Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Frida Berrigan.
And it's been a long time since we've spoken.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Good to talk to you.
Hey, listen, this is such a great piece that you wrote here.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you again to whoever sent me this.
I can't remember anymore.
Waging Nonviolence.
Oh, it might have been Bill.
Was it Bill?
WagingNonviolence.org.
It's called Nuclear Weapons Ruined My Life.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
And that is because you are quite famously the daughter of Phil Berrigan and Liz McAllister, a priest and a nun.
Is that really right?
Yeah.
Liz McAllister was a religious mystic with the Heart of Mary nun and was up at Marymount on the Hudson River in New York.
And Phil Berrigan was a Josephite priest who was originally stationed down in New Orleans.
And they eventually met at a funeral, actually, of a Catholic worker, kind of mutual friend, in the midst of the Vietnam War.
And resistance to that war and one thing led to another.
And here we are.
All right, then.
Well, good.
I'm glad you exist.
And so these two have quite a career.
And this is no hyperbole when you say this ruined your life.
Your family was broken into pieces like a car wreck, only it was all over nuclear weapons here.
Right, yeah.
So I was born in 1974, Scott, and I have a younger brother who's a year younger, and then we have a sister who was born in 1981.
And my parents estimate that they spent 11 years of their marriage separated by prison, which means that we grew up, all three of us, with either our father or our mother missing pretty much every major milestone you could think of, because one of them was in jail or prison for acts of anti-nuclear disarmament or different acts of resistance throughout our life.
So part of my reason for writing this piece and for reflecting on our upbringing that way is because my mom is now 79 years old.
My father died in 2002 at the age of 79, but now my mom is 79 and she's in a county jail in Brunswick, Georgia.
She's been there for more than a year, and now instead of being the child who is making their way in the world without one of their parents in jail, I'm sort of explaining or intermediating this experience for my own children and trying to explain why Grandma's in jail and also why nuclear weapons exist and why white police officers kill black motorists and just trying to explain our whole messed-up, crazy world to a 5-year-old and a 6-year-old and a 12-year-old.
And all of that makes me think a lot about how our crazy, messed-up world 40 years ago was explained to me.
And this pretty brutal education I got in U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism and U.S. racism from these two peace activists and all of the friends and fellow travelers that they attracted along the way.
Well, it's a really great account, and I like the way you're kind of using, in a sense, as a narrative device, this history of the hardship of your upbringing, not to be bitter about it, but being completely frank about it at the same time.
Like, yeah, it did hurt to not have my dad around and this kind of thing, but you're using that to tell the story of, well, where was he?
Well, he was in the pen.
And what was he in there for?
He was in there for spilling blood on a nuclear missile or on a submarine?
So go back and take us through, tell us some of these stories and what this was really about.
Sure.
So I start that piece with being born in 1974, and then my first real awakening to this issue being as a new five-year-old, it was right around my fifth birthday, that the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island happened, which is about 90 miles from where we were growing up in Baltimore, Maryland.
And the nuclear power plant melted down.
There was a lot of concern about radiation and contamination throughout the mid-Atlantic region.
And my parents took my brother and I and went to West Virginia.
And that was kind of the beginning of my young education into just the havoc that's been wrecked on our land and on everything by nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
I talk in the piece about coming back to a changed diet.
We were forced, I tell you, Scott, to drink miso every morning.
My mom had read that workers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who drank miso suffered fewer of the ill effects of radiation exposure by drinking this fermented soybean paste.
And it was really awful.
I kind of like it now as an adult, but as a child we just kind of held our nose and drank this salty, brown, icky stuff every morning because our parents were so concerned about us being exposed to radiation.
And I think for many parents that would have been enough, right?
But then just a couple years later, in September of 1980, my father and seven other people gained access to basically this nuclear weapons production plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
And they had cased it out, and they had prayed over it, and in the course of planning and conspiring and thinking and learning about one another, they're all Catholic and they're turning to their Bibles.
And this call from the Hebrew scriptures to turn swords into plowshares, to turn spears into pruning hooks, really resonated with the whole group and became this metaphor, and actually a lot more than a metaphor, as they went with household hammers into this production facility, found Mark-12A nose cones and poured blood on them and hammered on them with their little hammers, and then stayed and took responsibility for what they had done.
And then had this incredible trial, and a jury of all very staunch Republicans and hard-nosed kind of right-wing people who really had to grapple for the first time in their lives with nuclear weapons, and with this power that at the time was just held by a handful of nations, this power to destroy the world.
And at the time, both the United States and the Soviet Union were not only building nuclear weapons and testing nuclear weapons, but were articulating our first-strike posture towards the other, and thinking that not only could we fight a nuclear war, but we could win a nuclear war.
The United States could win, the Soviet Union could win, and we were in this heated arms race with our Cold War superpower rival.
And into this big conflagration stepped these eight very simple people, and so then this movement took off.
And since that time, there have been more than 100-plus transactions, really all over the world, mostly in the United States, but throughout Europe and New Zealand and Australia and a handful of other places where citizens take personal responsibility for what's being done in their name and with their tax dollars, in the name of their security and safety.
But really, it's not only bankrupting our nation and poisoning our land and our water, but really holding the whole human family hostage.
And I think some of us are particularly afraid of Donald Trump having his finger on the nuclear button, but really every president since 1945 has really held all of our future in his hands, and it's a terrifying prospect.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
Hey everybody, buy my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and it's available all over the place in EPUB format and of course in paperback and Kindle at Amazon.com, and you can also get the audiobook version at Audible.com.
If you want a signed copy, check out scotthorton.org slash donate and help arrange that for you there.
It's Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Find out all about it at foolserrand.us.
Well, you know, Dan Ellsberg shows in the Doomsday Machine how, oh, there are thousands and thousands of men in all of these countries who have the ability to launch these weapons.
You don't need the president to open his football and type a special secret presidential code.
They have fail-safes for that.
What if somebody killed the president and he's not available?
You know, Colonel Hapa Blap has to have the ability to launch a cruise missile, and it's already there, you know?
That whole Dr. Strangelove scenario is exactly right.
And Ellsberg talks about when it came out, him and his friends at the Rand Corporation went and saw it, and when they left, they were kind of laughing and kind of saying, you know, it's not funny that that is really accurate about the way things are set up here.
That's really something.
Anyway, so now I got to tell you, you know, I think the whole time growing up, you know, my parents aren't peace activist types or anything like that.
You know, I came to the anti-war stuff through libertarianism as a teenager and that kind of thing later on.
But just through my whole childhood in the 1980s and teenagerhood in the 90s, I've always known about, sort of like I've always known about Donald Trump, I've always known that there are these Catholic priests and nuns who go and get themselves arrested, breaking into nuclear weapons facilities.
And I never knew anything about it because they never did a primetime live where they explain the whole thing or anything like that, 2020 or anything where they, you know, give you guys a fair hearing or anything.
But there's always a headline about it here, there, the other thing.
And that's really powerful, right?
Because it's not some hippie in a tie dye shirt, does it?
It's a Catholic priest and a Catholic nun.
They break into a military base and they take a hammer and they start banging on a missile.
Wow.
That's an interesting thing.
And that's certainly to their credit.
And it certainly, it brings, it's an inescapable narrative of why, who these people are and why they're doing it.
It's, they're religious people, very serious ones, and they're doing it for the most serious reasons.
This is not vandalism.
These are people who are looking straight at the New Testament.
And then when they believe it, they really believe it.
And they're trying to hold their current society to those kinds of standards.
That's the kind of thing that you don't have to be a Christian to see why, hey, this is, these are serious people of serious faith doing something, sacrificing themselves for what they think is not just right, but the most important thing, you know?
Right, yeah.
And sometimes it really resonates.
You know, as I said, there have been more than a hundred of these actions, and some of them have kind of bubbled up into popular media.
There was a Plowshares action in 2012 that was organized by Sister Megan Rice, who was a nun in her 80s, a Catholic worker named George, Greg Borchee, and then a Catholic worker, a man named Mike Wally, were both in their mid-60s.
And they gained access to the Fort Knox of uranium in Tennessee.
And then there were congressional hearings about it, and it was front-page news, because it was very embarrassing to the National Nuclear Security Administration that these amateurs, these random people were able to gain access.
But the real question of why we have a Fort Knox of uranium, and why we're continuing with the production and improvement, continued improvement of nuclear weapons, was really the issue that Sister Megan and Greg and Mike Wally wanted to draw attention to.
But, you know, we had this odd spectacle, which is documented in a movie called The Nuns, the Priests, and the Bomb, that was done by a filmmaker named Helen Young a couple years back.
And we had this spectacle of members of Congress thanking Sister Megan for showing the weakness of our security, and thank God you weren't a terrorist, and all of this kind of thing, which was sort of laughable.
One of the powerful things about Clashier's Witness is this question of, what is property?
What is proper about these nuclear weapons?
What makes it okay for them to exist?
And international law doesn't say that they shouldn't exist.
Religious law doesn't say that they have no right to exist.
And yet here they are, enshrined and protected behind all of these fences and this huge security apparatus.
And, you know, meanwhile, so many other of our institutions are so threadbare in this country.
And so these Clashier's Actions really get at the question, or hope to get at the question of, what are we doing with these weapons, and why do we have them?
And given the opportunity, the activists do the action, and then do the time, and are able to really speak a very powerful truth before judges and juries and prosecutors, and aren't looking to get off, aren't looking for leniency, but are really looking for truth and conversion and transformation, not only of nuclear weapons, which is the metaphor out of the Hebrew scriptures to turn a sword into a pruning hook, or a plowshare, a spear into a pruning hook, but the transformation of hearts and minds as well.
Where people who never even considered that we have thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, and that we spend $90 billion a year on these weapons of mass destruction, who've never even thought about that before, are confronted with people who are willing to spend the rest of their lives in prison to get them to think about it.
Which is what my mother is willing to do.
She's willing to spend the rest of her life in jail, so that you and I can have this conversation, and so that your listeners can, who probably actually know much more about nuclear weapons than the average Jane and Joe, but really asking people to think about this, and to figure out some way to say their own no to the way that we're doing things.
To the way in which our resources are being squandered, to the way in which our security is being protected, in big fat quotation marks, through this security apparatus.
All right.
Now, sorry, but just a little bit of internal education for my movement here.
The great libertarian sage Murray Rothbard said that, according to our non-aggression principle, that all nuclear weapons must be banned forever, for the reason that they are impossible to use with discrimination.
They are only a weapon of indiscriminate killing, and so therefore they cannot be used in any way that could be possibly justified, even in so-called defense, to kill civilians en masse in another country, just because their government had even nuked your cities, still makes no moral sense whatsoever.
And then there's no question about that, so I like to show people that, because it doesn't have to be any kind of necessarily religious principle at all, right?
It just has to be a recognition of, well, what Sheldon Richmond calls the non-aggression obligation, right?
That that's what we owe each other as social animals, that we don't attack each other, and then you extrapolate out from there.
But anyway, so what you're saying there about the accepted permanence or the forgetting, it's kind of both, right?
Everybody knows we got nukes, but everybody forgot about it, or like you say, they never really had to stop and think about it for a minute.
But as you say, there are thousands and thousands of these things, enough where if a general nuclear war broke out under whatever scenario, you're talking about losing a couple of billion people right off the bat.
Billion.
That's right.
So yeah, there's something for people to be—and maybe it takes somebody like Donald Trump sitting in the chair to make people kind of recognize it, like, oh yeah, did we ever resolve that thing with the nukes?
Right?
Maybe we never did.
We're friends with the Russians now, aren't we?
Or maybe we're not again.
Right, now Putin's over there shaking hands with the Chinese prime minister, so maybe we're not so hot on him right now.
And yeah, right, like all of this is so mercurial, right, which is not how you want to think about the end of the world.
One device that I use throughout this piece is the doomsday clock.
And my brother and I joke a lot with our sister about how our social life as children was tied to the doomsday clock, which is a device that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists developed, I think, in 1954, to just kind of graphically demonstrate the nuclear threat.
And how close we were to nuclear midnight, which is the doomsday scenario that you kind of just outlined, billions of people dying in an instant, in a heartbeat.
And so the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists came up with this clock to graphically represent that.
And so when I was born, the doomsday clock was at 12 minutes to nuclear midnight.
And throughout my life, really, except for one point, in the early 90s, after the end of the Cold War, when it stood at 14 minutes to nuclear midnight, it's been just moving closer and closer throughout my lifetime, to the point where we're now at about two minutes to nuclear midnight, according to that doomsday clock.
And our father would always bellow at us when we were like, Dad, can we go to the movies?
And he would be like, you want to go to the movies?
We're four minutes to nuclear midnight and you want to go to the movies?
I don't know if not going to see, you know, Jumping Jack Flash, I don't think it's going to, you know, it's not going to tick the clock any closer to nuclear midnight, Dad.
The peak of Whoopi Goldberg's career, sorry.
That was a really fun movie, honestly.
We are glad he took it that seriously, but maybe not that seriously.
I know, I know.
But it really, it just kind of tick-tocked all the way through my upbringing.
And it is, it's sobering, you know, as a parent of these two people who devoted their whole lives to nuclear disarmament, to look at how we've, you know, we haven't had a nuclear conflagration and, you know, obviously we're grateful for that.
But that we're, you know, the danger's still here and it's even more present and it's even more, you know, existential and palpable and close.
And yet, you know, it really is off the radar screen for the majority of Americans.
In 1983, there was a made-for-TV movie that was shown in November of 1983 called The Day After, and 100 million people sat down, kind of all together across the country, to watch that movie.
And it was a little, you know, it was a little over-the-top in some ways, but it told the story of a nuclear attack on the United States, a nuclear tit-for-tat, really, between the United States and the Soviet Union, and focused on a town in a metropolis, I think in Indiana, and the effects of this nuclear attack on the people of this community.
And one of the striking things about it was, you know, who are the lucky ones?
You know, was it the people who died right away, you know, because of the fireball and the explosion?
Or was it the people who, you know, survived but then had to deal with, you know, the impact to the infrastructure and the nuclear radiation, the blocking of the sun?
And then just the anarchy that followed the attack, and the uncertainty, the instability of these human interactions that we sort of take for granted.
And so we watched this made-for-TV movie with our parents as a nine-year-old and an eight-year-old.
You know, our little sister spared this, but it was sort of this indelible moment, and it really kind of drove home how, when I think about it today, I can't imagine us all sitting down, you and me and pretty much everybody we know, all sitting down to watch, to consume the same media, and to have this stark message of a nuclear war is not survivable.
And even if it is, if you're lucky enough to survive, it's not the world you want to live in, right, the aftermath of one of these attacks.
And so, you know, there was a trope at the time that the scariest part of the movie was your children asking you afterwards what you were going to do about it, right?
And, you know, Ronald Reagan, as President of the United States at the time, watched the movie, and he wrote in his diary that it depressed him deeply to watch this film, which is laughable when you think about his public persona and his Cold War years.
Well, they say that even that really helped kickstart a change of heart, and that his really kind of briefsmanship policy ended there, and the beginning of his detente and willingness to negotiate in good faith with Gorbachev really began right there.
That, man, I cannot let him ever nuke St. Louis or whatever it was in that movie, you know, gave him nightmares and stuff, which I guess is plausible, because, you know what, I was an elementary school kid at the time, second or third grade or whatever, and yeah, we did all watch that same experience where everybody watched it.
And that's what it really would look like, an H-bomb going off over your city.
Wow, okay.
And everything bleached white by the heat afterward, all the rubble, you know, and Steve Guttenberg's face falling off, and poor John Lithgow doesn't—they cut the movie short before he got to finish his arc, and it was terrible.
It was, right?
You remember it, right?
I remember it.
People can definitely watch the attack scene on YouTube.
It's there, the day after.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
So, you know, the Game of Thrones final season is not comparable, right?
It is not asking us to do anything with our own lives, right?
It's not asking us to demand anything from our leaders.
And so, anyway, our culture and our media has changed a lot since then, but what hasn't changed is the amount of resources we devote to nuclear weapons as a nation, and the way in which they still operate within U.S. foreign policy and economic policy, right?
They are the fist inside of the glove, although, you know, we don't have much of a glove these days.
Felts worn thin, that's for sure.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, you know, Mr. Burns on The Simpsons complains of the expense of these do-nothing nuclear missiles, which, you know, is funny, because we would rather not get our money's worth if it's all the same, you know.
But it is a huge expense, and then—but so that's the thing is, it seems like it's sort of like with the so-called peace dividend all around, where we had this opportunity at the end of the Reagan and Bush era there, and instead Bill Clinton was elected.
And then, in fact, Reagan and Bush had done far more to dismantle the nuclear weapons than Clinton ever did.
Bush, even while he was the lamest of lame ducks in January, 93, when the USSR was gone and it was just Russia now, he went over there to make one last deal to get rid of another few thousand and this kind of thing.
That was probably the most—it's funny to think, that's probably the most heroic thing anybody ever did, really, right, is H.W. Bush and the dismantlement that he ordered.
But they didn't complete it.
And there was no mandate by the American people that, hey, remember that movie from 1983, when we decided how we really want to get rid of these H-bombs?
You know, but there was no consensus, and nobody cares enough.
There's no organized interest group against it, but there are plenty of organized interest groups for keeping them in the military and in the manufacturing and all of that.
That's right.
It's a lot of money.
So then you have President Obama standing before throngs of thousands, I think in Prague in 2009, and saying we're going to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and he had this vision of a nuclear weapons-free future.
But that steady work that you referred to of all of these arms control treaties and this kind of latticework tapestry, really, that was moving us quite slowly but surely towards disarmament, really didn't advance under Obama.
And, you know, and then, and then we, it's obviously not advanced under Donald Trump.
What's funny is, you know, with or without Russiagate, though, you know, the best move for him should have been to invite Putin straight to D.C., maybe even assuming the whole Russiagate scandal is, hey, art of the deal.
Go ahead and say this whole scandal is stupid and cooked up, which it obviously was anyway, and just go ahead and invite Putin to D.C., take him to a rock concert, not to dinner, and then, and then sign a new nuclear arms reduction pact, and then dare the Democrats and demand that the Democratic Party leadership explain to their constituents why they're against this new nuclear arms reduction pact, and then see how they like that.
But this goofball, some, some ghost writer wrote that book.
He didn't know nothing about dealing anything.
And so he's let them, you know, persecute him with this fake narrative the whole time when he could have turned the tables on them right from the very beginning and just said, you know what, I'm inviting Russia into NATO.
How do you like that?
Or something stupid.
I don't know.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
The art of the deal.
Scott Orton.
Yeah.
The art of the deal.
Yeah.
But yeah, you know, so anyway, I mean, he really did have those kind of instincts, but there's no way he can pursue that now, even if he really wanted to, which I don't guess he ever really wanted to.
But anyway, so, but now let me ask you this.
What do you know about a global zero and all that?
Because you see Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and, and William Perry and these others saying, oh, yeah, you know, Berrigan's right there.
We got to get rid of these things.
But they don't ever seem to have much effect, even though they're the grayest of gray beard foreign policy centrist expert CFR types up there, you know?
Right.
That was an interesting development.
And, you know, like one way of looking at all of that is that they were comfortable with the Cold War parity and with the mutual assured destruction paradigm and the rationality, you know, some kind of rationality that they thought undergirded that.
Right.
But then when nuclear weapons democratize, right, when India and Pakistan, you know, have their own tit for tat, when, you know, when other countries got into the mix as well, when Iran starts developing nuclear weapons, when North Korea starts developing nuclear weapons, when the plans for dirty bombs are available on the Internet, all of a sudden, they kind of have stepped in and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, we do not want a world where every country has nuclear weapons.
And yet, and we want to decouple nuclear weapons from, you know, being a global power and a global influencer in a, you know, fully formed state.
Right.
The five permanent members of the Security Council are all nuclear weapon states.
And so there is this, you know, this aspiration of, you know, if you want to be a real country, you have to have nuclear weapons.
Right.
That was the model that was, that came out of the Cold War.
And so you have those, those four statement of the apocalypse or whatever, kind of now stepping in and saying, we have to, we have to change something.
So, but then that, you know, there's something very colonial about that.
It's something very paternalistic about it.
No surprise there.
And so, so, but this, this effort, you know, to, I mean, it really does begin and end with the United States and Russia, who have, you know, more than 90% of the world's nuclear weapons.
So, you know, we can get all bent out of shape because Iran has a nuclear program or Pakistan has a handful of nuclear weapons.
Or, you know, China is modernizing their modest nuclear weapons arsenal.
But we, you know, as the United States can't, can't really say you disarm first, when, when we are stepping so hard on the scale of the balance of power.
And, and when we still have a, you know, first strike policy on our nuclear posture review.
So, so the United States and Russia really, you know, have to, have to set the pace.
And other countries are waiting for us to do that, have been.
And if they're not waiting for us, they're, they're developing their own nuclear weapons.
And so, so that, you know, like, I think it was a good moment when you had somebody like George Shultz saying that he was wrong or Henry Kissinger sort of, you know, reconsidering the past.
But, but the impetus really is still on the United States and Russia to disarm first.
Right.
And especially just to back off too, because after Iraq and Libya, Korea would be crazy to give up their nukes.
And Iran would be crazy to give up their, at least, you know, their mastery of the fuel cycle and their ability to enrich weapons grade uranium.
Not that they ever have, but they have a, you know, a civilian program that is essentially a latent nuclear weapons capability.
And they'd be insane to give that up with the precedent of how we treat their neighbors.
So.
That's right.
At this point.
But, you know, so, I mean, the thing is the whole opposite of the way that you phrased it, just taking the exact same thing that you say, but back the other direction is that if America really took the lead on this, and if you just had, you know, what's his name, goes to Washington and, and does the right thing and this kind of thing and decides to really lead the world toward nuclear disarmament and saying, yes, exactly.
Beginning with us and Russia first, because we have the most.
And our allies in Europe and in Israel and our good friends in India and Pakistan, we expect them to disarm too.
We're doing this, everybody.
Come on.
And if America really did that themselves and insisted that they could do it, that'd be the end of that.
That's right.
That would be the end of that.
Yep.
And then we really would have a peace dividend that would repair our roads and bridges and, you know, take care of our schools that are falling in on the heads of our children.
And, you know, the whole country would look, the whole country would look really different.
Yeah.
And it shouldn't be magical thinking.
And that shouldn't be, you know, like even, well, yeah, sure.
The Berrigan family thinks that or whatever.
That should be, of course, the consensus.
How in the world are we sitting here tolerating the existence of these things for one more second?
That's the real question.
The whole burden of the argument is on them.
That's right.
But good thing the Berrigan family is hearing good on this.
And speaking of which, so let's wrap up with this then.
Tell me, what was it that your mom did this time to get her locked up in Georgia there?
So on April 4th of 2018, she and six other Catholic peace activists gained entry to a naval base in Georgia, the Kings Bay Trident Submarine Base.
It's home to a fleet of six Trident submarines, which each carry, you know, 250 Hiroshima's in their bellies deep below the ocean blue.
And they went deep into the heart of the base.
They spread banners and poured blood on, you know, basically the entrances to three different facilities there within the base and were arrested.
They came with signs that quoted Dr. Martin Luther King.
It was the 50th anniversary of his assassination on April 4th, 2018.
And Martin Luther King said, racism, the ultimate logic of racism is genocide.
And they were so bold as to update that thinking with a banner that said, the ultimate logic of Trident is omnicide, the killing of all of human creation.
And so Scott Bay and my mom and a Jesuit priest named Steve Kelly and a Catholic worker activist from New Haven named Mark Colville, the three of them have been in jail ever since.
And then their four co-defendants were released on bond and are wearing ankle monitors and have been out since later last summer.
They're still awaiting trial.
There's no trial date set yet, despite the fact that it's been more than a year now.
And they have kind of launched this novel defense for themselves using RFRA, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which your listeners might recognize as the piece of legislation, the law, that was used by the Hobby Lobby, by the homophobic cake baker.
So they're trying to frame their opposition to nuclear weapons, their need to respond to the burning fire, the crisis, the terror of nuclear weapons by trespassing onto the base.
As religious speech and religiously motivated actions.
So as far as I know, this defense hasn't been used in a...the Religious Freedom Restoration Act hasn't been used in a criminal case before.
Those were civil cases that were brought.
And so things are moving very, very slowly in their case.
Your listeners can learn more at kingsbayplowshares7.org.
And they have a really great website with a lot of information about their action.
Say it again?
It's kingsbayplowshares7.org, because they were the kingsbay7 plowshares.
And then they also have all of their motions related to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act there, too.
So we're hoping for a trial by the end of the summer, a trial by jury, and an opportunity for them to tell their story and to share their motivation, their attention, and their vision with the people and with the jury as they speak to why they carried this action out.
Well, I don't know.
It just seems like what a great opportunity for a bunch of well-meaning hypesters to make a cause celeb out of this thing, right?
That's right.
What a great bunch of poster children, these elderly religious figures who are willing to obviously essentially risk dying in prison in order to try to make this point.
I know that defending the CIA and the FBI and the military is a big popular thing among liberals these days, but there are still lots of good leftists out there who aren't falling for that stuff, who aren't falling for this Cold War with Russia stuff.
So you know what I mean?
Like Cindy Sheehan, she's plugged away doing her work this whole time, but at least as sometimes other people chose to make a big deal out of what she was saying.
So you know what I mean?
And I wish they would stay that way, by the way.
I think she's great.
But same thing here, that like, hey, these people are doing the work.
It's kind of up to the rest of us to draw some attention to what they're doing and to show how important it is and how brave that is.
Seriously, a little lady, 79 years old, sitting in jail awaiting a trial that might not come and this kind of thing.
This is crazy.
It's a great opportunity for something on Twitter to get retweeted.
I don't know.
Something.
Somebody do a TV show about it.
Somebody put a thing on Netflix about it.
You know, I don't know.
Hey, and you never know who's listening.
That's right.
So you say there is this movie, The Nun, The Priest, and The Bomb.
Where can people watch that?
Nun, Priest, Bomb, thefilm.com.
And the filmmaker, Helen Young, is really trying to get it out there, is traveling with it, speaking about it.
Oh, so it's brand new out then?
It's a new film.
Oh, okay, great.
It tells the story of two of these clashers' actions and speaks to a lot of people about the history of this kind of resistance to nuclear weapons.
Cool.
Well, it is absolutely brave and heroic work, and it deserves, and for the very best of reasons, and really deserves all the attention it can get.
So that's great, and I'll see if I can get that director on the show then, too.
The Nun, The Priest, and The Bomb.
You say Nun, Priest, Bomb, movie.com?
Yep, and I think it's all plural.
Nun, Priest, Bomb.
Okay, great.
All right, well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time again on the show, Frieze.
Great to talk to you.
Oh, did you want to say a word about your uncle Daniel?
He just died a couple years ago, right?
Yes, that's right.
He died in 2016, just short of his 95th birthday.
He was part of the first clasher's action in 1980 with my dad and six other friends.
And he was a priest, too, right?
And he was a Jesuit priest all through his life, and really brought the art and the poetry and the kind of precision of thinking to this work, and to this question of what kind of property deserves to exist, and what is proper is that which gives life and protects life, and nuclear weapons do none of that.
And so people keep turning back as they're inspired to carry out this kind of witness and this kind of action.
They keep returning to that question, which really kind of began with Catonsville and the draft board raids in the late 1960s, which caught fire throughout the anti-Vietnam War movement.
And this is just maybe an evolution of that action.
You know, that great statement of we're burning paper instead of burning children that was articulated by the Catonsville action.
And this is just a new facet of that same work.
That's great.
And I'm sorry, I'll throw this in.
It's not so much of a last word, but a parentheses that I just thought in here.
It was great when I read that you used to work for Bill Hartung.
Was that back in the 1980s?
Is that it?
No, I worked for him in 2000.
Oh, okay.
Well, I was going to make some kind of joke about it.
No wonder that both of you guys are so good on everything, because I'm a huge Bill Hartung fan.
And I just thought, oh, doesn't that make perfect sense that you two worked together there?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's great.
He's great.
Okay, well, listen, I'm sorry.
I will let you go, but thank you so much for coming back on my show, Freda.
I really appreciate it.
Scott, it was great to talk to you.
Take care.
Okay, that is Freda Berrigan.
Wagingnonviolence.org is the site, and the article is called Nuclear Weapons Ruin My Life, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
And, you know, I should talk to Eric.
We can still run this on antiwar.com, even though it's a month old, because it's not that timely a piece, and I think I will run it.
Wagingnonviolence.org.
And then, of course, again, the story is she is a peace activist in her own right, to a great degree, and is also the daughter of Phil Berrigan and Liz McAllister, and the niece of Daniel Berrigan, all the great anti-nuclear weapons peace activists there.
And then, again, that's what this article is about, as well.
Nuclear weapons ruin my life, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
