 co-founder of Code Pink. Medea Benjamin is in Europe traveling following the International Summit for Peace in Vienna. And we are thrilled to have with us tonight as guests for our program, Making War Invisible. We have Norman Solomon, author of this book, War Made Invisible. And we have Matthew Ho, former military, well-disabled veteran and associate director of the Eisenhower Media Network, and we'll learn more about that later on. But first, some news updates, and Cole may be with us, Cole Harris may be joining us at some point. But for right now, let's go to you, Jodi, for a news update on China. Sure, hi everybody, great to be with you on this last Code Pink Congress before we move into the summer, but it doesn't mean we don't want you to be engaged and we'll have lots of plans for engagement. And also it's just awesome today already that we've had like 150 calls into Congress on our call in day. So China is not our enemy. Blinken's visit to China, which by the way was pushed by global leaders and those in the US that were concerned with the push to war and the hate on China that was hurting so many people, including I want you to know that there was back channels from Taiwan saying, stop, this is hurting us, the people in Taiwan that don't want to be Ukraine and the people in Taiwan that already, the big companies were canceling their contracts and moving out of Taiwan because the US was saying that China was gonna attack Taiwan. I am just back from China and I wanna say that everyone in China would say, people are crazy in the United States. China's not gonna attack itself. Why would people in the United States believe that? We would raise up as a country if China were to attack itself. So the things that we are sold by the Pentagon and the State Department that gets swallowed whole by people in the media and the mainstream is fascinating to the people in China. I think it's important for us to look at what has just happened with this meeting first of all, Blinken didn't go to China to meet with Chi but the fact that that did happen is huge. And it's huge because it means that Blinken agreed to things that he listened and that therefore Chi and China wanted to make sure the world heard that the US is not gonna support Taiwan independence even though they're sending weapons even though we've got 300 bases surrounding China that Blinken was forced to say that as activists we always need to take the victories and we can get them even if we know we can't trust the Pentagon and we can't trust the State Department, we can't trust the White House, please let this nourish you because it is huge. In the scheme of things, it's huge. It's like people forced this to happen because communications between two major powers have to happen and you can't be children calling balloons by balloons and acting out and I mean really internationally behaving like children and some of the adults of the world said you have to go this channel has to be happening, we are talking about the brink of nuclear war so that it happened and that we have like a new kind of stone to stand on that there's some agreement that Taiwan independence isn't in the news, it can't be in the news, it's been quieted down. That does not mean that the Pentagon and the White House and the State Department will not continue in their nefarious horrible ways but let's take this victory please. It's important for our hearts and our souls in there is a victory. Absolutely and when I saw that headline that Blinken says he will not, the United States will not support Taiwan independence I almost fell out of my chair because we've heard Biden say four, I think on four separate occasions, the United States will militarily intervene if China tries to invade Taiwan, whatever. I mean, and we're saying we folded $8 billion of weapons for Taiwan into the last NDAA. So to read that I thought, oh, whoa, this is such a shift and I just wish I had been a fly on the wall for those meetings. I'm sure that Blinken got some scolding because they really are behaving badly and the White House and Blinken got scolding from Taiwan even. So they're being pulled back in this creating China as an enemy and we know the cost to people, planet and the taxpayers of the United States when the US makes others the enemy. So please nourish yourself. I've also just returned from China and I'll post later my report back if you wanna see more, but the major takeaway is that the people of China are thriving. They are committed in their continued development and they know war will interrupt it for them and they also know that it will be disastrous to the rest of the world. My last day I went around and I asked everybody I could, what do you think about the US trying to go on war in China? And my favorite answer was from a Frenchman who's lived there for the last 12 years and he said, I know you're from the United States and I hate to say this, but I'm more worried about it for you than for China. So that's how it feels. There's a confidence inside of China. You have to understand what it is to be in a country where you have grown so rapidly and so like everyone has benefited and the people in China feel that they trust their government. It has done what they needed. Every time they push back on something, they get what they need. And so there's a trust there that we don't have for our own government. And also I just wanna say, you can't have an authoritarian government with a billion and a half people, just to note that. Also Janet Yellen a couple of weeks ago warned about the economics of the US going to war on China. And I think that was also a big part. We have Carrie and Janet Yellen, Carrie for the planet, Janet Yellen for economics, trying to pull the White House and the State Department back because the war would more disasterously affect the economics of the US than it would for China. China has really been pulling in what it needs to create sustainability. It's like what we call a local peace economy. It's like, how do you create the economics locally to support yourself? China's been doing much better job in the United States. What we make are weapons, but when it comes to nourishment and care for ourselves, we haven't been so good. Also, we have the effects of the Ukraine war on the EU that are happening, but the EU was silent about it. And I wanna say we had a member of the German parliament come to visit last week and something she said that was interesting. I wanna pass on so we can think about this, but I said, does German elite care? Don't they care about their country? They're just letting it go to disintegrate because she had said to me that people in Germany feel that it's as bad as it was right before World War II. And she responded with something like the top 30 countries in Germany are owned by BlackRock and there's Americans on the board. There's 30 bases in Germany. So the military of Germany is the US and the current leadership of Germany is all trained, allied and connected with the United States government. She goes, Germany, I think we're just a facile state of the US. So some way to look at like NATO and who those countries are and how that has been integrated into the US, how do we look at this global South coming together and this alignment in contradiction to the aligned military, economic and political block that we call the global Norths. So something to look at. I also- Thank you. Wait, one sec. I just also asked we can just see delivering petitions to the members of Congress who are on the hate China committee, 30 of them and in my meetings, it was depressing at best. There is a member of the military in all the members of Congress offices called military fellows. They came to all the meetings. So war is embedded in Congress. I hope later after we do our summer of peace that we call for embedding peace in Congress. And I was talking about what I saw in China and one of the staff members responded. She goes, well, we know better than you because we get briefed by the State Department. And I said, you mean the same State Department that lies us into wars and has this as a breach of nuclear Armageddon? So, and then I disrupted a general from the Marines who's destroying the pristine ecosystem of Guam and the history and homes of the Chimorran people in Guam and met with some of the squad staff. So they're now working to create something in the NDAA that elevates what we're doing in Guam as one of the violations of human rights already in our war on China. So I'll post a bunch of these things in how you can be engaged in the chat. Thank you. Well, thank you, Jodi, for that report, comprehensive report. Yeah, good news. We have to celebrate this good news. It seems like there's a shift and I'm not sure if it's because of the election, the 2024 election and what's going on with that or if it's Ukraine, if it's waking up to the BRICS countries that 30 countries want to be part of BRICS and develop an alternative currency or maybe it's all of these factors that are shifting the White House and hopefully Congress won't be too far behind on the lunacy of preparing for war with China and perhaps this will also signal that, I can be hopeful, I can be optimistic that this war in Russia and Ukraine, war between Russia and Ukraine, U.S., NATO, Russia and that one will come to a close sooner rather than later. And on that note, I just wanna say, headlines from antiwar.com this morning were included that NATO's chief, Stoltenberg says there'll be no formal invitation for Ukraine to join NATO when NATO meets again in Lithuania. There was also a report that troops are being trained in Poland to stage a coup in Belarus so we gotta watch that one. And the New York Times was out with a report that a lot of the weapons that we are sending to Ukraine are arriving broken or can only be used for spare parts. So that's that. I did want to share a little bit about the International Summit for Vienna, in Vienna rather, for Ukraine in Vienna. And as I said, Mzia Benjamin is traveling around Europe after having introduced speakers at the summit. Anne Wright is with her, Colonel Anne Wright, she spoke at the summit. And we're just gonna take a moment. I know we're gonna get to our guests, we will. I just wanted to show you where you can find some of the documents pertaining to the summit. So Maha, if you can bring up the peace in Ukraine website, thank you so much. There we go. And here is this page that we have under news and press. And if we click on, if we click on declaration, I think you're already there. Yeah, just click on that declaration. This is the declaration that emerged from the International Summit. I'm not gonna read the whole thing. I'll just read the beginning. We, the organizers of the International Summit for Peace in Ukraine call on leaders in all countries to act in support of an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. We are a broad and politically diverse coalition that represents peace movements and so forth. And later on it goes on. It does condemn Russia's illegal invasion. It says diplomacy is urgently needed. This war reflects a failure of diplomacy. A lot of back and forth on this declaration, please understand there were representatives of over 32 countries at this coalition. Many people from Europe who do feel under threat. And so the word NATO is not in this document, but there were a lot of people who supported the insertion of that word. We got failure of diplomacy. So the bottom line is it calls for a ceasefire and negotiations and that's the most important thing because we haven't seen that. Also on this page, you'll see some articles, one written by, if we can go back to the beginning of the page, you'll see speeches. Okay, let's look at the speech by Yuri. Many of you know him. He's the secretary of the organization for pacifists in Ukraine. And he spoke there as well. And we're constantly hearing. I know you must be hearing this. I'm hearing this. We need to listen to the Ukrainians. And my response is, which ones? There's martial law. There's no opposition press right now. Opposition political parties have been outlawed. People are being dragged from their cars, men being dragged from their cars to report to the front line. So we have to listen to all voices, right? Plus we know that there's a lot more at stake than just the future of Ukraine. Yes, we wish the best, but we know the whole world is watching this because this is the proxy war between the two most nuclear armed nations. The United States and Russia. All right, also, lastly, on this page, you'll see some articles that you may wanna read to follow up on your links podcast. Whoops, let's see. Yeah, there we are. And we had a Code Pink radio, where I interviewed, excuse me, Medea and Ann about their experience. And we also included some of the presentation that Dan Kovalik gave to the Peace and Ukraine Coalition. If you're not a member, consider joining peaceandukraine.org. Okay, with that, let's go to our guests. I'm going to introduce our first guest, who's a longtime friend who I admire so greatly. I'm talking about Norman Solomon, prolific author. Norman Solomon is the National Director of Ruth's Action. You've seen those petitions, right? I've filled out a few myself. And the Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books, including his latest indictment of the military industrial media complex, War Made Invisible. How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. For 17 years, Norman wrote the syndicated weekly newspaper column, Media Beat, assessing the quality of mainstream journalism in the United States. And today, he will give us an update on that as he talks about his book and reads excerpts from this terrific book. I read it, I reviewed it on Goodreads and Amazon, read it, review it. Okay, Norman, you're on. Hey, thanks a lot, Marcy. And many thanks to Code Pink Congress, a real step forward for peace organizing in the United States and getting out of sometimes what is a bit of a bubble onto Capitol Hill and reaching out. After all, the war makers in Congress are elected from somewhere and they need to hear from people in what is supposed to be a democracy. I was thinking as you talked, Marcy, about media criticism that a standard for journalists should be very similar to a standard for activists and hopefully for pretty much everybody. And that is that we're looking for truth, we're willing to be independent. The great journalist, I.F. Stone, said that all governments lie and nothing they say should be believed. That doesn't mean that governments lie all the time or that any government lies about everything, but it does mean that we should be independent and be skeptical and really look for facts, not just swallow the official story. I've written a book called, as Marcy mentioned, War Made Invisible, my first book in 15 years. I've been doing a couple of things in the meantime and mostly focused on activism and organizing. And Marcy, I appreciate your suggestion, which I hadn't really thought of, that I read a couple of brief passages, but I do wanna say that we really are in a situation where war has become hidden from the people who are paying for it. In our names with our tax dollars, we in the United States are subjecting so much of the world to ongoing war. It's become so normalized, so much a matter of, you might say, white noise that we don't give it a second thought. But the people at the other end of US weaponry, they have to give it more than a second thought. Sometimes they give their lives. Patterns of convenient silence and deceptive messaging are as necessary for perpetual war as the Pentagon's bombs and missiles. Patterns so familiar that their app to seem normal, even natural. But the uninformed consent of the governed is a perverse and hollow kind of consent. While short on genuine democracy, the process is long on fueling a constant state of war. To activate a more democratic process will require lifting the fog that obscures the actual dynamics of militarism far away and close to home. To lift that fog, we need to recognize evasions and decode messages that are routine every day in the United States. The nation's far away warfare draws strength from a diffuse siege on the home front via media, politics, culture, and social institutions. More like water on a stone or fumes in the air than any sudden assault. Living with adherence to don't go their zones, we become accustomed to not hearing or seeing what scarcely said or shown in public. We've grown acclimated to the implicit assumptions wrapped in daily news, punditry, and pronouncements from government officials. What happens at the other end of American weaponry has remained almost entirely a mystery with only occasional brief glimpses before the curtain falls back into its usual place. Meanwhile, the results at home fester in shadows. Overall, America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they're doing to people we'll never see. When, and we've all heard this, when US officials say that civilian deaths are merely accidental outcomes of the war effort, they don't mention that such deaths are not only predictable, they're also virtually inevitable as a result of policy priorities. Presumptions of accountability are hot wired, presumptions of acceptability are hot wired into the war machine. The lives taken, injuries inflicted, traumas caused, environmental devastation wrought, social decimation imposed, all scarcely rank as even secondary importance to the power centers in Washington. In your local community, imagine how you'd feel if police made a practice of spraying gunfire through the front windows of stores and other public locations while chasing criminals. Such efforts would surely take the lives of innocent bystanders, yet none of them would be quote, targeted unquote. And so their wounds and deaths could always be called unfortunate accidents and mistakes. The implausible deniability is routine. Deniability is routine for the president, the Pentagon brass, State Department officials, congressional leaders, as they refuse to acknowledge that ongoing civilian deaths are an integral part of the so-called war on terror. While American forces are supposed to distinguish between terrorists and the terrorized, such distinctions easily get lost in countries where people of all ages experienced the US military itself as terrifying. The Americans can make and break their own rules, operating as intruders who are unaccountable for the results of their violence, no matter how indiscriminately lethal. Yet the Pentagon can always say that maimed and killed civilians were not targeted. In each instance, the shattering of their lives was just a tragic error. Well, you can imagine with a book along this line, it is as anti-war activism is in general, an uphill climb. And so I really do appreciate whatever you can do to spread the word about this book were made invisible. There are libraries around the country that should put it on their shelves. Unfortunately, all four of the major book review outlets in the industry gave it very positive reviews. As a matter of fact, Kirkus, which is known to be the toughest, gave it what's called a starred review, book list, library journal, publishers weekly. There's no excuse for a library not to put it on the shelves, for bookstores, not to stock it. And I hope that you'll get hold of a copy and reach me if I can do any sort of webinar because ultimately this book should be about organizing. Describing the problem is part of the process. Making a difference is, of course, what's essential. Thank you so much, Norman Solomon. And we will have questions for you, both about the content and the process and what the catalyst for this book. Great to hear from you tonight. And Jody is going to introduce our next guest. Oh. Okay, our next guest, who I'm a super fan of, Matthew Ho is just a devoted peace activist. And I've been in the streets with him so often and he's an amazing leader. He's also the associate director of the Eisenhower Media Network, an organization of expert former military intelligence and civilian national security officials who seek to reach broad cross-partisan audiences and diverse media outlets. And among the American people who increasingly sense that U.S. foreign policy today is not making them or the world safer. Matthew is a former Afghanistan State Department officer, 100% disabled Iraq war veteran and the senior fellow emeritus with the Center for International Policy. Welcome, Matthew. Hi, Jody, it's so good to see you. Marcy, it's a pleasure being here in Norman. It's really great to be here as you talk about your book. And of course everyone for joining us tonight. If people hadn't seen the news in a case of like you can't make this stuff up just a couple hours ago, the Pentagon said that they're accounting for the weapons they supplied over the last year to Ukraine have been off by $6 billion. So that's an additional $6 billion that they can now spend, which if you're paying attention like we all are and you read in the Times or the Post how they're a Republican saying there won't be a blank check for Ukraine spending as well as a debt ceiling negotiation just occurred. Although if you've been following that as well, you see that one of the first things that both parties said even before the ink was dry and the debt ceiling a deal was that they had a loophole to be able to make sure the Pentagon got the money it needed, it wanted, which is very similar if everyone remembers to what the Pentagon did with the 2012 Budget Control Act sequestration where they used a slush fund. So while everything else in the federal government got cut by what, 15 or 20% the Pentagon ostensibly was cut by that much except there was what was called the Overseas Continuity Operations Fund which is a slush fund that the Pentagon was able to put or Congress was able to put hundreds of billions of dollars in for the Pentagon. And so not joking, the debt ceiling act or the debt ceiling deal is announced and within two days you have senators from both parties saying, don't worry about it for the Pentagon because we have loopholes that we can exploit. And so of course today though with just a couple hours ago noticed by the Pentagon that, oops, our accounting was off we have $6 billion extra that we couldn't account for didn't realize or we made a mistake or our Excel spreadsheet we skipped a row or whatever they're trying to say. But that's the reality of what we're up against here. We're not just up against something that is massive in terms of the money and I'll get that to a minute and get to it all in a minute just to kind of conceptualize what we're talking about when we talk about the military industrial complex what it means for us here, locally but also to just the willingness the hoodspot of this Leviathan to say, oh, we've never passed an audit up until five years ago we were never audited unlike every other part of the federal government and the five audits we've had we've failed all those famously, fantastically but now we're gonna tell you that we've got another $6 billion for Ukraine because we couldn't do our math right over the last year. And this is about 10% of the weapons that were sent about $60 billion in weaponry or so, so far and they got 10% of it wrong in their accounting and they're able to get away with this they're able to move along with this and part of it I think and Norman gets to this and Norman also has done so much and I'm so indebted to him over these last years what I owe to him and the Roots action as well as the groups like Code Pink veterans for peace but this idea of going along to get along and so there's a website out there it's called a government contracts one and it's WON not one but not one but WON governmentcontractsone.com and if you know Brad Wolf from Pennsylvania peace action Brad Wolf informed me about this and you can go on there and you can see over a 20 year period from 2000 to 2020 how much defense spending went into your local communities and just to give you an idea of the scale of this so I live in North Carolina got about 10 million people here in North Carolina over the 20 year period 2000 to 2020 we have $40 billion in defense contracts in North Carolina in 2020 which was the last data available on this website almost $3 billion in defense spending on contracts in North Carolina you go to my county Wake County we're the biggest county in North Carolina about a million people but over that 20 year period $5 billion and in 2020 it was $476 million on defense contracts in our county of one million people my town Wake Forest which we have 55,000 people and so three years ago we had about 49,000, 48,000 people we had $6.5 million in defense contracts in our town of 50,000 people and so you can even see it you go to the small I mean, because you can look up your state your county, your city so the smallest county in North Carolina which is 600 square miles and about 3000 people to Tyrell County out east they had $120,000 worth of defense contracts in just among a county of 3000 people right? So I mean, this idea of how prevalent it is and the idea of the going on the get along and how everyone benefit, everyone makes out you know, that really gets to the foundation of all this what Norman is talking about and the willingness of people to turn a blind eye the willingness of people to deliberately lie the willingness to go, people go along with the lives and I just want to end by, if I could read a passage the final passage from Norman's book because I think his last paragraph is so appropriate for what you all with code pink do what the piecing Ukraine coalition is doing with so many y'all whose names I can see in the chat and the participants like Laura Gibney who's here in North Carolina with me who is all the time everywhere doing what she can to educate people I think this last paragraph from Norman's book really applies to what you all are doing. It is of course in the very nature of a myth that those who are its victims and at the same time its perpetrators should by virtue of these two facts be rendered unable to examine the myth or even to suspect much less recognize that it is a myth which controls and blasts their lives. James Baldwin wrote, in its third decade of continuous war in the name of fighting terror propelled by military might and mythology about extraordinary virtues the United States has become its own enemy. Meanwhile, the US's relentless global search for enemies has made them more numerous and intractable. Now as an imperative is to insist now an imperative is to insist on telling vital truths and acting on them. As Baldwin said, not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it's faced. And I know so many of you who are here tonight that's an ethos, that's a motto that's something that you live and inspire others by and so I just wanna thank you all for everything you're doing and Marcy, Jody, Norman it's so good to be here with you all. Great to be with you, Matthew. Thank you so much, Matthew Ho with the Eisenhower Media Network and we'll learn more about what they're up to during our Q&A. I also wanna encourage you to stay with us throughout the program because we are going to post in the chat a one click to Congress and Ma, when you're ready if you can post that that'd be fantastic. And this is to your representatives to say do not take any money from the major the top, the biggest military contractors we're talking about companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing I think those are the top five and take that to your community, right? Send it to your Congressperson but also you can get people to sign in your community and take it to their office. And while you're at it, let's ask Jodi, when you mentioned that as you were on Capitol Hill talking to people about Ukraine you confronted the fact that some of these offices have people from the State Department and the Department of Defense embedded in the Congressional office. I think all of us should ask our Congresspeople that we do not wanna see anyone from the State Department or the Department of Defense staffing their office. That's a simple ask, right? Kind of simple. Anyway, we're gonna get to our Q&A now and Maha will be posting that link in the chat and then we'll have our Capitol Calling Party on Ukraine toward the end. So Jodi, why don't you lead off with the first question? So sure, Matthew, I've been in the streets with you for a very long time and as we look out right now and this unimaginable happening where when you raise your hand about peace to kind of get buzz-sod, what do you see that we can do as, here you have the intrepid peacemakers here with you today. What is it that we can be doing this summer and this break time? You talked about teaching and that that's what we do. Where do you feel the teaching is right now because over our time we've watched people's minds really get embedded themselves with the lies of war and also we've watched the lies push people away because we've had successes that then turn into just members of Congress voting for more war the bigger budget. Where's your engagement and hope? Well, I'll say my, the hope is in this, is in platforms like this. Five years ago, would this have been possible to do a Zoom webinar like this without us nervously crossing our fingers and waiting for it to crash, right? You know, I mean, this ability to communicate and I think this is something that really makes the powers that we certainly seen with establishment media, right? With the major mainstream media, corporate media. This type of technology allows us to inform, to educate, to communicate, to integrate, to create networks, to mobilize, to organize. And so this is what gives me hope is this type of technology with younger generations that were not raised on getting their views and their news solely from one newspaper or from one half hour network news broadcast at 7 p.m., right? So I think we have a whole, we have generations that are behind us who didn't marvel at CNN with the first Gulf War, right? With the first Iraq War, right? Those of us who remember that, how different that was and everything that came before and what that has then become what's opened up from that and Billy to get your news and your information. And so in different method and different platforms and from different sources. So I think this is what gives me real hope. In terms of the engagement, I would say, have patience. The public is always with us. The public is always with us in public opinion. It's just a matter of time. If you go back and look at public opinion polls for the Korean War, for the Vietnam War, for the Iraq War, the Afghan War, the public is initially, this is a lot of what Norman talks about, not just in this book, but in War Made Easy, which both the book and the documentary, I encourage people to watch and share that. But the notion that people are sold and then one, the lie is ultimately exposed because you can only lie for so long and now with media like this, it's easier to crack the lie, but also two, the moral rot, the organic corruption of the war always comes through. And so I say to people, the patience, the patience to be there, to patience to meet people where they're at and to normalize peace. A lot of us, we're very inspired this past weekend, or I'm sorry, two weekends ago, because it was the 60th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's June 10th, 1963 peace speech at American University, where he speaks to peace being the rational ends of rational people and to normalize that because people understand that, people get that, people look back and they say, oh, maybe we had a good war back when my grandparents or great-grandparents were alive, but there's nothing in decades. And so they understand the moral rot, the moral corruption, the intellectual dishonesty of war. And so we have to on our level organize and be willing and able to accept people where they're at and to incorporate them. And one thing I just wanna bring up about what you talked about with the military fellows, Jodi, which is really something that was the brainchild of Bob Gates, no fingerprints Bob as he was known when he was secretary of defense. This idea of having his people in every congressional office. And I don't know if it's every congressional office now, but it's pretty close. What's even worse than that, and you can go and look at what Ben Freeman at the Quincy Institute just did to couple with this where he found that 85% of talking heads, pundits, those going on to the television to speak about the war on Ukraine were funded by the defense industry. Well, about 10 years ago, I was talked with a member of Bob Casey staff and he actually was a military fellow. He's a major in the army and Senator Casey from Pennsylvania Formulations Committee. And this major was very upset because what he was telling me was that of every 10 briefings, the state, the Formulations Committee of the Senate received, seven of them came from defense contracting funded think tanks. So they weren't getting their information from the State Department of the CIA or the Department of Defense, which, you know, bad enough that would be, but it was coming from the think tanks funded by the defense industry. You know, Institute for Study of War, Senate for New American Security, Brookings Institution, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, this idea of how nefarious and how troubled we should be about how information is presented to those who we elect to represent us is something I think that should be brought up to them. So when you go to town halls, when you go on office visits, ask them where are they getting their information from? And I think that would be a good way to engage with them. Thank you, Matthew, a lot of wisdom there. I know we recently asked, I was in a meeting with a staffer for, well, a Congressperson with a high profile, and I said, where are you getting your news? And the first words out of her mouth were Timothy Snyder, who's been on a tirade against Trump, but he's also a huge backer and has been for a long time of a confrontation with Russia. So this is the scary thing, right? People are believing and listening to people who are really state propagandists when you get down to it. So Norman, same question to you that Jody asked, where's the hope? What strategies do you recommend to tackle war making it visible rather than invisible? Somebody I work with said at a meeting that the hope is in the struggle. And I think that's true. Mass media and politicians in office, they encourage passivity. We're not supposed to in response to media really, intended to do much anything, but go out and buy things and watch a horse race and probably vote once in a while. But the passivity is acceptance. The silence as AIDS activists were saying decades ago, silence equals death. And in the war machine environment that we live in, which is unfortunately the proverbial water around the fish, it's hard sometimes to even notice it because it's all around us. That requires that we not only challenge the overt war makers, but yes, speak to the choir. A reality is that whatever choir there is, could sing better, could sing louder and expand. And we've experienced in the last year and a half or so, the erosion of some of the peace choir because of the reflexive belief that a Democrat in the White House or democratic so-called leadership on Capitol Hill can guide us. And so a lot of people for a variety of reasons, including the desire to blame Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016 on Russia instead of her closeness to Wall Street and so forth, a lot of the impulse that has been cultivated by outlets like MSNBC is to rather than apply the same standard that we applied to say George W. Bush, we have given a pass, so many give a pass to Obama and now giving a pass to Biden, even though the military budget is through the roof and we have a country which not only has a record of killing vastly more civilians on the planet in this century than any other nation, talking about the USA, but continues to assert the prerogative to invade any country and wage war as it is in many countries now through special operations and drone strikes and so forth. I think that it's going to be a challenge to combine collective action with addressing people about their individual power that is usually surrendered right out of the gate. In 2009, I was looking at the news and I discovered that somebody who had been pretty high-ranking official in the State Department and involved with the war in Afghanistan that he had resigned in protest and I read his protest letter and that was Matt Ho. I didn't know about Matt Ho, but I learned about him and then I got to work with Matt like so many other people have. That's inspiring because it's about people saying I can, as an individual, make a difference. I don't need to, as Matt just referred to, go along to get along and that combination of the individual action, if you will, and the collective action. Right now, Daniel Ellsberg present day. We know Dan Spirit is with us as with millions of other people and it was never only in the last 52 years for Dan about him inspiring people. He also implicitly and sometimes explicitly asked, what am I inspiring you to do? And that's always the question for us. Yes, it is. So thank you for sharing those words from Daniel Ellsberg. A real hero. We will miss him. We do miss him. Thank you, Norman. I have a couple of other questions and then back to you, Jody, but this one's from Matthew and actually it's a two questions. One, you alluded to it, but maybe you could tell us a little bit more about your own journey from militarism to anti-militarism as well as a little bit about the Eisenhower media network. What's it all about? What are you doing? So forth. So first, your personal journey. You know, I lied to myself for a long time. I find Dan, I was very lucky to become a friend of Dan Ellsberg and to find him as a mentor. And I always remember the first time I ever spoke with him. I was, after my resignation, I became a bit of a media darling and I had to travel from Washington, D.C. to New York a lot to be on television. And I was at Union Station, a train station in Washington, D.C. and received a phone call while standing in the ob-on pond there buying a cup of coffee and something neat or whatever. And it was Dan Ellsberg. And his willingness to share his generosity, his graciousness, I think that's what was so amazing. Dan is, I think a lot of people would say he's the most intelligent person they've ever met. Maybe he's the most courageous. He's also one of the most generous and gracious people you would ever be lucky enough to know. And Dan said things to me over the years when we would discuss our journeys. We were both Marines. We'd both been Marine officers. We were both born the same day or but we share the birthday of April 7th. Our journey was similar in many ways. But what he said over and over again, he said this up until his last days was don't do what I did. Don't do, don't wait. And I did the same. Dan will say I should have done what I did in 64. I should have done what I did in 65. I should have done what I did in 2003. I should have done what I did in 2004, 2005. But I had a weakness inside me. There is a willingness to lie to myself, a willingness to rationalize things, willingness to make excuses. So you go to war, you see it's all for naught. You see it's all one big lie and you lie to yourself. You tell yourself that, well, you know what? That might be wrong, but I can be a moral actor in my own spear, which is great folly because war is a uncontrollable force of nature and much greater than humankind. And it will make you, it's immoral agent much more than you will ever be your own moral actor. You just keep telling yourself these things. Oh, when I'm a junior guy or I'm a mid-level guy, when I'm a senior guy, I'm not gonna do this. And you're coming out of the realization that when out in the Marine Corps in the late 90s, you had plenty of sergeants major, colonels, generals who have been in Vietnam and they all stood in front of us as young officers and all said, that war was a tragedy, that war was a crime, that war was a mistake. We'll never do that again. And within a few years, we were in two Vietnam's. So, my journey was one of having to get to a point where I was morally and intellectually broken, suicidal to have the courage to, if I could call it that, to step out and speak out. And I had no intention of stepping out and speaking out. It was people I've shared this with will know. It was a forest-gump-like experience why I ended up on the Washington Post. But then what I found when I did was a community, was this community. And Dan Ellsberg, maybe the most prominent, called me when I'm in the train station, oh my God, the Pentagon Papers guy. But this community and the willingness to accept and bring in someone like me, who had been an officer of the empire, who had his ambitions, who saw himself doing it, who was willing to lie, willing to put other people aside and continue with the wars for his own benefit, willing to take me in and to teach me and to educate me because I didn't know a lot of this stuff. I still would have been like, oh, Iraq and Afghanistan are two, you know, I mean, it's Vietnam, yeah, loosely connected. The continuous line of history that this nation rests upon or empire rests upon, that was something I hadn't had the courage to accept until I got to know you all. So that was, that's my journey is really with you all and what you've done for me and allowed me to be a person who is in touch with who he needs to be. So I thank you for that. And the Eisenhower Media Network, as we said, we're a collection of former military, former national security officials, former law enforcement, Colleen Raleigh is with us, so FBI. And what we're urging is restraint of U.S. war-making and we're urging for a reduction in military spending. And I think primarily the way we phrase it and try to advocate for is ending a militarized foreign policy and introducing a diplomatic foreign policy. And so, you know, our goals are to reach people who are not hearing us who are, the idea being is to get out of our bubble and into other people's bubble and just as, you know, Code Pink and Mass Peace Action and Veterans for Peace, you know, last month you had that terrific advertisement and a hail urging for negotiations. We did the same thing within the New York Times and the idea of, again, of being like, let's get, how can we get this in front of people who aren't familiar with our argument? Normalize it, right? Get people to understand where we're coming from that we're on the same side. We're not agents of Russia or China or whatever they're gonna throw at you. What we want is peace because we understand that no matter how big we think our white hat is that we're wearing, no matter what side of this mannequin argument of these wars we believe we are on, war is only gonna lead to disaster. It's only gonna lead to catastrophe. And of course the consequences are unknowable, they're unpredictable. And in this case, potentially a nuclear third world war which is something that we've all been living underneath the shadow of for, you know, nearly 80 years now. Thank you, Matthew. I mean, I just wanna say community. I think that is so important. And the rules we pay in the community that we don't always understand. And Norman, you build a community, you're, you know, with Roots Action you're nourishing community all the time. And there was something in the chat, patience is so hard. Patience we find when we are with our community that we're together in joy and engagement. So Norman, like as we close maybe some wisdom that you've gleaned over all these years of nourishing and building the community that is the peace community and understanding how we need to come together. And also this is a beautiful community, this Code Pink Congress community. How can we make this the summer of love and take this all that we've nourished ourselves with together and take it and be that nourishment locally? Yeah, a summer of love and peace and hopefully decade and on from there. The pseudo, the ersatz, the phony sense of connectedness that advertisements and commercialism and cheering for the political party or team. I think that sooner or later rings hollow for most people. And as you're referring to Jodi there's a deep reservoir of possibilities to really connect. Not only and not particularly or mainly in isolation or one-on-one relationships but most importantly that we're building an ecology. It's not that, some have asked what's the one thing we should all be doing? And my answer is there isn't one any more than having one forest or one garden that should only have soil or only have a bush or whatever. So it is a sense of ecology that creates an overall vibrant, deep and long-lasting solidarity and community and so forth. I do wanna add that we're in especially adverse circumstances now. In memory it's hard to think of another perhaps right after 9-11. Imagine, because we don't have to imagine it's here living in a country and a political environment, a mass media environment where diplomacy is a dirty word. That's the huge hole that we have to dig out of right now. And a sad truth is that it's a dirty word on Capitol Hill and maybe not in private but widely in public vis-a-vis Ukraine and so forth. And it's sort of hard to say this with the right nuance but I think a shortcoming in the current environment for a lot of activism in relation to members of the House and Senate is that we're, for lack of a better term, too nice. We give a benefit of a doubt to members of Congress. Maybe we have a good history with them. They've done some really good things. They're not doing us a favor when they've done some good things. They're supposed to represent our interests. And so often, and Martin Luther King talked about this, he said too often the establishment leadership of the civil rights movement. They're supposed to represent the movement to the power structure but they usually end up representing the power structure to the movement. And that's true of people in the Progressive Caucus with very rare exceptions. And they don't get a pass just because they have a D after their name or their leadership of the Progressive Caucus. They're unfortunately, when it comes to their refusal to really fight for diplomacy, they're part of the war machinery and they need to be challenged as such. Well, as somebody who challenged somebody from the war machinery, I'm with you 100% Norman Solomon. Thank you so much, and Matthew. Let's unmute, thank our guests and stick around for our capital calling party. Okay, so. Thank you so much. Thank you, yes. Thanks everybody. We are. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Norman. Thank you, Matthew. Thank you so much. Fighting the good fight. That's right. Matthew, I love that poster behind you. Thank you, people, new humans. Check out Norman's book. We're made invisible. Thank you so much. Really, five stars. And check out the Eisenhower Media Network, all that great work that Matthew Ho and the others are doing. Now, in terms of CodePank, I wanna just come out some of our work too. We have started a phone bank operation. I think we have 40 volunteers, which is pretty good out the gate, but we need more. And we have a list of over a hundred lawmakers we are calling. Oh, it's super, super organized. I mean, I don't wanna say this is a military operation because I don't think I should say that, but it's very organized. And our co-director Danica, Farid is our other co-director. Danica has organized the spreadsheet and it's got people calling 10 lawmakers at a time saying, we wanna ceasefire. We want you to publicly support a ceasefire and negotiations. What are you doing? Stop with the weapons, right? And just to add on to what Norman was saying, this word diplomacy, and I know Jodi uses it a lot and of course Matthew does as well, we have got to start using that like a lot, right? With these people because it's a foreign term to them. And so is the word negotiation. I was just telling my husband and buddy, what is it? Why don't people understand what the word negotiation means? They say Russia has to leave the Donbass. Russia has to leave Crimea, which was part of Russia for 200 years before there can be any talks. That's not negotiations, right? That's just endless war. So that's a lot of the education that we have to do right now. But do join our phone bank if you're interested. Hope you are. Just text me, email me, Marcy, M-A-R-C-Y at codepink.org and we'll make sure that you get plugged in. Also the peace and Ukraine coalition where we are meeting this Wednesday, 1230 Pacific, 330 Eastern and we'll be debriefing the Vienna summit. We'll be talking about our rapid response media team. We have organized the team to rapidly respond with comments to some of these articles written by think tanks basically in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere. So check it out, peaceandukraine.org, Marcy at codepink.org. Now we're...