World Bank published a study of...

of Brazil in 2016, May 2016, in which they discussed what they called the golden decade, a unique period in Brazil's history under Lula's two terms, 2003 to 2011, a period in which there was remarkable improvement, poverty reduction, enormous poverty reduction, A large expansion of inclusiveness, marginalized. Remember, these are very unequal countries.

Rich but incredibly unequal, enormous poverty, tremendous resources wasted. Inclusion of people, Afro-Brazilians, almost half the population, indigenous people, women brought into educational institutions, a sense of dignity, of commitment. The country just changed. They say it's a remarkable example of development rarely equal. At the same time, Lula became probably the most respected statesman in the world. A very respected statesman as a voice for the global south, respected everywhere. I remember visiting Brazil, it seemed like, yeah, it seemed like a beacon.

Yeah, it was a remarkable period. Well, Brazilian elites couldn't tolerate this. And not only the, first of, he was very supportive of establishment institutions. He didn't interfere with the wealth robbing the country. He paid off the debts to the foreign investors. He satisfied the IMF. He's not a radical. His belief's pretty straight.

You just put money in the hands of poor people. That'll take care of things. That's his radicalism. But for the Brazilian elite, who are outlandish, all the Latin American elite. This is intolerable. Furthermore, there's enormous class hatred. How can this uneducated worker

who doesn't even speak proper Portuguese dare to be sitting in the residential palace? You know, these people have to have humility. We'll take care of them, that sort of thing. That's deeply rooted all throughout Latin America, and Brazil in particular. Anyhow, as soon as he, a couple of years after he stepped down, the oil prices dropped and the commodity prices dropped with China cutting back development. There's a lot of claims that the improvements under his rule were just illusory that.

But the World Bank didn't agree. You look at their analysis, they say that's not true. In fact, if you look more closely, I've written about this. The Brazilian economists have written about it. It was mainly the predatory financial institutions who prevented any sensible reaction to this. Every effort that was taken was beaten back, and it did lead to a recession. That gave the opportunity for the soft coup that's been going on since then. The first step was to impeach his successor, Dilma Rousseff, on absolutely derisory grounds.

I mean, you look at them. It's not even a joke. And she was impeached by a gang of thieves of a sort you can't even describe. That was the first step. Then comes the next, just a couple months ago. There was an election coming up in October, October 2018. The Lula was way ahead in the polls. It was pretty clear he was going to win the election.

So what did they do? Put them in jail. solitary confinement, 25-year sentence, basically a death sentence, prevented from reading newspapers and journals, and crucially,

prevented from making a public statement, not like murderers and death row. This is right before the election. Next step, which is, we should look closely, because it's a test run for the 2020 election here,

a massive campaign on the social media, which are the main source of information for most of the population. Press is, of course, mostly right wing, but these are. But the media campaign is just unbelievable. I mean, the lies, the fabrications, the vitriol, you know, the workers' party, his party is planning to turn all the boys into homosexuals. It's going to kill religion. They're going to put out baby bottles with penises as the nipples, you know, on and on like this. People believed it, you know.

They finally managed just by these means, you know, shut up, silence, the guy who's probably going to win, flood the so-called information system with grotesque lies and attacks that can't be responded to. And remember, we're going to see this soon. We're starting to see it already. This is Testron. They managed to get into office,

a guy who's the most outrageous of the right-wing fanatics all over the world. Just to illustrate, this is a guy who, when he was in the parliament, when he voted for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, he dedicated his vote to her torturer. She was a gorilla tortured by the military regime. He dedicated his vote to her

torturer, the general who was in charge of the torture. He supports the military dictatorship, which was vicious. But he criticizes it too because it didn't go far enough. He said it should have, it was too soft. They should have killed 30,000 people like the Argentines did, the worst of the military dictatorship. He goes back to the 19th century and criticizes the Brazilian cavalry because they didn't do what the Americans did, wipe out the indigenous population. If they'd done that, we wouldn't have these problems today. In fact, now that he's in office, first of his economics advisor is a ultra-right Chicago boy, Pablo Gaita's. His motto is literally privatize everything, sell the country, out to mostly foreign investors.

Right now they're killing the Social Security system, which is not that strong, but something. Hand everything over to the rich and the powerful. The newest legislation is change the history books so that they don't criticize the military dictatorship. They say it was necessary to protect the country from communism. He says the whole country has been taken over by what's called cultural Marxism, including the right-wing press, universities. We've got to block that science is finished. We don't support that.

We don't waste money on that kind of stuff. So the Brazilian science is pretty powerful, interesting thing. It was upcoming. So, I mean, this is just indescribable, and it's happening in the most powerful, important country, in Latin America. one of the most important in the world, with the strong support of the United States, very powerful. In fact, this media campaign,

you can't prove it, but it has all the fingerprints of the people have been running these things elsewhere. Well, let's, I want to try. It's going to get to linguistics which you're not going to get to, but look, this has been a sobering conversation in many ways.

But I wanted to end by talking about your balance. I mean, we didn't get to talk much about science a little bit, but you've devoted much of your life to writing. Your popular writing has been, other than interviews with you, your popular writing has been primarily on issues that we've been talking about now, whereas your scientific writing in linguistics has not been, as far as I know, spent a lot of time on popular books in linguistics, okay?

And so I wanted to talk about that balance. as someone who also does science and has written about science and writes about it, this balance, to ask you whether you feel, I've often, people often ask me if you've felt compromised

because one takes away from the other and I have my own answer to that, but I wanted to hear about yours whether you felt that the efforts you've devoted to exposing what you view as fundamental problems that need to be addressed for society has of course compromised

potentially the time you could have spent on linguistics and philosophy, and how you feel about that? If the world would go away, I'd be much happier just to keep to the scientific and philosophical issues. That's really intellectually exciting. Frankly, these issues we've been talking about are pretty superficial. It doesn't take much to figure them out and understand them. There's nothing profound about it. You don't have to have a PhD. and political science to talk about these things. The guilds try to protect themselves,

but the fact of them, and it's not a criticism of the fields. I mean, they're just too complicated. Yeah. So things are complicated. You don't get deep theories. I mean, physics is lucky. If things get too complicated,

just hand it over to the chemist. Yeah, that's why I told people. That's why I do physics is the easy stuff. But you can't do that with human life, you know. So, but the point is anybody, They can understand these things if they want. It's not intellectually exciting. It's humanly significant.

And it's, there's a lot of frustration because you know that what you're going to do is going to be smashed and slaughtered in the mainstream with tons of lies and attacks. There's all kind of evidence about this and won't go into it. So in a way, it's, you know, it's kind of like wasted in a sense, except for the whatever effect it may have for the public. So if it's wasted, why, if you do it, doesn't it? Because I think it's just critically important. So like, say, the Vietnam War, when Kennedy started escalating the war, I really had, I remember a personal decision.

Nobody cares about this. Am I going to start trying to do something about it? Or can I keep to my work, which was at a very exciting period at the time? I was a young person, department developing, all kind of new ideas. And I knew perfectly well from experience. I have an activist history. Yeah. You put your one toe in and pretty soon you're swimming.

Yeah. You can't just do a lot. Yeah, in for a penny and for a pound. I just decided it's got to be done. You know, it looked hopeless at the time. As I mentioned before, it took years before you could even talk about these things. But they're just too important to let go. In fact, Bertrand Russell was asked once around the late 1960s why he's wasting his time.

on anti-nuclear activities when he could be producing more serious work and philosophy and logic. And he said, if I don't work on the nuclear activities, nobody's going to look at philosophy and logic. Well, I think, I mean, you said it before,

it looked hopeless in the Vietnam War, and ultimately it wasn't. It was really social, it was really the raising of consciousness about that war that ultimately forced people. But notice that it's dual. It was effective among the population.

Among the intellectual classes, basically zero. Yet they can't go beyond. It was a mistake, no? Well, yeah, but nevertheless, I think the lesson from this is, and we've spent two hours now talking about, largely talking about problems that will depress people and there's serious problems in the world today. But the fact that you chose to devote much of your life and time

to at least talking about these issues, consciousness, pointing out that people could understand them. And that's the first step to action is incredibly important. And I think that's why I feel I'm happy we were able to spend this time. And I think the world, we're lucky that you did that. And I'm hoping that we will continue our conversations. And people who agree or disagree will least be motivated to ask the questions, simple questions about the world that need to be asked if we're going to,

if we're going to try and address the important challenges of the 21st century, which are now global, which, as you said, not just nuclear weapons, climate change. We need to have these discussions. And I and literally millions of people thank you for what you've done. Thanks a lot, Noel. Thanks. The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss, Nancy Dahl, Amelia Huggins, John and Don Edwards, and Rob Zeps. Directed and edited by Gus and Luke Holwurda.

Audio by Thomas Amison. Web design by RedmondmediaLab.com. animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects, and music by Ricolus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.