Say the Pentagon Papers, - that material went much deeper. It went into internal government planning back for twenty - five years. Those are things that the public should have known about. In a democracy they should have known what leaders thinking and planning about major enterprises like the Vietnam war. It was kept secret from them.

Now, you ban not the whole Muslim world. You ban seven states, seven states that have not been responsible for a single terrorist act. Those are the seven [Donald Trump] banned. But, you leave the ones that really are responsible, like Saudi Arabia, which is the center for propaganda and funding and so on for radical Islamic Jihadism, well you can't touch them because of business interests, also they have oil and so on and so forth.

Africa's a wreck and it's not because it was hit by an asteroid. It's a wreck largely because it was hit by Europe.

Iceland is capitalist social democratic, rather like the Nordic countries generally. The capital had a mayor who is an anarchist, but the city has been nothing like that. In fact a few years ago it was super-neoliberal, which led to the crash.

There's an internal coherence and logic to what they get from [Rush] Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything - a crazy answer, but it's an answer. And it's our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don't ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, "Take over your factories."

The people we call the prophets I think are the earliest dissident intellectuals, and they're treated like most dissident intellectuals - very badly. They're imprisoned, driven into the desert. King Ahab, the epitome of evil in the Bible, condemned Elijah as a "hater of Israel." This is the first self-hating Jew, the origin of the term. It goes right up to the present. That's the history of intellectuals.

What matters is what happens among the powerful.