Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 83: The White Natives of Appalachia?

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Episode 83: The White Natives of Appalachia? · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: You must excuse me.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Simple and easy in the number.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: But you remember lesson.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: A lesson in honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Honesty to yourself and honesty to others.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: That lesson will stand you in good step on your life.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_04: Now I'm catching on to why that's so and why that's so why that's so why that's so why that's so why that's greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Ostlantes, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and we help combat the spread of disinformation about these very topics.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_04: And Ruben Ariano Tlacatecat.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_04: What's going on, my brother?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, yeah.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Just uh winding the summer down.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it is Chicano Heritage Month.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_04: It is.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_04: So happy Chicano Heritage Month.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_04: Happy Chicano Heritage Month to you too, sir.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_04: Uh just go out and, you know, be pretty good.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's gaming's theme.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think more people are beginning to catch on.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: August is uh Chicano Heritage Month.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's pretty cool.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_04: It's pretty badass.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_04: I uh I I think it's cool.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's something that I've noticed on the social medias.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_04: Um in fact, uh Rasa Unida Party in LA, I believe, is holding an event on August 30th.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_04: Uh they're calling it a Chicano Unity Day as part of Chicano Heritage Month.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_04: Nice.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_04: Nice.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_04: So very, very dope.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_04: Well, yeah, uh school is about to get started up again, isn't it?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: The new semester.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: New semester, um, new students, new rules, too.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: So apparently, I don't know how many people keep up with uh politics and especially if you're here in Texas, uh, but the recent uh legislative session that ended, not the one that uh Governor Wheels uh is trying to get going now for um the redistricting uh the gerrymandering, I should say, that they're trying to do in Texas.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: But the one, the official one that just ended uh not that long ago, they passed a new law in Texas.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: So if you are someone who teaches, uh I don't know if it's just higher ed or or if it's just uh for teachers in public education across the board, but it's really gonna affect um teachers in in higher ed like myself.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas before, for instance, let's say you know um you teach uh three or four classes in person um and then the rest online.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: For a community college instructor, like the base is a five-five here in Texas, so at least for for uh the um Dallas College, I'm not sure about other colleges.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um if you let if you're a professor, say at a at a four-year institution, you know, your workload might be a three, two, you know, three, one uh fall, two in the summer uh in the spring or two, two, depending on on the course load and your department, right?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: But for for us here at Dallas College, like to be considered full-time faculty is a five-five.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then anything extra is a lot, but it's a lot, it's a lot, let me tell you.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, but anyway, so but the way that uh we've been able to um uh navigate that that that space of having to teach minimum five courses, right?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: Is that we at least teach three in person and then two online, right?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: And we can split those up, we can have them either as uh two 16-week online courses or we can have them split into eight weeks.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: So one the first eight weeks and then the second one, the second eight weeks, and so that gives you the five, right?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then if you want to teach extra service, you could pay extra for that.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: So if you want to add on uh one or two classes or what have you, then that gives you a little bit of extra money.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, the option has always been that you teach those online as well, right?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: Because you've met the minimum required uh of teaching three classes in person.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's like like an unspoken rule, but I think they're trying to codify it.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: So now what they've done is and so before, if you taught, say, Monday and Wednesday, and you taught from like the way that I do it, I go in at eight, and then I have back-to-back-to-back classes, you know, all the way until like one o'clock, and then you know, I have office hours after that, and then my Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually like my off days in terms that I'm not teaching in person, but I'm always like on campus doing something.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: But the the option has always been there that if you need to go do something, like go um give a lecture somewhere, go give a talk, which is what I do on occasion, or if you're doing research, for instance, for your next paper or what have you, like you have that ability to go off campus and and do that.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: So now, because um the Republican-controlled um legislature here in Texas uh has deemed it um uh so that instructors who are full-time faculty must be on campus a full 30 hours a week, whether or not you're teaching on on that day or not.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: They want you to be on campus, physically on campus, you know, because they they they think that we don't do anything, right?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: They think that we're somehow gaming the system, that we're just a bunch of bums who are collecting a check.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so to ensure that we that they at least control our our hours and control the things that we do, they want us to be physically on campus for at least 30 hours a week.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so how that's gonna work out for people who have other teaching engagements, because some professors do adjunct in a different um uh institution altogether, right?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like I used to adjunct at UT Arlington teaching Mexican American history on my on my off days from Dallas College or what have you.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: So, how's that gonna work?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, are they gonna make exceptions for people who are and can prove that they're teaching elsewhere, or is that also going to not be allowed now anymore that that they've mandated this thing?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's fucking nuts, man.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's crazy.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, what are you idiots doing?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna not only is it infringing on our academic freedom, but it's going to limit the ability for a lot of us to engage in our scholarship that we do outside of teaching.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: And and that's exactly what they want.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: They don't want us to be engaged in scholarship because they see all of uh higher education as being quote unquote woke, liberal, yeah, the enemy, anyway.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: The enemy.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, well, that might say something about your ideology and your worldview if the things that are um you know academic in nature, the things that um involve rigorous investigation happen to be things that are diametrically opposed to your ideologies.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, maybe you might want to rethink your positions, right?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like they don't see it that way, right?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: He loves the poorly educated.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's kind of where we are.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: We it's it's it's set to begin this fall semester, and so it's uh it's still kind of very uh up in the air at the moment.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure how that's gonna play out.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: Damn.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you'll have to keep us updated on that, because that's some crazy shit, man.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_04: And speaking of crazy shit.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_04: I caught the latest, or I don't know if it's the latest, because I don't really keep up on it, but recently there was a video um that Jubilee puts out called Surrounded.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_04: And it's where they have one person with one particular view and then like 20 people sitting around them of the opposing viewpoint, and they they debate like every single person in the circle.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_04: Um it's not really conducive to debate.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_04: Like they don't I've never actually seen a debate happen.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_04: It's usually people who were so far removed in their beliefs that they just yell at each other for a while.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_04: But that's funny.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_04: One of the yeah.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_04: One of the most recent ones had uh Mehdi Hassan uh as the person in the middle, and he was surrounded by like all of these Christian nationalists.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_04: And one of them um and a lot of people have been talking about it online because one of these smug little pricks said, uh, I am Native American, whites are Native American.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_04: And this like set off this whole like you know, uh conversation online, like what the fuck is this dude talking about?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_04: Like how how are white people identifying as Native American?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_04: And so it's prescient, my friend, that you uh just so happened to uh write a little script about something that's along those lines that that uh fits into that mold.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think we have kind of discussed it before, not at length, but we have like when we've talked about uh Chicano identity and the tension between that and Native American identity, and I think I might have mentioned before that there is this uh and that that I you know I I can see the point of view coming from people who are card-carrying Native Americans who say, well, you know, you might be indigenous and you might belong to a group that that claims indigenity, but you're not officially recognized, and and that means something to us because how do we know you're not just one of these white people that claims that they're native, we know with a small N, Native American, because they were born and raised in the in the US and they can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower or whatever, you know?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like and and I think that's where this is coming from with these white people who are claiming this that they're Native American, native quote unquote with a small N, not a capital N as a Native American uh or American Indian, right, I should say.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, and and this has been an issue for a long time, and and it's something that's also come up on the Discord, uh, and maybe we can get into that in the uh the Discord conversation uh at the end of this in the discussion and say a little bit more about how this kind of came up.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: And this is what gave me the idea to to really look into this this topic.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so well, you want to properly introduce the topic today, my friend, so we can get going.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so right now we're calling the episode Indigenous Mountaineers, but I might think of uh something saucy to change that.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_04: And this is episode 83 of the regular episode uh I might call it the White Native Americans of Appalachia.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think that'll get some some eyeballs.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I bet.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: All right, so let's get going.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: So today we're going to talk uh about or really tackle a really fascinating and frankly provocative topic.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we're talking about an article that was uh penned by Stephen Pearson titled Indigenizing Settlers: The White Appalachian Self and the Colonial Model of Appalachian Um Exploitation.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I've heard different people um pronounce it Appalachia, Appalachian.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not really sure how how do you usually say that word?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: Is it Appalachia?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_04: I usually say Appalachian.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_04: But uh there's a member of my crew who's from the south who's from this region, so I should just ask him tomorrow.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think I've heard people from that area pronounce it.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think they pronounce an Appalachia, so I'm just gonna stick with that for this episode.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: So this is gonna be a deep dive into how that article uh goes into this notion of white Appalachians and how in some ways they have come to see themselves as an indigenous population, uh literally an indigenous population.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but it's different from what we would consider as an indigenous population.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll we'll see how that that plays out for them, right?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: So this is a powerful and complex argument that's being made.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: So when we think of Appalachia, we often think of the cultural stereotypes, the economic struggles and the environmental battles.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, some of these things uh have been uh passed down through us through various cultural memes, right?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's the uh the coal miner's daughter, like that's one of those that kind of ties in and taps into this whole notion of the uh Appalachian whites, right?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um but this article by Pearson reframes that entire narrative through the lens of settler colonialism, which is a topic that has come up in the Discord uh a few times, and that's what kind of prompted me to kind of take a deep dive into this and see what I find or what I found.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and so this is what I came up with, this article, which suggests that, as Pearson says in the article, that it's a project of self-indigenization indigenization.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: So self-indigenization, these people are self-ascribing indigenity to themselves.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: And this has been something that has been underway for several decades.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: And and I believe Pearson, somewhere in the article, makes a connection to that community.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm not sure how connected like uh generationally is, but he does um uh I believe has either relatives that live in that area or he himself comes from that area, one of the one of the those two.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so he has uh a personal connection to this, and so he's speaking about this topic from a very personal uh perspective.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and he writes about it quite a bit, I think, because I I did a quick Google on him, and uh some a a handful at least of articles popped up about the same topic.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I should say this this is an article that um is from 2013.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um but as Pearson himself says, it's not just about cultural identity.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: So according to Pearson, this identity project is deeply political.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not only just identity, but it's politics.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: And those two kind of always go hand in hand, right?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: So uh there's really no way to separate those.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Even if you try to separate them, there's always some kind of tenuous connection from one end to the other.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: But what he's trying to say here with this article is that this has real-world consequences for how people themselves view the land, the history, uh, and their place within that society.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: So the article uh by Pearson argues that by framing themselves as indigenous, white Appalachians can negotiate their own place in a complex system, often without acknowledging the foundational act of settler colonialism itself.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: Some people, I mean, these people probably don't even know what that term means.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Those two words put together, settler colonialism.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: If you probably talk to the average white Appalachian, they're gonna look at you like you're crazy.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but that's exactly what they're doing without realizing it.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: So in a very like subconscious way, that's what they're engaging in, right?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: Settler colonialist.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_04: So are you suggesting that they don't read Fran's Frenon, fanon in uh Napalachia?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I hesitate to say that they should because then we end up with people like JD Vance.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe not.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, no friends fanon for you.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: Because Pearson's article is, as I said before, is from 2013.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: He opens with a perspective that can uh very well be applied to many of today's current white supremacist groups with ties to the reactionary tea partiers of the time.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you're old enough to remember 2013, if you were paying attention at that time, we had a group of people, which some in the media I've heard this before over and over again because they try to always both sides things, and I was like, they try to paint the Tea Partiers as uh an organic group, right, that came from the grassroots.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: And while there were a lot of people who eventually were from the grassroots that came to be part of the Tea Party movement, its origins are deeply tied to corporate uh uh um political and corporate lobbyists who were definitely trying to um get white people riled up against the black president at the time, Barack Obama.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: What one might one might call them useful idiots.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: Useful idiots, exactly.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: So while there's this persistent idea that the Tea Party was a grassroots movement, uh no, it was not.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: And as we as we note it, uh or as I noted just now, Pearson explains this kind of at the at the very onset.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: So uh Curly, if you want to uh go ahead and and um open us up with that that quote there from Pearson about the Tea Partiers.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_04: The Tea Partiers dressed up as their misconceptions of Indians, new age practitioners engaged in their misconception of Indian religious rituals and so on.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_04: Though the Appalachian Appalachian, Appalachian?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_04: What are what are we deciding on?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_04: Appalachian?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_04: I'm saying Appalachian.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_04: So we'll keep it consistent.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_04: Though the Appalachian whites, I will examine, did make comparisons between their situation and that of American Indians impersonating American Indians or presenting an idealized conception of American Indian relationships to the land as alternatives to economic and environmental exploitation was not unusual.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_04: Instead, Harry Cowdle, Helen Lewis, white who are white Indian apologists, and others code features of white Appalachian culture as traditional, native and indigenous in their own right, positioning these features as anti-colonial alternatives to other settler cultures.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_04: These theorists and activists do not attempt to play Indian, indeed.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_04: They make a claim to indigenous status for themselves and their culture without reference to Indianness.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that's an important point.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_04: In these cases, uh settlers do not primarily assert indigenity by associating their lifeways, culture, or political resistance with Indianness, but rather by the elision of Indianness.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_04: These discursive replacements of American Indians by settler whites enact a separation of Indian-ness and indigenity.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_04: Claims to native status are often not intended to be metaphors, but to be accurate descriptions of the settler Appalachian relationship to the land.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I should note here that um Pearson here is responding to uh the notion that um people who are not part of the white Appalachian and Native American um framework are uh before this, if you were someone who was white and you were plain Indian, which is one of the the books uh that that he cites by uh Philip Deloria, who happens to be Vine Deloria Jr.'s uh son, and he wrote a book some years back called Plain Indian.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: And in that book, one of the first instances that he cites going back to the colonial period when um the first uh um revolutionaries, right, the Patriots were rebelling against the king and all that stuff.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that they did, and this is something that I open up with my students in class uh when we're talking about um the Revolutionary War period, is I tell them, I I even um show them the image from the time that was done and that was uh plastered all over the various leaflets that were handed out throughout the colonies about the Boston Tea Party, right?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of these uh uh patriots they call themselves the Sons of Liberty.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: That was that was the name of their secretive organization uh that they were you know engaging in and revolutionary, and if you're looking at it from the king's perspective, traitorous acts, right?
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so they had to do this uh behind closed doors and and you know, hidden away from from visibility.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so when they go to protest and throw the tea overboard at the at the Boston Harbor, many of these people go dressed up as Mohawk Indians.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: They literally dress themselves up as indigenous people, as Native Americans, and that's one of the very first, very visible and very much tied to the foundational rhetoric of this country of white people, settler colonials, plain Indian, so that they can they can claim freedom and independence from the mother country, right?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: So this is a very long tradition that goes all the way back to even before the founding of the nation.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it goes back to a lot of those mountaineers, right?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's the subject of of this episode.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so, in order to advance the notion of Indigenity, these scholars like Cowdl and Lewis have to scaffold it with an existing analytical framework.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: One such approach is to appropriate the rhetoric employed by actual indigenous activists.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: A central idea that emerges is the colonialism model of Appalachian exploitation.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: So this model gained traction in the 1960s, largely in response to what was called the quote-unquote culture of poverty.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that was a model that was used at the time.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so the old way of thinking was that Appalachians were poor because of their quote-unquote traditionalism and quote-unquote fatalism, kind of the same way that a lot of marginalized people have always been referred to as, you know, why they are poor, why they are ignorant, is because they have this traditional culture, because they have a fatalistic culture, et cetera, et cetera.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: So this new model that they come up with that ties it to exploitation and colonialism flips those uh ideas onto their head, right?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: They're coming at it from a different framework altogether.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so this is a classic uh change in perspective.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: So instead of blaming the victims, which is what the other the older model did, this model, the colonial one, popularized by figures like Harry Cowdle and Helen Lewis, they looked outward.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: And by this, the uh Pearson argued that Appalachia itself wasn't a cultural backwater, it was a colony, and an internal colony of the United States, exploited by powerful absentee-owned corporations, especially the coal industry.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: So in Lewis's own words, uh she bluntly states that.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_04: I wrote an article titled Fatalism or the coal industry to counter the culture of poverty explanation, which blamed the victim.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_04: I laid out the colonialism model instead.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so the colonial uh model, the internal colony model, is one that was used going back to uh uh Franz Fanon and others, um, who were using it to argue for the liberation of third world peoples, right?
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: Going back to the 40s and the 50s, and especially the 60s, and it really takes hold by the late 60s and the 70s.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: And it's something that even you know, among Chicanos, like that's one of the uh frameworks of analysis that the early Chicano scholars were using, people like uh uh Rodolfo Acuña and and others before they were criticized by the this new line of Chicano scholars who were looking at it from not more of not necessarily a racial perspective, but more of like a working in a class perspective, uh a class war perspective, right?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: More of a Marxist view.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so, but so so what these scholars are saying is that there's that that same colonial model that was applied to these other marginalized people, because these people are also marginalized, it also applies to them, right?
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: So they're they're making this two-pronged approach here.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: Not only are these people indigenous by the fact that they have these traditional ways, uh, but they're also part of uh of the internal colonial model, which is another aspect of being indigenous.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: And and so uh this is where the indigenization begins.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: Advocates of this model, like Kaudel, started using terms like quote-unquote indigenous mountaineers.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: They crafted a narrative that said early white settlers uh after adapting to the environment became a kind of quote-unquote pale-faced Indian, right?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: Just let me repeat that.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: They became a quote-unquote pale-faced Indian.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: So these people are now full-fledged indigenous people with a white face.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: They adopted some Native American survival skills, like using deer skins for clothes, and this was framed as a process of becoming native to the land.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: So this idea of like going native, right?
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: We still hear people say that.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: This ties directly into this notion of indigenous mountaineers, of the frontiersmen, uh, and that sort of stuff, right?
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, for instance, take this description by Cowdle of the development of the quote unquote native status of the whites who settled in eastern Kentucky.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_04: By the time of the Herrodstown settlement, much of the pioneer society in this mountainous region had resided in the wilderness for three or four generations.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_04: They had already become thoroughly adapted to their environment.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_04: They had acquired much of the stoicism of the Indians and innumerment to primitive outdoor living had made them almost as wild as the red man, and physically nearly as tough.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_04: His old woman could endure hardships and priviation as well as the Indian squaw gross and was far more fruitful.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_04: The white man became almost a pale faced Indian.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_04: He ate the Indians corn and jerked meat.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_04: He wore the Indians' deerskin clothes, he even adopted his tomahawk, and here only on the rampaging frontier, the white borderman collected scalps with all the zest of the Choctaw Brave.
• 30:55
  unknown: Wow.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_04: Interesting.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_04: So romantic.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: So that was a description that was given to us by Cowdle.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so Rebecca Scott, another sympathetic scholar on the topic, you know, I mean, to her credit, she tries to be uh a little bit critical and offer more of a nuanced um analysis, but in the end, there's there's a lot of cryptic messaging that she does, and she comes off as being a straight-up apologist for these uh indigenous mountaineers.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so this is what she had to say on the topic.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_04: The claim to native-like status is entangled in a colonizing logic at the same time as it expresses an aspiration to another way of life.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_04: If deployed casually, it erases the original presence of Native Americans in the area and the colonial history of the region.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_04: Claims to white victimization can serve as a reassertion of centrality and universality, especially when a near exclusive focus on white injuries suggests that this suffering is uniquely wrong.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_04: From another angle, however, these comparisons also reflect the inherent instability of identity categories.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_04: Instead of insisting on a politics of purity, recognizing the contingency of identity formations opens movements up to emergent coalitions and the possibility of change.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_04: So did you did you hear it?
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: Did you pick up on it?
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's it's right there.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's not easy to catch and pick up.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: But despite her recognition of Native American erasure, the uh apologetic tone in Scott's text is subtle with phrases like, quote unquote, aspiration to another way.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: What is the aspiration?
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: Who's aspiring to what?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: Or even the idea of quote unquote emergent coalitions and the possibility of change.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: Like this is uh tying into this notion of pan-Indianism.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: She doesn't frame it in those terms necessarily, but I'm sure that that's on her mind.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: She's saying, Well, why can't these whites also be just as an another white another native tribe and they can be part of the same pan-Indian collective of indigenous peoples, right?
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: The rainbow tribe.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: The rainbow Exactly.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: The Rainbow Tribe.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: Look it up, folks.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's a thing.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: Pearson notes this by pointing more problematic language in her work.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_04: Scott consigns American Indians to the past, noting just their original presence and colonial history, eliting the settler colonial present and the erasure performed on indigenous people now living in the region.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_04: What her final sentences intend to indicate remain unclear.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_04: The idea of indigeneity is not called into question when settler whites claim to be indigenous, and Scott does not describe how such claims would destabilize indigenous identity.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_04: As Divan Mehuisa Meheswa Meheswa argues many people self-identify as Indian, but this is not a legitimate classification.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_04: And the same logic applies to Appalachian whites who claim to be indigenous.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_04: Boom.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: Smack.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: As Pearson calls, also calls out Cowdow's anti-Native American racism, he used derogatory terms like quote unquote savage and quote unquote contemptible to describe Native Americans, even as he was using the concept of indigenity to describe quote unquote white Appalachians, right?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: And white white continues to be capitalized in throughout this entire um uh text.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I noticed.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: You noticed that.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, hmm.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: This is a crucial contradiction that Pearson says his successors largely ignored.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: They took the colonial model but left the overt racism out.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: So he's saying they're they're improving their narrative, they're improving their arguments, but but you can still see the overt racism is out, but it's still subtle.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's still there.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: If you read between the lines, it's still right there.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: So it's important to note that this conversation about indigenization is tied directly to land ownership, which is a huge issue in Appalachia.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: The article by Pearson mentions that in a 1981 survey by the Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force, a whopping 72% of land in 80 counties was absentee owned.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_02: And in case you don't know what that means, absentee owned means that someone who does not reside in that county or even that state is the owner of that land.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's a lot.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's a lot of 72%.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Sheesh.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: This created a destabilized population.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: People who lived on the land but didn't own it.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: And this is where the indigenization discourse becomes a tool, right?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you're a people who's dispossessed, then you begin to see yourself as someone who is owed something.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: This is our land.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's, you know, the people owe it, right?
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so it allowed white Appalachians to fight for land claims against other settlers, the corporate owners, right?
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: So I like the way that the Pearson paints this here.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: He's saying you have two settler communities or entities that are fighting for the land, and one is claiming to be indigenous, and the other one is painted as the colonial other, which is so bizarre, right?
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_02: The foreign colonizing force.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: And again, so without having to confront the original act of indigenous land dispossession, right?
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's what he's saying here.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: He's calling them out.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: They could argue that, quote, this is our ancestral land, and these corporations are outsiders stealing it.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that is exactly what a lot of these uh so-called um white Appalachian Mountaineer indigenous activists do.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: They they claim that they're being robbed of their patrimony.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_04: And these are claims that could be like this whole dispossession of their community and and selling off of the land.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_04: These are claims that could be made legitimately without having to resort to And by the way, we're the indigenous people, you know, we should be recognized as indigenous.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Well, legitimate in the sense that they they can fight for this based on colonial um argumentation, not necessarily indigenous uh argumentation.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah, that's what I mean.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so, but that that's the core argument, right, that Pearson here is laying out, that this narrative often involves the erasure of indigenous peoples altogether.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: For instance, the name Appalachia itself is an appropriation from the Appalachian people who were displaced and eventually ended up in Louisiana.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: And honestly, I'm not even sure if they're still there.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't I didn't look it up, but that's uh that's what I understand historically.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the narratives of white settlement in this framework often treat the region as a terra nullius or empty land ready to be settled.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Native Americans are either absent from the story or they're mythically integrated with the arriving white settlers, who are then conveniently imagined as the true inheritors of the land.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: So there's always this vanishing Indian aspect to this as well.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_02: This indigenization project isn't just an academic exercise, it's been used by activists for decades.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: Pearson talks about figures like Marie Cirillo and Judy Bonds, who use this rhetoric to demand that development projects prioritize quote unquote indigenous people with quote unquote indigenous knowledge.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_02: And some activists have taken this even further.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: And you laugh because it's funny as hell.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: Who are these indigenous people and what indigenous knowledge?
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: The white mountaineer indigenous people with their white indigenous knowledge.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: Get out of here.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_02: So you have people like James Branscomb and Bo Webb who have used the language of genocide to describe negative stereotypes and environmental destruction from mountaintop removal or MTR.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: Branscomb even made this really striking and frankly ridiculous claim that TV shows like the Beverly Hillbillies were a more intensive effort to quote unquote destroy a minority people than anything directed at black or Native American groups.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: Let me say that again.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: The Beverly Hillbillies did more damage to minority white indigenous, quote unquote, white indigenous people than anything that has ever been done against any black person or Native American in this country.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_02: So this is what Pearson calls a super secessionist settler colonial fantasy, right?
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: Where a group takes on the role of indigenous victims and revolutionaries.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_02: For example, Curly, please enlighten us.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_04: I love this quote, by the way.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_04: So this is from uh the book Annihilating the Hillbilly: The Appalachian Struggle with America's Institutions.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_04: And it is written by James Branscomb.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I'm not sure what year.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_04: Let me see here.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, it might say it on the article.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_04: So here's so this is from the actual this is from the book.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_04: This is like page two, I believe, but I love this quote.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_04: As read by Foghorn Lakehorn.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_04: In September, CBS began its new television season with the theme Let's All Get Together.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_04: If you watch television on Tuesday nights, you know that Who Got Together Back to Back were the stars of three Amer three of America's most popular TV programs, the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Hee-Haw.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_04: Each week, millions of Americans, I say I said millions of Americans gathered around their sets to watch this combination, which has to be the most intensive effort ever exerted by a nation to belittle, demean, and otherwise destroy a minority people within its boundaries.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_04: Within the three shows on one night, hillbillies are shown being conned into buying the White House.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_04: Wait, that's bad.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_04: Coddling a talkin' pig, well, who wouldn't?
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_04: Come on.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_04: And rising from a corn patch to crack the sickest jokes on TV, which, by the way, were my favorite parts of the Kiha.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_04: I say, I say, all on the same channel, all only a short while after Eric Severid has completed his nightly lecture to the American public on decency, integrity, dignity, and the other great American virtues to which he and his network supposedly adhere.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_04: If similar programs, even approaching the maliciousness of these were broadcast today on blacks, Indians, or Chicanos, there would be an immediate public outcry from every liberal organization and politician in the country, and a scathing editorial in the New York Times about the program's lack of taste.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: At least he included Chicanos in there.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: Chicanos.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_02: Chicanos?
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: Chicanos.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe he's talking about the Chicanos.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_02: Pearson informs us that Webb and Bonds have taken the internal colonialism model to its absurd conclusion by taking indigenizing rhetoric to an extreme level of social religious self-delusion.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_02: Again, Curly, please, enlighten us.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_04: But not as foghorn leghorn.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_04: Bonds stresses the length of white land tenure, invoking Euro Christian divine providence as proof of legitimate settlement.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_04: Damn, that sounds like the current DHS fucking uh Twitter posts right there.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_04: Ma'am.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_04: The peop to quote, the people in my family were mountaineers before they were coal miners.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_04: We have been managers of the land for centuries.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_04: In the mountains here, God gave us everything we need.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_04: It wasn't until the rest of the country realized that there was coal in them their hills that they came and stole and conned our ancestors out of the land.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_04: End quote.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm surprised.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: They came before the Indians.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like that right there.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think?
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps one of the most vivid examples of that Pearson gives us is from an anti-MTR activist named Chris Irwin.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, this guy's a character.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: He was accused of being an outsider, and he responded by making a geological claim to the land, which is ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous claim to make.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: Irwin, who is of Scotch-Irish descent, essentially claimed a quote unquote primordial connection to the land by saying that the Appalachian Mountains and the mountains of Ireland and Scotland were once part of the same continent.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_02: Pangea.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: Pangea! Before humans.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_02: Pangea, dude.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: This guy took it all the way to Pangea.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: Before dinosaurs.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_02: Before dinosaurs.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, the Scotch-Irish have a thousand years of connection to those mountains.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: A relationship that predates corporations, empires, and even the English language.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_04: I should note that it would have been longer than a thousand years, though.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_04: Angea was a little bit longer.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_04: A little bit, a little bit.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_04: Just a tiny bit.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_04: And and to get back to your your previous joke, I just thought of this.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_04: If you wrote that they came before the Indians, you could call yourself uh Ivan von Serio.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_02: You like that?
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: So back to Erwin.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_02: In his own words, tell us, Curly, what is this nonsense?
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_02: This is so good.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_04: And this this is meant completely seriously, by the way.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_04: Like this guy is being serious when he wrote this.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_04: At one time, all of the continents formed one megacontinent called Pangaea.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_04: You can look at how all the continents on a globe would fit together like pieces of a puzzle and see what Pangaea once looked like.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_04: And since the Appalachia Mountain chain is one of the oldest in the world, it ran through Pangaea.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_04: And when Pangaea broke up, so did the Appalachia Mountains.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_04: Where did the other half of the Appalachia Mountains end up?
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_04: Ireland and Scotland partially.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_04: For those of us who are Scotch Irish, our relationship with the Appalachian Mountain chain goes back for literally a thousand years.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_04: A thousand years at least.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_04: The genetic history, as well as the cultural history, which pounds in the veins of the Scotch Irish is inseparately interwoven into the Appalachian Mountains.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_04: We belong to these mountains.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_04: The irony of being called an outsider for defending these mountains against a rapacious corporate carpet bagging coal company from Florida.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_04: Damn that's hardcore, man.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_04: I know, man.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_04: In the face of these facts is amazing when you think about it.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_04: Our people lived and loved in this mountain chain before there were corporations, before there were empires, and indeed, even before there was an English language.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_04: Live left love epic.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_04: This guy, Irwin, I swear.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_04: I know he didn't say they laughed, though.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_04: He said our people lived and loved in the mountains.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_04: He was so close.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: There was no laughter.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't laugh.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_02: Too bad.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a bizarre narrative, to say the least.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_02: It makes him kind of a settler as returning native kind of guy, justifying his presence and the ownership by erasing erasing the Native Americans who were there.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's a strategy that has echoes in the quote-unquote settler as returning native rhetoric seen in much of the Zionist discourse.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I hate to say it, there's a lot of similarity here.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot of this discourse that's been tossed around lately because of what's been going on over there with Palestinian people.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: And you can see that there's a lot of similarity.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_02: And it's one of the reasons why we did this episode.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_02: We'll get to that here in a minute, and what prompted it.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_02: And it ties into this, the Zionist discourse that's going on.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_02: What's even more egregious is Irwin's appropriation of the native slogan of 500 years of resistance.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_02: And those of you that have listened, right?
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: That have listened to this show for a while, we did an episode on this, uh, and much has been written about the 500 years of resistance, uh, which was back in 1992.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, the the idea of commemorating Columbus was uh you know a slap in the face of indigenous people who at the time organized against this nonsense and did their own um commemorations of resisting uh the colonization of the Americans.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so now he's over here, Irving is saying, Well, I'm gonna take your 500 and I'm gonna double it.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_02: We're a thousand years.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_02: Take that, you Indians, right?
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so, as Pearson notes, this creates a pattern of exceptionalizing white experience, right?
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: Doubling the number by registering a call of a thousand years of existence.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: You did 500 years, we're doing a thousand.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_02: We see your 500 years and we raise it.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_02: We raise a hundred.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so this pledges the fight against colonialist destroyers for the possession of the Appalachian Mountains for another thousand years, right?
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: So he's so he's like doubling up.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: We're better than we're even better than those Indians.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so the idea of being a protector of the land, a quote unquote keeper of the mountains, keeper of the mountains, that just I mean, what is this?
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_02: The Lord of the Rings?
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, is another huge part of this indigenization project.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: Pearson explains how this narrative appeared partly from how outsiders saw Appalachians as quote-unquote white indigens.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, did they?
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_02: Is that I was just gonna say, did I mean I don't know about that.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_02: Are you sure?
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_02: Sure about that name themselves as the rightful stewards, white Appalachians could argue that the rifle settlers, the corporate coal companies, were the ones failing the land.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very clever way to claim ownership and moral superiority, right?
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, you're not doing good by the land.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_02: We're the true people of the space, just like those Indians were, which we were first, but then they came and then so it gets very complicated and very convoluted very quickly.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so what we have here is this complex picture of a group of people who are both victims of economic exploitation and simultaneously beneficiaries of a settler colonial system because they are they're benefiting from all this.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_02: The article by Pearson concludes that this self-indigenization project is a deep and extensive uh attempt by white Appalachians to negotiate land claims and other inequalities among white settlers.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: So they're trying to right wrongs, as you were saying, Curly, that there's a way to do it if you're gonna do it through the system that they already belong to, that they're that their colonial forebearers, you know, imposed on the land.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: They can do it that way, but because they don't have that kind of clout, because they don't have that kind of power, they feel like, well, maybe what if we just claim our indigenity as this white other who's been indigenized?
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_02: And and now like it's it's weird because not only are they self-indigenizing, but they're also saying we're we've been we've we've been indigenized from without our own community.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: So we've accepted that, right?
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_02: By saying that we're being treated as white indigens, so they've happily sort of adopted that identity.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we've been othered, therefore that legitimizes our claims and status.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_02: But here's the ultimate paradox.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this discourse is aimed at fighting capitalist exploitation, it actually reinforces the very settler colonial structures that it claims to oppose.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_02: It does this by erasing the original violence of indigenous dispossession, right?
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you don't accept that it existed, if you don't accept that it was your ancestors who benefited from the erasure of indigenous peoples, then you are basically, you know, you're you're lying to yourself and you're also benefiting from those lies.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_02: The logic of genocide requires the disappearance of indigenous peoples so that non-indigenous people can become the quote unquote rightful inheritors of the land.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_02: And this is exactly what's happening here.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_02: The past is rewritten to begin with peaceful, you know, peaceful Europeans.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_02: They just came, they settled, you know, they were the good guys, and you know, all the original violence that was perpetrated against indigenous Americans, the original, the First Nations peoples is erased and is, you know, forgotten, and it's it's uh, you know, it's it's minimized, right?
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_02: So this leads to some truly disturbing examples like activists appropriating the suffering of Native Americans.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_02: There are even individuals calling for the construction of condominiums, a pale-faced trail of tears.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_02: You can you heard that right.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_02: You have these so-called white Indians who are now calling um the gentrification of their areas a pale face pale-faced trail of tears, because again, you know, they're suffering the same way that Native Americans suffered when they were kicked out from their homelands, which is a direct and shocking appropriation of the historical genocide of the American Indian people who were displaced by those very same settler colonial whites that these people descend from.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's outrageous, man.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I'm trying to contain my anger at this, just knowing this.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's ridiculous.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's not only it's it's infuriating, it's so absurd, and and oh my god.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, these baseless ideas contribute to the white Appalachian claims to a mythical quote unquote Indian blood through a Cherokee great-grandmother, right?
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_02: There's always that great, great Cherokee grandmother, and therefore, yeah, I'm Indian too.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_02: No, you're not.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_02: The article says this is a way to indigenize themselves, and in some cases to obscure African ancestry.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's all it is.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_02: If you really did a DNA test of most of these people who claim to have some indigenous ancestor, nine times out of ten, and I'm just throwing a number out, but I'm willing to bet that nine times out of ten, these people have more African ancestry than they do Native American ancestry.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_02: All the while ignoring the actual problems faced by contemporary indigenous people, right?
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_02: So we're gonna uh not only not care about the actual plight of the First Peoples, but we're going to assume that our plight supersedes theirs.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_02: The article's conclusion is so stark.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_02: It Pearson states that the true collaboration between settlers and indigenous peoples is impossible as long as white Appalachians see themselves as the indigenous population, right?
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_02: So you can't collaborate, you can't be part of the resistance against colonialism if you don't accept the fact that there are other people who were doing this before you and who have a more rightful claim to the land than you do.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_02: For decolonization to happen, the desire to possess indigenous land and culture must be abandoned.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's plain and simple.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's just as straightforward as that.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_02: You have to abandon these stupid notions, white Indians, right?
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_02: That you are not only that you're indigenous, right, but that you have some kind of claim to decolonization.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_02: You are the colonizer.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_02: They must, in the author's words, work to give them back, right?
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: This is Pearson is saying this.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_02: Pearson, one of your guys, is saying this.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_02: Give it back.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's all it takes.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's a heavy thought to end on, but a necessary one.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_02: This idea that you can't be an ally in decolonization while simultaneously benefiting from and reinforcing settler colonial structures is at the heart of this article.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, kudos to Pearson for that, for coming on and saying that straight up.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I hope that it forces these poor white Appalachians to ask tough questions about their own history, their own identities, and what justice really means in a place like Appalachia.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_04: Um I'm reminded of that uh quote from Malcolm X, and I'm gonna totally fuck it up because I don't remember it word for word, but to paraphrase Malcolm X when he talks about like, you know, if you stab me in the back and the knife goes in nine inches, and then you know, white people want to pull it out six inches and call it progress.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_04: And he's like, that's not progress.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's not progress until you pull the knife all the way out of my back.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_04: All the way out and then we work to heal that wound that was caused in the first place.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_04: But they don't even want to admit that they attacked us.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_04: Like they they don't even want to admit that they stabbed us to begin with, much less pull the knife all the way out and work with us to heal the wound.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_04: And that's like this brings to mind that uh that quote.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm sure I butchered that quote.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_04: So I'll look it up later.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, man.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_04: These uh the pale face trail of tears.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_04: Pale face trail of tears.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_04: And uh what's interesting is we have something a little bit similar here in New Mexico with the Hispanos.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_04: There's like this historian, um, and I'm not gonna name him because fuck him, but he's from northern New Mexico.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_04: And he makes this argument.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_04: I've seen this presentation he gives where he's like, well, Hispanos are s are basically the indigenous people, not because New Mexicans have indigenous blood and descend from indigenous peoples and practice indigenous culture, right?
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_04: Because they see themselves as straight up white Spaniards.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_04: And but they're like, since we've been here so long, we're now indigenous people and this is our indigenous homeland.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_04: And uh while all the while rejecting having actu any actual ties to indigeneity and like w actively warring with and going toe-to-toe with the indigenous peoples from New Mexico.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_04: So there's like this weird parallel there, too.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_04: That was the first thing I thought of when I was reading this.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_02: It did cross my mind too.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_02: I was I was hoping you would bring it up because that is something that I was thinking about as I was reading the article and doing the script for this.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, I'll leave that out of the script, but you know, I'm sure Curly might have a few things to say about that.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_02: But I did want to bring it back to this issue of Zionism, you know, before we get away from that and just to clear things out, right?
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_02: Like to clear what's going on.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like um one of the things that has come up um with uh in conversation with some of our Discord um uh members, but also just outside of that, like just personal conversations that I've had over the years, even before the current um you know violence that's taking place, uh because this has been going on for a very long time, right?
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_02: This idea that you have uh a state, the state of Israel, which is the entity, the government, the the polity, uh the nation state, where you have different groups of people who are citizens of it's not just Jewish people who are citizens of Israel.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_02: You have people who are Christian, you have people who are um Muslim, uh from different uh backgrounds, and and it's not a monolithic Jewish state as a lot of people have in their minds, right?
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like this is a very plural society, right?
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, Jewish people tend to be the majority.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so a lot of people can't seem to distinguish between being critical of what the state is doing, the government, yeah, and you know, criticizing that and calling it anti-Semitism, as you know, the um the leader of uh the what's his name, uh Netanyahu, right?
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh likes to likes to paint anyone who is critical, right, of of Israel and anything that they do anywhere at any time as being anti-Semitics like, well, you know, that's that's good propaganda for you because you're a politician and because it benefits you, even though you're at war with the people who can't defend themselves.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_02: And and this is it really a war if the other side's not really fighting?
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, whatever, right?
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_02: We're not gonna get into that here.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_02: But this idea that when the state of Israel was created, that these people who had not lived there for I don't know how many generations, but it had been at least over a thousand years, maybe, all of a sudden have the rightful claim to a land where other peoples have already lived for generations as well.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, um, Jewish people and and Israelites were not the only people who lived in that part of the world, even when it was quote unquote the original kingdom of Israel, it wasn't as big as it is now, it was smaller.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it grew and it shrunk, you know, because as empires and kingdoms tend to do over time when they conquer and then they get conquered, and then things like that, you know.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the just the the natural process of of human um um governments and things like that that happen over time, you know, it things are always in flux.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so this notion that that because at one point Jewish people were in that space that now all of a sudden it's theirs forever to the exclusion of everybody else.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so we have people, we have some scholars here, some or I don't know, maybe some scholars, but definitely some public figures, some people who are um public intellectuals, let's let's put it that way, who uh are some of them happen to be Jewish, some of them aren't necessarily Jewish, but they uh have an affinity or they support the Jewish state because it aligns with their political worldview, what have you, are making this claim that settler colonialism should not be a bad thing, right?
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_02: That that to call yourself a settler colonist is actually a good thing.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you're looking at it from the viewpoint of the state of Israel, you know, the state of Israel exists because you have the settler colony that went in and established that that Jewish state for the Jewish people who had been persecuted during the Second World War.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and sure, I get it.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I understand I'm a historian, I know the history, I'm not an expert on it, but I know the basics.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so I I understand where they're coming from, but at the same time, I'm thinking, well, it used to be that if you called someone a settler colonist, that it wasn't really a good thing because you were saying something about that individual, right?
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_02: You were saying that this person advocates for the seizure of someone else's land and the eviction of that of those people, uh, the ethnic cleansing of that space to make way for a new set of people that are going to come in and settle that space.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's literally what it means.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_02: You are a settler colonizing on someone else's land.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, to call yourself a colonist literally means that you are going from your homeland to somewhere else to set up a new community of people that are not originally from there, right?
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so now you have this rebranding and this rephrasing that kind of ties into this topic that we you know that we were talking about today with the white, so-called white Indians uh in Appalachia who are.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_02: I don't remember twisting those words, right?
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_04: Well, which I remember when that came out.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_04: This because a lot there was a lot of discussion about the city.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_02: You want me to say the name of this individual?
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_02: David Frum.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's who we're talking about.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's who it was.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_04: And he was like, we need to rethink like is settler colonialism really a bad thing or is it really bad?
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_02: You know, David Frum is one of these flea, slimy public figures who comes across as being, you know, I mean, he's he's educated.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna take that away from him.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_02: And he's intelligent, sure.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_02: But he's one of these people who, you know, operates like a politician.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_02: He's he's one of these people who will say one thing to suit the purposes of the moment.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_02: And and that's not really what a true scholar does.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_02: A true scholar is someone who cuts right to the chase and dissects and and and deconstructs the language that is being imposed on on whatever topic is being discussed to get at the core of it and maintains that the the the maxim that's that you can find within the core of that argument that's being made.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_02: And you're gonna maintain it whether or not it's something that you agree with, right?
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_02: You could disagree with it, but you say, I accept that this is true.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_02: Not that I'm gonna hold this truth to be self-evident until it's not.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_02: If it does until it doesn't suit my purposes, yeah, and then I'll just go with the next thing.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's not being an honest broker of the truth.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's what we call these people in academia.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_02: You're not being an honest broker of the truth because you are twisting the words and the ideas to suit your own your pet argument that you're making.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what's happening here, right?
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you have this whole refashioning of what settler colonial means, now it's a good thing.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_02: And now this idea that, oh, well, you know, being an Indian, a white Indian at that is okay because we've been here for a long time.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we lived here at least a thousand years since all you know, we're connected to Pangaea at least a thousand years ago.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that's that's the argument that these people are going with.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, Frum's thing was like settler colonial should not be an insult, right?
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's his thing, right?
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_02: I shouldn't be insulted by settler colonial.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's a badge of honor.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_04: And speaking of which, there's this great documentary.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know if you do you watch any any Louis Thoreau.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_04: I'm uh I'm a big Louis Thoreau fan.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, so he used to do a TV show.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_04: I think he mainly works with the BBC, but they're like these documentary series.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_04: One was um called Weird Weekends, where every weekend he would go out and and just like hang out with people with really bizarre beliefs.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think I've seen those.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_04: So he did one where he hang he goes to New York and he hangs out with black supremacists for the weekend and he engages with like Hebrew Israelites and the Nation of Islam.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_04: It's a it's great.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's fantastic.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_04: But he just dropped one on BBC about um Zionism and uh the settlements, right?
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_04: The illegal uh settlements that are taking place.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_04: And he goes in and he interviews like all these settlers and and they are unabashedly like just shameless about like, no, we want it all.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_04: This is gonna be ours, this belongs to us, and we're gonna take it.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_04: And he's like he's really good because he'll ask the questions just enough to where he allows them to you know, he gives them enough rope to hang themselves.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_04: Like he just lets them talk and doesn't really inju interject a lot, but he lets them speak and and it'll cut to like a shot of him where he just kind of you just see him going, hmm.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_04: So that's what you think, huh?
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_04: But I I forget what it's called.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_04: He did one a long time ago about ultra zy uh ultra-Zionists, and this is like his follow-up to it.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_04: And it's when the con it's within the context of the current situation right now of what's going on there.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_02: So we're not being paid by Louis Thoreau, so you know this this reminds me of a different show that was on a different network, I think.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um was it done through Was it done through uh my goodness, I'm forgetting.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um what's the name of the the um there was uh a black actor who was doing a similar show a while back?
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think Stone.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_04: Was it on Vice?
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, Vice.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_04: He's a comedian.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_04: Uh yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Hate Thy Neighbor.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_04: Is that the one you're thinking of?
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's kind of reminiscent of that.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_04: Or he would go and hang out with people.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_04: I saw a couple of those.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_04: He's like members of hate groups.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_04: Is it Kamal?
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_04: Is his name Kamal?
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_04: Jamal, Kamal.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_04: I can't remember his name, but he's funny, man.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm gonna have to look it up now.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, please do, because I'm gonna feel bad.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not remembering his name.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because it's a great show.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Hate Thy Neighbor, Jamali.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_04: Jamali.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_04: Um that's what it reminded me of when you were talking about.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_04: Jamali Maddox.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, it's it's got the same kind of vibe, uh, for sure.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_04: But the Louis Thoreau one, it's uh it's it's new.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_04: It's called The Settlers.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_04: And you could find it on BBC, and I'm sure somebody has uploaded it to YouTube at this point.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um so you could watch it there.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_04: I forget where I watched it.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_04: I think I watched it on the BBC.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_04: But uh, really good stuff.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_04: And it it really intersects with what we were talking about in this episode.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and the reason why I bring it up too is because I mean, this is something that we've been talking about for a very long time in reference to the hypocrisy that the United States has in place when it comes to the state of Israel supplying it with uh you know funds and weapons and security and you name it, resources to defend itself, to maintain itself under the excuse, right, that they they that their people belong in that space because of the Bible or whatever, right?
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_02: Some religious reason.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I'm thinking, and I remember we used to talk about this back in in the old forum days, like, well, you know, I mean, by that um, you know, token, like, where does that leave Native American people in the Western Hemisphere, right?
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, should we not also, because our ancestors were here way before a thousand years, since Pangea uh on these continents, right?
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like where's where's where's our um similar um um deference, right, for the land?
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_04: Well, first they have to uh recognize us as human beings, which given the current state of affairs in this country, we obviously do not qualify as human beings in uh in the eyes of those in power.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_02: So so when when I hear all these politicians and all these people uh in the in the public in the media uh you know with their their full throated support for Israel and the and their right to defend themselves, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_02: I sure I get it.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, then I I think about our people and our our ancestors and what we've had to go through and what we're still going through, and I'm like, what utter bullshit?
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like, who believes these people?
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, do they even believe it themselves, right?
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's a good question.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_02: Do they even believe it themselves?
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like how how if you were to press them, if this was a matter of life and death, like would they believe the bullshit that is coming out of their mouths, right?
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, who knows?
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_04: Like they they're they're just as likely as not to believe it, just because it benefits them, right?
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_04: You hold a position because it you think that it benefits you.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_04: So wish yeah.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_04: Well, they're afraid of the truth, my friend.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_04: What's that about the truth?
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_04: Well, the truth it's like medicine.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_04: R.I.P.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_04: Flaco Jimenez and Free Palestine.