cnn's evan mcmorris uh santoro speaking to a mom
this is a tennessee mom who's leading some of these sorts of uh anti-crt stuff um and
it's just interesting the way that well i can we can play in the reactor
just outside of nashville basic american history is up for his
parents taught him about george washington and he identifies george washington as a white man
and then asked if if he would be killed back then because he has brown skin i mean he's
judging george washington not by any of of what he about being the founder of our country so when
do we tell the kid that in fact he may have been killed back then because of the color of his skin
i'm not sure that that's that that's what you teach that you would have been killed for the
color of your skin that's that's a narrative that's a narrative really robin steeman is trying
to change the narrative on race that's a narrative so it is a narrative and actually i want to um
want to see what you're saying and say like actually you're right if that's all they're
teaching that if you were a black person in colonial virginia you would be immediately killed
that would be the wrong lesson to teach somebody the correct lesson is that if george washington
comes galloping up in his horse and sees a black person that he doesn't know who they belong to
uh he's not going to kill them on the spot he is going to enslave them
and use their labor on his plantation and failing that um uh um failing acceptance of that sort of
slavery then that person will be killed so that should be that's the fuller lesson that that uh
parents child should be taught in this instance yeah the full context of slavery is a narrative
but my commitment to an american exceptionalist white ideal that's not a narrative that's just
a myth that i think is so dandy this is myth protection this is like we want to look at all the
great things he did found in our country like not not let's actually historicize george washington
as somebody who always had an eye on say property in ohio and that might have sweetened the pot
for him to leave office because he can start explaining some of that sort of stuff like like uh
washington yeah i mean our historicized uh um the way his dad uh came to the states and immediately
married a widow um so he could inherit the plantation uh that she had like that sort of
is that the founding that she meant i don't kind of think it is isn't it it is not a coincidence
that there is a huge overlap between evangelical christian ideology and this like myth mysticizing
and the mythologizing of founding fathers and the american exceptionalist ideal it's like religious
commitment it's so childish you really just think that george washington was this honest dude
who he could never tell a lie as you say matt right the cherry tree have you heard the myth
thomas jefferson don't mention that he didn't that he had slaves he had a loving
loving relationship with the slaves that he raped and fathered children with i mean like
why do we have to engage in this hegeography it's nationalism mixed with their commitment
to religiosity and like my emotions and my belief in the ideal that's what needs to
be protected over everything else and it's just like a child not getting candy the way
in the moment that they want it deal with the circumstances in front of you grow up like
are we are we dealing with santa claus here it's just ridiculous this is what we're dealing with
i mean her like the way that her brain breaks when that simple question is asked never had to
engage with a com with with with um a conversation topic that made her uncomfortable in any real way
you see why that's valuable like for instance in just mass voting patterns right uh and also
valuable in terms of you never really and it is a problem like right like that i do think there's
a way this stuff does get too collapsed and it it slavery didn't just happen because those uh
colonial uh uh those plantation owners hated black hated hated africans it's because they were
the earliest form of capitalists exploiting people on a mass level that's why they brought him here
and i do think like um slavery was intrinsic to them to capitalism yeah exactly there's no
capitalism without slavery yeah and right and particularly that like not in sort of anglo
capitalism that could uh conquer the rest of the world yeah particularly as it came to
like i don't know the cotton trade that was the foundational element that was the way that you
could take it internationally um and and that's that's what elevated capitalism beyond well
it's like the initial usage of uh cotton coming out of um india and asia you look at like even
me looking at my history as a north dakotan the north dakota heritage you're right we have lewis
and clark uh who was also on that exhibition york the slave who was given special a dispensation by
thomas jefferson to go into those territories even though slavery was supposed to be banned there but
we could not do we could not get explorers through a territory unless you had slaves
there to do the hard work and also um maybe even partially sort of indentured
or slightly coerced translators of a mixed indian heritage so like like yeah i mean it's it's it's
the amount that is missed by american history and the way it's taught uh particularly um these
sort of anti-crt people and what they're trying to sort of cement or maintain um i don't think
they're going to be able to be successful because i think fundamentally like information technology
is just too advanced to like be able to deny like this is why the uh jefferson descendants the way
jefferson descendants had to acknowledge that the hemings were also descendants of jefferson um even
though they were black and that it proved that the rape of a slave happened is because of dna testing
and you know they're going to attempt to hide all this stuff from their kids but they're not
going to be able to be successful ultimately dj from syracuse my parents understood that they
didn't understand half of what i thought and i'm thankful they let the school decide yeah i mean
anyway i had parents like that too um yeah like um i went to church every week growing up but also
um my parents knew like not to try to
um i guess pervert my education through their sort of spiritual beliefs which is what's going on
i did there was a lot of like i i i did have to break away from that you know religious kind of
worship of founding fathers in my family though which is maybe why i have such resentment towards
it because it it's so [ __ ] ridiculous yeah none of that in my family and it still persists so um
give me two glasses of wine at thanksgiving and i go off on that the founding fathers in my
household were uh daniel boone and davey crockett it's like very north dakota as opposed to my like
you know northeast centric uh family i i just like i i we did so many tourists sorry now to i
i remember going to jefferson's house what's it called i have mountains
and they get like should i be into this like it seems it's like there were a lot of slaves put
yourself in the mind of a slave owner and wouldn't it be nice to have them all working hard that you
like sitting in here reading a book and go out and ride a horse across the politician wouldn't that
life be great i'm like even like yeah like at like 12 or 10 i'm like i don't know bradley is daddy
who's writing in a lot and makes me want to like now i have to say bradley is daddy every time um
bradley uh just yeah t take that for what you will um uh you're missing the point guys george
washington actually hated slavery even though he didn't free them uh even on his death bed
yeah that's the thing is like but they hate like when they complain about slavery as being like
such a bad thing it's like they're almost they hate how much work they have to do in terms of
like whipping people and buying slaves and stuff like that like they're not they're not doing
like i don't really buy the sincerity that like jefferson would have done something
if it wouldn't have meant like wiping himself and future generations out for her
yeah yeah white communists it's not hypocrisy shaming to point out the political opponent's
contradiction of what they previously claimed to hold as a cherished principle pointing out such
contradictions exposes incoherence and insincerity and political projects i agree it's just sometimes
it's easy to fall into that being the core of the critique and it's not as productive as other uh
other modes of critique there's a huge limit to hypocrisy discourse you could
demonstrate it by looking at say title 42 and the border there's a lot of people that say look at
joel biden said he would be different than trump i'm thinking of contrarian types you think he
said he'd be different than trump but now he's doing the exact same thing and if you leave it
there at the hypocrisy thing you are might as well just be naturalizing trump's behavior and saying
well trump actually did the right thing because joe biden's not doing anything different this is
actually i guess what needs to be done when really the you need to take it beyond the hypocrisy point
and say biden needs to get rid of title 42 and start processing uh refugees um most importantly
exposes the opponents hiding a deeper project the fugitive slave act shows that states rights
was a flimsy cover for their true project racial subjugation critical race theory attacks show that
free speech and cancer culture are flimsy cover for their true project racial subjugation exposing
contradictions isn't shaming which trivializes it it is the dismantling of lies i agree i just
i think we laid it out it's an important element but it can't be the core but i mean even in your
defense of it you are already engaging in more substantive critique than just the hypocrisy
shaming element yeah or the or what you know it's hypocrisy towards what like like the same thing
like you say we sort of de-emphasize the kyrie irving stuff even though we think he's wrong it
might be some people might say it's hypocritical if that was steven crowder you'd be all over him
it's like yes that's actually true and i don't i don't care about consistency towards those things
you had mentioned crt you know backlash earlier yeah and being from the northeast i think we kind
of uh people will poo poo the whole thing as if it's not really happening here yeah i
i encourage everyone to look into what their local school board is talking about
and who is running right now because the town i grew up in shoreline town in connecticut it
was recently i don't know if it made national news but some local news did a great story on it where
the person running the republican school board campaign their manager had a little leaked text
saying that uh helping kids of color to feel they belong has a negative effect on white christian or
conservative kids wow and that kind of got pushed around sort of a little unmasking right there
um but that's basically what the republican school board members are running on in that town
right now which i wouldn't have known about if people i went to school with weren't sharing that
on social media on facebook so make sure you look into who's running if you're in connecticut local
elections are on november 2nd i'm not sure if it's different in other states but look into it
because you never know who's uh living amongst you i really appreciate it that is great advice
because republicans are trying to make this local fight which is astroturf
a a project of political engagement and without some sort of counterbalance to it it's going
to be difficult so it's a midterm strategy yeah appreciate the call matt thanks and uh appreciate
the advice even more and folks if you all if you do keep an eye on your school boards call in
uh like matt um and let us know what's going on yes white communists emma and matt have great
energy good show um it's all me obviously just kidding back to george washington he ran a slave
labor camp in society that was a racial tyranny of human commodification forced labor rape killings
and torture an enslaved person as a commodity was valued in today's dollars at roughly 30 000 some
more some less young women were priced higher for raping washington enslaved over 123 people at his
death which would be around four million dollars today not including the value of each lifetime
of stolen labor yep the apologist should be asked to explain the difference between what americans
euphemistically call plantations i.e uh racialized slave labor camps and the slave labor camps the
nazis copied from america's racial tyranny model that men like oscar schindler ran just
68 years after the civil war i mean what an amazing i am really appreciate that context
i don't know how much longer