Kathleen Belew (white supremacy historian)

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert, experts on expert.

[1] Today we have an incredible guest.

[2] Kathleen Ballou is a historian and an international authority on the White Power Movement.

[3] I found this episode to be fascinating.

[4] White Power is such a bigger thing than I had any idea of prior to this.

[5] She has a book out now called Bring the War Home, the White Power Movement, and Paramilitary America.

[6] There's so much here.

[7] There's all these fringe groups that you've heard of that really all are under this umbrella of white power.

[8] This is a terrifying and fascinating episode, and I think you're going to love Kathleen Ballou.

[9] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now.

[10] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[11] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[12] Is there a story of this dog?

[13] There it is.

[14] I'm excited that there's an actual armchair, too.

[15] Oh, yeah.

[16] Oh, yeah.

[17] You'll find, as you hear, the origin of that dog.

[18] Most of the things in here are things my wife rejected from our house.

[19] So this lazy boy was in our living room in front of the screen for optimum viewing, and she hated it.

[20] So she kicked it out, and then it ended up in this attic, which wasn't really even a thing yet.

[21] And then similarly, this dog, that's not a painting, print that you speak of, when I moved into the house we just left 16 years ago, I never lived in a house.

[22] A lot of wall space.

[23] I had a one bed and apartment for 10 years.

[24] I mean, what am I going to do?

[25] Went online, ordered a bunch of random things.

[26] This was one of them.

[27] I happened to love.

[28] And my wife was like, you're not a dog person.

[29] What is this?

[30] He just called to you.

[31] He has a brother too, but he's long lost.

[32] I haven't seen him in a lot.

[33] And he's in the basement.

[34] Is he also in front of a post?

[35] He just looks like this.

[36] He looks regal.

[37] I mean, his owner's rich, right?

[38] We would agree about this great name?

[39] Yeah, I think so.

[40] Big column.

[41] A big marble, would we say plinth?

[42] Oh, wow, would we?

[43] It's Greek architecture, right?

[44] Yeah.

[45] And you would call it a plinth?

[46] I think the bottom part is the plinth.

[47] Did you say plinth or plif?

[48] Plinth, I think, but I could be wrong.

[49] Of an N and a T. I think.

[50] You've given us so much for the fact check already, and I'm so excited.

[51] Yes.

[52] Before we get into serious stuff.

[53] Okay, yeah, please.

[54] Yeah.

[55] This is a ding, ding, ding.

[56] You have to be careful what you give away because my best friend, Callie, she moved from London.

[57] All this came to light this weekend.

[58] She's moving in with her now husband.

[59] They were moving into a shared space.

[60] They were calling the herd.

[61] Yeah.

[62] And, you know, it's a little fragile when you're telling your partner, I don't want that in the house, I don't want this.

[63] So they're both trying to be really mindful.

[64] So Callie's like, we'll get rid of all of this stuff.

[65] We'll just get rid of it all.

[66] And then Max, her husband, was like, well, how about we keep that chair?

[67] And he's trying to be nice.

[68] Sure.

[69] This chair's nice, let's keep it.

[70] She's like, no, no, no, no, no. Let's just get rid of it.

[71] So she sends it to out of the closet here in L .A. And this weekend, she was on First Dibbs, which is an auction site, looking for chairs.

[72] And her chair was on there.

[73] No. Guess how much?

[74] What kind of chair?

[75] Like when you're sitting in?

[76] It's a Windsor chair.

[77] It turns out it's from...

[78] The Elizabethan period?

[79] fancy British chair designer.

[80] Mm -hmm.

[81] How much?

[82] $5 ,000.

[83] Well, the only person...

[84] She gave it away.

[85] And Max fought to keep it.

[86] Okay, so he feels good, thank God.

[87] This could have ended their marriage, right?

[88] Exactly.

[89] He probably hated this chair.

[90] It sounds old and shitty.

[91] He was like, it's fine.

[92] It's fine.

[93] Of all the things, let's keep this.

[94] Yeah, he's encouraging her to save a couple times.

[95] She had an upholstered and she didn't like the upholstery, so she had a negative opinion.

[96] So even having been altered, it was worth $5 grand?

[97] Yeah.

[98] Okay, we're sorry, Kathleen.

[99] but thank you so much for it's what we do yeah it's what we do so we have a heavy heavy topic ahead of us you're a historian by training what calls you to this before we even talk about it where are you from where are you born so i'm from colorado i'm from the denver suburbs and a lot of my work has been more about trying to understand what i saw growing up right much of which turns out to be historically significant and not just you're run of the middle teenage angst about what you're seeing around you The two big ones for me were the trial of Timothy McVeigh, who was the Oklahoma City Bomber, that happened right down the street.

[100] Oh, he was tried in Colorado?

[101] Yeah, he was.

[102] Because he had been pulled over there?

[103] No, they had to do a change of venue because they didn't think they could get an impartial trial in Oklahoma.

[104] Oh, okay.

[105] So they moved it to the Denver suburbs, which made us all really aware of the bombing and what it was in a variety of ways that I don't think we've really reconciled with that history.

[106] Yeah.

[107] And then the other one is Columbine, the Columbine shooting.

[108] So that was when I was a junior in high school.

[109] That was my school district.

[110] It wasn't my school, but it was down the street.

[111] And you were, what age when that happened?

[112] I guess 17.

[113] Oh, so you were in school.

[114] Did you know anyone there?

[115] I knew people at Columbine High School.

[116] I didn't know anyone who was killed.

[117] I would never say that I was part of the survivor community.

[118] Right.

[119] Because people who were there are impacted in completely different ways.

[120] But I think everyone from Colorado at that time carries us around as sort of a irreconcilable story in all kinds of different ways.

[121] and it really led me to thinking deeply about violence and how we come to this point.

[122] Well, I would parallel it with when you're sexually abused as a kid, what immediately happens afterwards is your entire worldview changes.

[123] It has to.

[124] There are people out on planet Earth that are trying to abuse you.

[125] And so that's a permanent adjustment in your worldview.

[126] Similarly, even if you weren't there or the relative of someone who had been killed, in your worldview, in your town, or in your community, sometimes people will come in and gun everyone up.

[127] So it's a permanent shift in your worldview.

[128] Definitely.

[129] There's this book called Aftermath by Susan Bryson that I really like, describing her own experience of assault.

[130] And I think this is true at the community level, too, when we talk about mass trauma.

[131] She makes the point that it isn't that trauma makes the world unsafe.

[132] It's that it reveals that it was not ever safe.

[133] So for that to happen in high school, when I was becoming a person, It really shook what I thought I knew about everything.

[134] And then I became a historian completely by accident.

[135] I just wanted to figure things out and tell stories.

[136] And I went through a whole bunch of different majors, more than my parents would have liked, I think, and landed in an interdisciplinary kind of build yourself program, which was great for me. An a la carte one, yeah, when it emphasized study abroad and community and story -driven methodology.

[137] And then I did my grad degree in American Studies, which is also not history, capital age, history proper.

[138] Why?

[139] I mean, I had no idea what grad school was.

[140] My parents didn't go to grad school.

[141] I didn't know anything.

[142] I just wanted to go somewhere where people were asking questions, like the ones I wanted to ask.

[143] So the way my mother summarized it was American Studies is like history but with no rules.

[144] You use the history toolbox, but you can use it on movies or songs or jokes or whatever is around.

[145] It can be like a cultural.

[146] It's a lot like cultural studies, yeah.

[147] Capital Age history has now expanded a lot to include a lot of those methodologies.

[148] and topics, that divide is not as stark as it was once.

[149] Yeah.

[150] But then my professional life has all been in capital H history.

[151] So now I'm feeling very proprietary about training and the skills we can learn from it and things.

[152] And I find myself more and more a historian as I go.

[153] And so you come out now armed with a PhD, you have PhD in history?

[154] In American Studies.

[155] And then you take a job in academia and you're going to have to do research, I presume, to have your job, right, that's kind of required of a professor.

[156] is that when you decide this will be your focus or does it predate that?

[157] It was my dissertation.

[158] It was, okay.

[159] Racial inequality and interpersonal violence is where most of my thinking has been.

[160] And the thing that really stands out as soon as you start reading about any of this is that the United States is really not unusual in our history of racial violence and racial inequality.

[161] There are a lot of countries that have had entrenched white supremacist legal systems that have had deep histories of racial violence that have had horrific moments of genocide, and we could go on down this list.

[162] But we are very unusual in how little we've done to have a public conversation about it.

[163] There's been nothing like, for instance, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

[164] There's been nothing like a major national telling of the story.

[165] This problem comes up over and over again in different ways, but things like people choosing school boards as a site of cultural, political skirmish is because of telling stories about history.

[166] When I started my dissertation, we didn't have the National African American History Museum on the mall yet.

[167] We didn't have the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama yet.

[168] And so I really wanted to know what was going on with that.

[169] It's not just that it happened.

[170] It's why can't we tell a story about what happened?

[171] Why can't we talk about what happened?

[172] Yeah, I was brought up to go, we had a real rough start.

[173] We owned human beings, but in 1886 or 68, whatever it was, we put an end of that, close the book.

[174] Yeah.

[175] Problem solved, no more slavery.

[176] And then only through loving historical biographies have been like, oh, wow, Reformation was a crazy period that was just as violent and maybe more.

[177] Oh, and then this and then this and oh, well Civil Liberties Act.

[178] Okay, let's close the books off.

[179] I think we've just wanted so many times to go, and that's that.

[180] Now we're past that.

[181] Yeah, I grew up with that too, but about the civil rights movement, the idea that people fought hard and they fixed it.

[182] And now here's this world that we give you.

[183] But I could look around and see that that was not a complete task.

[184] Yeah, yeah.

[185] So I got drawn to there was this little upstart Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro, North Carolina in 2005 and they had nothing.

[186] Not even the city council said, yes, we buy into this process.

[187] They had no subpoena power.

[188] They couldn't make anybody do anything.

[189] They had no punitive power.

[190] If they unearthed inequality, they couldn't do anything about it.

[191] It was just, let's tell a story about this thing that happened.

[192] So I came to the project wanting to learn about that.

[193] And then I got very involved in the story of what it happened, which is about an event in 1979 where a group of leftist demonstrators were picketing and having an anti -clan rally outside in a black housing project in Greensboro.

[194] And a united caravan of neo -Nazi and clan gunmen showed up, opened fire, shot for 88 seconds, so caught on three different news cameras.

[195] There's tons of evidence.

[196] And then they were acquitted in state trial.

[197] They were acquitted in federal trial.

[198] Oh, my God.

[199] And the civil suit later on came out and said that the only death that had been wrongful of the five people they killed was one person who had not been a card -carrying communist at the time of their death.

[200] All the other deaths were sort of okay, not wrongful.

[201] Like you put down some insurrectionists that were trying to make this country communists.

[202] Is the subtext, yes.

[203] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[204] It's one of those things as a historian that just doesn't sit right.

[205] Because 1979 is really late.

[206] I was alive then, by the way.

[207] Yeah, for what I thought I knew about the clan, that was late.

[208] The dynamics of it seemed strange to me because it was four victims who looked like white men.

[209] It turned out one of them was Cuban, but they look white and one African -American woman were killed.

[210] And then also the whole neo -Nazis and the clan together part didn't seem right to me. Yeah.

[211] And then in the TRC process where they're there to tell their stories, they kept saying something that I just couldn't stop thinking about, which, by the way, the perpetrators showed up to tell their stories, which is amazing.

[212] The thing they kept saying was, well, I killed communists in Vietnam, so why wouldn't I kill them in North Carolina?

[213] I mean, that collapses home front and battlefield, that collapses wartime and peacetime.

[214] That mixes up everybody on the left into one communist, quote -unquote, enemy.

[215] I just thought that was so strange.

[216] And then I started looking, and it turns out that that was not at all unusual.

[217] Also implicit in that story is a collective national guilt that Vietnam was a regrettable experience that ruined a lot of people.

[218] Absolutely.

[219] So you almost go, God, we fuck these boys up.

[220] And now they're here and they did this thing.

[221] But who could blame them?

[222] Will you fuck them up?

[223] It mobilizes a narrative about the Vietnam War that we tell in a whole bunch of different places in our culture.

[224] Right.

[225] And then it turned out that this was not an isolated incident, but a nationwide movement that was bringing together clansmen and neo -Nazis and later on skinheads and some parts of the militia movement into one ground swell.

[226] And you can look and see how they're interconnected in the archive because they're marrying each other, they're trading weapons, they're picking each other up from the airport, they're sending money, they're giving each other computers.

[227] It's a dense social network.

[228] The social movement part of it was really a surprise for me. So I'm going to read one little excerpt from your book that's right at the beginning because we're going to be talking a lot about white power.

[229] And I think there'll be some confusion about these many different groups that you already maybe know.

[230] But you say, I use white power to refer to the social movement that brought together members of the clan militias, radical tax resistors, white supremacists, neo -Nazis, and proponents of white theology such as Christian identity, Odinism, you'll have to explain that, and dualism between 1975 and 1995.

[231] Some have described this group of people with the terms, white nationalists, white separatists, the racist right, or white supremacists.

[232] None of these terms is appropriate for describing the larger movement.

[233] Not all proponents of white power advocate white nationalism or white separatism.

[234] white nationalism presumes a different outcome, one inherently less violent than that envisioned by a vocal segment of the white power movement.

[235] The term racist right presumes a political continuum that does not properly describe this activism, which at times shared more with the revolutionary left than with the conservative mainstream.

[236] Therefore, the encompassing term white power, which was a slogan commonly used by those in the movement, is the most precise and historically accurate term.

[237] So when we talk about white power, we're talking about this umbrella all these people fit under without getting into other little individual idiosyncrasies.

[238] Academics, journalists and I think people when they're trying to figure out what they're looking at, we have all dramatically over -emphasized distinctions between these groups.

[239] So for instance, how many are skinheads, how many are Klansmen, which tattoo goes to which group, which slogan goes to which group, which one is in my community, which ones are violent or non -violent.

[240] Probably even have a little hierarchy in our head.

[241] Yeah, absolutely.

[242] Neo -Nazis with Hitler stuff on there, the top of this pyramid.

[243] Proud boys, I don't know, they're in colored shirts.

[244] And it gets confusing, particularly when they're deliberately dressing in a way that they think will be palatable, right?

[245] Yeah, yeah.

[246] But the way that this works on the ground does not care very much at all about those distinctions because what you see in the archive of the earlier movement is that it was very typical for one person to be in multiple groups or to move around between groups.

[247] There's shifting allegiances having to do with everything from moving from one time, to another and they don't have a clan chapter so you join the Nazi chapter instead to like you had a fight with this person and so you're going to move down the street to the other one or maybe you get romantically involved with somebody in this other side so you go over there and there's all these different interpersonal reasons for moving around yeah and as a result I think it's very difficult to get an accurate head count of anything because what we really should be thinking about is sort of a ground swell of people not isolated groups right thank you for reading that section When I hear that section about definitions now, I wish I could have done that a little more clearly.

[248] Oh, no, no, I loved it because I came at this thinking these are all segmented little groups that are all bound together by being not cases.

[249] But beyond that, no overall coordination, no overall shared anything other than they hate everyone.

[250] But not true.

[251] Not true.

[252] Same movement.

[253] Lots of interconnections.

[254] But I think the other part about defining terms that's important is white supremacy, the way that historians use that term, is not just.

[255] racist belief.

[256] It's the broad set of problems that create and perpetuate racial inequality.

[257] So it includes racist belief, but it also includes things like the Greensboro verdicts come out that way because of the way that jury selection is still a vestige of old white supremacist practice in the court where they're tried, right?

[258] So it's not just the racial violence, it's also the court.

[259] Here's a big branding issue.

[260] And I understand why people are confused and or are defensive.

[261] White supremacist is a fucking Nazi.

[262] I grew up hearing white supremacists are Nazis, right, or skinheads.

[263] My judicial branch of the government is a white supremacy.

[264] That's rough.

[265] Not the judicial system.

[266] So I'm not somebody who thinks that all of American democracy is white supremacist, right?

[267] We have a history of white supremacist construction of many of our systems.

[268] Sure.

[269] And that means that if we want to have a system that creates and ensures equality, we have to do a little bit of an accounting to figure out what's in there that's not operating in a fair way.

[270] Yeah, what's a holdover or vestige?

[271] Yeah, but what I'm concerned about is if you look at something like maternal mortality rate or educational attainment during COVID or incarceration rates, all of these have profound racial inequality just at the statistical level, and they have that even if nobody involved is individually racist.

[272] Right, right, yeah.

[273] It's our systems.

[274] Right.

[275] So if we care about equality, we have to go a step beyond, I'm myself, I'm not a racist, in order to address the lingering issues left behind by our history.

[276] Yes.

[277] So that's what I mean by white supremacist.

[278] I got you.

[279] So let's think about a wooden fence in your backyard.

[280] The planks of the fence are distinct pieces, and the whole fence is white supremacy.

[281] So one or two boards are individual racist belief.

[282] And then over here is disparate rates of medical care efficacy.

[283] And over here is incarceration practice.

[284] And over here is policing.

[285] None of those have to have individual racists.

[286] to function in an unequal way.

[287] So the whole fence is white supremacy.

[288] One plank maybe is racial violence.

[289] And when we're talking about neo -Nazis, I guess there are a splinter in the plank.

[290] I'm trying to think how far I can stretch this moment.

[291] Right, right, right.

[292] What I'm talking about is not even all people who believe that white people are better than non -white people, which we would call individually racist or individually white supremacist.

[293] I'm talking about people who believe that and advocate violence to remove non -white people and believe that all the things that they disagree with about our country have to do with threats to the white birth rate and they're perfectly willing to commit genocide to solve that problem.

[294] So I'm talking about a tiny, tiny, tiny, subsection of individually racist people.

[295] That's the white power movement.

[296] Okay, great.

[297] And that little subsection includes a bunch of different varieties.

[298] So clan, neo -Nazi, parts of the militia movement, parts of radical tax resistance, the whole skinhead movement, et cetera.

[299] It's funny because we do it.

[300] conspiracy show and there's a conspiracy pyramid similar virtually when you get at the top of the pyramid when you're dealing with like QAnon everything what's really really weird is that they all end up leading to anti -Semitism because of course there's this big global elite that is running this conspiracy perpetuating it and of course it's always Jewish people who are at the helm yeah in what country I don't know and where they got the reins passed over to them I don't know but all roads lead there it's interesting how much conspiracy theory appears as a rehash of much older stories, right?

[301] So, I mean, I think Q &ON is different in some ways just because of how it works and how quickly it goes.

[302] But as you say, the idea that there is a network of malevolent elite cultural powerbroker forces that are trying to victimize white women and children.

[303] That's the same thing as the protocols of the elders of Zion, which is from the early 20th century.

[304] Right.

[305] And that's Henry Ford's.

[306] That's the Henry Ford one, yes.

[307] Yeah.

[308] And then similarly, we have this expert on who teaches at Texas State who was saying, The QAnon thing is identical to Salem in that all of these old conspiracies end with children being killed.

[309] So it was these women, we're torturing kids in the basement, these witches.

[310] And QAnon's ultimate belief is that we're extracting adrenachrome from babies in basements.

[311] It's like, well, it's the same goddamn story that we now think is preposterous.

[312] They pick that because that's a universal heartstring that everyone can totally feel visceral about.

[313] and then there's real stuff happening with kids that they won't do anything about.

[314] It's so ironic.

[315] It manipulates that, of course, everyone wants to keep their child safe and other children safe, right?

[316] Like, that's a basic human instinct.

[317] Yeah.

[318] But it warps that instinct in a lot of really destructive ways.

[319] You know, if you study any conspiracy theory, I bet you talk about this already on your other podcast, but any conspiracy theory has within it a seed of a grievance that is real.

[320] Oh, of course.

[321] People don't just grab a conspiracy theory because they're being crazy.

[322] They grab a conspiracy theory because it deeply pulls them in.

[323] Yes, it has to find some purchase as an entry point to them become insane.

[324] While we're talking about words that people would maybe at first go like, well, you can't call them.

[325] Because somehow activists is like a euphemism almost.

[326] It's like a positive, right?

[327] And so you refer to these people as activists, which they are.

[328] And I think you have to point out early in the book.

[329] what they're activating for.

[330] I don't mean that in a endorsement kind of a sense.

[331] I see that as a neutral word in so far as I'm using it in this book.

[332] Similarly, one key distinction here is that what they are doing is revolutionary, and I don't mean to imbue that with any positive meaning either.

[333] What I mean is that these are people who are prepared to take action, often violent action for their beliefs, and are interested in overthrowing the country to create an ethno state.

[334] Yeah, that's a really key component.

[335] Yeah.

[336] I think it's really important to understand that it is fundamentally not only anti -democracy, but anti -American.

[337] It's interested in the overthrow of the country and genocide of everyone who does not fit into their racial logic.

[338] I learned this from you today, studying you, which is, I guess I would have assumed a lot of these white power movements.

[339] We're working towards a United States of America that was whites only.

[340] But in fact, they don't want a United States of America.

[341] They want an entirely different country, an Aryan something of America.

[342] Exactly.

[343] Exactly.

[344] And this is why I think white nationalist is a really tricky term because when people hear nationalist, they think, aha, this must just be an over -exertion of patriotism, right?

[345] Like a little too much patriotism has gotten out of hand.

[346] But the nation in white nationalism, as understood by the people I study, is not the United States.

[347] It's white people throughout the world.

[348] So they're interested in, can we have a coming together of white people in the United States and Canada and Australia and Europe and maybe South Africa?

[349] It's the Handmaid's Tale country.

[350] What do they create?

[351] Oh, Gilead?

[352] Gilead, yeah.

[353] It is a little bit like Gilead.

[354] Yeah, I was very much by way of my brother immersed in the 80s and 90s punk rock scene.

[355] Oh, cool.

[356] And there were skinheads that would show up.

[357] There would be bands that had overlap.

[358] Like, Sick of It All was a band.

[359] It would bring out both.

[360] There would be the Nazi skinheads at these shows.

[361] And then there would be sharps, skinheads against racial prejudice.

[362] So the sharps would come and they would fight the Nazi skinheads, but who's who.

[363] Wait, what?

[364] A skinhead against.

[365] Yeah, anti -racist skinheads.

[366] And in fact, when I was in eighth grade, I had shaved my head, and I always made it very clear.

[367] I'm a sharp.

[368] I wasn't really, I didn't go to any meetings.

[369] Oh, just people who had shaved heads.

[370] They wanted to distinguish themselves.

[371] So they looked like skinheads, but we're against racial prejudice, sharps.

[372] Yeah.

[373] And they would go and defend the black folks that happened to be at a sick of at all show against the neo -Nazis.

[374] Yeah.

[375] There's a longer history, too, of the skinheads coming to the United States out of a very working class.

[376] They were more anarchists in England.

[377] Much more in England.

[378] And then the sharps, as you say, are.

[379] really interesting countercurrent.

[380] The other thing that I think is significant about the skinheads is if you think about another popular depiction of this movement is Vicki Weaver, the woman who was killed in 1992 at Ruby Ridge.

[381] She's a survivalist housewife.

[382] There's pictures of her in like a long white dress.

[383] This is in Idaho, like, Cortalane -ish.

[384] Remote from Cortalane even, like 30 minutes up.

[385] And a federal standoff.

[386] Exactly.

[387] The federal standoff.

[388] So the image of the survivalist housewife with like no makeup and a long dress and she's removed from all of this for a social movement to bring together those folks and the skinheads who are showing up perfectly fine with drugs and alcohol, perfectly fine with tattoos and women going topless and wearing tons of eyeliner.

[389] Orgies.

[390] Yeah.

[391] And they talk about this.

[392] They talk about these people are very different, but this emergency that we're facing makes it critical that we join forces.

[393] I want you to track us because in your book you segment this from post -Vietnam into the 90s.

[394] But within that, I watched a great documentary on Timothy McVeigh, and it really just put together the pieces of Ruby Ridge.

[395] Ruby Ridge set off a real unifying, real rally cry to those people, huh?

[396] Can you explain it?

[397] Absolutely.

[398] So Ruby Ridge and Waco come one right after the other.

[399] Yeah.

[400] So in both cases, it's federal law enforcement officers pursuing extremists in ways that end up creating both tragic deaths of the extremists and also huge public relations disasters, especially Waco because it's out there on the Texas Prairie and happens on the evening news.

[401] Right.

[402] We're watching it for like 40 days.

[403] Maybe more.

[404] Yeah.

[405] And Timothy McVeigh was there, right?

[406] Yeah, he was.

[407] He was there selling bumper stickers and he watched the end of the Waco siege when the compound went up in flames and people died.

[408] Apparently watched it with tears running down his face.

[409] He was profoundly moved by it.

[410] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[411] Which a lot of people were.

[412] Yeah.

[413] Well, yeah, people are dying.

[414] You're pointing out the greatest thing, which is Timothy McVeigh, at that point has no interest in starting a polygamist cult.

[415] It's just the government.

[416] Any enemy of the government is a friend of mine.

[417] Yeah.

[418] And Waco is also a tricky one because it was a multiracial compound.

[419] It's not a white supremacist compound or a white power compound.

[420] They were more just apocalyptic, which is a different current, but an important current.

[421] So Ruby Ridge, a federal informant, asked Randy Weaver to sell him a gun that was a quarter inch short of the limit.

[422] So that makes it a sawed -off shotgun, which is illegal.

[423] To be fair, that strikes a lot of people as entrapment.

[424] Yeah.

[425] I think that's some dubious dealings.

[426] Yeah.

[427] They were trying to get Weaver to be an informant on the Aryan Nations compound, which was a white power compound near there that he had gone to several times.

[428] And both of the Weavers were clearly involved in the movement in different ways.

[429] Both of them were political.

[430] It wasn't just that Vicki Weaver was along for the ride.

[431] She also wrote letters about every knee shall bow and the government should back off and let us have this.

[432] Randy Weaver didn't appear in court and then there was a warrant out for his arrest and there's another government misstep here where they gave him the wrong court date but also he had also decided not to go so I don't really buy that as a defense but they did also mess up the court date and then they laid siege to the mountaintop they had helicopter surveillance they had heavy weapons going in through the nearby town including armored vehicles and sniper training and a bunch of other stuff and in the end there was a series of altercations and Vicki Weaver was killed standing in the doorway holding her 10 -month -old daughter in her arms.

[433] Rough, rough, rough.

[434] Rough, but also that scene is incredibly symbolic.

[435] It's marrying her child.

[436] Exactly.

[437] Or if you've ever seen birth of a nation, it's directly out of birth of the nation.

[438] The embattled white woman who stands for all of these things.

[439] And I should just do a quick aside.

[440] The reason white women and white babies are so important here, and you'll see this if you read about the manifestos of mass shooters, is that people in this movement saw all of these different social issues as being about the dropping white birth rate.

[441] So they're worried about immigration, abortion, feminism, gay rights, all of those things because they think they will reduce the white birth rate.

[442] So white mothers have this incredible symbolism and the federal government killing white mothers, this is where we get to the conspiracy theory part, right?

[443] It's not just, oops, immigration is going to accidentally do this.

[444] They think that there are elite power brokers who are doing that on purpose, in order to eradicate the white race.

[445] But why?

[446] Why would they do that?

[447] To get your grubby little non -white hands on the levers of power?

[448] But why would American elite?

[449] Oh, why would our government be trying to enact that?

[450] Makes no sense.

[451] So they believed in what they called Zog, which is the Zionist occupied government.

[452] So they believe the government was controlled by Jewish people and even by the state of Israel.

[453] And they also thought that Jewish people controlled the banks.

[454] They tried to assassinate Norman Leer at one point because of depiction of interracial family life on sitcom, television, and all of these sort of culture brokers were suspect.

[455] So when Vicky Weaver got killed holding her infant daughter, one prominent movement leader wrote there are tens of thousands of Randy Weavers stretched out from one coast to another and this is going to be the start of the next war and he said something like when the feds blew the head off of Vicky Weaver they killed the American white wife.

[456] It became this emblematic.

[457] call to arms.

[458] What a martyr.

[459] And then we see skyrocketing memberships and militia groups, and that's the surge that leads to the Oklahoma City bombing.

[460] Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

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[476] So in this fear of the birth rate, I thought I had copied it and paste it.

[477] That was one of the things I wanted to read directly from your book, which is I didn't realize with that starting point, you then click in immediately to their anti -abortion.

[478] They have to be because that's a birth rate threat.

[479] They're anti -LGBQ because that's going to lower the white birth rate.

[480] it's a suite of ideas that has to follow from the first one.

[481] Exactly.

[482] Yeah.

[483] Wow, it's deep.

[484] That one idea is the key to understanding where we are now when we see events like the Buffalo shooting and a manifesto that talks about replacement theory.

[485] Yes.

[486] And often we get news reports saying that's about being anti -immigrant, which it is, but it's also about being anti -other kinds of perceived threats to the white birth rate, which means African -American people, even people that don't live close to you.

[487] Any interracial contact is also seen as a threat to the white birth rate.

[488] Oh, I did do it.

[489] So this is from your op -ed piece, actually.

[490] The long game of white power activists isn't just about violence.

[491] This belief transforms social issues into direct threats.

[492] Immigration is a problem because immigrants will outbreed the white population.

[493] Abortion is a problem because the white babies will be aborted.

[494] LGBTQ rights and feminism will take women from the home and decrease the birth rate.

[495] Integration, intermarriage, and even the presence of black people distant from a white community, an issue apparently of keen interest in the Buffalo attack are seen as a threat to the white birth rate through the threat of miscingenation.

[496] Misogination.

[497] Say it?

[498] Misogination.

[499] That just means interracial marriage and sex and the birth of interracial children.

[500] That's interesting.

[501] I will next time say the birth of interracial children.

[502] No, it's good.

[503] We like learning.

[504] No, I have dyslexia, so I will stumble on a word.

[505] I'll just look at it and I'll go, you know what, I quit.

[506] There's no way I'm sounding that out.

[507] I mean, that one's a doozy.

[508] It is a doozy.

[509] There's a C and an S and maybe.

[510] to see sounds like an ass.

[511] Okay, here's another thing that I learned this in an interview you were doing.

[512] Actually, I want to have a fun dance about this part.

[513] I think we'd all have guesses of what drives increases in the white power movement.

[514] And there's a shocking driver of it that I wouldn't have predicted, which is...

[515] So if you look at the rise and fall in Klan activity, which is the one that we have the longest historical record for, it begins in the aftermath of the Civil War, and then it goes all the way through the 20th century and into the present.

[516] And they ebb and flow The sort of peaks in membership align more consistently with the aftermath of warfare than they do with poverty, waves of immigration, populism, economic scarcity, and a whole bunch of other explanations that we have typically gravitated toward.

[517] Yeah, I would have definitely assumed it was driven by poverty, diminished resources, increased competition between immigrants and low -income whites.

[518] That's wild.

[519] And those are factors.

[520] But what we're looking at here is not only people's friends.

[521] frustration, but the thing that tips them into action.

[522] So one of the interesting things about that measure is that a sociologist found that all measures of violence tick up like that after war.

[523] Right.

[524] This is when the Hells Angels was formed, post -World War II pilots.

[525] And it's not even just veterans.

[526] It's not just veterans bringing the war home, although my book is called Bring the War Home, and they do do that in some really important ways.

[527] But it's also those measures take up among children, among women, among older people.

[528] It's something about all of our society.

[529] Just because it's been in the zeitgeist, violence has been in the zeitgeist?

[530] I mean, I don't think we know why.

[531] But I do think it's really important to pay attention to it because we're now in this period of aftermath of the global war on terror where my students don't even remember before the global war on terror.

[532] And we have this protracted aftermath period coming where we're going to see these waves of violent activity.

[533] Well, one mechanism you mentioned, which is something I hadn't thought.

[534] about is it's a huge recruitment opportunity.

[535] So you have people coming back who are now displaced.

[536] They took a big pause of their life.

[537] They were engaged in violence.

[538] Now they're back.

[539] They're confused.

[540] Who are they?

[541] What is their cause now?

[542] They had a very clear mission.

[543] And so just the availability of recruits sky rockets post -war.

[544] Absolutely.

[545] And I think wartime trauma is one of the things we should be thinking about, both as a legitimate part of a cycle of repeating violence and as a script that they are able to use for their own purposes.

[546] So one person I write about Lewis Beam, who was a leader of the movement and was involved in the clan and then in Aryan Nations and then in the post -Ruby Ridge militia movement and certainly was at least an influence on Timothy McVeigh, if not involved in some way that we don't know.

[547] He spoke regularly about being diagnosed with PTSD after his wartime experiences in Vietnam, about how wrong warfare is, about the encounters with dead bodies.

[548] He was a helicopter gunner, so he saw an enormous amount of carnage.

[549] I don't know, and I think historians can't know whether he means that or whether he's using it because other people are drawn in by it.

[550] But either way, it's definitely one of the primary ways that people talk about their involvement in a movement like this.

[551] And they talk about their activism as continuing the work of Vietnam.

[552] And that appears not only in Greensboro where they're killing communists, as they say, but it appears when they are doing border patrol actions and detaining people trying to cross, it appears when they're attempting to assassinate sheriffs and federal judges.

[553] All of this they see as continuation of the war until they decide to take out the government.

[554] Okay.

[555] It's just the gut intuition I have.

[556] You're probably approaching it more at the societal level and maybe I'm more looking at this from the individual perspective, but I have this opinion about all the mass shooters, as well as most of these members of white power, which is they are generally male, they're generally white.

[557] I think they're people that felt excluded from classmates in school, maybe excluded from jobs, excluded from romantic relationships, from friendships, and they have to conclude that the system they're living in is flawed because it excludes them.

[558] And now you have someone that's just like, well, what thing can I join that agrees the system's flawed and it needs to be overturned.

[559] There has to be some consistent personality type within this membership.

[560] I think this is where we jump from my first book to what I am now researching.

[561] Oh, okay.

[562] So I think we need to distinguish completely, just in recent news, between Buffalo and Uvaldi.

[563] Okay.

[564] Where a school shooting typically is not a politically, ideologically driven act of violence.

[565] Buffalo belongs on a different list.

[566] So if you think about Columbine and a really good example of this.

[567] There is not a political ideology.

[568] I think there could have been, I mean, they were interested in Ramstein and writing Heil Hitler and notebooks and stuff, but they weren't networked.

[569] What do we call political?

[570] So yes, I doubt they had any national concerns, but I think they were overthrowing the local system.

[571] Yes, the local high school hierarchy government.

[572] Jocs are in charge, pretty people are in charge, and fuck this system because we're the rejects of it, and we're taking down the system.

[573] To me, it does still feel inherently political.

[574] I think that's a fair argument.

[575] Let's put it this way.

[576] They didn't go to a gas station and just, they didn't want to just kill people.

[577] They wanted to kill the people at high school.

[578] And they are, in some cases, directly motivated.

[579] So the Columbine shooters talk about being directly trying to outstrip the carnage of Oklahoma City.

[580] But what they are not doing is trying to do something about whiteness.

[581] No, right, right, sure.

[582] So my first book is about the more legible ones, which handily often come with a manifesto that explains what they're doing in one way or another.

[583] In the second book, I'm interested in that next step about what do we do with those events that seem to be much more individual and yet there are so many.

[584] So when we're looking at a shooting like Buffalo, which has a really clear set of political ideas and antecedents and enemies, I put the manifesto of the Buffalo shooting through my plagiarism detection software, which you have if you teach college, and a lot of it is just cut and pasted from the shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand.

[585] Which, by the way, is another reason that it sounds a little more anti -immigrant than the target selection.

[586] There's a side conversation.

[587] here about those manifestos are not always honest documents anyway.

[588] A lot of it is just designed to get journalists to forward it around and post it.

[589] And then the middle part is all tactical information.

[590] How to?

[591] Yeah, how to information about target selection and body gear and stuff.

[592] There's a really clear list that Buffalo goes on, including Christchurch and El Paso and the Tree of Life Synagogue and the Charleston Bible Study shooting.

[593] All of those are carried out by white power gunmen.

[594] They are radicalized and in a social movement.

[595] even if that contact is only online, it's still contact and it's still very legible from a historical standpoint.

[596] It's a mission within the same war.

[597] Yeah.

[598] Those shooters should never be called lone wolves because they are part of a movement.

[599] Yeah.

[600] Over here with Columbine, we really are talking about lone perpetrator action.

[601] Okay, wait, these aren't antithetical to each other, I don't think.

[602] They're not in opposition.

[603] To say then one step further, does any quarterback of the high school football team join that movement.

[604] Oh, like the white power movement?

[605] Yes.

[606] Oh, sure.

[607] Okay, so people that are thriving in society and accepted and lots of peers.

[608] The weirdest thing about the white power movement, and I should out myself as I am not a person who studies radicalization per se.

[609] That's a whole subfield, and I'm not a radicalization expert.

[610] But the historical archive has a lot of people who we can track not only what they say they're doing, but their actual lives through a long stretch of time, which I think is an important record of information here.

[611] And what we see from that is that there are kind of as many ways into that movement as there are people in the movement.

[612] So they range from, like Lewis Beam was pretty popular and ran his own student organization.

[613] It was a segregationist student organization, but it was a student organization.

[614] He did his time and service, and he came back and started his own chapter.

[615] And furthermore, clan groups in Texas in the late 60s, that's not a social outcast.

[616] Yeah, that feels like an Elks Club in the 60s.

[617] Exactly.

[618] It's a much more mainstream thing.

[619] It takes a very long time for law enforcement to get serious about it.

[620] Okay.

[621] I've been defeated.

[622] I just want to acknowledge it.

[623] No, I think we want to believe that.

[624] It's easier for us to be like there's a reason.

[625] They're outcast.

[626] They feel excluded.

[627] I feel that with terrorists in other countries, too.

[628] I'm always saying that.

[629] It's because they're vulnerable.

[630] They're this.

[631] They're that.

[632] And maybe that's wrong.

[633] My motivation for that, if we can identify something about it, we can go upstream.

[634] We have to put way more resources into these kids that are straggling around and you can tell they're lonely, you can tell they're upset.

[635] And that's a great social impulse anyway.

[636] That hurts nothing.

[637] And we should come back around about that for school shootings.

[638] So for this, people who are very popular, there are a few people in the white power movement who had advanced degrees, like physicists, multi -millioners.

[639] There's a guy that lived in a replica of Mount Vernon and had his own plane.

[640] I know.

[641] There was this doxying project for the people at Charlottesville, and they traced one duty as a medical student at UCLA.

[642] Yeah.

[643] And there's business owners.

[644] Some of them are in the suburbs.

[645] Some of them seem like nice neighbors, and that's actually a really good recruitment pitch.

[646] There's one woman.

[647] For me, this was one of the most interesting moments of the research.

[648] Because, so if you study women's history earlier in time, one of the key things is figuring out where women might have made an impact, even if they were not actually the person who signed that they wrote that book.

[649] All the times that people were razzed, people about thanking their wife for typing the manuscript, quote unquote, but actually she co -wrote.

[650] Right, yes.

[651] So there's one of these stories where there's a woman in the white power.

[652] movement who really was in the movement for child care.

[653] She had two little kids under two.

[654] Her husband got involved.

[655] He was gone doing bank robberies and a whole bunch of other stuff for the movement.

[656] And she's like, what am I going to do here with these kids?

[657] So she took them to the center of the thing.

[658] And then she kind of got pulled in because of the community.

[659] Yeah.

[660] They gave child care.

[661] They gave church.

[662] They gave marital counseling.

[663] They took care of her.

[664] Yeah.

[665] And then she ends up being at, there's this big last stand.

[666] So there's a group called The Order, which was a white, power terrorist and bank robbing cell in the 80s.

[667] And the leader Robert Matthews famously had this big last stand with pursuing federal agents up on Whidbey Island, Washington in 1984.

[668] And this is in many a made -for -TV movie depicted as a little shack in the wilderness where it's just one man against pursuing law, marshals, you know, like, it's a Western, we know that story.

[669] Yeah.

[670] It turns out that's totally not what this was.

[671] This was a vacation house.

[672] It was full of women and children.

[673] He was babysitting.

[674] They were helping him dye his hair so he could go on the lamb.

[675] Uh -huh.

[676] Right up until right before the feds got there and he ended up dying and the house caught on fire when they dropped illumination flares.

[677] Okay.

[678] He had a lot of ammunition in there.

[679] This woman was there with him right before the end and he wrote this document called the Order's Declaration of War, which was a foundational document for white power activists and which is still referenced all over the place by people in the movement.

[680] And in court transcript, somebody asked her, oh, you were there when he wrote that?

[681] She's like, yeah.

[682] And they were like, well, did you help?

[683] She said, yeah, of course I did.

[684] In what capacity?

[685] Oh, I proofread it for them.

[686] Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

[687] Because proof read it for them can mean, I fixed the commas, but proofread it for them can mean I co -wrote it or added three stanzas.

[688] And that's just somebody who was there for child care.

[689] But to your earlier point, there's also a bunch of people who are high school dropouts and felons and people who really don't fit anywhere else.

[690] And people who are just recklessly violent that this movement likes because they want to use that impulse.

[691] Yeah.

[692] It's all of it.

[693] It's all of it.

[694] Yeah.

[695] I know.

[696] I wanted there to be like...

[697] Me too.

[698] But I guess it's a multi -prong approach to all the stuff.

[699] So women's role in the movement.

[700] It's so weird to think of this as misogynistic.

[701] Because you're kind of giving them the benefit of the doubt.

[702] So it sounds nice on the surface.

[703] But I think the popular conception would be women get drug into this.

[704] Yeah.

[705] Well, and some do.

[706] But a lot don't.

[707] Yeah.

[708] Look at how many women voted for Trump and didn't vote for Hillary.

[709] So many.

[710] Yeah.

[711] So the notion that women are a voting group or anything, is preposterous.

[712] Yeah, this is a historian's problem also that we collectively totally missed the Reagan Revolution coming to the extent that a prominent historian wrote an essay in 94 called the problem of conservatism that was basically just, you guys, where did that come from?

[713] How did we miss this?

[714] This is huge.

[715] Meaning how successful it was?

[716] Yeah, how many people were involved, how successful?

[717] Here comes Reagan into the White House.

[718] How do we get from the 60s, right?

[719] Which is the time of leftist social mobilization to the 80s, which is the time of absolutely the other thing.

[720] Right.

[721] And what I'm about to say is not about the white power movement.

[722] I am now talking about the new right, which is sort of the broad conservative movement that emerges in the United States after World War II and crests up to the Reagan years and then morphs in the 80s and is still with us in different ways.

[723] So different thing now.

[724] I am not painting them with the same brush.

[725] But it's interesting because the reason we missed it is that a lot of it was powered by women's grassroots activism.

[726] And if you asked them, they would say, I'm not political.

[727] I'm just a wife and mother.

[728] Right.

[729] And then they would turn around and go back to their political organizing.

[730] Sure.

[731] So if you go to a John Birch Society meeting in the 60s or a Reagan campaign event or a Goldwater thing, all of these were really done by women.

[732] And when historians were looking back then in the 80s and 90s, we were looking for the men who were sort of the intellectual archetypes of the movement.

[733] Yeah, holding the power.

[734] Holding the power, writing the books, doing all that stuff.

[735] So that's part of the story.

[736] but you don't see this whole underground of mobilization and that underground is the thing that gives rise to like the big movement that propels reagan.

[737] My wife finds out something's healthier than the other thing.

[738] Everyone's gonna know within a couple hours.

[739] You know?

[740] So you know what's really weird about the white power women?

[741] Tell me. They are so into macrobiotic diet and organic gardening and they're into it way early, like in the 70s.

[742] Really?

[743] Yeah.

[744] Because let's go back to nature when the white male was king.

[745] Yes.

[746] And also, they don't trust the government.

[747] Yeah, exactly.

[748] Grow your own food.

[749] Grow your own food.

[750] Be off the grid.

[751] But also, it's one of the places where you can kind of see the fringe left and the fringe right start to...

[752] Yeah, be glad.

[753] It's a political circle, not a spectrum.

[754] It's same with the anti -vaccine.

[755] Absolutely.

[756] That's such a smart way to think about that.

[757] A lot of whole food shoppers.

[758] A lot of whole food shoppers.

[759] Whole earth catalog is what it was back then.

[760] Yeah.

[761] Okay, so women, they sometimes have been tasked with softening the message of these folks or just the public perception.

[762] But they, in fact, we're on the ground in many of these things that drove getaway cars, as you say.

[763] Yes.

[764] They're also involved in the homeschooling, obviously, and the church get -togethers.

[765] I don't know why I wrestle with the notion.

[766] I guess because it feels so hateful, and it feels like the domain of men or violence feels like the domain of men.

[767] Do you agree, Monica?

[768] It feels weirder.

[769] That women are involved.

[770] Yeah, women are passionately involved.

[771] Yeah.

[772] It doesn't feel that weird to me. I mean, the violent portion, yes, but that's the part they're not really engaging in.

[773] They're making it all happen.

[774] Yeah.

[775] I get what you mean.

[776] though.

[777] You know what I'm saying?

[778] I'm just trying to confront this.

[779] I'm probably acknowledging there's some misogyny here, there's something here.

[780] But it's just curious to me that I immediately think, oh, these poor gals have been drug in by these fucking loser husbands.

[781] They can't get a job at ACO hardware, so black people need to go.

[782] I mean, it's a mystery, right?

[783] Because if you're a woman in the movement, so Vicki Weaver, for instance, lived in a very remote place with her husband, and she and her daughters had to go to a special shed for menstruation when they were unclean, right?

[784] And she She chose that.

[785] She chose that for ourselves.

[786] Right.

[787] He probably didn't even know about the red tents.

[788] She figured that out.

[789] Yeah.

[790] Was she raised in a family that was like, what?

[791] They worked at the John Deer plant in Waterloo, Iowa.

[792] Wow.

[793] They make a great tractor, by the way.

[794] They do make a great tractor.

[795] They do make a great tractor.

[796] Okay, so maybe we could plot through.

[797] So as we already mentioned, your book, Bring the War Home, is taking us from Vietnam to the 90s.

[798] There's some critical parts of that or steps in that.

[799] Well, we've already touched him.

[800] but can you kind of just give us an overview of that?

[801] Wait, I have to stop.

[802] Sorry, because I just had a realization.

[803] Oh, great.

[804] Real -time realization.

[805] Is it about Callie's chair?

[806] No. But I am still thinking about that.

[807] No, I think when women have kids, something happens where the mama bear comes out and everything to protect that kid and the future of that child and the future of children in general.

[808] What world they're inheriting?

[809] It's all similar.

[810] which is fine.

[811] Normally it's good.

[812] But I bet that's what's happening with the women in these.

[813] I also want to add, I know some racist ass bitches from home.

[814] Oh, of course.

[815] Me too.

[816] I know some racist, racist women.

[817] Yeah, but it's just so easy for them to channel it into the future for their children that will make them think anything.

[818] Part of what's going on for the women is that they, via this ideology, sit in an incredibly important position.

[819] Yeah.

[820] Because without the participation of women you cannot create more white children yeah cannot do it so that makes them in some places powerful purposeful power yeah in another way is not any power right like it depends on which way it's running at a particular moment but the other part to remember is the apocalypticness of this ideology is immediate threat and it really is packaged as if you do not take up arms there will be no future for your people and your children yeah that's all a mom has to hear get sort of involved.

[821] It's like the end is eminent.

[822] You have to act yesterday.

[823] The end is not.

[824] Yeah.

[825] You know, I just get really distracted by the topic of apocalypses because I think it's fascinating.

[826] An apocalyptic narrative can either inspire action or total inaction.

[827] I do think apocalyptic thinking in general is a very human endeavor.

[828] We're very susceptible to it.

[829] As we are susceptible to the belief in a God, I think this is one of our things that we always have to check ourselves against.

[830] And what I always think is my mind is, you know, I saw it with Y2K.

[831] Oh, my God, everything's going to melt down.

[832] In my short lifetime, 47 years on a 4 billion -year -old planet, I've seen a lot of people think that the end was coming.

[833] And I've said to myself, there's a real arrogance to it, that this thing, this human experiment has been going on for 150 ,000 years.

[834] But you happen to be in the generation that's going to witness it disappear?

[835] Or that the Earth is going to be uninhabitable.

[836] It's been here for 5 billion years.

[837] We had CO2 levels 10x of what this was.

[838] But also, there was a long time without humans.

[839] Absolutely.

[840] My point is everyone who thinks they're going to witness it is a little arrogant.

[841] When you look at where we're at on a timeline, it has to be acknowledged that, yes, humans have been here for 150 ,000 years.

[842] Ominids have been here for 6 million years.

[843] But us born in the 80s are going to witness the end of it all?

[844] Yeah, I don't know if the thought so much is that we're going to witness it so much as it's coming and like your grandkids or grand grand, whatever, they might witness it.

[845] And somebody will witness it.

[846] That is going to happen.

[847] Even when we had the paleontologist on, he was like, yeah, there's cycles.

[848] Well, mammals may day out, for sure.

[849] But I'm saying everyone right now, who's certain that Y2K they were going to witness the end of civilization is pretty arrogant because there's been many, many years of past and no one witnessed it.

[850] Everyone needs to check themselves on the left and the right.

[851] Y2K is my favorite one.

[852] My students think Y2K is so cute.

[853] From here, it looks like such a nothing.

[854] But they were so worried about you, you remember.

[855] Monica's mother was frantically working up until December 31st because she was a computer programmer.

[856] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[857] So I'm researching Colorado in the 90s right now.

[858] So they had every prison guard in the state of Colorado on duty in case all the doors flew open.

[859] Right.

[860] And the promise keepers, the evangelical group, canceled their rally because they were pretty sure Jesus was going to come back for Y2K.

[861] Right, of course.

[862] And it goes on and on like this.

[863] And from here, my students are like, it's a very sweet apocalypse because nothing happens and nobody gets hurt.

[864] I think you're absolutely right.

[865] that people have imagined that there was an imminent end of the world.

[866] From the get.

[867] So I think in your book, Bring the War Home, I would imagine step one is recognizing this is a humongous thing that's not lone wolfy.

[868] It's not two knuckleheads.

[869] It's one big terrorist organization that works within cells.

[870] The cells could be Nazis.

[871] The cells could be sovereign citizens, whatever cell you're in.

[872] But globally, we have to go, no, no, we have a huge white power problem.

[873] Yeah.

[874] And we need to address.

[875] How the fuck do we do that?

[876] What do we do?

[877] The white power movement is what historians call trans scaler, which just means it exists at a lot of different scales of activity.

[878] So it includes purportedly loan attacks.

[879] It also includes public actions like we saw in Charlottesville or like we see in a lot of proud boys' actions, although those are tending toward the violent lately.

[880] And it's starting to include some crossover into our mainstream politics.

[881] All of those need different kinds of solutions.

[882] So I don't want just say a law about domestic terrorism, which is one thing that people talk about sometimes.

[883] I'm not super excited about that for a lot of historical reasons also, but I think what we need is a bunch of stuff.

[884] I think we need surveillance resources.

[885] I think we need different kinds of training in our DOD and law enforcement.

[886] I think we need some changes to law so that we can prosecute when we get the opportunity.

[887] We need to tell different stories about it in our newspapers.

[888] And, you know, just on an individual level for people listening, just paying attention to it, I recognize, is a huge ask.

[889] Because I feel like he's just open your Twitter and it's like a fire hose of impossible information all the time.

[890] Yeah, yeah.

[891] Overwhelming.

[892] But just reading those stories and trying to put them together is a huge step if folks are able to.

[893] I follow this great rapper to Lib Quali.

[894] He posted a video of them arresting.

[895] I want to say it was 21 white power dudes in the back of a U -Haul.

[896] 31.

[897] In Cordillane.

[898] In Cordillane.

[899] Yeah.

[900] A U -Haul full of 31 dudes in military fatigues.

[901] And all they can really arrest them for at that point is being in a vehicle without a seatbelt.

[902] Mm -hmm.

[903] And I say to myself, there's got to be something more.

[904] If they had Al -Qaeda sweatshirts on, we'd have no problem.

[905] We would have no problem.

[906] And I mean, like, there's a conversation to have about should we be able to do that if they have Al -Qaeda sweatshirts on.

[907] Like, there's a question about kind of differential prosecution that I think is a valid question.

[908] And also, we do have some more information about that one, which is that they had a plan to violently confront a pride event in Cordillane.

[909] Oh, they did.

[910] Yeah.

[911] And we know that a couple days later, another group of folks, I forget which group, stormed a drag storytime at a San Francisco Public Library and scared a bunch of kids.

[912] So this is a coordinated thing.

[913] What we need is a way to think about it and talk about it as a coordinated thing.

[914] And that's not easy to do piecemeal.

[915] because even if you were just going to read every story about the proud boys, you're getting one tiny strand of this big tapestry of stuff.

[916] And we need to be following the proud boys and the oathkeepers and Patriot Front in all of the subgroups and the people that aren't in a group but are affiliated and the way that those groups are being called upon.

[917] And I don't know what the nature of this is.

[918] I think that is up to the people running the commission.

[919] But the January 6th commission is right now trying to tell us a story about whether our elected officials deliberately used those groups as shock troops in an anti -democratic action, we need to be following that story.

[920] Listen to you speak on this in an interview.

[921] If you look at the capital riot slash insurrection, I think that's interesting because the left's going to say insurrection, the right's going to say riot.

[922] And I would argue both things are true.

[923] Some people there were insurrectionists.

[924] Some people there were caught up in a riot.

[925] Agree.

[926] Yeah.

[927] And you point out there's a bunch of groups there.

[928] Yeah.

[929] January 6th, we can understand as the collision of three different streams of political or organizing.

[930] One is QAnon, which I think we should for now perhaps just set to the side.

[931] As a historian, I feel like it's too new for me to say anything about it.

[932] Right, right, right.

[933] This is a disciplinary thing where we get uncomfortable with things that are too present.

[934] So it mobilizes old conspiracy theories, but it works very fast and very deep.

[935] And I think we will know more about it very soon.

[936] So QAnon, small, but let's set it to the side.

[937] And then there's sort of the Trump base, the stop the steel rally.

[938] And I think that that group is the biggest one.

[939] And that includes a spectrum of intensity, ranging from people that really wanted to deface some stuff to people who are just there to protest what they saw as an illegitimate election.

[940] And witness this craziness and getting caught up in a big...

[941] And got caught up in a swell.

[942] Those people are there.

[943] Yeah.

[944] The third stream is the one that I think we really need to pay attention to because the people that got caught up, this is why they got ensnared.

[945] This third stream is the organized white power movement and the militant right.

[946] Yes.

[947] They're the smallest.

[948] They show up in tactical gear.

[949] You can see them.

[950] They are uniformed.

[951] They showed up with radios.

[952] They cased the site before they started.

[953] They went and figured out where to breach the building.

[954] They led people to the breach.

[955] Yeah.

[956] They're insurrectionists.

[957] They're insurrectionists.

[958] What they did is an attack on the functioning of our democracy.

[959] So if you're interested in democracy, right or left, reasonable people should be able to agree that that part is a problem.

[960] Yeah, yeah.

[961] That's a coup.

[962] That's a coup.

[963] And how other people get sucked into it can have fatal consequences.

[964] Well, I said that right from the get goes.

[965] Right when I was watching, I was like, what is this group?

[966] I got one guy over here with a Jesus saves poster.

[967] I got another guy anti -abortion.

[968] There's another person over here.

[969] It was a cornucopia of weird shit from my perspective.

[970] Yeah, and I think that's sort of the through line of what you're saying.

[971] It's all over.

[972] It's not just this one group or this one group.

[973] they have a running agenda that happens to overlap.

[974] And the other thing to remember, and this has been true of the Klan since the 1920s and it's true about white power now, it is fundamentally opportunistic and it is incredibly good at reading the room.

[975] So if you learned about the Klan in the 20s, this is the really big one.

[976] It got up to 4 million people and like 10 % of the state of Indiana.

[977] Wow.

[978] And that Klan, if you learned about it in high school, you probably learned was anti -Black and anti -Jewish, anti -Semitic.

[979] It was also anti -immigrant in the Northeast where there were a lot of immigrants and anti -Mexican on the border and anti -union in the Pacific Northwest where they were having a bunch of union skirmishes.

[980] And it was anti -Catholic in Indiana because Notre Dame University is in Indiana, right?

[981] So it goes to the local community and picks up whatever handy scapegoat is available and uses that to recruit and radicalize one.

[982] The second part of this opportunism has to do with how it presents its same.

[983] So if you look at women's clan robes in the 20s, they're very fashion forward.

[984] Slim cut shows a little bit of ankle.

[985] They're using cultural forms to make themselves palatable.

[986] Same thing when we see the island print shirts for the Bukulu boys or the khakis and polos in Charlottesville, these are experimentations about what will work.

[987] And one lesson from Charlottesville, where we just got back a very large settlement in the civil suit about the people that organized that rally, is that the overesteads, neo -Nazi and clan stuff is being held up in courts of law as wrong, whereas the militia stuff is going through.

[988] Yeah.

[989] So we had acquittals in the Whitmer thing.

[990] We had an acquittal in the Kenosha one.

[991] We have some perverse thought that being armed is patriotic.

[992] It falls under this weird safety net of patriotism.

[993] Yeah.

[994] Well, and there's a reason for that having to do with the militia stuff particularly.

[995] But so what we saw in January 6th, with a few notable exceptions, mostly it was not swastikas and Confederate flags.

[996] mostly it was don't tread on me and militia stuff, right?

[997] Because the movement has figured out that that is what will work right now.

[998] So militias is tricky.

[999] Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[1000] Militias have a special place in American history because of their role in the American Revolution.

[1001] Yeah.

[1002] As we know.

[1003] Don't tread on me. That's where it comes.

[1004] Don't tread on me. And also Lexington and Concord and the role that.

[1005] the private soldier, that the citizen was going to be a citizen soldier and going to be part of this democracy via their combat.

[1006] This is attached to the Second Amendment.

[1007] This is attached to how people think about gun rights.

[1008] And it's attached to how people think about popular sovereignty and their own ownership of the country in ways that I would not undermine.

[1009] It's an important strand and who we are.

[1010] For sure.

[1011] But militias are tricky because they were incorporated into National and State Guard units in 1903.

[1012] So after 1903, all of the constitutional militia activity is in National and State Guard units.

[1013] Everything else is a unlawful private army.

[1014] Right, right.

[1015] All 50 states have laws on the books against militia activity in one way or another.

[1016] Whether it is things like you cannot form and march a private army or you cannot parade in public with firearms, there's different ways that they did it.

[1017] But all 50 states prohibit private armies.

[1018] Why on earth are they so then prevalent and accept it?

[1019] That's a great question.

[1020] Yeah.

[1021] Well, I think also we have an obsession with self -defense.

[1022] We all feel like I should be able to defend myself, Kenosha, all of that.

[1023] That was the main defense.

[1024] Yeah, the idea of self -defense is an interesting one.

[1025] It's changed a lot in the last 30 years or so.

[1026] So the advent of open carry legislation and stand -your ground laws, which is sort of the legal basis for using a firearm if someone is on your property.

[1027] And then different states have done things like, like extend, stain your ground laws to self -defense, like, while you're not in your house, just out and about.

[1028] There was one that I thought was interesting.

[1029] I think this was in Colorado.

[1030] They did an open -carry law that made it so that University of Colorado couldn't ban carrying weapons.

[1031] And I wanted to know, could I ban them on my syllabus?

[1032] I can ban cell phones.

[1033] I can ban laptops.

[1034] But anyway, but I don't teach theirs, so it's kind of a non -issue.

[1035] Yeah, yeah.

[1036] But it's interesting, right?

[1037] These articulations about where the gun is within our...

[1038] But that succeeded?

[1039] They made it illegal for them to ban firearms on.

[1040] the campus of a college.

[1041] I think that was a Colorado Supreme Court decision.

[1042] You'll have to go look and fact check and see if I'm right about that one.

[1043] Yeah.

[1044] Not sending my kid to that college, I don't think.

[1045] Well, there's a lot of places where guns are seen as sort of part of the fabric of the community.

[1046] Well, that's its own thing.

[1047] Milicious.

[1048] Yes.

[1049] Because I think that's very polarizing, personally.

[1050] When did they have their explosion of popularity?

[1051] Post -Vietnam as well?

[1052] No. So the first big militia movement is in the 90s, the early 90s.

[1053] and it's partly reactive to the Randy Weaver, Ruby Ridge, Waco set of events we talked about.

[1054] It's also reactive to gun control legislation that came through at the same time.

[1055] So it's the 1994, yeah, it's the omnibus crime bill that comes through.

[1056] And it's an interesting bill in that people on the left and the right really did not like that one.

[1057] Right, ended up criminalizing black folks.

[1058] Criminalizing black folks through mandatory minimums, but also banning a lot of assault weapons.

[1059] Yeah.

[1060] It was a loss for both sides and a win for both sides.

[1061] Yeah.

[1062] People in the right more generally react very strongly to federal limits on gun ownership.

[1063] So the militias, which called themselves the Patriot Movement, became popular right around that same time.

[1064] And one of the interesting things I found in Bring the War Home is that people usually have talked about that as a separate thing from the paramilitary right that I was looking at in the 80s.

[1065] But really it's more that if we had a Venn diagram of the militia's big circle, and the white power movement smaller circle.

[1066] There's some militia activity that's not in the white power movement, but the white power movement would be almost entirely inside of the militias.

[1067] I got you.

[1068] Even the militias that were not openly racist were going to the same events and marching shoulder to shoulder and going to the same gun shows.

[1069] Grabbing a coffee afterwards.

[1070] Grabbing a coffee.

[1071] Yeah, so there's at least some social overlap there.

[1072] Furthermore, the white power movement had amassed some pretty serious money and weapons and tactical training in the 80s.

[1073] That all flowed.

[1074] into the militias.

[1075] So if we want to draw a line, I mean, it goes directly from the founding of the white power movement into the militias and the Oklahoma City bombing and then forward into the present.

[1076] There's never really been a stop to this activity.

[1077] There's all laws, though, on the books.

[1078] Have any of these been tried in the Supreme Court and overturned or anything?

[1079] So we've had some big trials.

[1080] In 1988, the government, they did a big seditious conspiracy case against people in the white power movement.

[1081] And seditious conspiracy means they needed to prove that there was a conspiracy, so people in contact with a plan to violently overthrow the government.

[1082] Now, that is what they were doing.

[1083] That's what they said they were doing.

[1084] They had been working on it since 1983, at least.

[1085] They had declared war.

[1086] They had talked to each other.

[1087] They had wiretaps.

[1088] They had all kinds of interpersonal communications.

[1089] Oh, they also went online in 1984 in an early computer networked message board system called LibertyNet, where they could communicate about assassination targets and also share personal ads and things like that.

[1090] Sure.

[1091] Proto Facebook.

[1092] Sell some old cars and farm equipment.

[1093] Yeah.

[1094] So all of this is on the books.

[1095] And they were outfitted, although the jurors didn't see it.

[1096] The sedition trial had a list of armament that was not just the usual.

[1097] So the usual, we would expect to find error 15s and M16 semi -automatics.

[1098] They also had things like anti -tank guns, surface -to -air capability.

[1099] They were trying to get the kind of missile that would take down a helicopter.

[1100] RPG?

[1101] Yeah, RPGs.

[1102] And they had a bunch of homemade stuff that I personally would not want to be homemade, like landmines and napalm.

[1103] I think maybe we should not make it home.

[1104] Well, just think that Timothy McVebaum was enormous.

[1105] Handmaid.

[1106] Yeah.

[1107] So the sedition trial did not work.

[1108] Huge failure.

[1109] The Justice Department put so much into this, too.

[1110] It was a whole bunch of smaller trials in the 80s.

[1111] They had taken plea bargains, trying to get testimony that would put together this big win.

[1112] And instead, they were all acquitted.

[1113] And the headline was.

[1114] was jubilant racists win trial.

[1115] The photo was Lewis Beam holding his young wife in his arms.

[1116] The photo is amazing.

[1117] I teach it to my students.

[1118] She has no shoes.

[1119] I don't know why.

[1120] She's wearing a long white dress.

[1121] She's got her blonde hair like flowing over his arm.

[1122] It could be a still from birth of a nation.

[1123] It's one of those evocative images.

[1124] I would imagine the issue as I just know nothing about it would be when you do this with a mafia organization, it's kind of easy because there is a boss.

[1125] There's no great hierarchy that everyone agrees on.

[1126] Is that the problem?

[1127] That's part of the problem.

[1128] So part of it is leaderless resistance, which is just cell -style terrorism.

[1129] The idea is that one or a few people can work in a cell without communication with other cells and without direct orders or communication with leadership.

[1130] And they were doing that, and that was very effective for them in this trial.

[1131] There were some other things, though.

[1132] So including, but not limited to, two jurors had romantic relationships with defendants during the trial, which I think we can all agree is not an impartial jury.

[1133] Yeah.

[1134] Okay.

[1135] So they weren't sequestered, obviously.

[1136] They were just kind of.

[1137] pen pals.

[1138] Oh, my goodness.

[1139] What a love story.

[1140] What a love story.

[1141] How'd you end up me?

[1142] He was being tried.

[1143] Yeah, yeah.

[1144] That should be one of our armchair anonymous prompts.

[1145] Have you ever fallen in love with a prisoner?

[1146] Oh, yeah.

[1147] Or a white power.

[1148] No, I don't want to know those people.

[1149] There might be some crossover.

[1150] There might be some crossover.

[1151] Yeah, they had other trouble too, though, chain of custody stuff.

[1152] So Lewis Beam was on the lamb to Mexico.

[1153] He was on the FBI Most Wanted list.

[1154] And when they arrested him, all of the stuff he had with him, which included stuff about falsified.

[1155] his identification, faking his own death, a bunch of other incredibly damning evidence.

[1156] None of it was admissible because it was collected by the Mexican police officers, and they didn't follow chain of custody rules.

[1157] And his young wife, Sheila Beam, was showing up in court doing this incredibly interesting and damaging, performative martyrdom.

[1158] Here she is in pain.

[1159] Here she is in a roughly white dress.

[1160] There were all these stories about Sheila that didn't even mention what Lewis was on trial for.

[1161] So the narratives were working in their favor in a whole lot of different ways.

[1162] And then they all represented themselves, which was...

[1163] They loved to do that.

[1164] It was a big mess, and it sure makes them look disorganized.

[1165] Yeah.

[1166] Which is helpful in a sedition trial, right?

[1167] But it worked.

[1168] It worked.

[1169] He talked about how he was a patriot, and no one who had ever served in war could possibly be a traitor to their country.

[1170] Well, listen, if your narrative is, I'm the lone citizen the Constitution is supposed to protect.

[1171] Actually, bringing in a lawyer is antithetical to that story.

[1172] Exactly.

[1173] Yeah.

[1174] It's like, I'm such a story.

[1175] simple, man, I don't even have a lawyer.

[1176] I'm just here to tell you the truth.

[1177] Right.

[1178] Well, and it makes them look like a bunch of disorganized guys, which is what they're trying to show is that they're a bunch of disorganized guys, right?

[1179] So it was an acquittal.

[1180] They even returned all the weapons to them at the end of the trial.

[1181] Even the anti -tank stuff.

[1182] My lord.

[1183] Okay, I find this to be one of the more fascinating topics ever.

[1184] This whole thing?

[1185] Yes.

[1186] Yeah, I know.

[1187] It's crazy to me. Maybe because I watch those skinheads, you know, in the mosh pit and the many fights that followed.

[1188] But you said we've got to talk about it.

[1189] That was one of the steps in confronting this.

[1190] Yes.

[1191] In addition to us confronting it and talking about it and learning what the story is that they're telling so we can counteract it, what other things do you think need to happen?

[1192] So I think being able to tell a history of what has happened in our country, both in the recent past and in the more distant past, is critical for being able to move forward in a less polarized society.

[1193] And wanting to learn and talk about history is something that is often attributed to the left.

[1194] Yeah.

[1195] But it strikes me that even Make America Great again is a argument about history.

[1196] It's about periodization.

[1197] When was it great?

[1198] Who is it great for?

[1199] Who's included?

[1200] What is it?

[1201] Can it be done again?

[1202] Should we do it again?

[1203] That's a call to talk about history.

[1204] I'm aware that I'm a historian and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

[1205] But I really think that having a big conversation about our nation's history together would open the door to a lot of positive change.

[1206] I guess their argument, if I could put on their hat for a second.

[1207] Their argument would be, we have history.

[1208] You want to rewrite it and show a different version of it.

[1209] And we're opposed to this new version.

[1210] We have our history.

[1211] Slavery ended.

[1212] It's all good.

[1213] You're taking down our statues.

[1214] So you're trying to remove the history that was already written and replace it with now your left -wing history.

[1215] Well, I'm trying to have a conversation about history.

[1216] I'm not interested in one story of history from either side.

[1217] I would like to have a conversation about history.

[1218] And I think that dialogue is where the truth probably lives.

[1219] There's a really amazing book that just came out a couple years ago about the way that we have argued about history.

[1220] And it shows that people who were creating Jim Crow wrote a really specific version of the history of reconstruction that would enable Jim Crow.

[1221] And then people who were fighting the civil rights movement wrote a really specific version of the history of Jim Crow that would prop up segregation.

[1222] And this happens on a cyclical basis.

[1223] We're always rewriting and reinterpreting and re -understanding.

[1224] But we also have a whole bunch of thinking skills that come from knowing our history that are applicable to other parts of our society.

[1225] And we have a whole bunch of evidence to look at.

[1226] Learning our history isn't about loving a verdict or making anybody feel terrible or besmirching people's family stories.

[1227] People love history when it's their family tree, right?

[1228] Yeah.

[1229] People want to know where they came from and what that is.

[1230] I would argue there's an anthropological approach to it, which is you're learning it for the sake of learning it, not to declare a verdict, not to render a judgment.

[1231] You're just learning.

[1232] Why do they do this?

[1233] Why do they do that?

[1234] Because I think that what is in that story is not about a political judgment.

[1235] It's about a capacity of thinking that is more open and has more options for the future.

[1236] And from where I'm sitting, we need more options.

[1237] We need to stretch the limits of our social imaginary so that we can have some more choices.

[1238] the more ways to come together.

[1239] Well, I'd also argue it's data for us in the same way that we're excited that they've cracked the human genome.

[1240] We're excited about CRISPR.

[1241] We're excited about learning daily how the insides of our bodies work.

[1242] Yeah.

[1243] That's of great fascination to us.

[1244] We can see the application of that.

[1245] We're excited by understanding ourselves biochemically better.

[1246] Yeah.

[1247] Recorded history is, what, 5 ,000 years old?

[1248] There's 5 ,000 years of data of how we are.

[1249] We're not unique to anyone at any other period.

[1250] This is humans doing human shit.

[1251] This is what we've done.

[1252] It is an exploration of what we are.

[1253] I like American history because we live in this place that has made this radical set of promises about life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

[1254] And it is absolutely not controversial among historians for me to tell you that was never meant for me. Or Monica or a black person.

[1255] It was meant for wealthy, white, property -owning men who were living there at the time that it was written.

[1256] That is not that many people who are in our nation now.

[1257] And over time, there have been movements of people who have organized and demanded inclusion in that category.

[1258] And then, of course, there's pushback.

[1259] But then we open it up more.

[1260] That is such a hopeful story to me. Oh, totally.

[1261] It's a hopeful thing to read.

[1262] It's not about hating America or something.

[1263] No. It's about whether we can make good on that radical idea.

[1264] Yes.

[1265] And also we're free to acknowledge along the way that we've made great, great strides in that.

[1266] Half the people that wrote that thing own many human beings.

[1267] We've come quite far from that.

[1268] It's not like it's over, but it's a story of triumph and defeat and everything.

[1269] The whole thing's there.

[1270] Yeah.

[1271] Okay.

[1272] I know you're married.

[1273] Currently at night, my routine is I watch about 25 minutes of the Benjamin Franklin, Ken Burns, documentary.

[1274] And then right when I'm getting sleepy, I switch over to Audible to the Ron Chernow, George Washington.

[1275] Oh, nice.

[1276] Wouldn't you love to be my mate at night?

[1277] I mean, doesn't this seem like your dream husband, that all I do is consume?

[1278] Boring history every night?

[1279] My husband is also consuming boring history every night.

[1280] Oh, cool.

[1281] Maybe I should hang with him, too.

[1282] Do you know what I did for my students at the end of the year this year?

[1283] Okay, this was my last year at UChicago, where famously fun goes to die.

[1284] Oh, we needed to have a fun moment for the history nerds who'd finish their history things.

[1285] We got a Lincoln impersonator.

[1286] Oh, really?

[1287] It was so fun, though, because he knows a lot.

[1288] I had not totally anticipated how much he was going to get grilled, but he got grilled and he knows a lot about the makeup of the Supreme Court and how everything worked and how Lincoln patented an invention about boats and canals.

[1289] When you get into the deep life of any one person, I think it's super interesting.

[1290] Why didn't you have a Rockefeller impersonator?

[1291] That's his college.

[1292] Oh, that would be cool.

[1293] I'll tell you, it's easy to find a Lincoln impersonator in Illinois.

[1294] I will put on a bald cap and old makeup.

[1295] Yeah, I was about to say, it'd be a good job for you because that's a hard job to be an actor, essentially.

[1296] Yeah.

[1297] And smart.

[1298] You have to have a good knowledge of history.

[1299] And you have to have the correct cut of the jaw.

[1300] Yes, yes.

[1301] He was great.

[1302] And he had that great disease.

[1303] I know the name of it, but it's escaping me right now, where your aorta.

[1304] They say his aorta would have exploded.

[1305] Oh, marfins?

[1306] Did he have marfins?

[1307] He had marfins, yeah.

[1308] I did not know that.

[1309] Yeah.

[1310] That's what I was anthropologists say.

[1311] The forensic osteologists and many people have declared its hands.

[1312] There's a bunch of clues.

[1313] Yeah, he did have like the really long fingers.

[1314] Yeah, real gaunt and all this.

[1315] So they say his aorta would have exploded on him shortly thereafter.

[1316] If that's any comfort to anyone, I don't know if there will be, But did this guy have Marfan's disease?

[1317] I don't know.

[1318] Okay, okay.

[1319] I thought for a minute I had it.

[1320] When I was learning about Lincoln having it, I'm like, I think I would check yes to all those.

[1321] Oh, yeah, like the long fingers?

[1322] Yeah, all the phenotypical attributes of Marfan's.

[1323] Kathleen, it was incredible time talking to you about this.

[1324] Very fascinating.

[1325] I wish you would party at Northwestern.

[1326] You've gone now where fun is born and perpetuated.

[1327] That's where you're going.

[1328] I'm very excited.

[1329] We're working on building history of the present.

[1330] So I want to work with journalism students about asking historically informed questions and they're reporting.

[1331] And then I want to work with historians about how to talk better publicly about what we're doing.

[1332] Nice.

[1333] Yeah, you need a rebranding.

[1334] History seems old.

[1335] They're very fun.

[1336] It has an oldness because it is old because that's the whole point of it because history's old and then we think old.

[1337] I know.

[1338] But see, almost everything I study is Vietnam War Forward, which to my parents, for instance, they're like, that's history.

[1339] Right.

[1340] They were there.

[1341] Yeah.

[1342] I just taught a history class on 9 -11 because my students don't remember 9 -11.

[1343] You have to go back and relearn all this stuff.

[1344] Yeah, so many babies.

[1345] History is now.

[1346] History is now.

[1347] Go ahead, hit her with your favorite saying.

[1348] History doesn't repeat itself.

[1349] It rhymes.

[1350] Ooh, I like that.

[1351] Thank you.

[1352] You've heard that, right?

[1353] I didn't hear that one.

[1354] You've never heard that?

[1355] You only heard it for the first time a couple months ago?

[1356] But I'm not a history professor.

[1357] Well, now I'm going to say it a lot.

[1358] Please do.

[1359] It doesn't repeat it rhymes.

[1360] It's very abstract.

[1361] I mean, I can piece it together.

[1362] It's just not easy for me. My own family, and I think it's great for smart people like you.

[1363] It makes sense right away.

[1364] It doesn't repeat.

[1365] It rhymes.

[1366] I think this is such a huge, much bigger than anyone would guess topic.

[1367] It was an incredible history.

[1368] And I hope everyone checks out, bring the war home.

[1369] The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

[1370] Kathleen, thank you so much for coming.

[1371] This was really, really fun and interesting and informative.

[1372] Thank you for having me. You're welcome.

[1373] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[1374] Hi.

[1375] I'm catching you right before you leave on a big trip.

[1376] Yeah.

[1377] It's a sad, happy trip.

[1378] I mean, it's happy because it's a trip.

[1379] Because trips are happy.

[1380] Yeah, exactly.

[1381] But we're splitting.

[1382] Mm -hmm.

[1383] Because you guys are going on a fun European vacation.

[1384] Mm -hmm.

[1385] And so you guys aren't coming, and it's sad.

[1386] And happy because they're both trips.

[1387] Yeah.

[1388] We had a, what a great record yesterday, huh?

[1389] We had a really fun guest, yeah.

[1390] That was like reinvigorating, recharging.

[1391] Because it was, what was that, three hours?

[1392] It was a three hour.

[1393] We have not had that in so long.

[1394] It was super fun.

[1395] You think we should do two parts, part one and two?

[1396] Oh, it's up to you.

[1397] We've never done one and two.

[1398] Well, let me see how it.

[1399] Edits together.

[1400] I don't think there's that, I mean, but yeah, we'll see.

[1401] Everything will be revealed later in the TVD.

[1402] One thing, I had a revelation.

[1403] I texted you about.

[1404] Last night.

[1405] because we both, we love Cherry Garcia so much.

[1406] Yes, yes, yes.

[1407] We talk about how much we love it and we found it on an airplane.

[1408] And just to remind people, the best part of it really was the reveal.

[1409] It was the trick ending.

[1410] We thought we hated it.

[1411] Exactly.

[1412] We only ate it in desperation on the airplane.

[1413] Yeah, they gave it to us, fine, we'll eat it.

[1414] Turns out we love it.

[1415] It turns out it was our favorite.

[1416] It seems too simple and boring.

[1417] Cherries and vanilla ice cream?

[1418] And chocolate, though.

[1419] Oh, chocolate, that's so.

[1420] C .C. But then you realize last night that cherry, this is the part that confuses me. Did you just realize there was cherries in it last night?

[1421] No, no, no. Okay.

[1422] I knew there was cherries in it.

[1423] Okay, good.

[1424] But I didn't put two and two together that that's extra meaningful to us.

[1425] Yes.

[1426] That we like Cherry Garcia.

[1427] Yes, I'm Cherry Garcia.

[1428] Should we pitch, well, we're doing it now, I guess, Ben and or Jerry, if you're listening.

[1429] Limited run?

[1430] Limited run of armed cherry Garcia.

[1431] And then we'd add one more piece to make it limited.

[1432] What will we add?

[1433] Our DNA.

[1434] We'll spit in every batch.

[1435] Oh, my God.

[1436] Or put one of your hair follicles in every batch.

[1437] Ew, well, yes, you can poop it out like you did that one time.

[1438] Okay, and are there any updates on your European wardrobe that you're collecting?

[1439] Oh, great prompt.

[1440] Well, before I say that, huge relief this morning.

[1441] I thought because I was able to secure tickets to the...

[1442] Austin Grand Prix and Miami, they won't be an issue when I try to hit this Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring.

[1443] That'll be a cinch.

[1444] Easy.

[1445] I've been working for three months to get us tickets.

[1446] It's so sold out and it's so hard.

[1447] And there's no lodging within 90 miles of the track.

[1448] Oh, no. So anyways, with the great, great grace of Williams, the race team, they got Chris and I and the girls tickets.

[1449] So I'm so delighted we're going to be in the Williams box and we're going to get to go be in the pits.

[1450] with the Williams team and everything, which is awesome.

[1451] Yeah.

[1452] And then it was like, oh, what about the fucking Richardson's?

[1453] Like, we're just going to, sorry guys, we're going, you know.

[1454] Yeah.

[1455] But just today, F1, Formula One, got back to us and said, we found four more.

[1456] So now we can all go.

[1457] Because the entire trip, just to remind you, was literally built around this race.

[1458] I'm like, I really want to go to this race, but it's selfish, so let's do a family trip around it.

[1459] Convinced the Richardson's that they should go to a race.

[1460] Yeah.

[1461] And then guess what?

[1462] No race.

[1463] For the last couple months, no race, after the plane tickets were bought.

[1464] Anyway, today was a great relief this morning.

[1465] That's exciting.

[1466] Yeah.

[1467] Almost felt like I could go to sleep for the next two days over it.

[1468] You earned it.

[1469] And then, yes, thank you.

[1470] Wardrobe.

[1471] Next item of business.

[1472] I've been knowing we're going to be in Europe for almost three weeks, which is incredible.

[1473] Worry not, there'll be no interruption in this show.

[1474] Worry not.

[1475] Yeah, well, we'll be recording abroad.

[1476] We'll be connecting.

[1477] And I want some loose, some lighter pantwear with a euro.

[1478] vibe.

[1479] Yeah.

[1480] So I've been trying out a bunch of different Chino variety slacks, I guess, for lack of the other.

[1481] Trousers.

[1482] Trousers.

[1483] Cackies, but not cackies.

[1484] Cackies makes me think of dockers.

[1485] No shade, but Not cat.

[1486] I'm not gonna call them cackies.

[1487] They're just trousers.

[1488] Yeah.

[1489] Okay, so I've been sampling a few.

[1490] And I'm gonna give some shout -outs because there's some I really like.

[1491] The marine layers, I really like.

[1492] We love marine layer.

[1493] We do.

[1494] And you know the light blue ones I have?

[1495] They're drawstring.

[1496] All these are drawstring too.

[1497] Very comfortable.

[1498] And then I thought, by the way, I'm throwing And Hail Mary passes, because the trip is here.

[1499] So I'm on Todd Snyder, my addiction.

[1500] Yeah, you love.

[1501] And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are these summer pants?

[1502] So very similar to the Marine Langer.

[1503] But then the bottom is elastic, or what would you call that?

[1504] Oh, a cuffed.

[1505] But tight.

[1506] Okay, yep.

[1507] So you can almost wear it as a capri.

[1508] Like it's a jogger.

[1509] It's a jogger.

[1510] It's a capri.

[1511] It's a clam digger.

[1512] Ew.

[1513] Yeah.

[1514] That's a word?

[1515] You know clam diggers.

[1516] Ooh, clam diggers would be clams penises, clam dingers.

[1517] Oh, yeah.

[1518] Clam diggers are the original floods or short pants, caprice.

[1519] Oh.

[1520] That come up mid -calf.

[1521] Because when you're digging for clams, you don't want to get the bottom of your slacky trousers wet.

[1522] I see.

[1523] There's also another word for them.

[1524] Shit diggers.

[1525] No. Mudhogers.

[1526] No. Junco's, nope.

[1527] Oh, Junco, she's an incredible massage.

[1528] I know.

[1529] She's so booked up.

[1530] She's an incredible massage therapist.

[1531] That's right.

[1532] We learned something.

[1533] I can't remember anyway, whatever.

[1534] Back to your slacks.

[1535] Okay, so I got the Schneidies, and they arrived.

[1536] This is what's scary and irresponsible.

[1537] I just found those.

[1538] I was like, I don't have time to order a pair, see if I like them, and then get more.

[1539] So I just went all in.

[1540] I got five pairs.

[1541] They're not cheap.

[1542] They're way more than I spend on pants.

[1543] I want to say either 180 to 280, something like that.

[1544] Yeah.

[1545] That's nice, but it's not like $7 ,000.

[1546] No, they're not.

[1547] They're not Dolce or Gabon.

[1548] Yeah, they're not Gabon's or Dulch.

[1549] So they arrived, I guess, on Monday, five different colors.

[1550] And I wore the first pair two days ago.

[1551] And I was like, wow, these are incredible.

[1552] You loved them.

[1553] I loved them.

[1554] Then, as you saw, you've seen me in both looks.

[1555] Then I went to a green.

[1556] The first day was like either a dark blue or black.

[1557] I can't tell the difference.

[1558] Definitely yesterday was like a military green.

[1559] You don't remember.

[1560] You don't remember them.

[1561] No, God.

[1562] I remember.

[1563] all your outfits.

[1564] You know, I put a good effort into your outfits.

[1565] I do too.

[1566] You think I'm into outfits?

[1567] Yeah, obviously.

[1568] I'm newly into outfits.

[1569] I am always into your outfits, but we were hurried yesterday.

[1570] Yeah, we only had three hours to look at each other.

[1571] We were looking at our guests.

[1572] Three short hours.

[1573] He looked, well, you know what it was?

[1574] I got outshined so big time.

[1575] He looked incredible.

[1576] True.

[1577] No, but no, but really this is what happened.

[1578] I was already up here.

[1579] You came in with him.

[1580] So it wasn't like we had any time up front to chit -chat.

[1581] Right.

[1582] And then you left while I was still talking to.

[1583] Exactly.

[1584] So that's why.

[1585] Otherwise, I totally would have noticed Army Green.

[1586] Okay.

[1587] They're great.

[1588] And there's still two inbound.

[1589] Those, I hope, are going to make it right before I leave because that could also.

[1590] But anyways, you can see me. I'll be going around Italy.

[1591] Hey, borgono.

[1592] Oh, that's not even Bronto.

[1593] And I'll be in my thin caprice.

[1594] And where's the?

[1595] And where's the pasta, begsidi, bolognese.

[1596] I can't.

[1597] We should warn the people of Italy.

[1598] I'm coming.

[1599] Oh my God.

[1600] You know, you're slowly, you're turning into me. Yeah.

[1601] You're ordering clothes that are coming last minute.

[1602] It's very scary.

[1603] You might have to Uber them.

[1604] Put the slacks on a flight.

[1605] Exactly.

[1606] You'll have to leave, and then you're going to have to Uber somebody to the airport with your pants.

[1607] Put them on the fly.

[1608] I'm going to find somebody on TaskRabbit that's willing to fly to Italy.

[1609] Yep, exactly.

[1610] Speaking of that, I have a shirt that's arriving any minute now.

[1611] Oh, my God, before your trip.

[1612] Are you going to derail your trip over it?

[1613] I don't know.

[1614] I consider should I drive by the apartment, just to see.

[1615] Oh, I know what the important update is.

[1616] Okay.

[1617] We all went to Nora Jones.

[1618] Huge update.

[1619] What are we talking about?

[1620] I know.

[1621] All that shit, cut it all.

[1622] None of that belongs in here.

[1623] It's really important.

[1624] The main thing is.

[1625] It was a double whammy.

[1626] There's two phases to this story.

[1627] We started by eating at Mess Hall where we saw our buddy Andrew Pack.

[1628] That's right.

[1629] And Andrew had then heard that we love him.

[1630] Yes, we shouted him out.

[1631] We're shouting him out again.

[1632] Yeah, so he was pumped, and we were double pumped.

[1633] Yeah.

[1634] We saw Terry Cruz in the lobby.

[1635] Oh, yeah, your old friend.

[1636] Yes, he happened to be at Mess Hall.

[1637] Hug, hug, hug.

[1638] I'm feeling his muscles.

[1639] I like to think he was feeling mine.

[1640] Yeah, you guys looked, you know, I got a spike.

[1641] of anxiety because you popped up and you went over there and you guys were hugging.

[1642] I basically tackled them.

[1643] He didn't see me coming.

[1644] Is that what you mean?

[1645] No, no, no. I just got anxiety because like, you guys are huge and your celebrities.

[1646] And I was like, oh my God, everyone is looking now.

[1647] They're making too big of a scene.

[1648] Yeah.

[1649] And then I just got anxious for you.

[1650] Like, oh, no, now everyone knows.

[1651] They probably already did.

[1652] But, you know, yeah, I just got anxious.

[1653] I'm in a real good phase of that.

[1654] Good.

[1655] You don't care.

[1656] Which is so much more enjoyable.

[1657] and not being in a good space with it.

[1658] That's neither here nor there.

[1659] Andrew Pack.

[1660] Yeah, we love him.

[1661] And I found him on Instagram and I send it to you.

[1662] Yeah, I followed him.

[1663] I hope people follow him.

[1664] I do too.

[1665] Andrew Pack.

[1666] He really is.

[1667] He's so, so lovely.

[1668] He is.

[1669] He's very Michigan.

[1670] Yeah.

[1671] No?

[1672] Um, well, I mean, yeah, and the fact that he's like cool and down to earth.

[1673] Yeah, he's like kind of, he's, I hate these terms.

[1674] He's like super masculine Oh, I see, yeah He was a football player He's got a big rugged beard And then he's super nice And inviting and kind That's true.

[1675] That's true, yeah, yeah And he sends us biscuits He sends us some biscuits And then I was upset Because he should know I'm gluten -free Yeah, and then Kristen made the point They were for me Yeah, that's right Which was the right point to make And I stand by all of it Okay Oh, and then we go to the concert Yes The Great Theater If you're ever in Los Angeles and you have an opportunity to see a concert at the Greek theater, do not miss it.

[1676] It's so special there.

[1677] There's not a more enchanting venue in California that I know of.

[1678] I agree, enchanted.

[1679] The bowl is very enchanted too.

[1680] It's a very romantic place, the Hollywood Bowl.

[1681] It is.

[1682] I love it.

[1683] When you're in there, there's a palpable vibe at the bowl.

[1684] But it is enormous.

[1685] It's like five times a size.

[1686] Exactly.

[1687] So the Greek is like contained.

[1688] Yeah, intimate.

[1689] And what I wanted to tell everyone was like, look around.

[1690] We're all on a raft.

[1691] Like, look at this raft.

[1692] rolling because you're in a little bowl.

[1693] It's just, it's just this raft of seats and then nature.

[1694] Well, I guess it's like a ramen bowl.

[1695] Yeah, pokey.

[1696] You could say we're like a, uh, everyone look around.

[1697] Why?

[1698] I can't say ramen bowl.

[1699] Why?

[1700] I can only say like white person.

[1701] We eat, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, I'm not allowed to say.

[1702] I can say like, you're a bowl of pasta.

[1703] Hey, pronto.

[1704] You can't say that.

[1705] You're not Italian.

[1706] Bonjour, no. No, we're in a really, um, we're in a really, um, warm ramen bowl.

[1707] What was it?

[1708] Kimshi, is that too much?

[1709] No, well, that's not what I'm saying.

[1710] Oh, okay.

[1711] A ramen bowl is warm.

[1712] Nootty.

[1713] Yeah, there's noodles and broths.

[1714] Salty.

[1715] Bross?

[1716] Broths and broths.

[1717] Oh my God, somebody, because I posted a picture of the concert, and somebody said, I was there, we saw you guys, you missed the brawl above you or something.

[1718] Like above.

[1719] Do you think that was all that chit -chat?

[1720] Maybe.

[1721] There was a shit -chat time.

[1722] There was a shit show is what it was.

[1723] And I guess it was a brawl.

[1724] That makes sense.

[1725] And a Nora Jones concert.

[1726] I know, guys.

[1727] You're at the wrong brand.

[1728] You're off -brand.

[1729] But, okay, back to the Greek.

[1730] The sun is setting.

[1731] She warms up for herself with her bar band.

[1732] Yeah, and sorry, guys.

[1733] That's the only time she's doing it was that one.

[1734] Pousin' boots?

[1735] Yeah.

[1736] Yeah.

[1737] Okay, so when she was here, the first time, she did a cover of a Dolly Parton song.

[1738] Yeah.

[1739] And so I just, like, listen to that on.

[1740] I love that song.

[1741] Okay, the Greek.

[1742] Snafu, fist fight, bummer, but you know while that was happening, and all these people were talking, you'd hear all these voices, very, I was like, this is so disrespectful, and this is my friend.

[1743] Yeah.

[1744] You know, I wonder how I would have felt normally.

[1745] Yeah, it was weird.

[1746] It was weird, and I was agitated, and I think I would have been agitated, but I was then defensive and protective of our friend.

[1747] Of course.

[1748] And also overwhelmed with gratitude, I wasn't close enough to get involved.

[1749] I'm so glad you didn't.

[1750] I was like, good.

[1751] This is so far away for me. It's not my job to control that thing because I would have had to have.

[1752] Oh, wow, okay.

[1753] Yeah, yeah.

[1754] Puss and boots.

[1755] Yeah, push some boots.

[1756] And then they sang the song that I loved.

[1757] Played your favorite dolly song.

[1758] And then I just, Norris was one of my all -time faves.

[1759] She, I love her so much.

[1760] She just transports you.

[1761] The sun was setting the outline on the ridge of all the different native California trees, the palm trees and everything.

[1762] It was so enchanted.

[1763] Yeah Sunrise One of my top five of all time I was radiating goosebumps I was just like I was euphoric That was the first song she played I mean dolly had its own That was its own like special thing But when she started playing sunrise I was like It like really transported me back to when I was I was young I was just a little baby A little girl And I was so mood by that song and I would just listen.

[1764] It was so romantic to me and like, oh my God.

[1765] And then I was just like filled with gratitude that I was seeing it light.

[1766] Like I never thought about how I'm not a concert goer, really.

[1767] Right.

[1768] I'm not huge either.

[1769] I'm in the middle of the spectrum.

[1770] I got to really love the thing because I'm a little overwhelmed with how the amount of time it's going to be.

[1771] Same.

[1772] I feel a little trapped.

[1773] The logistics, that feeling of being like, oh, what if I want to leave?

[1774] this anxiety that I might want to leave and I can't.

[1775] Yeah, so I don't normally go and then...

[1776] I don't normally go to concerts, but when I do, it's Nora Jones.

[1777] That's really the truth.

[1778] And I was like, oh, I get it.

[1779] I get why people, like, have to go to concerts.

[1780] Yeah, I wish you were sitting next to me because I, at the peak of my euphoria, I had the thought.

[1781] Some of the monkeys make noise.

[1782] I thought about the aliens.

[1783] Some of the aliens are watching.

[1784] Some of the monkeys make noise out of their body and the other monkeys come and just stare and let that noise make them feel a certain way.

[1785] What a wonderful thing the monkeys do when they do that.

[1786] That must be so confusing to the aliens.

[1787] Of course.

[1788] Why are all those monkeys gathered there?

[1789] And they're all sitting like really, they're generally not this well behaved either.

[1790] Well, until the braw they're like, oh, yep, there they go.

[1791] But yeah, they're all sitting, like everyone's being respectful, and then one of the monkeys comes out and makes a noise.

[1792] out of her body.

[1793] The aliens, I feel like, pulled up a chair for that concert.

[1794] Like, they liked it.

[1795] I think so, too.

[1796] I think so, too.

[1797] Even it was their first time hearing music, I think they could see the harmony that existed from the one monkey making the noises and the other monkey smiling.

[1798] And I said this in the car after.

[1799] Nora, because we now know her, which is insane, she's like my size.

[1800] She's tiny.

[1801] Yes.

[1802] And her presence in life is small.

[1803] Like it's not like She's shy She's like Exactly She's not like Trying to take up All the energy She's not a Dax Shepherd type She's not a human megaphone No no It made it all that more amazing But to see That small person That person doing this Like Captivating a enormous crowd I don't know I was just Oof this is so special It is You know like When James Hatfield Let's it rip in Metallica You're kind of like Yeah that guy guy's a Viking like right but it's the same level of power coming out of this little pint size how much do you think about her being Indian when you're watching her I thought it a few times I told Molly she did oh yeah yeah so I felt proud of that I was thinking a lot about her Indianness yeah I know sometimes I'm like she's kind of my like soul sister yeah and then I was like am I not allowed to say that but I think I am why I don't know oh because soul is the like you were going to say that exactly I was oh yeah yeah That's lovely.

[1804] I know.

[1805] Yeah, I feel like maybe in another life we were like related or something.

[1806] Sisters, one once -in -a -lifetime podcaster and the other once -in -a -lifetime singer.

[1807] The parents would be so proud.

[1808] They'd be doing Indian backflips, whatever version you guys do there.

[1809] And then also I was looking at the screen.

[1810] What we call it, Jumbotron.

[1811] Yeah, Jumbotron.

[1812] I was looking at her face.

[1813] I just was transported back to the cover of her first album.

[1814] She's so young.

[1815] I know you add in the youth to the original mix of Chinese.

[1816] But she's still doing it.

[1817] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[1818] It's so cool.

[1819] I'm just saying, imagine, I think it would be, like, at least now she's like an established woman.

[1820] Yeah.

[1821] And, but imagine seeing all that come out of her at like 24 years old and you add in how young she was, that must have been just like, how is it?

[1822] What's going on?

[1823] Yeah, I know.

[1824] A little creature is so powerful, this little monkey.

[1825] Yeah, this monkey is very powerful.

[1826] Yeah, but I was also, I was just like, women are, awesome yeah they are and they're terrible just like man but they're awesome you don't have to say that part oh you're right anyway that was so fun i'm so glad we went it was so fun and it just was like this is probably no one's business when i'm going to tell it to you anyways yeah you know i have this kind of i hate even saying it out loud because i don't want to be held accountable to it but i have a fantasy of myself at 50 years old where i don't put anything into my body but i'm just fine as a human on planet Earth that I don't need anything.

[1827] What do you mean?

[1828] That means I don't need nicotine.

[1829] I don't need caffeine.

[1830] I don't need anti -inflammatories.

[1831] I don't need SSRI inhibitors.

[1832] Got it.

[1833] I don't need anything.

[1834] I'm fine to just exist on this planet.

[1835] Okay.

[1836] This is a goal for me. I don't know.

[1837] I'm not recommending to anyone and I'm not judgmental of anyone.

[1838] So in kind of sight of that, as you know, I've already backed off the caffeine.

[1839] Yes.

[1840] Profoundly.

[1841] So about three weeks ago, I went from, I'm on, I don't even know how many milligrams of Zolov, but let's say, I think it's 100.

[1842] So the pill, I cut a quarter off.

[1843] And so for two weeks, I was on three quarters of my dose.

[1844] And then when I went to Nashville, I then went down to half.

[1845] And look, I don't have a position on this at all.

[1846] Yeah.

[1847] This is just what's happening with me. Yeah.

[1848] And I remember this.

[1849] When I first went on antidepressants, like probably five years ago or something, I remember like, oh, my smell's not as good as it was.

[1850] I had a very, very acute smell.

[1851] I can tell you exactly what it happened.

[1852] I took Lincoln to Asheville, North Carolina.

[1853] I've been there a bunch of times.

[1854] I know what it feels like there.

[1855] I have a very visceral feeling.

[1856] And we're in this little river.

[1857] She's playing with a bottle filling up with sand.

[1858] I'm sitting on a rock watching this little girl who's so beautiful, and the trees are green, and I know what it's supposed to smell like there.

[1859] And I just, it was a little dulled.

[1860] I remember coming home and telling the psychiatrist, like, I don't know if I liked this because it was a little dulled.

[1861] but at the same time at that point in my life I was like trying to get chips made I was very stressed out I couldn't sleep I had a lot of anxiety when I was sleep so I was like well whatever I'm gonna roll with that because sleep's the number one ingredient I have to have I don't have that much stress in my life anymore at that concert I was very aware of how many sensations I had in my body I welled up like three times I had so many goosebumps and waves of kind of light euphoria and I think it's intermixed with that yeah maybe yeah it's just an update.

[1862] Yeah.

[1863] It's not good or bad or anything.

[1864] It's just what I'm doing.

[1865] I think they call that either bunting or blunting, the term that antidepressants do.

[1866] They blunt a little bit.

[1867] I mean, they're lobbing off the bottom and the top is what they're kind of doing.

[1868] I guess.

[1869] I mean, have you ever experienced any of that?

[1870] Blunting?

[1871] That's interesting.

[1872] No. No. I mean, I definitely, I feel that it's lobbed off the bottom.

[1873] Mm -hmm.

[1874] But I actually, some of my depression is that.

[1875] I'm not as happy as I should be right now.

[1876] Because you're so sad.

[1877] Yeah, you can't even reach.

[1878] But it's not even sadness.

[1879] I think that's a misconception about depression.

[1880] It's just like you're sad all the time.

[1881] Or numbness.

[1882] But yeah, there's just like a little bit detached or just like, oh, I should be really happy here.

[1883] Like I am.

[1884] Technically I am.

[1885] All the ingredients are here.

[1886] Yes.

[1887] And I know myself.

[1888] So that was a sign for me that I should get on an antidepressant.

[1889] For sure.

[1890] And it did help with that.

[1891] Yeah.

[1892] So it just says everyone's so.

[1893] They are.

[1894] Yeah.

[1895] Even the fact that like, and we just had an expert on this week as well, like I don't have anxiety during the day.

[1896] Ever.

[1897] I've never had a panic attack.

[1898] I'm never, like I don't even have those feelings.

[1899] But at night I do.

[1900] I have anxiety at night.

[1901] Yeah, I know.

[1902] Such a specific little monkey.

[1903] Might backfire.

[1904] We'll see.

[1905] Well, then you'll adjust.

[1906] TBD.

[1907] TBD.

[1908] Yeah.

[1909] Everything can be adjusted.

[1910] Okay.

[1911] Kathleen.

[1912] Oh, I was fascinated.

[1913] This was fascinating.

[1914] Yes.

[1915] The one thing I don't understand about the white power thing, like learning about that if you're white power, you immediately have to snap into like three other issues you support.

[1916] Like pro -life, anti -LGBQ, because that reduces the white children.

[1917] Oh, it's all about white birth rate, yeah.

[1918] A, I didn't really know that was one of their big agendas.

[1919] But what seems not tactical on their end is like, if it's pro -life for everyone, that means a lot more brown babies are getting born too.

[1920] I know.

[1921] It's kind of, isn't that a push, what we would call a push on a blackjack table?

[1922] Like, okay, you're going to have more white babies, but there'll be an equal amount now of brown babies are also going up.

[1923] No, because they're going to take other measures to get rid of people of color.

[1924] Now, that would be at least a logical platform for them to be pro -life for white people, but that brown people can get abortions.

[1925] I mean, literally, that would make the most sense for their agenda.

[1926] For that subset of pro -life people, yes.

[1927] Oh, I'm just saying for white power people.

[1928] Right, exactly.

[1929] Yeah.

[1930] They should be pro -choice for non -white people and pro -life for white people.

[1931] Oh, my God.

[1932] It's crazy.

[1933] And timely, I guess.

[1934] I'm going to address this right now.

[1935] Okay.

[1936] I'd imagine some people are frustrated.

[1937] We haven't talked about the Roe v. Wade thing.

[1938] Yeah.

[1939] I mean, I've posted some stuff.

[1940] Not that much, actually.

[1941] I think it's great independently for both of us to have opinions.

[1942] the only thing I'm going to I guess my point on this is simply I have very strong feelings about it it's very yeah yeah and it's very very present in my household and it's a big thing and my mother and I have had a bazillion talk so it is huge in my life I think it's incredibly important yeah yeah I also think you should be able to tune into Seinfeld and not hear them talk about whatever the political thing was of that day I think it's okay for us to have pockets of our life that are free of that.

[1943] And I don't want anyone to interpret that as us not carrying a ton.

[1944] Yeah, I agree.

[1945] I think Seinfeld should be Seinfeld.

[1946] I agree.

[1947] I also don't think we're Seinfeld.

[1948] No, yeah.

[1949] But we're doing this.

[1950] To me, this is the level of which...

[1951] I'll put it in a nicer line.

[1952] I think sometimes they want to hear our opinions because they hold us to a high standard and that's really flattering.

[1953] Yeah, that's nice.

[1954] But yes, it's everywhere and like sometimes you need to break from it.

[1955] It doesn't mean we're not going to bring it up or talk about it at any point.

[1956] It's just not going to be on the agenda necessarily.

[1957] Like for me, it's a huge issue in our household and in our friendship circle, and it takes a lot of our day is spent thinking about that.

[1958] I personally like the break to click into something else and think about something else.

[1959] And so because I like that, I want us to be that in a simplest way.

[1960] Yeah, I just want us to be honest and authentic, which I think we are.

[1961] I think that's, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, the contract we have with our, that's a ding -to.

[1962] That's an Easter.

[1963] With our Cherry Garcia's.

[1964] Yes.

[1965] So to me, that doesn't mean we're not talking about stuff.

[1966] It just means we might not, unless it's relevant to the guest or if it's relevant to...

[1967] Yeah, if we're learning about white power.

[1968] Exactly.

[1969] It's coming up.

[1970] Yeah, that's part of it.

[1971] Yes.

[1972] That's what I don't want, we're not actively ignoring when it's relevant.

[1973] Yeah, yeah.

[1974] I mean, I just have like a gazillion opinions on it, obviously.

[1975] As do I, as do I. Yeah.

[1976] Okay, I'm going to get into a little facts because I got to go.

[1977] I know.

[1978] I know.

[1979] And I have therapy.

[1980] Oh, yeah.

[1981] Oh, my God.

[1982] What time is it?

[1983] It's 1137.

[1984] Oh, we're great.

[1985] Okay, so she said in the dog pitcher that that column is called a plinth.

[1986] Oh, right.

[1987] That was mind -blowing.

[1988] Assuming she's right.

[1989] Well, that's why I had to check.

[1990] And a plinth is a heavy base supporting a statue or vase.

[1991] I would say yes.

[1992] Wow.

[1993] That's a gross word.

[1994] Sounds a little bit like pimple and, yeah, I just got back from the doctor and I guess I got a pretty good sized plinth on my shoulder and he's going to lance it off.

[1995] Speaking of.

[1996] We've told people, right?

[1997] But you ordered it.

[1998] Yeah, I know.

[1999] It hasn't come in.

[2000] They've taken their sweet -ass time.

[2001] I know.

[2002] And I asked if they take off some freckles because I found some random freckles I'd like removed.

[2003] All right.

[2004] And we just don't know yet.

[2005] But I have so many.

[2006] I'll just, I'll experiment on myself and see.

[2007] it almost feels do you feel like it's a little bit like you know and i you and i both believe in luck yeah like you got to go to the audition in santa monica where you'll never get an audition again i just looked at this freckle i thought oh that'd be a good one to try to zap and then i thought is that breaking the contract with my body i what if it changes your whole well just like that's there i know and that's part of me yeah and if i remove it am i disrespecting am i i i know This is a struggle with plastic surgery.

[2008] Yeah.

[2009] I was like, this is what I was given.

[2010] Yeah, is it disrespectful?

[2011] I know.

[2012] I don't feel that about some of my freckles because they're new.

[2013] They're from the sun.

[2014] But your body was like, you need these as you get mature.

[2015] No, I think they're like, you better put on some sunscreen.

[2016] And I'm telling you, be careful.

[2017] Yeah.

[2018] What about yesterday's guest spraying your eggs?

[2019] You'd have a real chance of having, like, an Olympic athlete.

[2020] With your elite muscle mass, your...

[2021] history is a state champion, your stick -toedness and your mental acuity.

[2022] Sure.

[2023] I'd like a lot of them.

[2024] A redhead Indian?

[2025] Yeah, I don't think.

[2026] I think that I'd end up having brown hair.

[2027] Well, we don't know.

[2028] That red hair is freaky powerful.

[2029] No, it's a recessive gene.

[2030] That's what you're saying.

[2031] Until it's not.

[2032] It is a recessive gene.

[2033] And you're right, I don't know 100%, but I would guess I don't have that gene.

[2034] so mine would be would dominate is it recessive do we know that you're posy okay all right like blue eyes that's why it's it's rare it's cool yeah i love it i love recessive jeans i love the recession a lot of my genes are very dominant oh i know yeah yeah okay how long was waco the standoff the siege were you were you old enough to be watching that i was fucking watching that on TV That was wild.

[2035] Was it like three weeks or something?

[2036] It was 51 days.

[2037] 51 days.

[2038] Oh my God, divided by seven.

[2039] That's seven weeks and four days.

[2040] Did you say 53?

[2041] 51.

[2042] Oh, 51.

[2043] That's wrong.

[2044] Two days.

[2045] Seven weeks and two days.

[2046] The hard thing is with your math.

[2047] I'm not going to correct it.

[2048] I know.

[2049] It's kind of the beauty of it.

[2050] But seven times seven's 49.

[2051] Yep.

[2052] And then add two.

[2053] Yeah.

[2054] Okay.

[2055] Lincoln -Marfin syndrome.

[2056] We've talked about this before.

[2057] It's a great syndrome.

[2058] I wouldn't recommend it No, well you can't recommend it It either it's a recessive Well, I just said I liked recessive I know so now you like marfins So I don't like marfins, okay Okay So that was a duckedogooose Just to remind people Connective tissue disorder So affects many structures Including skeletons lungs, eyes, heart and blood vessels Characterized by unusually long limbs And it's believed to have affected Abraham Lincoln But they didn't diagnose him It's just like after they're like oh, it looks like he probably had it.

[2059] Posthumously.

[2060] That's right.

[2061] It's like how we go back in time you're like, that guy was gay.

[2062] We don't know.

[2063] We can't ask him.

[2064] Well, I guess the only, right, we don't know how he would want to identify.

[2065] Sure.

[2066] But I guess if a lot of people saw him having sex with a man, then they could be like, well, he was gay, but that's also.

[2067] Who knows now?

[2068] We just don't know.

[2069] We don't care.

[2070] We don't care anymore.

[2071] We just, really.

[2072] All I care about is you're fucking.

[2073] The only position I have is to be, I'm pro fucking.

[2074] What a gift it was given.

[2075] to us, little primates.

[2076] Consensual, happy, joyful.

[2077] Fucking.

[2078] Yeah.

[2079] What a riot the aliens have when they see the monkeys bump around.

[2080] I think they're like these guys.

[2081] They love it.

[2082] They're like, are they wrestling?

[2083] Or are they, man, they are holding each other tight?

[2084] Oh, they're screaming.

[2085] I hope one day we're able to interview an alien and really get down to their thoughts.

[2086] Would you want to have sex with an alien?

[2087] No. I would immediately.

[2088] Of course you would.

[2089] You want to have sex with everything.

[2090] Not any animals.

[2091] Why an alien then?

[2092] Because they're kind of animalistic.

[2093] They're above us.

[2094] It's mean to fuck something below you, intelligence -wise, on the animal hierarchy.

[2095] But an alien's smarter than me, so I'm the donkey getting fucked at this point in the parable.

[2096] Or the dolphin.

[2097] But do you think you'd have intimacy?

[2098] Well, I think it could be like the Navi.

[2099] Like, what if they connect me to something?

[2100] Yeah.

[2101] And then there's this huge explosion of neural activity and then a sense of intimacy that's never been experienced.

[2102] But this is kind of the difference, like masturbation versus actual sex.

[2103] Right.

[2104] You can achieve the sensation, sometimes even better by yourself.

[2105] But it's not the same.

[2106] You're not getting the oxytocin bump and everything.

[2107] Yeah, yeah.

[2108] So the aliens, I feel like, could probably give you a more intense sensation.

[2109] I think they could give us Well, yeah, because of the extreme brain power they have Because what you're talking about is something that happens between two brains You can rub the device Yeah, exactly The pee, the vulva, you can stimulate that But it's the brain It's the soul Yeah, sure, the soul's in the brain Soul sisters So I think because the alien's going to have this big powerful brain That my hunch is it's better because that's the thing you're hot for is the brain.

[2110] Well, the same thing I'm a hot for.

[2111] But, like, if I had sex with someone super smart who I never met before, like, no. Yeah, yep.

[2112] You know what I mean?

[2113] It's not about how smart they are.

[2114] It's about how connected you are.

[2115] Okay, that's a good, very good point, very good counterpoint.

[2116] It might be a checkmate.

[2117] But I think the alien is so sophisticated they could, like, fast track that.

[2118] Mind you, I have a few lunches with the alien and stuff.

[2119] Learn about what he or she does.

[2120] I think he speaks in a different language.

[2121] But I guess that's not enough.

[2122] He or she would know how to speak in our language.

[2123] Again, there's so much smarter than us.

[2124] Yeah.

[2125] The alien would be like, hello, Monica.

[2126] It'd be, the problem is, too, is they've really painted bad pictures of them.

[2127] It's like, we're both picturing octopi.

[2128] Yeah.

[2129] Right?

[2130] Or like some fucking huge oval shape thing with giant eyes.

[2131] Yeah, I get it.

[2132] Yeah.

[2133] But now picture a Navi.

[2134] Right.

[2135] Beautiful blue alien.

[2136] Yeah, that's hot.

[2137] Or what if they're tiny?

[2138] But then there's for me going to be a logistical issue.

[2139] What if they're just like a snail size?

[2140] No, you can't have sex with that.

[2141] But what if they're big?

[2142] Picture me and a woman that was like nine, ten feet tall.

[2143] Yeah, that's cool for you.

[2144] I just think if they're too big, that's a logistical issue for me. That's right, right.

[2145] Okay.

[2146] Okay, here we are.

[2147] Ding, ding, big.

[2148] God, my horny.

[2149] for an alien right now.

[2150] Okay.

[2151] All right.

[2152] I hope you have a great trip and we'll check in.

[2153] And those were the two white power.

[2154] The column.

[2155] There was like one or two more.

[2156] They're just not that important.

[2157] Okay, great.

[2158] Have a great trip too.

[2159] Have so much fun.

[2160] Love you guys.

[2161] Enjoy your linen.

[2162] Love you, Cherry Garcia.

[2163] Follow armchair expert on the Wondry app, Amazon music, or wherever.

[2164] you get your podcasts.

[2165] You can listen to every episode of armchair expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[2166] Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry .com slash survey.