I am so happy youre here for this book educated this is one of the most extraordinary memoirs i have ever read and that made my experience. Thank you so much. Turning toward the house on the hillside tall shadow stiffly pushing to the currents my brother was testing whether a picture my brother with his steel toed boots on the highway below the school bus drives past without stopping. And more than any other we dont go to school but the government doesnt know about us to force us to go we dont have birth certificates we have no medical records. We were bored at home and never have seen a doctor or nurse. We have no School Records weve never set foot in a classroom when i was nine i will be issued a delayed certificate of birth at this moment according to the state of idaho and the federal government i do not exist. Of course i did provide load up with parents waiting for the sun to darken i spent my summers in the fields in the winter rotating supplies my family continues on unaffected. That is quite an opening. So tell me about a day in the life we had a farm which belonged to my grandfather. It was beautiful. There were wheat fields and we lived on the mountain it wasnt really big but it was beautifully named it came up out of the earth and formed a perfect spire i was told that when the snows began to melt there would be a body my dad called to the Indian Princess and then it was time to come back in with that exotic playground there was a lot of beauty of my childhood but it took me a long time to realize that it wasnt completely normal but it seemed very normal to me. My dad was opposed to those institutions that people take for granted like Public Education and that meant i was never allowed to go to school or to the doctor. It is the interplay of this environment that it seems like a magical place that i have heard you talk about this but there are two sides. My mother was an herbalist and then to have another side. Like my the time my brother put his leg on fire and we made the decision to treat at home because my dad did not believe in doctors or hospitals even Something Like the herbalism that could be scary when youre dealing with a real injury that could be scary when youre dealing with a real injury talk about your fathers philosophy attribute that more to your father than your mother. It is complicated. He had a theory sometimes i call that the illuminati or the new world order because he believed they were trying to do harm. It was a conviction that he had. I wonder if they could pinpoint. That depends on which institution you are talking about and with that medical establishment you thought we were doing good that people were taking drugs or pharmaceuticals would damage your body. And also spiritually. And with that natural healing. And with Public Education and was brainwashed that would lead us away from god. Add brainwashing seems to be part of what he was talking about they are. It without illuminati of brainwashing but that is just outside her. I think he was worried we would go to a doctor or in some way compromise our health or spirituality then you have to do those exact things. And then this idea of the world to be otherworldly. And that also just included doctors. But most mormons they support education but they definitely believe in doctors and i found that interesting in your book that you wanted to make that clear. Because i think that right now the environment is so polarize people latch onto any story that they can. And with some irregular ideas and im not a medical professional so i dont know but to have that mental irregularity and in my mind that religious extremism so whatever was happening in his mind i dont think it is the other way around that all religious people are like this or all mormons are like this. And then just to make them into a caricature. And that is not the take away at all. So what is interesting and then to apply the worldview is to apply the first memory that is not a memory which was the ruby ridge massacre so can you talk about that believes that your father espoused quick. He did have these ideas about the government especially around the time of the ruby ridge incident and to be a little bit isolated but then there was a period where my dad said it could happen to anyone which really isnt completely irrational. With the water purifiers and emergency food but it is a very frightening thing that made me think that government would come at the moment. But the family lived in idaho and with the conflict over selling to an undercover atf agent and missing the court date and that the fbi and federal marshals found them and somehow there was a conflict the dog was shot than the agent was shot and it just got out of hand very quickly and ended up they were visiting his sons body they are surrounding the cabin and ultimately his wife was shot while holding the baby that was a horrendous story that is a version that i was told that my dad told us kind of having dreams where i would fall to the floor because there were snipers outside but he didnt tell me the end of the story so when i was 17 i was at university and i heard the end of the story how there was a Massive Public outcry and professional inquiries and every major newspaper cover the story. As a child was a government coming for us that i thought only we knew about but then i realized it wasnt covered up it was very much public. Especially that situation to identify with the family or that would be comforting to you. I think if i had an understanding how the institutions had responded. It wasnt like the government was in the holy evil force. That was in incident of abuse of power and a callous disregard of life. That there was a congressional report but in how the constitution works. That is interesting but to with the education thats what you call it uneducated but the education that you did learn with your family so tell me the values of what you learned as a child. My parents homeschooled of my older brothers were younger my mother did a pretty good job and by the time i came along shes a wife and a mother there wasnt a lot of schooling going on. Nothing like a lecture so the whole school that i received was pretty limited with formal education but what i did very value just the way that they raised us and they had a philosophy you can teach yourself anything better than somebody else and thats a principle i really agree with someone we talk about education in this country that learning is passive and there is not an individual component and with social it is a bit of propaganda and they need to be actively engaged in designing their own curriculum i hate the word disempower because i think it sounds like a cliche but a lot of people really take to heart to learn something you have to have a degree and a whole institution in place to teach it to you. I was not raised to think that so nice that i wanted to go to college at 16 it felt like something i could do not because i didnt have a former formal education but if algebra then i can get a book and learn it. I barely got through but i really went in underprepared i had to raise my hand and ask what the holocaust was. That i was denying it but i had never heard of it before. But i think they had something there. And thats about making a person. Everybody should have that opportunity and that needs to be more active and more involved. How was the way you raise help you to write the book . Its not easy. I did not know how to write narrative i have not written word of narrative what i wrote this book ten years later after i sat in the classroom for the first time at 17 and i had dozens of academic writing but i did figure it out i know how to write prose which is very different so i sat down and said this is a skill that i want and what made the biggest difference for me the podcast which was amazing because writers come on and read stories of other great writers and it is an amazing curriculum but it worked for me. So i pursued it and i didnt have to spend a lot of time on curriculum that did not work for me which is why i think the curriculum you make for yourself is better than what people make for you. So when i started to write it i thought it was a short story. I did know it is short story was but i find them so helpful. Read a lot of Toni Morrison because she is genius. Read a ton of short stories i could go on and on there so many great writers but the ones that speak to you and there are some amazing writers and those that dont give me ideas about how to write but that is the beauty of control of how you learn. What we reading then i read a lot of religious books read the book more than the bible and a lot of 18th century by the founding mormon prophets that was the language. Its interesting when you go to school for the first time at 17 you go through this archaic style. I had no sense of style because thats what i was reading i think my professors were very bewildered why i sounded like 19th century. It took a while to give up that voice. Isnt that amazing the writing voice is different than your talking voice and you had to work on to speak that way i assume that is interesting. I think a lot of people do but they feel certain selfconsciousness and sometimes they become more formal i have noticed that people will word like establishment or words that you never use unless youre trying to sound intellectual. How long did it take you . So the first four months everything about was absolutely terrible. Are you being hard on yourself . Five. It was really bad. I was in a writing group which is i was lucky i did not think of myself as a writer i literally wanted to write the one book. When they said this is really terrible i said yes, i know. Im not a writer. Tell me how to make it better. That is a wonderful place because i had no personal thoughts at all i did not think it was a writer. So it was a great place. When did you start journaling . I had a couple at eight years old but then i got serious at ten and then i was very faithful. A lot of them were given to me by my grandmother and had pictures of jesus on them actually perk almost all of them. So for you sometimes it dont understand something until i write it down. I do think there was a bit of loneliness sometimes i detect i didnt have any friends actually there was another family in town that was like my family so occasionally i would see this one other girl but everyone else i never went to any of their houses and i was never invited as i was pretty isolated perk i had my siblings but so i could tell somebody all my stuff and thats one reason why other than that i dont know why stomach about your thankful now after having written the book. They were really helpful. Yes. You still journal now . I do. Yes. But going back to your childhood something that i did not recognize on my own was physical pain sometimes we scan our knee or hurt ourselves in the junkyard you have an accident so can you talk about that . My dad ran a junkyard and for whatever reason he did not have the bone in his head that would tell him this is dangerous. Even after somebody was hurt he would never understand how serious it was i think he thought everything that happened, happened for the best and we would be protected he did not believe in Safety Equipment to have safety harnesses or safety hats and i dont think its because he didnt care about her safety. I think he did but he just didnt understand how dangerous it was even after it happened freckle one example was i was about 14. I was filling up a bin of scrap metal and when its full and had to be picked up by a forklift with the extendable boom and dumped into the semi trailer. I said lets dump it and he wanted someone to go into the big bid in the trailer after he dumped it he thought it would be faster if i rode up in the bin and is that i will hold that level you could crawl out and be out the way of the falling meta metal. I was terrified but i was not a habit of disobeying my dad. He picked up the bin and as he turned to rotate a bit of scrap came loose with a jagged edge and pierced through my leg pitting me in place and i could not move he waves me to call out im trying to shout out i could not move but it was a really loud Diesel Engine and he could not hear me. So then he starts to raise it up and i know hes going to dump this and i am inside it its going through a meat grinder of 2000 pounds of falling scrap metal by disease it starts to fall it comes out of my leg i could follow myself over the edge i was hurt but i was okay i have myself on the trailer but i was first experienced anger that he let it happen after that i was ashamed. It seemed like a simple thing and i dont know why i couldnt do it. But what i was missing in that moment i knew he would never hurt me on purpose but i didnt have that information that there might be something going on in his head where he could value my safety but not be able to keep me safe. There might be an explanation besides its not my fault i know it wasnt my fault. It is so easy to internalize but i had to be much older to look back at that event and not be ashamed and not just where i was very angry at my father. How could you do this but now i feel like i have all the pieces and i can put it together to say hed never want me to get hurt but for whatever reason he was not able to understand the risks of the way he was doing things. I am blown away by the fact you are not angry. So many people are angry with their parents with transgressions but this is pretty major. And you dont seem to hold any anger. I think anger is important and it is a mechanism of the brain to keep us from going back to situations or people. I thank you need anger to get you out of these situations but once youre out and say im not sure you need it. I wonder if you can get rid of it and live a better life out of it if i still had my family and my life i would need my anger every day but for now i dont feel like i need it particularly and its been important for me to reclaim the beautiful parts of my childhood and to remember that yes, the backyard was frightening but it was also fun and yes my father let those things happen to me but would never have wanted that to happen and there were wonderful things about him, too. I think its a delicate balance because i would never want to take the good things about them and they im just going to only focus on the good and dismiss the bad things because you let yourself get hurt for you lets not get hurt but then you dont want to obsess over the bad either. I aspire to this idea of mental integrity which means that to me anyway it means no one to take from you the good but no one can obscure from you the bad and thats what i mean when i say it but i want to live in my own head want to have a grasp on the reality and dont consumed with anger the box of the wonderful things of a person but also to want to expose myself to risk by not recognizing there are limitations. That solve sounds extremely evolved. Have you come to this on your own or going to therapy given. I think i come to a lot of it on my own but i have gone to therapy. Therapy is helpful because it never feels like it is but thats the tragedy of it. But i do think it is because you satisfy the time to think about how you feel do you want to feel that way and i have spent time in therapy talking about how angry i feel and i also dont want to go back so whats the middle road . Was this catharsis or did it bring things back . It ended up being cathartic. I do not think it would be but it was because the one thing the bits i thought would be hard to write about were the more traumatic bits were not very hard to write about. I feel like i had before i started writing i reconciled with the bad things in my life and the danger of the scrapyard and i reconciled with that but when i had not reconciled with the beautiful things. With the mountain looks and the way my mother would laugh when she was canning peaches and the good things about my father and i think those were the things i loved about my child the most and those are the things i had lost and it was hard that was the hard thing was being all about those things that i never would have again and i think that ended up being the hardest thing to write about but i think in a way you think because it let me reclaim a bit of that in a strange way. I will never be able to really reclaim it but i weakened it in the other way. Was there the part that was hard to write the book that surprised you . A couple moments about my dad that were hard to write about and there were moments when my brother saved my life where we were on horses my horse went completely berserk he was on a horse that had never had a writer on it before but it never been written. My horse went into a fit and i got my foot caught in the saddle and was barking and running and on the hillside and it was a matter of time before i fell off and dragged and that was game over. Your head hits iraq and youre done. My brother somehow on this completely unbroken horse managed to catch hold of my horse and slow it down but this was the brother who was quite violent and very manipulative and controlling and who would at other times twist my wrist behind my back but had this wonderful side and i think what took me a long time as i said before is you cant to me it was tempting to say he is kind and can be sensitive and wonderful and i still think that but i dont want to use those things to dismiss the fact that he could be manipulative and violent. Lets talk about john but i was wondering if i was hard for me to talk about because you seem pretty open. Those are things i have reconciled with. There are points where i had to put on the book because it was hard to read and very violent and psychologically violent as well so its not just the physical violence but it was a psychological torture in some ways. I found the psychological i think people fixate on physical but to meet it was not the important part. I have this idea that all of these matter what abuse it is an assault on the mind because if you are going to abuse someone you have to invade their reality in order to distorted and convince him of two things convince them that what youre doing is not that bad and you normalize it and its rationalize it and other people thank you deserve it the second thing is easy to convince people up because people tend to internalize that guilt when they are hurting. The pricing is hard and my brother was pretty good with it. He had convinced me something cannot happen but happen to ms. Before and could convince me to a completely different interpretation of it and one example of that is when i was 17 i bought this man home, his name is charlie for thanks giving dinner and i think he felt the need to demonstrate his control over me in front of this person and so before the mail had started he grabbed me by my hair and called me pulled me down the hallway and stuck my head in the toilet. Later when it was all over he told me it had just been a game and that next time we were having fun i should really be sure to tell him if i was in any pain. I had no idea you are having time. I completely took their perspective on board one 100 so much so that i tried to convince charlie of it and he knew what he had seen but he also i thank you that reality had no bearing on me. I hate to see how far under or how much under my brothers power i was and he tried to reason with me for a while and then didnt and could see but then there was another incident couple later and i have Bennett University a while and going to university help me learn how to hold onto my own opinions and gave me the ability to say i disagree. A few months later it happened again. My brother attacked me in a parking lot and then when it was over he said im sorry i was having a good time and i know idea i would hurt you so the next time having fun make sure you speak up if youre in any pain. After he left i was writing in my journal and i wrote that i did not know which version to believe but i wrote down my version and wrote down that i had been terrified and then i have been in pain and wrote that in that moment i would have torn them apart if i had been able. I have these two versions of my mind i did not necessarily they might is right and his is wrong but i knew i had not experienced it as a game. I think thats an important moment because of the first time i did not see my reality to someone elses. Was the first time my brother attempted to dominate me at the end of the process there were still two mines present, two distinct lines. Not one mind having control over another. Its almost like a testament. There were times in your journal that you include in your book where your still engaging what you call reality and you say things like sean and he was so much nicer to me before the accident and said something to the effect that he was my best friend before is a wonderful and now hes mean and then go back and realize he was violent and abusive and before the accident and it was almost as if you play this game with yourself. I had put in my mind had a serious head injury. He fell of a pallet when he was working for my father and had a very serious head in her injury. He nearly died. I had supervised when that accident took place but we might we thought expected he might be violent after that accident but in my mind i told that it was young and it was writing the book that i got my own journal and talk to my brothers who also kept journals and i got the date on the strong so how is this possible and it turned out it happened when i much, much older. I think when i was 17 that was 16 i think i was 16 and that was just i suddenly thought that does not explain any of it then. It had been going on for so much longer than that. That was hard. Even the night but things happen with charlie i had emails and wrote to him that night saying he would never hurt me and not after the head injury that he would never hurt me. I was writing this i had a broken toe in my wrist was in a splint and i was saying that he would never do this thing that hed obviously done so i think its hard to underestimate how powerful that reality distortion is. Its not just the person was experiencing it but anyone whos Living Committee to these relationships to some degree subjects to the reality bending that goes on to justify it. You could say enabling in a way. I want to get back to that but i want to talk about memory. The questions you flirt with in the text about memory and putting this book together it seems like it involves interviewing with a lot of people putting different forces together and trying to ferret out the truth. What really happened and what are your thoughts on that and what are your thoughts on the reliability of your own memory now having done all this . Its a difficult thing. You dont want to overly rely on your memory but you dont want to be vulnerable to people coming in my family culture had a culture of justifying, rationalizing and there was a lot of gas lighting and denying things that were happening as they were happening and i think we were all so affected by it and deeply affected by it that it had become difficult to sort out and luckily there were my brothers were wonderful and helpful and my inlaws are a wonderful thing. They come in from the outside and they see things through different eyes and there are a lot less vulnerable, i think to some of those estrogens that happen so i think memories are, located in the stories spring up in families that maybe they are right or wrong but sometimes those narratives themselves can tell you quite a bit. Oh yeah. How much do you think now we touch on this as well explicitly and you talk about your fathers Mental Health. You were not however there are things that you experienced firsthand that would be one to believe there was instability there and the moment when youre in a psych 101 class and you hear about bipolar disorder and this turns the light on in your mind and does it sound like my father. My whole idea of Mental Illness before i took the class i think i had to be a raving lunatic. That was my idea of it so what that class did was give me another category and a way to think about Mental Health and the brain and im not a medical professional and i have no idea but i do feel like theres a gap between the fact that my father loves me and yet we could be so terribly hurt by the things he did. Physically especially. There was irrational decisions he made about how to do things and i know it wasnt malicious so having that other category helped me. It helped me understand that sometimes people do the best they can and that does not mean everything is okay. Having that label doesnt provide comfort that you think because you seemed as if at least when you were a child you are some of that shame you are focusing on yourself that im the one would you describe that experience in the junkyard you were the one who is wrong, not your father but hearing the outside label or perspective from the Mental Health perspective on this it helped so much. It help me go back and we experience that and have empathy for my dad and also for myself which is a hard thing to have empathy for yourself especially your younger child self. But i think its an important step of feeling to let yourself off the hook for those feelings you been carrying around. This might be a cheesy question but i have to ask if it if you could talk to yourself when you were ten is there something you would say particular to yourself . No, i dont know. I kind of think this will be cynical so sorry to be cynical to your heartfelt question but i dont think theres anything anyone could have said to me that would have made any difference. One of the things charles said to meet that night was my brother when i was telling him it wasnt the night but a little later we ended up breaking up because i was too dysfunctional basically to be in the relationship. One of the things he said to me basically said i cant and said i cant this is out of my league and way over my head and said to me i cant change this for you. You are the only one that can make this better. I think thats true but i dont think theres anything i could say or anyone else could say to my ten yearold self that would move the needle at all. It was something i had to come to terms with. Thats true of the eventual estrangement for my family which was a credible decision and a lot of years i was searching every story and every film and every novel for permission to make the decision i made in the permission to cut myself out of my life and eventually i realized no one will give you that permission. You have to give it to yourself. One thing that did change her past is your brother, tyler. But the first time is when he introduces you to music and when he shows that college is a possibility and probably wasnt even in your idea of the future. What was your idea in the future prior to tyler going off to college . My parents, especially my dad, the strongly that womans place was at home so i was i would get married when i was 17 or 18 or 19 and have a house on the farm, have kids and that was unschooled probably been in a midwife like my mother that was how i thought my life would go until i was in my older brother tyler who had educated himself and got into university came home and said i thank you should try to do this. Some of the most incredible parts of the book when you go to byu for the first time in your outside your family for the first time and on your own for the first time in existing as an adult when he never stepped foot into a classroom before. Can you talk about those early days and what that mustve been like . What did you look like that and how did you act . I probably acted quite strangely. I definitely acted i do not feel like i belonged to my family but i also did not belong there either. He never spent time with what i wouldve called Public School kids, kids went to Public School and never been friends with mainstream mormons. For me they lived in this way that i thought was quite licentious even though they were observant mormons because they drink coke or the women would occasionally wear a tank top around the apartment but i just was appalled so i did not really turn to a fellowship immediately because i was a bit weird did not have the greatest hygiene. My housemates had to hit me down and say most people wash their hands after they go the bathroom that was my dad always taught us my grandmother and my mothers brother used to get after him for this because we never did and then he would always say to her i dont teach my kids to wash their hands after they go to the bathroom but i teach them not to the iss on their hands. I thought that was a great philosophy. But my new roommate do not think that was. I felt outside and had a hard time even as i started to fit in a little better and made a few friends and i was going to make it then i was more confused because the way i would go back to idaho have might mainstream friends and they would seem normal to go to the doctor became more normal but then i went back to idaho and watch the way my family lived. Would feel completely foreign but at the same time utterly familiar. When my dad he gets injured my third year where he is standing next to a car trying to take it youll take off and rather than taking it off any other way he does it with a cutting torch and a spark from the torch makes it into the fuel tank which he has not trained in the car explodes and he was burned horribly. His whole upper half of the body so many thirddegree burns and my family made the decision to treat it at home. I remember they use the salves that my mother had and they had no morphine and he almost died. There was a moment where i thought he had died and i closed my eyes and started saying goodbye is that i was sorry that our relationship had become full of conflict but he did not die even though he did not die there were months of this healing process and so much pain in the whole time i was at war with myself and i did not know whether they were right and this is what god wanted them to do or they were insane and torturing them for no reason. Thats a huge step. You see a different perspective and do you remember in school you talk about running about the holocaust and not knowing about the holocaust and shocked about that is not believe that you do not know about every other examples looking back youre embarrassed that you did not know then . So many things. When people talk about queen and you think theyre talking about duckweed and 90 about what people said to me casually about pop culture i would say oh, yeah, right almost like an alien life form you, i do not know what they were saying. Smile and nod. In terms of i had never heard of the Civil Rights Movement and that was i had heard of a slavery but i definitely learned from a very different perspective, i think then reading account slavery from slaves like Frederick Douglass was really eyeopening for me. I never had that experience. It blew my mind that it happened and it was so recent and my mother had been a child when this was happening and it wasnt so far in the past and that time could be measured and measured in the wrinkles on my mothers skin and wasnt measured in geological time but really recent and that did blow my mi mind. You end up going to cambridge or trinity first and did you have an experience of imposter syndrome when you are there human it sounds like a little bit what youre describing you are a professor as you as a person who he feels has potential. Yet, he helped me. Theres a Study Abroad Program that would to cambridge and i applied because he told me i should and then i did not get in. He wrote them and said i think this person is learning a lot and is behind but i think shell catch up and we should give her a chance so i dont have you talked to him about that what he saw and you . No,. [laughter] [inaudible conversations] you do not do the interview for the book. You, i wrote them or send him what i had written but no, i did not ask and have no idea but in the beginning you describe an imposter syndrome like i dont belong here and people are different but there seems to be a turning point where it is at trinity where you start hearing about positive liberty and reading about different ideas and at some point right in the book you say avalon and that doesnt happen there . Did you feel that . I still felt like i didnt belong at that moment but i was interested in the idea i was learning and i was really it was hard not to be excited by what i was learning because it was so interesting. I was going to change it so when i went to a lecture on positive liberty first week in cambridge as an actual cambridge student. I got in and out like i belong there and my first week i went to lecture and that lecture blew my mind because the whole point of negative and positive liberty is the idea that yes there are external obstacles you have to keep from doing things but if youre tied up you cant do something but positive liberty says that there are obstacles that people have to them doing things that are internal and exists only in the mind so if youre tied up you may not be able to go outside but also if you believe that someone outside will shoot you and there isnt someone like that it doesnt matter whether that there or not but you still cant go outside. This idea that what might be the most important thing in determining how much freedom you have an ability to have but that might be in your own mind and that never occurred to me that it was around this time a friend of mine sent me the song by someone i had never heard of because i had never heard of anyone but i got obsessed with that lyric for yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can spare our minds. I became obsessed with that and ended up on wikipedia reading about bob marley and read about the cancer he had and how these doctors had told him that he needed to amputate his toe but he had a belief in a whole body system and what happened was he died and he was young when i was reading that i realized that i had stopped believing in my dads view of doctors and hospitals and i told myself i had but i never had my vaccinations. I called and got them and got all of them. I left the hospital looking like a pincushion because it was all in one day it took me quite a long time but i really didnt need all of them. It was a moment where i realized i have renounced that old worldview and old view of the world but im not from the courage to live in this new one. There is a moment when you do find the courage and that happens after you and sean effectively completely banishes you from the family. I confronted my parents and my sister and i both experienced something with my brother and she told me i should confront my parents. I decided i would. I did and told them i thought it was an issue and we needed to deal with it and the father decided i was lying and that i was trying to destroy the family and my mother said i was crazy and my memory couldnt be trusted and that was hard. Having them happily meet was hard but i think the hardest thing was after that they called my brother and told him everything i had said. But followed after that was a time of and he called me and said he hired an assassin to come kill me in these kinds of things and then he cut me out of his life and disowned me. My parents supported that decision so that is mistake that youre not allowed to come home because it will make your brother comfortable. For the reader i was most upset by your mother in that situation. I felt that there was an opportunity there when your pressure mother and she seems to be of equal mind and had seen the things she agreed with me at first. We had a chat online when she first started talking to her about it and we had this chat where she said yeah, i can see this now and we will help you and we will take care of it and we will get you into in him into therapy and it will be okay and she apologized to me and said she was sorry that she had not been able to keep us safe but when my father the position he did she follow suit. This culminates with the blessing that your father offers to you at harvard and you decline that blessing. We do not have a lot of time and i have another question for you but you talk about that because that to me is where your education comes from several. That the first stage of the mistreatment i have for my parents not bite my choice. My brother cut me out of his life my parents supported it and i was ostracized for about ten months. Then my fellowship at harvard and my father came to visit me which was surprising because my dad traveling and he liberals so harvard was not an ideal place for him but hed only been ther he came into not fit in but he came late only been there a few days before i realized it come to offer me a way back into the family. Look like david time people and they believed that i was possessed and thats why i had said the things i said about my brother. They were going to offer me this blessing as an exorcism and if i could go along with it i could say i had not meant the things i said or effectively trade out those things and then there was a period of a couple of days when we were sightseeing orion boston attorney like we were a happy family when i thought i could make that bargain. I thought it was a good deal. I tried to convince herself that there was some dignity into nine my own memories and my own perceptions that i was justified somehow its rendered what i needed to be true and i thought it was a deal i can make but the night before they left back to idaho my dad offered me his blessing and i couldnt. I couldnt do it. I think there were a couple things i realized in that moment that the daughter my father had come to reclaim just did not exist anymore. I had gone off and gained a whole different perspective and that mind i had had no tolerance for violence. I couldnt surrender to it and it was clear to me of course i had been the one that said it wasnt a demon that said those things about my brother. It was me. My father had said it was not true and it was meat. I want to end this with the final reading at the end of the book that brings us full circle brings it back to education that you were able to achieve this experience. Give me one second. Exceptional book. Andrew mccarthy argues that the Obama Administration attempted to rig the 2016 president ial election. From the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley and Mountain View california, this is one hour and ten minutes. [applause] thank you, good evening and thank you for coming. Its wonderful to see so many of you here. Id like to welcome our friends from book aimed over here to my lifetime and after the qanda they will be something of a new book and then he will be signing them for you. So thats an advanced announcement for that. Some of you may remember that he was here three years ago, and invective is aug