The specific trigger for me was when the President [Barack Obama] put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block. Why I got into the race - it just seemed unconscionable that the Democrats were leading the charge.

I was very engaged by the folk music movement.Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary. And then I sort of discovered world music, and fell in love with ethnic music of all sorts.

We need to use antitrust laws. You know, we need to create real media again.

I was more tuned into the assassinations, the riots that were going on, like in Watts, and, in fact, my summer before my senior year in high school I went on the Experiment in International Living to Sweden, yes, with a group of students , you know, leisurely discussion over the summer about, you know, where we were going to go with our lives, and how did you how did, you know, being a born-again Christian mesh with being, you know, a socialist from New York.

There was really interesting work going on, for example, in the Mississippi bayou, where there were some really exemplary health centers that also became centers with kind of political organizing.

On the other hand, there was hard evidence of real tampering in the election, and that was the email, you know, that were revealed from the DNC, that showed, in fact, that the DNC was collaborating with Hillary's [Clinton] campaign, and with some members of the corporate media, to smear Bernie Sanders and to really pull the rug out from under him. So, there's no doubt about that tampering, and that's when they began to say, oh, the Russians are doing this terrible stuff to our election.

Neoliberalism, arguably, sets the course for this kind for this kind of neo-extremism, this right-wing extremism that we are facing. The only way we solve that crisis, the rise of the right-wing extreme, is by truly progressive policies that address this crisis of economic security. That will not come from the lesser evil.