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MAGA Wants to Ban his Books. Who was Howard Zinn? · The Real News Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Protest will always be useful. Protest will always be important.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: It always seems.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Protest always looks futile at the time that it takes place.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: But protest mounts up.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: If they thought protest was futile, they wouldn't send... the
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: police out every time.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: There's a demonstration.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: Have you noticed that, you know, you set up a
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: picket line of somewhere seven people and.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Twelve policemen show up.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: They must worry about protest because they know that small
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: protests lead to large ones.
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you all.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: It is such an honor to be here with you
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: all tonight in Red Emma's Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse in
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: our great city of Baltimore.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Give it up.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: And I am really, really honored and excited that we
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: get to chat to the man, the myth. legendary sports writer,
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: book author, documentary maker, political thinker, like a true love.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Warrior and a true role model for so.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: Many of us of what it means to just be
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: a good-hearted person and to fight for good.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Dave Zirin. Give it up for Dave, everybody. Now, Brother Dave.
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: Yes, sir.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: We've gotten to work.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: Together over at The Real News on your kick-ass show,
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Edge of Sports TV, right?
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Yes, sir.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: And so many of us know you through your sports
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: writing and your analysis and commentary on sports. But we're
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: here tonight to talk about your new book, which is
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: decidedly not about sports. And it is The People's Historian,
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: So, Dave, I want to start off this way. Who
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: was Howard Zinn? Who is he to you?
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: Like, why did you write a whole book about him?
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: And why was now the time to write that book?
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: Wow. So great to be here. Such a terrific question.
• 2:20
  Speaker 4: Just the quickest of side notes, that last clip of
• 2:24
  Speaker 4: Howard that you saw, that was his last mass meeting
• 2:27
  Speaker 4: that he ever did before he passed away in January 2010.
• 2:31
  Speaker 4: And it was at the convention of the campaign to
• 2:34
  Speaker 4: end the death penalty. And I just wanted to say
• 2:36
  Speaker 4: we have someone here tonight who is as responsible as
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: anybody for the fact that we don't have the death
• 2:41
  Speaker 4: penalty in Maryland right now, and that's Kenny Collins.
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: And I just wanted to.
• 2:57
  Speaker 4: A heart big enough to crush injustice sitting right over there.
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: So for me, I got to know Howard at the
• 3:04
  Speaker 4: end of his life. I got to travel with him
• 3:07
  Speaker 4: to different places and interview him on stage because he
• 3:10
  Speaker 4: was sharp as a tack at age like 86, 87
• 3:14
  Speaker 4: years old, but standing and doing a 45-minute lecture was
• 3:18
  Speaker 4: just something he couldn't do any longer. I'd gotten to
• 3:21
  Speaker 4: know him by writing a book in the People's History
• 3:23
  Speaker 4: series called The People's History of Sports in the United States.
• 3:27
  Speaker 4: And so I would sit with Howard on stage in 2008, 2009,
• 3:32
  Speaker 4: and he was just the easiest interview in the history
• 3:35
  Speaker 4: of the world. You would just say, civil rights, your thoughts.
• 3:40
  Speaker 4: And then 30 minutes later, he's interrupted five times by applause,
• 3:44
  Speaker 4: and everybody's standing up at the end cheering for him.
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: And afterwards, people would come up to me and say, yo,
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: you did a great interview. And I'd be like, I
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: said 12 words.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: It was awesome.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: And I got to sort of bask in the refracted glow.
• 4:00
  Speaker 4: And the thing about Howard is that when he would
• 4:02
  Speaker 4: speak about himself, it's so interesting thinking back to the
• 4:06
  Speaker 4: pronouns he would use.
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: It was always we. It was always us. It was
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: always they. And sometimes he would say you, but it
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: was always, what do you think?
• 4:16
  Speaker 4: What are you doing? It was never about I or me.
• 4:20
  Speaker 4: And but but backstage, of course, he would tell these
• 4:22
  Speaker 4: incredible stories.
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: And, you know, it's like out of nowhere. Oh, at
• 4:26
  Speaker 3: that time, I marched with James Baldwin in Selma. And
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: it's like, oh, sure, as one does.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 4:34
  Speaker 4: And so I said to him once, what we need
• 4:38
  Speaker 4: is a people's history of Howard Zinn.
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: And he laughed at that.
• 4:43
  Speaker 4: And that was actually my first proposal for the title
• 4:46
  Speaker 4: of the book. And my publisher said, well, that's too
• 4:49
  Speaker 4: inside baseball, which kind of insulted me because I'm a
• 4:52
  Speaker 4: sports writer. So they thought the only way I'd understand
• 4:55
  Speaker 4: it is if they said it was too inside baseball.
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: I was like, oh, I get it. OK, now I understand.
• 4:59
  Speaker 4: And then the second title I wanted was when I
• 5:04
  Speaker 4: was going through Howard Zinn's FBI files and they had
• 5:08
  Speaker 4: this sheet that was sent to J. Edgar Hoover in
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  Speaker 4: 1950 about Howard Zinn where they said he was 28
• 5:15
  Speaker 4: years old and they said, we are convinced he is
• 5:18
  Speaker 4: a subversive who wants to overthrow the United States. He
• 5:21
  Speaker 4: is a spy maybe for the Soviets and the proof
• 5:23
  Speaker 4: of this is that he has an alias. And so
• 5:27
  Speaker 4: you look closely, and you're like, what's the alias? And
• 5:29
  Speaker 4: it's listed right there, and it's Howie. So I wanted
• 5:34
  Speaker 4: to call the book, Code Name Howie, The Outsized Life
• 5:39
  Speaker 4: of Howard Zinn. And I never thought I would write
• 5:42
  Speaker 4: a book about Howard Zinn when he passed away in 2010.
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: I never thought I would in a million years.
• 5:47
  Speaker 4: But something interesting started to happen during the late 2000
• 5:51
  Speaker 4: teens and into 2020. which is a lot of people
• 5:56
  Speaker 4: started to get in touch with me and say, what
• 5:59
  Speaker 4: do you think Howard Zinn would say about the Black
• 6:02
  Speaker 4: Lives Matter movement? What do you think Howard Zinn would
• 6:04
  Speaker 4: say about the rise of Trumpism? What do you think
• 6:06
  Speaker 4: Howard Zinn would say about the growth of right-wing fascist authoritarianism?
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: And they would ask this.
• 6:12
  Speaker 4: Question kind of gingerly and even a little bit scared. Like,
• 6:16
  Speaker 4: was Howard Zinn wrong that struggle is how the world changes?
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: Because we've struggled. And look where we are. Donald Trump
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: is in charge. So what if struggle just doesn't work?
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  Speaker 4: You know, and they ask this with fear as if
• 6:29
  Speaker 4: somebody like has the God failed was almost with the
• 6:32
  Speaker 4: question like that kind of sadness. And I was thinking
• 6:36
  Speaker 4: about some of the stories that Howard told me who
• 6:38
  Speaker 4: through his life. And thought to myself, you know what,
• 6:42
  Speaker 4: I'm not going to try to write anything or even
• 6:44
  Speaker 4: say something that tries to answer that question for somebody
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  Speaker 4: who's no longer with us. That's not a job of
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  Speaker 4: any journalist or author to speak for those who can't
• 6:52
  Speaker 4: speak for themselves. But he left behind so many breadcrumbs
• 6:56
  Speaker 4: from his life. about how to fight right-wing tyranny, about
• 7:00
  Speaker 4: how to maintain in difficult times, about how.
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: To ride through movements when they're at their.
• 7:06
  Speaker 4: Most perilous, that it's just like his life is an
• 7:09
  Speaker 4: example for us about how to survive the 2020s. And
• 7:13
  Speaker 4: the fact that somebody born in 1922 who died 16
• 7:17
  Speaker 4: years ago could generate a crowd like this in Baltimore
• 7:20
  Speaker 4: and generate crowds like this or bigger in cities that
• 7:23
  Speaker 4: I've been to, it just speaks to the fact, not
• 7:26
  Speaker 4: only of his influence, but the fact that we're all
• 7:29
  Speaker 4: trying to wrestle with these questions right now of hope, optimism,
• 7:34
  Speaker 4: and how change can happen in very difficult times.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Hell yeah.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: Well, beautifully and powerfully put as always, brother. And like,
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: You know, I think one of the many things I
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: love about this book is not just that I get to,
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: you know, enjoy more of your writing, which, like, is
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: really chicken soup for my, you know, weary, radical soul
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: these days. And I know I speak for a lot
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: of us when I say that. But there's so much
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: of Howie in this book.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Like, you did find so many.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: quotes that feel so perfectly and gently and gingerly and
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: rightly placed in the book. And I wanted to actually
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: have you read one without giving us context up front.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: But the one there on page 21, read that passage
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: from Howard.
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  Speaker 1: Zinn, and then I'll throw a question at you about it.
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. You want just the red part, right? That he read.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Okay. Okay.
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  Speaker 3: This is from when Howard was.
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  Speaker 1: No, no context.
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: No context, sorry, sorry, sorry.
• 8:42
  Speaker 4: Exactly at 10, banners unfurled. People started chanting. It was fantastic.
• 8:50
  Speaker 4: So my friend and I relieved two women holding a
• 8:53
  Speaker 4: banner and then we heard sirens. And before I knew it,
• 8:57
  Speaker 4: cops with clubs began beating the demonstrators. I was spun
• 9:01
  Speaker 4: around and got hit on the side of my head.
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  Speaker 3: I was out. I woke up in a doorway.
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  Speaker 4: The demonstration was being scattered, and it was an absolute
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  Speaker 4: shocking experience because I had no idea the police would
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  Speaker 4: react like this to an innocent demonstration, that an innocent
• 9:19
  Speaker 4: group of people could be perceived.
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  Speaker 3: As that menacing.
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  Speaker 4: From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal,
• 9:26
  Speaker 4: a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I
• 9:30
  Speaker 4: was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in
• 9:34
  Speaker 4: this country.
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: Not just the existence of poverty amidst great.
• 9:38
  Speaker 4: Wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black and brown people,
• 9:42
  Speaker 4: but something rotten at the root. Since then, I've come
• 9:45
  Speaker 4: to understand we need not just a new president or
• 9:49
  Speaker 4: new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the
• 9:53
  Speaker 4: introduction of a new kind of society, cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Hell yeah. So, first, give it up for Howie on
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: that one.
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  Speaker 3: Okay.
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  Speaker 2: Now, if you please, give us the context of that
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: story that Zinn is telling us, and what it means
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  Speaker 2: for him to make that journey from being what he
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: calls a liberal to being a radical.
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  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
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  Speaker 4: So Howard Zinn is born in 1922 in Brooklyn, New York,
• 10:33
  Speaker 4: a very different Brooklyn than the Brooklyn of 2026, to
• 10:37
  Speaker 4: put it mildly.
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  Speaker 3: And his childhood was a childhood of poverty.
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  Speaker 4: Of going from tenement to tenement, of outrunning landlords as
• 10:47
  Speaker 4: a young child with his immigrant parents and his three
• 10:50
  Speaker 4: brothers just going from apartment to apartment. And he'd written
• 10:54
  Speaker 4: and I spoke to him about how he still had
• 10:57
  Speaker 4: this fear of rats to this day because of how
• 11:00
  Speaker 4: they would appear in the apartment and how they would
• 11:02
  Speaker 4: cuddle up in their blankets because they were so scared
• 11:05
  Speaker 4: of getting rat bites. And it's one of the things
• 11:08
  Speaker 4: about Howard Zinn that I always so respected is that
• 11:10
  Speaker 4: he would thunder, and he would rarely get mad, but
• 11:13
  Speaker 4: he would thunder angrily about people who were poor, who
• 11:18
  Speaker 4: became wealthier, who would romanticize their poverty. And he would say,
• 11:22
  Speaker 4: we must never romanticize poverty. Poverty is violence, and I
• 11:27
  Speaker 4: will never romanticize my own upbringing. And he became this
• 11:31
  Speaker 4: incredible reader growing up and like finding books on the
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  Speaker 4: street and reading them.
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  Speaker 3: Things like Charles Dickens.
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  Speaker 4: Was his first love, and then his parents, they had
• 11:43
  Speaker 4: very little money, but they signed him up for an
• 11:46
  Speaker 4: encyclopedia chapter of the month club through the newspaper. So
• 11:50
  Speaker 4: he's just reading encyclopedias and whatever he could get his
• 11:54
  Speaker 4: hands on.
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  Speaker 3: And the Brooklyn of now we're into the.
• 11:58
  Speaker 4: 1930s was also just this absolute hotbed of political activism.
• 12:03
  Speaker 4: I mean, as one person said who I interviewed, if
• 12:06
  Speaker 4: you weren't some kind of communist, anarchist.
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  Speaker 3: Or socialist, we really thought you were just dead from
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  Speaker 3: the neck up. in the 1930s of Brooklyn.
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  Speaker 4: And Howard Zinn was somebody who just loved arguing with
• 12:17
  Speaker 4: people on street corners.
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  Speaker 3: Loved talking politics. He was very radicalized, not.
• 12:22
  Speaker 4: Just by the poverty and the racism and the segregation
• 12:27
  Speaker 4: of Brooklyn of the 1930s, but also radicalized by the
• 12:30
  Speaker 4: anti-fascist movement in Europe at that time. I mean, imagine
• 12:33
  Speaker 4: being a working-class kid in Brooklyn in the 30s, and
• 12:37
  Speaker 4: you see a poster of somebody from your.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: Neighborhood who you knew who's returning from.
• 12:42
  Speaker 4: Spain because they were over there with what were called
• 12:44
  Speaker 4: the Abraham Lincoln Brigades fighting Franco's fascism. So you're a
• 12:49
  Speaker 4: working-class kid in Brooklyn, and you're seeing a kid just
• 12:52
  Speaker 4: like you who's back from Spain where he was.
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: On the anti-fascist front lines.
• 12:57
  Speaker 4: So an incredibly sort of radicalizing experience for him. But
• 13:02
  Speaker 4: he still wasn't somebody with a clear kind of set
• 13:04
  Speaker 4: of politics in terms of like the system actually needs
• 13:08
  Speaker 4: to be uprooted and changed. And that changed for him
• 13:11
  Speaker 4: dramatically as a teenager when one of the street corner
• 13:15
  Speaker 4: radicals invited him to that demonstration that you talked about.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: And that was in Union Square, New York, over on
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: 14th Street.
• 13:23
  Speaker 4: Again, Union Square very different today than it was.
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: In the mid, in the late 1930s. And it was
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: there where he.
• 13:32
  Speaker 4: Got knocked upside the head by the police and like
• 13:34
  Speaker 4: actually generations of radicals certainly I think share this experience
• 13:38
  Speaker 4: is that when you come into direct contact with the state,
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: it changes you forever and very fundamentally.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: Well, and say a little more about what would continue
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: to change Howard Zinn fundamentally when he entered military service
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: during the World War?
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: Well, first I gotta say, how many people have seen
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: the movie Forrest Gump? Out of curiosity.
• 14:05
  Speaker 4: Like, imagine if Forrest Gump was directed by John Sayles.
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: Like, radical, working class filmmaker. That's like Howard Zinn's life.
• 14:14
  Speaker 4: And imagine if instead of Forrest Gump you have this
• 14:18
  Speaker 4: learned historian. And he's just at these incredible junctures of
• 14:23
  Speaker 4: US history bearing witness. That's why the subheading of the
• 14:26
  Speaker 4: book is The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. Because he
• 14:29
  Speaker 4: wasn't just this historian who was trying to make history.
• 14:32
  Speaker 4: He wasn't just somebody going to demonstrations. He's in these
• 14:36
  Speaker 4: like cinematic landscapes. Like we just talked about Brooklyn, the Depression,
• 14:41
  Speaker 4: the 1930s. Then he becomes a bombardier during World War
• 14:45
  Speaker 4: II because he wants to fight fascism. He becomes a
• 14:47
  Speaker 4: bombardier even though he'd never been on a plane.
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: That's how much he hated fascism.
• 14:52
  Speaker 4: He's like, I'm going to get on a plane and
• 14:54
  Speaker 4: fight fascism. But he leaves World War II committed at
• 14:59
  Speaker 4: this time. He called himself a pacifist and somebody who
• 15:03
  Speaker 4: was anti-war for the rest of his life. That was
• 15:06
  Speaker 4: one of the results of his experience after being asked
• 15:09
  Speaker 4: and told and ordered to bomb civilians in a French
• 15:13
  Speaker 4: resort town called Royanne, a place he later visited in 1966.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: But then.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: Early years of the civil rights movement.
• 15:21
  Speaker 4: He's at Spelman College, a woman's HBCU, teaching this incredible
• 15:26
  Speaker 4: generation of students like Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman
• 15:32
  Speaker 4: and many more. Bernice Johnson Regan, who was part of
• 15:35
  Speaker 4: the SNCC Freedom Singers. And so he's there at ground
• 15:39
  Speaker 4: zero of the start of the civil rights movement. And
• 15:41
  Speaker 4: then he becomes the adult advisor along with someone you
• 15:44
  Speaker 4: might have heard of named Ella Baker of the Student
• 15:47
  Speaker 4: Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. And then he's at
• 15:50
  Speaker 4: the center of the anti-war movement against the war on
• 15:54
  Speaker 4: the people of Vietnam.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: In the 60s.
• 15:56
  Speaker 4: And so he's just at these moments where he's able
• 16:00
  Speaker 4: to play this role in helping make history, but also
• 16:04
  Speaker 4: playing a role that I think we have a lot
• 16:05
  Speaker 4: to learn from, particularly as I say in one chapter,
• 16:08
  Speaker 4: as a white guy in the black freedom struggle, like
• 16:11
  Speaker 4: his behaviors as a white person, I think are actually
• 16:14
  Speaker 4: a model for how white people need to approach anti-racist struggle.
• 16:18
  Speaker 4: And the fact that he was doing that decades before
• 16:20
  Speaker 4: we started even having those conversations seriously is really interesting
• 16:25
  Speaker 4: to me. Other issues as well, like he and his
• 16:28
  Speaker 4: partner Roz, when they went up to Boston, one of
• 16:30
  Speaker 4: the first things they did was set up mental health
• 16:33
  Speaker 4: clinics for people who were part of the movement against
• 16:36
  Speaker 4: Jim Crow, who were coming back to North with PTSD
• 16:39
  Speaker 4: from what they experienced. And so this idea of something
• 16:42
  Speaker 4: we talk a lot about now, like self-care, you know,
• 16:45
  Speaker 4: like they were trying to practice that even though it
• 16:48
  Speaker 4: had yet to be articulated. So it's this, and that's
• 16:51
  Speaker 4: why I think he has so much to say to
• 16:52
  Speaker 4: 2026 because he was living that life of struggle.
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: For over 70 years.
• 16:58
  Speaker 4: So, so much to learn from that when somebody is
• 17:01
  Speaker 4: an activist in these incredibly huge junctures of history for
• 17:05
  Speaker 4: over 70 years.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: Well, and, like, you and I have joked about this
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: at The Real News that I feel the same way.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: About Mark Steiner, right? Yes. Baltimoreans will know Brother Mark Steiner.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: But, like, you know, that guy is very much cut
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: from that same cloth and that same great Jewish radical
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: tradition as well.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: But speaking of which, I want to— The.
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: Jewish part's important, but we can talk about that later.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: Well, and, like, maybe we can— weave it into this
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: question because I wanted to circle back to that passage
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: that I had you read, right? where Howie is talking
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: about that moment when he no longer identified as a liberal,
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: this country, not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth,
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: not just the horrible treatment of black and brown people,
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: but something rotten at the root. I wanted to ask you,
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: Dave Zirin, if you had a moment like that in
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: your life.
• 18:15
  Speaker 4: Lord, first of all, I'll answer that, Max, but only
• 18:18
  Speaker 4: if you answer it, too, because you are a radical
• 18:20
  Speaker 4: of the first order.
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: So your story demands to be heard. Is that a deal?
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: Deal. All right.
• 18:26
  Speaker 4: The easy answer is I started to believe that this
• 18:29
  Speaker 4: country needed to be fundamentally overturned. when my sister gave
• 18:34
  Speaker 4: me a book called A People's History of the United States.
• 18:39
  Speaker 4: And that's God's truth that changed me. To the letter
• 18:45
  Speaker 4: truth is that she bought me A People's History of
• 18:47
  Speaker 4: the 20th Century, an abridged version of A People's History
• 18:51
  Speaker 4: of the United States because she knew her little brother
• 18:53
  Speaker 4: and knew I would never read a book that was
• 18:55
  Speaker 4: this thick.
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: It would have ended up a doorstop in my house.
• 18:58
  Speaker 4: And instead, or my dorm, And instead, though, she gave
• 19:02
  Speaker 4: me something she knew I would read. And it fundamentally
• 19:04
  Speaker 4: changed the way I looked at the world. It changed
• 19:06
  Speaker 4: the way I looked at sports, which was my obsession.
• 19:08
  Speaker 4: So that's the easy answer to say I read this
• 19:10
  Speaker 4: book and it changed me. But books, I think, are
• 19:13
  Speaker 4: never really enough to turn you into somebody who just
• 19:17
  Speaker 4: wants to turn the system upside down. And my answer
• 19:20
  Speaker 4: to that where I was just like bleep this system.
• 19:24
  Speaker 4: to its core, happened at not necessarily something that was
• 19:29
  Speaker 4: ostensibly political. But I used to do graffiti piecing. And
• 19:34
  Speaker 4: I was working with red paint. And it was getting
• 19:38
  Speaker 4: on my hands a little bit. And someone called the police.
• 19:42
  Speaker 4: And I was arrested with a friend and ended up
• 19:47
  Speaker 4: spending a couple of days in prison. and had to
• 19:51
  Speaker 4: deal with the police officer laughing that they caught me
• 19:53
  Speaker 4: red-handed because I had red paint all over my hands.
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: I had to hear that joke about 50 times and.
• 19:57
  Speaker 4: They kept telling each other it like it was the
• 19:59
  Speaker 4: funniest thing.
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: In the world.
• 20:01
  Speaker 4: And the way me as a white kid, a college student,
• 20:07
  Speaker 4: still was treated... while in prison and speaking, or in jail,
• 20:12
  Speaker 4: I should say, I shouldn't call it prison, but in jail,
• 20:15
  Speaker 4: and how long those days felt was something that, by
• 20:20
  Speaker 4: the time I was out of there, I wanted to set.
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: I don't know if I should say this too. I
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: was really angry at just everything.
• 20:29
  Speaker 4: Like just talking to people, being around that for a
• 20:33
  Speaker 4: couple of days. It reminded me, there's this quote by
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: Oscar Wilde when he was talking about being in jail
• 20:40
  Speaker 4: where he said, every day feels like a year, but
• 20:42
  Speaker 4: it's a year where the days are really long. And
• 20:47
  Speaker 4: it's just that idea. And I don't, for one second,
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: want to make it I mean, it was two days,
• 20:53
  Speaker 4: for goodness sakes. But you're asking me, like, what was
• 20:56
  Speaker 4: a pivot moment where you just start thinking this system
• 20:59
  Speaker 4: is just beyond wrong.
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: And that really was it for me.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: Well, and, like, you know, it's an experience that, you know,
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: so many people don't have but have such strong opinions about.
• 21:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: And it's the kind of thing where if you have
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: experienced it, or someone in your family has, you don't
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: go around talking about the criminal justice system the way
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: our culture loves.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: To talk about it.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: I work with Mansa Musa, who was locked up for
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: 48 years.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: You know him well.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: Brother Eddie Conway, a legend in our history and at
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: the Real News in Baltimore. He was in there for
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: 44 years. The things they've told us are horrific. But
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: even just getting a taste of that, even just recognizing
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: that the system is not just made for the bad people,
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: the worst of the worst.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: When it comes for you or people you know who don't.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: Fit that description, the country is getting a crash course
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: in what that looks like right now. But that is
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: the violence coming uphill. Like, it has been there in
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: places like jails and prisons, in sacrifice zones, in the poor...
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: and abandoned parts of this country that sucks up the
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: resources and life from places and abandons them since the beginning.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: So I had a similar experience. When it came to
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: my place in America, my belief in the country I
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: lived in, in the kind of future I was going
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: to have, the life I was going to be able
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: to make for myself, the things that I and many
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: in my generation, who at least had some sense of
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: class mobility in the 90s and in the post-Cold War moments,
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: the dot-com boom, it was.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: In retrospect, feels like the kind of heyday of what
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: I'll experience this country as. But so many things that
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: felt possible then don't anymore. And what really made me
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: and my family learn that was the crash in 2008
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: and the recession and that whole awful, heavy period where
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: over the course of years we lost... everything that my
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: parents had worked for. Like, we were the American dream.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: We were a mixed immigrant family, middle class, Orange County,
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: you know, like, it was great.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: And then it all went away. We lost the house
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: I grew up in.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: We lost so much of ourselves and the family we
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: were before that.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: And, you know, I graduated from.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: College with a degree in Russian literature thinking that, like, oh,
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: we were like, oh, yeah, he can go be a professor.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: You know, they make good money. They're respected.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: We actually knew one who lived on our block, so
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: we thought he could be like that. We had no
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: idea how screwed higher ed was or how dumb of
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: a decision that was, but I sure learned when I was, like,
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: holding that degree and all the debt it took to
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: get it and, like, working 14-hour days at a body-crushing, mind-numbing,
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: soul-killing warehouse or factory in Southern California while my dad
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: drove Uber and my mom handed out samples at Sam's Club.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: And, like, everything was going down the drain.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: And I'm watching the damn TV tell me that.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: The country's back, the economy's back, the banks.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: Got bailed out, these guys got bailed out, you know,
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: everything's great. And like, you know, we're sinking further into
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: the couch and into the abyss the whole time. And
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: that period taught me a lot. I wasn't radical by
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: any means. You know, I was conservative. I grew up
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: very conservative. I had shirts that had me with Ronald
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: Reagan's face on it and stuff like that. If anyone
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: ever wants to blackmail me. I guess I'll tie this up.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: The point being is that we had a lot of
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: right reasons for believing what were ultimately the wrong things
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: back then in the 90s and 80s and early aughts.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: We believed in meritocracy not knowing how untrue it was,
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: but we thought the argument was sound.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: And we wanted to believe.
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: That we could make a life for ourselves based on
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: our merit, not the color of our skin.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: That's why that spoke to us.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: It wasn't a bad reason to believe that, but whether
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: it was that or whether it was the sort of
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: classist belief That the people who are working in these
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: big beige warehouses that we drive past on the freeway
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: every day probably deserve to be there.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: Or the people locked up in those big awful.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: Prisons in the middle of nowhere, they deserve to be
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: there and treated horribly. Like when you get a taste
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: of what it's like to be in there and when
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: life pushes you in there. And when you start getting
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: beaten by the system and seeing how rotten it is
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: and who it serves and who it doesn't serve and
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: how little you mean to it, no matter how much
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: you defended it before, you learn some shit.
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: It changes you.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: All right, now I want to shut up and go
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: back to you because this is your book talk.
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: So true, though. No, well said, man.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: Well, so I want to talk about.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: You know, like the radicals in and like how he
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: was treated in his day.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, you write about in.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: The book that, you know, this guy was like, you know,
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: a public enemy during the Red Scare, the J.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: Edgar Hoover, you know, like hated him.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: And, you know, to this day, post-mortem, like he is,
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: you know, in the hall of fame of books that
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: piss off the MAGA right and that get targeted.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: For book bans.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: So, like, I wanted to ask if you could sort
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: of talk to us about the parallels between the kind
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: of persecution of Zinn and what he stood for then
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: and the continuing need of our oppressors and the people
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: who stand for the opposite of what he stood for
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: continue to try to silence and bury him today.
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 27:23
  Speaker 4: Howard Zinn wrote a play called Marx in Soho. which
• 27:26
  Speaker 4: is an amazing one-person play. And a lot of people
• 27:31
  Speaker 4: joke that it's basically Karl Marx speaking, but he somehow
• 27:36
  Speaker 4: found a time machine and traveled ahead 100 years and
• 27:39
  Speaker 4: then is commenting on the previous 100 years and what
• 27:42
  Speaker 4: capitalism has done to the world. And it's very funny,
• 27:46
  Speaker 4: much funnier than I think Karl Marx ever was. So
• 27:49
  Speaker 4: a lot of people joke that it's more like Zinn
• 27:51
  Speaker 4: in Soho, like it's his voice.
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: Because it really sounds like Howard. And there's this.
• 27:56
  Speaker 4: Line in it where Howard, as Marx, if you want
• 27:59
  Speaker 4: to put it that way, says, why do they feel
• 28:02
  Speaker 4: the need to bury.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: Me again and again and again?
• 28:06
  Speaker 4: And that speaks to why Howard Zinn matters so much
• 28:10
  Speaker 4: to 2026, because they.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: Haven't stopped trying to bury him, and he.
• 28:13
  Speaker 4: Hasn't stopped rising up to be able to teach a
• 28:17
  Speaker 4: new generation of kids. I mean, Donald Trump, who, by
• 28:20
  Speaker 4: the way, is the Picasso of bullshit artists, and has no,
• 28:24
  Speaker 4: I guarantee you, he has no idea who Howard Zinn is. Remember,
• 28:28
  Speaker 4: this was the person who said Frederick Douglass is doing
• 28:31
  Speaker 4: great work.
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 28:34
  Speaker 4: And he talks about Zinn in speeches and he blames
• 28:39
  Speaker 4: Zinn for, quote unquote, the left wing mayhem in this
• 28:42
  Speaker 4: country and uses it to justify book bannings, school boards
• 28:48
  Speaker 4: that prevent not just Howard Zinn, but all radical. He
• 28:50
  Speaker 4: becomes the stand in for all radical histories and keeping
• 28:54
  Speaker 4: them smuggled, keeping them out of the classroom to the
• 28:56
  Speaker 4: point of which teachers have to smuggle them in. to
• 28:59
  Speaker 4: be able to teach their students. One teacher said to me,
• 29:02
  Speaker 4: I'm no radical, but Howard Zinn is the only thing
• 29:04
  Speaker 4: that keeps my students off their phones. And so it's...
• 29:09
  Speaker 4: There's an importance to his work in terms of how
• 29:12
  Speaker 4: it makes the student feel alive, how it makes them
• 29:15
  Speaker 4: feel like they're a part of making history and not
• 29:18
  Speaker 4: just somebody who's an object of history or a victim
• 29:22
  Speaker 4: of history. I can be somebody who fights back. I
• 29:25
  Speaker 4: can be someone who makes history. And obviously, the reason
• 29:29
  Speaker 4: why the right wing, fascism, fascists, they want to keep
• 29:32
  Speaker 4: those ideas out of our heads because what could be
• 29:35
  Speaker 4: more dangerous for them than ordinary people thinking if I
• 29:39
  Speaker 4: want to, I can depose you and create the kind
• 29:42
  Speaker 4: of society that I want to create. They want to
• 29:45
  Speaker 4: erase that idea from people's heads, an idea rooted in history.
• 29:50
  Speaker 4: I had the utter privilege recently of being able to
• 29:54
  Speaker 4: sit with Mumia Abu-Jamal political prisoner in Pennsylvania for several hours,
• 29:59
  Speaker 4: and we were talking about Zinn, who, by the way,
• 30:01
  Speaker 4: would visit Mumia on death row and they would speak
• 30:04
  Speaker 4: to each other. He said the reason why they are
• 30:10
  Speaker 4: waging a war against history is.
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: Because their agenda demands ignorance.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 30:17
  Speaker 4: Now, that's a beautiful way to say what Donald Trump said,
• 30:20
  Speaker 4: much less poetically, where he said, I love the uneducated.
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: They're my favorite people. I mean, they want us to
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: not know.
• 30:27
  Speaker 4: Our history because, first of all, they know we're going
• 30:30
  Speaker 4: to fight back. They wouldn't have the National Guard piled
• 30:32
  Speaker 4: into D.C. picking up trash off the ground if they
• 30:36
  Speaker 4: didn't know that they are creating conditions for for people
• 30:39
  Speaker 4: being furious and fighting back. What they also want us
• 30:42
  Speaker 4: to do though is to have us have to relearn
• 30:45
  Speaker 4: all the lessons from history which will slow down our
• 30:48
  Speaker 4: side from victory.
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: They don't want us to know our history.
• 30:52
  Speaker 4: They don't want us to know something that Howard Zinn
• 30:54
  Speaker 4: said once very beautifully, which is he said, the way
• 30:57
  Speaker 4: things are are not necessarily the way things will be
• 31:02
  Speaker 4: or could be.
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: And that's really important.
• 31:04
  Speaker 4: Too, because far too often I think we as radicals
• 31:07
  Speaker 4: live too much in the present tense and are just like,
• 31:11
  Speaker 4: what is life five feet in front of my face?
• 31:13
  Speaker 4: And that's what politics are when politics are the past,
• 31:17
  Speaker 4: which informs the possibility for a better future.
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: That's the first thing. about why Zinn matters today and.
• 31:25
  Speaker 4: Why this war that they're waging on him, it has
• 31:28
  Speaker 4: real life repercussions on policy and on government. I'm dealing
• 31:34
  Speaker 4: with this right now with the 10 year anniversary of
• 31:36
  Speaker 4: Colin Kaepernick first taking a knee and how incredibly, yeah.
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: Colin Kaepernick.
• 31:45
  Speaker 4: Coming to Coppin State September 25th to speak. And the
• 31:49
  Speaker 4: degree to which there's been this utter distortion and rewriting
• 31:52
  Speaker 4: of what that was all about. And frankly, what that
• 31:56
  Speaker 4: whole period was about of the Black Lives Matter movement.
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: And not only.
• 32:00
  Speaker 4: The right wing, obviously, who have not waged such a
• 32:04
  Speaker 4: backlash against that period. That they've created entire police forces
• 32:08
  Speaker 4: now rooted in counterinsurgency movements.
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: And they've made ICE, you know, a higher budget than
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: the U.S. Marine Corps.
• 32:14
  Speaker 4: It's all about domestic, quote, unquote, pacification that police chiefs
• 32:18
  Speaker 4: in the United States have learned in part by going
• 32:21
  Speaker 4: to Israel to learn from police chiefs over there. People
• 32:26
  Speaker 4: can Google the real programs to teach police. in this
• 32:29
  Speaker 4: country from the Israelis about how to do pacification in
• 32:33
  Speaker 4: this country, in our cities. So that phrase, we are
• 32:35
  Speaker 4: all Palestinian, is not just this abstract call for solidarity,
• 32:39
  Speaker 4: but it's how we are being treated in our own cities.
• 32:43
  Speaker 4: And so that's very real. And I'm sorry to.
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: Go off on that tangent, but it's just.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: Brother, it ain't no tangent. We all came out to
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: hear you talk about it.
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: But it's just what.
• 32:55
  Speaker 4: So you've got the backlash on the right. That's how
• 32:58
  Speaker 4: they're treating the... The Black Lives Matter movement scared the
• 33:01
  Speaker 4: holy shit out of them. And their response to that
• 33:03
  Speaker 4: has been to create a police state of counterinsurgency. When
• 33:08
  Speaker 4: ICE gets these electroshock gloves, that's because.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: Of how much the Black Lives Matter movement scared them.
• 33:13
  Speaker 4: That's why they take the drills and put them on
• 33:18
  Speaker 4: the ground where it's written Black Lives Matter, because they
• 33:20
  Speaker 4: want to uproot the memory of what that was. But
• 33:23
  Speaker 4: now we're also seeing people on the liberal left say, oh,
• 33:27
  Speaker 4: that period in the 20 teens, that was just woke 1.0,
• 33:31
  Speaker 4: as AOC put it, and says we were just demanding
• 33:33
  Speaker 4: too much, when the reality is maybe we didn't demand enough.
• 33:37
  Speaker 3: And when they.
• 33:39
  Speaker 4: Try to characterize that period in the 20-teens as somehow
• 33:43
  Speaker 4: silly or immature, when they caricature it as, oh, look
• 33:47
  Speaker 4: at those crazy demands to fund the police, all they're
• 33:50
  Speaker 4: doing is helping the right enact a further backlash on
• 33:53
  Speaker 4: our side when we should be celebrating what people fought
• 33:57
  Speaker 4: for in the 20-teens. So what's been so bothering me
• 33:59
  Speaker 4: as a sports writer.
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: Is all these people have been, several writers have been like,
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: Colin Kaepernick, it was quite a moment, but I guess
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: it wasn't a movement. And it's like, wasn't a movement.
• 34:13
  Speaker 4: It was a movement that, in the modern sense, first
• 34:16
  Speaker 4: of all, it goes back hundreds of years if we're
• 34:18
  Speaker 4: talking about the struggle for black liberation, but in the
• 34:20
  Speaker 4: more recent sense, it started the day George Zimmerman murdered
• 34:24
  Speaker 4: Trayvon Martin in 2012.
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: It extended through Ferguson, Missouri.
• 34:29
  Speaker 4: Colin Kaepernick became a sports amplifier of that movement because
• 34:34
  Speaker 4: of the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
• 34:37
  Speaker 4: And then that grew out into hundreds of high school
• 34:41
  Speaker 4: athletes around the country taking a.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: Knee when that anthem would play. And it's like, that
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: is a movement.
• 34:49
  Speaker 4: And then, of course, it culminates in 2020 with the
• 34:51
  Speaker 4: largest protests after the police murder of George Floyd that
• 34:54
  Speaker 4: this country had ever seen.
• 34:55
  Speaker 3: So for them to take.
• 34:56
  Speaker 4: Colin Kaepernick and decontextualize him and say, oh, he was
• 35:00
  Speaker 4: just some wacky guy taking a knee during football games
• 35:03
  Speaker 4: and he lost his career because of it. By the way,
• 35:07
  Speaker 4: probably the only actual victim of cancel culture is Colin Kaepernick.
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: The way they took his job.
• 35:13
  Speaker 4: But it's just to say that our side needs to
• 35:17
  Speaker 4: understand that that history of the 20 teens, we can't
• 35:21
  Speaker 4: surrender control of the memory of that decade because in
• 35:25
  Speaker 4: a bipartisan sense, they are trying to rewrite. And oh
• 35:29
  Speaker 4: my God, saying this in Baltimore is so poignant because
• 35:32
  Speaker 4: it was in Baltimore after the police murder of Freddie
• 35:34
  Speaker 4: Gray that the bravery of people on the ground in
• 35:37
  Speaker 4: this city in the face of so much state oppression,
• 35:41
  Speaker 4: as the Real News Network documented assiduously, is one of
• 35:45
  Speaker 4: the most inspiring things I've ever borne witness to, for
• 35:49
  Speaker 4: goodness sakes. But we live in a country rooted in
• 35:52
  Speaker 4: white supremacy, where they care more about a CVS getting
• 35:57
  Speaker 4: broken into in Baltimore than they cared about the Capitol
• 36:01
  Speaker 4: building getting ransacked on January 6th, because it was white
• 36:04
  Speaker 4: people doing it on January 6th, and it was a
• 36:07
  Speaker 4: different situation in Baltimore. So it says something about they
• 36:11
  Speaker 4: cared more, they were outraged more about the CVS than
• 36:14
  Speaker 4: they were about their own Capitol. But it's just to say,
• 36:17
  Speaker 4: if I could, and I'm sorry to go on.
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: No, no. So long with this stuff. Go on, baby.
• 36:23
  Speaker 4: But it's just to say that we cannot surrender the
• 36:28
  Speaker 4: memory of the bravery. that people showed in this city
• 36:32
  Speaker 4: in particular, and that's what they want us to forget.
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: And that's evil, because what it does then is.
• 36:37
  Speaker 4: The next time there's struggle, once again, we're trying to
• 36:40
  Speaker 4: figure it out again. We're not carrying the lessons forward.
• 36:44
  Speaker 4: And I think people ask me a lot of the
• 36:46
  Speaker 4: times about like, well, what does Howard Zinn offer us
• 36:48
  Speaker 4: in 2026?
• 36:50
  Speaker 3: Because optimism, whatever, pie in the sky is fine. He
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: was an optimist.
• 36:55
  Speaker 4: But he wasn't just an optimist. He was somebody who
• 36:57
  Speaker 4: dealt with facts and dealt with history. And I think
• 37:01
  Speaker 4: history is what our movements so desperately need, like a
• 37:04
  Speaker 4: conversant knowledge in history. Like when I was coming up
• 37:08
  Speaker 4: as an activist, it seemed like everybody had read People's
• 37:12
  Speaker 4: History of the United States and the autobiography of Malcolm X.
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: As a baseline.
• 37:17
  Speaker 4: And so there was this lexicon or vocabulary that we
• 37:21
  Speaker 4: shared talking about that history. And I think we need
• 37:24
  Speaker 4: to re-implant that right now, right in the middle of.
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: Our struggles to know that history.
• 37:28
  Speaker 4: And that's what Howard Zinn brings to the table today
• 37:31
  Speaker 4: in 2026.
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: And I.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: Know we got to kind of bring this around the
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: final turn here, but I wanted to just push you
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: to keep going a little more Because those who want
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: to silence it and erase this history, what version of
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: history do they want us and future generations to believe?
• 37:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they want us to believe one of two things.
• 37:59
  Speaker 4: You've got the right wing and the liberal left version
• 38:03
  Speaker 4: of history, neither of which I would argue help us
• 38:06
  Speaker 4: at all going forward. The right-wing version is, of course,
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: that history is the creation of really, really wise, powerful
• 38:15
  Speaker 4: white men. And through their brilliance, reaching down from the
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: shining city on a hill, they have brought us to
• 38:23
  Speaker 4: this remarkable place of progress, delivered us from savagery, and
• 38:28
  Speaker 4: brought us to this profoundly wonderful civilization where AI wants
• 38:33
  Speaker 4: to eat our children. The best of all possible worlds
• 38:38
  Speaker 4: that we're living in right now. And that is obviously
• 38:43
  Speaker 4: very easy to debunk, but it's what Trump, that's why
• 38:46
  Speaker 4: he's putting warning signs in front of the Smithsonian.
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: Warning, history herein.
• 38:52
  Speaker 4: And why they forced out Lonnie Bunch as the head
• 38:54
  Speaker 4: of the Smithsonian, because it's for putting forth a version
• 38:57
  Speaker 4: of history that goes against the great white man theory
• 39:01
  Speaker 4: of that this is how the world spins. The liberal
• 39:04
  Speaker 4: left have their own version of this, though, where their
• 39:08
  Speaker 4: argument is that with every generation, we are building a
• 39:11
  Speaker 4: more perfect union. And Barack Obama has only given about
• 39:16
  Speaker 4: 100 speeches.
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: With this theme. It's just like President Obama.
• 39:21
  Speaker 4: He gives speeches about how every generation takes the baton
• 39:25
  Speaker 4: from the last to build a more perfect union.
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: We keep improving. Yeah. the country is flawed, and yes.
• 39:31
  Speaker 4: The Constitution, it's a document in progress that we keep
• 39:36
  Speaker 4: making better and more inclusive. I mean, I don't see
• 39:39
  Speaker 4: how you can live through the past 10 years and
• 39:41
  Speaker 4: think that at this point. And so they call Howard
• 39:46
  Speaker 4: Zinn's politics this is the big liberal left critique of Zinn,
• 39:50
  Speaker 4: is that he looks at.
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: Things too simplistically.
• 39:53
  Speaker 4: What could be more simplistic than saying this country keeps
• 39:56
  Speaker 4: getting better by the generation? That's an absurdity on the
• 40:01
  Speaker 4: face of it, but especially over the last 10 years.
• 40:04
  Speaker 4: And Howard Zinn's version of history, that oppression is actually
• 40:08
  Speaker 4: baked into the cake of this system. And there's a
• 40:11
  Speaker 4: reason why the book is not just called A People's
• 40:13
  Speaker 4: History of the United States, but A People's History.
• 40:14
  Speaker 3: Of the United States 1492. to the present.
• 40:19
  Speaker 4: So he roots the United States founding with the expropriation
• 40:23
  Speaker 4: and genocide of indigenous peoples and their land and then
• 40:27
  Speaker 4: of course the transatlantic slave trade and then the entire
• 40:30
  Speaker 4: history of the United States is then that battle of
• 40:33
  Speaker 4: oppressor versus oppressed and it's also a battle of of
• 40:38
  Speaker 4: forward progress, but then also vicious backlashes, but then how
• 40:43
  Speaker 4: we beat back the backlash. And that's really what Howard
• 40:47
  Speaker 4: Zinn lived for as an activist, much more than as
• 40:50
  Speaker 4: a historian, was.
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: Beating back the backlash.
• 40:54
  Speaker 4: And I love that that sort of ferocious approach to
• 40:57
  Speaker 4: the world is something we really need right now. Because
• 41:00
  Speaker 4: I believe that right now, we are in the first
• 41:02
  Speaker 4: stages of beating back the backlash. When apolitical members of
• 41:07
  Speaker 4: my family are getting in touch with me and asking
• 41:09
  Speaker 4: about how we can shut down a data center, it
• 41:12
  Speaker 4: really just starts to make me think, like, okay, maybe
• 41:15
  Speaker 4: something actually is brewing during a period that can feel
• 41:18
  Speaker 4: so incredibly gray.
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: Well, and like to really kind of end on that
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: note of family, I love this book and all the
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: ways you've helped me and us understand the many people
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: and things and experiences that made Howard Zinn who he was.
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: And I wanted to sort of ask you in that
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: vein if you could tell.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: Us about.
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: You know, how Howie Zinn has sort of made you
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: who you are, and the person the book is dedicated
• 41:56
  Speaker 2: to made you who you are.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: Oh, Lord.
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: All right, all right, let's just keep the... All right.
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: All right. My mom passed away during the writing of
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: the book.
• 42:10
  Speaker 4: It took six years to write, and about year three,
• 42:14
  Speaker 4: she passed, and.
• 42:17
  Speaker 4: And like I wrote in the introduction that what my
• 42:19
  Speaker 4: mom taught me was that if you ever really want
• 42:23
  Speaker 4: to think of yourself as somebody who understands a people's history,
• 42:28
  Speaker 4: you first have to learn.
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: How to love people.
• 42:32
  Speaker 4: And I've met a lot of folks in my time
• 42:35
  Speaker 4: who love the people but aren't so great with people.
• 42:42
  Speaker 4: And it was what my mom taught me to the
• 42:45
  Speaker 4: core of my being. And just to say that in
• 42:50
  Speaker 4: the last months of her life, when she'd be up here,
• 42:54
  Speaker 4: we'd always drive to the Real News Network for my show.
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: And she was sick.
• 42:59
  Speaker 4: And y'all were just so beautiful to her.
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: And it meant so much to me. So I really
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: want to thank you for that, Max, so much.
• 43:08
  Speaker 4: And Kayla, who's here as well, and Dave Hebden, and
• 43:12
  Speaker 4: everybody who made, and Cameron, if he's here, and everybody
• 43:15
  Speaker 4: who made my mom feel so welcome.
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: She just loved y'all.
• 43:22
  Speaker 4: But yeah, and if Howard Zinn, also what he taught
• 43:27
  Speaker 4: me when he passed away, it was this thing that
• 43:30
  Speaker 4: always changed me because I couldn't believe that he had died.
• 43:35
  Speaker 4: which you don't normally think you would say about somebody
• 43:37
  Speaker 4: who's 87. But I learned that it really doesn't, like
• 43:43
  Speaker 4: we really need to treasure our elders to such a
• 43:46
  Speaker 4: degree because they really can be here today and gone tomorrow.
• 43:50
  Speaker 4: And I also interviewed several, the other people I dedicated
• 43:54
  Speaker 4: the book to were the like half a dozen people
• 43:57
  Speaker 4: who I interviewed who've since passed away before the book
• 43:59
  Speaker 4: came out. And it's, I mean, I don't want to
• 44:04
  Speaker 4: sound cheesy or anything, but like our elders are precious,
• 44:08
  Speaker 4: are so precious. And it's impossible to sit up here
• 44:11
  Speaker 4: and talk about the importance of history and not also
• 44:15
  Speaker 4: say that one of the ways that we've always gotten
• 44:17
  Speaker 4: our history as a human society.
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: Is not just by reading, not just by study.
• 44:23
  Speaker 4: But actually speaking and taking the time to listen to
• 44:27
  Speaker 4: people who've been through the struggle.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: Let's give it up for Dave Zirin, everybody.