The Supreme Court deals President Donald Trump another loss, this time in regards to his taxes. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Trump's rampant corruption, the damage it's done to the rule of law, and connect the dots from Richard Nixon to our current crook in the White House. Also, they welcome historian Kevin M. Levin, author of Searching For Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth, to discuss the Confederacy, statues and memorials, and the desperate need to revisit our history.
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Well, the rulings were basically starting all over again, sending everything back down to the lower courts, and you start all over again.
So, from a certain point, I'm satisfied.
From another point, I'm not satisfied.
Listen, most Americans don't care about his tax return.
They expressed that in 2016 when they elected him to office.
You know, it seems like the only people that really care about it are my Democrat colleagues or my previous Democrat colleagues on Capitol Hill because this is the number one issue for them.
When you really look at it, you know, this is a fishing expedition.
I was saying, how can you say you're not going to tell all the schools how to reopen, but you're going to tell them all when to reopen?
47 guidelines issued by the states.
There's local guidelines that have been put in place.
This can be done safely.
It can be done well.
And we believe there's a way to safely do this.
And the child will always come first in this administration.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm your co-host, Jared Yates Saxton.
As always, I'm here with my loyal co-host, Nick Halseman.
We got a jam-packed show today.
Tons going on.
Supreme Court rulings left and right.
Eastern Oklahoma being given back to the native people.
Tax rulings.
Just you name it, we got it.
We'd also like you to stick around.
We have a very special guest.
I've been excited about this for a while.
I'm a big fan of this guy's writing, Kevin N. Levin.
Oh Jerry, I guarantee they're gonna have some monuments up at Trump's next rally and they'll probably troll us with a couple of Confederate ones as well.
So don't be surprised.
Right now, he's writing about the history of Confederate monuments.
I don't even know if that's relevant right now, if it's something that we could talk about, Nick, that could, you know, somehow or another say something about our modern times and modern condition.
Oh, Jerry, I guarantee they're going to have some monuments up at Trump's next rally.
And they'll probably troll us with a couple of Confederate ones as well.
That's actually a rumor.
That's a rumor that this might be the thing.
That he might just start showing up.
And that's something.
But as of today, for those of you who might not have heard at this point, the Supreme Court continues to surprise.
It's an interesting thing that they're doing right now.
He has been, Donald Trump has been rolled by the Supreme Court in recent weeks.
Today ruled 7-2 that his taxes were to be made available.
in terms of investigations against him, but not made available possibly to Congress, which is a hard thing to sort of wrap your head around.
There's a lot of maneuvering going on here.
What do you make about this, Nick?
Everybody wins to some degree today because the taxes, even though they go to Vance, it's not going to be released.
We're not going to know much about it.
And I don't think he's going to be able to get a grand jury and any kind of sentence between now and November.
I did hear somebody on MSNBC, Neil Katyal, was trying to say that things have gone really fast in the past and you never know, but it just doesn't seem like we're going to find out much And those things won't leak there.
So, you know, the can is kicked to some degree.
And then on the other side, with what the Democrats do, I kind of am pissed off about the whole thing and how they've done this.
I think it's their fault, the way this has played out, why they didn't get the access to the records now.
Well, go forward.
I would love to hear about your anger, Nick.
This is what the people are here for on a Friday.
Well, you need a legislative purpose, which is what they've been harping on.
It seems to be the one argument that has really taken hold on the Supreme Court.
They should have subpoenaed these records in the midst of an impeachment trial.
This case should have been gone in front of the Supreme Court while the impeachment was going on.
That would be the legislative purpose, because they would have had evidence, especially with Michael Cohen's testimony, that there are some serious issues that indicate that he violated the laws.
And they didn't do that, and they didn't bother to try and administer the subpoenas for witnesses during the impeachment either, which is a little bit along the same lines of, well, it would take too long, we can't do it.
And it's just frustrating that it feels like a smarter, somebody who could have seen this a little further out would have been able to predict this happening and done it better.
Are you a fan of the movie The Usual Suspects at all?
Do you enjoy that movie?
I just watched it actually.
Just watched it.
One of the all-time surprise endings.
If you've seen it once or whatever.
I'm not gonna spoil it here.
That's not what we're here for.
Right?
We're not movie spoilers here.
But I will say that there's this moment, an awakening, a realization.
There's like one of the more dramatic Revelation moments and all of a sudden you start to realize like a genius that has been at play throughout the movie It's kind of the exact opposite looking at how Trump has been handled Do you know what I mean?
It's just like it's you just see one misstep after another where somebody either profited off of Trump with the media and the way that they treated him or his opponents who underestimated his ability to possibly win the Republican nomination.
And then you keep having these steps where it's like people want to believe that Donald Trump is a secret genius, right?
We've talked about this on the podcast.
They want to believe that he's playing four dimensional chess when in fact he's choking on one of the pieces.
And it's just this person who just bumbles his way through life, and you would think that competent politicians or a competent opposition would have been able to just nail him dead to rights.
I mean, how many things at this point, Nick?
I mean, you would think.
It's a lot.
And it's one of those things where you look at not just the impeachment, but the way everything from the Mueller report, to the impeachment, to this thing with the taxes, to I mean, I mean, how many millions have just been given out to Trump cronies at this point?
And maybe we'll hear about that in the future.
Maybe we won't.
I mean, the man is a walking, talking, living, breathing corruption machine.
It's not like he's slick.
He's never been slick.
I mean, those taxes?
Can you imagine taking a look at Donald Trump's taxes?
I mean, it has to be just, like, the most blatant, like, illegal and incriminating tax report you've ever looked at.
Well, I think we can assume that only because of how ferociously they're defending not releasing them, right?
Because we can go into this in a minute about Nixon, who actually did release his taxes because he was convinced, oh, wouldn't it be a big deal and no one's going to, you know, what he did get caught on ended up not being prosecuted, which it probably should have been.
I think that there's no other alternative than to assume or than to accept as fact that these things are riddled with all sorts of evidence of money laundering and misvaluations and fraud, basically, of his assets.
Here's the thing that frustrates me about the Vance case in New York is that I just don't know if anybody really does care about campaign finance violations.
This is what he's trying to get him on and I don't even know if I would care if I was a Supreme Court Justice at this point.
Why is this coming up to our level to have to adjudicate this kind of a case?
That's what's also frustrating about it because, listen, I would be more than happy that he would get exposed for all these terrible taxes and get him out there, but I don't know if this is what they're trying to prosecute.
The one thing that Trump is really good at, and he's very competent at, is lawsuits.
Although he threatens the lawsuits, he never does them, but he also knows that these things take a long time.
He can tie everybody up in court way past at least the election, and at this point all they care about right now is kicking in the can to the next election.
Then they'll worry about if they can keep him out of prison later, but at this point It's a win because they can get it past the election and that's the only thing they have going for them right now.
Can we talk about the existential thing that just happened and exactly what you said?
Because I think you're exactly right.
Why should we care about campaign finance reform, right?
This is what we keep trying to talk about on this show.
Because you're exactly right.
Like, I'm sorry, that doesn't move the meter for me either.
And like, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Donald Trump is a criminal who should not be President of the United States.
Do you know why it doesn't move the needle for me?
Because we live in a country where we understand that the rule of law doesn't matter.
I mean, you know, it's there's a societal thing that has happened.
And you know, I was actually doing some research for an article that I was working on.
And you look at like the 2008 economic collapse, right?
And this happens because of not just not just carelessness, But also nefarious accounting and like people who were just like, you know, they're breaking the law left and right.
And on in the meantime, you have corporations left and right who are breaking one law after another and basically, you know, begging government oversight to do anything.
But there's not enough people to do it.
We don't.
And actually, it's funny.
We're talking about taxes.
I don't know if people know this.
There are not enough people at the IRS to actually investigate all of the tax fraud in this country.
And that's not by accident.
That's on purpose.
Because they've been hollowed out.
It actually has been done so people like Donald Trump will not get caught cheating on their taxes and corporations cannot.
It's been a purposeful hollowing out of these oversight groups.
Well, eventually what ends up happening is you live in a lawless country.
You have a guy who can shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and it doesn't matter.
It really doesn't matter.
And me and you are sitting here, and again we've said this multiple times, We're not in a Trump apology show.
Like, we'll nail him dead to rights every time that we possibly can.
And I'm with you.
I'm like, no, that's just, you know, that's like trying to shoot a gun at Superman.
It doesn't work.
And it's just a thing where, like, that lawlessness breeds more and more lawlessness.
And then you get to the point where you're exactly right.
You watch Houdini break out of enough safes.
You expect Houdini to break out of the safe.
So why are we going to put him in another safe, you know?
Well, there's a lot of things to unpack here, because we've got to talk about the history of this in a second, but first of all, I keep thinking that they would have fraudulently filed their taxes anyway, so if we ever get them, they're just going to be doctored.
But a lot of people don't think that's the case.
And that also then talks to the sheer, you might say, not incompetence, but ineffectiveness of the IRS.
I don't know about that.
I'm not so sure that it's not just a corrupt entity in and of itself, because They should have caught these things.
If he does file his taxes properly, or like properly but like revealed all the illegal things he was doing, they should have been able to catch a lot of these things and they didn't over all these different years.
The New York fucking Times can do an expose and win a Pulitzer exposing all of that and they couldn't find any of that over the last 50 years of his tax returns?
Hard to believe.
Well who helped?
Who helped on that exposé?
Did you hear this?
Yes.
Yes.
The niece who's releasing the book.
Mary Trump.
Mary Trump had to help the New York Times to explain the scheme.
Because that is the imbalance of power in this country.
Is that corporations outpower all these people.
And you're exactly right.
There are obviously corrupt people involved in this all the way around.
But it's been intentionally imbalanced.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why somebody like Donald Trump can do what he does and his family did what they did.
It's an entire cottage industry.
I mean, that's the reason.
I'm sorry, but that's the reason why you have so many houses in like the Hamptons.
You know, it's a bunch of people who figured out how to manipulate the system and they move money around for these people.
You know, having watched William Barr for these years, is it fair to say that you're concerned about the Justice Department and how on the up and up they really are?
Is that fair?
I will say this, and listen, I'm feeling saucy today, Nick.
I'm going to be honest with you.
So, you know, we talk about these things on this show, and we talk about, like, these moments of corruption.
And, you know, sometimes we talk about, like, the FBI or the CIA, and now we're talking about the Department of Justice.
We talk about these institutions, right?
And they're at a breaking point, all of them.
Have I ever trusted them?
No, I haven't.
And that's the whole thing.
It's like, Trump is a symptom, he's not the disease.
William Barr is a symptom, and he isn't the disease, but he is very well the disease that might destroy The rule of law in America.
So yes, I have that.
OK, so if you feel that way, how much do you feel about Steve Mnuchin right now and the Treasury Department?
Because in my mind, they're completely running a smokescreen for him as well and battling this like a personal lawyer would for Donald Trump, which is insane as well, only because there is a law that the Congressman Richie Neal had invoked.
that says he will be compelled to release his taxes to my committee.
And they just ignore that.
And by the way, that didn't get to the Supreme Court.
I don't think that was the argument they were going for when the Congress tried to get him to release them.
But he's got a guy in the Treasury Department now who has completely sullied the reputation of what it's supposed to look like.
And by the way, that's just a tipping point.
Every one of these cabinet secretaries is as corrupt as possible.
And that's the end of our system here.
But let's talk about for a second this notion that it goes unpunished.
These things have gone unpunished ever since the beginning of our country.
Right?
We've had robber barons and we've had wealthy people just be able to take advantage of the system to no end.
In fact, Trump could go in the middle of a debate in front of everybody and say that I cheated on my taxes, that's why I'm smart, because I did that.
And it might even be an applause line.
I guarantee it would be.
I guarantee it would be.
Well, let's take a trip back in time because I did some research and I looked up the Nixon, you know, stuff.
Now, let me just say this.
Nixon is quote-unquote lucky that Watergate happened because he would have been impeached for his taxes.
And what happened was, is back in the early 70s, now I know we're coming out of the tumultuousness of the 60s, we still had the silent majority and some notion of fairness and some notion of like how the government's supposed to work.
The idea that someone would cheat on their taxes back then was enough that would have caused him to be impeached.
Believe it or not, I know it might be hard to believe, but that was still a big political no-no for any politician if they got caught doing that.
There was still shame.
That's the thing.
There was still shame.
And actually, real fast before you tell the history of it, I just want to draw this bridge for people.
When Nixon was compelled to give up the tapes and the transcripts of the Watergate scandal, He did it except for he like erased big chunks of them, right?
So like that was like the middle finger in everyone's eye, but he still gave them up.
You know what I mean?
Like it's not like somebody came in the room with a gun and like held a gun on him and made him do it.
There was still that Give and take.
Like you told us we had to do it.
The Supreme Court ruled on this.
I guess we have to do it.
There's nothing that says that Donald Trump or anyone around him has the shame necessary to make any of this happen or cooperate with any investigation.
And it's that loss of shame that actually sets this apart and makes it a little bit more dangerous.
But I think the line you're drawing is absolutely right.
The founding fathers probably never could envision someone not having shame.
They probably did in some degrees, but not in this sense where the norms could be violated to the degree where, yes, they would ignore that.
But it gets interesting because Nixon was compelled to give up his taxes as well.
And he didn't fight that either.
In fact, he gave it over the next day.
He gave consent, and then the Treasury Department turned him over, just like Richie Neal wants now.
And as soon as they invoked that clause, boom, they sent him over.
So there's been precedent to invoke that clause that compels anybody in the private system to release their taxes.
So he let him have him.
But he knew what was in there, and what was in there was a thing that was going on for years with a whole bunch of presidents where they could donate their presidential papers and write it off as a tax break as a charitable donation.
So they had changed the law, but he was going to try and get just a month or two before the law goes into effect.
He was going to get these papers over there in 72.
And you know how much he valued these papers, a thousand pieces of paper for?
Before you tell him – Before you tell me the number, I just want to say how gross this is.
It reminds me of the old stories of Picasso paying for dinner by just scribbling something on a napkin.
This is so gross.
This is so gross.
Okay, go on.
Half a million dollars is what he declared this for.
Now remember, half a million dollars back then was probably like three, four, five million dollars now.
Now he could write that off as taxes.
He didn't have to pay taxes.
He basically paid about $800 in taxes for those four years.
And he had another year coming because all that money can continue to apply to deductibles for his taxes.
Now this might sound familiar to you, doesn't it?
Does it sound at all familiar to anybody we might know now who did almost the same kind of thing?
Richard Nixon is such a two-bit criminal.
It's just incredible.
You know, you think you know about him, but he's such a two-bit criminal.
It gets better.
You know that famous, I'm not a crook, speech?
That line?
You know what?
He wasn't referring to Watergate.
He was referring to this tax thing, this tax scandal.
When he said that the United States people need to know that the President's not a crook and I'm not a crook.
That's what he was talking about.
This was before the Watergate thing hit.
So they used that quote for Watergate, but it turns out it's actually for the taxes he was talking about.
And they released it, and he pledged to go, you know what, I will pay back whatever taxes I owe.
And that's sort of the default.
There's no punishment.
The IRS said they weren't ever going to punish him.
They were not going to charge him with fraud.
And they got really nervous about that for some reason.
And so he simply said, I'll pay back the money.
Now here's the other question is, He makes about $200,000 a year, I think is what he's making.
And he was able to write off all those taxes.
So all of a sudden, in one shot, he was able to pay half a million dollars.
How did that happen?
Who covered that money for him?
Right?
That couldn't possibly be legal.
No one ever followed up on that.
And here we are, though, where there was no punishment for that.
There was no punishment.
I mean, I know he had to resign his office, but they didn't prosecute him for the crimes he committed.
And here we are.
Direct connections to what happened there and to here.
And what makes it worse is that because he wasn't prosecuted, we are now at the point where we're like, eh, who cares?
So what if he cheated on those campaign finance laws?
So what if he cheated on his taxes?
Big deal.
Everyone does, or whatever.
Everyone lies.
All politicians lie.
Right from there.
And that's why we're here.
And if we don't do something now about this, and we don't prosecute the fuck out of Trump, then we'll have this every 20 years, at least.
The amount of lawlessness that Trump is going to breed in future presidents is going to be unbelievable.
And by the way, it's not going to just be Republicans or Trumpists.
I mean, it'll be everybody.
Because every time that you establish some sort of a precedent, people just run with it, right?
I will throw out of here, and listen, I think you're exactly right linking this thing with Nixon and Trump, but I want to give people just a tiny little tiny shred of hope on this thing.
Nixon was a competent politician.
Like, one of the things that we were talking about before we started recording this is we have to take a look at, like, the Checker speech, right?
And for those who aren't familiar with this, everyone always likes to push this myth that Richard Nixon was, like, he lost the election because he was terrible on TV.
He used TV constantly.
He was a professional with TV.
And one of the first things he had to do was, well, he got caught in a political slush fund problem.
Which, isn't that weird that he was corrupt from the very beginning and then it turns out he was corrupt later?
I don't know.
And so then he like trots his family out in a dog and does this whole dog and pony show like, oh feel sorry for me.
First of all, Trump doesn't have that.
You know what I mean?
Like there's no Donald Trump like sitting at home with his family talking about his taxes.
He doesn't have that.
What I want people to think about is this.
Have you seen Trump's tweets about the Supreme Court?
Yep.
Okay, he's just raged, and he's like, oh, they're against me, even though, you know, I put two of them on there.
And, you know, they never liked me, and they're coming after me, and this is presidential prosecution.
Wasn't he elected to drain the swamp?
Am I wrong?
Do I, did I misremember that?
That sounds familiar.
Wasn't he elected completely on the promise that he would fight the deep state?
Yes, narrator's voice.
So, so, let me get this straight.
Four years have gone by and his war against the Deep State and his effort to drain the swamp have not birthed any results whatsoever, right?
There are some who will tell you, and by the way this is the reason we talk about QAnon every now and then, this is why something like QAnon exists.
It's so they can figure out a way to make him a success.
right they have to create a whole mythology that involves time travel and jfk jr still being alive to make him sound like a success he is a failure at the mythology that he's even created like three years and almost four years into this thing he has failed to even slay the mythical dragons that he made up so i actually think this hurts him i I think by sitting here and continuing to cry about it, like there's a small base that still hears that and they still believe that thing, but he's a failure by his own mythology.
And I think that is pretty incredible that we have a president who's running on his first term saying, yeah, I just failed at everything.
That's incredible.
I don't think that we've ever seen that.
Yeah, as long as people can hear that through what he's saying.
I just don't know.
Remember, he has this thing where he says things three times, and for somehow, psychologically, that makes it true in people's minds, which is why when we hear him speak, we think, oh no, he's got dementia.
He didn't remember he just said that a second ago.
He's probably doing it, you know, this rule of three he has in his head, aside from the positive power of thinking.
And so that's the question.
How many of the people that are fervently believing him are going to be turned?
We don't need a lot of them, right?
You only need a couple percentage points.
I have a quick question.
Let's go into the diseased brain.
Can we do that for just a second?
Because I love this.
It's my life.
Let's dive down this rabbit hole.
I want people to think about this for a second.
So, when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court, and for those who aren't familiar, Brett Kavanaugh voted today that a president has to hand over his tax return.
So Brett Kavanaugh is nominated for the Supreme Court and is exposed in public as being a sexual assaulter, right?
But if you are part of like the Trumpist cult, why was he called that?
It's the deep state, right?
They came after him.
They went out, they tried to submarine this really honorable man.
Well, let's take that mindset further.
So that honorable man who the deep state tried to take down now voted Seven to two against Trump and it's presidential prosecution or presidential persecution.
How do you how do you rectify that?
What do you do with that?
How do you run that through your processors?
Well, he went on a Twitter thread about Comey and McCabe.
That's what he did.
He went on the whole thing as well about how why are they being punished?
Why are Clinton and Comey and McCabe and Strzok and all these people were allowed to spy on me, Obama.
I mean, I think he literally He's still yelling treason to the wind, and again, he knows what that means.
When a president's going to accuse treason, you're talking about firing a line, right?
So that's his obvious subterfuge going on here to try and change the narrative.
I'm sure it'll get worse.
He might even do a speech in blackface, Jared, by the end of this thing.
I swear to God.
You know, I streamed a thing last night and somebody asked a question.
They were like, you know, what kind of compromise would come out against Donald Trump that would bury him?
I don't think there is any.
You know, everyone talks about the... The pee tape?
On The Apprentice.
The idea that on The Apprentice he like, you know, used racial slurs all the time.
I think we actually live in an environment right now where if a video of him saying a racial slur came out, he wouldn't back down from it and his supporters would be like, there's nothing wrong with this.
And like the cult of them would just start openly using the slur.
I really believe that's what would happen to Discord.
Well, that's already happening, right?
We've seen these videos of these white people using the n-word.
And it's just startling because it's so out of place in a way, right, in the world I created for myself.
And it just flows right off the tongue, right at them.
In fact, one of the videos I saw, I don't think the people were even black and they were using the n-word at them.
And it's just, it's still alive and well.
I had thought during my era, growing up, that that word would be stamped out, and it's not.
And it shows you something.
I'll be honest with you, and this is one of those things where, unfortunately, this is something I have to talk about.
I grew up again in white identity evangelical circles in a small rural town.
When the doors were shut, the word was there.
You know, it was just it happened to be.
You said it like in your family and like people said it to each other when they felt comfortable with each other.
And even if you were like, hey, this is racist, they'd be like, oh, I'm not a racist, yada, yada, yada, right?
Trump flew the door open.
That's the point.
It's like what we're seeing now is a bunch of people who are not afraid to be racist and fascist.
And unfortunately, if he got caught doing something like this, yeah, I think that people would support him.
But as that happens, as they become more concentrated, they start shedding members.
And that's why the poll numbers are going down, is because there's a group of people who are like, yeah, I thought maybe he was going to drain the swamp, but he's just he's just failed.
He hasn't done anything he said he was going to do.
Well, let's go back to the Nixon era in a moment because what was so politically troubling about the taxes thing was that a lot of people for those four years that worked as hard as they possibly can, your family is like what I'm kind of talking about, they would discover they paid a lot more taxes than he did.
And that was the political death that he was, you know, probably concerned about was the way he paid it back.
So that, I wonder what that would do.
And we already know that he hasn't, he was able to deduct so much taxes, he didn't pay for like almost a decade any tax, any income tax.
So I really wonder if that is a tact that they could use to fix Trump and take and, you know, slough off more of his followers if they're the ones who are grinding, grinding every day and they have to pay these taxes and this asshole hasn't paid a dime in a decade.
I wonder, what do you think?
Would that hold any sway?
Well, I'm glad we're talking about taxes because it just reminded me that I have six days to get mine in.
And I'm gonna take a bath in it.
I just am.
And it sucks.
You know?
Like, when you owe money for taxes, it sucks.
It's like one of the worst feelings when you gotta pay it over.
Nobody likes paying taxes.
And one of the problems, actually, is that the Republican Party has really done a great job of framing this thing.
Right?
Everyone hates taxes, so let's just say your taxes will go up, yadda yadda yadda.
Everyone hates it.
But I think the problem here, and this is actually I think where Democrats have failed and I think where media members and pundits have failed.
Don't put a dollar number on it.
Talk about schools.
How many schools were not funded?
How many infrastructure projects were not funded?
How much health care could have been gotten to if people like Donald Trump weren't able to shirk their responsibility in terms of taxes?
Because when you say the number, and the number doesn't mean anything, and as a result you're like, oh that's how much money he saved.
Talk about the public consequences.
Talk about what that actually does.
And talk about how that's hurt communities.
Because people like Donald Trump have hollowed out America.
You know what I mean?
They've really hurt everything.
And I got a newsflash for you, Jared.
Whatever you're going to be hit with on taxes this year, it's the lowest it's ever been.
You're not going to pay any less taxes, really, than you had in the last, you know, you're looking at a 50-year period.
This is the golden age, and you have these asshole rich people who still want to complain, and yet it doesn't matter.
And here's the other thing is, they'll quote the tax codes, they'll use the percentages that they're expected to pay, and then you know, and I know, and everybody knows, they don't pay anywhere near that rate.
And that's what's also galling.
So they want to use this notion, but they know that they have all the loopholes in the world.
Okay, and how do they get those?
Because they donate to the politicians, and the politicians enact the laws, which then give them more tax breaks.
And then you got to wonder why people think that the government is stacked against minorities and poor people.
And there's your answer right there.
They've rigged that part of the system so much that, you know, we had, when I had Curtis Harris on, he talked about how, you know, what were some of the laws enacted that would have caused, you know, black people way back in the day to be so far behind that they'd never catch up.
But one of them was they forced people to have to buy their wife from the slave owner and their kids.
And it was so much money that that was it.
For the rest of that life and that generation going forward, they had no more money to save or anything else.
And here we are the same way here.
And they're just giving the money back to these rich people.
And it's time.
We need to do something to stop this once and for all.
And there needs to be some punitive damage to this.
And what we're talking about in terms of how they have framed it actually gives these people a really, really powerful weapon.
So like, okay, during Reaganism, which of course was like taxes are terrible or whatever, we end up having this hyper-capitalistic society where all of a sudden the very wealthy become increasingly and exorbitantly more wealthy, right?
They just keep getting more and more money and the corporations keep getting larger and larger.
And eventually what ends up happening is you have like Transnational corporations that aren't actually American, you know?
I mean, this is why they have, like, Cayman Islands offices, you know?
And then, the moment that we might actually try and make them pay taxes, do you think that those companies will stay in this country?
No, they'll threaten to leave, and they'll take any jobs that they have with them and anything that they pay at all with them.
So actually, you've created a monster.
You've created a situation where we can't make people pay taxes, where we can't make people chip in, and you know what happens with that?
We don't end up with healthcare, our infrastructure and our educational systems fall apart, and then we're just stuck there.
And unfortunately, that's the horror that we're in right now.
Jared, I had no idea you hated Hamilton.
Wow.
I think it's a great musical.
It's really, you know, really great numbers, really a lot of talent on that stage.
But man, you basically just destroyed his whole vision of our show.
Alexander Hamilton was pretty gross.
I have not seen the musical.
I hear it's very charming, but Alexander Hamilton was a real monster.
And that's a hard thing to talk about, but I mean, that guy's fingerprints are on a lot of different things.
And the idea of Adam Smith's wealth of nations and capitalism in terms of self-interest, it's really brought us to a bad point.
Oh, by the way, I don't know if you noticed, but coronavirus numbers are still going up.
Not that that has anything to do with what we're talking about.
Well, answer me this then, because how is it possible that we're now in a situation where these pundits and these politicians are saying, we have to reopen schools?
And that's the only sentence.
Nothing about, we have to wait and see to see if the virus calms down, if we can do it safely.
No mention of any of that.
This simply has turned into, we have to open up the economy, so we have to reopen the schools.
We don't give a shit whether or not these kids are going to affect anybody or the teachers or any of the workers in the schools and then have it be a super spreader event from there.
How would any of these Republicans get re-elected again with this kind of slogan that they're pushing out there day after day now?
I cannot follow that.
What's the Trump slogan that they rolled out, Live With It?
Isn't that what they're saying now?
It's live with it?
Well, that's not real, is it?
I thought that was kind of like a cheeky joke.
Did they really say that?
I don't think they're putting it up on banners, but I mean, I think that has become the motto.
Yeah, no doubt.
I always find it interesting that all of these reopening meetings are on Zoom.
You know, the people making the decision about whether or not kids should be in classrooms.
Wait, did you hear about this?
They had all these administrators meet to discuss how to open this thing and they all got COVID.
Where was that?
What state was that?
Do you remember?
I want to say that was in Texas, maybe.
Yeah, or I'll look it up.
Either way, I mean... Or it might have been California.
I forget where it was, too.
Yeah, it was California, but either way, it's insane.
Yeah, but it is.
And the problem here, and I've been a very vocal person on this, the reason that we're arguing whether or not we should stay closed or reopen, it's a dichotomous choice.
Like, we shouldn't have to have that argument.
Of course we should be shut down right now.
And the thing is, the wealthy and the powerful don't want to have a conversation about reforming economics in this country.
Because the moment that that door opens, God knows where it leads, right?
If people are going to be getting public assistance, or we're going to actually tax people, or we're going to redistribute some wealth and make it fairer and more human, there's no telling where that can end.
So no, they don't want to have that conversation.
They would much rather sacrifice thousands of lives.
Follow me on Twitter and you'll see I tweeted this out a little while ago, or today, all caps, DEFUND THE GOVERNMENT.
I am now, let's defund the police, let's defund the government.
Let's just do the whole thing while we're at it.
But, you know, he's already destroyed where we're at.
I mean, that's where I'm at right now.
Because, listen, we just talked about, Mnuchin says, to get back to taxes really briefly, he said it would be dangerous to honor this request for a tax return.
What would be dangerous about anything like that, that they do all the time as a routine, unless it was completely nefariously done?
And here we have, you know, people wanting to send the kids back to school, even if you want to assume that the kids aren't going to get really sick and they're, for whatever reason, blessed because they don't get it.
But it's all the teachers.
I mean, what would you know about teaching people in a classroom, Jared?
I have to tell you, I'll be real.
I don't want to do it.
I don't.
I don't feel safe.
I haven't been told anything in any way shape or form that makes me feel safe or like anybody is taking any of this seriously and actually considering it from a point, and we talked about this on the last podcast, that isn't based on how do we get football out there.
These systems are messed up.
This is not the way it's supposed to work.
It's not the way That higher education is supposed to work, which by the way, that's where you.
That's where you educate the future experts who believe in science and logic and facts, and instead we're having a system now that is pretending like those things don't exist because the economy of it and the for profit status of it has completely ruined any belief in all of it.
So no, it's it's a really disturbing moment and I don't think in this case this brings it all back around to what we were saying.
When you start taking those things away, the law, science, and facts, there is a domino effect.
And you just get to the point where they don't matter anymore.
And we've talked about this in depth.
You eventually reach a point where there is no rule of law except for the people who want to use it as a weapon.
Right?
For other people.
Right?
That's what Donald Trump wants.
He wants to use the law.
I mean, there's a reason why he's talking about, you know, jailing people who burn a flag or jailing people who, like, knock down a statue.
The law is for them.
It's not for him or any of his conspiratorial cronies.
And then you reach a point where reality doesn't matter and you feel powerless and nothing can ever make it feel better, which is what we're talking about with this tax thing.
The fact that we look at this, we know that it's important, but we also don't expect it to be the silver bullet.
That's what Trump and people like him want because they want to continue knocking down the rule of law and they want to fast forward corruption.
I mean, that sounds horrible, but it's true.
Well, the problem, I think, is that it's always been this way.
It just hasn't been pronounced.
It hasn't been in our face as much, right?
And I guess the argument is that the longer you behave this way in the shadows and keep this whatever, eventually it's going to come out and creep out and then we see it.
Right.
This was like this happening in the 40s, in the 20s.
We've had this kind of ripe corruption across the board all the whole time.
Maybe it's a function of capitalism.
But at some point, and might be very quickly, then the whole thing can just fall apart.
We've never really seen a country like ours We don't know, we don't have any past precedent of what it looks like when a country falls apart and the republic just dies.
I mean, like ours.
We've seen it where it becomes a dictatorship, but before that it probably wasn't necessarily a democratic republic.
But this is really where you could point to if you're looking back on this 100 years from now and say, you know, this is the point where enough people became completely completely aware of what the graft was.
And you can argue that Trump wants it to be that way, to continue to destruct the norms.
But as a result, he's taken everybody down with him.
And that could very well lead to something disastrous sooner than later.
I don't know.
I'm hot today.
I didn't realize I was so hot, but geez. - I think you have a reason to be hot.
Because it's stuff like this that should piss you off.
Because what you just said is exactly right.
Like, I feel like one of the problems in this country is that people believe that America is inherently stable and that nothing could ever happen here that could unseat that.
Well, guess what?
It can.
It absolutely can and it's happening right now.
That is why all of us are screaming out for alarm fires.
We're talking about this stuff.
We're telling you what can happen and trying to explain what has happened because it is a steep grade and eventually it just rolls and rolls and rolls and you don't even recognize it at the end of it.
Don't you see why the value of studying our past and realizing why we shouldn't have Confederate statues is so important now?
I mean, really, if we don't, and we talked about this in the last podcast, if we don't reflect and analyze and see what the reality was back then, and maybe pierce this notion that we had of what the, I don't think it's so stable.
I don't think that the country's always been that stable.
Certainly the educational system has never been stable, right?
It's always been, the public system has been, Almost like the tax structure.
That's so weird that you say it like that.
It's almost like the tax structure.
different methods, and by the time you get to the top of this thing, they're all diametrically opposed to each other, and it's almost gridlock for the whole thing.
You can barely get anybody educated. - Almost like the tax structure.
That's so weird that you say it like that.
It's almost like the tax structure.
It's almost like we are suffering because all of our institutions have just grown and grown and grown and grown and grown and grown and grown until they are pretty much nonsensical, and they don't really serve anybody except for powerful And that might not be anybody's fault.
It might just be the notion of we've been around for a couple hundred years.
You know, over time, these things continue to grow and get more complicated and this and that.
And you know, remember, we still have laws that outlawed sodomy, right?
I don't know if we still have those.
We did very recently.
We have laws on the books right now that enable forced sterilizations.
That are still left over from that time period.
So, you know, it comes across the board in everything we deal with.
So that's why it's so important.
And you have so many more people, I think, than I would have thought who want to either put their head in the sand or who want to celebrate these things, what they think that they really are, when they're not.
And as a result, we get stuck with a non-functional government.
Right?
I suppose, I bet you I can go back and we could see that people predicted this in the 70s and the 80s, right?
We would have seen that at some point these two-party systems going to ground to a halt, they're not getting anything done.
Has anything been done?
Have we even passed a law?
Have we had any kind of substantive, you know, debate in the Congress about anything in the last, I don't know, six months?
Aside from impeachment?
Keith and Congress was there to pass laws to help the people.
That's really sweet though.
I really appreciate that.
That's very nice Well, I I do have to say and this is something that we've been talking about and we've been kicking back and forth There is somebody who predicted this and that man's name was Jimmy Carter and the country didn't want to hear it The country just had no interest whatsoever in hearing it and weirdly enough.
I I think you said it like You know, we live in a country where if everyone wore masks, things would be great, and they didn't want to wear a sweater for them.
You know, it's a really crazy thing.
But we're going to dive some more into history here in a few minutes.
Hang around.
We're going to have Kevin M. Levin, who is a historian and author of Searching for Black Confederates, The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth.
We're going to talk about that history that Nick and I have been talking about here, hear Kevin's thoughts on that.
So hang around.
We'll be right back.
Hey, everybody, we're back with Kevin M. Levin, who is a historian and author of Searching for Black Confederates, The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth.
You already know that, though.
Doubtlessly, you follow him on Twitter.
You already know this.
This is a really exciting guest that we have on today's podcast.
So I'm just going to jump into this thing right away.
Kevin, you've spent your career writing about things like the Confederacy.
Jumping into the past, I know as somebody who does research on history and writes about it, there's always a feeling that you hope that present-day audiences find it relevant and find it to be something important that they will dive into.
How's this moment treating you?
Yeah, this is, I mean, this is certainly, I've been here before, right?
I've been writing about this, blogging about this subject, Since 2005.
So it's always been a topic that resonates with an audience with a wide audience.
And that's one of the things that makes it so interesting, because it gives me a chance to really, I mean, I'm interested in the question of how Americans struggle to still come to terms with the legacy of the Civil War reconstruction.
So there's always an opportunity to sort of gauge that, right, depending on what's going on.
And we saw that, you know, In the aftermath of the Charleston shootings in 2015, we've obviously seen it again more recently after Charlottesville, where I used to live, and obviously the last few weeks.
This feels different.
I'll be honest in saying that I'm still trying to wrap my head around everything that has happened.
That was like the weirdest Mad Libs I've ever heard.
NASCAR, the President, and monuments.
I just never expected to be here.
It's like the weirdest Mad Libs I've ever heard.
NASCAR, the President, and Monuments.
I just never expected to be here.
What an odd time.
Yeah, how did those come together?
Well, Tammy Duckworth got onto Tucker Carlson's shit list this week when she said that we need to have a conversation – That was all she said.
She didn't say we need to tear down Washington statues.
But my question then was, well, do we have to have a conversation before we take the statue down?
Is taking the statue down the conversation?
And what exactly does that mean and how are we supposed to proceed?
That's a really, really good question.
And it's a tough one to answer because I can come at this as, um, As a resident of a community, as a citizen, as a historian, and as an educator.
And the educator slash historian in me, you know, would like to see some reflection, right?
I mean, you know, I, you sometimes wonder, what are, what do people really know about the statues that they're ripping down, right?
What's going through their, what's going through their head?
What did they learn in high school and college, et cetera?
Those, those questions are tough to answer, but at the same time, Having studied this for so long and understanding the broader history of these monuments and understanding just how long they've been divisive, this is nothing new.
If you study the history of Confederate monuments, you understand and appreciate the extent to which many of them have been controversial from day one.
So to see that kind of frustration, penned up frustration for many, now allowed to let loose.
I can understand it, right?
There's a context there that I can use to understand what's happening.
Not necessarily to outright celebrate.
Yeah, I was kind of happy when they removed the Nathan Bedford Forrest monument in Tennessee, although the city took care of that.
But it's one of those things where I'm not worried about the slippery slope, but I do wonder what people are thinking about when they're pulling these things down, right?
For me, it's a back and forth in terms of my response.
Yeah, I think there's a sort of weird conversation in that, sort of a symbolism.
So, like, when people are pulling it down, it's like the energy of a crowd, and when a city suddenly decides to take all this down, you're like, oh, this might be systemic.
Yeah, you know, I got into some trouble on social media, as I do from time to time.
On Twitter, when I suggested that, I actually prefer to see the cities take them down, right?
In part because I worry that people pulling them down, that it may not be seen as representative of the city.
It's the cities and the communities that initially put them up.
And I think as a symbolic moment, and also as a way to continue the conversation of what happens to these public spaces, I think a community is in a better place if the city does take it down as opposed to, you know, just the general public or a segment of that public.
But again, at the same time, there is something quite powerful about that, you know, pulling down.
You don't have to go any further than looking at those images of New Yorkers pulling down the equestrian monument of King George after the Declaration of Independence was read publicly for the first time.
So there is something powerful about that act that I do want to acknowledge.
How nefarious do you think it was erecting a lot of these statues to the Confederacy across the board?
I mean, do people want to say it's their heritage?
And they want to honor some sort of notion of the best parts of it?
Or was it a thing where they wanted to continue to further the ideology?
I think, you know, we have to keep in mind that these monuments went up in stages, right?
And I think that earliest stage after the Civil War Where most of the Confederate monuments that were dedicated were dedicated in cemeteries.
And even in that case, I don't think you can divorce it entirely from the politics of Reconstruction, which is taking place at that point.
I do think that we can acknowledge that this was much more about commemorating the dead.
I think in our, I think we are much too quick In engaging in a kind of reductionist argument that, you know, we make the claim that all these monuments are simply about race and white supremacy.
And there's a certain amount of truth to that when we get to the next stage of monument building, roughly between 1880 and 1930, that height of the Jim Crow era.
But that earlier stage, I think we need to acknowledge, I think we've lost sight of the extent to which white Southerners sort of were dealing with the trauma of defeat and just death, the scale of death and loss in many of these communities.
Certainly by that later stage, I think we do need at some level to acknowledge the ways in which these monuments reflected the extent to which white Southerners had regained control of their state and local governments, right?
In other words, I see these monuments as much, if not more, a response to reconstruction as they were to the Civil War itself.
In other words, coming out of Reconstruction, ensuring that military occupation, federal intrusion into the, you know, the racial hierarchy of the South never occurs again.
And so I think we do have to acknowledge the extent to which the soldier statues, the larger monuments in places like Richmond and other large cities, are an attempt to remind white southerners of what their fathers and grandfathers fought for in the 1860s, and what they have a responsibility of maintaining and upholding once white supremacy has regained control, that they have a responsibility and what they have a responsibility of maintaining and upholding once white supremacy has regained control, that they
That they have a responsibility to ensure that that continues into the 20th century.
Those monuments and memorials are as much about children and educating a younger generation that didn't remember or didn't live through the Civil War and Reconstruction as they are in honoring the Confederate veterans themselves.
So there's a lot going on and a lot of it, of course, depends on local communities and the dynamics in those communities.
But certainly I think we can we can make some broader kinds of generalizations about how to understand those monuments during that.
I'm so glad that you brought up the generations of the monuments, because what you're talking about, the memorials to the soldiers, versus what happens during the Lost Cause mythology age, and that's all of a sudden where you have the leaders and the generals and the sort of more elite of the South, that is also kind of that flattening and that's all of a sudden where you have the leaders and the generals and the sort of more elite of the South, that is also kind of that flattening out of history, where I think most people don't understand that the Confederacy was very much an aristocracy, and
and that you had a lot of young men who weren't necessarily slaveholders, who might not have even believed in the Confederacy, who were either conscripted or forced into battle.
And so then you start to flatten out the history of the Confederacy. - Oh, that's a really good point and an important point.
You know, the monuments are, people talk about the The way in which you're pulling down monuments, some people worry, is tantamount to erasing history.
But I think we need to appreciate the extent to which the monuments themselves both erased and mythologized the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, both the soldier statues and the larger memorials, both in terms of, as you've just alluded to, you know, sort of stamping out the idea of unionists in parts of the South.
Obviously ignoring the extent to which African Americans and slave men fought for the Union or just simply did not support the Confederacy.
So these monuments have a great deal of power.
But I would also say that the soldier statues themselves also have to be connected to that broader project of sort of uniting white Southerners in that Jim Crow era.
I mean, we can, you know, as I go through a lot of the dedication speeches right now, Even with the soldier statues, you know, the most famous example, the best example is, of course, Julian Carr's address in 1913 at the dedication of Silent Sam, which once stood on the campus of the University of North Carolina.
And, of course, he's in 1913 talking and reflecting back on coming back from the war in 1865 and seeing a woman, a black woman, disrespecting another white person.
Uh, and describing how he quote unquote horse whipped her until she was bleeding.
So the way in which, um, you know, white Southerners during this latter period, um, use these monuments as an opportunity to unite the community is incredibly powerful.
Uh, and I think helps to explain a great deal of why that lost cause narrative, uh, has remained so deeply embedded in our culture.
I mean, even to this day, even as much as we've sort of, we're beginning to move past it.
I think the removal of monuments is a reflection of that, but it's still there in various ways.
Is it?
I mean, it's safe to say that a lot of the bad kind of behavior and ideology that we saw in the South before the Civil War, it kind of still exists, right?
I mean, I don't want to be too, you know, make broad assumptions about a huge swath of the country, but it seems like the fact that it remains at all indicates the deep influence that something had in the South, right?
And something had that continues these ideas that we keep seeing them pop up.
So I'm kind of wondering if you had a feeling of what, like, what has been able to propagate that?
We talk about progress all the time and how the country is supposedly trying to keep moving away.
But here we are so long from the Civil War and so long from Jim Crow, and yet we just seem to still, to this day, have these issues.
And what's propagating it?
A lot of that has to do with education, but I don't mean sort of in the In the way in which we're blaming teachers in the last few decades for everything.
I mean, you know, going back to the role that the United Daughters of the Confederacy played, you know, beginning in the 1890s and stretching into the 20th century, where we think, I think, typically, the UDC is connected to the monuments, right?
That's where we're hearing them for the most part.
In fact, on the first night of protests in Richmond, It wasn't just the monuments that the protesters went after.
They set fire to the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in downtown Richmond.
But their most important project was not the monuments, one could argue.
It was actually on the front lines of controlling textbooks in schools throughout the South and beyond.
So their primary concern, and you know, They were actually quite successful, and I think this gets to the point that you're making.
They were actually quite successful for years in controlling and approving textbooks at various levels in public schools throughout the South.
And you can imagine, of course, the kinds of concerns they had, what kids learned about what the Confederacy was fighting for, how to think about Abraham Lincoln, how to think about the relationship between slave and master.
And, you know, those textbooks, those lost cause influenced textbooks, and then add to that, in the 1960s, there's a push to, as a part of massive resistance in states like Virginia, to publish textbooks that counter the civil rights movement.
These books are used into the late 1970s in some places, right?
And so I think it's important sometimes to acknowledge, you know, that the generation of students that I started teaching, And this is going back now 20 years, right?
The idea that they would learn that slavery was central to the war, that slavery caused secession, that slavery was not benign, right?
That Reconstruction was not simply the federal government moving in and corruption and all that.
But there was a great deal of progress for African Americans, even white Southerners.
That narrative is so recent.
Right?
It doesn't go back.
You don't have to go back that far to find students learning from those old textbooks.
That old narrative.
And I think, you know, we need some perspective on that.
Because it is fairly new.
And it's going to take some time, I think, to fully get beyond it.
Right?
I mean, younger generations get it.
And I think that's one of the reasons why this Push against Confederate monuments?
Who's taking the lead?
It's young kids, right?
There's something to that.
Yeah, one of the reasons we started this podcast in the first place is because I think when you look at modern times, but you don't understand history, they seem inexplicable.
They seem very puzzling because the history that we've been taught mostly is a mythology.
It's sort of a flattening out of American history.
And so I always like joke about it, but basically the Civil War boils down to Abraham Lincoln was a savior and Robert E. Lee looked good on a horse, right?
Yeah.
And so we don't really talk about why the Civil War, like what were the causes that led to it and what the Confederacy actually was, and Reconstruction, because not only does it look terrible for America, but it also looks badly for how America was founded and how it conducted itself.
What do you feel like are the main missing pieces of information that people don't have that keep them from understanding not just the Civil War, but the consequences that we're still living with?
I think that's a great question, and, you know, I answer that question every year in my survey class in American History by spending a good deal of time on Reconstruction.
I think, you know, right now, if we were really to sort of dig into, you know, the racial problems that we're facing in 2020, we're talking about Reconstruction, right?
That's where those problems stem from.
I also think, and, you know, this is something that I don't mind admitting that I was relatively late, you know, coming on board with, And that is the recent scholarly work that situates the Civil War into the broader westward expansion, right, into the broader sort of imperialist push west, and of course connecting that to imperialism overseas.
That I think is, I mean, you know, your typical history class, we have no problem sort of looking at the debates over expansion into the territories and this question of, Whether the Western territories will be free or enslaved, right?
That's standard History 101.
And then we get to the Civil War, and then somehow we forget about it on the flip side, right?
We're into the Gilded Age, right?
I mean, we're still talking about the West, but we're not talking about it in the same way.
And I think historians, a number of historians, have really sort of pushed back on that in recent years.
And so I think that's another piece that helps us understand, you know, sort of the broader sweep of American history.
that situates the Civil War in that broader 19th century expansion.
And I think that those two things, for me, are paramount in understanding the 19th century as a way of bridging to the present.
I'll just say real fast, I thought I knew American history.
You know, I took my fair share of classes.
But the problem I found, I was doing research on my recent book, and I realized I didn't actually know history, that there were a ton of historians that I had not been introduced to.
And there's, there is an academic consensus of all of these things that you don't get in public schools.
And maybe with like your quick survey in college, there's not enough time to put all of it.
Because like you just said, what I'm learning about Western expansion and the Confederacy basically surviving, I mean, that's its own course.
I mean, that, that is, you know, that's its own semester's worth of work.
That's right.
And what that means for Native Americans out West, what it means for just people of color generally, you know, all of that is important, right?
And I couldn't help but think that I'm sort of in the same camp as you.
And, you know, in terms of, yeah, I teach this stuff, but I'm constantly, you know, trying to stay up on interpretations and scholarship, although I'm a high school history teacher.
And I mean, one of the things I've found that has been just so incredibly helpful is just social media, right?
I mean, a lot of these historians are just doing really good public outreach on places like Twitter and elsewhere.
And so what I found, actually, in the last 10 years, is that I think I am actually much, much more in tuned with sort of changes in the scholarship, because there are so many more people actually engaging the public, right?
So, I mean, I use it to sort of promote my own work on social media.
But man, it's in terms of just as an education, sort of getting to some of the points you're raising.
For me, it's just so it's just invaluable.
You know, that brings up a point.
Yesterday I was on social media, on Twitter, looking at some feeds, and somebody had made a great point about the difference between the Confederate battle flag and the Confederate flag, which is what everybody wants to embrace, the battle flag.
And then, first of all, the question was, well, does the U.S.
have a battle flag too?
But like, can you give us a little insight into the difference between that and what that actually what they were embracing?
Yeah, so it's a little bit complicated.
I guess this is back in the news because of the state of Mississippi last week making that decision to to lower and and and revise their state flag.
But you know, in 1861, the Confederacy adopts what they call the first national flag, which if you look at it looks a lot like the Stars and Stripes.
And that ends up being the flag that regiments will use on some of those earliest battlefields, like Bull Run in July of 1861.
But it was confusing for the soldiers on both sides, which is my side, right?
You know, because they both look alike.
And so within a few months, some of the regiments in Virginia, or the Army, what becomes the Army of Virginia, adopt this St.
Andrew's cross pattern, that square flag, the battle flag, as we call it.
And by the middle of the war, That St.
Andrew's Cross gets adopted to a new national flag.
You can see it in the far, it's a white field.
And in the corner is the battle flag symbol.
So the battle flag by the middle of the war becomes part of the Confederate national flag.
And by the end of the war, there's a third national flag.
And what they do is they add a red stripe on the corner, the opposite corner of the flag.
And so you still have the St.
Andrew's Cross there.
But you also have this red stripe.
So the two sort of meld together, right?
And it's important because some people will try to make this distinction that the Confederate battle flag was always the soldier's flag, that it was never the flag of the Confederacy.
But that's just simply not true.
If you look at, again, those second and third national flags, you can see that pattern.
And it speaks to the extent to which that Lee's army, Robert E. Lee's army specifically, by the middle of the war, really had become the symbol of nationalism for the Confederacy, much like George Washington was during the Revolution.
He had become even more so than Jefferson Davis, because he was just so unpopular by the end of the war, that Lee becomes, in his army, because it's so successful, becomes sort of the best hope for the Confederacy, that symbol of nationalism.
Can you maybe draw a comparison that we can also understand?
Like, what would that be like now of us wanting to, you know, is there a comparison we can use that's a little bit more recent?
I don't know.
A comparison of... Like, what's the equivalent of that kind of flag?
You know, we want to celebrate that flag.
You know, is it like an ISIS flag?
Or like, you know... Well, I guess it depends who you ask, right?
I mean...
Certainly, I mean, if you mean the battle flag, generally what we call it generally, whatever.
Yeah, I mean, that flag in various shapes, you know, by the by the mid 20th century, if not sooner.
I mean, look, I think it's always important to remember that the battle flag is connected to the issue of slavery from from the beginning.
The armies function as the military arm of a government committed to protecting and expanding slavery.
But certainly by the mid-20th century, the best examples are that flag, that battle flag becomes a fairly popular symbol of massive resistance in the 1950s and 60s.
So white kids who are reading from those textbooks, right, that we talked about a few minutes ago, you know, they are standing in those, along those highways, you know, sort of responding to African Americans with that flag.
The Dixiecrats in 1948, that is also their symbol.
That's their party symbol.
So I think it reminds us that, you know, white Southerners have always understood the connection between that flag and the importance of white supremacy.
There shouldn't be any surprise by that in 1950 or in 2020, if, of course, you understand a little bit of that history.
I hope that gets at your question.
Absolutely, thank you.
Good, good.
So before I ask Kevin my last question, I just want to go ahead and let people know that we do have a YouTube video component and they should check it out because as Kevin is holding a master class, his beautiful cat has just been rampaging around in the background and it has been I think that's the... Sorry about that.
No, it just brings it up to another level, Kevin.
It is wonderful.
So, last question I have for you.
I think you're exactly right about not just the invigoration of social media creating new avenues for education, and we obviously have a generation that not only rejects the old mythology, but they want truth.
They really, desperately want truth.
As a historian who I have to imagine that I mean like as a historian you butted heads with a mythology in this country and you've had to do battle with this sort of like a consensus that I feel like has done a lot of harm and has also hidden white supremacy in our laws and culture and politics.
How do you do you feel hopeful?
Do you feel like there is a tide is changing or how are you feeling right now?
So yeah yeah that's a good I mean As an educator, as a high school teacher, I have to be optimistic, right?
And I think I have every reason to be optimistic, you know, given the students that I've been teaching over the past number of years.
And certainly, you know, I've had, I save all my emails.
I have an archive going back 15 years of some of the most hate-filled emails, death threats that you can possibly imagine.
I've seen it all, right?
And I think it's easy to sort of, You know, it's easy just to sort of focus on that, right?
Because that's what people want to hear about anyway, right?
I mean, tell me about the people who are threatening you and everything.
But actually, I think what stands out most to me are the number of people that I've come into contact over the years, as you said, who really do want to learn.
I think there's actually a voracious appetite out there for good history, history that not only offers some complexity of the past, right?
But also helps to make meaningful what's happening right now.
And I think, you know, if you can do that, if you can do both of those things, if you can both acknowledge the complexity, force people to step back and say, look, maybe not so fast on your generalizations, but let's dig into this a little bit, but still have it relevant or make it relevant to what's happening right now.
That's incredibly powerful.
And I think that's the reason why we do engage in the past or the serious study of the past.
At least it's the reason why I do it. - Well, thank you so much.
You want me to take it away, is that what you're saying?
Well, no, that answer is way too good.
I was sort of, you know, blown away by it.
We've been talking with Kevin M. Levin, historian and author of Searching for Black Confederates, The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth.
An absolutely must-read book.
I think it's really well written, and I think it's a must-read.
So, thank you so much for coming on with us.
People already follow you on Twitter, but where would they find you?
Yeah, so, at Kevin Levin.
Add Kevin Levin, follow him.
Do you have anything in the pipeline, anything you'd like to bring up?
I am working, like I said before, working on a sort of a collection of documents to help people understand the history of Confederate monuments.
Awesome.
I can't wait to read that.
Thank you so much, Kevin Levin.
Yeah.
Well, what a terrific conversation, and I'm really glad that we could hit some of the really important notes about what the statues mean, what the flag means, and that was a great point he made about the difference between the battle flag and what it really means.
And so, I just don't think that Southerners can hide behind anything else that that flag stands for besides white supremacy.
I mean, it's a complete myth that the Confederacy was anything else.
I mean, you know, you can make arguments about state rights, but it's state rights in the pursuit of power and white supremacy.
I mean, they said as much.
Yeah, that was great.
I was so happy.
I was so excited about getting Kevin for the podcast.
And I think he is a really, really interesting historian.
You should absolutely check out his book, Black Confederates.
In the meantime, thank you so much for hanging out with us again.
We are still absolutely touched and excited about the growing support that we have here.
It means so much.
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If you'd like to check in with Nick before next week, he's at Can You Hear Me?
