served as the middle east bureau chief and the balkan bureau chief he also is author of many bestsellers including his new book america the farewell tour which is just being released and worth your read a very good read so chris thank you once again for coming on thank you and we'll continue our conversation in the book i'm going to read a quote from the book which i think chris just held up you write that america is convulsed binary of pathologies that have arisen out of profound hopelessness a bit of despair and a civil society expense of the citizenry and that includes academia i mean we've got this university across the street it's pretty much all and subsidiary of a corporate state  that includes the press that includes institutions within government that were created as karl popper points out to make incremental or piecemeal reform possible it's all been obliterated you can in this system vote against the interests of goldman sachs which i consider a criminal organization ok that's fair also we also talk about voters and third party i know that you were ralph nader i don't blame of voters i'm saying a lot of times people will be concerned that two choices whether they be democrat or republican they feel they can vote for either one of them i can the recent election between trump and clinton they don't like either one the lot said that parties are controlled by corporate power and you have the democratic party is kind of the left racist xenophobic homophobic islama phobic wing of the ruling elite and the republican party are a bunch of racists nativist assad genus and those are the two choices and these are cultural issues that's the form of anti politics the system itself the corporate system itself does quite well i mean i just mentioned goldman sachs trump as five officials from goldman sachs obama had his administration filled with ghost goldman sachs as did bush  so the corporate system is can live with either one in fact of course the tax cuts which the republicans have been trying to push through for a long time is this giant  almost tax boycott handed to corporations which is going to swell the deficit which will then be used to further carry out programs of austerity so i think the frustration that many voters feel and  that both parties neither party addresses their concerns or their rights is correct and i've long worked with ralph who i admire very much and ralph feeling was that the only way to put pressure on the democratic party was the way the democratic party had pressure in the past including under roosevelt through the regressive party and even more radical groups like the communist party and others if we could see if we could poll five ten fifteen million voters behind a third party movement the democratic party would be forced to respond and  and i think ralph was right unfortunately they put up so many barriers and now both parties so you know they take away the debates from the league of women voters form of for profit corporation that they control and this  after ross perot was able to pull in one thousand percent and they just are never going to believe me you would not want to have to debate ralph nader having spent a lot of time with ralph they just want those voices out it's why  g the the previous presidential election dennis kucinich who was advocating for universal health care was locked out of the debates because the for profit health care industry did not want that argument for universal single payer health care to be presented to the american public and they blocked it and then you have all sorts of arcane rules which make it very hard to register as a third party and we know from the polling that huge numbers of americans i don't remember the exact percentage would like to see a third party but again this is the kind of political paralysis that so dangerous the longer these two corporate parties impose this paralysis the more the public will react and and and support demagogues like trump who at least however awful and however inept at least express their anger i have trouble understanding that connection as to why the public would feel that way and let me ask it this you spend you certainly have taught in lecture to younger people so i'm curious as to how you find them who are more of a clean slate two for whom they have not lived through the directly implications of corporate power they may not have as much of a religious connection is they might have had in past many are not part of a controlling academe after after high school even then so do you see hope that they those kids in their twenty's they are they are very open to socialism and i am a socialist and i think that i was spent a lot of time at the park during occupy wall street which was largely a white middle class college educated movement and what broke my heart about those kids is they've done everything right they've gone to good schools they've studied hard they worked hard graduated with crippling forms of debt tens of thousands of dollars of debt and they walked out into the economy and found there was no place for them and that actually  e and building alliances with a dispossessed working class so yeah i mean when i princeton is about and you know i speak as somebody went to harvard these institutions like harvard and princeton are about perpetuating the plutocracy that's why they were created that's why they are founded that's what they do you come to princeton you get branded you go to ivy and then hopefully you get an interview with goldman sachs though biggest major princeton is computer science the biggest major harvard is computer science in a sense these are vocational schools now the humanities which i studied are withering away and it's about serving in the systems their systems managers so that when you have the financial breakdown of two thousand and eight the these figures will come out of these elite institutions larry summers the former president harvard they only know how to serve the system and which meant loo approach what would you say if if your viewership for this show and your readership for your new book were all eighteen to twenty on you're in the book i spy go to standing rock and standing rock is a model for me of how to resist so there you have the water protectors are there for seven months under horrific to so you would put their bodies in in the way i think as sas as a mass civil disobedience sustained civil disobedience is imperative if we're going to begin to roll back  public opinion polls right now reveal that a progressive agenda and we touched upon this a little bit you know that have west this was once before right now and by progressive agenda couple things i'm referring to is you know varies in the minimum crush competitors or cheap customers and even crashed you can't be without consequences so i guess my question is and coming up from a person that you studied under maybe with james in the atoms he talked a lot about moral courage and so how does moral courage fit into what we're talking about right now well if you get up and lift up the voices of the oppressed and challenge both or corporate capital system and our imperialism there is no place for you in the mainstream you are pushed to the margins of the internet and we are seeing now through google algorithms which are imposed on left wing sites including  the sites that i write for in the sites that reprint my work they are the traffic is being shunted aside so for instance i have a column in truthdig run by robert scheer former editor ramparts one of the great journalists united states and and what they have done over the last year is build algorithms so that employ they call them impressions so that if you went to google and typed in you know imperialism and i had written a recent article on imperialism before the algorithms it would have come up along with other articles now you won't see it so we've drawn it we've seen the graph in the last year on truthdig the referrals from impressions have dropped from over seven hundred thousand to below two hundred thousand traffic on alter net has fallen by sixty three percent world socialist website counterpunch black agenda report and i think the reason is because the ruling idiology neo liberalism which was that's another story was always utopian and ridiculous to begin with the idea that there's nothing in economic history that said that you should build your society around the dictates of the marketplace david harvey wrote a very fine book on the liberalism but the  ruling idiology no longer has credibility whether on the left or the right and so critics become much the critics who are already marginalized i mean our greatest intellectual noam chomsky is blacklisted and has been blacklisted for a long time for decades and the the the the critics because they don't have a counterargument are are now viewed with more hostility and that is part of net neutrality so if you tear on their own they're wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state that's what citizens united is it is about overturning constitutional rights by judicial fia so the whole idea that unlimited corporate and dark money into campaigns is quote unquote i'm quoting citizens united the of a free speech or the right to petition the government is to invert the constitution we've lost privacy every where you meet everyone watching all of us are the most photographed monitored surveilled and and and eavesdropped population in human history not covered the stars who stayed in east germany and have the courts protected our right to privacy you know even with the snowden revelations we have seen and we are about to see under trouble and acceleration of this so we've kind of been left defenseless and i just in terms of courts ninety four percent of our prison population never had a jury trial as michelle alexander points out if everybody actually got a trial which they should get the system would crash and you go to marginal communities not far from here trenton camden the people poor people of color lives in what can only be described as reigns of terror where their lives can be taken from them by rogue militarized police three point three people are murdered a day by police forces most all of them are on armed i mean this is utter insanity nowhere in the world because you have spent twenty years outside of the eradicated poverty when i was when i studied french in switzerland you had a system it was actually a private health care but it was a system but heavily regulated so we all paid three hundred fifty francs a month into the system if you were poor you didn't have didn't have homeless now us in switzerland switzerland as was true in this going to you the mentally ill were not thrown out on heating grates or locked twenty five percent of our prison populations mentally it was a humane society and and that corporate assault that privatization of everything and look you want to talk about princeton we've got this charter school it is a charter school this charter school is a way to essentially  e poor people people of color people with learning disabilities within the public school system it is it is a paula look at the statistically i mean yes there is an asian population but what they're doing even within our community is destroy the crown jewel of american democracy which was our public school system they're destroying it even here in princeton everywhere but there are still more humane look at the french health care system is good i lived in france the british health care system is good the canadian i mean those are examples of societies that have not embraced the level of cruelty that our society has embrace as a journalist well i should question why what is the state of journalism today as president and his administration about think news is there is such hostility because it's personal it's you know it's kind of fascinating as a former reporter for the new york times to watch the language the establishment press uses about trump we were never at the new york times allowed to use that language about anyone and it's become this kind of personal battle between the press which represents the more less racist less center phobic honest wing of the ruling elite but they're still not reporting on the lives of the normal american which is why the press has an approval rating that's lower than congress so they can engage in this kind of reality show war with the trump white house which is very entertaining which is why they do it you know and c n n made more money than they've ever made before last year made a billion dollars but it's not journalism has nothing to do with journalism it's gossip it's trivia it's invective it's it's entertainment it's all all those things but it's not journalism so what happened to the real journalists what happened to them got corrupted by money i mean so in the old journalistic system like let's say  general electric are these huge corporations owning media outlets and they're just one of many dozens if not hundreds of revenue streams and they compete against other revenue streams and if they don't produce the requisite  e ask every once awhile of our guest is that growing up did you have any role models my father you know why he was presbyterian minister world war two vet very involved in the ne war movement very unrolled in the civil rights movement and i was a kid in the sixty's but took me to all these events i remember when i was a kid he told me that viet nam war was still being fought when i was eighteen he go to prison with me and he has an ordained presbyterian minister very very nationally vocal for the gay rights movement because his youngest brother was gay and he had a particular sensitivity of the for the pain of being a gay man in america in the one nine hundred fifty s and sixty's so he i mean the church kind of got rid of him because of that in the end so he he stood up for what was right he paid a price for it i watched we grew up in a small white farm town in upstate new york where martin luther king was one of the most hated men in america i watched people get up and watch walk out of his sermons and that taught me a lot which saved me because i understood that no institution including the one you work for is going to defend you for doing what's right in fact they may probably persecute you and that when you stand when you really stand with the oppressed in the end you get treated like the oppressed and that was a really important lesson to learn as a kid and he you know i muzzle me which i wasn't going to accept and i remember walking i was given a formal written reprimand to stop speaking out about the war which i wasn't going to accept but i remember walking out the paper out the door of the paper and and you know i because of my father i didn't need the imprint tour of the new york times to tell me who i was i knew who i was i was my father son and that and what my father gave me in the end was freedom i didn't need these institutions for my identity and i didn't expect these institutions to reward me for doing what to i didn't expect to be rewarded for doing what i thought was right and boy that that saved me a lot of what was intriguing to me about some of the work that i saw you do during speeches and whatever you talk about magical thinking and that as someone who was trained as a scientist in science  i've been very puzzled and disappointed at how few have taken on the notion of how magical thinking has really gotten in the field of science from people who are not trained in science you mention creationism you mentioned in one of your speeches the notion of mistakingly associating vaccine so for the benefit of what with with autism for example in other ills because of the connection but tell us what what you mean when you write about it talk about magical world magical thinking is when societies are pushed or people are pushed to such a level of despair i mean this i found the christian right is about magical thinking and i found that those people just couldn't cope with the real world the real world almost destroyed them and so they retreated into a magical world with magic jesus who if they were right with jesus jesus was going to intervene to make them wealthy and protect them in advance that this is just a matter and i have actually had a kind of empathy for them part of the apocalyptic vision of the christian right and i went with tim way who wrote the end time series books in detroit was kind of an appropriate setting for this big conference and again that's why you want to go as a reporter and i watched how excited these people were about speaking about the destruction of the world around them and i think it's because that world almost crushed them and that's and that that a much of it is about expressing a hatred for a real world that they could not cope in that was unforgiving towards them and at the end of the book on the christian right argue they were never going to argue these people out of the idea that adam and they swallow it but i think that you know i argued we we have to really integrate these people into the economy we have to give them stable jobs we have to give them stop security we have to  make and give them an income by which they can live with dignity that's the only solution and of course as you see in this book it's only gotten worse so that when you talk about the assault on science i think it's a natural reaction by people who have fallen into deep despair and of course the danger of it and and this has been fueled by corporations like exxon mobil who have funded whole you know the that again it's the inability on the part of you know we're talking about huge percentages of the american public to cope with the real world well that but that we enjoyed our conversation  conversation with chris hedges remember to get his book america the farewell tour which is now out and a very very great book if you really want to learn about what's going on in america please go out and get it right now so chris thank you very much and coming o thank you for watching i will see you next week on another edition of open source until then stay active stay healthy and stay focused have