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Tad Sturmer is a public historian, teacher, and author of the forthcoming book A Resistance History of the United States that will be coming out this year in June. His work dismantles the mythologies that pass for American history, how we've created nostalgia and often outright lies, moral evasions and institutional silence that has protected abusive power that we see being exercised today. A Resistance History of the United States is a record of repeated fights against abusive authority. Real resistance that took place in American history carried out by people who refuse the lies that were used to justify the abuse of power. Those battles have taken many different forms. The women and men in Salem who would not confess to witchcraft, black loyalists who seized their own freedom during the Revolution, and anti federalist who forced a bill of rights to limit nationalist power. We're talking about Ona Judge Henry David Thoreau, John Brown and the Secret six resistance so disruptive it helped push the nation into civil war to end one of the grossest abuses of humanity and in history, which was chattel slavery in the United States. He is a visiting scholar the University of Southern Denmark center for American Studies and a lecturer in the Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He previously taught history at Harvard, served as a historian for Colonial Williamsburg, and was the advisor for history content@c span. And today he is with us to talk about going into 2026, what real resistance actually looks like. We're going to talk about the American Revolution and what we got right and the fact that most of us were never actually taught what the American Revolution was about and that our best examples of resistance come much later and from unexpected characters. Today on Flipping Tables with Tad Stermer. All right, Tad Sturmer, thank you so much for joining us on Flipping Tables. With the time change moving things around, and Happy New Year.
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Happy New Year. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
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So we were just talking before we started recording that you're in Denmark since June. How has that been for you?
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Well, it's been good in a sense that my grandmother used to say that it's easier to fight a burning house fire from outside the house. And so coming here was able to I was able to make sure that my wife and son are healthy, happy and stable, which enabled me to do more of this without having to worry about them, lean into it more, push the privilege more, in fact, in fact see all of these things more clearly and be able to talk about them, write about them, engage people in real time more clearly and actively as a result of it. So I'm actually able to do more of what I do.
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A
Having come here and your wife is from Denmark, is that how that was facilitated or was it a job situation?
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No, my wife has a German citizenship and therefore so does my son. And so what we wanted to do was go somewhere where I could go ahead and find, focus on working. And so I was invited by the center of American Studies here at the University of Southern Denmark to sit and do what it is that I do. So incredible that ended up being a good opportunity.
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A
And, and what has, because I've been wondering this, like, what is, you know, because I'm, I'm in it. I'm, I'm in the lobster boil right now, and especially being in the American South. So what is the difference, do you think? Like, as far as how things are being reported, what is the perception, you know, coming from Europe? And I mean, I'm sure it's different per country, but what's kind of, what do you, what differences did you notice being in Denmark versus being here?
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Yeah, the, the first thing that I noticed and because I was exactly where you are, I mean, being in the middle of it, being, seeing, seeing and hearing and feeling it all in real time, trying to be responsive to it, trying to understand it as things kept moving, rather than being able to stop and take a deep breath and exercise some, some analysis of it, even though it's all absurd.
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Yeah.
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What I noticed over here was a maintaining kind of a constant drumbeat of Trump centered news every single day, no matter what. Now, obviously in Denmark, they have their own issues because of what's going on with Greenland and the regime's foolishness there, but still constantly this sort of flavor of, this flavor of news coming in, but the break was that it didn't govern everybody's life. So the fact that the broader concerns that Trump fuels, which are global concerns, which are European concerns, concerns with Russia, concerns with Putin, and how that destabilizes everybody, given what a global community, Denmark is, that I was able to kind of see in ways that I hadn't before how Trump is impacting the world, impacting Europe and the whole world in ways that I couldn't see before because we were so focused on what was going on domestically and seeing how that's enough of an avalanche, but to understand that it's actually triggering avalanches all over the place that are impacting people's lives and impacting the way people are reconsidering not just their relationship with each other, but everyone's relationship with the United States. How this is not just obviously it's destabilizing to us, I mean, to Americans, but the fact that that reach is not just rippling across the globe. Everyone else is just downstream, this avalanche.
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And, and what's the kind of the, the perception and the opinion with people that you work with, people you talk about, what are, what are their dominant concerns like as this news comes in? And obviously Denmark is directly affected because of Greenland. But what, what is kind of their response to all of this?
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Well, it's on a couple of different levels. The first one is just bewilderment.
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Yeah.
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Exactly. So it's not anything that I think you, certainly not you, and I think certainly any member of is going to find strange that. I mean, I think that we all thought, and people certainly in Europe and in Denmark thought that the United States was fairly stable and that Americans in particular, not just the United States government, but Americans, were fairly stable, reliable people. What this has done is change that entire perception that everything, just like it has with us, everything is off the table. That, that, that the world in which, that the latest thing that we never thought would happen is now something that happens every day, sends everybody into reconsidering, reconsidering what's going on, but also having no sense of reliability anymore on, on anything. So the United States government, which was once seen as kind of the bulwark of NATO and as a constant friend and as somebody who they could rely on, is now no longer even neutral. They're seen as the enemy. They're actively destabilizing it, particularly after the national security review of just a couple of weeks ago that leaned the United States into the side of organizing, supporting far right parties in Europe in order to battle against this replacement madness that they think is happening as a result of immigration and not labeling Russia as being any kind of adversary, considering them to be as a kind of partner. That, that also is a language that everyone here recognizes as being absolutely absurd, as being so contrary to their ideas of reality that they wonder what's next with the United States now that this entire polarity of the world with the United States as once being a friend and an anchor and so consistent in the post war period that now that's gone. And so it's a scramble to see what's going to replace it. And then the other thing is that they're a little bit bewildered about the American people. I think that the questions that I get more often than what the hell is wrong with Donald Trump is what the hell is wrong with Americans? Why is there no Real opposition. And they were able to see it from what they see and hear, that it's coming out of the Democratic Party or that's coming out of the Democratic establishment, that there is no organized opposition. They find that to be strange because organized opposition is kind of built into many European governments and their political culture is certainly after the war. And so there being no real. There's a lot of instability in the United States, but there's no real leadership in opposition to the Trump regime. Now, even almost a year into this, that's the other thing that they find strange. But then again, they're not anywhere different from where you and I are.
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Yeah. And, and I think their perception is, you know, not only do they have, like, you look at like, how the French respond to overstep, and we're seeing all these Eastern European, I mean, massive protests. I mean, entire cities covered by especially young people who have finally decided that we're not doing this, which is very, reminds me very much of protests in the past with the civil rights movement and those movements being led by the young people, which I think they'll continue to be again because young people are aware that their future is on the line.
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Yep.
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And I think with Europe. Europe is so much more in tune with the threat that Russia poses because they're on the doorstep and they know who Putin is. They. And it's right there. That's their next door neighbor. I think Americans are allowing themselves to unplug from that danger a little bit because it seems so far away and it's. I think we see the same thing with the American response to what's going on in Palestine. It's so far away that I don't have to sit in the discomfort of it because it's those people. It's not here. Versus for other neighboring countries. The reality and the threat that allowing a genocide poses is much, much bigger. And with your upcoming book, because I really want to center. When is the release? I know it's available for Pre order now.
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B
June 2nd.
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June 2nd. Okay. So I would love to do a little bit of. Because I started following you on Instagram because you're a public historian. And that's one of the things I do love about social media is that experts like you and scholars and medical professionals can come give information that otherwise may be a little bit harder for people to access. But I would love to know your story. You're writing about the resistance history specifically, like, how do we fight back in situations like this, in times of, of evil and overstep and Abuse. But what got you on that path? Like I would love to know a little bit of how you grew up. What made you decide to study history the way you did and choose the career you did? I would love to hear the ramp that has led to this book.
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Well, I, I grew up in a conservative household in Baltimore and we were a military family and, and that was our way out of our, the life that we were in is that everybody was expected to go into the military. There was no real tradition of going to college or doing that. That's not kind of the world that we lived in. The whole thing for, for our family and our cousins and everything else was we did the same thing our uncles and fathers and GR and great grandfathers did is that you go into the army or go, you go into the military, you serve, you do your time and then you get out and you figure out what's next or for, in the best case scenario for a lot of folks, you would stay in and just make a career out of the military. So, you know, my dad was, was in the Navy and I have two brothers who were in the Marine Corps and my sister was in the army, was in the Air Force and, and I went into the army and so it was that. But I remained, I started off as, you know, this 18 year old kid, 17 year old kid. When I went into the army and didn't know anything and started off as a registered Republican. My first vote was for Bush and Quail. So how absurd was that? And so I kind of went through that. But what happened was when I was in the, when I was in the army, I was encouraged to go to college, which wasn't something I had really thought too much about doing because we didn't have any money and there really wasn't a, you know, people, I think a lot of people need that kind of social and family infrastructure to understand just what that means. So for our family that was, that was a really big deal and we kind of didn't know quite how to manage that and it certainly wasn't our tradition. And so I, but I, I took that advice and I, and there was a, and I got out and went to college and it pretty much changed everything. Education will do that, education will do that, education will do that. It's insane how it was just, and it wasn't indoctrination, it wasn't sort of Marxist faculty, it wasn't any kind of liberal grandstanding, it was just education, it was just information. And I wanted to be a historian, I wanted to Sort of follow. I had always been interested in American history. I had grown up loving Colonial Williamsburg and we're taking to go to the battlefield at Gettysburg all the time. So I grew up in a family who appreciated that history, although from a particular perspective. And then when I got into college I kind of realized that the history that I understood growing up was not the history that that was the actual history. And then so I wanted to study more about that. But I had a. I had an advisor in college who was not terribly happy with his career choice as becoming a professional, an academic historian, teaching. And so his advice to me was to go to law school and be a. Be an amateur historian on a lawyer salary rather than a. Rather than a professional historian on a historian salary. So I did that. I went to law school at Tulane in New Orleans. And while I was there, Tulane's a great place and this is well before Katrina. So New Orleans was a different place then.
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Yeah.
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And I hated it. I hated it. I wanted to study constitutional law and I started studying it and I realized that constitutional law had nothing to do with the Constitution. Had nothing to do with Constitution. Constitutional law is, as every American needs to know, has nothing to do with the Constitution. It has everything to do with just what the court says about it. It because of the United States absurd way of embracing the Constitution without change. Everything is this game of interpretation and storytelling rather than actual change. So law school hated me as much as I hated it. I got a part time job working for this Senate campaign in Louisiana for this candidate who had no hope of winning. But I needed something to do. I was interested in politics and this candidate had no chance of winning. Louisiana's primary is free for all. There were like 12 candidates running and it was enough of a small campaign that a know nothing kid could actually get a job writing press releases and speeches, sort of helping out. Well, we got to the end of the race and this is in 96 and she was within shouting distance. Wow. So I postponed my last and the campaign getting bigger and bigger and bigger and there were more resources and I kept moving up in the campaign. So I was one of the candidates, Mary Landrieu one of her. I became one of her senior campaign staffers. And then the primary came and we finished in the top two. And then the general came and she won. I left law school to go to D.C. and be a staffer on a U.S. senators office. And so I stayed there, stayed there for a year and then I went to work in the House of Representatives on the House Appropriations Committee for a year. I mean, you wanted the story, you're getting it.
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I love the story. This is exactly why. Because this. This gives me so much context for where the book's coming from.
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Well, see, there you go. And then I went to. I. I went to run a congressional campaign in south central Pennsylvania believing, and this is sort of this trajectory, believing, that essentially what American voters needed in a. In a really conservative area in south central Pennsylvania, Gettysburg and York and. And southern Cumberland county, that the reason why Democrats had not won there since, I don't know, Thaddeus Stevens, that was because they just simply hadn't gotten the American story. I was. I was all into the Aaron Sorkin, Ken Burns way of thinking about everything, and I thought, well, it's just they hadn't voted. They had always voted Republican and conservative because they hadn't gotten the full American story about what the Founding meant, what the American experiment was really about. And damn it, I was the guy to go ahead and bring it to them in this campaign. That was essentially a civics lesson. Well, then I got a really nice. I got a really nice lesson in transactional politics with the worst kind of primary campaign and with our candidate against this guy who was. Just. Who was. Who was just wretched. And I. I kind of made it my mission in life that if I never did anything in the world, if I kept that guy out of the United States Congress, then I was. Then I would consider it all a win. So I just, like, jettisoned everything else, and I was like, no, if anything, I'm gonna beat this guy. So. So we. We did end up just wiping the floor with him. But then, you know, it was a district in which the registration is like 70, 30 Republican to Democrat, and even those Democrats are conservative Democrats, and they were kind of not up for it. They were not up for the civics lesson, and the candidate was not raising money, and he was finding it tough to raise money. And so we got our heads handed to us in the general election, as we should have done. And then I went back to D.C. and I went into. I was hired by the League of Conservation Voters to be their director of political communication and then their national communications director, and we worked with the DNC on environmental politics. And so I was their spokesperson and communications director for a couple of years. And it was then that I sort of went back to this idea that I'd been. That had in my head ever since working in Congress, thinking that, well, Congress is kind of applied history, right? Everything is about how we work with The Constitution, how American politics is supposed to work, what campaigns are supposed to be, what are the better angels of our nature, and how does that fit into the way everybody relates to their government? And then this. This annual pageant of democracy that we go through. And I wanted to know more about that because it struck me that it wasn't quite fitting. And this was particularly after Bush versus Gore.
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Yeah. Oh, I remember. I remember that. I mean, I was little, but I remember that. And growing up, and my. My family was friends with the Cheneys, so, like, we were just. It was just in the midst of it. And. Yep. Anyways, that. Yeah, that brought back some memories, just.
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Of Gore and exactly that whole discussion and even the role of the Supreme Court. But I remember I had been so interest. Interested in the actual relationship between the founding past and that present that I had reached out to a couple of my favorite writers, a couple of my favorite historians, one of whom was Pauline Mayer. And we had started back when you could only communicate versus occasional emails, no texting and no frequent email. And so when I remember the day that the Bush versus Gore decision came down from the Supreme Court, that she sent me an email saying, the Republic died this day. Wow. And that's Pauline Mayer saying that. And I. That blew me away. And I thought about that for a long time. That really impressed me. And I thought, well, then and there, that I wanted to actually figure this out.
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Yeah.
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So, Pauline, the only other. The only other historian I was talking to at the time was, I think, the greatest of all historians of the American Revolution, Jack Greene, and who was at Hopkins. And he said, well, if you want to do this, why don't you come work with me at Hopkins? Come get your PhD, come work with me and be my last graduate student.
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Wow. Wow.
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And I thought, well, yeah, and I thought, okay, okay. Because at the same time, and I don't think I've told many people this story, at the same, I was really close to John Kerry and the John Kerry campaign. And so at the same time, I was offered a job to go start working on his presidential campaign on his press team. And so I had a decision to make. Was I going to stay in politics and take the job on the Kerry campaign and go that route, which is a fairly traditional cycle. You go that route at that level, you're just pretty much going to stay at that level. You'll either go from the administration to the Hill, to a nonprofit, back to campaigns, back to the administration of the Hill. It's just the same kind of thing. Or I could leave and I could go to graduate school. So I left and went to graduate school, and I got on this path and I had a wonderful experience, but it was an experience of deconstruction from the very beginning with Jack. Jack's view was a lot like Pauline's, but Jack's view was that you have to get out of. Most of American history is written from a nationalist perspective.
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It is.
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It's written in a kind of apologetics that just reinforces the greatness of the Founding, and that everything in our history is generally written from the standpoint of justifying the Founding, rehabilitating the Founding, celebrating the Founding, or believing just teleologically, that the Founding was somehow preordained, that the Revolution led to the Declaration, led to the Constitution, led to the United States in this kind of inevitable strain. And we have to look at it all like that. We can't really question that or understand that in context, because we have to stay within this box. But his opinion and the way his method was to reject that entirely, not to purposefully write against it, but just put it to the side. Go into that world, focus on the kind of. Focus on history as a series of problems that you want to solve, or at least questions that you need to answer. And I think that any academic historian does this fundamentally. But Jack, was this on. Turbocharge that. Focus on just that question, and go wherever that evidence leads you. But you've got to immerse yourself deeply in that moment to understand that context, to actually understand the nature of the problem, see whether or not it is in fact a problem, or is it just a problem that other people say is a problem, but you understand that only by getting in the shoes of people who were in that moment, understand it in their terms. So it's a project of both sympathy and empathy across centuries. But you've got to go. You got to follow the evidence wherever it leads. And you can't stop at an artificial line drawn on a map and say, well, that's just American history. I can't go beyond that. No. If you pull back in a broader lens, in this case Atlantic history, then you've got to look at it in every single way that influences it. And so when I was interested in being a kind of contrarian, I was interested. I wanted to know about the Patriots and the Founding and the Revolution. By looking at the people who said it wasn't a good idea at the time, by looking at the Loyalists, I thought that I would get a better idea, or at least an idea, a Particular idea of what the Patriots were trying to do. And by looking at what the people who said that they didn't want to go that route were trying to do. Yeah, because I was doing a review of the Declaration of Independence, and at the very end, there's that line that Jefferson puts in there about, and to this end, we're pledging our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. And with. With. With Jack's pushing, I sort of took a look at that. It Was that true? Were they really doing that? And if they weren't, who was? Or. Or just pull out if you're an asking the question, who was doing that? Who were. Who was following their. Their lives, their fortunes or their sacred under. Whatever that is. It sounds good. You know, it sounds great, right?
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To.
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To whatever end. So if. Because if these are questions about fundamental principles, about principles of equality and rights and about destabilizing governments, about destroying relationships in order to pursue them, what does that really mean? And to whom? And to get down deep into that context, to try to unpack that. So I started chasing that and started understanding what actually was going on and to whom. And so I kept pursuing that. And in getting more deeply into that moment, I spent a lot of time Colonial Williamsburg, because I was focusing on Virginia, and I spent a lot of time there with fellowships, and I spent a lot of time there trying to understand how that broadly related to a more public engagement with it. And so right as I was finishing my degree, Colonial Williamsburg asked me to come and be their historian.
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Wow.
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Cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I did that. That was my first job at a graduate school. So I was there, that historian. I was their historian for four years because. And I. But I was coming out of that as an academic historian, which is a whole different ballgame from a public historian, an academic historian. You know, again, they. We pursue the past as a series of problems that we're trying to resolve or questions that we want answered. And normally that's in conversation with a small group of people who are looking at the same problems, half of whom are alive, half of whom are probably dead historians. And you want to contribute to that discussion, but you want to contribute in a way that. That deploys scholarly methodology and a scholarly mechanism, a monograph, an article that's peer reviewed, that you put on it, that you contribute, you put on a shelf, that's your contribution, and then you move on to the next one. But it's never really about engaging any other questions about why it matters, who it matters to, as long as you're making the argument that this does matter to the field of historians, then it's worth pursuing. But I ran into a different thing at Colonial Williamsburg, which was the public.
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Yeah. That is a different animal.
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Holy cabooses. It blew me away not believing that everybody going back to that congressional campaign, that I got my hat handed to me and that what people understood about the American Revolution and what people understood about the founding and about these founding fathers and about all of the dynamics, all the people involved, enslaved people was light years different from what I had just spent six years in graduate school studying. Yeah. And I needed to understand that gap and why that gap existed. And then I did that by understanding that I was in no way a public historian, that what I needed to do is shut up and listen to people. So I, for six months at cw, I shut up and I started just pretty much following people around. I went on every tour. I would follow guests. I was creepy. I would just follow guests all the.
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Time in the background of everybody.
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Yeah, no, that was me. You were a colonial Williamsburg between 2010 and 2014 and saw this egg headed guy with a tie on in the back of the room with a clipboard. That was me just listening and listening to them, listening to their questions, watching their faces, seeing that moment when there was something that they didn't know, that they now knew that something clicked. And I'm sure that you've seen it with all the people that you talk to. That moment when people kind of get something.
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Yep.
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That's intoxicating.
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It is.
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That's. It's a. It's amazing feeling when you see people that. That a flip switch, that a switch flips for them. And. And then when you make that next sleep, that. Hold on. This is not just something that, that they're interested in. That's engaging them. This is something that matters. They now understand something a little bit more about democracy. Yep. Understand a little bit more about the oppression of enslaved people and how they fit into the founding. They now know better what the Declaration of Independence means, and they can sort of apply that in their life. I mean, as I, you know, teach my students all the time that history, first and foremost, is a shield against bullshit that people throw at you when they want to try to manipulate you to do things that are against your interest. So they will use your history and identity to play games with them.
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Yep, absolutely.
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And to see people start building those defenses and then deploying them by understanding, well, how do I relate to that? How can I step into the shoes of those people and whoever they are and actually understand the past on their own terms, but then make the next leap, which is, how does that in fact apply to my life? Is it apples to apples? Is it apples to oranges? And to leave that experience changed a bit and changed enough that they want to come back and they want to learn more. And that, that really turned me. It just. It just turned me on to the. To the brilliance of public history as a practice. That this idea that. That our goal as public historians a is to understand history not as a series of facts and figures or even as a set of unresolved questions. Public historians look at history pretty much as a set of stories that people tell themselves about the past. Past. It's all about narrative. That everything, even academic history, informs the stories that people tell about the past. But it is in that narrative, in all the forms that people tell those stories, in all the kinds of media that people get, or even as a conversation they've had with a grandmother around the Thanksgiving table about their past. All past is a set of stories. And so if you understand that as being the way that people actually gain their information and gain their understanding and shape their perception, then that's a powerful way to start to see how the past influences people every day. And that sort of led me to really want to engage people in that way, but in increasingly broad levels. And that's really what made me excited about being a public historian and doing that work. Not writing for the seminar room, but you're writing for not just the digital screen. You're just writing always for the people who are right in front of you and having to go to where they are.
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A
Well, and that's what's. I so agree with that. That story often matters so much more than fact as far as being able to access a bridge with people, because everything is a story. You know, that's one of the reasons that music resonates so much with people or television. Like, we all connect with stories. And so whatever story someone's getting about history is going to impact how they perceive their country. It's going to impact how they see certain groups of people. And I love the phrase that you used, which was historical deconstruction, where you come in with a set of ideas. That was a huge part of my deconstruction from Christian nationalism was I had been taught. I went to all Christian nationalist schools and I. It's funny because we talked about education and it wasn't these Marxist, you know, teachers. I went to the third most conservative major university in the country and still came out deconstructing because I had simply gained more information, and I had learned how to think differently. What. What was some of the things that you remember learning that you found really shocking, that kind of maybe shattered your perception of American history a little bit.
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It was easier to go along with the Patriots than it was to oppose them.
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A
Okay, can you give me some context on that?
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B
Well, understanding that the Patriots actually had gained almost complete control of all the institutions and frameworks that mattered in the colonies by 1774. 1770, certainly by 1775, that you can explain a lot of the lack of an opposition by how deeply the Patriot movement, which was still only a fraction of the population, was able to gain control over all of the public mechanisms that mattered, all of the newspapers, everything that mattered. They were able to sort of steamroll any kind of opposition. So it was never a fair fight fight. It was never a marketplace of ideas that the Patriots. And you can use loaded terms like propaganda, and you can also overgeneralize about what the Patriots were. But when you're talking about any kind of opposition to the Patriots, anybody who was saying, hold down, hold on, slow down. Are you. What you're really. Is what you're really saying true? Is armed opposition? What is really left, all that is left in terms of solving this problem that is essentially a political problem, are the Patriots really being enslaved? Is that authority really being deployed here? That conversation never really happened. And so what did happen was the Patriots ability to control all of the mechanisms of communication, to keep any effective, organized opposition from even forming ever. And so the way that they responded, also forcefully to any kind of vocal opposition was enough to really. To really ruin lives. And when you understand. And that's what led me to try to learn more about those who opposed anyway, why act in ways that are against your own interest? Why. Why get. Why give up your life, your fortune, whatever, your sacred honor is? Why. Why do that? You certainly don't do it because you're loyal to a king.
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Yeah, that. You don't know that. Like, you know, I was like, that's.
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That's insane. Nobody does that. And I sort of had to study it, sort of. Pause. Hold on. Let me. Let me look at it. Maybe they do.
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A
Maybe they do. Maybe they did. Maybe people do.
- [33:44]
B
Maybe they love kings. Maybe it's a king thing. Because all the. A lot of historians say that, well, they love to the king. And they're like, no, this is the late Enlightenment. These people cared about representative government. They cared about Constitution. They cared about the Constitution. They Cared about equal rights. The Enlightenment did impact everybody. It was a thing. It was in all the papers. Everybody loved this stuff. And so why? Why? I desperately wanted to answer that question because it was that, that one thing that it was so much easier for people just to go along with the Patriots because the amount of control they had and because the fear of retribution that people had had of acting against them. So it was so easy. And so this idea, and you run into it a lot of times now, that the other thing that really impacted me was the idea that the Patriots themselves had nothing to lose. That British authority in the colonies was so weak and the interest of the British government in any kind of real retribution for. For the patriot movement was so compromised that this idea that there was a blacklist and the King George was going to hang them. None of it's true.
- [34:54]
A
Wow.
- [34:54]
B
None of it's true. Yes, they were declared in a state of rebellion, but never was there any blacklist. Never was there any stated plan to arrest them. There was no even clear stated plan to arrest Daniel Adams and John Hancock as part of the Lexington and Congress. Mythology never happened. It's all part of this broader American mythology that builds out of it. That, that the story that has to be bought by people is that the stakes were so high that this lives, fortune and sacred honor thing was so real that they were all going to hang if they did not. If they. If in. If they. If they did not oppose the Crown and if they. But by sticking to their own principles, they were going to hang as a result of that. No. When you realize that, no, they weren't. Yeah, no, they weren't.
- [35:45]
A
And it. But it does create a hell of a kind of a mythological underdog story. Yeah, it does.
- [35:51]
B
But you need it for the mythology. You need the stakes to be that high for what they were doing to actually form an equal weight. Oh my God, they were all going to be hanged. What they were doing must have been so important. And then if you decrease the stakes, that actually they weren't risking a whole lot. Mainly because the British government thought that this was going to be until the very end. The British government thought that this was going to be able to be negotiated. And even if it wasn't, even if there was some small scale military action that the colonies were so important economically to the British imperial system that they could not risk destroying that investment. They wanted to go ahead and end it quickly, get it back on side quickly, get those trade networks running again and do it without damaging this thing, this major financial contribution that was what was going on in the colonies. It's those interests that was driving most of parliament's response, except when they got their backup about Boston and the Tea Party, which is legit abuse of authority. But still, it is a narrow example. So when you realize those things that are kind of the bulwarks of the patriot mythology, that it's easier to go along with the patriots than it is to oppose them and that the patriots weren't risking a whole lot, then you start taking a different look about at least what the war for independence really was about. And so those are pretty much two of the things.
- [37:13]
A
That's incredible. I have a question on that. But before I do, I'm going to announce Our 1st of 2 Mid Show Sponsor breaks. If you would like to hear these episodes ad free, you can become an ally starting at $4 a month on patreon.com montemater they are always ad free and you get episodes early. So you mentioned you get to learn what the war for independence was really about. In your opinion, what was it really about? Like, if we destroy this narrative that it's these, these brave men of resistance and men of principle who are endangering their lives, what's it really about?
- [37:47]
B
Well, it's really about political independence from Great Britain. But it. That doesn't mean that it's about establishing country that is. That is for equal rights for all. But what. All of that can sound very cynical and people are like, oh, man, what are you saying about that? It's depressing. I mean, my book, it's a cranky book. It's a downer. But I'm a cranky historian. But where I go to, and this is again what I was always taught, when you don't know, go to the people, go to what they said. Go to your sources, rely on them, use their words, use their language. Try to understand what you meant by it. And I was really gripped when I encountered the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, 1826 and the years leading up to it. America then was a little bit like America now in the sense that they really had no idea what was the war for independence even 50 years later that they wanted to know. Well, what was this thing that we call the revolution? We celebrate July 4th every year and we kind of know the fact of it is to celebrate independence from Great Britain. And there's George Washington who's supposed to be great and King George is supposed to be bad. Apparently we don't like monarchy. Okay, that's great. But we kind of don't know what it's about. Like, so and so people started writing to John Adams. He's one of the few of the patriots who were still. Who was still alive by then. And people were running to him asking, well, so what was it about? Tell us, tell us, tell us. Because everybody's getting ready for 1826, and people have book deals coming out. There are newspapers who want to special. Who want to print special editions. They want to focus on, wow, this is the 50th anniversary. Let's revisit what happened. So what happened? And they asked John Adams. And John Adams, in his first letters, was also very cranky. He was like, nah, you don't get it. You don't get it. It's not anything that you say it is. He was so mad. Looking at what past for historians by the 1820s were saying about the Revolution. He was like, you're never going to know. You conflate the revolution with the war, with the Constitution. These are all different things. You're never going to know. And I don't have time to tell you. I'm old and tired. Go away. Then he writes to Thomas Jefferson. He says, you know what? I'm getting asked this question, and I might be wrong, but these people are getting it wrong. I think, what do you think? And then Jefferson writes back saying, yeah, no, you're right. I'll never know. Gonna get it wrong. Everything's lost. Bye.
- [40:26]
A
And they were just like, I'm not doing this again. Yeah.
- [40:30]
B
So Adam started to think about it a little bit more clearly. Adam's had his moments of insanity, but for the most part, he's a thoughtful guy, which is why you can kind of rely on him. Right? Jefferson's a chameleon through his life, so you never know what he's saying. But Adams. Adams was, except for when he was president and signing the Alien and Sedition Acts, was otherwise a decent guy. At least he was a thoughtful guy. And so when he thought about it, he agreed with Benjamin Rush in saying that and with a lot of others of his contemporaries who weren't around anymore by then, but who had said it at the time, that the revolution was different from the war, that the revolution was what changed in the hearts of minds of Americans. Well before shots were ever fired at Lexington and Concord, those changes and the way people saw themselves, the way that people thought about their relationships with each other, the way that they then thought about their relationships between themselves and the British government, that all of those things were not just well, underway but finished by the time you get to April 1775. Because they have to be complete before somebody pulls a trigger. Yeah. So the American Revolution as being this, this American inflection of the Enlightenment and this question about human rights and a question about the value of a human being had worked. What it did on the Americans. And the way that the British government responded to the end of the Seven Years War and all of those pressures that it placed on them, mostly financial, but also geopolitically, that all of the changes that were made in their political relationship, that all of that really happened between 1763 and 1775 and that's done. That's the American Revolution. And why it might not have been fully completed by 1775. That the idea of these questions about rights and principles and liberties, that process was mostly done by 75 and after that is a question of implementation. But we said that, listen, that's not the war. The War for Independence is about a coalition of 13 loosely associated colonies that each declare independence for their own reasons, based upon their own dynamics. And then they orchestrate an alliance to achieve what they think is the only reliable end to that, to secure those rights that they have articulated, which is independence. That's its own thing. And so that's its own story about how those 13 colonies then defined enough in common that don't have anything in common, but they're able to cobble together enough in common to achieve this joint goal of independent independence under kind of loose association that turns into our confederation. That's the war. And that's about again, building these coalitions, establishing international relationships about gaining the kind of capacity to fight the British. And then essentially let the French fight your battles. Because you can't beat the British. The French need to fight the British. So let the French fight the British. Reignite the law. The second Hundred Years War that they've been fighting for so long, just reignite that. Let them fight it out and then let us sort of like come in on the back end and be like, no, exactly. And then claim that we did it all on our own.
- [43:42]
A
Exactly. Same with World War II. You know, there's all this rhetoric or, you know, back to back world war champs and America just skated in right at the end. And we did help. It's not that we didn't do anything. All of my grandparents are World War II vets, but we did not, you know, Britain carried the bulk of that, but we like to pretend that we came in and saved.
- [44:03]
B
Yeah. Not for the Battle of Britain. The rest of this doesn't matter. Yeah, my dad was in the Navy in World War II. But that idea that Adams articulated was, okay, that's the war for Independence. That's its own thing. That's about political independence. That is. It's kind of related to the revolution and is a product of the revolution. But it's. But it's not the only product. And it's certainly not an inevitable product because nobody, as Adams points out, as Jefferson pointed out, in agreement, nobody in even early 1776 is thinking about independence and certainly not thinking about creating a nation. Nobody's thinking about creating a United States consolidated federal nation state. And so the war needs to be understood on its own terms. And then the Constitution as being, again, just one outcome of independence and not even a necessary outcome of independence, is its own story. And so Adams was upset that all of that had been conflated into one narrative. Yeah, when they are different things, they're different actors, they're different dynamics, they're different events. And you don't understand them if you just push them all together and talk about it as the American founding. That's not how it worked. And he was. And he started unpacking that in more letters to a couple of correspondents to try to Try to have them understand how all of this. This worked out or didn't work out. How you needed to understand what was going on in each of the colonies before you understood anything that they possibly shared. That, as Adams put it, that enabled 13 clocks to strike as once, which is a lovely turn of phrase to describe independence. But Adam's point was that they never were in time before that and they never were in time after that. And you've got to understand what got them to that one point that they then went past each other in the war. So it was that formulation that Adams put up there and again, that Rush agreed with and that Jefferson agreed with, that the revolution, when we talk about it, and this idea, this sincere conversation about rights and liberties, that does not exclude enslaved people, that does not exclude black rights, that includes all of these people engaging these ideas. That one particular formation formulation of it was what the New England patriots did. But Virginia patriots had used a lot of the same words, but had a completely different idea about what those things meant. And so we've got to understand those moving parts that there are, in a real sense, celebratory about the way that rights are conceived of. But to automatically take those ideas and insert them into the Declaration of Independence or to insert them into the language that is wrapped around the Revolutionary War ends up doing both a disservice because you then get away from. One of the more revealing projects that I ever engaged in was a forum in which we were all asked to. And I think everybody should do this. We were all asked to read the original state constitutions that were written during the Rebel.
- [47:09]
A
That's fascinating.
- [47:11]
B
Just to answer the question. So everybody just start from the same basis. Read all of them. And again, there are only 13 of them. 14 of them, if you include Vermont, and some of them are very short. And if you want an articulation about actually what was going on in each of the colonies, what they thought needed, they could. If they're turning the world upside down, if they're beginning the world anew, creating their own governments, then what are they doing? Take a deep look at that and see the kind of things that they are leaving the same mostly everything. The kind of things they are changing. Turning over a lot of offices that had been appointed into elected. But then what they're really changing who can vote. And they're making it even more narrow in a lot of circumstances. And for the first time, questions about religion and Protestantism enter into these constitutions and you start thinking about. Hold on. We talk a lot about freedom of religion, but understanding that it was freedom to exercise religion, fine. But not a freedom to actually participate equality in the body politic. In South Carolina, you couldn't hold office if you weren't. And if you did not sign an oath saying that you not only believed in the Christian God, but that you believed in the revealed truth of the New Testament. And you know exactly what that means. Yep. I mean, you had to do that in several states. That is a very particular kind of Protestantism.
- [48:34]
A
Yes.
- [48:34]
B
That you are tying.
- [48:36]
A
Very exclusionary.
- [48:37]
B
It's very exclusionary. So if people start understanding that, then they start thinking we've got to go ahead and destroy this notion that America is a Christian nation in terms of Christian nationalism. But we also have to see where in fact it was true. So we can see where it was. And it's looking at those kind of things to kind of see, okay, this is what I think should have happened, but here's in fact what didn't happen. And so these questions that we infuse in the founding moment as being all of these questions about rights that we think that people are kind of running with as a result of the revolution isn't what's happening. That's why people in France were so excited about what was going on in America during the Revolution because they'd been reading the pamphlets, they've been reading all of these articulations about rights and liberties and freedoms and how we can reconsider the relationship of the government to the governed. And these were very exciting pamphlets, particularly for people in France who were thinking about fighting against their own monarchy. And then they started reading the first constitutions and they started realizing that this isn't doing what it is they said they were going to do. They were strikingly disappointed, which is why they wanted to go a more clear route with putting together the French Revolution. They actually wanted it to actually follow these ideas to their logical end, not have them be moderated and modulated into these kind of compromise situations. So they really thought the American patriots let them down. And I think. Think taking that seriously is not only interesting, but I think it's instructive. But you can get back to. In terms of the drag, right? Yeah, we can get back to a moment in which people are taking those ideas seriously. Now, the conflict with Britain might have been constructed that Britain was not focused on enslaving patriots or stealing their property. The problematic part is when they get after the Boston Tea Party, when Parliament closes the port of Boston, that's a problem problem. But that's a different kind of problem than what the broader rhetoric of the patriot movement is really espousing in terms of that kind of abuse of authority. But no matter whether that's real or not, that reconception of rights and responsibilities was real. And that's a major contribution that is something that we still learn from and benefit from today. But what we have done is that we have taken that language and we have infused its value into the war and the Constitution and these institutions and as therefore somehow uniquely representative of those ideas, rather than just being certain products of it, certain results of it. And not even the only ones. Those ideas are what informed Canada, they what informed the Bahamas, they what informed most of the Atlantic world. And we can see how they worked in different ways in those different places as kind of alternative histories in our own time, real ones that operated and emerged from the same set of historical facts. And in the case of Canada and the Bahamas, by some of the same people. Loyalists went to Canada, Loyalists went to the Bahamas. They created those countries in their modern sense. The Black Loyalists are the main influence on the nation of the nation state of the Bahamas right now. The Black Loyalists are part of their origin story with. With complete with principles of democracy and representative government. And the same thing happened in Canada. How does that happen if The Loyalists are chasing after a king.
- [52:10]
A
Yeah.
- [52:11]
B
No, they're not. They, they are taking these ideas that are part of these, this Enlightenment world and they are applying them, they're just not applying them in the exclusionary ways that the patriots did. And to understand that in kind of these parallel ways, the way that, the way how Canada addressed slavery, how its Constitution developed, the way the Bahamas developed, and you look at the way the United States developed, at the same time, you see some pretty different narrative strains.
- [52:38]
A
And what's interesting too, like you were mentioning the Constitutions that when you look at the history of religious exclusion. Right. Because that's used as such a trigger point in today's world. You know, the war on Christmas, the war on Christians, all of these things. When you look at that pre establishment of the United States, like the Christian persecution was coming from other Christians. It was Christians who were ostracizing and excluding other denominations of Christians. And the reason that the Constitution had to have a clause saying you cannot require a religious oath or a religious kind of prerequisite to hold office was because so many states were doing that.
- [53:14]
B
Yeah.
- [53:14]
A
But it was the Christians who were doing that to other Christians. And of course only free white men. But it was extremely, extremely narrow. And I think one of the things, because I do this with, when I teach people about like the Bible and we talk about scholarship, it's like you have to go back to what were those people experiencing at that time. Understand that this document was not written for you. It was not written for a 2025American. So when you put your own values, your own views and your own bias on it, you're by inherently misinterpreting it. And so I think a lot of, I love that there's that, that 50 year period where we get to see Adams and Jefferson say this is what it was about. This is something totally different. And I, and I really believe that the French were the ones who took what the patriot movement said they were and actually became that movement.
- [54:08]
B
Yeah, that's true.
- [54:09]
A
And I think that there's a huge reason that, you know, we look at France and there's protest culture is such a part of, of their personhood because of how their revolution went. Because it was actually founded on these principles of liberty. And in coming from a country where the bottom 98% didn't own anything.
- [54:29]
B
Yeah, yeah. And they. It's not just a culture of opposition, it's a culture of resistance.
- [54:34]
A
Yes.
- [54:35]
B
It's a culture of making sure that if a government is not responsive to the people Then you withdraw the consent you have given to it and you change. And if they won't do it on their own, you will make them. That's a tradition, and that keeps a government honest. It should have been what kept the United States honest, but it didn't, which is kind of what a resistance history of the United States is all about. But you're absolutely right with the French. And so it's not just an opposition culture, Monty. I think it's a resistance culture. They know what to do, and their governments know that. The people will not just stop at any kind of, like, accommodation, that if. If it's important enough, we can go on to the next version of this constitution. That's fine. The next republic can be right around the corner. Yeah. And we can do better than this if it's not working for the people. And that's a. That is a. That's a resistance tradition worth celebrating. And you're absolutely right as to its antecedents.
- [55:29]
A
And what I love about that. Excuse me, is growing up how I did. Like, the French are always demonized when I was growing up. Like, they're weak and they're this. And I'm like, okay, well, they won. They won the Revolutionary War for us. You know, it's like. And they have. I love. And I loved the. The opening ceremony for the Olympics in France and how they honored their history, because there is. They have this grit as a people that we are not going to tolerate mistreatment. We're not going to tolerate overreach. We are going to show up at your job, and we're going to make you make changes. And I think that it's really inspiring. And, you know, and even the stories, you know, behind the Statue of Liberty and what the French believed America was doing until they realized that's not what we were doing at all.
- [56:13]
B
Yeah.
- [56:13]
A
We were making it more exclusive, and we were doing the same thing we're doing now in the sense of shuffling power and wealth upward.
- [56:19]
B
Yeah. Yeah. And. And that's one of the reasons why, to really put together when I was asked to write the book and I had to figure out whether I was the right guy to write it.
- [56:27]
A
Yeah.
- [56:28]
B
It took a bit of time because this is not an easy book to write. It's not an easy topic to explore, and you gotta. You can't do it in a glib way. I couldn't just. Just dash off 12 chapters and say, I'm done. I really had to think about this, especially in this moment. And so I had to really think about, well, what is resistance? It's all about abusive authority. What's abusive authority? What's abusive authority? Where we are, what happened to other places. And I realized that that kind of analysis hadn't happened for the United States. So I had to look at places where it had happened. And so I looked at France. I looked deeply at France's opposition culture and looked particularly about what happened in World War II. That's kind of the concentrated resistance moments, the period of the worst kind of abusive authority, the greatest. The greatest abuse. And therefore, you could look at the way opposition turns in protest turns into opposition turns into resistance in a very short period, in a very concentrated way. And to see how that dynamic works, particularly in France and the way that the French people did and didn't respond and. And where resistance leaders and resistance participants got their motivation, how their networks worked, where did their resilience come from, what kind of principles did they live by and have to live by not knowing how any of it was going to end. And it was different looking at it in, say, Denmark or the Netherlands or France and being able to understand how all of that worked in France, France and how so much of it did come from the fact that they had this historical tradition of saying no to abuse of authority. That comes from largely. That comes from attacking the Bastille, that comes from toppling Louis xvi. That comes from all of that. And to see how that tradition can remain kind of alive and well even if latent, in order to be burst into flame by 1941, 1942, to be able to give them that, using their history, to be able to give them the kind of inspiration they needed. They all adopted. So many of these French resistance cells, adopted names of French revolutionaries in order to remind themselves of that moment. And that was. And using kind of the iconography of the time to give themselves an identity is fascinating to learn about. And also understanding that that doesn't exist in the United States.
- [58:51]
A
It really doesn't. It's. It's. We are unfortunately. And unfortunately, because I think in a lot of ways, the indoctrination has been really, really well done.
- [59:01]
B
It has been.
- [59:01]
A
Yeah, it has been. So a lot of people don't realize that. They don't know. And it has created, again, growing up, how I did it. It's created this rhetoric of, we're always the good guy, we're always the underdog. I was reading. Did you read the book? One Day Everyone will have been against this by Omar El Akkad. My best read of 2025. I know, you were writing a book, so you were busy. But he talks about how, you know, because he was born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, now has lived here and in Canada. And so he's. He's giving. He talks. It's. It's really about what's going on in Palestine and the American response to it. But he talks about the movie Red dawn, which I hadn't thought of in years, and he's like, it's this, this. It's this American trope that shows up in our movies where we're the underdog against the impossible enemy, whoever the enemy is. It could be the Nazis, it could be the Soviet Union. And he's like, but also in the same movie, we're so powerful that there's no way that we can be overcome.
- [60:00]
B
Yeah.
- [60:01]
A
And it has created, I think, a sense of complacency, being taught this version of history, because Americans have this idea that even if we're the underdog, we're always going to win because we always come out on top, because we're always righteous and we're always justified. And of course, Christian nationalism attaches God to that, but it creates a sense of complacency and safety that, well, this is gonna work out no matter what. When. That's not how that works. And even the French Revolution was long and it was bloody and it was messy, but because they were willing to dig in and entrench themselves is the reason that it worked in such a different way than it did here.
- [60:40]
B
And the fact that it was an actual revolution, it wasn't just a political change, it was a social revolution, it was a cultural revolution. They abolished the church, they abolished the calendar. I mean, this is an actual revolution. And even as violent and bloody as it was, the fact that they were establishing and living by these principles, yeah, it got out of hand with the extremism, but they established these principles that. That run the world over. And it's an extraordinary moment, especially when you compare it, when you compare it to the American Revolution. And it's not that the United States doesn't have a resistance history. When you talk about the indoctrination, it's that. Is that you. Otherwise, I guess, there wouldn't be a book. It's just that these resistance moments have been so beaten in to the broader. Beaten under the broader mythology. This broader indoctrination that you talk about, starting with George Bancroft, the chief of the Christian nationalists, that. The arch Christian nationalist Bancroft, that this is. We have to hold all actual resistance as being illegitimate after 1780, nine after the Constitution, because the Constitution solved all problems, all resistance actually must just go through permitted channels established by the founders. And if you don't achieve change by going through those permitted channels, then you just have to be okay with that. That that's a symbol of the system working and that you just need to be a happy warrior. You need to be a good loser and then learn to fight another day and not recognize that people are still being oppressed, that inequality is still beating down on people, that change still needs to happen. You, in your own comfortable way, can just go ahead, turn off your light, go to sleep, get up the next morning and fight the good fight again, rather than actually working for change which might take you outside of those permitted channels. No. Going outside of those permitted channels is illegitimate. The Underground Railroad was an illegal clandestine network and is a symbol of American resistance history. It's not taught that way.
- [62:42]
A
Yes.
- [62:44]
B
And so when we think about the Bill of Rights as being a product of resistance to the Federalists, not of the Federalists, that the Underground Railroad is a criminal conspiracy. That's part of our resistance history. That is a model for resistance networks in World War II, given its complexity. That the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments are products of suspending the Constitution, breaking all the rules to keep the Southern states from voting, ramming through transformational change to the Constitution. It's not taught that way.
- [63:16]
A
Just never taught that way.
- [63:19]
B
And to understand these moments are part of this American tradition of. It's a. It's. But it is very. In very real ways. And I'd love for you to talk more about this. A part of a kind of civic deconstruction. Because this is a process that a lot of people have to go through. A lot. White people. Comfortable white people.
- [63:37]
A
Comfortable white people. The one.
- [63:38]
B
And it's always them. Right. It's always comfortable white people.
- [63:41]
A
Those of us who have the option of this is uncomfortable. I'm gonna take my ball and go home.
- [63:46]
B
Yes.
- [63:47]
A
That's an ex. That's an example of white privilege. Because a black person doesn't get to choose to not be black anymore. Like that. That what they experience never ends. And. And this, again, this is like a. When I. Because when I talk about deconstruction, when you grow up in. Entrenched in Christian nationalism, you have to deconstruct all of these categories.
- [64:04]
B
Yeah. And.
- [64:05]
A
But I also think that even people who don't grow up religious in the United States, if you're a white person, you have to unpack history and civics. Otherwise you're Gonna run up. I did an interview with Jane Elliott. And you know, and I had asked to interview her because she was a major part in helping me unpack inherent racism. And you know, and she told me, she was like, listen, you grew up and you were raised and you were educated in the United States as a white person, it would be a miracle if you weren't a little racist. She was like, everyone has to approach this. And I have more questions on civic deconstruction. But real quick, I'm gonna take our second of two mid show sponsor breaks again. If you would like these ad free, you can go to patreon.com montemater and this is also in the book I mentioned about one day everyone will have been against this because when we look at underground railroad or the civil rights movement, you know, even, even the, the counterculture revolution that was happening at the same time, it's, oh, these dirty hippies, these rude prot. See how Reagan took vengeance on college students who were protesting the Vietnam War. It's always demonized. It's. And it's demonized even now. We see protesters getting arrested for voicing support of Palestine. We see people like. And it's demonized until they win.
- [65:25]
B
Yep.
- [65:26]
A
And then when they win. Oh yeah, we were totally support, like segregation. Terrible. Segregation was terrible. You know, and it. And that's when I think that the comfortable white people or even the white people that participated in opposition kind of come in on the skirt tails of those movements and be like, of course I was supportive of this. And at the time, we have to recognize. And I think this comes up in the. For people that don't understand the language they're using. When we get into documented and undocumented immigrants, well, they're like, well, you just, no matter what, you have to follow the law. And I'm like, that's not, that's not how these changes work.
- [66:07]
B
Yep.
- [66:07]
A
Because positions of power are never going to give you their power and money willingly. And what they're going to do is they're going to steamroll you with the law, with the courts, with. You can only protest in this channel. Real protest that creates change always happens outside of those channels.
- [66:24]
B
Yep.
- [66:25]
A
And that, I mean, that's, that's across the board. I mean, I think of one of my favorite heroes is John Brown down.
- [66:31]
B
Well, you know, there you go.
- [66:33]
A
You know, that's resistance. You know, that is what that means and looks like. And, and to your point about the underground railroad is that this was a enemy of state, clandestine institution violating the Law, you would get arrested or killed for participating in it. And, and that's, and also like understanding that back to World War II, that what the Nazi party was doing was legal. That was the law. Law saving Jewish people or helping them get out. You know, being a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or a Corey 10 boom was against the law. And I think that that's a really important conversation people need to have right now that America needs to get our, our France on.
- [67:11]
B
Yeah. And realize that's a good way to put it.
- [67:13]
A
Right. That we, we need to realize that we need to, we need to pull, pull the building down.
- [67:20]
B
Yeah.
- [67:20]
A
Instead of. Well, that's, I think that's what frustrates me the most about establishment Democrats is there's so much performative conversation without any meaningful action.
- [67:29]
B
Yeah.
- [67:30]
A
And it's on often to me, and as someone who used to be an extreme far right Republican and now considers myself a leftist and a progressive, is that the Democrats often come to me as GOP light.
- [67:43]
B
Yeah, sure.
- [67:44]
A
They're just not as bad. Right. They're not openly as bad, but they're not effectively doing anything. I, I think of the, I don't remember the context of it, but when it was Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of other people came out and they kneeled in the rotunda with the scarves on while they're actively voting against things that would actually mean equality and equal rights. And I remember being so annoyed, just, I'm just like, this doesn't mean anything.
- [68:09]
B
Yep.
- [68:09]
A
You don't actually care. And I think we saw that with how the, the Democratic establishment responded to Zoran Mamdani.
- [68:16]
B
Well, that's exactly it.
- [68:17]
A
They refuse to endorse him. They refuse. And Zoran has showed that when you pick a side, when you actually go left and stand on business, it works. And you had Schumer and Jeffries and refusing to endorse him, refusing to support it because it was too, quote, anti establishment. And I don't know if you saw some of Zoron's speeches at his inauguration, but he, you know, him saying he was like, I am not going to break my promises or ignore the people of New York because I'm afraid of being called radical. And I thought that was so powerful of like, I'm not going to let them create false walls by calling me names that end up harming the people I'm supposed to serve. I mean, that whole ceremony was just incredible. But.
- [69:06]
B
The way that we talk a lot about the right where, oh my gosh, they're saying the Quiet part out loud. The left needs to start saying the quiet part out loud.
- [69:14]
A
Yeah.
- [69:15]
B
And it will make sure that it clarifies against the centrists or against just the folks in the middle who are just there because it's the way it's their acc. Access to power. And so what they don't want to do is risk their, their place in the establishment. As, as, as somebody used to say when I was in politics, they're just there to be something, not to do something.
- [69:34]
A
Yeah.
- [69:34]
B
And right now we need to focus on people who want to do something, who in fact want to act, who actually want to show how to in fact get things done and that are saying their own quiet parts out loud. Because, you know, be bold and the mighty will come to your aid. The people will find you. Yeah. And the people will respond to that. And if they don't, then they're not your people. Then why do you then what do you care? Then what are you doing this for? Then either convince them or focus on your message reaching the people who need to hear it. Regardless of what letters are after, their last name, regardless of their registered Republican or a Democrat, if you get out there with your message and it's clear and it's values based, then people will find you and come to you regardless of what their registration is. Don't start following the pollsters that keeps saying that you need to be seen. Safe, Stop. Safe. We are in an. We are all unsafe now.
- [70:21]
A
Yes. Because people kept playing it safe. And what I, the phrase that I use to describe this to people and I, I use it for like centrist Democrats, which to me is just like, you're just a conservative that doesn't want to say the mean things. That's my opinion. But also even with like when you look at religious establishments, and especially when women contribute to their own subjugation in religious establishments, the way that I phrase that is, I say, say you're so focused being the master's favorite dog that you don't realize you still have a master and you're still a dog. And like that's the system that you have chosen to create because you think that your proximity to power will reduce your proximity to harm.
- [71:00]
B
Well, and that's what I, I would love to get your thoughts if you have a chance to read it again, if is to read thorough civil disobedience. This is, this is the ideological origin of American resistance, at least the ideological foundation. But he's talking about that, that he's talking. It is the most revolutionary document that I have ever read it will surprise most people to learn he's writing that the same time he's writing Walden. He's not the quirky environmentalist by the pond this guy's talking about. The original title of the pamphlet is Resistance to Civil Authority. And he's writing it in order to understand how people disconnect themselves from this blind field. He. To a government that is now acting to put its, Its, its to put its foot on the, on the throat of people who are oppressed. And then you have to examine your relationship to that.
- [71:54]
A
Yeah.
- [71:54]
B
And so it is this entire discussion and this, this deconstruction about what is your relationship to a government that does that? What does that say about you? What does it say about the government? And therefore then what do you do about it? Because he reserves a special place of hatred for the folks whom he called the men of 87. But the lawyers and the politicians who all just perform, they say a lot, but they do nothing. They speak resistance, they speak opposition, but then they act establishment, they don't do anything to change. And that is where all opposition goes to die. Because people lose their energy and they lose their attention by focusing on those people and assuming that something is getting done because they say it's getting done, then what do they do is that they compromise, they moderate, and they never ever act. And so that will perpetuate. That will go ahead and perpetuate oppression for another generation by continuing to rely on those people. And it wasn't until comfortable people after the Mexican War, Mexican American War, really started bringing other people into it. And then the Fugitive Slave act of 18 deputized all Americans to help enslavers, that then it's that deconstruction that Thoreau is leaning into, that hold on. You need to start recognizing that the Constitution is in fact the enemy.
- [73:19]
A
Yeah.
- [73:20]
B
And once you start doing that, you start disconnecting that from this mythology. Mythology that says it's a fundamental good, that it's in fact causing fundamental harm. And you're not going to be able to get to any kind of point. Point at which compromising with enslavers doesn't actually just look like what it is, which is surrender to them and a perpetuation of this oppression that will never get changed. And just because you're comfortable, just because you can put your newspaper aside and go to bed at night and then get up the next morning and write a strongly worded letter to the editor about how your taxes are not being used. Right. That the minute that you realize what that is in fact, doing what you are enabling by continuing to just support those mouthpieces. Yep. And all you're doing is being complicit in the oppression.
- [74:05]
A
And that is really, you know, you mentioned comfort and that's what it is. Comfort is like, in my opinion, the direct enemy of resistance and progress. Because as soon as people get comfortable and this can be you, can you, you see this with political leaders who start out really strong and they get a little bit of money and a little bit of power and they just get diffused, completely just diffused. But you see that especially in white America, because we are closer in proximity to power. There's a reason so many white women voted for Trump, knowing exactly who he is. They know he's a rapist, they know he's messed with kids, they know. But the proximity to power creates this fear of like, well, what happens if I let go of this little snack of power that I've have of in my hands? And that's one of the things I, you know, back to John Brown is like, you know, you have a man who was so staunch in his principles that he was like, there is absolutely no alternative for me but to enact violence on those perpetuating the evil of slavery. And he was right because no one was going to give that up willingly. And he recognized human trafficking and abuse and rape and murder for what it was and refused to dress it as well. We should just this, let this politically resolve itself. It doesn't work that way.
- [75:28]
B
Well, that's why I wrote a whole chapter on this in order to try to explain and try to understand how the people who that John Brown doesn't happen alone. Right. John Brown needs support. Right. John Brown needs money, he needs guns, he needs recruits, he needs all of these things and he can't do all of that on the, on alone. So I, in looking exactly at the question you're talking about, how do comfortable people close to the establishment decide they need to really risk for change? I looked at that. Not just the group of men who supported them, the six, Garrett Smith and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Samuel Gridley Howe and Frederick Sanborn and those folks who made John Brown possible. But it wasn't just them, because they were each relying on their own networks of comfortable white people in order to get all of that money, in order to gain all of that support, where they drew all of the recruits, where they enable John Brown through. So it wasn't just those six, it was everybody who those six were drawing from too. So I wrote the chapter to try to explore and explain how those comfortable people moved to the point where they saw what John Brown was doing as the necessary step and how people who are close to them didn't move, where they stopped, stopped, where their opposition didn't quite get to resistance and what they wouldn't do, but to also understand where those people went, who did accept that. And it's a terrible chapter, I'll admit this to you, because it's complicated and trying to understand the motivations of these people and everybody and a lot of people around them too, Lydia Mariah Childs and others, to try to see and try to understand their tipping point. Because I realized in doing all of this study that one fundamental point is that opposition can move. If it's a question of nature and scope, right? The nature of abusive authority can be really dire. But if the scope is narrow, if it's visited only a narrow part of the population that can be marginalized, then it will remain that way. And any kind of resistance within that margin can be dismissed, can be trampled on, can be turned to genocide. So if Nat Turner responds, if Nat Turner rebels, that's a slave rebellion and you can crush it using the entire arm of the state. That most resistance doesn't move to the point of actually being able to push for structural change until comfortable people start moving and become allied with the folks who have been doing all of the hard work. So I needed to write a chapter that explored that because I wanted to see how that moves. So it's not until you get to the Harvard educated New England elite who start to decide, no, what we've got to be put on the line for this now. Things have reached this kind of point. This is how I get to the point where the Constitution is the enemy. Moral suasion and persuasion ain't gonna work. Daniel Webster and his compromises suck and John Brown is doing the right thing. We might not have the same, we might not have the same theological foundation as John Brown if we're Unitarians or if we're Transcendentalists or if we're stoicists, wherever that's coming from. We don't have John Brown's evangelical fervor on this and the certainty he has on this. But we have to arrive in that a different way. But we have to recognize that we have the same goals as John Brown and he's gonna get it done. And what he is doing is in fact the point that we, we need to reach. And it's those people that I really needed to Try to understand, to see how that point of resistance is essentially the tipping point to forcing structural change. So it's one thing for the radicalized to be mobilized. It's another point for the comfortable people to get to the point where they are supporting the radicalized. And that's kind of what I needed to understand by looking at John Brown through that lens, through the lens of those people and then the people around.
- [79:24]
A
And as you're writing this book, because, again, these are the real resistances of American history that you're writing about, not just the doctored, pretty picture ones that we have. What are maybe your top two kind of favorite resistance moments in American history? Like, real resistance moments. Even if they weren't successful.
- [79:45]
B
Oh, even if they weren't successful. Okay. The. The two of them that come to mind, the one that really is on the top of my mind is the passage of the. Is what makes the passage of the 14th amendment possible is Thaddeus Stevens, Edward Macpherson. And it is counterintuitive because they're inside the positions of authority. But this is when resistance actually makes it through the barricades. This is the way I describe it. But they finally get in. They gain control. The Radical Republicans gain control within the. The. Within the Congress. And what they do is they fight to keep that control. They know that the 13th Amendment passed by only two votes.
- [80:23]
A
Y.
- [80:23]
B
But the 13th Amendment isn't enough. Ending slavery is not enough. You have to establish equal rights, equal, equal citizenship, not just for black people, but for everybody. And for that, you need to go further. You need the 14th amendment. But you also know that more people are against that than we're against ending slavery.
- [80:38]
A
Yes.
- [80:38]
B
So in order to do that, you cannot allow any of the rehabilitated rebel states to get back into Congress, even if the rules say they're supposed to get back. You can't let that happen because you need to get this done. So they're going to rip up the rules. They're going to step outside the norms. They're going to bust all of those compromises, and they're going to keep those representatives from being seated. So on December 4, 1865, the clerk of the House and Thaddeus Stevens conspire to make sure that even though they show up with their credit credentials ready to be seated, that they don't recognize them during the roll. And then after the roll, they say that you cannot speak on the floor unless you've been recognized in the roll. And then Thaddeus Stevens passes a bill that ensures that nobody from A former rebel state can be seated unless a committee on Reconstruction says that you can be seated.
- [81:30]
A
I love it.
- [81:31]
B
They maintain enough of a super majority to get through the Civil Rights act of 1866, the 14th Amendment Amendment, and make sure that they can override the eventual. The inevitable vetoes that come from Andrew Johnson of those bills. But they only do that by breaking all the rules and by understanding whatever it takes, they're going to get the job done in order to secure this constitutional transformation. That, to me, is one of the moments. That's a badass moment.
- [82:00]
A
That's a badass moment. And for those of you that heard radical Republicans, remember that this is before the party switch.
- [82:04]
B
Yeah, it's before this party switch. And then I think the other one is actually a moment in Boston, and this is about community level resistance. There is a moment in Boston in which an enslaved person who has escaped from the south and is in Boston has been tracked down by his enslaver and federal marshals have been been sent to snatch him in Boston. Well, the entire community of Boston turns out to make the Fugitive Slave act unenforceable. They harass these guys. They ring bells every time that they walk by. He can't find judges that are willing to serve their warrants. Nobody will cooperate with them. Other people are having them arrested under false charges for. They're just making things up, too.
- [82:58]
A
I love it.
- [82:59]
B
They go all around Boston. They're not able to do anything. So harassed they are. They are ice of the time. They can't do anything because the people are making the Fugitive Slave act absolutely unenforceable. Is it on the books? Yeah. Does it work in Boston? No, not in black Boston. Not in abolitionist Boston. They aren't having it. The federal law might be on the books, but they will have to go ahead and enforce it. And to enforce it, they're going to have to deploy regiments, not a couple of marshals, and to have everybody do everything that they can to make sure that this cannot be achieved. If resistance fundamentally is the pushback of abusive authority is making sure it stops. And then if you can't, if once you stop it, is to roll it back, that's resistance. And even if it's operating on a micro scale, all you have to do is recognize all those dynamics and build it. And that's what resistance is all about.
- [83:57]
A
I love that. And that was, again, a topic that came up over the last two weeks. Kind of, you know, the end of the year and thinking about what does next year look like, is that resistance is is truly like a snowball starting an avalanche. And that may be something as small as. I'm not going to buy products from this company because I know what they support and it builds into. Because I think sometimes people get paralysis from everything feels so big and so overwhelming. And does it matter? Does it matter if I go to a protest? I doesn't feel like I can do anything. It doesn't feel like all of that matters. Like, the community level resistance matters so much. Those micro resistances are so important. And that was like, I made a list today. I was. I was researching, you know, companies of makeup brands I own and be like, what are they participating in? Are they donating to these things? Are they testing on animals? Or, like, looking at, where are these other ways that I can push back more? And I think that that's such a powerful reminder in Boston that this is just a city that said, no, you will not.
- [85:00]
B
Yep.
- [85:01]
A
And those things matter. So if you're listening to this today, I hope that, like, you understand that resistance is often small and sometimes the smallest thing is when someone is saying something crazy, you say, I will not tolerate you speaking that way.
- [85:14]
B
That's absolutely true. It's every single. Every single moment like that. Every single micro resistance matters. It puts. It is a moment of defiance. It is a moment of refusal. Whether it's to refuse the lie, whether it's to refuse the action of abusive authority, whether it's to call something into question, whether it's to refuse the fact that you are giving your money to an abuser of authority because you're buying one of their products or you're supporting one of them in another way that all of them matter. The only thing you can't confuse that with is it being enough.
- [85:42]
A
Yes.
- [85:42]
B
It being sufficient. That is, it works. It matters. It's a contribution. But it's not enough. It's not sufficient. It's not. Not. It's not the only thing you should do, but you absolutely should do it.
- [85:53]
A
Yeah. And that's that. Immediately. As soon as you said that it's not enough, I immediately, my body just dropped into Schindler's List where at the end, he's walking around and he's like, I. I could have traded this pin. They would have given me two more. And he's. He is heartbroken and he's devastated. He saved hundreds of lives, but he is still in that space of understanding. It is not enough. Like, when it comes to human lives, when it comes to humans, enough. And I think that that's something that I have to constantly check in with, even with myself is like, there are human lives at stake. Like it's human rights, human lives. And that, you know, any, any qualms I feel or any fear I feel has to kneel at the altar of understanding that these are human lives.
- [86:42]
B
Yep. And that suffering is not ending just because we go to bed.
- [86:45]
A
It doesn't.
- [86:45]
B
That suffering isn't ended because we think that, oh my gosh, there was a court case that kept. That says that Donald Trump can't be sending National Guard troops into that city. It doesn't end there. There are people.
- [86:55]
A
Because we also, we're dealing with, you know, we have the abusive power where there's this conversation on the left of like, we have to follow the rules and decorum and blah, blah, blah, blah, while the right feels absolutely no responsibility to tell the truth, to follow the rules. And you can't bring your fist to a gunfight fight.
- [87:13]
B
Yep. That's absolutely true.
- [87:14]
A
Like you can't follow the rules while your opposition has absolutely no use for the rules. Not if it gets in the way of power. It's insane.
- [87:24]
B
It is infuriating, Monty. It is infuriating to hear people talk off the bat about, well, we need to pursue all of these things in a non violent way.
- [87:32]
A
Nope.
- [87:33]
B
Really? Who. Whoever said that? And even Thoreau, who is considered the father of non violent resistance, who informed Gandhi, who informed Dr. King. He said, well, nonviolence will work if nonviolence will achieve your ends. But if nonviolence doesn't work, violence does. Okay. Sharps rifles are built for a reason.
- [87:50]
A
Yep.
- [87:51]
B
That if abuse matters, if the stakes are high enough, nothing is off the table. And if you start disarming yourself unilaterally, when the stakes are that high, then you've already lost.
- [88:02]
A
Yep.
- [88:03]
B
And you're not into resistance.
- [88:04]
A
The older I get, the more Malcolm X makes sense to me.
- [88:06]
B
Me.
- [88:07]
A
He was right. He was right. You know, and again, another person who in my growing up years, I mean, granted, in where I was growing up, MLK and Malcolm X were both demonized, but Malcolm X especially. And I was like, man, he was right.
- [88:20]
B
Yep.
- [88:20]
A
He was a hundred percent right. Yeah.
- [88:23]
B
You combine Malcolm, what Malcolm X said with what James Baldwin said and what you have there is a one, two punch about the realities of American society, culture and politics. Politics that matter a lot today. Yeah.
- [88:34]
A
And very real. And. And I didn't start reading James Baldwin until two years ago. And that was so transformative of just seeing like that perspective and that truth in such a hard Hitting way. And as we kind of start to wrap up, it actually leads into my question. I wanted to ask you. If you were sitting down with someone because you you're a public historian and they said, what are the three books that I absolutely have to read? What would those three books be?
- [89:08]
B
Well, I'd start with James Baldwin's the Fire next time. And then I would read Ty Miles all that she Carried. And then I would read Pauline Mares From Resistance to Revelation.
- [89:24]
A
Oh, I haven't read Pauline's.
- [89:27]
B
Yeah.
- [89:28]
A
And actually that brings me back to the very beginning of the episode. Did Pauline ever kind of elaborate on that email of the Republic fell today? Because I was so young when that decision happened, that I remember my family demonizing Gore. I remember there being controversy over the election, but I was so young, I don't actually remember what happened.
- [89:50]
B
What she meant was that it was the end of kind of constitutional order. It was when the Supreme Court made a political decision, when the traditional role of each branch of government understanding what it was supposed to do, that was what she meant, that the Republic that she thought that had been created with these assumptions built into it and these vaunted checks and balances is that that was really, you know, after the imperial presidency of the 1970s already stuck a fork in one part of it. She thought that that was pretty much the end of it. And then she took from that moment wrote and I think that if there was another book that I would. That I would. I would impose upon people. But it's a thick book. Is the book that came out of that. She wrote a book called Ratification, which was. Is the. Is the. The standard work right now for understanding the ratification of the Constitution. And so she came around after finishing that book. It's a doorstop of a book, but it's one stop shopping. And it transformed my understanding of it and I rely on it a lot. Is that she revised her understanding of what she meant by the Republic. And she thought that that Republic actually never really got off the ground and that by looking at what the Republic was supposed to be be coming out of the ratification process, what Hamilton and Madison actually intended it for it to be coming out of the Constitution and how much the anti Federalists were articulating a whole nother vision for America and how their efforts resulted in the version of the Constitution that kind of emerged from that, then she reconceived her idea of what that Republic was. And I think that the more healthy way to kind of think about it. But her first book from Resistance To Revolution covers essentially that period. Adams was talking about that period from the end of the Seven Years War and the passage of the Stamp act through Lexington and Concord. But what it does is that it captures the rise of that language of rights that was articulated by the New England Patriots. But more to the point, for what I do, it really applied them in a very mechanical way to how protest and opposition was organized and developed over that period in a really fantastic way to understand not just the core of what the American Revolution was in terms of the ideas, but also the building blocks of that part of American resistance. But with TYA Miles, you understand why it was important. I cried with that book. It transformed how I saw the past. And then, of course, James Baldwin will just make you think differently about.
- [92:31]
A
Yeah, James Baldwin will change. He will change you. I don't think that you can. At least with honesty, you can't read James Baldwin and not come away different. Truly, truly incredible. And as we, you know, you're working on, like this book and actively participating in resistance. From your perspective, what is it that Americans can and should be doing as we move into this year? This is why I wanted your episode to be the first one of January was because this topic is so important. We're going into midterms. We're going into what is your perception of what do Americans have to wake up to and what do we have to do moving forward?
- [93:13]
B
Well, the first thing, that people actually have to lean into their personal networks that you find the people you trust, build those networks. I mean, build those communities, build them online, build them in person, build them around the block, build them through your. Through your platforms, but find the people whom you can rely on. Find your trust tribe, as Martha Jones calls it, right? Find your tribe and lean into them. Identify those people who are your ride or die folks and the people whom you can always count on to be able to relay accurate information, honest information, who can help you through these kind of things emotionally. Who can actually be your blocks, Find them, identify them, lean into them wherever they are, whether they're around the globe. And if you don't have them, start reaching out to people, people. And the other part is about understanding what, understanding what role in resistance that you play and play that role. And that can be any number of things, but it all starts the easiest one. Well, it might not be quite so easy, and you know this from what you do is that you've got to. You've got to push for the truth wherever you can. Yeah, it is that moment, that micro resistance and Understanding that every little step matters, but every little step matters. That is defying the lies that are told by abusive authority, which is their single greatest way to achieve that authority and maintain it. The more you undermine that, the more you represent honesty, the more you say that's not true, the more you boost somebody else who's doing the good work, that any kind of role that you play on that is absolutely worth it, because that's the foundation of all abusive authority, which is establishing the lie and pushing the lie. Everything that you can do to push against that is something that's a valuable to any kind of resistance.
- [94:57]
A
Yeah. And I, and I think we're seeing that right now. Just to give people listening an example, we have the, the Minnesota daycare absolute scam happening right now with Nick Shirley. Complete lie. He made it up. A daycare didn't let him in because he's not supposed to be there. And he's, they're not going to let him have a camera around kids. That's insane. Yeah, but, but because the lie, the narrative has been creative. Now Trump has cut off all daycare money to all states. And, and what it does is it, it pushes Forward Project 2025 goals to make people more impoverished and wage dependent, to get people in those W2 jobs. Because if your health care and your child care and your livelihood and your safety depend on you keeping that job, you're not going to show up to a protest. It also serves the purpose of pulling women out of the workforce. And so it's like we're seeing that, I mean, play out in real time. Because if we cannot beat the lie, then they can control the narrative.
- [95:54]
B
Yep.
- [95:56]
A
So, and as we wrap up, I would love for you to tell people where they can find you the best places to stay up to date on the book and the release. Where's the best place to pre order all of those things so people can learn more?
- [96:09]
B
Well, where they can find me is pretty much, pretty much anywhere online. I think this is the best place right now to go to where people are in effective ways. So I'm on Instagram and YouTube and substack and TikTok for the book. Obviously you can pre order it through. Independent booksellers are the best places to get it.
- [96:33]
A
Yes.
- [96:34]
B
And there'll be an audiobook and there'll be an ebook, but we're going to be talking a lot about it. The one thing that is important for me about the book is that it's to be used. This is not a staggering work of literary genius. It's not intended to be. It's one that I hope people rip up, write in, take parts out, throw stuff. I just want people to use it, which means I want us to talk about it. So we're going to be talking about a lot about. I'm not, like, pegging a whole lot to the release of the book, which will drive my publisher insane. But what I want to do is that the book is used as a sparking point for all of these discussions, a lot of which we just had, using these examples from American history, these kind of moments that people keep telling me, well, I never knew that. Well, there's. And for us to talk about why you never knew that, which is an important cultural point, which is why these things aren't. Why these things aren't getting through and doesn't inform our identity as Americans. And more to the point, what we can do to stop oppression. So. So I think that that's a. That's the main thing that I want to get across.
- [97:39]
A
That's incredible. Thank you so much for taking time. Thank you for, you know, being seven hours ahead and being willing to do an evening session with me. Thank you for your work. It's really important.
- [97:49]
B
I. I appreciate your work. You cover so much brilliant ground and you do it so well on such. And. And on every single issue. That's important. Looking forward to. To the new album.
- [97:59]
A
Thank you. Yeah.
- [98:00]
B
Do we still call them albums?
- [98:01]
A
Yeah, we do. We do still have albums. And the book will be coming as well. But it's just. It's been very inspiring to watch you and. And people like you teach these things in such a meaningful way. Again, that's so inaccessible for a lot of people, you know, not just because of affordability of education, but just being able to find the truth and being able to sit with that and say, okay, well, what does that mean for my future? If this is not the reality, and this is the reality, how do I live in this new space? And I think it's. I think you do it, like, just so well, and it's so approachable. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, everyone, for listening to Flipping Tables. I hope in this new year that you really step into your resistance, that you really understand that every single step that you take towards resistance matters, that there are people depending on it. Again, especially if you are a white person, we do not get to take our ball and go home. It is our obligation to take the front line because of the protection that privilege affords us. And I will see you next week on flipping tables.