time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have back with us live in the studio this morning david neiwert there is a seattle based investigative journalist in the pacific northwest correspondent for the southern poverty l he is the author of numerous books including strawberry days how in term and destroyed a japanese american community and health followed with her crossing the dark side of the american border orca's in men what killer whales can teach us and he is here to talk about his just released book allt america the rise of the radical right in the age of trump david thank you very much for com and spending time with us again this morning always a pleasure mike so start out tell us what was your motivation in writing your new book alter right well actually i wanted to spend the last couple of years writing a book about  but then donald trump kamala it is actually like in january or february of two thousand and fifteen that i recognized that we had a real problem our hands that even if trump turned out to be a flash in the pan and he went away and this phenomenon that he was raising up in his wake was not going to go away and that was this amazing increase in the radical right and it activities and recruitment and so i began working on it really back then started selling it selling the book proposal to publishers you know in summer of twenty fifteen and and  story's going to be dead by next year and so i can finally be houses back it up fortunately vers so did pick it up because they have an interest in you know obviously following these trends with the radical right and so yeah after election days and we realized we were going to have a very major story on our hands and sort of proceeded to pace and you've been covering the far right for like three decades now yeah well even in some ways longer you know i was back when i was starting out my newspaper career in northern idaho back in the late seventies and it was a little town called  up there in the panhandle and it's all about twenty miles north of the area nations compound and when i was there just when those folks are moving and in yeah and we had quite a fair amount of activity dealing with them and it's kind of it's  story i like to tell because you know we decided at the time that we weren't going to cover and you know this is we thought well these guys just want publicity and and that's the only way they're going to get ahead is if they get a lot of publicity so let's not give it leader of the order i don't know if you remember the order the neo nazi crime gang that murdered alan berg yeah i used to get letters to the editor from robbie matthews but yeah we pretty studiously tried of a void doing any coverage of them and within two years you know i think they realized that was pretty much a mistake i was gone from the paper by then had moved on to other papers but certainly i figured it out that you know because we're awash in all these hate crimes in the region all of a sudden and yanick culminated in eighty four with the orders rampage by which time it was very clear that you know you  can't ignore these people if you ignore them they fester in darkness and you're just days interpret this silence as tacit approval as a green light in so it's really really important to shine a light on him directly in you know so i heard news reporter pretty much took that approach and then in the ninety's i started writing about the militia movement here in the northwest as really i was an environmental reporter at the time and was writing about it as kind of an entire environmental backlash story because that's what they were doing here in the northwest was organizing these  militias as a way of countering mentalists and land use decisions it was all around the land use acts they were here in washington state in oregon and yeah they were claiming that  the land use acts were actually cover for a plot to round people up and put them in concentration camps in the cascades and and that's when i started writing about the militias and then after oklahoma city i was was dubbed a militia expert because i was one of the only people who actually got out of these guys and i wound up having a lot of that work over the years a lot more of that work than i you know i do my civic duty it's working this beat is very similar to being in the sewer maintenance guy you know you have to call through the sewers a lot but somebody's gotta do it so defined what all to write is well the all right is really a pretty new phenomenon it's only came up really started in about two thousand and twelve and and really started gaining traction in about two thousand and fourteen it's essentially a white nationalist movement but you know white male nationalist it has  it anti feminist element that was kind of part of its point of origin it's primarily began life as primarily you know almost one hundred percent an online phenomen n people were meeting in chat rooms like four chan and on reddit and in these gaming forums and things like that and it started out yeah in the whole gate controversy that that came up in about two thousand and fourteen with as primarily an anti feminist thing where these gamers and  the males the massaging as males in sort of the gaming world all organized to combat the the evil feminists who are ruining their fun and  but it became really this huge conduit for opportunity for white nationalist to move in because when nationalism is fundamentally massada mistake and very male oriented so yeah they became very much an opportunity for some of these white nationalist move in and start recruiting people out of that gaming world because they all had very much a very similar worldview and it's very easy to turn someone from anti feminism into white nationalism as well so recruiting them for preexisting groups new green yeah there are so  the new white nationalism really grew out of the white nationalism that popped up in the ninety's jared taylor and his american renaissance vdare that peter brimelow operation that's online  purely white nationalist and these outfits are all designated hate groups by the s p l see but they've been promoting this idiology for quite a few years and you know they finally they didn't have a whole lot of traction though what happened in about two thousand and eight two thousand and nine is that this sort of a younger generation of white nationalist came along and they're online and they're very unlike previous generations of white nationalists and it's premises these guys are really culturally savvy they're mostly young i mean i got to tell you one of the things about covering write me of history mr a long time is that you know a lot of our hope was most of the people we were covering for these crotchety old haters from the ku klux klan and whatever the urges kind of waiting for him to die off and maybe this world view had slowly fade away  and they have been dying off but unfortunately they now opened up this whole new whole venue a new generation by recruiting young people in and they do it because they i mean they they create means online and all these other very you know social media activity like i say they're very savvy and so they have all the they use a lot of humor i mean is really ugly humor and it's usually vicious  mean that they use it's it's all a lot of irony and a lot of sarcasm and humor but you know these guys like to claim i'm just being ironic when they see these horrible racist things but honestly there isn't a dime's or the difference between somebody who says something racist ironically and someone who says it seriously it still has the same effect on its audience so anyway yeah so that's how they work they in there are very concerning because like i say it's opened up whole new vistas for voids premises did not exist before and do these young people are they do they  have solid economic means good education things like that yeah yeah most of the time they're actually most of the time they're from the suburbs these are not lower education low education low income people these are kids who have rich parents at home in the suburbs in fact it's typically a very suburban sort of following for them to receive right wing extremism taking place and taking root in rural areas is always very is a different segment and that's the patriot militia movement which has also been surging for the last eight nine years very distinct and different movement they're both part of the radical right they're both part of this larger tide but they don't see eye to eye that they all right and the patriot right they they have very kind of the different world views they just realize they're they're all trumped supporters and they all they certainly all believe in the same conspiracy theories that alex jones infowars nonsense that is very much part of their world  they share that they just have the patriots aren't as nakedly racist and don't enjoy the transcripts of behavior as much as the writers do and the term all right wasn't that their own labeling yeah it was it is the it's the is short for alternative right which was richard spencer the white nationalist organizer and one of the gurus a real gurus of the all right  came up with the name and you know he called his magazine alternative right and they shortened it to all right and yeah it is it is they're all labeling we kind of is so is a patriot movement for that matter  just kind of have think eventually concede their names for themselves recognize that it is yeah this is a of marketing their ideas but it's also if you turn that name toxic enough it doesn't matter you know if people start to see the right as equal to nazi then i don't think it's a problem that we call them all right you know and frankly it is equal to nazi but they are different and that's a that's my problem with  i mean a lot of people say well why don't we just call them nazis and the reason is that while nazis are actually distinctively different than these guys they have a different set of traits they they believe they believe different things and they advocate different things and a lot of people say well we shouldn't call them we shouldn't we should just call them nazis and i'm like well yeah that that's got an emotional makes an emotional sense but in terms of actually dealing with this we need to understand them we need to understand how they work and why they were and how they're different in order to be able to properly deal with them because they're very agile they're very smart and they're not your grandpa's father's clan let's put it that way all right and then why not just call him just white supremacists and not all right well we could you could call that i mean i try to do that whenever i can but again what's a promise it actually doesn't capture everything the all right is all about including massage any and the nativism so in the vivi islamophobia those are these are all really key components of what's the all right so just calling them or it's a promise is doesn't it encapsulate everything that they're about and so i have no problem with calling them the all right and i have and i did coined this term all to and the klan and all these folks who are still around because they're all part of this very much larger phenomenon that includes the all right but is bigger than the all right so you have a sense of numbers for who's in the all right and or the injury of a yeah i guess i mean it's just this i mean this is just my saying get sense that i've tried to use since i've been covering this i mean in the ninety's i would have said maybe eight percent of the population had succumbed was succumb to this world view the voting population this patriot slash militia alex jones conspiracist worldview in the ninety's as it is had was about eight percent and really it stayed like that through most of the first decade of the two thousands but it kept growing and growing through the whole nine eleven truth movement and then when the tea party came along it just became this huge conduit for all these all these conspiracy as a mali's bizarre right wing  belief systems to mainstream themselves and so i would have said you know midway through obama's tenure that we were up to about twenty percent of the population had absorbed these beliefs and was was believing these things and nowadays under trump thanks to trump and it's it's well above thirty percent you know it's right around the low thirty's i would guess i mean i look at his poll numbers and i see those people who will not give up support for a further any reason whatsoever and there are it's about thirty percent of the population so if i had to guess yeah about thirty percent of the population believes this stuff so i ask that because you recently just a few days ago had an article related to your book in crosscut and multiple which you always have to give out which use a large amount of salt with carmen right right never read the comment we're talking basically saying no this is it we're talking about such a miniscule number of people and it's the media that's feeding this  and if the media wasn't covering this with glee we wouldn't have to worry about it well actually the media tries not to cover this stuff i've had it terrible time getting any kind of this information getting it published getting editors interested in it it's only been after charlottesville that the media has actually shown any serious interest in this stuff i mean a major piece for mother jones magazine last october really detailing all of trump's multifarious connections to the far right and describing how it was a symbiotic relationship he fed them and they fed him and he was totally ignored pretty much we actually created this huge database that demonstrated you know just the extent of the connections and him part of the the story is kind of about and so the story got completely ignored in just shoved under the carpet more or less so yeah the idea that that the media is pretty pushing this is nonsense furthermore i can guarantee it that if you're well the all right is actually a pretty significant phenomenon i wouldn't have thought so prior to attending a lot of these rallies that they've gone to but i was there january twentieth a significant number of them and i go you know i'm going to portland of going to berkeley and covered all these events down there and yeah anybody who thinks that it's a minor movement with piddling numbers doesn't know what they're talking about simply and that's just the all right now if you had to rural america the patriot militia movement is the where every where it's pervasive in rural america today these belief systems this so called constitutionalism this idea that america's not a demagogue democracy it's a republic all the stuff it's commonplace i mean extremely commonplace in rural america and people have really bought into these patriot militia belief systems so anyone who thinks it is is a minor phenomenon is wrong and they should also remember that the least when it comes the militiaman very well armed these people have large numbers of guns in their in their dens so then what do you see as the proper response to this movement well it's fundamentally anti democratic it's a fundamentally anti democratic move this is kind of the one of the things that i mean if i have one message that i hope people come away from the book with it's that  know we've lived in a stable democracy now for about one hundred years since f d r and as they realized the economic system helped create the the modern mass consumer society in the early thirty's ended the civil and labor strife of the of the preceding four decades and and since santa really created this we've had this really long  democracy they do not believe in the right to vote they don't want rights for minorities they don't want equal equality of opportunity or civil rights for any kind of minority and including women and we were so i think we were so sort of content we're certainly happy to believe in we want to believe that all this that our system that our liberal democracy that we've had for  hundred years is this going to keep going and it's not if we don't defend it i mean these people are out to attack it they're out to destroy it and americans need to wake up and recognize that democracy is genuinely under to do whatever they can to destroy and damage our economic democratic institutions and especially the right to vote the value of the vote so yeah we need to wake up and we need to recognize and i think because these are fundamentally anti democratic movements that the only if they way we can defeat them is with the tools of democracy you know they they like to a lot of these demonstrations that i've covered have all been around suppose that the free right or is free speech rights of the right wing extremists and how they're being trod upon by evil left evil violent leftists who want to take away their free speech rights but it's incredibly cynical these people really don't believe in free speech rights they don't believe in free speech for you or me it's only for them that's all they care about is that they're able to say whatever they want and their idea of free speech is speech without consequence that is that they don't have to put up with other people's using their free speech rights to say no you don't which is what's been going on at these protests you know most of these people are other exercises in their free speech rights to say no to their to the right wingers free speech and nobody really seems to want to acknowledge that that you know it's competing speech folks this is how democracy works right and you know i understand people talking about no platform and that sort of thing you know that's a subtle subject that we can get into another day but the the larger issue is that these guys i mean i can show you the the strategic documents and stuff where they sit around and talk amongst each other about how they attack democracy and one of the ways they want to attack democracy is using its own assets using its own institutions to turn it against itself so these is the issue of free speech obviously one of the main institutions of had america credit society to just as a means to destroy that democracy is very very cynical and for in way too many people who are falling for it we need to you know understand that  that's what they do they use democracies institutions to try to destroy it my belief is yeah you counter you defeat it with more democracy you get as many people out there to vote because honestly i go to these things and we outnumber them heavily we have a lot more people on our side a lot more people but there's just too many people out there who are complacent who are who don't feel that politics affects or personal lives so they don't get involved in politics they don't think voting makes any difference and we need to change that we need to get people out of their homes on election day and help their voting as many as we possibly can and use democracy to push these guys back into the corner where they belong so just a couple minutes left do you think it's fair to categorize this current all right movement as kind of a tip of the  the republican party that the newer republican party not the one that is really my parents were part of which was by today's standards would you know be in the probably the middle of the democratic party  yeah yeah well i it's been eminently clarine and the republican party is all too happy to write this tide you know they they don't have any co about having well they obviously are having second thoughts now about having trump as their president some of them are but really all they care about is getting their big tax cut so if trump delivers on that hey they're good so yeah yeah they are the tip of the spear and honestly i think it's i think it's going to destroy the republican party eventually let's be clear this is you know trump isn't himself a fascist but he has raised a movement that is fundamentally pro fascist and that's what we need to confront all right with that we're pretty much out of time talking with with videos and all kinds of things so that people can actually go and see this stuff that i write about in the book because a lot of it is available on video i mean if you don't believe that people said and did these things you just go look at the video yeah and we have  it tuesday night go ahead or it's a town hall or it's actually not a town hall town halls being remodeled so we're holding it at about the town hall hall folks are sponsoring it it's going to be at university lutheran on fiftieth northwest there in the district and then it will be at seven thirty pm tuesday night we're also going to have a signing at my favorite local bookstore any books on wednesday night at seven w hi everyone my name's ari thank you heather for that amazing introduction you hued me up perfectly and i just want to add i'm so thankful to be here tonight i did this really amazing and terrible thing this week where i just sort of panic watched all the past sleek you know and so i what i what i know to be true is that there have been a lot of really amazing and sort of legendary people that have greased the stage so i just feel really humbled and honored to be here myself and it feels so special to me because i been walking around the room and i'm surrounded by so many of my love were here to where you are so many of my c s a members and fellow farmers in my community and it just feels like an honor to be able to be here and share this space with you all so heather did this already but i  always start any sort of day or meeting just by offering thanks to the indigenous people of this land and so for this players to do amish people and also for me and to the kwame people whose land i snow call me valley and as heather said earlier because of the rains the valley is about to flood so i think more of my farmers from that area would have been here tonight but everyone sort of racing to get stuff out of the ground  so i spend a lot of my time focusing on how food community land and culture can be more deeply intertwined and that's what i'm going to talk about tonight so from a very young age i was always called to the land i grew up in the land of douglas firs mountains and giant peoples as a young person my walk home from school was dotted with blueberries a small farm stand and yes thank you small farms and damp bonds that always felt like a trampoline in the fall when it was rainy and i was chronically ill as a child and would oftentimes retreat into the teacher when the rest of the world felt like too much i would walk through the forest surrounding my house and i would run into deer and squirrels and in the spring time i was remembering that some thinking how adorable and nerdy this was i would take a notebook down to one of the ponds near my house and i would do this daily tally of all the new doc wings that emerged and then i also remembered that i watched a lot of cinderella when i was younger and i just had this fantasy about my going back one night yeah so i'm mixed white and filipino woman and i grew up mostly with my big amazing loud crass white family and my mix sisters who are feature here my father who's filipino left the house when i was pretty young and was pretty culturally disconnected from his family because of cycles of violence and trauma so for me culturally i just always felt like some pieces were missing and desperately clung to the few things i knew about my culture and the filipino culture that was food and so that has that's always been my point of connection but i really had a longing to know more about who i was and then when i was seventeen i moved to los angeles for school and if the description of my childhood is any indication i was just really shocked by the change in scenery  i missed my big family and trees and water and i was incredibly homesick my first year of college i went to school to study urban environment planning and in the first months of school one of my professors thankfully took us on an environmental justice tour of l a and the final stop on the tour was the south central farm so raise your hand if you know of the south central fountain awesome so for those that don't know the south central farm was a beautiful fourteen acre farm in the middle of south central l a this is a picture of it so the property had previously b concrete lot filled with garbage and tires and after the protests in l a in one thousand nine hundred two the city gave this piece of property it to the local community food bank and the community quickly turned it into this amazing dynamic lush farm and community space when we arrived at the farm it was just completely awestruck so here i was this homesick seventeen year old and all this and i was in the middle of basically a jungle  but when you walk into the farm suddenly you're surrounded by fourteen acres of food and as we toured the farm i remembered one of the farmers specifically was talking about the gift of this land  and he was talking about how he had brought seeds with him from mexico and that his greatest joy in life was coming to the south central farm with his grandson and farming that you see them growing plants to feed his family but what he loved most of all was being able to pass more seats down his grandson so it occurred to me in that moment and over many years that seeds and food have this amazing  stories about family and lineage culture and place and the people who keep these seeds and who tend these plants feed their families and communities from them are keepers of their culture so i was incredibly moved by this idea that seeds and land and gardens could be used as pillars and sort of stands for culture and as someone who felt relatively disconnected from my own it it sort of started me on this path so i began working more and more with immigrant communities and l a who are working to grow their own cultural foods and in turn feed their communities and i watched as they carved out space for themselves and made themselves visible through this act of growing food and sort of loudly proclaiming their presence in a city where they're basically otherwise denied existence so i talk here is that about the same time that i started firming i also started doing trauma healing work through an organization called generative semantics and in the early days of doing this work something that one of my teachers said really struck me they said that in order to ensure that systems like capitalism and white supremacy continue to exist people must numb themselves from the pain that their privilege causes because that would otherwise be intolerable meaning that there are actual physical ways that those of us who carry privilege have learned over many generations to shield ourselves from the pain of others it's actually encoded in our d n a so when i heard this from a teacher i very quickly thought about the history of colonialism and white supremacy in our country i thought about how the united states were founded upon the genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement of africans and the colonization generally of people of colors homes cultures bodies and land  we're a country built on the commodification of land and people a country where land and people can be by and treated like goods still to this day and it's deeply embedded in everything that we do and most especially our food system and if you saw that last imagination to understand why we're still in this place but what happens when we commodify land is that we inherently have to push it beyond its natural capacity we traumatize it and this is we also traumatize the people who tend it and who rely on it we literally strip these places and these people of their  lightness so it's no wonder that we feel disconnected from ourselves and from the impact that we have it's become acutely visible probably to all of us this year if it wasn't already that we haven't even come close to reconciling the deep interim out of history  of our country so we can't possibly move our collective likelihoods forward and a healthy and sustainable way especially for those of us who hold privilege and in particular for those of us who benefit from whiteness part of deconstructing these systems is beginning the process of learning how to feel again and in my work i truly believe that developing a relationship with land is part of the key to that so this leads me to a few questions what in this specific moment in time is our obligation to reconnect to the way and so that we can not only be fierce defenders of it but also of its workers and also so that we can begin to feel ourselves and each other in ways that transform us towards economies of care rather than economies of exploitation so i don't have any answers to these questions but what i thought i would bring tonight are five wishes so number one i wish for us to get rooted and complex narratives around land and place so in  in the years that i have done food and land where they came to learn that one hundred years before i was born on the very same land that i grew up on european settlers had ransacked the forests fell all the trees for te and basically left out land behind right behind them however came this new group of japanese immigrants and their families and indigenous people and filipino immigrants  that were ready to make a life for themselves here and they saw not barren land but an opportunity they used dynamite to blast stumps apart and judge them out of the way and so if you think about this it's not like they're using tractors they're using dynamite and their hands they planted strawberries and corn alongside see that they brought from their home countries they raised their families there they developed a booming and evade of farm business an economy that spanned across the entire region and they jump started an economy in an area that had previously just been discarded as unusable timber wasteland they made a home and a livelihood out of growing food on land that had just been considered irreparable so no spoiler it's because a lot of people in this room know where i'm from but can anybody gas where i grew up that's not what i learned about you but what i learned in doing this research is that i'm part of a story that i never even knew existed i never knew it existed because by the time i was born it had already been replaced by a narrative of a city that wasn't built by people of color but rather white settlers and there's a very specific reason for this right like the japanese immigrants and by this term by this time just want to point that out but the more important piece of that is that when i when i learn these stories and this is the picture of a family in an area very very close to where i grew up so seeing this picture is a picture in of the past for me but when i learned these stories i felt really powerful and i felt like all of those years i had sort of spent tending to the woods and talking to animals and speaking to the ducklings was a was someone of my birthright and that i had unknowingly been fulfilling the wishes of my ancestors and i felt probably for the first time like i belonged there which is not something i felt  so the point here is that we need to rewrite the stories about who gets to exist on land and told the complex truths about their contributions because what we know about the past deeply informs what we believe is possible in the future and in the future we need a complex first multilayered stories just like we need our ecology so my second wish is i wish for us to build deeper relationship with the land around us this is one thing that feels incredibly important in my work and i try as much as possible to create space and opportunities for people to build a relationship with land and i consider it an obligation so one of the ways that i've done this throughout the years and one of my one of my favorite ways that this happens is by doing plant walks or out the city because when i talk about land i'm not just talking about rural land i am also talking about the land in this city and the communities that we create on it so some of the people on the stream have been on this box which is amazing but on these walks we usually just pick a neighborhood and kind of wander and we look for any plants that could be either edible medicinal or significant and any other way so it can be kind of a romantic notion should just go for a walk and look at all the beautiful flowers and i think even just doing that can be healing in itself but beyond the romanticism of it being able to notice these plants in your community and notice that they're part of your community is a way to build resilience so like when i have a cold i know that my neighbors down the street are growing rosemary and sage and i know that i can take that as a teacher help you know myself or if i know that a friend is grieving i know that two blocks away there's a ha for entries to help me make some heart medicine so these plans if we know where they are in our communities can become sites of healing resource and resilience and another point that i feel like is really important to make here is that gentrification is deeply tied to these issues of land and trauma part of what happened in bellevue is that these japanese families would basically create these thriving farms on land that had been considered and usable and then once they were thriving the white landowners would come back and say ok thank you and they would take it and the families of have to move on which is another form of gentrification  and so i just want people to be thinking about what happens when people get priced out of their communities and what stories and narratives leave with so number three i wish for way and workers yeah these are pictures from the walk so we need to be centering the people who are most intimately linked with the land and this starts with indigenous people but it extends out to farmers fisher folks migrant farm workers people who transferred food from the land to our tables and the people who cook our food if ever there were and they go phone for the land it's the people that work it day in and day out because we know what's happening most intimately so this summer i think if you go to the next slide it's kind of her to see but a lot of you probably experience this the summer but the summer i spent three weeks outside with ash raining down on me and smoke or air that smell like i can't fire and i did my daily tasks like that every single day so what's happening now is that farmers and land workers they have always been but we're becoming more and more climate warriors we're on the front lines every day and some of us like myself have the privilege to protect ourselves from those from those disasters as much as possible i own my own business so i can choose to take breaks when i want to to get water when i want to but unfortunately a lot of people in our food system don't have those privileges  say his passing was entirely heat related and preventable so we can't afford to lose those people or ignore those voices because they're actually experts a lot of times people talk about farm work and say oh we need unskilled labor and i have to tell you farm work is incredibly skilled and very technical  they are also innovators and experimenters and i tell you i the farming community on insert them is amazing but part of that is because you see the innovations that farmers are coming up with on a daily basis to help cope with these new arrests that we're facing and it's incredible the pace of innovation but we can't innovate and last we are given the money and the resources and the space to do  so but we desperately need will need that kind of scale and resources to face some of the climate problems that we're about to face and another point i want to make here to is that young people are incredibly important  equation we have an aging farmer population in this country and if we don't support a diverse group of young people in our place in them we're going to shift much more rapidly toward a consolidated industrialized agricultural system that is completely devoid of the magic and creativity of young people number four my wish is for us to practice  ritual so every single culture has rituals based around food or seasons or land and sometimes you have to go back several generations to find that and sometimes it's harder to find those because of colonization but the there and when i started come on farm i wanted to create rituals that would honor the land as a living thing and not just a commodity or a source of income so now each year this picture is from missed each year begins and ends with an offering so people in my community bring things of significance or maybe a ritual that is from their lineage  and just something to symbolize appreciation and abundance because we often take from the land but we rarely practice offering and ritual is important and might sound like a womb thing but ritual important because it is practice and our bodies learn what we practice consistently so if we practice the land as a commodity and our job as humans is to pull every single ounce of productivity from it as possible we're going to forget that both the way and our bodies are precious ecosystems worthy of  care and my friend felicia who's here tonight has been building upon these rituals by bringing a lot of magic and beauty to the farm this year which i'm really excited about and i want to say particularly for people of color being able to choose how we want to connect to when and when we do it is powerful many of us have antigun this sick and violent associations with land encoded into our genetics so we have to practice the ability to choose connection and shape how it is how we do that so bringing rituals like the ones that felicia have been offering to the farm to me really feels like shaping a new i guess the in real time plans and everything around them that goes into the soil and the air and the water those are the few things that actually become our physical body use during our life time they actually become us so if we practice giving why if listening to them offering them care i believe that those practices and term become in body heat and us so rather than practicing exploitation colonization numbness disconnection we can actually begin to build entire communities and economies around wellbeing care and accountability that is a wonderful picture from a fire breathing fair money that felicia  and finally wish number five i wish for us to put resilience into action i was listening to this woman who really inspires me her name a seat about mike and she is an artist and chef who's part of the people's kitchen collective in the bay area and she was saying that there are two ways that we can preserve a culture and the first one is that we can take it and put it behind glass and pay to see it and go look at it maybe once a year but the second is that we can actually put culture into practice by making rituals of them and recreating them this means cooking them planting  singing them dancing we've seen a lot of that tonight which has been really beautiful and creating a culture that we can touch and see and smile and share as an act of love and resistance so with th waiting for our dinner my my last words for you is that i just wish that you all are doing such amazing work and i hope that as you go out into the world and continue to do it that you find daily ways to connect to the land around you and allow that to fill you up in a way that makes you feel feel more alive so thank you so much for having me i hope that you join me