Latest / The Chuck ToddCast / Full Episode - Republicans Warned Trump Would Be A Disaster… They Were Right + The American West You Didn’t Get In History Class

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Full Episode - Republicans Warned Trump Would Be A Disaster… They Were Right + The American West You Didn’t Get In History Class · The Chuck ToddCast

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  Speaker 1: e thos dot com slash chuck. Application times may vary
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  Speaker 1: and rates may vary. Hello there, I'm Chuck Todd and
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: welcome to d Thursday, or call it the Long weekend
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: edition of the Chuck Podcast. So twenty four hours ago,
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: I I'll be honest. Right as I was recording, we
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: knew that he was going to get an exit ramp
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: on all Things Iran, and then he sort of did
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: his typical you know, almost celebratory aspect of things that
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: looked like he was suddenly business partners with Iran, even
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: floating the idea of a joint venture to collect tolls
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: on the straight up. Hoorn moves well. Needless to say,
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  Speaker 1: if you're trying to figure out what is going on
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  Speaker 1: in Iran, you're not alone. Is the straight open or clothed?
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  Speaker 1: Is the ceasefire holding or not? Are we done with
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: this war or not? Because if you listen to Pete Hegseth,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: it's over. If you listen to General Kane not so much.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: And who knows about the president. This is easily turning
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: into one of the more humiliating moments in American modern
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: American history. I mean, this is this is nothing short
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: of a debacle for American prestige. Throw in a concern
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: about whether any ally can trust us, whether you're Israel,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: whether you're Europe, whether you're a Gulf state, your cutter.
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  Speaker 1: We could judge whether these how close these allies can be.
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  Speaker 1: But Donald Trump is proving to be an erratic partner.
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  Speaker 1: And before I get into what I think the fallout
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: and where we're going, I wanted to just remind ourselves,
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: you know, boy, could anybody have seen this coming, this
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: idea that we would have somebody running American form policy
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: as the commander in chief who would create, somehow take
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: situations which were impossible to make worse and he would
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: make them worse, like Oh, I don't know, handing the
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Iranian regime the control over the Strait of Hormuz and
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: you and you ask yourself, cheeze, did anybody raise any
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: red flags about this? Anybody? Well, it turns out some
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: of President Trump's most important supporters these days, we're actually
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: the ones sounding the alarm the loudest, arguably back in
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. And it feels very important for us to
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: go back and remind ourselves because we're in this situation
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  Speaker 1: where we have just pissed away American American prestige in
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  Speaker 1: the Middle East in particular. But it is just a
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  Speaker 1: total and complete mess. Whether it's our relationship with Europe,
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  Speaker 1: whether it's our relationship with Southeast Asia, whether it's our
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: relationship in North America, whether it's a relationship with Israel,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: whether it's our relationship with Saudi Arabia UAE Kadhar. And again,
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  Speaker 1: I go back to what I said earlier, Some of
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: these relationships. Some of you may not like the United
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: States having at all, but whatever you think, when you
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: make a commitment in the name the United States of America,
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: you would assume any American president is going to stick
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: by it. But I wanted to just make sure I
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: was not hallucinating when we were watching this debacle happen
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: and we're living it in real time and it's all
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: impacting our pocketbooks. And then some I thought it would
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: be important to remind folks that there were plenty of
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: warnings out there, and remind folks that there are Republicans
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: in power today who were concerned about exactly what has happened.
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  Speaker 1: And when you hear their silence, now you should be outraged,
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: and you should and then some. So let's start with
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  Speaker 1: Lindsey Graham again. This is in May of twenty sixteen.
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  Speaker 1: In an interview with Time Magazine, Lindsay Graham May six
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Trump is basically the nominee by this point, okay, and
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Lindsay Graham says the following. I just believe his temperament
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  Speaker 1: and judgment is not sufficient to be commander in chief
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  Speaker 1: of the finest fighting force in the world. I think
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  Speaker 1: his foreign policy is gibberish, and of course, in May
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  Speaker 1: of twenty sixteen, Lindsey Graham tweeted, which is still out there.
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  Speaker 1: If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed and we
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: will deserve it. Now, of course that was not true.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: So one thing Lindsay Graham was wrong about was the
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: political viability of Donald Trump, and he wasn't alone on that.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: But I want to go back to what he said.
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  Speaker 1: I believe, I just believe his temperament and judgment is
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  Speaker 1: not sufficient to be commander in chief of the finest
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  Speaker 1: fighting force in the world. I think his foreign policy
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  Speaker 1: is gibberish. Well well, last twenty four hours Lindsey Graham
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  Speaker 1: circuit May twenty sixteen, it's pretty prescient. Let's move to
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  Speaker 1: Marco Rubio March of twenty sixteen. He's an active candidate
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  Speaker 1: against running against Donald Trump, so you can chalk this
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: up to that. But here's one of his campaign statements,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: this official campaign statement, Marco Rubia on Trump's fitness. We've
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: seen a scary side of Donald Trump. It isn't just
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: the opposite of what the Republican Party stands for, it's
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: the opposite of what America stands for. More Marco Rubio
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  Speaker 1: on giving him the nuclear codes. We're about to turn
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: over the nuclear codes of the United States to an
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  Speaker 1: erratic individual. Jeez, is Donald Trump as president displayed any
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  Speaker 1: signs of being erratic? Oh, you mean, like forty eight
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  Speaker 1: hours ago when he threatened to eliminate an entire civilization.
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  Speaker 1: It was clearly a veiled nuclear threat. The White House
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: had to put out of it. No, no, no, he's
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: not talking about news. But they waited until the question
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: was asked. And then, of course there's this kicker, which
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: is on video. You can find it anywhere that archives
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: of video, because this was set on CNN in March
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: of twenty sixteen. For years to come, there are many
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: people on the right in the meetia and voters at
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: large that are going to be having to explain and
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Trump because this is not going to end well one
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: way or the other. Again. Marco Rubio, the current Secretary
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: of State, Marco Rubio, the person that, according to The
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: New York Times, pushed back enough on Trump to say,
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure about regime change, but if you narrow
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: the mission, okay, I can go out there and sell
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: it again. Marco Rubio. Now think about future Secretary of
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: State to Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, who said the following,
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: and I'm going to repeat it because it seems incredibly
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: important and pression at this moment for years to come.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: There are many people on the right, in the media
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: and voters at large that are going to be having
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: to explain and justify how they fell into this trap
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: of supporting Donald Trump, because this is not going to
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: end well one way or the other. If you're a
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: real hawk about Iran, or you're a real dove about
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  Speaker 1: a run, donald Trump has failed you. If you're a
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: hawk about the use of American forces or a dove
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: about American forces, donald Trump has failed you. Donald Trump
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: lets down everybody. He always has, and that has been
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: his mo. He has done it every single business. Remember,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: this is a man that failed to make money owning
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: a casino. How incompetent do you have to be to
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: not be able to make money owning a casino, let
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: alone his foreign policy. Let's go to Ted Cruz, who,
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: while running against him, brought up the issue of nuclear
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: of the risk of nuclear putting the nuclear codes in
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  Speaker 1: Donald Trump's hands. I don't know anyone who would be
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: comfortable with someone who believes this way of having his
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: finger on the button. I mean, we're liable to wake
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: up one morning and Donald if he were president, would
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: have nuke Denmark. That's not the temperament a leader to
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: keep this country safe. What's really eerie about that quote
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: about Denmark is this was before Donald Trump was musing
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: about Greenland in February of twenty sixteen. This was literally
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Cruz just picking a country, like the least threatening country
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: in Europe he could come up with. And yet it
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: turned out Cruse stumbled into something that was true. While
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: we haven't bombed Denmark, it is clear Donald Trump has
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: all but said he's pulling out of NATO because of
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Denmark because they won't hand over Greenland. But if only
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: somebody had warned us, if only the Republican Party of
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: twenty sixteen still existed. How about Nicki Haley. She said
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: this during the State of the Union response in January
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: of twenty sixteen on behalf of the Republican Party. Well,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: Donald Trump is the front runner. During anxious times, it
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: can be tempting to follow the siren call of the
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: angriest voices. We must resist that temptation. The next morning,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: she was asked if Trump was her target with that comment,
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: and she said, mister Trump has definitely contributed to what
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: I think is just irresponsible talk, but I still can't
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: help right, the real kicker is Marco Rubion. For years
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: to come, there are many people on the right, in
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: the media and voters at large that are going to
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: be having to explain and justify how they fell into
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: this trap of supporting Donald Trump because this is not
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: going to end well one way or the other. Well,
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: this is not ending well. This Iran war was not
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: well thought out, clearly was not something was we learned
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: in the New York Times over the last forty eight
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: hours from Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan that there was
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: a lot of hesitation, and then bib Natne somehow found
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: a sucker in Trump, right, bib Natya, who tried to
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: convince Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden,
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: everybody else knew that Bibie always came in and overhyped
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: his intelligence and oversold the capabilities and oversold what they
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: could accomplish, because those other four American presidents actually trusted
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: their own intelligence agencies, this one only here's what he
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: wants to hear. And he surrounded himself with people who
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: decided that in order to keep their jobs, they would
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: not disagree with the president. Now they're going to claim
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: as we hurt as this time story spells out that
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: in their own way, they tried to steer him, They
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: tried to let him know how difficult this would be.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: But none of them were Gymnatis, none of them were
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Mark Milly, none of them were John Kelly. People who
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: had the guts to say this is stupid, don't you know?
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: There was at the end of the Obama presidency they
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: started trumpeting what they said was the new Obama doctrine,
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: don't do stupid shit. This is the definition of stupid shit.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: Not having a plan going about this sort of damaging
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: the military's reputation, even though the military itself did their job,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: and in some cases did their job quite well. But
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: if you don't have a strategy around your military campaign,
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: then you might You're were wasting munitions, you are wasting
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: the credibility of American military mighty. And now look what
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: we have. So where are we and what does this
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: mean going forward? Well, it was, as you know. Oh,
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: and I've been saying it for a while. Trump put
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: himself in this box. He desperately wanted out of this war.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: He literally grabbed a lifeline to get out of this war.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: But the problem is he just took whatever lifeline the
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: Iranians would offer him. And so now there you know,
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: this ten point plan that Trump seemed to indicate that
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: he accepted the premise of that the Iranians were circulating
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: included ridiculous things like getting rid of all sanctions that
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: go back to the George W. Bush administration, that include
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: full reparations for the damage that was done. And he
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: indicated it was a workable place to begin negotiations. And
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: then all of a sudden, the backlash comes and what happens,
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, no, he threw that it's a
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: different ten point plan. You know. The point is, and
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: it goes to something that David Milliban, the head of
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: the International Rescue Committee. This is my exclusive guests for
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: my Newsphere show. This normally comes out this weekend, but
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: it's actually we're going to push it out early for
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: variety of reasons due to scheduling. I had to tape
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: it earlier this week and you know, he was Foreign
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: Secretary for the UK and you know he dealt with
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: the Iranian regime every now and then, and he will
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: tell you he goes The number one thing they like
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: to do is negotiate. They don't want to end negotiations.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: They've used negotiations. It's very similar to Putin right, the
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Putin strategy of these bullshit cease fire talks that have
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: supposedly been happening over the last six months or what
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: is it a year now since remember Donald Trump was
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: going to end this war in Ukraine twenty four hours
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: once he was elected president. Well, it's gone real well, right,
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: the Russian strategy, they're not interested in ending this war.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: But the more that they negotiate, the more it puts
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: Zelensky on his heels and they get to do what
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: they've been doing. Well, the Iranians are this regime is
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: the same way, and they will negotiate and negotiate and negotiate.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: In fact, it was getting that way with that nuclear
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: deal and finally they found an endgame. So now the
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: question is, you know, first of all, is it a ceasefire?
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: Is the straight opener closed? The biggest problem is the
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: Strait is now in the hands of the Iranians, and
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: we're going to have to negotiate it. They started this
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: off by thinking there was going to be regime change.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: By the way, speaking of regime change, the new I
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: had told them Comani's son. It's interesting. Axios reported that
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: it was the new Supreme Leader who said, no, no, no, no,
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: it's time to let's try to come up with a
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: cease fire. Any green Linen Well, The Times of London
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: reported that the guy's not cons and has not been
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: conscious since given the job, So we don't even know
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: who we're negotiating with. Nobody seems to know whether that
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: guy is dead or alive. Apparently he's not dead, but
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: nobody's quite sure if he's conscious or not. And if
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: we're negotiating with the IRGC, well, they have no interest.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: They certainly would like a ceasefire because if they would
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: like to pause and gather, and my god, this ceasefire,
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, it is handing the Iranians everything they could
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: have ever asked for. Right, They've got the President of
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: the United States making ridiculous over the top threats that
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: actually create condemnation. The Pope spoke out, and of course
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: the Pope speaking out has then got parts of Maga
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: world so angry that they're like trying to ret in
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: the Vatican. So this president can't handle criticism to the
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: point that he's going to declare war on the Vatican.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: And you know, I know there's a source of Maga
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: that hated Pope Francis and source of the right wing
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: part of the Catholic Church. It is, it is, it
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: is some strange Brew And then you have the whole
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: there's sort of an anti Catholic contingent in this Maga world.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: Pete Haigseth this sort of part of that crowd, right,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: that's why they apparently, you know, wouldn't even allow a
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: Catholic Mass at the Pentagon Chapel on Good Friday. So
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: there's always been there's a weird and I have to say, politically,
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: that's incredibly risky, right, if you wanted to just look
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: at swing states by religion, there's a lot of Catholics
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Iowa too. By the way,
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: if you in Ohio, if we in certainly this cycle,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: they're going to be competitive states. Whether they're swing states again,
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: we'll find out in twenty eight. But they're certainly going
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: to be competitive in twenty six, so I'm not sure
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: pecking a fight with the Pope, the first American pope,
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: who frankly is the most interesting and likable pope we've
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: had ever as far as Americans are concerned. My god,
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: he's a Chicago White Sox fan, right. That is, you
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: want to talk about devotion, that's devotion. But the President
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: makes this ridiculous, over the top call somehow creating some
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: empathy for this Iranian regime. So, to borrow some words
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: from Marco Rubio, this is not going to end well,
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: one way or the other. This episode of the Chuck
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• 21:53
  Speaker 1: This war was clearly not working. The only way you
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: were going to seed and all your goals here is
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: to put in ground troops, and he clearly didn't want
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: to do that. Understandable, it's this you know he did.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: This is going to be a quagmire. Now. The person
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: who understood that getting involved in these Middle East wars
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: was a dumb idea supposedly was Donald Trump, But perhaps
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: he can't even remember his own campaign pledges from twenty
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: twenty four, let alone twenty twenty and twenty sixteen. So
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: now what well, I think the best we can hope
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: for is some sort of negotiated settlement on the straight.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: My guess is there might be some fees that are
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: going to be connected to rebuilding some parts of Iran.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: Maybe that's how this is done. The world economy, I
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: mean that, you know, Donald Trump cares more about how
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: markets and the stock markets behaving, and knowing him, he's
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: sitting there bragging to his own people, Look, look what
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: I did. I made all this money back by getting
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: this by convincing the markets there's a cease fire and
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: that the Strait is open. By the way, we still
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: don't know if the Strait is open, but a whole
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: bunch of people got to make money on Thursday on Wednesday,
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: so I'm sure he's feeling pretty good. The point is
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: he does care about that part, and he does care.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: If he is the trigger for a recession, it may
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: be too late, right, the damage that has been done
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: to a variety of facilities in the region. It's not
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: like all of a sudden everybody just turns up. No,
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: there's going to have to be repairs. There's gonna it's
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: going to take months for the energy markets to sort
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: of become whole again. And that's assuming this stays as is.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: But what's funny is that the Israelis are complaining that
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: the United States got to deal without consulting them. Well,
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: it does look like the Israelis are making their own
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: decisions on Lebanon without really consulting the United States, and
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: that it's clear the Iranians are hoping that the United
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: States will pressure the Israelis to back off a Lebanon
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: and more importantly, has Blah because they're trying to keep
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: their proxies in place. The point is is it goes
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: back to the initial criticism. Okay, the worst thing is
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: to be an equivocator. If you're going to be the
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: commander in chief, are you here? Are you here? When
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: you're an unreliable ally? You're not an ally. Unreliable allies
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: are simply people on your contact list that you've decided
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: not to alienate. But you're never going to really trust
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: them on anything. That's the United States at the moment.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: Is any NATO nation to trust the United States to
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: come rescue them right now? Of course not. They won't.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: There's going to be people in Israel that are wondering
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: whether they should trust the United States. Now. Look, you
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: know it is Donald Trump's fault that he didn't trust
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: his own intelligence agencies. That he took the word of
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: the Israelis that this regime change was going to be easy,
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: This was going to you know, everything was going to tumble, right,
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: And this is classic Donald Trump. He gravitates towards the
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: person that tells him the best possible outcome, not not
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: necessarily the most likely outcome. Right, So Bbe is selling
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: him this incredible and you'll be the one. You'll be
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: the American president that did what all these other American
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: presidents failed to do. Well. He has become that president.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: He is somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: in what was, as far as a military campaign is concerned,
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: should have been fairly winnable. The United States has done
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: plenty of destruction. They've certainly crippled the country. But again,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: the regime itself, they just care about staying in power
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: if it takes some years to rebuild, but they get
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: to stay in power, they don't care. These are people
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: that killed their own kind simply because these people were
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: asking for more freedom. And this is who Donald Trump
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: wants to make a deal with. Maybe or maybe he won't,
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: who knows. But can we put to rest the notion
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: that the Madman theory of foreign policy is ever a
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: good idea. It's ridiculous and all it does is erode
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: America's credibility. And look, we already have very little trust
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: in our government right now as a society. Just look
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: at the numbers. We don't trust people in any corporation
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: these days. We don't trust anybody that doesn't come from
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: our world. In our news feeds these days. But there
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: was something about the word of the United States still
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: mattered somewhere, and he's gotten rid of that. And that's
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: not going to get fixed overnight. That's not going to
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: get fixed with one new president. It's going to take
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: us multiple presidents, probably having to be eat some eat,
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: some crow, and some humble Trump, humble pie. We're going
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: to be apologizing to the world for Donald Trump for decades,
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: whether it's in one on one relationships with countries, because
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: of this ridiculous trade policy that he's come up with
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: that's only alienated allies. Right, What is he done in
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: the area of foreign policy that has improved a relation
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: and American relationship. I know some of you might say, well,
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia or is it? Those are transactional relationships. And
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Go talk to anybody serious in Israel to
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: think if they actually think Donald Trump is a reliable ally.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: Go ask anybody inside up in the upper echelons of
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: the UAE of the Saudis right now, they thought Donald
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Trump was a useful idiot that they could manipulate and
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: buy off. Well, they bought them. They've done that. They've
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: bought the family and the man's still unreliable. Now. I
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: guess you could say Donald Trum can't be bought. Well,
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: he weirdly can, but we just don't know who he's
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: working for at any given time. Perhaps, but he's just
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: a erratic and he's unstable. And it's not as if
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: we weren't warned he was a erratic and unstable in
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: some ways. He's consistently inconsistent. I've always said this, He's
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: authentically inauthentic. He's consistently inconsistent, and his instability has been
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: stable over a ten year period. He's been unstable the
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: whole time. But the mistake so many people make with
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: Donald Trump is that they think, oh, no, I can
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: control him. I can do this, and nobody ever can.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: And the problem these folks have is all of the
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: backsplash ends up on you. He always walks away with
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: much less dirt on him than on everybody else. And
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: I promise you, if this gets really bad, he will
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: be blaming everybody left, right and center. But everybody inside
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: this current Republican party knows damn well what he has
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: done to the credibility the United States is a disaster.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: And why do I know they know this because they
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: said it ten years ago. They all knew it. They
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: knew it then, they knew it in January of twenty
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: twenty one when Mitch McConnell choked. And we are all
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: paying the price. The world's paying the price again. Whatever
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: side you come down on on our relationships in the
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: Middle East, we've burned all of them. And he has
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: put the next president in the worst possible position. We're
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: going to be going hat in hand all over the
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: world again having to fix or apologize for things that
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: Donald Trump has done. I remember, I'm old enough to
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: remember when when when the right got mad at Baraco,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: they thought Barack Obama was having to was apologizing for
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: for for George W. Bush in the Iraq War. Well,
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: it certainly caused some anxiety in Europe, but nothing like this.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: And there was a lot more. Ah, there was a lot.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: You know, there may have been disagreements that I had
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: to handle Iraq, but there wasn't a lot of disagreements
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: on what to do about Russia and what to do
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: about and whether Europe was an ally or not, and
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: whether you treat Canada and Mexico like partners or like adversaries.
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: But here we are and this is a big bungle,
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: and there's you know, we make get dragged back in
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: at this point, so this may not be over. I
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: think Trump doesn't want to go back in. I think
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: he wants to wash his hands of this and somehow
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: hope he can paper over what is going to be
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: a giant mistake. Now I do think it. I do.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: I'm going to end this little rant on the topic
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: that does not that we all have chosen not to
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: talk about as much anymore, because there's just in some
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: ways there's nothing to do about it. But there is
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: only one country that continues to benefit from how poorly
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: the president has handled American form policy. And you know
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: where I'm going, mister Putin, and Russia the biggest beneficiary
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: of all of this. This is bigger beneficiary than even China.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: The Russians benefit the most their clients state Iran, who
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: has been their most important military supplier of these drones.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: It is depleted American munitions, it is depleted the supply
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: that Zelensky was counting on to help Ukraine that we
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: were sort of doing in this sort of quasi len
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: lease program through NATO. Meanwhile, America's relationships around the world
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: are all fraid due to Donald Trump's erratic behavior. There's
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: one person that's benefiting and one entity that benefits the most.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: Oh well, only somebody had warned us. Only somebody running
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: against him had said. There are many people on the right,
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: in the media and voters at large that are going
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: to be having to explain and justify how they fell
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: into this trap of supporting Donald Trump, because this is
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: not going to end well one way or the other.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: It's going to be on Marco Rubio's tombstone. That's how
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: much that quote's going to live in infamy. Our Secretary
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: of State there is I don't want to overlook what happened.
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: What else happened this week, which is, you know, in
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: some ways more cow bell if you're the Democrats, a
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: massive overperformance in the Margie Taylor Green special and the
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: blowout on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Right, remember where we
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: were a year ago with mister Chainsaw Musk, and that
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: was that was what a competitive race was supposed to
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: look like. That was somewhere I think a nine to
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: ten point twenty points. This is Wisconsin. I tell you
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: one thing it has done. I was I was sort
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: of assuming that Wisconsin voters would do what they've done regular,
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: which is so you know, they go back and forth
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: on their governors, and we're going to be to open
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: governor seat, and you know, slight advantage to the Republicans,
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: not after what I saw there. All I'll say is
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: Senate Republicans ought to be happy there's no Senate race
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: in Wisconsin this year, because that was a shocking blowout.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: Remember the the the the non liberal candidate, I don't
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: know whether he was running as a conservative, was trying
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: to run as an independent, and it went nowhere. So
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: I think I look at what happened on Tuesday as
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: a reminder that this war is accelerating the Republican Party's
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: problems in this midterm. And I do wonder, and it's
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: this is I will say this to my friends and
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: the right who know this is a disaster, who know
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: they've got to find a way to save face here
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: in order not to get blown out. Trump's very vulnerable
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: right now. He's on an island. He's on an island
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: in his own West wing. If the Republican Party wants
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: to have some credibility going forward in a post Trump era,
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: those that attempt to distance themselves now will probably be
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: glad they did come twenty twenty eight, because again, this blunder,
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: this one's not getting papered over. I know with Trump,
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: we've been here so many times. Oh there's this, there's this,
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: there's this one, this one. There's certain things that are
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: in permanent marker. This one's in permanent marker. And I
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: think the political situation is deteriorating very quickly on the
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: right for the right. And you know, you can we
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: can have this argument all day. You know, you can
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: try to distance yourself and see if you can mitigate this,
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: because I don't think the base. I think the base
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: is going to be more fractured than ever on this.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: I know what the numbers say, per se, but you're
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: starting to see it. To me, that blowout in Wisconsin
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: is an indication a whole bunch of the Republican base
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: is like, I ain't bothering if you get any sort
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: of turn out situation like we saw in Wisconsin this week,
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: and this is what you see in November. Are we
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: going to talk fifty two Democratic Senate seats, fifty three?
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: Could we really see thirty or forty House seats? And
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: I think the numbers are very difficult to get out high.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: I think a wave, frankly is four Senate seats in
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: twenty to twenty five house seats. But that in Wisconsin,
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: if that's if it's closer to that, that's how you
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: get to that's how this gets over thirty to thirty
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: five house seats, and that's how you get to four
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: to six sentencee pickups, I would say, And we're there yet,
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: but boy, every week it looks more viable all the time.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: All right, my interview I've had. Man, you guys are
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: gonna love. I really employ you. It's an author. Her
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: name is Megan Kate Nelson. She's the author of this
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: tremendous book that I just read called The Westerners myth
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: Making and Belonging on the Pioneer Front. It's all about
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: sort of the night in the West in the nineteenth century.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: And you know how obsessed I am with all things
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: the nineteenth century because frankly, of how similar it is
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: to our politics today in many ways. And first of all,
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: Megan is just such a treat and you're just gonna
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: I think, you know, some authors are great writers and
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: not the best spokespersons for their own work. That is
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: not the case with Meghan, you know. So whether you're
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: a fan of Little House on the Prairie, whether you're
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: a fan of the movie Tombstone, whether you're a family
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: of a fan of the TV show Deadwood, whatever your
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: whatever you have consumed when it comes to the West. Look,
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: part of this is busting some of those myths. But
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: she's not, she doesn't, she doesn't pour cold water on
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: all of it. Number one, but it really is. It
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: really is a terrific, terrific book. And this is a
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: terrific conversation. So I know some of you just come
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: from the monologue sometimes Q and A and stuff like this,
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: this one's worth your time. This book is really worth
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: your time as well. It's it's just terrific the way
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: it basically profiles eight sort of incredible figures. It's sort
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: of are emblematic of the real of the real West.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: And as she said, it was a lot more north
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: south than it was east to west. It's fascinating. So
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: with that, let's sneak in a break when we come
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: back my conversation with Meggie. This episode of the Chuck
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  Speaker 1: am a customer. Well join me today. Is the author
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: of a new book, Nurse. The author is Megan Kate Nelson.
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: And what she wrote is basically, it's a challenge to
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: the mythology of America and the West if you will
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: write the mytholo ge that pioneers moved across a free land,
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: subdued the wilderness and indigenous peoples, and the process created
• 42:07
  Speaker 2: this piece of American character that many.
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: People out west still cherished today. And there's certainly, you know,
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of you know, there are certainly plenty
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: of good things that happened out west that ended up
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: traveling east, probably the biggest thing being of course, women's suffrage.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: But what is you know, as you as everybody knows,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: I'm we're all obsessed with sort of getting history rights
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: and not always just falling for the elementary school version
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: of events. So, Megan, welcome to the podcast.
• 42:43
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: Well, before we get started with the Westerners and sort
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: of your interest in the Frontier and sort of trying
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: to essentially re educate, if you will, those of us
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: who might not be as familiar. What got you into
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: that topic? What have you?
• 43:01
  Speaker 3: What?
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: What got you to where you are today? How'd you
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: get to become somebody who was obsessively studying this era
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: of American history?
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: You know?
• 43:12
  Speaker 4: That journey began when I was very young. I grew
• 43:15
  Speaker 4: up in Colorado. My parents did. Yeah, so I am.
• 43:20
  Speaker 4: I'm a legit Westerner. We're in Colorado, jeff south of Denver, Littleton,
• 43:26
  Speaker 4: so the suburbs of the front Range, yes, And my
• 43:31
  Speaker 4: parents didn't really like to fly, and so every summer
• 43:34
  Speaker 4: we took these vacations by car, where I was trapped
• 43:37
  Speaker 4: in the back seat with my annoying older brother.
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: Perhaps you've had a similar experience.
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: And yeah, all we could afforda road trips in Florida,
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: so I saw every nook and cranny of Florida back
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: in the day. We didn't make it. We didn't make
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: it much past Georgia. But I am jealous. I've done that.
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: I did a Denver to La road trip once.
• 43:56
  Speaker 4: Oh.
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, if that is I'm sorry, I'm jealous of
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: your childhood. We had the flat you know, the highest
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: peaks in Florida landfills.
• 44:06
  Speaker 4: Yes, I know, I know, very flat, very flat state. Yeap,
• 44:11
  Speaker 4: and we so basically I saw the country by car.
• 44:14
  Speaker 4: By the time I went to college, I had been
• 44:16
  Speaker 4: to forty five of the lower forty eight states in
• 44:19
  Speaker 4: a meaningful way, and so I experienced what it was
• 44:22
  Speaker 4: like to move from region to region where you kind
• 44:25
  Speaker 4: of it stopped being the West and became the Midwest,
• 44:28
  Speaker 4: or it went from the South to the Midwest or
• 44:31
  Speaker 4: to the North, and you know, people talked differently, there
• 44:34
  Speaker 4: were different food ways, it was a different climate. So
• 44:37
  Speaker 4: I was often thinking about region. And then I went
• 44:40
  Speaker 4: I went to Harvard undergrad. So this is my first
• 44:43
  Speaker 4: time living on the East coast. And when I told
• 44:45
  Speaker 4: people I was from Colorado, I mean, these are very
• 44:48
  Speaker 4: smart people, chuck, and they said, did you ride your horse?
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: To school?
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: Wow? I'm sorry, you know you did not go to
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: college in the nineteen fifth or the eighteen fifties, right,
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, no, I assume you at the college of
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: the nineties or odds right, Yes.
• 45:06
  Speaker 4: Very good, yes, nineteen nineties. But still yeah, I had
• 45:10
  Speaker 4: to explain to someone. I had to actually, because you know,
• 45:13
  Speaker 4: years before the Internet, I had to go find a
• 45:15
  Speaker 4: map and show this guy that Colorado was not Utah.
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: He was insisting that it was. And you know, so
• 45:23
  Speaker 3: so that was all.
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: Those square states look alike.
• 45:26
  Speaker 3: Exactly exactly.
• 45:27
  Speaker 4: So I just thought, you know, people still have this
• 45:31
  Speaker 4: really entrenched idea of what the West is. You know,
• 45:34
  Speaker 4: there's it's not a land of nineteen seventies suburbs like
• 45:37
  Speaker 4: the one I grew up in. You know, it's ranching west,
• 45:41
  Speaker 4: the mountains, skiing. You know, this kind of vivid image
• 45:44
  Speaker 4: that people have. And this just endured. And then in
• 45:47
  Speaker 4: twenty nineteen, David McCullough came out with his final book,
• 45:52
  Speaker 4: The Pioneers, and that book had the title it was
• 45:57
  Speaker 4: something like the Pioneers, the the Eastern settlers who brought
• 46:03
  Speaker 4: American ideals west.
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: Or something like that.
• 46:06
  Speaker 4: It was like the perfect evocation of the frontier myth
• 46:08
  Speaker 4: and the Pioneer.
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: Those were fighting words for you.
• 46:11
  Speaker 4: H Yes, well it was fighting words for most academics
• 46:14
  Speaker 4: who have been trying to fight the frontier myth for
• 46:17
  Speaker 4: fifty years now but not succeeding. And you know, everyone
• 46:21
  Speaker 4: went crazy and published journal articles about this, and of
• 46:25
  Speaker 4: course The Pioneers was on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks.
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: David McCollough, I mean, he's he's gonna, he's he earned that,
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: he did earn his reputation the heart, Yes.
• 46:36
  Speaker 4: Yes, but I but again, I was like, Okay, we're
• 46:39
  Speaker 4: still well, we're still here with this, even though we're
• 46:42
  Speaker 4: starting to see some changes in Western TV and movie
• 46:45
  Speaker 4: things like Gobless has a more kind of interesting, diverse
• 46:49
  Speaker 4: vision of the West, and then the show yell Us,
• 46:51
  Speaker 4: I would argue.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: And I know, I'm sure I'm not going to sit
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: here and defend Taylor shared in a variety of ways. Yep,
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: but he's at least improved things in pop culture slightly.
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: And I say slightly because let's just say missus Todd
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: and I cringe. He has this view of women in
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: general that is very, very hard to The longer you
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: watch Taylor Sharre and the Herd, it is over but
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: he does try hard to be more accurate about the West.
• 47:22
  Speaker 4: He does, he does, and he, to me kind of
• 47:24
  Speaker 4: exemplifies where we are right now, which is this push
• 47:27
  Speaker 4: and pull right Like he he has these very traditional
• 47:30
  Speaker 4: visions of someone like Dutton, who is, you know, the
• 47:33
  Speaker 4: rugged individualist, the cowboy, and then he'll have an entire
• 47:37
  Speaker 4: episode devoted to missing and murdered Indigenous women and you're like, oh.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: God, yeah, thank you. Right, no, yeah, no, that's why
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: it's sort of like, that's why we can't quit him
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: exactly exactly. Yeah.
• 47:49
  Speaker 4: So all of these things kind of boiled up together
• 47:52
  Speaker 4: around twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, and I thought, you
• 47:56
  Speaker 4: know what, you know, what if we started to kind
• 47:59
  Speaker 4: of think about Western history a little bit differently, And
• 48:02
  Speaker 4: what if we thought about instead of the pioneers, we
• 48:04
  Speaker 4: think of all of the different kinds of people who
• 48:06
  Speaker 4: built the American West as Westernerners, like to kind of
• 48:10
  Speaker 4: get away from that whole pioneer frontier myth.
• 48:14
  Speaker 3: And then I was off and running.
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: Well, it's interesting. You use, in some ways, it's a
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: very traditional way to tell a story, right, You use
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: different characters, different points of view on different things. But
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: you don't begin with one of your characters. You begin
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: with the essentially going after the person I guess you
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: believe created the myth, mister Jackson Turner.
• 48:38
  Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, Frederick Jackson Turner.
• 48:40
  Speaker 4: I was on a panel a couple of weeks ago
• 48:42
  Speaker 4: with some other Western historians and we were joking that,
• 48:45
  Speaker 4: you know, it's a Western history if Frederick Jackson Turner
• 48:49
  Speaker 4: shows up in the prologue or the epilogue or both.
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: And he does, in fact.
• 48:55
  Speaker 4: Show up in those ways in this book, because in
• 48:58
  Speaker 4: eighteen ninety three a paper at the American Historical Association meeting,
• 49:03
  Speaker 4: which is held in conjunction with the World's Fair in Chicago,
• 49:06
  Speaker 4: which is you know, this obsesses cultural historians because it's
• 49:10
  Speaker 4: such an.
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: Amazing the World's Fair stuff. I know, you know it really,
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: you know. I I remember going to the remnants of
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: a World's Fair in Knoxville and the remnants of a
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: World's Fair in New Orleans back in the early eighties
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: road trips. By the way, part we did get north
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: of Florida once in a while and having my parents
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: try to explain, you know, there was a time that
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: World's Fair was a big deal. Yeah, And then eventually
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: it ended up in Knoxville, Tennessee. No offense to Knoxville, right, that's.
• 49:40
  Speaker 3: Right, that's right.
• 49:41
  Speaker 4: It was a huge deal. And this is an amazing moment.
• 49:43
  Speaker 4: And what I found so interesting about that is that
• 49:48
  Speaker 4: Turner gives this paper, he kind of has this manifesto,
• 49:53
  Speaker 4: and it's a very new argument for the time that
• 49:57
  Speaker 4: American ideals, American institutions don't actually come from European antecedents,
• 50:04
  Speaker 4: which is what historians had been arguing for forever, but
• 50:08
  Speaker 4: they're actually rooted in this process of frontier formation and
• 50:13
  Speaker 4: conquest that you know, white men are moving progressively west
• 50:17
  Speaker 4: and as they face nature and indigenous peoples and conquer both,
• 50:22
  Speaker 4: then they settle down, they build towns, they build churches
• 50:25
  Speaker 4: and schools, and this is what creates the American character.
• 50:29
  Speaker 4: And but was what's interesting about that moment is every
• 50:32
  Speaker 4: you know, a lot of people think that Turner actually
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: created that thesis out of whole cloth, but it actually
• 50:38
  Speaker 4: had been brewing for a very long time.
• 50:40
  Speaker 3: And he actually admitted that later.
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: He's like, oh, yeah, this was kind of in the zeitgeist,
• 50:45
  Speaker 4: this was kind of out there.
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: How was that any different than the popularized mythology of
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: how America itself was settled by the right British columnists,
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: right like, it feels like it's just a version of that.
• 51:00
  Speaker 4: It's a it's a different kind of version with it
• 51:02
  Speaker 4: different valence still the kind of religious that religious mission.
• 51:06
  Speaker 4: The frontier myth really dovetails beautifully with manifest destiny, with
• 51:10
  Speaker 4: the American dream, with this whole idea of you know,
• 51:15
  Speaker 4: the Europeans errand into the wilderness, particularly English, because they
• 51:20
  Speaker 4: of course ignored the fact that the Spanish and the
• 51:23
  Speaker 4: French were in North America before them.
• 51:27
  Speaker 3: But yeah, so he gives.
• 51:29
  Speaker 4: This paper, no one really cares, but then it gets published.
• 51:34
  Speaker 4: Teddy Roosevelt writes him a nice letter like, yeah, I
• 51:36
  Speaker 4: totally agree, and it gains so much momentum in the
• 51:41
  Speaker 4: field of history that it dominates US history and Western
• 51:47
  Speaker 4: history for more than one hundred years.
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: The sort of vision.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: I have a theory, but I don't want to I
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: want to I don't want to throw the question. I
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: don't want to bias your I'll.
• 52:02
  Speaker 3: Tell you mine in the new tell of yours.
• 52:04
  Speaker 4: My theory is that it is just a very compelling, linear,
• 52:10
  Speaker 4: simple narrative. It literally moves in one direction from east
• 52:18
  Speaker 4: to west. It does not engage with much complexity. And
• 52:24
  Speaker 4: you know, we like those kinds of stories. We like
• 52:26
  Speaker 4: complicated stories, but really like we we need it to
• 52:29
  Speaker 4: be organized and neat. And also it's it's a story
• 52:33
  Speaker 4: of triumph, and who doesn't want a story of No.
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: I would just add in, I think we've still had
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: scar tissue from the Civil War, we still scar tissue
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: from reconstruction, still had stark issue from slavery, and talking
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: about the West, you could ignore all this other papers
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: over the uncomfortable pieces of the nineteenth century history. And
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: a guy like Teddy Roosevelt, who many you know it is,
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: he is in many ways Trumpian. I don't think, you know,
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: I don't think we fully but he is a marketer
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: and he sort of he does and it doesn't you
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: know when you throw all that together. So I think
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: we're I think I think that's essentially I'm in agreement
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: with you. But I think I think the Civil War
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: itself and the fact that that's still a recent memory,
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: oh definitely.
• 53:22
  Speaker 3: And this is something, Yeah, this is starring the country.
• 53:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and white Americans can kind of rally around this
• 53:29
  Speaker 4: idea of the West, this.
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: History having a deal with the slavery question.
• 53:33
  Speaker 3: Exactly right, exactly.
• 53:35
  Speaker 4: Yeah, as long as they can get rid of indigenous
• 53:37
  Speaker 4: people's and you know, settle the land as it should
• 53:41
  Speaker 4: be settled, that's the that's the kind of key component
• 53:44
  Speaker 4: of that. But yeah, this is the this is the
• 53:47
  Speaker 4: white Northerners and Southerners American dream, a shared American dream
• 53:52
  Speaker 4: in the wake of the Civil War. I would definitely
• 53:54
  Speaker 4: agree with that that this becomes another part of their
• 53:58
  Speaker 4: reunion and why they are able then to come back
• 54:02
  Speaker 4: together as a country because they agree on how to
• 54:05
  Speaker 4: shape the West for the future of the nation.
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: So talk about your ability to research. Let's go through
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: the folks you do, because you know, it's not like
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: there was probably a lot of English language on this.
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you had to go into Mexican history a
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: little bit, a little bit into European history, a little
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: bit into that. How hard was it to tell these
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: stories of our examples? You tell it through Psycaagea, Jim Beckworth,
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: Maria Gertrudis, Barcelo Ovando, Hollister, Little wolf, Ella Watson, and
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: Holly Bemis. Yes, so tell me how you've found got
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: your research and all of that on these folks.
• 54:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so some of the stories are harder than others.
• 54:46
  Speaker 4: Whenever you are conducting research on women or people of color,
• 54:51
  Speaker 4: it's always harder because they don't enter the written record
• 54:55
  Speaker 4: in the same.
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: Way, and journals weren't preserved. There weren't things like that right.
• 55:01
  Speaker 4: Exactly, And much to my frustration and probably to every
• 55:03
  Speaker 4: other historian's frustration, the people who have these amazing lives
• 55:08
  Speaker 4: rarely write their autobiographies. I mean, Jim Beckworth is one
• 55:12
  Speaker 4: of the only ones who was truly satisfying in that way.
• 55:16
  Speaker 4: So basically, when you have someone like Zaka Joeia who
• 55:19
  Speaker 4: left no written record and really was not famous in
• 55:23
  Speaker 4: her lifetime. This is one of the things that interested
• 55:26
  Speaker 4: me and surprised me, is she wasn't even really famous
• 55:29
  Speaker 4: until the twentieth century. She wasn't taken up as a
• 55:34
  Speaker 4: kind of symbol of American womanhood until nineteenth basically nineteen
• 55:40
  Speaker 4: oh four. So this, you know, she didn't leave any records,
• 55:44
  Speaker 4: No one thought she was anything really special in the moment.
• 55:50
  Speaker 4: But she appears more than one hundred and fifty times
• 55:53
  Speaker 4: in the Lewis and Clark journals, and she is always
• 55:56
  Speaker 4: doing something or saying something I write narrative history, and
• 56:01
  Speaker 4: so I make arguments in my books, but I'm really
• 56:05
  Speaker 4: putting you on the ground with people as they're doing
• 56:08
  Speaker 4: things and saying things. So that was really important to
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: me to be able to find this evidence, which was
• 56:15
  Speaker 4: corroborated by other journal writers who were with her on.
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: The core So were Lewis and Clark. That was a
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: core piece of context for you.
• 56:24
  Speaker 3: Oh, yes, absolutely, so this was.
• 56:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah, her story is embedded first in an indigenous world
• 56:31
  Speaker 4: of North America, which becomes the American West, which is
• 56:35
  Speaker 4: huge and interconnected by trade networks and kin networks.
• 56:39
  Speaker 3: And then the other major context.
• 56:41
  Speaker 4: Is the Louisiana Purchase, the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, and
• 56:45
  Speaker 4: then this Lewis and Clark expedition, which is the first
• 56:48
  Speaker 4: of the big federal, federally funded surveys where men, it
• 56:54
  Speaker 4: was almost always men, went out into all parts of
• 56:58
  Speaker 4: the continent and mapped it and sent back specimens. So
• 57:03
  Speaker 4: there was this was really the kind of first moment
• 57:06
  Speaker 4: when they did this, And this is why I think
• 57:07
  Speaker 4: this is a vital moment for the creation of the
• 57:09
  Speaker 4: frontier myth in American history, because they wrote about it
• 57:13
  Speaker 4: and they sent back all of these reports and specimens.
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: Tell me, I'm just curious, what's the what's the most
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: unique source material you found that just was really helped
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: fill in some gaps that others hadn't been able to
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: fully put together.
• 57:34
  Speaker 4: That's such a great question. I think what has really
• 57:38
  Speaker 4: revolutionized my research lately, and I know a lot of
• 57:41
  Speaker 4: other historians, is newspapers dot Com interesting. Yeah, they digitization
• 57:47
  Speaker 4: has been incredible.
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: And that site that I promise trudging through various small
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: library towns all over them might or might not have
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: had microfiche and things like that right exactly.
• 57:58
  Speaker 4: And I promised that I am not, you know, a
• 58:01
  Speaker 4: sort of paid advertiser for them, but I really feel
• 58:05
  Speaker 4: like it sometimes. But because it's so great, it's such
• 58:07
  Speaker 4: a great website. You know, you pay a yearly fee,
• 58:10
  Speaker 4: but you it's cert word searchable. And then the amount
• 58:15
  Speaker 4: of material they have is just incredible. So I could
• 58:17
  Speaker 4: put in Bepcworth in all of the different spellings of
• 58:21
  Speaker 4: his name. I was just going to say, he had
• 58:24
  Speaker 4: a lot of different spellings, and you have to account
• 58:26
  Speaker 4: for that with a lot of nineteenth century sources that
• 58:28
  Speaker 4: they're going to misspell pretty much in everyone's name. And
• 58:32
  Speaker 4: you just see him pop up everywhere, and you see
• 58:37
  Speaker 4: Maria Hertardiz Barcelow, who is this woman who's born in
• 58:40
  Speaker 4: Sonora and ends up running a gambling empire in Santa Fe.
• 58:45
  Speaker 4: She starts to emerge because all of these American travel
• 58:48
  Speaker 4: writers start kind of depicting her and interviewing her and
• 58:53
  Speaker 4: writing about her and again under sometimes they call her Latulas,
• 58:57
  Speaker 4: sometimes they call her Metam Toulouse, sometimes they call her Barcelo.
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: It's it's a huge wide range, but they are.
• 59:06
  Speaker 4: They emerge, they emerge from these sources, and it's really
• 59:09
  Speaker 4: quite incredible. So the one I think the most one
• 59:13
  Speaker 4: thing that shocked me when I found it, And this
• 59:16
  Speaker 4: is also something I'm not sure if you've run into
• 59:18
  Speaker 4: this with other histories you've written, you've read, but people
• 59:23
  Speaker 4: met who you never or like, engaged with one another
• 59:27
  Speaker 4: or crossed paths in ways that you don't expect.
• 59:29
  Speaker 3: So I found I love.
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: I love those moments, and I still don't always believe
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: them when you know, I know, like you're like, really
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: those two were like in the same bar, you know, yeah,
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: you know, really Picasso and Einstein may have run into
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: each other in Paris. Seriously, like, you know.
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems incredible.
• 59:47
  Speaker 4: But Jim Beckworth, who was born into slavery, brought to
• 59:52
  Speaker 4: Saint Louis by his enslaver father in eighteen oh seven
• 59:56
  Speaker 4: and then sort of became the forest Gump of the
• 59:59
  Speaker 4: American West. He just he shows up everywhere, huh, everywhere everywhere.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: It was really kind of incredible.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 4: And he ended up as a scout and a participant
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 4: in the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. It was like
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 4: a real kind of mark on his reputation that he
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 4: engaged in that action and killed some Southern Cheyenne individuals.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 4: And he so he testified to the US military. And
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 4: Ovando Hollister, who's one of my other protagonists, who's a
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 4: newspaper man at the time in Colorado, wrote about that
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 4: trial and wrote in defense of Jim Beckworth because there
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 4: was a lot of talk about like should he be
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 4: allowed to testify because he's black. And Jim Beckworth then
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 4: wrote him a letter, which then Hollister published, And to
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 4: my knowledge, no one else has ever found this before,
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 4: and I found it. I was able to find it
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 4: because Colorado historic newspapers had digitized all of these you know,
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 4: tiny little newspapers for mining downs all across Colorado.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: This is why we need more local news today. We
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: have no idea what stories that the Megans of one
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: hundred years from now are going to want.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 3: Right about absolutely? Yeah, So that was really fun. I
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: think that was my kind of find where I was like,
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: this is incredible. I can't believe it.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: That's the best part of going down history rabbit holes
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: is playing detective in some ways, right, you almost feel
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: like you're a detective.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: On that front. What's interesting is when you when you
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: start your various protagonists here is it's you know, it's
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: you realize that the hollywoodization of the West, right, you know,
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: which then adds its own imprint on the mythology, particularly
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: in the in the arguably in the fifties and sixties,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: and in particular is you realize they all had a
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: little bit of this history. And because some of these
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: characters are make their way into these into these movies
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: as sort of as caricatures or but you they said,
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: they became very familiar to me, at least small ways,
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: Like You're like, okay, so now I see where that
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: idea for that character came from, right, it was? It
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: was just interesting when you realize it wasn't totally detached
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: from history, it was just simply detached from the from
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: the reality.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 4: That's probably right, Yeah, I mean, and I think this
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 4: is what is also compelling about miss like this, So
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 4: this explains part of that too, is there is.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: A basis in reality. Of course there is.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 4: I mean, of course, there were tens of thousands of
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 4: white Easterners moving west in Connaestoga wagons. Of course there were.
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 4: But they were not the only ones. They were not
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 4: the only ones. And you know, the women who were
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 4: in the West were not all, as Westerns would have it,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 4: either prostitutes or you know, really sweet loving school teachers.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 4: You know, they had they had other lives, some extraordinary,
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 4: some completely normal.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: You know, given that, and I think it's Netflix is
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: about to reboot A Little House in the Prairie.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: I saw that.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: What's your fear and hope with how that's portrayed.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 4: I mean, my fear is that it will just be
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 4: a kind of retread of all of the familiar themes
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 4: of Westerns and kind of Midwesterns that we've had in
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 4: American culture. What I would love to see though, and
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 4: what that I mean that show did a fairly good
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 4: job really of showing you just sort of normal life,
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 4: everyday life.
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 3: And I think that's what we usually miss right in right, that's.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: The stuff it did well. It glosses over the tough stuff.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the tough stuff.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: There's a nod to it here there, and you know
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: it's funny, you know that. Look, I will admit I
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: love the show. As a kid. I did.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, me too. I have the brains.
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: When you watch it as an adult, you're like, okay,
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: I had a little more to it than I thought.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, And you know what I would love to
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 4: see is just a fully fleshed out world. You know,
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 4: where you do see indigenous peoples, you do see immigrants
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 4: moving through, you know, in that region, it would be
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 4: mostly from Europe. So it would be someone more like
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 4: Ella Watson in The Westerners, who comes from Canada from
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 4: a Scots Irish family and ends up in Kansas and
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 4: Nebraska and then moves to Wyoming and tries to start
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 4: this cattle ranch. So that's the kind of figure, you know,
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 4: who I would really love to see in this millia
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 4: like people the amazing movement across the West in all directions.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: Well, I bring that up, and I want to get
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: to the all directions part here, because how much did
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: Laura Ingalls Wilder books accentuate this myth in your mind?
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: How much did it contribute to the mythology?
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 4: I think they really did contribute a lot, especially if
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 4: people of our generation who grew up with those shows
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 4: and with the books, right, and I think especially for
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 4: Little Girls, because.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 3: The main characters were girls.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 4: That was that was something unusual and different, that was
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 4: a depiction.
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: We gave it its own form of forward leaning to
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: just put in those terms. I wouldn't quite call it progressive,
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: but right right.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 4: Exact exactly, but it gave us, you know, as a
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 4: as a young girl kind of reading those stories. You know,
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 4: they all the daughters had their own personalities, you know,
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 4: but the family was white.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: They were heteronormative.
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 4: You know, there was this notion of single families just
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 4: going out into the wilderness and building their lives and
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 4: succeeding almost entirely on their own. Although there is a
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 4: lot of community engagement in that show, and that is important.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 4: But one of the things that the Frontier myth really
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 4: glosses over is how much federal help white settlers had.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 3: I mean they had the Homestead Act.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 4: Yeah, they had the Homestead Act passed in eighteen sixty two,
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 4: which gives anyone loyal to the United States, so confederates
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 4: need not apply, or at least known confederates. Gives them
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 4: one hundred and sixty acres to develop as they will.
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 4: Then the eighteen sixty two and eighteen sixty four Pacific
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 4: Railway Act. Here comes the trans Transcontinental Railroad, which makes
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 4: it possible to travel quickly and also to send whatever
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 4: you are growing or tending in the West to markets.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 4: So, now, the trans content, the Transcontinental Railroad enables the
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 4: rise of the cattle industry, right. It enables the rise
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 4: of this moment in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties West,
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 4: where we have cattle barrens and huge cattle drives from
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 4: Texas all the way up.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: They're driving them to rail lines, right.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 4: And then you can ship all of your produce, you know,
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 4: if you're growing wheat or you're growing vegetables, you can
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 4: ship it back and forth. And that enables people to
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 4: survive in the West.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 4: And then, also most importantly, the US military is out there,
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 4: obviously federally funded. They had built forts and their job
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 4: is to protect white settlers and to try to rain in,
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 4: if not exterminate altogether tribal nations across the American West.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 4: So those three components themselves. I mean, there were other
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 4: kinds of laws on the territorial and state level and
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 4: then the federal level, which are really helpful. But I
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 4: mean I always find it, you know, kind of hilariously
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 4: and egregiously ironic that the American West often you know,
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 4: people are like, oh, we're anti federal, Like, well, we're not.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 4: We don't like big government when the American West is
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 4: built government.
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 3: On federal money, just built on federal money and help.
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: Yes, well, you know, keep the government, you know, keep
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: your hands off. My medicare excellent.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 3: Still resonates ridiculous.
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the idea, right, it's the myth is
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: east to west. But as you want to say, look,
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: there was you just talked a couple of stories about
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: you know, you people would emigrate through Canada make their
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: way west. Obviously you had Mexicans that in some ways
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: it was always their land and you know, they just
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: whether they traveled there or were there. You had Native Americans,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: and then you you also had some Asian, some Asian
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: travel on there. So tell me about in particular. Let's
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: start south to north.
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so this was so Maria Heretredese Barcelow is sort
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 4: of my my one protagonist who really embodies this particular movement,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 4: as I noted before, born in Sonora when it was
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 4: New Spain that became Mexican in the middle of the
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 4: Mexican Revolution where they freed them from.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: Spain in eight to three countries thirty one.
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, basically, And by that point she was already
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 4: her family had emigrated northward to a little town south
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 4: of Albuquerque, and then she had gotten married and her
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 4: husband taught her to play this card game called Spanish Monty,
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 4: which is Spanish deck is a forty card deck, so
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 4: ten cards of four suits. And he taught her to
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 4: play it, and it turned out she was great at it.
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 4: She had super amazing memory, very mathematical mind, and was
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 4: really good at it and started to win.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: All Right, I have to ask, because I know listeners
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: are going to say, what's it. What's the modern card game?
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: It's most it would be closest to resemble Spanish Monty.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 4: It might be something like blackjack, because what you're doing.
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 4: And I actually did learn to deal it because I
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 4: couldn't figure out how she made so much money because
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 4: she ought they became a dealer and.
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: So this was for gambling. I mean she was winning,
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: she was winning cash with this.
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 3: Oh yes.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 4: And basically what it is is there you have, you know,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 4: the forty card deck and there are five cards in
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 4: each hand. You deal out the first two, you bet
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 4: on the it's a it's a betting game where you're
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 4: betting on whether the suit is going to show up
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 4: on the fifth card of every given hand. So you
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 4: you deal out to people have a chance to bet,
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 4: like do they think it's going to be is the
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 4: fifth card going to be a club? Or you know,
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 4: is it going to be one of these two? And
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 4: you deal out the next two and people have a
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 4: chance to bet, and then you turn the fifth card.
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: You're just playing percentages if you're really doing the.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 3: Second head yep, exactly.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: But it is black Jeck meets poker in some form.
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 4: Yes, and it's you know, because you have a single dealer,
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 4: a big table, there's no limit on the number of
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 4: players who can play. And she is in Santa Fe
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 4: ultimately in the eighteen thirties. So this is the Santa
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 4: Fe Trail has come into town. The Chihuahua Trail is
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 4: coming from Mexico. There are constantly people on the road,
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 4: very oh yeah, and very mobile. So even though she
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 4: has technically settled in Santa Fe, she's still her life
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 4: is still based around all of this movement in multiple directions,
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 4: and she takes advantage of it because all of these
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 4: mostly men but also some women come in and gamble
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 4: at her gambling saloon and they almost always lose, and
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 4: they have to come in.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 3: She set it up.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 4: I mean, it was so genius, and of course you
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 4: would do this now too. You have to enter the
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 4: gambling saloon through the actual saloon like the bar, and
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 4: so you please.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: Vegas figured this out a long time, right, Like I
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: guess we now know who Vegas learned it from. Right,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: She's the godmother.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 4: God exactly exactly. I mean, she made so much money
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 4: that she was investing in currency, she was investing in mules,
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 4: she was loading money to Anglo businessman.
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: I'm guessing she didn't drink, or she didn't drink as
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: much as she everybody else in that room with drinking
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: in order to win all that money, exactly.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 4: I think maybe she was one of those people who
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 4: either drank it tiny little bit or pretended, you know,
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 4: kind of threw it over should Yeah, exactly exactly. So
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 4: she's one of these people who's moving from south to north,
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 4: and this, you know, gives us this vision of the
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 4: West as as a profoundly kind of Hispanic place. This
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 4: is a place, especially the Southwest, but also the larger
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 4: west as well, because there are relationships across the region
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 4: for people coming from Mexico.
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: Is she tell me how you learned her story?
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 4: I ran into her actually when I was researching my
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 4: third book, The Three Cornered War, because a lot of
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 4: that action takes place in Santa Fe. So I had
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 4: I had a couple of women in that book and
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 4: was researching kind of just women in New Mexico. So
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 4: I ran into her, and I was like, oh, man,
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 4: she is so great that she got in eighteen fifty two,
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 4: so this is not she. I couldn't fit her into
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 4: the Civil War book, so I just kind of saved her.
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 3: I was like, when the opportunity.
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 4: Comes again, I need to write about her because her
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 4: her story is so extraordinary. But at the same time,
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 4: you know, she operates as a woman in Mexico, where
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 4: she had she had a little more rights, a little
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 4: bit more freedom than in the US. But once the
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 4: US comes in in eighteen forty six, I mean, she
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 4: sees the writing on the wall. She knows what's happening,
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 4: and so she brings in the US soldiers and all
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 4: of their appointees and cultivates them as customers and is
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 4: and as allies up join them.
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: Little diplomacy, yeah, exactly.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 4: But if she had lived longer, I think she would
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 4: have experienced a lot of basically a downturn her financial
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 4: prospects because of the way that the US government was
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 4: regulating women's property and their ability to have money and
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 4: their ability to hand it down to their airs, things
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 4: like that.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: Tell me about the folks that came from the north,
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: were they all? That was sort of where the European
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: immigration came from.
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 4: That's where so that's where some some of it came from,
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 4: and some Canadian specifically Canadian immigration from north to south.
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 3: And that interested me. Also.
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 4: Little Wolf, who is northern Cheyenne, does a great deal
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 4: of moving from north to south and then south back
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 4: to north to and from his homelands.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 3: The Missouri River tends to.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 4: Be of a very well trafficked riverway in this in
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 4: this peerage in Beckworth moves north and south. And even
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 4: Saka Jeweya, who we really only think of as moving
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 4: west with the Lewis and Clark and then back again,
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 4: she actually started her life moving west to east. But
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 4: then later in her life she went from her the
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 4: Knife River villages in the Upper Missouri down south to
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 4: Saint Louis and then back again. So but a lot
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 4: of the European migration either came through New Orleans, so
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 4: a lot of the German migrants to Texas and to
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 4: other parts of the West came through that port. But
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 4: also then Canadian any any kind of Canadian immigrants, anyone
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 4: who had come through that way came then south. So
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 4: Ella Watson's family was one of those families, and they
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 4: took up homestead land in Kansas and began to farm it.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 4: And she ultimately was not a farmer, but she had
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 4: really great cooking skills, and so she found work everywhere
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 4: she was able to work as a cook and a
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 4: housekeeper really across the American West. And then should.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: Ask, so sooner, what's your time frame?
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 4: In this book Oh, it's huge, which was unusual for me.
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: I mean your pre Civil war, sometimes your post Civil war.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: So and I know each person's story slightly different, starts
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: at a different time, which probably in itself was a
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: challenge for you, right, Like, because there's history, it's hard
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: to avoid going chronologically, but you have these different characters
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: that in some ways are pieced together differently.
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. Roughly it's a nineteenth century story. So roughly
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 4: it kind of most of the stories start around eighteen
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 4: hundred and then most of the action is kind of
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 4: ends in the eighteen nineties, although Little Wolf lives until
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 4: nineteen oh four and Polybemis lives until nineteen thirty three,
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 4: so we have a lot of her life to discuss
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 4: in the final final chapters of the book.
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 3: But really, this is a nineteenth century story.
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 4: This is sort of the core century for the emergence
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 4: of the American West as an actual region.
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 3: And then also so in the American imagination.
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: Tell me about the Chinese immigrants and the workers that
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: were there and how you deal with that.
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 4: Yes, So poly Bemus was is my protagonist for that
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 4: particular movement, and through her I was able to talk
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 4: about a lot of West East movement, which is again
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 4: we don't talk about very much in the history of
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 4: the American West. Chinese migrants first came to the US
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 4: for the California Gold Rush in eighteen forty eight forty nine.
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 4: Many of them stayed and provided kind of anchor communities
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 4: for future migrants to come to help build the Central
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 4: Pacific Railroad, which was the kind of western half of
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 4: the Transcontinental and then they dispersed across those rail lines
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 4: into other mining towns across the West in the eighteen
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 4: seventies and eighties, and poly bemus Is trafficked to first
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 4: California and then Idaho.
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 3: Of in that later moment she arrives in.
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 4: Labor or for labor labor, it was unclear kind of
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 4: what she was there to do. There was it was
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 4: possible possible that she could have been trafficked to become
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 4: a domestic servant. It was possible that she was brought
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 4: to either be a second or third wife to someone
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 4: who was a Chinese miner who was living in this
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 4: Idaho town, or as a prostitute, to either work in
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 4: a saloon, or to just be kind of the property
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 4: of another one of these.
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: In some of these. I mean, I remember reading in
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: one book that I read about the railroads that some
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: of these Chinese workers were sort of brought over on
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: a false promise that it was Some of them signed
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: contracts that they thought were going to you know, they
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: were just coming to earn some money, and then they
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: were going to go back, right, And some of them
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: did go back. Some of them just disappeared.
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 4: Yes, And there were labor contracts, most flee for men mostly,
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 4: and I think in this period ninety percent of Chinese
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 4: migrants were men, and they came specifically, they were recruited
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 4: in China, their passage was paid, and then they did
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 4: sign these contracts to work. And some of them became
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 4: trapped in that labor system and either were not released
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 4: from their work or had to kind of take matters
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 4: into their own hands when these contracts, in their view.
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 3: Were over.
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 4: Polly Bemus was part of a more traditional Chinese exchange
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 4: of women's labor, because it was quite common for parents
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 4: to kind of put their second or third daughters into
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 4: this kind of trade in girls as workers or as
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 4: wives or as sex workers, and so she was part
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 4: of that larger system. But when we find her again
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 4: in eighteen eighty she had been trafficked to this town
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 4: called War in Idaho and it was a Chinese majority community.
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 4: And I think this is what will surprise people, right,
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 4: Like as we were talking about before, in westerns, Like
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 4: if you think of a show like dead Wood or
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 4: you know, any any kind of Western, there will be
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 4: Chinese migrants there.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: Always there, always just a family or a grourk or
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: a this it's an a. It's like, well, we've got
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: to depict a Chinese person in here somewhere because we
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: can't well, we won't be credible at all if there's
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: no Chinese characters in this program, right.
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 3: Exactly so.
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 4: But she enters this town where she very likely could
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 4: speak the language of most of the people there, and
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 4: you have to.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 3: And this is again one of.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 4: Those things where I'm like, oh my god, how how
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 4: it would have been so amazing if she had written
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 4: an autobiography or someone had interviewed her for more.
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: Than they did about this local Idaho newspaper on newspapers
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: dot com. No, I think I'm guessing that you didn't
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: find right.
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 4: Actually, there were a lot of newspapers in Idaho and
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 4: they wrote about Chinese people a lot and then later
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 4: after she became kind of discovered in the nineteen twenties
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 4: by tourists, they wrote about her quite a bit. But yeah,
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 4: the sort of notion that she would be trafficked all
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 4: that way, you know, thousands and thousands of miles and
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 4: sent by herself.
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 3: Basically into this new space, but.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 4: Then to find other Chinese people there and to be
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 4: able to speak with them. And by eighteen eighty when
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 4: we have a census record, she's a housekeeper and she
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 4: is working for a man named Charlie Bemis, who she
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 4: does later marry, but she helps him run all of
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 4: his businesses, and she ultimately ends up a kind of
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 4: on a farm on the Salmon River. And this is
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 4: how people come to know her, because tourists start coming
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 4: down the river and their ranch, it was called Bemus Ranch,
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 4: was a pretty good place to put in.
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 3: Actually it still is.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 4: Whenever I talk to people about poly Bemus, if they
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 4: are whitewater rafters.
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: Or fly fishermen, they've heard of this.
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 4: They have heard of Bemas Ranch because they have pulled
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 4: in there. It's still there. She is buried there with
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 4: her husband, Charlie, and you can come in and take
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 4: a tour, there's a kind of historical marker which is fantastic,
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 4: but otherwise it's extremely hard to get to and the
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 4: Salmon River is not for the faint of heart. Do
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 4: not go out there if you do not have some experience.
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 4: But yeah, so she lived a very, very long life.
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 4: But she also led a life where restrictions were kind
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 4: of hanging over her head because in eighteen eighty two
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 4: we have the first passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 4: In eighteen eighty three that is renewed under the Geary Act,
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 4: and she is forced to have her picture taken and
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 4: register with the US government, and she must have this certificate.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: On given that we're talking about birthright citizenship, which of
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: course the original case is about a Chinese. Yes, it
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: is a Chinese individual. Was she born in the continental
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: the United States or was she born in China?
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 3: Was not?
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 4: No, she was born in China. So she would have
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 4: been if she had been kind of caught without her
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 4: certificate and without any way to prove that she had
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 4: been living in the US since before the Chinese Exclusion Act,
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 4: she would have been deported. So yeah, that there were
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 4: efforts increasingly in the late nineteenth century to really control
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 4: and surveill and kind of wall off people who were
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 4: considered an American, and that included Chinese immigrants, Japanese immigrants.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 4: It also included indigenous Americans. Like this is the real
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 4: height of the reservation era in the United States as
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 4: well in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties.
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about Avondo Hollister by yes, the lone sort.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 3: Of white pioneer, the lone white guy. Yes.
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 4: I first ran into him when I was writing again
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 4: the Three Cornered War, because he wrote one of the
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 4: best records that we have at the history of the
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 4: first Colorado Regiment. So he was a super fascinating guy.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 4: He was born in the eighteen thirties and he went
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 4: his parents took him to New Lebanon, New York, which
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 4: was a Shaker community, so he grew up as a Shaker.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 4: He was there from the time he was five years
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 4: old until he was probably twenty or twenty one, and
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 4: then he was allowed to choose whether he was going
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 4: to stay, and he chose to leave. And from there
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 4: he went to Kansas and then to Colorado as part
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 4: of the eighteen fifty eight eighteen fifty nine gold Rush
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 4: and he was one of these guys who was living
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 4: in Colorado, perfectly situated to volunteer for the US Army
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 4: when the Civil War broke out. So his original plan
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 4: was to go back to Kansas and serve for a
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 4: Kansas regiment, but they got kind of stuck in Colorado,
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 4: and he ended up joining the First Colorado and fighting
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 4: in a couple of major battles against Confederate Texans who
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 4: had invaded New Mexico in an attempt to take the
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 4: entire West for the Confederacy, which is a theater of
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 4: the war.
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 3: We don't really talk.
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 4: About it all in Civil War history, so it was captivating.
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 3: He was a very good writer.
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 4: He was kind of, you know, developing his own writerly
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 4: sense during this moment, and so again he was my
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 4: kind of person for the Civil War West. But his
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 4: post Civil War life was even more interesting because he
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 4: had grown up with Shakers. He was an abolitionist and
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 4: also feminist because he believed in the equality of all people,
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 4: at least white and black people.
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 3: What became very clear.
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 4: Though, after his years of living in the West and
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 4: after he left the US Army, he became a newspaperman.
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 4: He founded a newspaper in Black Hawk, Colorado, and then
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 4: kind of went on to work for the Rocky Mountain News,
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 4: and he agitated vociferously against Indigenous people and argued that
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 4: the US Army had to come into Colorado, Colorado had
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 4: to become a state in order to kind of get
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 4: the money and the funding they needed to finally defeat
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 4: every tribal nation that still had land and was still
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 4: protecting that land and their own sovereignty in Colorado. So
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 4: he became an anti indigenous agitator. And then in eighteen
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 4: sixty eight he moves to Utah to report on the
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 4: completion of the trans on in a railroad, but then
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 4: becomes an anti Mormon agitator because he thinks of them.
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 4: He's a he's a totally diehard Republican, which at the moment,
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 4: you know, it's the opposite of what it is today,
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 4: and so the Party of Lincoln, and he sees both
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 4: indigenous peoples and Mormons as standing in the way of
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 4: the Republican vision for the West, which is this frontier
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 4: pioneer of vision white settlement across the West, you know,
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 4: farmers and ranchers kind of making the land pay and
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 4: in his view, bring him young, and the Mormons had
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 4: too much of a stranglehold on business in Utah, so
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 4: he kind of outrageously moved to Salt Lake City and
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 4: lived three blocks from the Temple Square and agitated against Mormons.
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 4: He was one of the most hated men in Utah.
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 3: But he lived there until he died.
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: In the early keep wanting to say, and he was
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: raised a Shaker. You know, this was like that, this.
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 3: Is not crazy.
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well it is always a reminder how we're respectful
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: of anything we we know three dimensionally are it's easy
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: to scorn something that we see in two dimensional in
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: two dimensional visions exactly. I guess we ought to close
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: with obviously Little Wolf and sort of how and and
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: you know, this is how, frankly, how Native American tribes
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: are depicted, both in our pop culture. That's if anything
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: has improved a lot over the last thirty years in
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: the stories of the West, it has been that. I mean,
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: I guess you know it has been. It does feel
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: like each successive decade we get a little bit better
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: at our depiction of Native Americans. So but it also
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: gets it to the the Diben, tell me how you
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: discovered Little Wolf's story and how you thought you were
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: able to verify it.
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah, you know I had written before about Sitting Bull,
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 4: and then also about the Navajo peoples and Cherikaua Apaches,
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 4: particularly in Mangas Coloradus in the Southwest, and so I,
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 4: you know, had some experience in indigenous studies, but the
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 4: history of every tribal nation is different. And when I
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 4: was thinking about, you know, which Westerner would be a
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 4: really good person to kind of followed during the eighteen
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 4: seventies and eighties, you know, I had read about Little
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 4: Wolf kind of on the edges of some of the
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 4: Sitting Bowl material, because he is an ally during Sitting
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 4: Bull's campaign against the United States in seventy five and
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 4: seventy six, although he doesn't actually fight at Little Bighorn
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 4: because he's off hunting somewhere else, but his tribal nation
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 4: pays for that, for that loss or their victory and
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 4: the US loss. And then I started reading about this
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 4: amazing exodus that he led in eighteen seventy eight and
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 4: eighteen seventy nine from Indian Territory, where the Northern Cheyenne
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 4: had been forced after surrendering to the US government in
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 4: eighteen seventy seven in the wake of Little Bighorn, and
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 4: there's a big US Army retribution, like under the direction
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 4: of US Grant for that battle and for that loss
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 4: of Custer and his cavalry, and you know, they had
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 4: been forced into Indian territory. They were living there in
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 4: Little Wolf. Who was this really extraordinary leader he had become.
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 4: He was the only man to have held three different
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 4: leadership roles simultaneously within Northern Cheyenne politics and culture, and
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 4: everyone really trusted him. He was a great military strategist.
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 3: He was also a.
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 4: Really good diplomat and a good leader of his own people,
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 4: and he always had their best interests in mind. And
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 4: he could see because you know, the Northern Chian homeland
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 4: is huge. It ranges from southeastern Montana into Wyoming and
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 4: parts of Nebraska and Dakota's and that climate and landscape
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 4: compared to Indian Territory, which is Oklahoma today, extraordinarily different.
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 4: And he knew that his people were not going to
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 4: survive like this was. They were not going to be
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 4: able to make a future in Indian Territory. And so
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 4: within the year he planned and executed a fifteen hundred
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 4: mile exodus where he was in a running battle with
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 4: various US troops until he got his people back to
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 4: their homeland, and only then did he actually surrender to
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 4: the US Army. And it was with the stipulation that
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 4: his people be able to remain, and he was able
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 4: to convince a bunch of.
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 3: Really hardcore US Army.
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 4: Generals in the West that they should remain where they
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 4: wanted to live and where they needed to live. And
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 4: it was really an extraordinary moment in eighteen eighty four,
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 4: they are able to get their own reservation.
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 3: Where so he.
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: Doesn't do that. The Native American communities that do exist
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: in places, you know, in fairly substantial numbers in South
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: Dakota and Montana, they wouldn't be there.
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think his success really had an
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 4: immense effect. I mean, this is the same moment where
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 4: the US is forcing the Lakota onto reservations at Standing
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 4: Rock and Pine Ridge, and you know, this is one
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 4: of those moments where we see indigenous defensive sovereignty and
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 4: homeland really went out. And you know, there are other
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 4: kind of darker stories wounded me, you know, the the
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 4: defeat and murder of Sitting Bowl, but this is one
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 4: of the stories, and I really wanted to emphasize that this,
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 4: this did happen too, you know that that they did
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 4: uh manage to come back home and to build lives
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 4: for themselves and they're still there.
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 3: They're still there. This is also something really important, you know,
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 3: let me.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: I want to sort of land the plane here more
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: and sort of the you know. One of the things
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: that I think we fight about now, and this is culturally,
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: is his point of views of history, right, you know
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: sort of. And the example I like to use is is,
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: you know, with most history books, now, I want to
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 1: know a lot more about the author before I even
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: read the book, just because I know, look where I
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: always say, we're all born with original bias, right, human
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: beings are wherever you're born. You know, I'm born in Miami,
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: I'm into in that, you're born in Colorado, You're spending
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: all the time, you're interested in the West. That in itself, right,
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: that that is an original bias of interests. So the
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: point is is that obviously, as human beings, whatever it is,
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: you're born with original bias. But I always like to
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: use examples. I've probably written, I've probably read five different
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: books about the eighteen seventy six election, and the facts
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: don't change, but the point of view of the author
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: is what changes the interpretation. So and I think this
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: is a real challenge. I think about it myself whenever
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: I've dabbled in this is how do you take what
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: you think versus what you research? How do you We
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: all have our own bias as you as you go
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: through this, how do you deal with yours? I think,
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: frankly it's very I know where you're coming from. So
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: I think you've made it fairly clear. I think the
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: reader gets it. How intentional do you feel that is?
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: And how much do you think historians don't do this enough?
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we all try to write that line
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 4: right between being completely objective, uh, and then also understanding
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 4: that we do come from a subject position and that
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 4: we yeah, we're interested in what we're interested in. And
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 4: I grew up in the West. I grew up, you know,
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 4: during the rise of multic culturalism.
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 3: So you know, I read a lot of the classics.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 4: I read a lot of you know, uh, novels and
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 4: histories by white men about white men. But then I
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 4: also read Frederick Douglass and I also read that, you know,
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 4: uncle Tom's cabin and and then a lot of you know,
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 4: kind of feminist theory and all kinds of things. So
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 4: that has shaped kind of who I am as a historian.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 4: Then I'm interested in complicated stories. I'm interested in short
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 4: stories that really show the reality of the diversity and
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 4: complexity of US history. And definitely, I mean, I think
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 4: there will probably be people who are like, well, you know,
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 4: you've you have picked these seven people and they're all
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 4: coming from you know places, And I have been very
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 4: overt about like, I do want to talk about this
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 4: person who moved to this way, you know, and they
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 4: are in their way extraordinary, but they are also quite
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 4: typical in other ways, that they are representative of larger communities.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 4: And I think I can make those claims by doing
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 4: all of the research not only on the person themselves,
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 4: but also the communities around them, that this is not
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 4: just I'm making a huge claim about who Westerners were
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 4: only looking at seven people across a huge span of time,
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 4: but that I can connect them to these larger movements
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 4: and these larger communities. And I think that's that's the
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 4: line I think most historians today.
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: No, I feel like your contribution is the way I
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: look at it, which is you know, we're painting this
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: huge tapestry. I guess whenever, maybe I'm mixing my metaphors
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: here that every historical every sort of historical record only
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: adds you add to the tapestry. Right, you add, and
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: you're adding more context, more colors to something that might
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: have been binary or black and white or whatever you
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: want to Like I said, so I get that. Now,
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: let's imagine yourself and the your meeting with the I
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: think Colorado has a state school superintendent. Maybe it'sappointed by
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: the governor, I think, but you think about the Western
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: history you received in school, and how would you improve
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: the curriculum in a way to just more honestly depict
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 1: the West right? And you can, you can. I can
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: almost hear the complaints from from another group of people
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: who would say, where's my you know, no, no, no, no,
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: we must teach it this way because this is the
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: way I was taught. And the fact of the matter is, no,
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: if we have more information, you know, it's like, oh
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: we discovered you know, it's like we're not going to
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: take away We only taught division and multiplications, so why
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: aren't we only teaching that, right? Like you know, we
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: all get it in the sciences, we struggle sometimes with
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: it in the social sciences. So how how would you
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: recommend teaching Western history today being mindful of the climate
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: we also.
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 4: Live in, right, Yeah, I mean, well this is really
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 4: super interesting now too, because Colorado is having its one
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 4: fifty while the nation is having its two fifty.
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 3: It is the centennial state.
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 4: So it's interesting to think about how we're going to
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 4: think about Colorado history moving forward. And I think one
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 4: of the ways to do it is to say, okay,
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 4: what if we focus on Colorado's like Ovando Hollister, Jim
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 4: Beckworth who lived there for quite some time, Jean Baptiste Scharboneau,
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 4: who was second Jawaya's son who lived there for a
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 4: little bit, and we think about all of these people
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 4: circulating in and out of Colorado. And then we also
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 4: do something which you know, I grew up and I
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 4: think I I don't even think I learned the history
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 4: of Denver. I think it was all ghost towns and
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 4: boom and bust and like you know, and Denver.
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: I mean I assume you had did you have a
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: year where they supposedly taught you Colorado history? I mean
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: I must TetR school.
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 3: I mean I must have.
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 4: But I think it was all it was all kind
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 4: of first the Indians were here, and then there were
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 4: silver mines, you know, and then and then there's the
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 4: ski industry.
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 3: I think there was a lot kind of missing YadA.
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: YadA YadA, A lot happened in the YadA YadA.
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah exactly.
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 4: And you know, I really do believe people like to
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 4: read about and learn about people. I mean, there are
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 4: the kind of nerds among us who are like, I
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 4: love dates and I want.
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: To know you're you're not wrong. I'm always I've learned
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: more about an era reading about reading about an individual
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: and their navigation to it, Like I'm you know, the
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: best book I read about the railroads, frankly for me
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: was was a biography of Leland Stanford. Yep. And so
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: you know it is. I agree. I think it is
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: easier to follow a narrative of an individual to learn
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: about an era and a geography.
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 4: And I would love to see if we could kick
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 4: up a bunch of names of you know, nineteenth century
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 4: Colorado's from a host of different communities and then kind
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 4: of hand those out to students and have them do
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 4: the research because that's the fun too. I mean, you
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 4: talked earlier about historians being detectives, and we really are,
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 4: and that's that's a really kind of fun part of
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 4: it is to go and really dig some things up.
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 4: So I think that would be really fun. But yeah,
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 4: also look at you know, foregoing all of the interest
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 4: in Deadwood and Tombstone and you know, ghost towns and
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 4: be like Denver.
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: Can I confess I just you know, Tombstone might be
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: one of my favorite movies ever. I know, sorry, does
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: it disappoint Do you think less of me if I
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: admit that? I mean, at least admitting I mean, you know,
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: I won't be your huckleberry. I know that. Ye, that's sorry,
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 1: but you're you're not wrong. I mean there is Look
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: I have you know, I'm I'm a dude, so I have.
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: I have done the Deadwood thing, I have done Tombstone
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: and and and some of that. But with the knowledge
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: that yeah, this is not fully correct.
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, or at.
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 4: Least it's I mean, dead would the TV show actually
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 4: is pretty decent. All of those people actually existed, but
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 4: you know, their lives were just so outsized and so
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 4: based in violence and so just kind of incredibly melodramatic.
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 3: Then so violent.
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: Do you believe the West really was?
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 4: I mean I think that it was especially kind of
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 4: in the time before territorial government.
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 3: People did take matters of justice into their own hands.
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 4: There were fights, law right, there was Yeah, there were
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 4: fights in the street that ended up in deaths. And
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 4: but you know, I think that would be really interesting.
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 4: I'm not sure anyone has done a study of like
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 4: what the actual murder rate was in one place as
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 4: compared to today.
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 3: And I if.
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 4: I had to guess, I would think it wouldn't be
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 4: so different, right, I think it wasn't like crazy Wild
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 4: West shootouts every day, people dying all the time. I
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 4: mean they probably died more of disease, quite frankly, than
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 4: anything else.
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: So a lot of books like this trigger the next project.
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: Do you know what your next project is?
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 3: I do I do the next project?
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 4: I go, yeah, absolutely, I go back to the I'm
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 4: going back to the Civil War, but staying in the West.
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 4: So the next book is the story of a Kiowa
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 4: and Comanche raid on a biracial ranching town in North
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 4: Texas in eighteen sixty four during the American Civil War.
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 4: So I get to talk about I mean, basically, and
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 4: I think you will agree with this too. One of
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 4: the major arguments is Texas is weird, and I think
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 4: that's pretty a consistent historical argument across.
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: This is a contradiction all the time, all the time. No,
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: it is, and you know, in some ways that makes
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: it a rich place to go tell stories.
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 4: Yes, exactly, and it becomes Texas becomes the sort of
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 4: dream of the Confederacy in the last year of the war.
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 4: You know, that's where Jefferson Davis is headed when Richmond falls,
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 4: that's you know, the last battle is there at Palmito Ranch.
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 3: We have Juneteenth in.
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 4: Texas, So there's a lot of really interesting This is
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 4: another story for me that brings together.
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: Of contradictions, right both that's where exactly you know, you know,
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: Juneteenth is is essentially that's the origin story and at
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: the same time it's where Jefferson Davis was looking for
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: exactly exactly.
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's another book that brings together the kind
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 4: of white and black and indigenous West, which you know,
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 4: and these are the kinds of stories I like to tell,
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 4: the complicated ones. But yes, hopefully that one will also
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 4: have a kind of built in narrative that'll that'll bring
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 4: you in and be as compelling as the kind of
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 4: frontier myth while still giving you a good a good
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 4: sense of the reality of life on the ground.
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: Well, I've kept you an hour, which is probably means
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: we gave away too much of the book.
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 3: But no, that's fine, that's fine.
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: Grab it. It's it's wonderful. And I can't wait for
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: you know, our friends at Netflix and Amazon to type
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: by the rights to your book and say, let's do
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: a story. Especially I think we I think we've got
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: to do a story on our gambling Mexican woman.
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 4: Oh.
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 3: I mean, don't you think like Selma Hayek is, like.
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: Let's just let's do a nice series on her, right
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: like that?
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 3: Please?
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: That's that would be fun, interesting and might accidentally teach people.
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 3: Something that would be amazing. I would love that.
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: Megan, congrats, this was great. I appreciate it.
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 3: Thanks so much, Chuck, thanks for having me on.
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 4: As Chuck.
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: First question comes from Barry m in Miami, and he
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: just wishes me a happy birthday. I tell you, mister Manelo,
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: I appreciate that. I appreciate the sentiment. I don't know
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: that the m is for Manelo, but if you're Barry
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: m I'm going to assume it's Manelo. So thank you
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: for those wishes. Next from Mark in Cleveland, and he writes,
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: could you share your thoughts about the long term damage
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: being done by the Trump administration in terms of what's
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: being missed by incompetent leadership. I think about the late nineties,
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: when gas prices were under a dollar, the tech bubble
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: was still growing, and the news seemed almost boring all
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: the while the plan for nine to eleven was being
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: hatched different times, obviously, but I just wonder what's being
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: missed that will come back to bite us in the future.
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 1: Thanks Mark and Cleveland. Well, I'll tell you my biggest concern.
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: It goes to actually at the heart of that New
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: York Times story on who sold Trump on the Iran
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: War and when he came in with this intelligence from Masada, Hey, no, no, no,
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: we know that regime change and this is going to happen,
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: that people are going to fight, And so the Israeli
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: intelligence agencies claimed one thing. The American John Ratcliffe, head
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: of the CIA, and he's not exactly a Trump antagonist.
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: It's called it bullshit. Marco Rubio did. They sort of
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: all did except for Hexa. But so my biggest concern
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: is you have a president that does not trust our
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: intelligence agencies. He does. He views them as enemies, right,
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: he views them as the deep state. We have a
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: Director of National Intelligence that does not believe the intelligence community.
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: I do think John Ratcliffe does. I think he is.
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: I think I know him a little bit. I choose
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: to believe that he takes his job seriously and that
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: he trusts the men and women at the CIA. I
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: think are The National Security Agency is run by you know,
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: I think a competent person. But my concern is threefold
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: on this because you say, what's missing? That's the thing
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: we don't know. I can tell you that I'm I
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: got to be careful here of my own sourcing here.
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: I don't want to burn anybody. But there are multiple
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: issues in our intel community right now. Number One, you
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: have rank and file intel agents who don't trust the
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: political bosses. What do they withhold because they're worried about
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: their own sources being built? That should they withhold? No,
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: they should like whatever you think of your political bosses.
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: That's the democracy. But that doesn't mean the instinct of
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: these career CIA guys is to not trust these political
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: actors who have been dismissive of what they do. So
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: that's number one. Number two is the concern that what
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: I just said also applies to the quote five eyes.
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: Five eyes is the essentially the English speaking the white
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: English speaking countries, right, it's Canada, the United States, Australia,
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: New Zealand that share intelligent and Australia, United States, the UK, Canada. Yeah,
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: five eyes in the United States, this is the quote
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: five eyes. Well, there is a lot of distrust these
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: days between the Canadians and the United States, between the
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: Brits in the United States, pretty much between everybody in
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: the United States. So how much is being shared there?
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: We already know of reports that Massad is so concerned
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: about leaks, particularly by the commander in chief. It's you know,
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: Trump's one of those people who will just blurt out stuff.
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: So the point is there's a lot of intel being
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: withheld from our intelligence agencies. Intelligence sharing is a huge,
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: vastly important thing that takes place. So you're asking me,
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: what do we I think we are. I think we
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: are incredibly blind in a lot of places, incredibly blind
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: because you have rank and file and intel officers who
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: are concerned about their political bosses. You have other allies
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: who are withholding some information for fear that it may
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: fall into the wrong hands. So yeah, I think it's
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: it's quite possible. You know, we were distracted by impeachment
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: back in ninety eight ninety nine when ben Laden was
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: doing all of this. In fact, i'm when when when
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: Clinton actually launched a missile strike to try to get
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: ben Laden missed him by day. He was accused by
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: some Republicans of playing wag the dog that it was
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: a quote distraction from the impeachment inquiry. I think it's
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: a fair critique that essentially the impeachment, you know, this
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: was both why the impeachment was damaging to our national
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: security and why Clinton resisting resignation might have been dangerous
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: to our national security. Right, what would have been in
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: the best interest in the United States was to not
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: have this issue, right, And I understood the political fight
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: and all of this stuff and what was the line,
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: But there's no doubt that we missed something when it
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: came to Bin Latin. So you're right to do this.
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: The problem is I can't I can tell you I
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: know all of those these issues that we have right
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: now in our intelligence gathering. So we don't know what
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: we're missing, but I have a feeling we're missing something
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: big and it is a cause for concern. This is
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: why I you know, you know, it could be the
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: worst job in the world, and twenty nine is having
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: to be the president to follow Donald Trump. Next question
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: comes from Brad. You've often said that DC is more
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: veep than West Wing. If you're comfortable sharing, what's the
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: most veep thing you've seen? Thanks for everything you do,
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: Keep up the great work. Isn't the most veep thing
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: we've seen? This Aron debacle at this point right where
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: we go from threatening the obliteration of a civilization to
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: maybe we'll start a joint venture in the straight of
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: horror moves to collect tolls, which is a true thing
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: that Donald Trump did this. Boy in all seriousness, I say,
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: in all seriousness, like this is all serious at this point. Boy,
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: I don't know if I have one big thing, but
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 1: there's like, you know, whether it's staffer, you know the
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: way staffers sort of you know, over worry too much
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: about whether their boss is going to have the right
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: drink of water on set or want to do all
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: these things. But I wish I had a I wish
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 1: I had a good go to answer. But the problem is,
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 1: and this is what the Trump ara has done. Like
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: Trump himself is kind of a parody at times of Trump, right,
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: Like there are times you're like there plenty of times
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: you see some of these Trump truth socials that get
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: repurposed and retweeted all over or on Instagram, whatever, and
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: you look at me, you like, this can't this one
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: can't be true. This one's going to be made up, right.
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: I mean that's the problem is that he is in
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: some ways he may kill satire because how do you
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: he certainly made it really hard to write fictional politics.
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: I say this with somebody who was working on this
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: with a with a friend of mine. We off and
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: on are working on a potential, you know, some sort
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: of thriller based in Washington, And you say to yourself,
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 1: you know, if you sort of of the law and
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: order model, right, you sort of ripped from the headlines,
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: you know, it's stranger, right. This is the case, classic
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: case where the phrase truth is stranger than fiction. So
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: you know, I'm not kidding. When the more I think
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: about your question, what's the most what's the most deep
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: thing you've seen, It's the Trump presidency, right, whether it's
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: how he's handled the Kennedy Center, how he's handled the
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: gold le mat everywhere, the sort of you know, you
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: know he is, you know, he's such a creature of
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: the of the sixties and seventies and eighties. You know,
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: one of the leading you know, sort of showmen of
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: the seventies was a man named Liberaci. And if you've
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: never heard of him, we should go google him. Just
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 1: a flamboyant sort of showman piano player. It would just
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: you know, it was. It was sort of like if
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: Billy Joel and if Elton John and Lawrence Welk had
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 1: a baby, it would be Liberachi. I know that's a
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 1: strange thing to say, but it was. It was sort
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: of like because it was piano based, right, but it
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: was sort of you know, it was but it was
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: to describe Liberaci as flamboyant, as almost underselling him. And
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: yet if you spend some time looking at like there's
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: some great tours of where Liberaci lived and his a
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: Vegas abode and all this stuff. Let's just say I
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: think Donald Trump would be right at home. I just
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: think that the entire presidency feels like a VIEP, a
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: series of you know, season ten of VIEP. Next question
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: comes from Andre in La and he says, one very
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: powerful way that the Republican Conservative Party gets their messages
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: out to their bases through talk radio. Why do you
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: think that most Democrats tapped I haven't tapped into that market.
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 1: Even out here in California, Conservative talk radio is very
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: effective in getting a message out and slowly building momentum
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: for ideas and talking points. I know that somewhat point MPR,
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: but it does not move the needle in the same
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: manner to hear you take on this best regards, Andre, Well,
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 1: you know, it's interesting. There's a little chicken and egg
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 1: when it comes to talk radio talk radio. You know,
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: if you think about the Rush Limbaugh time slot, right
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: which was before Rush Limba, there was another conservative talk
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: radio icon named Paul Harvey. And that's the that's the
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: rest of the story. If you've ever heard I was
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: about to say, and that's the way it is. That
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: was cronkite. The rest of the story. The rest of
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: the story was a Paul harveyism, and Paul Harvey was
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: conservative without being a sledgehammer about it. Rush became a sledgehammer,
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: but it was, you know that the talk radio you
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: got to think about it almost demographically, right, who's in
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: their car more often? It was like the traveling salesman,
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: the person that's on the road, the sort of almost
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: like white collar, working class, meaning like it was sort
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: of service sect but sort of maybe insurance salesmen, pacemaker salesman,
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 1: you know, a small time financial advisor. I'm just you know,
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: a lawyer, but that's always sort of trolling for business.
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 1: And again it is sort of working class, white collar.
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 1: I don't know how else to call it, right, you know,
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: there's right, there's the people that shower before work and
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: the people that chower after work. Right, these are still
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: people that chower before work, but they're in their car
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: all day. And that was always the hard So you know,
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: I've always thought that talk radio just sort of the
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 1: demographics just fit right, and the person that's more likely
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: and you throw in, right, the traveling salesman or any
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: of these folks. I just described all work on commission,
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: commission and the taxing of it, so there was sort
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: of an already it was sort of like it was,
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: you know, to me, sort of already almost like a
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: predisposition to the messaging on the right, which was a
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: little more anti government, you know, low taxes, you know,
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: you're working hard, they're taking money out of your pocket,
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: and you know, it was sort of the middle manager class,
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: if you will. So I just think the reason it
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: worked for the right, and I think it's less so now,
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: I really do. I think in many ways, podcasts of
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: you know, everybody now as their channel. You're right, I
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: think there's still what remains of talk radio really is
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: targeting retirees, right, folks that still are sort of in
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 1: the habit, but that were radio listeners of the nineties.
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: So I think there's a little bit of that. I
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: think over time you're going to see that when these
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: folks age out of voting, I think you'll see sort
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: of talk radio, you know, Like I said, in some ways,
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: it's already shifted to this, you know, to to this
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: independent world, you know, whether it's Ben Shapiro or what
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson's doing, or even what Magan Kelly's doing and
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: things like that. So, but the the other part with
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 1: the left is it's the left is just more fragmented
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: and where they get their news and where they get
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 1: their information and always kind of has been in different ways,
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: and I just think that radio is never it just
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: wasn't in some ways. Television was right. I would argue
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: for a long time, cable news and broadcast news was
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 1: sort of was geared towards center left, and and then
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 1: you had talk radio on the right. And then essentially
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: all Roger Ailes did was bring talk radio mindset to
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: primetime cable and so and that's you know, I think
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 1: that now the technology is going to be wiping that away.
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: But I just think it was just sort of the
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: if you think about the demographic that was in the car, right,
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: and this was really targeted at car. I can tell
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 1: you most of the time that I ever listened to Rustling,
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: but was I was in traffic, right, I was sitting
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 1: there and you're you're you know, this was in the Yeah,
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: you might have had a cassette player or a CD
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: player or whatever. I had the six. I had the
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 1: had a Mazda six two six I had you know,
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: would immediately you know, had a little CD player, had
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 1: the had a six CD change. I thought, I was,
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 1: you know, I wouldn't spend money in a car about
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 1: a U sixty six. But I, you know, I had that.
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: I had as nice of a of a radio as
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: I could. But you did get bored of the same
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: six CDs, right, Can you imagine only having six CDs
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: to choose from back then? But I kind of look
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: at it, you know, and I and you know you
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: could have a chicken and egg conversation. But I think
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: it was just sort of a a predisposition of of
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: the of the person that was most likely listening to
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: talk radio at that time, and sort of melded with
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: the message that the right was pushing at the time
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: on low taxes and less government. Next question comes from
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 1: all love your show Wake Up Mornings out here in
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: the suburban foothills of the Cascades in Washington State. It's
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: amazing You've got a better view than I do. And
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: I listened to your podcast to start my day. Well,
• 2:00:25
  Speaker 1: thank you. Your list of droughts. Your list of droughts
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 1: missed Washington State. You're right, I didn't, and I'll tell
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: you why in a minute. I was only talking about
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: governor's races up this cycle. Washington State's always on the
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: presidential cycle Washington. There's actually another state on their Utah,
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: It's also had a lengthy drought as well, sort of
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: going the other way, but both Washington and Utah are
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: always in the presidential years. But that's why I did it.
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: But he goes, Hey, it took me a minute to
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: do the math, but having worked for both Dan Evans
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: and John Spellman, I figured we were close to South Dakota.
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: I count it as something like forty two years for
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: what it's worth. I also worked for Democratic governors Dixie
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: Lee Ray and Booth Gardner. I remember booth Gardner. Sometimes
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: wonder if there's another person alive in Washington State or
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: elsewhere for that matter, who can say they worked for
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: two Democratic and two Republican governors? Are to imagine these days? Paul. Anyway, Paul,
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: it's a good point, and I should have mentioned the droughts.
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 1: You know, I was very That's why I was trying
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 1: to be very specific about about being in twenty twenty six,
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: so in the midterm year. But if you give me
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: a second, there are a few the bigger droughts, right.
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 1: Utah and Washington are both at forty one years since
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: eighty five. On both of those and I think those
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: are the only two on the and we're going to
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: be getting there with Delaware, I think Delaware now. And
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: Delaware is another state that is on the presidential year.
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: There are eleven states that are on the presidential year,
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 1: and of course two of those states, Vermont and New Hampshire,
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: are every two years for their governors. So Delaware is
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: currently on a thirty three year streak of democratic governors.
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: But again, so just short of it was Mike Castle
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: was the last Republican governor and he left office in
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: ninety two. There my Castle infamously is the Republican, the
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: moderate Republican congressman who was going to be the next
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 1: US Senator from Delaware, replacing Ted Kaufman who was the
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 1: caretaker for Joe Biden Senate see. And then he ran
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: into a woman named Christine O'Donnell who ran the great
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: ad that said I Am not a witch, perhaps one
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: of my favorite all time paid for campaign TV heads
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: out there. She wins a Republican primary. So at the
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: beginning of this mega movement, before we were calling it
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: a mega movement, and Chris Coons is basically has a
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: Senate seat for life. He was going to be the
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 1: basically the nice man who was going to lose to
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: my Castle for a US Senate seat in twenty ten,
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: and instead he's now got a Senate seat for life. Frankly,
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 1: he's one of the more thoughtful senators out there and
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 1: one of the guys that does seem to want to
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 1: put country before party when the chips are really down.
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: All right. Next question comes from Kelly X in Texas.
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: Kelly writes, this would be my fourth question you answer
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 1: and putting me close to the Five Timers Club. We
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 1: really got to keep track of this, Nason Lauren, We
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 1: really do. Maybe there's maybe there's swag we got to
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: come up with, right todcast five Timers Clubs. It's gonna
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: be something. We got to come up with something fun here.
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 1: And hey, you know, since we want to keep everything
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 1: for free, maybe a sponsor will want to be a
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: sponsor of the Five Timers Club. See if I say
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: these things out loud right, the ad sales team will
• 2:04:10
  Speaker 1: be fired up. So let's go anyway, Kelly X. Let's
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 1: answer your question number four on your way to the
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 1: Jack Black five Timers Club with the war with around
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 1: you put war in quotes here, with the war in
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: Iran ending and gas prices falling. Do you think the
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: GOP will be able to run on the economy improving
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 1: in the midterm elections and winning the war. The way
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 1: I look at it, that if there's any uptick in
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 1: the economy at the end of the summer into the fall,
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: that the blue wave may ebb and GOP holds the
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 1: House and Senate. Thank you for your insightful commentary and
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 1: fins up. I say what you did. I'd like to
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 1: see a look. I do agree that the Finns fins
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: that there should be something better with that with the Dolphins,
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: and I think if they start winning ever again, that
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: maybe we can start making some of those things work.
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 1: Kelly X, I'm gonna guess you wrote this question before
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 1: you found out that's straight of hor moves. Man might
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: be open, might be closed before you found out whether
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 1: huh are we really negotiating? Are we not negotiating? I don't,
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: I am I'm skeptical. I I you know, I hear
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 1: your point. I think if this were a first term
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 1: I think if this were, you know, an administration that
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: was going to be gearing up for a reelect, you know,
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: they would be a little more focused, a little more
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 1: on top of things. But this economy is a mess
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 1: and the globe we're all interconnected. This isn't going to
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: just snap right back. And you know, I, I know
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: we have short attention spans collectively. I just don't think
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: our attention spans that's that short on this front. I
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 1: really don't think there. I think the exhaustion is there.
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: I think it's real and I think I go back
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: to a phrase that I probably am now overusing, but
• 2:06:11
  Speaker 1: good gets better, bad gets worse. This isn't getting better
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 1: because he's not getting better, right. I mean, he's been erratic.
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 1: He's fired two cabinet secretaries in the last month. He's
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: probably going to fire at least one more, maybe two more.
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: So Yeah, I am, I am skeptical. I hear your point,
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: and it maybe it's possible. I'm not saying they're not
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: going to try, but I think it's going to be
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: very difficult to sort of Jedi mind trick the voters
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: on this one last question, man, I go from a
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 1: Finns fan to a Pats fan. Comes from Mark h
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: Pats fan and Alan Texas God bless you, Hey check
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: love the podcast to take my mind off of civilization destruction.
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: I asked Chatchebt to write a version of Billy Joel's
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: We Didn't Start the Fire, using only notable events from
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: the current Trump presidency. It's amazing to sheer volume of scandal, drama,
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: and intrigue in just over a year. I think I've
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: got to hit on my hands. Also, this won't stop tanking,
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 1: but what about forcing an ownership change in professional sports
• 2:07:15
  Speaker 1: after a certain period of ineptitude like they faced in
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 1: the F One movie. For example, the New York Jets
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 1: don't make the playoffs for ten years, the incompetent Woody
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: Johnson has to sell the team. I'm looking hard at
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 1: Cleveland and the Jets, maybe even the Cowboys. You could
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: even do a Hard Knocks type series for teams facing
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 1: divestiter this. First of all, I wish you would have
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: shared with me the lyrics. You would have gotten me
• 2:07:40
  Speaker 1: to karaoke this a little bit. So here's first of all,
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: my challenge to you, Mark h. Submit the question with
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 1: the lyrics. I want to see what you came up with,
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: and I hope you know you got to include tolls
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: in the strait of hormones. Kim Jong Un right, I
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: can't take it anymore. So I got to see the
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 1: lyrics owner divestiture. This is the single best tank anti
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 1: tanking idea I have heard yet. Man, forget everything else,
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 1: and I'm you know, this is a good place to
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: sort of put a code on the weekend. This what's
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 1: happening in the NBA. It's right, it's beyond what's the
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: only good news about this issue of tanking in the
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 1: NBA is everybody's talking about it. So if Adam Silva
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 1: doesn't figure out how to do something about it, he's
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: got it because he's got to face this owner putting,
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 1: forcing owners to have skin in the game. You know,
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 1: one of the things I've always believed about these sports
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 1: owners is that they are custodians for these teams. These
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 1: teams belong to the league in the community. In fact,
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 1: if the league didn't exist, the teams wouldn't The teams
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: themselves would not have the value that they have, right,
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: So the league's given the value. So these are these
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 1: are basically just shareholders, right. They own the the Washington
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 1: ship of the NBA franchise, the Dallas shares of the
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 1: NFL franchise, right, the New Jersey, New York shares of
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: the of the Jets franchise. So I think this is
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: a very fair way to do it. And if you
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 1: want your anti trumpet, in fact it is. It is
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: up to the You know, the all of these leagues
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: are essentially run by the owners, right, because they're all
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: essentially shareholders. The board of directors are the owners themselves,
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: and the commissioners all work for the owners. Yeah, we
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 1: cannot put this on the teams. You can't put this
• 2:09:33
  Speaker 1: on the general managers, if you if the owners knew
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: they had to sell the team no matter what the
• 2:09:39
  Speaker 1: markets said at any given time, if they didn't, And
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 1: my god, in the NBA, you have twenty playoffs slots.
• 2:09:46
  Speaker 1: I think you know one of my you know, I
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: think the I would shrink the number of teams allowed
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 1: in the NBA playoffs. I think ten in each conference
• 2:09:56
  Speaker 1: is way too many. What if he had it down
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 1: to six and he gave he said, you gave the
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 1: one in the one and two seeds a buy, and three, four, five,
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 1: and six played best of five and then you got
• 2:10:11
  Speaker 1: to the best of sevens. But if you shrunk the
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 1: number of playoff teams, you go from twenty to twelve, right,
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 1: six in each league in conference. Excuse me, I'm speaking
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 1: baseball termser and the owners, right, playoff money is more
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: directly in the owner's pocket than anything else, any other
• 2:10:31
  Speaker 1: revenue that they get, right, other than their season ticket revenue,
• 2:10:34
  Speaker 1: So that that also would create an incentive if you're
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 1: not getting if you're not able to fill your arena
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: with playoff money, that's a problem. Right, So the point
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 1: is you're getting at it's the owners have to face,
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 1: not fines. Although I don't know if you saw Draymond
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 1: Green's rant earlier this week where he said, boy, they
• 2:10:55
  Speaker 1: love to find players, and we know there are ten
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 1: teams tanking and there have been two fine total. And
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 1: he's right, But the owners are in charge of Adam Silver, right,
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 1: this is part of the problem. But if the you
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 1: would think the good owners would want to shame their
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 1: fellow owners into being better owners. Right, what's in the
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 1: best interest of the league. So I loved a Vestinger.
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 1: I think it's brilliant, My goodness. I mean the Jets.
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 1: The Jets should have been sold decades ago, right, I
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 1: mean Woody Johnson. I think there's a reason they don't
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: put him in charge of Johnson and Johnson anymore. But
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 1: that is this is absolutely brilliant. You know you my god,
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 1: White Sox and Bulls fans, They've been trying to figure
• 2:11:41
  Speaker 1: out how to get rid of Jerry Hinsdorf for decades. Right,
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 1: this is a guy that had Michael Jordan and and
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 1: and was too cheap to even support that At times,
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 1: I think this is the answer. You know, you go,
• 2:11:57
  Speaker 1: you go ten years without winning a playoff series. You know,
• 2:12:02
  Speaker 1: it's either ten years without winning a playoff series or
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 1: five years without even being in the playing game, especially
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 1: if you keep ten spot. Please, getting into the plan
• 2:12:09
  Speaker 1: is not difficult. In fact, I think the Wizards have
• 2:12:11
  Speaker 1: gotten into the plan over the last couple of years. Right,
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 1: It is not hard to get into the plan if
• 2:12:19
  Speaker 1: you choose to, so Mark, it's brilliant divestiture, best tanking
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 1: idea I've heard yet one two send the lyrics. We
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 1: gotta know. I'm really bummed about the Nats bullpen. I
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 1: know I sound like my friend mister Kroneizer, who uses
• 2:12:41
  Speaker 1: pretty much the opening monologue of every one of his
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 1: podcasts to lament and complain about the Nats bullpen. But
• 2:12:48
  Speaker 1: it's really frustrated because the Nats are hitting. This is
• 2:12:51
  Speaker 1: such a smarter I will say this, I am. I
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: can tell this team is using analytics and tell this
• 2:13:01
  Speaker 1: team is a bunch of young players who are listening to,
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: you know, the raised way of doing business. And they
• 2:13:07
  Speaker 1: have a plan each night and they seem to, you know,
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 1: go up there and there and there and then and
• 2:13:13
  Speaker 1: you could see the problem is, you know, you can't
• 2:13:16
  Speaker 1: analytics a good bullpen and we just the art. Look,
• 2:13:20
  Speaker 1: I know everybody's always in need of bullpen arms, right,
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 1: this is not easy, but my word, it's it bad.
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 1: It feels like every person that comes in from the
• 2:13:28
  Speaker 1: bullpen the first thing they do is walk a guy.
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 1: So it's like there's always a man on. It's from
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 1: the sixth inning on down. I think the Nats have
• 2:13:36
  Speaker 1: now blown three leads the eighth inning leads. So on
• 2:13:41
  Speaker 1: one hand, it gives me a little hope that there's
• 2:13:44
  Speaker 1: something going on with this lineup. And it's nice to
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 1: see James Wood and just he his swing is so
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 1: good that just making contact the ball's going to go. Uh.
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 1: I mean he had a home run that was a
• 2:13:57
  Speaker 1: missile the other night. I mean it was in the
• 2:14:01
  Speaker 1: It thankfully wasn't low enough that it that it hit
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: the wall, but it left the yard so fast. Man
• 2:14:09
  Speaker 1: it is. He has got such a sweet swing, mister
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 1: James would but boy, this bullpen, man it is it is.
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 1: If I thought the Nats are going to be competitive,
• 2:14:19
  Speaker 1: I'd be losing my mind. I am relieved that the
• 2:14:22
  Speaker 1: lineup isn't just garbage. I really sort of am enjoying
• 2:14:28
  Speaker 1: that they find they just play baseball, they score, you know,
• 2:14:32
  Speaker 1: they figure out how to put pressure on the other team.
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 1: In fact, I looked at the Blue James performance against
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 1: the Dodgers, and I looked at the Nats performance against
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 1: the Dodgers, and I'm like, hey, our lineup's not so shitty,
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 1: but if we don't have a bullpen, we're not going
• 2:14:47
  Speaker 1: to win games. And you know, it's so frustrating about baseball, right,
• 2:14:50
  Speaker 1: and the difference between if you go six and four
• 2:14:55
  Speaker 1: every ten games throughout a season, you might you're gonna
• 2:15:00
  Speaker 1: come close to winning a hundred games, and if you
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 1: go four and six in every ten games, you're gonna
• 2:15:06
  Speaker 1: get close to losing one hundred games. Right, those two
• 2:15:09
  Speaker 1: games a week, right, those two games a week, you
• 2:15:12
  Speaker 1: got to go six and four, right, every ten games?
• 2:15:16
  Speaker 1: In order to make the playoffs. And the difference between
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 1: six and four and four and six every ten games
• 2:15:22
  Speaker 1: is your bullpen. It really is. It's two things, the
• 2:15:25
  Speaker 1: bullpen and the bottom of your lineup, right and the
• 2:15:28
  Speaker 1: good teams. The bottom of the lineup wins one of
• 2:15:31
  Speaker 1: those two games, and the bullpen wins the other. And
• 2:15:33
  Speaker 1: that's the difference between going four and six and six
• 2:15:35
  Speaker 1: and four every ten games. It's why we baseball fans
• 2:15:38
  Speaker 1: love baseball because the difference between great and disaster is
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: literally two games out of every ten. It's the beauty
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 1: of baseball and it's the frustration of baseball at times.
• 2:15:55
  Speaker 1: But come on that, let's go keep trying to find
• 2:15:57
  Speaker 1: new bullpen arms. Just go in the mind and bring
• 2:16:00
  Speaker 1: somebody else up. That's all I asked. Just don't keep
• 2:16:03
  Speaker 1: bringing the same people out to walk the guy and
• 2:16:08
  Speaker 1: give up the two run over. At least bring out
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 1: new arms to do that. You might stumble into the
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 1: next ball schemes. All right, man, to say we've had
• 2:16:19
  Speaker 1: a crazy week is as usual in an understatement. But
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 1: do your best to have a good weekend. Compartmentalized politics,
• 2:16:29
  Speaker 1: let people like me focus on it. I hope you
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 1: enjoy your weekend. Thank you for listening to podcasts. Don't
• 2:16:36
  Speaker 1: forget like and subscribe. I don't do that enough. I
• 2:16:39
  Speaker 1: forget to tell people. And Hey, if you want to
• 2:16:41
  Speaker 1: break from politics but you can't get enough of the
• 2:16:45
  Speaker 1: of the dulcet tones of Chuck Todd, please sign up
• 2:16:48
  Speaker 1: for Dynastic with my friend Jaa, Donda and I in
• 2:16:51
  Speaker 1: our sports history podcast. Now with that, I'll see on Monday.
• 2:17:01
  Speaker 4: Hey,