we are very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning chris hedges chris hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in central america the middle east africa and the balkans he has reported from more than fifty countries and has worked for the christian science monitor national public the dallas morning news and the new york times for which he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years and was awarded a pulitzer prize in two thousand and two for the paper's coverage of global terrorism he is a senior fellow at the nation institute in new york city and has taught at columbia university new york university and princeton university and just finished teaching inmates at a correctional facility in new jersey he writes a weekly column at truthdig dot com in addition to having written numerous books including empire of illusion the end of literacy and the t spectacle war is a force that gives us meaning american fascists the christian right and the war on america death of the liberal class and his new book coauthored with joe sacco days of destruction days of revolt so if we could start out before talking about the book talk about a recent development with you suing president obama and secretary of defense leon panetta regarding the national defense authorization act and talk about that yes this was just one more assault egregious assault by the obama administration against civil liberties i think at this point the record of the obama administration is arguably worse than the bush administration not only have they supported the amendment act which retroactively made legal what under our constitution has traditionally been illegal the warrantless wiretapping monitoring eavesdropping of tens of millions of american citizens and we now know that all our personal information is being stored in giant supercomputer in utah not only the refusal to restore habeas corpus not only interpret in the two thousand and one authorization to use military sacked to empower the executive branch  to order the assassination of american citizens i'm talking about the yemeni cleric anwar locky and then of two weeks later his sixteen year old son the use of the espionage act to shut down whistleblowers  him to expose his sources i mean this is just unconscionable in this what it was added to this was the decision by the president on new year's eve to sign into law the national defense authorization act which included section ten twenty one section ten twenty one of that act empowers the government to use the military to seize american citizens off of u s soil  hold them in military facilities including our offshore penal colonies strip them of due process and these are not just people by the way who may in the judgment of intelligence officials of relationships direct relationships with terrorist groups but can have relationships with what in the nebulous language of this section are called associated forces and these people can be held in the language of this section of the n d a intill the end of hostilities which in an age a permanent war as ever it's just indefinite detention by the military without access to the basic constitutional right of due process is a staggering assault on civil liberties dianne feinstein when the bill was co sponsored by carl levin and john mccain proposed inserting language to exempt american citizens from this it was this was rejected by both the  ma white house and the democratic party and so i sued the president and the defense secretary was eventually joined by a few other plaintiffs including daniel ellsberg and judge katherine forest of the southern district court of new york ruled in our favor and issued a temporary injunction against that section of the n d a in essence invalidating the law we are now waiting to see the government response there will be final briefs filed i think in august and then government lawyers have sixty days by which they can file an appeal and at that point it would if they do appeal it would go to the bono carl mayer and bruce out front we all paid we just paid our own expenses so the expenses because the lawyers were working pro bono expenses were marginal but of course you know i think for me what was so disturbing as i kept asking myself where are the one million lawyers in this country where are the deans of law schools where where are all those people who are tasked with defending the constitution why aren't they out here with us talk a bit about your your latest book days of destruction days of roll what was the motivation and well it's a look at the sacrifice of those places within the country that have been offered up to unfettered capitalism to the marketplace where there are no impediments to what corporate profiteers want we began with pine ridge which of course is where  all started the seizure of native american land by railroad barons and timber companies and gold speculators of course in the process carried out  just acts of acts of genocide that whole sort of demented project of exploiting human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse took place on  westward on the western plains and of course that whole concept of manifest destiny which is that god has given the anglo saxon race the right to seize for themselves resources land and push aside any any impediments including human beings who stand in their way once westward expansion was complete that imperial project when first to the philippines  into central america i mean and of course is continuing to this day in iraq and afghanistan but i think what's also important about that moment in history is that it didn't just seize land exploit and often exhaust resources from buffalo herds to virgin timber but it destroyed a competing ethic another way to relate to the natural world and relate to each other in native societies people who hoarded goods for themselves were despised everything was communal and marx and engels when they write on communism interestedly enough look very very closely at the at the social and political structures of the iroquois indians and and i think in some ways that sort of project of we go on and look at our former manufacturing centers in camden new jersey in particular which per capita is the poorest city in the united states and not surprisingly one of the most dangerous the coal fields of southern west virginia or we are allowing coal companies to literally destroy the appalachian mountain range by blowing the top four hundred feet off of mountains leaving behind a vast wasteland we flew over it hundreds of thousands of acres it's just insane because these coal companies to save money don't want to dig down as they did in the past to extract the coal they will just destroy the mountains expose the coal seams use some of the largest land equipment on earth twenty five stor drag lines try and bulldozers in one of the things they do is they use these massive machines to push the topsoil and the forests over the sides of the mountains and then they burn them so we're flying over the appalachians and we're seeing these manmade fires where they're just burning off the forests and there's nothing left behind now they point also you know poison the water the air the soil they leave these gigantic  billion gallon toxic impoundment ponds filled with heavy metals which occasionally burst it is it is just a perfect window of  how we of course across the planet have allowed corporate power to determine our relationship to the ecosystem that sustains the human species and theological terms these corporations are systems of death they are not about preserving nurturing our protecting life including the environment that makes life for us possible  and that's why the environmental crisis is intimately twinned with the economic crisis we also go into the produce fields of the country where undocumented workers are often treated literally like slaves held against their will and dead peonage sometimes behind barbed wire forced to work told that if they report the abuse to authorities their families in mexico or honduras or guatemala will be harmed as bernie sanders says of a mock ali where we were in the race to the bottom that has become america markley is the bottom and that is the perfect worker in the eyes of the corporate state what we are creating nationally as well as globally with globalization is a form of neo feudalism a world of masters and serfs where workers are told that in order to be competitive in a global marketplace they are going to have to  be competitive with the prison labor in china or sweatshop workers in bangladesh who make twenty two cents an hour that's what's being created these corporations are supranational they have no loyalty to the nation state they are quite willing to hollow the country out from the inside which they're doing the the signs of physical decay are everywhere collapsing infrastructure closing public schools closing libraries fire departments and then the long term suffering that is being visited on the working and increasingly the middle class roughly twenty percent of americans are either underemployed seriously underemployed  unemployed and the corporate state knows one word which is more there are no limits and some great political theorist including karl marx have written about this that unfettered capitalism is everything commodifying human beings modifying the natural world and he actually although he is an economist writes that when a society loses the capacity for the sacred when nothing has an intrinsic value but simply a monetary value then built into that system is a quality of collective suicide because you know no limits and that is precisely where we are as anyone who reads climate change reports as i do nature magazine this month had a very terrifying piece where they interviewed sixteen of the top climate scientists who talk about talked about global worldwide catastrophic ecological collapse and if we don't rest power back from these corporations which in essence of carried out a kind of corporate coup d'etat in this country in slow motion will kill us quite literally and we end with the occupy movement the book was always which we worked on for two years and i should say joe sako drew out fifty pages of illustrations including comic panels which give a kind of filmic quality to many of the lives of the people we interviewed  we we ended with zuccotti but we didn't anticipate scotty the we knew the book was going to be called days of destruction days of revolt because with all restraints lifted against corporate power and the predatory nature of corporate capitalism we were certain there would be a backlash but we didn't know what it would look like we didn't know when it would arise we didn't know where it would rise and then september seventeenth happened in new york city so the last chapter is this look at this attempt to rationally respond i mean i was on democracy now in new york a couple weeks ago  and after i finished with amy paul krugman was on and i like my crew and i read his stuff when the show is finished you know he's constantly calling for a rational response to the economic crisis which would of course include a that would in essence provide medicare for all and i said paul of course all the points you make but it assumes that the power structure is capable of responding rationally is actually it's interesting as his response was well given climate change doesn't this matters anyway so i think that when we look at the structures of power we find that because they are utterly beholden to corporate interests i think citizens united the two thousand and ten ruling sort of snuffed out what was left of our in ne make democracy all of our legislation including obamacare written by corporate l was at this point serve the interests of corporations the assault against the poor the working class and the middle class is unchecked so that even just in the last few weeks we saw unemployment benefits ended for hundreds of thousands of americans which of course means many will lose their homes we saw the supreme court strike a devastating blow against public sector unions and and so i i am certain that there will be a response i don't know what it will look like a covered movements and revolutions in insurgencies around the world eastern europe the street demonstrations that brought down slobodan milosevic the two palestinian uprisings are into photos and i learn that these forces have a kind of mysterious quality but the the you know the the the engine that drives popular unrest is the actions of the ruling elite of the ruling class and because they have not responded to the legitimate grievances and sufferings of american citizens tens of millions of american citizens then i am utterly certain that we've not seen the end of this will it be called occupy will it look like occupy i don't movements and and in essence what we live with is a political system that is become utterly paralyzed it doesn't function in a sense that it doesn't function on behalf of the citizenry and that doesn't matter whether it's republican or democrat and that's a very perilous state to be and i covered the war in the former yugoslavia and it was that political paralysis that inability on the part of the traditional elites to cope with a deteriorating economic situation and the war in yugoslavia was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds it was caused by the economic collapse of yugoslavia led to the vama need obvious some very frightening people community once again teetering on the brink of collapse you know some some some very terrifying distortions i mean the the the the tea party which channels i think a legitimate forces in american society including the koch brothers and others and that's exactly what happened with the nazi party i was bankrolled by the german industrialists and germany's problems were the fault of homosexuals and culture targets the weak and the vulnerable in this case muslims undocumented workers feminists again homosexuals intellectuals liberals have a long list feminists and i don't take movements like power there are always very large elements within that society who seek vengeance and they seek that vengeance through movements like that so one of the reasons i have been such an active supporter of the occupy movement is because i don't want to see us go the other way and of course i want our resistance to be nonviolent been very critical of the black bloc i mean clearly the the state was taken aback by v widespread support of occupy the goal of the state is to marginalize or sever that movement what's left of it from the mainstream and they occupy was a mainstream movement want to demonize the movement i think these black bloc anarchists are running around throwing bricks through windows and taunting the police are sort of a godsend to the state which is why probably they're significantly infiltrated as well so they  use that to frighten the mainstream away from the movement and then they want to funnel that energy back into a dead political system which is why you get figures like van jones and rebuild the dream a man i think we should look at wisconsin as a kind of case study of what we shouldn't do wisconsin could have gone either way a general strike or recall unfortunately they chose the wrong option which was a recall and they got a bankrupt democratic party to cough but  rerun candidate who was not at all fervent or passionate behind the issues that pushed people into the streets of madison and then of course they just got buried under mounds of money  and they lost and it's going to be very hard for them to reconstitute that movement i think you know at this point all energy should be spent on building movements movements in american history a bend the true correctives to our democracy  whether that's the liberty party that fought slavery the suffragists who fought for women's rights the labor movement the civil rights movement and without a functioning liberal class in essence that kind of safety valve that within a capitalist a mock recy makes incremental and piecemeal reform possible movements are all we have left i mean when conrad black writes his biography of rows of he says that roosevelt's greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism and i think that's correct but we no longer have functioning liberal institutions i spent a long time in death of the my book death of the liberal class speaking of about this and that means for those of us who care about protecting the open society civil disobedience is is all we have left at last night's talk use poco of boeing which was one of the co sponsors and said they needed to be a they needed to be sent a copy of your talk and be that if you if you lived in seattle you would have considered protesting in front of boeing or instead of goldman sachs how critical do you see  citizens doing things like that well it's absolutely critical because we if we don't do stuff like that we can even use the word hope i'm not naive enough to tell you it's going to work but we have to begin to build mass movements very very quickly because we don't have any time left both in terms of climate change and in terms of the precipice by which we face economically i mean we allowed financial speculators to loo the u s treasury and go right back to gambling and were already watching now the cracks not only are banks in dire trouble in europe with you know of course massive bailouts but we are seeing again j p morgan chase gambling and losing nine billion dollars at least and you know writers who know more about this than i do like gretchen morgenson at the new york times are running around saying it's coming it's coming it's going to happen all over again only this time it's going to be worse the last word and paul krugman is calm the other day was doom he's talking about the triggering of the great depression he sees nothing to stop it and and once that happens it will create political instability economic instability creates political instability and i don't want to live in a world where u ndocumented workers are beaten up on the street or muslims or terrorized or homosexuals are harassed and and victims of widespread hate crimes and that's not the world i want to raise my children and i think for those of us who care about a world for everyone a world of mutual respect a world where we put our resources towards in biblical terms helping our neighbor it's incumbent upon us to stop being passive and complacent because we live in an age is yates wrote where the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity so in terms of nonviolence clearly direct action and nonviolence are not exclusive weld gauge and all sorts of direct action was arrested in front of goldman have been arrested in front of the white house i think many of the moral voices in this country that i respect have also come to the conclusion that civil disobedience is the only weapon we have left that would include cornell west wendell berry seventy seven years old occupies the governor's office in kentucky to protest mountaintop removal and says before he goes in frankly going to jail is more time than i care to donate to the u s government but it's all we it's all we have and i think that the corruption within the centers of power is probably far more widespread than we realize  when i watch covered the revolutions in eastern europe i saw how massive peaceful nonviolent demonstrations were able to bring down the most efficient police state in eastern german state and what happened was that when protesters started pulling seventy thousand people in the city of leipzig which is where the protests began the communist party who'd been in power for eighteen years sent down an elite paratroop division to fire on the crowd and they didn't fire and at that point han occur was able to hang on to power for another week the right people forget that the russian revolution was a nonviolent revolution the violence came afterwards with the western powers building the white army creating the civil war with lenin and the bolsheviks carrying out an armed pooch to overthrow qur ski and a constitutional assembly we know when what broke those are was when the when the petrograd bread riots they sent the cossacks in to restore order and the not only did not fire on the crowd but started fraternizing with the with the demonstrators and and i think we you know this is a movement you know that that sort of tag of the ninety nine percent is correct this is a movement that articulate the concerns of the ninety nine percent and police officers in blue uniform are not part of the one percent i think that whatever they do and i have seen them do some acts that i or agree just in the wrong you want to treat them with the respect they may not always treat us as human beings but we want to retain our own dignity as human beings that moment when those women are pepper sprayed that first week in new york seated on a sidewalk if you watch the you tube video you'll hear one of the police officers say about his superior in the white shirt of pepper sprays them i can't believe you just pepper sprayed those women and that's a very telling moment if they were throwing bricks and cursing the police he wouldn't have had any sympathy or you want to create those that empathy you want to essentially draw those forces within the pillars of power towards you because that creates paralysis within those pillars of power that is the most effective tactic and that is why i've been fiercely critical of the black bloc for in my mind essentially playing into the hands of of the security and surveillance state all right well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thank you we are very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning and impartially and impartially is founder editor and publisher of feral house books he is also co founder of press he is the editor of numerous books a few of the titles which include apocalypse culture and apocalypse culture to culture rapture revelations of the apoc apocalyptic mind extreme islam anti american propaganda muslim fundamentalism and he is here to talk about his new book which he coauthored along with craig becker ritual america secret brotherhoods and their influence on american society a visual guide so start out talk to us about what was your motivation in creating farrel house books oh for office the company yeah well back when it started back in the one nine hundred eighty s there wasn't that much of an independent press at that time there wasn't an internet there were small publishers of things but you know i was in new york at the time and i thought the book trade was really without riskier and weirder and stranger books the kind of things i was drawn to personally so started a company i found a guy who could bankroll it to the tune of about a five thousand dollars amount  who had a credit card which i didn't at the time and to found a distributor and we got on the road with that we got into major outlets the chain stores and all that stuff and it surprised me that we were able to do that so easily and we got a very good response to some of our stuff so talk about what type of books feral house covers and maybe your selection criteria our selection criteria is actually what interests me personally i have to put it on that level i wish i was a little more businesslike about it and  wondering what would sell or focusing on that and getting marketing groups and all that we can't do that you know so it's basically a personal interest level that gets our books out and i do have an a collective and some people say weird and unusual taste to give some examples of books that cover the different genres sure for instance if you go to your website and you have like five different genres under books right well exactly we do kind of a cultural issues you know with books on music and film and other versions about the books on film for example like there was one on japanese monster movies and music is unusual music like we did a book that was unusual at first because very few people knew about it was called up black metal music it was a book called lords of chaos and now it's being made into a movie by japanese director and i co wrote the script for it too this is very exciting for me and then a book that had pretty it was pretty renowned for being out there is a book collection called apocalypse culture which i edited and what was unusual about it is just stuff that wasn't really collected before and book format about people who did extreme things and i thought they filled the perspective of being really out there in apocalyptic format that you wouldn't have they were not covered in any academic books or any other formats but these are the out there personalities and i collected that together in apocalypse culture and that won over well and was influential let's see there is a book called death scenes which is composed of a scrapbook of photographs collected by an l a p d homicide detective of mug shots and weird scenes he brought that around to high schools to i think torment young people about what would happen to them if they committed crimes the first kind of a shock you treatment about crime doesn't pay type of thing  and people were pretty upset by it because it was a first book that came out with photographs of that sort of thing and people got upset they thought it was not moral and what they how can you know picture these these dead people that's a good question but they were it was long past these people were alive or their relatives were alive really from the twenty's and thirty's of us culture now there's dozens of books of that kind of thing so it opens up other areas for people we did the first we did a book on the group the suicide girls which was unusual to me because these are women who basically ran their own naked poses which is usually territory run by males you know and these are people taking the whole matter in their hands and that was a great influence on what people do in this they started in portland and then they moved down to l a and now they're a kind of a big thing you know so various things like that a lot of your books a significant number appear to push the the boundaries of of publishing  hu have a big team of lawyers that defends here at home occasions no we don't have a team we work out of our home basically the thing is that we do we didn't have to deal with lawsuits because we put out you know political investigations and other matters too and sometimes that gets pretty hairy but you have to deal with it you know but we do take risks that's the matter of the company you know and so i have to deal with that issue on our own we do have attorney we deal with so we sometimes have to vet books with them and questions with an attorney yeah ok and also i would imagine running a small or i'm not sure if you can classify feral house no small it seems you know more medium i guess but as originally a small publishing house that you know that's got to be pretty economically challenging to begin with it's are things tougher now in the current economic crisis where you have to keep the costs down you know i was aware that i moved from l a where i had offices and all that to a place where i can work out of my home in the port townsend area and it is challenging however were we you know we're doing things allied with films and filmmakers and that helps because we have foreign rights and that sometimes helps because not unexpected revenue sources and so there are ways we can make it happen make it work one is to keep your costs down another is to have other you know revenue sources like the film makers and film option rights foreign rights things that this like like that you will begin to your new book and just check i was pleasantly surprised when i got a copy of your latest book ritual america by both the content but just the quality of the book i mean this is a large hardcover book that's just really nice quality so well thanks i agree yeah we pay attention to that matter you have a book you want to keep because it's the day of the electronic publication bits and bytes and we want to you know pay attention that we like physical books you know and we want to pay respect to that and make it worth owning and looking at you know and then finally in terms of publishing are things tougher now in the current political climate well  actually it's strange is contradictory a bit we do books that are things usually you know people get conservative on hard economic times and we go in the other direction we're not conservative anymore you know or we never were but we're less even now we just want to be able to provide books that are not provided by other publishing houses or other things sometimes that's difficult to get into barnes and noble if it's something rough you know however people seek us out and we sell books on in that way and if it works that's great i just want to be able to provide things you can't get elsewhere in a failed unknown in your introduction you also have a new publishing house called process media is that correct oh ya process yes that's our feral house is known for being fairly extreme or contentious process media is our imprint that i didn't want to have you know working from that perspective it's not a feral house book so we started this companies we have self reliance series books on do it yourself things on how to do things and preparedness on becoming an ex pat and we did a book called urban homestead or fighting a trademark situation with the electronic frontier foundation on that one but the yeah we love doing books were it provides knowledge and input into people who want to do things that let's say they can't get down to seven eleven that day they get an idea i'd like to know how to do this farming i'd like to know how to prepare for emergencies i like to know what to do  doctor's not there like to do that so we provide that for mainly for urbanites but in a way that doesn't it's not survivalist head for the hills type of thing all right well let's move on to your latest book ritual america tell us what was the motivation in putting together a ritual america well i'm out a long time fascination for the strange and bizarre  these american for turning organizations the shriners the freemasons the odd fellows even the lower you know business organizations like lions club or optimists club and all that stuff and i noticed that was there was a kind of a ritualistic aspect to it people would take oaths and do a certain thing they were a certain kind of costume and clothing and some of it extremely odd and makes you think were did all that come from what's going on there i first noticed it actually when my grandfather took me to washington d c when i was a small child and right in front of that h johnson's hotel we're staying in which is also in front of the watergate complex during when all that funny business was going on there was a black shriners parade and the black shriners came into the hotel and it just bowled me over as a child what are these people doing why and so i took that curiosity with me and i i've been collecting the largely through the amazing thing called that people would sell their old scrapbooks and all personal photographs and strange little things you could not find in any bookstore per se or any any other library anywhere and and i esoteric and strange way that most of these books encounter these things or either crazy conspiratorial concepts so that was a concept and to make it is easier to read or to browse and be with as a magazine you know so that's the intent of ritual america and also the intent was to show how broad the fraternal idea was in the creation of the country and how at one point as many as a third of all people in united states belong to a secret society or some sort of weird for eternal order prefer important to the daily functioning of american life for centuries or more and so i want to say that like it's hidden in plain sight and  rituals it's not like it's not secret anymore you can find anything on on a google search now and so it's not you know you go what's the secret all about when these organizations started way hundreds of years ago they were fighting the catholic church really and other way of forming up like a protestant type organization and also one that the catholic church  was particularly in europe at the time they were controlling the banking and means of distribution of goods or gold or banking situations that was crucial to the time and during the revolutionary war the french masonic societies are called the grand orient and lafayette was involved and who collaborated with ben franklin and george washington revolutionary war fighting against the british had their own masonic organizations but they're far more exclusive than the ones in the united states and france and so it's really huge part of america you drive into any town you see this big sign and at the front of the time town you drive into all these organizations you know you see signs from the masonic lodge you see it for the temple you see it for the optimist club and lines club an elks lodge and all that stuff and it just makes you think who are the what is this stuff you know and so i thought through that and did a lot research and that's where it is it's very surprising how all encompassing it is and the american environment even today do you have a sense for you said one at one point emma one out of every three americans who are part of one of these organizations you have a sense for numbers for now it's a lot less than it was the turn of the century in one thousand nine hundred or so and that is because there's  there's a lot less need for it basically a lot of it was for entertainment of the father or the family as well and there was things that insurance companies take up that was taken up by fraternal orders there's stuff like you know television t v dinners in the fifty's and all these things that were happening at that time  s played into the needs that were filled by for turn orders earlier and so there's a lot less need for actual need for the family so there's a lot less participation and that also there was a book done about ten years ago called bowling alone and that described how there's a lot less engagement in group participation and that has really hurt the fraternal societies so were the freemasons were they the original model then for the bulk of these other fraternal organizations absolutely yeah it was sort of like alcoholics anonymous it was the icon for the so bridey societies and there was a lot of them but you couldn't have them without a right so it was like the twelve step model and that freemasonry provided a way for those other groups alike a format of participation ritualistic concept you know a new way to run a lodge and what to do in a lodge and how to structure it so freemasonry was a big mama of that situation and did a lot of them carry over the same concepts let's say of an oath  and not revealing what your particular fraternity does well absolutely yeah that's that was a part one of the things the model provided the idea of secret rituals  and shakes and the formation of marches like let's say there's an order called the improved order of the red man that was a big there a million people belong to this red men group they would put on head dresses and dress like america native americans well they didn't allow native americans into their own of about native american however but that was that was a similar format as to the freemasons they had a ritual the rituals the way they've formed the way they engaged in a room the heads would sit in a certain place on the the other auxiliary roles done by the other members and what they would do and how they would dress and what they would say and all that it's really fascinating how many were there were there was i have this book that was done at the turn of the twentieth century and it discusses six hundred or more different orders and it showed they're set up it's like the six hundred orders they had multiple lodges each what some as many as thousands so it was such a huge part of the country and they had a name purpose someone who join all these various orders just to collect being a participant and many many different orders and so on even the catholic church who really didn't like the freemasons and felt threatened by the structure of them and as well they probably should because it with their mainly primarily protestant type organizations they started their own because people catholic kids and young men they would see how the freemasons they had these  collective organizations that did they paraded around and they they had these jonson across the country and they were due to all this fun stuff and so at the turn of the twentieth century there was an organization founded for catholics of the knights of columbus so they didn't feel left out of the masonic concept but it wasn't freemasonry per se talk about the the first third party in the u s it's amazing it seems like a very small idea to start a whole political party for everybody but it's called the anti masonic party and that was amazing because it's sort of like there was a very small idea defined idea of a political party to not like a certain structure you know and the reason for that was why that formed because the early days of the country particularly they weren't not as all inclusive as democratic principles would tell you they're the freemasons and they didn't allow the group the non freemasons were called callan's and they were ridiculed by the insiders of freemasonry at the time and so there was resentment against that it was a resentment that kidnapped and then later murdered and that started a huge explosion of disgust and hatred for the masonic organizations about half the masons in the country dropped out of the organization and they joined other similar organizations like the odd fellows at that time and then you know that turned around during the civil war time and  freemasonry started picking up a bit and particularly after the civil war there was a guy named albert pike albert pike there's a big statue of him in washington d c that's very unusual because he was confederate general who actually led indian or native american factions into scalping yankees it was amazing so this is a bit of american history not many people know he wrote new rituals for the scottish writerly they call them the southern jurisdiction they started in charleston south carolina but spread all over the country and today that scottish rite template is the biggest one in the country when you think of freemasonry there's a new york right and others but they're far less was at that time he was known for being a very big racist because of you know his belief system as formed by the confederacy so that's very unusual stuff going on the back the back end of the rooms you know the racialist concepts massage honest concepts women were not allowed to be part of a masonic organizations and so they were allowed to be part of a subordinate order that sore serve the man or the male so but this was you know people say well this is what the country was like at the time it's not specific well that is true that was more like what the country was it was you know the paternalist concept and the races concepts however not everybody in a masonic organization approved of having slaves like albert pike did in the southern jurisdiction of the scottish rite temple so it's interesting it's just the whole history of the united states and how it was structured how the nuclear family was structured how things happened at that time it's all within the fraternal orders if they're just not like obscure people or where strange costumes and you can see i'm on the honeymooners or you know flintstones there was all there was a huge huge part of the country what were the qualifications to be become a freemason if they were making fun of those who weren't was or some high threshold to become one well there are there are or it was sure there are also different types of organizations for different types of people there are the higher wealthier people the bigger businessmen they might join  the scottish rite then the oddfellows is more of a blue collar type of fraternal organization labor unions created their own little light masonic type organizations it was so wide ranging you know that filled every need at the time for that type of group and so people forget that i think it's just that you know books and co author of the new book ritual america secret brotherhoods and their influence on american society a visual guide and adam were can people find out more about your books they can come to our website on amazon or barnes and noble or major independent bookstores it's a big heavy very well illustrated book so really should be seen in person i think all right