and now i have the absolute privilege of introducing our next speaker she is serving her first term in the washington state senate she represents one of the most racially and economically diverse districts in the state she's the founder of washington state's largest immigrant advocacy organization she led the largest voter registration drive in the history of your state and she's a contributor to numerous publications including the nation i give you is i think i'm the only state elected official here tonight so i think that gives me the right to offer to the nation to katrina richard and john a lifetime subscription to washington state and seattle but but i can just tell you you better buy your property now so it's really incredible to be here tonight and i'll tell you that listening to nick and sharma and thinking about my own trajectory and why i've gone from being an activist on the outside to being a limpia is because i realized after twenty years of working for immigrant rights for civil rights for all the things that we care about that instead of asking other people to do it why don't we get in there and do it ourselves right wh why don't we take over the system and do the organizing that we need to do on the inside and the outside and it's been a real privilege to serve in the washington state senate as horrendously as horrendous i'm trying to think of a polite word dysfunctional how about that dysfunctional as it is down there the reality is we have to reform our tax system in this state and i'm ready to do that and you know we have to we have to start funding education and our teachers and we're getting fined one hundred thousand dollars every day for every day that we don't come up with the money that it takes to fund education and i'll tell you what our teachers being out on the streets now have the great privilege to speak at the s t a strike and it was amazing but our teachers are doing exactly what we need you to do in the streets building the movement and demanding change in a limpia so my my reading tonight is eleanor roosevelt fear is the enemy this is a letter that she wrote or i think it was a piece that she wrote for the nation on february tenth one thousand nine hundred forty when fear enters into the hearts of people they are apt to be moved to hasty action here in this country today we find people who have never sufficiently cherished their democracy to understand fully their obligations as citizens yet now they are taking fright because ideas which of obtained a hold in other countries have crossed the water and are appearing in certain groups in the united states these ideas can only appeal to those who do not really understand what means or who for one reason or another have had their faith shaken in the efficiency of democracy we who believe in democracy should not be so much concerned with stamping out the activities of these few groups or individuals as with developing among the people in this country a greater sense of personal responsibility toward a democratic way of life it is our job to know what democracy means and to try to attain real democracy we do not move forward by curtailing people's liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say we move forward by assuming by assuring to all people protection in the basic liberties under a democratic form of government and then making sure that our government serves the real needs of the people let us be aware of unreasoning fear which will make us curtail these liberties and present prevent a free expression of new ideas where the majority rules there is little danger of moving too fast when the power becomes concentrated in the hands of a few there is great danger that the majority will not be able to move at all so i just want to speak briefly to the context and to the person february tenth one nine hundred forty the interesting thing about that for me when i first saw this quote was that it was almost exactly two years later on february nineteenth one thousand nine hundred two that franklin d roosevelt signed executive order nine zero six six which led to the internment of one hundred twenty thousand americans of japanese ancestry and eleanor apparently privately spoke out against executive order nine zero six six and she defended japanese americans so much so that the l a times actually called for her to be quote forced to retire from public life over the issue and eleanor herself was kind of a groundbreaking first lady i mean especially for that time but even for today she didn't always agree with her husband and she often said so publicly she was beloved by african americans and a lot of things that i've read have said that it was really she who brought the african american voting block to roosevelt and in fact she was reviled by many white southerners at the time because of her support of african americans and she also thought and wrote deeply about fear not just as an intellectual proposition but because she herself felt fear a lot and she she had a great essay about this in another in another book and so i just wanted to tie that back to my start in politics and this very place actually but after nine eleven when we were seeing the patriot act passed we were seeing the detentions and deportations of arabs and muslims and south asians around the country and a group of us came together and formed what was then the free zone now one america and we were right here in this building so thank you townhall we had twelve hundred people in this building i think we broke the fire code that night  but it wasn't just the typical crowd right it was arabs muslims sikhs communities that had never participated in democracy before actually coming out and saying we do we cannot have our liberties and our rights abused in this way and we went on to file a nationwide class action lawsuit against the government around the deportation of five thousand somalis across the country and we won that we collectively went here's here's my reflection on fear because it was the same it was the same or that has permeated throughout our country whether it's been around the japanese internment whether it was post nine eleven or whether it's today as we watch bush and trump  in the presidential debates but the first is the reality that we all do have fears i think eleanor actually talked about this quite eloquently in her longer essay but the two questions really for me are that the that this reading made me think about is first what causes us to go to those most fearful places and the second is what do we do with that fear and so the idea in this reading that i think is so critical that the antidote to fear is actually to make sure this is her her words to make sure that government serves the needs of the people because the truth is that when government is not serving the needs of the people when the top one percent in this country own the equivalent of ninety percent of all of the rest of the country or right here in washington state between two thousand and eight and two thousand all of the wealth accrued to the top one percent in our state when that is happening when we have our most upside down tax system in the country right here taking the most in taxes from those who have the least then we create the conditions under which fear is likely to thrive when our basic freedoms are not met when government doesn't do its job and regulating wall street or preventing private prisons from profiteering on incarcerating african americans that's when people are most vulnerable to having their fear manipulated and so this is where a progressive agenda that speaks to the common good and agenda that puts the little guy or the little gal first is so important in an ocular people against letting their fear take hold but we also know that fear is still powerful and so then the question is what do you do with fear when you feel it does it use you or do you use it and i believe that it's when we feel fear deep inside of us and when we confront it that that's when courage is born that's when the courage to change comes that's when the courage to organize comes that's when the courage to do the things that are necessary to do come when you actually are able to look in yourself and often it takes the minority speaking to the principles that unite us to push back that fear and to remind us that we're bigger than all of that and really that's what happened after nine eleven that's what happened when we refused to allow arabs and muslims to be deported and secretly detained and that is also what happened when we here in seattle connected in two thousand and three the war against iraq to the war on immigrants you all remember that where you at that march we were one of the few places that did that to say these are deeply connected ideas what we're doing overseas what we're doing in other countries the wars that we're waging in other places are creating these wars just in another themselves and the war on immigrants is very similar to what is happening there so the abuses of civil liberties and the and civil rights right here in our own communities when what some manipulators in the top echelons of our government did is back then is and this was really powerful for me is to use fear and patriotism together to suppress dissent and you saw that after the japanese internment i certainly saw after nine eleven the receipt cabdrivers walking around with their american flags waving their american flags not wearing their turbans shaving their beards i didn't dress like this for several days because there was this aura of american patriotism that somehow was going to have to override anything else that we brought as an identity anything else that made us different but what we in the community did was we refused to accept that narrative and backed by publications like us magazine like the nation and so many people who decided that organizing on the ground was the way to fight back we stood up we defended our core values and we organized for a different future and that story that narrative of fear division being defeated by the power of the people is the story of fifteen in seattle it is the story of every movement that has ever been successful it is the story of climate justice in seattle it is the story the battle of seattle that was the same story of shell oil it's of people saying no we will not do this so when trump gets up there and he talks about you know let's do a collective when trunks gets up there  any talks about immigrants being raised rapists and drug traffickers when we hear about law and order of the silent majority of ridding ferguson and baltimore of tough dude stuff what he said  or even of criticizing jeb bush for speaking spanish and all the other sheep in the republican presidential competition follow along that is when we have to stand up and make our voices heard so what gives me hope though is that there are three movements today that to me are really exemplifying the power of the people and the power of the people to push back against fear one is the movement for black lives and it is an it is an incredible movement that is not just challenging the other side but it's chalo joining us on the progressive side to make sure that we are putting racial equity at the front of our agenda not something that we just say is nice to do but we leave behind but that it is right front and center the second the second is the movement for income equality and the fight for fifteen is amazing and it is going to continue and you know what i had a bill last last session to raise the minimum wage to twelve dollars across the state they didn't want to take it it is going to be a lot bigger when it's at the ballot and then the third the third and final one i want to mention is the movement for climate justice because what we are seeing in the street and what naomi klein so brilliantly describes about how this is changing everything is really the issue for our next generation but also for us today about what we do with the future and so i wanted to end by just saying i wrote something after the bernie sanders rally i think many of you probably saw it and i wrote something about what i think we need to do and i thought i'd end with that in the end if we want to win for all of us on racial economic and social justice issues we need multiple sets of tactics working together some are destructive tax some are loving tactics some are truth telling tactics some can only be taken on what by white people and some can only be taken on by people of color sometimes we need someone from the other strand to step in and hold us up and other times we have to step out and hold them up each one of us has a different role to play but we all have to hold the collective space for movement building together it's the only way we move forward thank you after bernie sanders came to seattle i read i was interviewing her about something and we're talking about the seattle stop and he said this is going to be so tragic much enter because you know that  that premier john paul she is really brilliant so a visionary got to take her on the road all those rallies she's an amazing woman has done is because you recognize that something started here in seattle fifteen sixteen years ago when people went into the streets to say that all these movements come together we can't talk about economic justice without talking about racial justice we cannot talk about the climate without talking about war and peace we can't separate poll everything about to get apart we have to realize there are connections that have to be made and all those years ago this incredibly young woman from canada right after the battle seattle published you know logo right around the time of it and no logo was this transformational book everybody was like how did you know everything that we were fighting for before we went and fought for it and it was at that point that we started to realize that naomi klein was always just a little bit ahead of us when we were trying to figure out all of the horror of the iraq war if ghana stand war all of these things and and all the profiteering that was going on she gave us the shock doctrine and she explained disaster capitalism to us and when she had given us more than any tom paying then she said it was time to get to work i was at the people's climate march yesterday here in seattle marching me klein and as she was when we come together in solidarity recognizing the connections of all these movements this changes everything what changes klein thank you john so that was such a lovely introduction i'm so happy to be here thank you all for being here to celebrate the nation which is very much my home as a writer and i'm just so so grateful to all of my colleagues at the nation but i want to thank in particular katrina vanden who is our fearless leader we're so proud of katrina you know is not only this brilliant writer and thinker but has this ability to go on television with these assholes and they call me and say amazingly radical and l things and we all just sheer so we love you katrina and i also just want to want to give a special shout out to richard cam who is my editor at the nation  is as you saw an utterly brilliant writer and he is an equally brilliant editor and it is such a privilege to work with him so i am reading a piece by the great wendell berry and it's called the unsaddling of america and you may know his book by the same title and it appeared in that in the nation on june fourth one thousand nine hundred seventy six and i want to repeat that day june fourth hundred seventy six because it is such a present essay and you know if we cast our minds back to what was going on and what he was reflecting on specifically it was the energy crisis but this was still early days it was years before jimmy carter would tell americans they had to put on a sweater so so here is wendell in one nine hundred seventy six one possibility is just to tag along with fantasy government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence comfort mobility and leisure indefinitely this curious fate is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy domestic oil fields shale oil gasified coal nuclear energy solar energy and so on this is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity it is a moral ignorance and weakness of character we don't know how to use energy or what to use it for and we cannot restrain ourselves our time is characterized as much by abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy nuclear power is presumably now going to be used benignly by the same mentality that has agreed just devalued and misapplied manpower if we had an unlimited supply of solar wind power we would use that destructive too for the same reasons perhaps those sources of energy are going to be developed perhaps all of them can sooner or later be developed without threatening survival but not all of them together can guarantee survival and they cannot define what is desirable we will not find those answers in washington or in the laboratories of oil companies in order to find them we will have to look closer to ourselves i believe that they are to be found in our history in its until now subordinate tendency of settlement of domestic permanence it is to be found in the ambitions of thousands of immigrants it is formulated eloquently in some of the letters of thomas jefferson it was the dream of the liberated slaves it was written into law in the homestead act of eight hundred sixty two there are few us whose families have not at some time been moved to see its vision and to attempt to enact its possibility i am talking about the idea that as many as possible should share in the ownership of the land and be bound to it by economic interest by the investment of love and work by family loyalty by memory and tradition how much land should should this be is a question and it varies with geography the homestead act said one hundred and sixty acres the freed men of the eight hundred sixty s hoped for forty we know that particularly in other countries families have lived decently on far fewer acres than that this old ideal is full of promise it is potent with healing and with health it has the power to turn each person away from the big time promising and planning of the government and to confront in himself in the immediacy of his own circumstances and whereabouts the question of what methods and what ways are best it proposes an economy of necessities rather than an economy based upon anxiety fantasy luxury and idle wishing it proposes the independent free standing citizenry that jefferson thought to be the surest safeguard of democratic liberty perhaps most important of all it proposes an agriculture based on intensive work local energies care and intentional permanence that is to state the matter from a consumer's point of view a dependable long term food supply this is a possibility that is obviously imperiled by antipathy and high places by adverse fashions and attitudes in the general public by the deterioration of our present farm communities and traditions by the flawed education in the inexperience of our young people and yet it alone can promise us the continuity of attention and devotion without which the human life of the earth is impossible it's such an honor for me to read that beautiful piece by wendell berry who is one of my personal heroes as well as one of my teachers  in the journey that i've been on and that produced this changes everything when i when i first embarked on that journey i felt kind of in secure you know as john said i i i cut my teeth writing about consumerism and marketing and and later economics and trade labor rights human rights but i was the city girl and i felt really secure writing about nature i understood that climate change was really important it being an existential threat and all i just wasn't sure that i was equipped to write about nature and so one of the first things i did i go on a kind of a pilgrimage to interview wendell berry one of the first things i did and that brought me to see a line a kansas of all places where wendell was giving a lecture at a place called the land institute some of you may know it it is it was founded by west jackson an incredible scientist farmer and the land institute which is also a place that that wendell has long ties to it's devoted to the project of transforming our entire approach to agriculture so that it does a much better job job of mimicking what actual living ecologies look like and function like so rather than mondo crops replanted year after year a tremendous cost to the soil what they try to do with the land institute is first of all develop systems of poly cropping but also they have this amazing groundbreaking program devoted to breeding perennial food grains sorghum barley that doesn't need to be replanted year after year and functions more like the native prairie so what happens with perennial with perennial grasses is that they have these incredibly long and deep roots and these roots are capable of storing water and therefore withstanding drought so it's very important not just in terms of caring for the soil but also in the context of climate change in the kinds of droughts that we're seeing these roots hold soil in place and that's important in the face of storms which is also relevant to climate change and they also do a much better job of sequestering carbon which is a climate actual climate solution and one of the things they do at the land institute is they dig up a few of these root systems of the perennial their perennial crop so that you can actually see them and this is kind of amazing because usually this is all happening you know under the earth so you can't see it and then these root systems some of them reach ten feet down and they are these intricate web strong branches like underground shreeves actually and you know when you compare them with these wimpy little wispy root systems that hold up so much of our agricultural plants it's really quite dramatic now some of you are probably wondering why i'm going on and on about roots so they had one of these amazing dug up perennial root systems hanging behind wendell berry while he was speaking in this barn in kansas and wendell delivered this lecture and much like the piece that i just read it was about the importance of settling down of putting down roots and then defending your home place against all those who would do it wrong wendell doesn't believe in nimbyism he says my job is to love and defend my home place and your job is to love and defend your home place and if we all did that we would just be fine and this is what wendell has done in his home place in kentucky practicing a kind of agriculture that is not based on the extractive logic of taking in taking and then replacing with chemical inputs but rather protecting those sacred cycles of fertility that are a part of the natural world and augmenting them and it's also what he does with literature in telling the story of his home plays and it's also what he does as an activist standing up and getting arrested taking on the coal barons who blast the tops off of mountains in his part of the world so i vividly remember watching wendell in that barn this incredibly rooted man who knew exactly where his home was with this backdrop of this intense root system and i have never felt like such a fraud and i just sat there going i cannot do this i am just so hopelessly urban and rootless this wandering jew  my ancestors have moved from place to place fleeing pogroms and conflicts and the vietnam war that's how i became canadian and then they started fleeing winter and just kind of you know just you wouldn't know anything about here right and then just out of habit you know i realized that i had come to think of home as a sort of a commodity and you know you think about those lists that rank seattle as the you know in the top five places to live in the world or in the united states as if where we live isn't you know nothing more than a hot new restaurant you know so at the same time i was having this feeling of intense fraudulen i also had this feeling that this was somehow relevant to the problem of climate change to our failure to rise to this challenge because though climate change is a global phenomenon though our earth as a whole is warming the way it plays out is intensely local it plays out in intensely local geographies an early blooming of a particular flower an unusually thin layer of ice on a lake the late arrival of a mi tory bird this is in the early stages and noticing these kinds of subtle changes requires an intimate connection to a specific ecosystem you have to know a place to know that it isn't actually normal to be able to wear t shirt in mid october it didn't used to be like that there used to be winter for instance and that kind of communion only happens when we know a place deeply not just as scenery but also as sustenance and when local knowledge is passed on with a sense of sacred trust from one generation to the next but that is increasingly rare now many of us abandon our homes lightly for a new job a new school a new love and that knowledge more knowledge is lost and then there is climate change which is busily adding to the ranks of the rootless every day as natural disasters and failed crops and starving livestock and wars displace more and more people from their ancestral homes and with every human migration more that site specific knowledge is lost so after the lecture i had my my my interview with wendell and and i very tentatively asked him whether he had any advice for rootless people like me and my friends who live in our computers and always seem to be shopping for home and what wendell said was this he said stop somewhere and begin the thousand year long process of knowing that place now i think that's really good advice and the good news i think is that a lot of more people are finding their home place and deciding to stop even if they're relatively new to that and i've been thinking about that returning to the pacific northwest it has been a year since i was in seattle and you know this is such a powerful phenomenon in this part of the world that some of you call cascadia and more and more of you are calling block you know this part of the world has clocked more victories against the fossil fuel giants than i think any other just just a few months ago we all saw the birth of a new word the chi activist taking on shelves rigs headed for the arctic right here in seattle as well as bellingham and courtland and that amazing unfair gettable image of your kayaks your beautiful colorful kayaks surrounding that monstrosity and i think it may have had a little something to do with shells decision to pull out of the arctic for the foreseeable future thank you for that year and this was not an isolated victory this region has successfully taken on tar sands pipelines cancelled multiple coal export terminal you're fighting coal trains and oil trains seattle was the first major city to join the fossil fuel divestment movement i went three fifty kicked off a few years ago and that idea has spread now paris has caught up to you so you're leaving you just have to get bill gates can you get bill gates we want your billions we are after them the next challenge is to make seattle what many are calling a faso free city and what that means is no new fossil fuel infrastructure no new fossil fuel infrastructure a s no new train line and no neutral pipelines no new storage facilities no new export terminals and this is critical because you know there's a massive push on now to lift lift the export ban on an oil we have to fight that but there is a bull's eye on this region they're going to want to be using it as yet another fossil fuel export terminal we are counting on you to stop it because it's we do have to build things we have to build all kinds of things but we need to build the infrastructure of the future and that's the other part of windows i say that so powerful i think is that it was a early call for climate justice right when he says it's not just about switching to wind and solar because if we don't change the logic we'll do that in an unjust way we'll do that in a way that is utterly unsustainable he saw that and he knew that and it was such an honor to be part of a genuine climate justice march here in seattle where all of those issues were integrated where people were fighting not just for renewable energy but for energy democracy to own and control that renewable energy and for frontline communities to be first in line to benefit from energy democracy as we transition office all fuels not just green jobs but green jobs that pay a living wage that are unionized climate justice means as we contract the extractive economy we need to expand the carrying economy you know climate workers are not just the people who are putting up solar panels and wind turbin low carbon workers are people who care for our kids and teach our kids and care for the sick the sectors that are under relentless attack which is why the logic of us therapy is utterly incompatible with life on earth we need to the caring profession and i need to say i know i'm running out of time that climate justice also means that yeah we need a price on carbon but it matters how we do it it has to be you know there's talk in this state right now about a revenue neutral carbon tax that's crazy that's crazy you need the revenue you need the revenue but you have to collect it in a just way which means low income people get back more in credits but they're but but the people who can afford it have to pay higher rates and most importantly the po uters need to pay for this transition you know my dear friend bill mckibben was arrested today at a gas station in berlin in burlington vermont because he was so beside himself with rage at the at the revelations that have come out over the past three weeks about the fact that exxon since the nine hundred seventy s has been conducting cutting edge research about climate change off of its tankers and suppressing that research and not just suppressing the research but funding the climate change and making absolute decades and we are paying that price in our acidified oceans people are paying that price in the loss of their island nations exxon needs to pay for this transition to make that happen sometimes when i say that climate change changes everything people say naomi it was already big enough did you have to make it about capitalism listen know when to has this wonderful quote that i use a lot about about this idea that you know it's too big are we are we really going to win can we when he says this he says we don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not the only question we have a right to ask is what's the right thing to do what does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live in it i think this is particularly true when it comes to climate work the decision of whether or not to maintain hope in the face of an existential crisis should not have anything to do with mathematical odds the stakes are so high that if there is any chance of avoiding catastrophe profound moral responsibility to do everything we can to increase those odds and that's what that's what being part of the nation family and the nation tradition means to me it's a family and a collective history that i deeply cherish it's as close to home as a wanderer like me is ever going to get we don't fight because we know we're going to win we fight because it's right and just and because we know that we cannot afford to lose thank you when you hear someone like now only speak or dave or richard or any of these other folks it is easy to focus on them and to recognize their genius it is harder sometimes to recognize how difficult it is to pull all of that together and to keep it together to do that in a magazine you need an editor who is willing to her own genius sometimes even her own passion to create a sense of community to create a sense of place where everyone else can shine it is a remarkable skill and it is a remarkable talent and i have seen it in play now for twenty years when i said i wanted to come to seattle in the spring of one nine hundred ninety nine to cover what we're going to be protests in the fall and no one else in national media was paying attention katrina vanden heuvel said go to seattle go do it cover the hell out of it and she sent a team of other people to come as well today president obama announced that what we feared would be endless war in afghanistan would indeed be endless war that the united states would stay in a war launched under george bush pursued under barack obama through the president the next presidency and i wrote about barbara lee and i wrote about barbara lee as the one person who said in two thousand and one that you can't vote for an authorization of use of force in afghanistan or any place else and endless war on terror because it will become a blank check for every president to remain at war for year after year after year after year lee cast that vote she was not a hero she was not treated well she had to have security in the days after that vote but one editor said we need to publish an interview with barbara lee and make sure that people know exactly what she's thinking and exactly why she is saying it the nation magazine published barbara lee in the first issue after nine eleven thank you john thank you seattle for opening your hearts your spirits your minds to the nation tonight you want to know why the nation has survived and thrived for one hundred fifty years you just met the reasons you listen to them tonight fearless writers thinkers doers naomi klein i can now just hang it up after those words from naomi klein thank  you but richard kim john nichols dave siren pre meal and schama nick honorary members of the nation family thank you thank you and i just want to say thank you again to naomi it is true i go on t v and tussle with assholes i but tomorrow night i am going to be on television maybe with a lone asshole but bernie sanders is leading the show and somewhere in there i take that we will have there we will hear from he's now my second favorite socialist we will hear from a socialist on corporate television and then i'll go tussle with more assholes but let me just be serious and let me be brief because you have given us your attention how could you not listening to some of these beautiful words but there is a reason the nation has survived i'd say one of the main reasons is a ferocious independence a refusal to live in a country of downsize politics with excluded alternatives to lift up voices like barbara lee's like those of the cities of the states who speak out against a wall  often a wall and we stay true to our first principles there is a history also that we bring to bear i think of that arc of history that becomes our compass you heard martin luther king jr was our civil rights correspondent from one thousand nine hundred sixty one in one thousand nine hundred sixty six he summoned the country to economic justice racial justice he first came out against the war in vietnam two months before his famous riverside church at a nation event in los angeles and event like this james baldwin wrote a piece in one thousand nine hundred sixty six report from occupied territory harlem we could publish it today change a few commas about policing abuses in cities in this country about the abuses of stop and frisk we've published hundred thompson under thompson wrote his first piece about what led to hell's angels we published e p thompson the great british historian howard zinn he wrote his first piece for the nation in one nine hundred fifty nine which become which became the unsafe car you can buy but launched the consumer rights movement and in that tradition you heard tonight naomi klein she's changed everything and someone who we nurtured jeremy scahill has an extraordinary report out today on the abuse of drones but someone like jeremy scahill is what the nation is about you never read stories about war in the same way and you know that when you hear this country is restrained and you have a president who has bombed or drone seven countries and we have one hundred thirty five special operations around this globe that is not restraint it is time to wage peace not war popular to go against government policy in times of war but by the way there should never have been a time of war we lifted up are barely we lifted up those who said it is not the time for vengeance it is time for a just response and as this country headed into the iraq opposed it understanding how destructive it would be noticed how many people now say oh yeah i was opposed to the iraq war they were out there and liberals just like this we understood because we had a d n a which understood that military action would lead to this region aflame more terrorism military intervention is not a response to barbarity injustice a broad i think the iran agreement is one we must fight for  and not to put a damper on this evening but we are probably as close to war as we have been since the cuban missile crisis right now and i think anyone who calls for a no fly zone in syria is calling for a proxy war we don't want we need diplomatic resolution of that but let me just let me close by saying one of what john said and thank you john i'm a steward of a great tradition as naomi spoke of a family a collective in so many ways i wake up every morning believing another world is possible i also wake up some mornings with despair but you can't despair you've got to keep moving and this is a remarkable moment it is a movement moment it is a movement moment which gives hope and it's a time when what seemed unthinkable is playing out in real time the rules are being rewritten around this country around the globe not always in pretty ways but they are being written we are in the fight of our lives thanks it's to have the people in the city you just heard from tonight on the front lines understanding that we are in the fight of our lives when it comes to climate when it comes to corporate power but we have organized people we have people at our back we have the wind and we will refuse to see the hijacking of our democracy by oligarchy money by the architects of reaction and bigotry and you can hear in this great space tonight the possibility of that  and it's going to be real but we at the nation have been in fights before we've been in good times in this country not so good times the height of mccarthyism our printer wouldn't publish us the nation was published in alabama by the publisher of southern farmer because he was a great friend of kerry mcwilliams then editor fear has stalked this land before as an eleanor roosevelt understood but we do not capitulate to fear because a great nation is not built on bigotry fear and hatred is that possible of fools which at best looks like the star wars scene at the bar travels this nation let me finish by saying we are cultivating a new generation of writers and thinkers we launched a new website on our actual birthday july six hundred sixty five because we want to bring our journalism to a new generation a million people read us every week on different platforms and that makes me proud even those john said it might have been one quarter when we made a profit so let me close the nation nations journalism has sustained oxygenated inspired movements and their allies inside and outside for one hundred fifty years we stand shoulder to shoulder with women with migrants with climate warriors fast food workers carwash errors with labor queue activists teachers nurses prisoners the poor we understand us elizabeth warren said in her recent remarkable talk about black lives matter channeling the civil rights hero john lewis sometimes is important because necessary trouble the nation was founded by those committed to causing some trouble necessary trouble to fulfilling a more perfect union to redeem in the promise of our democracy that is our fight and you are allies in that fight and the promise of this one hundred fiftieth tour is so realize tonight when we sit here with you we get away from our desks to the screens and we are actually hearing you in this hall and you are listening to us and to be in seattle is extraordinary so thank you i want to bring john nichols out to close it's a wonderful evening thank you thank you brothers and sisters you have given us more than we have given you after we marched in seattle in nineteen ninety nine and i  will thank you because the last time i was here it smelled more of tear gas but after we marched in seattle and nine hundred ninety nine we tried to figure out what to say what would our slogan be because we didn't read naomi well enough we wanted to have a logo we wanted to have a slogan and a lot of people struggled for it and came up with this phrase another world is possible when i walked the streets of seattle over the last couple days when i marched with the climate marchers when i saw l g b t q communities when i saw activists and i wore activists social justice activists when i saw schama and her campaigners out there i realized that it was exactly appropriate that that phrase another world is possible would come out of seattle because brothers and sisters you are showing us the next world that is possible you are doing it here and we have come to lift it up and take it to the rest of the nation and the rest of the world thank you so much