 With introducing our next speaker, I want to say that one of the thoughts that I had in early 9-11 was, you know, we're all told to remember 9-11. Well, I would say, let's remember 9-10 also. Let's remember the world before this. There was a huge progressive movement for the people who weren't around or alive or, you know, young people on this call right now. There was a huge progressive movement the day before 9-11. We had had the Battle of Seattle. We had had the IMF World Bank protests, the UN Conference on Racism, so much the Nader campaign. Our next speaker was called the Paul Revere of the Anti-Globalization Movement. And so with Kevin Downerher is going to be our next speaker. He is an American author and activist and he is the co-founder of Global Exchange. He's the founder and executive co-producer of Green Festivals. And he is executive director of the Global Citizen Center. Thank you so much from your tent, Kevin. Yeah. Yeah. And I should warn people, I'm up in the mountains near the Dixie Fire. We survived the Dixie Fire. It went around us to the north happily here in Quincy, California. But if you want to come live in a beautiful place, Plumas County is awesome and we're going to have water when no place else has water. We've got three major catchment areas up above us in height. I think we need to understand that the roots of this go very, very deep. This country was founded on genocide and slavery. If you look at the historical roots of the Second Amendment, it's not about the right to own guns. It's the need for a well-regulated militia. And the reason that a well-regulated state militia was needed was for two reasons. To kill Native Americans and to return escaped slaves. That's the history that we're involved in was predicated on somebody did something against it. We didn't start it. They did it to us. And we're just being violent and it's justified because somebody attacks us. We stole Arizona, New Mexico, Texas at the time, protested, he said, this is BS. We shouldn't be doing this war. So throughout the history, we have had voices within the system calling out going, wait a minute, this doesn't work. The reason why Vietnam told the Nazis, we're coming back from Vietnam saying, dude, don't go. Don't go. It's horrible. We're burning villages. We're killing innocent people. It's a mess. Every time we have gotten involved in these wars, it's been predicated. If you look at all the movies, Sylvester Stallone and Schwarzenegger, they killed the guy's wife. So he goes out and kills 20 people and it's okay. And I apologize if my internet connection is unstable. This is part of living in the mountains. So what we need to do is we need to own that and not out of a feeling of guilt, but you need to understand your own history. Look at the whole notion of roots. The fact that I went to Ireland and saw the home where my father grew up and heard from him the stories of what it was like growing up in Ireland under British military occupation where he had to hide in a church basement to study his own language, like Gaelic, Irish. And hearing those stories, he's out milking the cow one day and the British troop truck comes along and they start shooting at him and they killed the cow. One cow for nine children. And now those children don't have any milk. So it was easy for me to understand that I would be the British going to kill the Vietnamese who would be the Irish. Why would I do that? I grew up with guns in the woods of New Jersey. I knew what guns did. So we need to bring up our children with an understanding of, yes, this is an ugly history, but we need to embrace it. This is a cleansing therapeutic process. And part of that, something that really ticks me off, is whenever I raise the issues of building seven, building seven at World Trade Center falling in six seconds, it's a 47-story building. That's like the Trans America Tower in San Francisco, 47 stories and it comes down in six seconds. And no plane hit it. There was no major physical damage to it. The 2004 official report of 9-11 didn't even mention building seven and it's never been explained to the state. And then look at the tenants of building seven. It was the Pentagon for New York, the CIA for New York, the FBI for New York, Giuliani's Disaster Control Center. No terrorists could get into that building to plant explosives. You and I couldn't get into that building to plant explosives. But when you raise this, when you say to people, steel buildings don't melt. They never have and they never will. Just the other night I raised it and some young guys, they go, oh, oh, don't go there. Oh, so we're not allowed to question the official story that was used to incur all of this horror and destruction and waste of resources and trauma on so many people around the world. If we are going to bring down the U.S. empire, we need to be assertive and we need to be honest. And I want to pitch people, before I shut up, I want to pitch people on an idea. It turns out there's quite a bit of green economy within the U.S. military. They're doing solar energy, they're doing biofuels. They're doing all sorts of what we would qualify as green technology. Imagine if the over 800 U.S. military bases around the world were eco-universities, were platforms like the Green Festival for generating green economy enterprises and green economy jobs, then we would be liked around the world. We would be loved and we would be embraced. What we have seen in Afghanistan and we saw in Iraq and Yemen and Syria and all these other places is violence doesn't work, war doesn't work. If it worked, we would have had peace by now. It doesn't work. And one of the other things people need to look at in terms of the official story is September 10th, you can Google this on YouTube, September 10th there was a Pentagon briefing where Rumsfeld and the Comptroller of the Pentagon admitted that there was over two trillion dollars missing from Pentagon budgets. And the next day, boom, September 11th, all the violence, and all that got wiped off the headlines. It was never a headline. Well, let's go look at that. Why isn't there ever been an audit of the Pentagon? The Pentagon brought in official auditors, auditing companies, and when they looked at the Pentagon books, they said, we can't even do an audit based on these books. It's such a mess. So this is our tax money being used against our will, we were never asked, and it's being used to do violence against poor people around the world. And God help us if we don't have the courage to look at these facts and call for an official investigation. Let's investigate. How did Building 7 come down in six seconds? That's free fall speed, a 47-story steel building. And who were the tenants? And why is there video of people saying, get back, get back. This building's coming down, a BBC reporter reporting that Building 7 collapsed and the building is still behind her. A press release was sent out in advance that they knew the building was going to come down. All of that needs to be made public so that we find out who really was involved, totally who was involved. Yeah, there may have been some amateur terrorists from the Middle East, but there may have been some professional terrorists based right here on our own soil. Thank you for your attention. Thank you, Kevin. And I completely agree war doesn't work. Well, Mickey is next. And I thought I was introducing him. Well, then you go for it. Oops, okay. Sorry. Hey, so just wanting to kind of honor that space that Kevin took and just say that, okay, you know, it's a tough call. But I would say, hearing that from Kevin, one of the things I remember Fidel Castro saying, something else we're not supposed to talk about, Fidel Castro, but saying, you know, it's less important who did it than who benefited. I mean, if you look at who benefited, the absolute right wing. And Kevin, when we asked you on, it was, you know, really to remember, you know, those days pre-911 and the champion all over the world. And how convenient that was that that was truncated. I remember something in the news of someone said, well, that's the after night right after 911. They said, well, that's the end of the anti globalization movement. And I remember thinking, what does that have to do with it? Uh-huh. How convenient. So, you know, once again, the military is dictating what we do. I think that's called a military dictatorship.