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Episode 101: Born on the 4th of The Lie! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Excuse me.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Honesty to step.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Honesty to others.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: 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_00: Now I'm catching on the why that's song and why that's so why that's so why that's the same.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Astlantes, the podcast where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and along the way we challenge pseudo-historical distortions and confront the disinformation that too often surrounds these very topics.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: And Ruben Ariano Tlacatekat.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: How are you, Dr.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Tlakat?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm stoked, man.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: We're finally here.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're finally arrived at the precious moment that we've all been waiting for all year long for the past 250 years.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and to settle the rumors, you know, I I know the online discourse has been blowing up, going crazy, but the rumors are true.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: We were forced to pull out of the Freedom 250 uh events.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_03: Held at the uh the White House.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_03: We just couldn't get our paperwork in order to get out there in time.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: You win some, you lose some.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_03: But what a time to be a citizen of this country.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: Some might say a shithole country, but some.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: Some might say that.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, what are you gonna do?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_03: 250 years.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Two fifty.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was just thinking about that number.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Two hundred and fifty, uh it's I mean, it's kind of an arbitrary number, right?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, especially if you're an indigenous person from Mesoamerica, where the um the numbering system is a little bit different, the way you keep track of of uh the months, for instance, and the years.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we Mesoamerican cultures use the vitissimal system, you know, count of twenty.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, and then you have the the thirteen count and then the fifty-two-year bundle.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: So 250 seems I mean, it's meaningful to a certain population, but to indigenous people from at least the the the Mesoamerican part of of America, uh the 250 would be meaningless to to our ancestors, really.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you get it from the skiing of things, right?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: But because everyone's making a big whoop about it, hey, you know, I I figured, hey, why don't we also jump in the uh jump on that bandwagon and and uh do a little something something as the kids used to say.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_03: Used to say.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but us old folks still say it.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: So with the without any further ado, let's jump right into it.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: By the way, this is episode number 101.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's 101.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: So that's that's pretty awesome, man.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um I when we first started this, I I couldn't conceive of us going like uh and this is just regular episodes.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_03: That's not counting dispatches and bonus episodes and premium episodes and stuff like that.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, premium episodes.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: So this is regular episodes.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: 101 regular episodes.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: So uh salute, sir.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_03: That's uh quite the accomplishment that we've done.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm proud of us, buddy.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: 250 proud.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: I mean 101 proud.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_03: Freedom 101.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: And with that, dear listeners, that's it.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: Right there.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: You got it.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: There we go.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: We bring to you Bourne on the fourth of the lie the architecture of celebration.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Family, friends, and listeners.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: This historical threshold.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: The United States is engulfed in the pageantry, corporate sponsorships, and national choreography of its semi-quincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Across the landscape, museum exhibitions are being mounted, monument plaques polished, and civic speeches drafted.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: We are being summoned collectively to step into a grand civic liturgy, to look back upon 1776 with an unclouded eye of pride to venerate the so-called founding fathers and to reaffirm a singular narrative of unfolding democratic progress.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: Just ignore the whole merciless Indian savages stuff.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: Forget that.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: We were just kidding about that stuff, right?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Jokes.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: These are the jokes, folks.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: But as citizens of a deeply fractured landscape, we must ask the question that always haunts the perimeter of the American bonfire.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Who is this celebration for?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: When a nation marks its milestones, it does not merely remember the past.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: It constructs a curated archive to weaponize in the present.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: It attempts to build what the literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt famously termed a contact zone.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, contact zones are social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today, and that's how she defined it.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: To understand the profound limits and the inherent violence of a monocultural 250th anniversary celebration, we must look to a historical color scheme that has long been systematically obscured.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: As cultural theorist Minnie Yang reminds us in her analysis of Americanism, our national identity has historically been molded upon a strict, quote, white foundation and within a robust white structure, end quote, where the dominant culture has routinely used institutional power to quote, remove any color that is not convenient to white domination.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: I never noticed.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yang argues that as we mark this 250th milestone, the nation is rapidly recovering brownness rather than being whitened as a as designed and anticipated.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: This unfolding reality renders the traditional exclusionary white agenda increasingly inadequate, leaving its proponents feeling structurally threatened by an increased population of color, end quote.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: To find our bearings in this fractured landscape, we must look back to the 19th century to a pair of intellectual titans who did not wait for the demographic shifts of our era to challenge the hegemony of the state.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: We must listen to the voices of Frederick Douglass and William A.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Bis.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Writing and speaking from the margins of a self-proclaimed white Christian democracy, these two master rhetoricians engaged in what Patricia Bazell calls an extraordinary act of cultural archiving.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Bazell, an emeritus professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, explains that they did not merely reject American history, they mastered it.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: They stepped onto the public stage, looked their white audiences dead in the eye, and turned the nation's most sacred text, holidays, and icons into mirrors of devastating self-indictment.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Today we will trace how Douglas's iconic July 5th, 1852 address, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, and Apis's Forgotten January 1836 masterpiece, the eulogy on King Philip, provide the exact critical toolkit we need to dismantle the celebratory myths of the 250th anniversary.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: In doing so, we will discover that for communities of color, the primary American archives are not sites of uncritical joy, but battlegrounds of ongoing sovereignty and profound political mourning.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: Part one Frederick Douglass and the Irony of the Secular Temple.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Let's stand first in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York on July 5th, 1852.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Frederick Douglass has been invited by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society to deliver an address commemorating the 76th birthday of the United States.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: The air is thick with the residue of July 4th fireworks.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Douglass steps to the platform before an audience that is predominantly white, heavily abolitionist, but deeply embedded within the comfortable assumptions of Northern liberalism.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: As Bazell notes, Douglass faces a delicate rhetorical task.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: He must build enough common ground to keep his audience listening, while executing a radical critique that leaves them entirely exposed.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: To this, Douglas does not begin with an angry denunciation.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, he spends the first third of his speech performing a flawless recitation of the dominant culture's own historical archive.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: He praises the signers of the Declaration of Independence as great men who stood up against British tyranny and aligns his values with theirs, declaring, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: This is not capitulation.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: It is an expert deployment of ethos.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Douglas demonstrates that he knows their history better than they do, and having gained entry into the secular temple of American liberty, he immediately begins to pull down its pillars.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: He focuses on the glaring, irreconcilable paradox at the heart of American democracy, the coexistence of the world's first nation and its loftiest egalitarian legal language with the state of sanctioned torture of millions of human beings.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: To make this hypocrisy visceral, Douglas invokes the memory of the ultimate American icon, George Washington.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: He reminds the audience of a detail convenient to forget that Washington, in his last will and testament, provided for the emancipation of his slaves.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Listen to how Douglass weaponizes this archival detail, seamlessly pairing it with a quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to condemn his listeners.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traitors in the bodies and souls of men shout, We have Washington to our father.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_03: Alas, that it should be so, yet so it is.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: The evil that men do lives after them.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: The good is often turred with their bones.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's a dope This is a brilliant maneuver.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, were you gonna add to that?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was just gonna say that's a dope quote.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it is.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's why I'm like this this gotta go in there.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is a brilliant maneuver.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Douglas uses Shakespeare to ultimate, literally, uh the ultimate literary treasure of the Anglo Western canon to enforce a truth his white audience finds deeply disturbing.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: He shows that the good interred with Washington was his dying impulse against slavery, while the evil that lives on is the sprawling, blood-soaked system that contemporary white Americans continue to tolerate and profit from.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: So again, he's speaking from a contemporaneous time and he's alluding to slavery and its evils, right?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: So as Mimi Yang observes, Douglas's unvarnished depictions of the enslaved population sufficed to highlight an impassable line between the white and the black in an America marching blindly toward systemic fracture.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it is precisely at this moment that Douglass executes his famous pronoun pivot.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: He drops the inclusive we of his introduction and adopts the devastating exclusionary you he's pointing the finger right back at them, right?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: He asks his audience with scorching irony why he has been brought there to speak.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: He notes that the rich inheritance of justice and liberty bequeathed by their fathers shared by them, not by him.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_03: So he writes What to the American slave is your fourth of July?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days in the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: To him, your celebration is a sham your boasted liberty and unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity, your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless, your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence, your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery, your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings with all your religious parade and solemnity are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy, a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: Well God damn.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that still rings true today, doesn't it?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: This is the absolute zenith of Douglass' rhetorical power.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: By shifting to your celebration, your boasted liberty, and your sermons, Douglas casts the white American holiday as an act of, quote, inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Furthermore, as Bazell illuminates, Douglas is doing something deeply rooted in African American pulpit oratory.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: He is signifying.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: He begins his speech with a standard trope of modesty, claiming a quailing sensation and a distrust of my ability before this grand assembly.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yet by invoking the image of a man in fetters being dragged into the Temple of Liberty to be mocked, Douglas is explicitly casting himself in the role of the biblical hero Samson.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: Samson, blinded and enslaved by the Philistines, was brought into their temple on a national holiday for their amusement.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: But Samson seized the pillars of the edifice and, with a final surge of divine strength, pulled the entire structure down, burying his oppressors in the rubble.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Through this coded message, Douglas signals to his audience that the national crime of slavery is not sustainable.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: He warns them that it is dangerous to copy the example of an oppressive empire, for its crimes will inevitably be, quote, thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying the nation in irrecoverable ruin.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: Part two.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_03: William Apis.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: How do you say his name?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's Apis.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Apis?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's spelled APE S S.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been saying Apis.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_03: William Apis and the War Against Settler History.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: If Frederick Douglass pulled down the pillars of the American Temple on the Fourth of July, William Apis went a step further.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: He challenged the very dirt upon which that temple was built.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let us shift our gaze from Rock Rochester 1852 to Boston, January 1836.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: William Apis stands before a predominantly white lecture hall.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: He is a Pequot man, a veteran of the War of 1812, an ordained Methodist minister, and a radical political organizer who has just led the Mash P Revolt, a successful campaign of civil disobedience on Cape Cod to reclaim sovereign tribal lands from white overseers.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: So this guy was no joke.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_03: He sounds like a freaking G.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this guy, he's he's a soldier, he's an ordained minister, he's an activist.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this guy, my hat's off to the to Apis.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I mean, I was when I first learned of Apis, I'm like, wait a minute, what's going on here?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: How come I've never heard of this guy?
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I had to, you know, I did some deep digging and I found that he'd done this eulogy to King Philip that was kind of like a precursor to Frederick Douglass's uh um address, right?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm like, oh, this is perfect.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is perfect.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, hell yeah.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so here we go.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Apis's presence at the podium is an existential shock to the Boston Elite.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: As an early American literary scholar drew, Lupinzina writes in his biography of uh Apis through an Indian's looking glass.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Apis lived in direct conflict with history itself, right?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's what Lupinzina is saying about him.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: He opened in an era when, I mean, he operated in an era when mainstream American intellectuals were actively engaged in what Lupenzina terms unwitnessing or acts of unwitnessing that consist of rhetorically erasing inconvenient truths, such as the continued presence, resilience, and sovereign rights of native peoples in order to perpetuate the legalized fantasy, because that's what it is, that indigenous nations were naturally sliding into inevitable extension.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he's referencing this idea of the banishing Indian into the sunset.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Apis steps onto the stage to deliver his eulogy on King Philip.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: And for those of you who don't know, King Philip was the English name for the Wampanoag leader, Metacomet, who in 1675 had led a multi-tribal coalition to resist Puritan encroachment in what remained at the time uh uh the homelands of the Pequot and the Wampanoag, and it's also considered to be one of the most bloodiest conflicts per capita in American history.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so, like, for instance, in my courses for my students when we are uh looking at this early period of colonial America, this is one of the instances, one of the events that we look at, because I tell students that this is the first time that we have like a multi-tribal uh uh alliance between various tribes, some who were friendly with each other, some who were not, that began to mount a sort of concerted effort against uh the, at least in the Northeast, against the colonists.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's a very important um period in American history.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: For two centuries, the dominant Puritan archive had painted King Philip as an unmitigated demon, a bloodthirsty savage who nearly destroyed the holy wilderness errand of the pilgrims.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, again, you have to know a little bit of American history to understand what that means, because to the pilgrims, in in their coded language, um, they saw themselves as uh the chosen people who had been selected by God to establish the new kingdom on earth, the new Jerusalem, and they saw that that that was kind of the a holy errand that they had to establish this within the wilderness of what was then the New World America, right?
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so the the Spanish were had the same delusions of grandeur down there.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is where the program started from.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: The Spanish set the template, and everybody else kind of followed suit.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so that it's just uh another example of that same idea.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so here Apis is tracing his own lineage back to Metacomet.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: He was a direct descendant of Metacomet and stands before the descendants of those Puritans, the people who were there and listening to his lecture, to declare that King Philip was, in fact, the greatest statesman this continent had ever produced, a hero far superior.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: To George Washington.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: So he's slapping these people in the face.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like Douglas, Apis does not bypass the dominant culture's archive.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: He invades it.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: He demonstrates a flawless, devastating mastery of the primary Puritan texts, citing William Bradford, Increase Mather, and Mary Rawlinson.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: But unlike Douglas, who was willing to praise the context of 1776, Apis refuses to venerate the founders of New England.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: He views them as corrupt, land-grabbing colonizers whose historical narratives permanently poisoned race relations on this continent.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean he did have a point all the way back in 1836.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine that.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Apis's signature strategy is to treat the canonical histories as hostile witnesses.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: He uses their own written words to convict them of historical atrocities.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: He pulls up the famous captivity narrative of Mary Rollinson.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: He notes that while Rollinson routinely condemns Native Americans in her prose, her actual entries reveal that when she was held by Metacomet, the chief treated her with immense dignity, hired her for weaving skills, paid her fairly, invited her to dine and smoke with him, and he did not rape her.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: I cannot stress that enough because Apis was alluding here to the fact that native women, if they were ever caught in a comet situation or a raiding situation by colonists, they were always certainly going to be raped if violently.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_03: Violently sexually assaulted and then killed.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then killed.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: So he's definitely making that reference right there.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Apis looks at the audience and turns the record against them, demanding to know if Governor Winthrop or any of the quote unquote ancient divines ever treated an indigenous captive with such basic human decency.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: History, he notes, bitingly proves they did not.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: He then confronts the emotional insulation of his white listeners.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Reviewing William Bradford's account of a terrifying pilgrim night raid on an indigenous dwelling which resulted in the shooting of frightened women and children, Apis uses Bradford's own description to reconstruct the raw terror of the victims.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: He demands of his Boston audience.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_03: And do you believe that Indians cannot feel and see as well as white people?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_03: If you think so, you are mistaken.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_03: Their power of feeling and knowing is as quick as yours.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: Then echoing the exact structural rhythm that Douglas would use sixteen years later, Apis links his critique to the sacred calendar of the state.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: He takes aim at December twenty-second, which was considered the holy day when New Englanders gather to celebrate what they call Forefather's Day or the landing of the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_03: Apis declares Let the day be dark the twenty second day of December sixteen twenty.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_03: Let it be forgotten in your celebration, in your speeches, and by the burying of the rock that your fathers first put their foot upon.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_03: For be it remembered, although the gospel is said to be glad tidings to all people, yet we poor Indians never have found those who brought it as the messengers of mercy, but contrarewise.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_03: We say therefore let every man of color wrap himself in mourning, for the twenty second of December and the fourth of July are days of mourning and not of joy.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: Damn.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: So like it's it's interesting because this language, like the words he's using are exactly the same language that, you know, activists, uh indigenous rights activists, African American activists, uh Chicanos are are using to this day, right?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_03: That these are days of mourning, not days of joy.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_03: And then he even references let every man of color, which I always thought that that phrase of people of color, man of color was something more recent.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_03: But uh damn, man, this guy was pretty old.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this guy was uh this guy was rocking it.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: We'll we'll do an episode on that term, people of color.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe not just on that, but like associated with other things because it does have an interest interesting history, I should say.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm excited.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, you are onto something because these words um laid what would become the foundational text of indigenous resistance.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: Apis completely decenters the white national geography.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: Plymouth Rock is not a monument of liberty, it is a monument of displacement, a place where your your fathers first stepped onto the soil to bring destruction, he's telling his audience.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: And like Douglas, Apis unites all marginalized people under a single banner of counter-commemoration.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: He calls on, quote, every man of color, as you were just noting clearly, to wrap themselves in mourning, explicitly tying the 4th of July and the 22nd of December together as twin vectors of the same settler colonial violence.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: So he's anticipating a lot of this activism that's to come in a sense.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: But Apis does not leave his audience in silent mourning.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: In the most radical moment of the eulogy, he brings a dead king back to life, breaking entirely from the bounds of Western print literacy, Apis introduces the oral tradition of his people transcribing the fiery sovereign council of war speech that King Philip delivered to his warriors in sixteen seventy-five.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: These are the words of Metacame, preserved through indigenous memory and inscribed by Apis into history.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_03: Brothers, you see this vast country before us, which the great spirit gave to our fathers and us.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_03: You see the buffalo and deer, and that now are our support.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_03: Brothers, you see these little ones, our wives and children, who were looking to us for food and raiment, and you now see the foe before you, that they have grown insolent and bold, that all our ancient customs are disregarded, the treaties made by our fathers and us are broken, and all of us insulted, our council fires put out, our brothers murdered before our eyes, and the spirits cry to us for revenge.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_03: Brothers, these people from the unknown world will cut down our groves, spoil our hunting and planting grounds, and drive us and our children from the graves of our fathers, and our women and children will be enslaved.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: Damn, well, good thing none of that actually happened, right?
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: God damn.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean he was on point.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: With this passage, Apis commits an unpardonable sin against settler history.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: He gives the quote unquote banished savage an active, sovereign intellectual voice.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Philip is not a mute victim fading into the sunset.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: He is an analytical statesman warning his people about the systemic ecoside, treaty breaking, and total war that these people from the unknown world, or aliens you might say, are bringing to our shores, as Apis would have put it.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: As Lopenzina argues, Apis's work functions as a potent negative work in which the assumptions of the dominant culture are systematically dismantled and inverted, reflected back on a predominantly white audience in harshly critical terms.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that's I mean, you have to hand it to your Apis.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: This he was ahead of his time when it when it came to this kind of critical analysis.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: Synthesizing the archive for the 250th anniversary.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: What then happens when we bring Frederick Douglass and William Apis out of the nineteenth century and place them squarely in the middle of our current 250th anniversary commemorations?
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: They present us with an unavoidable reality.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: The very concepts of freedom, democracy, and equality that the semi quincentennial seeks to celebrate have never been a neutral, unifying fabric.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: As Mimi Yang pointedly observes in her contemporary critique.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_03: The truth is that beliefs of freedom, democracy, and equality never bonded Americans together across economic interests, political spectrums, and color schemes.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_03: In the present day, these very beliefs, in fact, divide Americans and pit one group against another.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: What more can you add to that, right?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a perfect describer.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: When the state spends millions of dollars to tell a story of 250 years of uninterrupted democratic progress, it is engaging in the exact same practice of unwitnessing that APIs fought in 1836 and Douglas exposed in 1852.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: It is trying to maintain a curated white archive that treats the horrors of history as mere bumps in the road toward a more perfect union rather than foundational structural features of the state.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just think about all the stuff that this current administration has been doing over the last couple of years, dismantling the government and its uh how it's used for the uh the greater good, the common good, how it's erasing actual historical uh literature, texts, landmarks, uh you name it, that doesn't ascribe to the white archive, right?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: So this unwitnessing, I mean, I think that's a perfect way of describing what's going on.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_03: And then I saw that uh now in Texas they're gonna start requiring uh Bible stuff in uh in the classrooms.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: So just let's erase history, let's erase all of that, and let's replace it with fucking nonsense.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Crystal fascism in full effect in Texas.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, hardcore.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_03: And then you had uh wasn't the um the lieutenant governor standing behind Trump the other day talking about, you know, the separation of church and state is not a thing.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_03: It does not exist.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it does not exist.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: How convenient of you to uh misread.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_03: Have you even read the fucking thing?
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_03: Come on, man.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: So if we applied Douglass' framework to the 250th anniversary, we are forced, we are forced to live past the corporate sponsorships and patriotic drones to see the ongoing systemic exclusions.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: We are forced to ask, what to the undocumented laborer, what to the most the mass incarcerated American, what to the economically disenfranchised citizen is your 250th anniversary.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that rings even truer right now as everyone is struggling to make ends meet, and you have this this con man in the White House with his golden facade all over the place and these these fake celebrations that cost millions and millions of dollars while everybody else is struggling, right?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_03: So Yeah, it's like it's fucking let them eat cake to like the nth degree, man.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_03: Like the French would have already fucking busted out the the the guillotines at this point in time, you know?
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, but freedom.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so freedom.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: It remains, as Douglas told us, an act of boasted liberty operating as an unholy license to ignore ongoing injustice, right?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: If we apply APIS's framework, we realize that celebrating 250 years of American independence completely erases the fact that this independence was brought through the systemic ongoing violation of thousands of indigenous treaties, treaties that remain legally binding under the United States Constitution, yet are routinely ignored to make way for oil pipelines, resource extraction, and corporate greed.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Apis reminds us that for Native Nations, 1776 did not mark the dawn of liberty, it marked the consolidation of a settler imperial power that finalized the theft of our ancestral homelands.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: Patricia Bazell notes that when sophisticated rhetoricians like Douglas and Apis master the dominant culture's archive, they do so, quote, in order to build rhetorical bridges to the members of this culture and affect social change, end quote.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: They do not speak to simply walk away, they speak to shatter the comfort of the listener, forcing the dominant culture to look into what Apeist called an Indian's looking glass, to see it in its own moral deformity.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: Our current demographic landscape means that as Bazell points out, white exclusive claims and sole ownership of freedom, equality, and democracy are no longer sustainable or congruent with reality.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: The 250th anniversary cannot simply be a passive replication of past myths.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: If it is to have any intellectual validity whatsoever, it must move away from the uncritical liturgy of joy and step into the difficult transformative liturgy of political mourning.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what gets me right now about what's going on with a lot of organizations.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: They're wrapped up and caught up in the spirit of commemorating this magical number of 250 that they're doing so uncritically.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I get it.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right now it's not maybe the most conducive and ideal time to do it, but if not now, when?
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: If not us, who?
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_03: The old Yeah, exactly.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_03: Like you gotta be able to and it it's like you were saying earlier, to make people uncomfortable, to to put that fucking mirror in front of their face and and and have them and it's like I I brought it up in an older show, right?
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: Where I don't think this country has ever or really will ever have those moments where they it sits down and comes to terms with these things, where there's like a reckoning where they're like, okay, let's do uh uh an analysis.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: A truth and reconciliation committee of some sort.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, at the national scale.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, fuck, man.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's I don't think it's ever gonna happen because anytime you bring it up, you can't even bring up the slightest shit.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_03: And they have a full-on white white man meltdown, you know, like that Tom Cruise energy where they start fucking shaking and their bodies become all tense and they just start screaming and and they're gonna handle it, man.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_03: Turning the mirror on the present.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: As we close and step back out into a nation draped in patriotic bunting, let us refuse the easy comfort of historical amnesia.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: The 250th anniversary poses an urgent question to every person who resides in these United States of America.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: Who will you choose to stand with in the contact zone of American history?
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: Will you stand with art architects of unwitnessing, those who polish the monuments, rewrite the textbooks, to erase conflict and demand a superficial unity built on compliance?
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: Or will you have the intellectual courage to stand with Frederick Douglass and William Apis?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: To stand with them means to embrace the complexity of a multicultural democracy.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: It means recognizing that the American experiment can only be evaluated from the margins up, never from the pedestal down.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: It requires us to listen to the alternative archives, the oral traditions, the suppressed protest speeches, the legal battles for land sovereignty that are actively being waged by communities of color across this continent each and every single day.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: As we wrap up this episode on the eve of a very consequential date, I leave you with the words of William Apis ringing in our ears.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_03: We say, therefore, let every man of color wrap himself in mourning.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_03: For the twenty second of December and the fourth of July are days of mourning and not of joy.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: The prayers, preaching, and examples of those pretended pious has been the foundation of all the slavery and degradation in the American colonies towards colored people.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man, that's deep.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, deep, brother.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: Aethus reminds us that true democracy is not found in the celebration of an anniversary, but in the unceasing struggle for justice.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let us look into the mirror of our history unshrinkingly, and let us find the courage to declare that we are not through.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: We are a people with a history and a sovereign presence that cannot be wiped out.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_03: Hell yes.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_03: And this um it makes me think of something that, you know, I I've been pondering this for a while, playing around in my mind on how to put this down.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_03: So I think I'm going to launch into a fun little rant inspired by uh your script here.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_03: Cool.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I've noticed online on YouTube and these various videos that get shared with me that the right wing right now, they've been pushing this narrative, um, really pushing back against the idea of a nation of immigrants.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I have my own critiques of that.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_03: Like, because people like to put out that idea and be like, well, we're a nation of immigrants.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_03: Like that's the response usually when uh people of color are attacked, when when people from other countries who've migrated here are attacked, they'll be like, Well, how can you even do that?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: We're a nation of immigrants.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's so unlike us to you know, it goes against everything this country stands for.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_03: But what they're doing on the right right now is they're pushing against that narrative.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: And they're saying, no, we are not a nation of immigrants, we are a nation of settlers.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_03: And that's an interesting difference that they're making, right?
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_03: Because they go on to say, well, if you look at it uh a settler versus an immigrant, well, what's the difference?
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_03: An immigrant are the people who arrive later after it has been established.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_03: The settlers, those are the first.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_03: Those are the ones who took all the risks.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_03: Those are the ones who tamed this hellscape of, you know, of unconquered lands and brought civilization to these lands.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_03: They were the ones who settled it and built it up and made it what it is.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: And these other people, well, they're just immigrants.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_03: So when you look at who has more of a stake, who has more of a right to determine, and that's what they're ultimately getting at, right?
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_03: Is they're saying we are the foundational Americans.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_03: We're the ones who can trace our ancestors to the original settlers.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_03: You guys came later, therefore your voices do not count as much as ours.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_03: And personally, I'm kind of glad that they're being this open with their shit, that they're that they're saying all the, what do they say?
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_03: The they're saying the quiet parts out loud because they're really leaning into this racist fucking narrative, which is what it is ultimately.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_03: Because when you paint the United States as this nice, well, it's a nation of immigrants, it creates this sense of like nobility and altruism, which isn't fucking there, you know?
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_03: And so when they get rid of that and they just lean hard into the settler thing, it's like, yeah, you are settlers.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_03: You are fucking settlers, it's settler colonialism.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_03: And they're proud of it.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, we need to come at them with that and be like, yes, so you're accepting it.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_03: So let's look at that.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_03: What is a settler colonialist?
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_03: You know, who are you people?
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_03: Because you came here, there were already people here, dumbasses.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_03: We already have our we have already had our institutions.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_03: So if you're your uh you know, standard of who Whose voice matters more is who was there first, then y'all need to shut the fuck up.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_03: And and and, you know, because if if you look at it that way, that that whole embrace and pushing of, you know, we are a nation of settlers and not of immigrants.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's interesting because I don't think, you know, to them it's a point of pride.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_03: They're very open about it.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_03: But when you just pick away at it and do some analysis, it's like, no, yeah, you're right.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is a settler colonialist nation.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: My shirt that I'm wearing again, that I wore before.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: Settler state 250.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: I guess I'm I'm I'm on the right side of history.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm on their own.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: They couldn't complain about that.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: They couldn't complain about this.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: If someone tells me something, hey, I thought we were all about the settler state now.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_03: I'm celebrating the settler state.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_03: But the thing is, they would push you out because your your opinion doesn't matter because you're being critical.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_03: You're using their words just like these fine individuals who you just quoted.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Apis and Douglas.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_03: You're using their words to point out how fucked up they are.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, that's my rant.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: Ranting and raving.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: Raven and raving.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_03: Ranting and raving, raving and ranting.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, man, this the whole thing with this country, I mean, could you imagine going back in time and talking to these two men and being like, well, guess what?
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna have human cockfighting on the front lawn of the White House while fucking dudes on motocross bikes do backflips.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: That was so surreal.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, is this a video game?
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: What what's going on here?
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: And they're so proud of it.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, look at how great we are.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's like you fucking trailer trash, backwards ass, like redneck clan rally having motherfuckers.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I saw a uh a meme somebody was sharing the other day, and it was like uh an aerial view of what the White House and its surrounding campus looked like four years ago and what it looks like now.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_03: And on the bottom they put uh it it looks like a fucking meth head family moved into the neighborhood.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so but it's appropriate.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean uh if if you were to ask Apis, he'll be like, yeah, that that rings true.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: That checks out.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this is the logical conclusion.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_03: That checks out of this country based on its origins and what it was built on, its foundational premises would naturally lead to the current situation.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like what did you expect?
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: With the acceptance of the settler colonial uh argument.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_03: So now they're just leaning into it.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_03: Now they're not even playing the colours.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_03: But what's funny about it?
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be curious about these people who are saying that, like, how many of them actually can trace their lineage back to the original colonists uh, you know, before this country was even founded, right?
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like very few people can actually do that.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: Most people today, uh, the majority, I would venture to guess, over eight seventy-five to eighty percent of white people in this country, their ancestors came probably sometime in the 19th century.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like very few people can trace their lineage all the way back to uh the 18th century and before.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you know, if if you want to look at it that way too, on my mom's side, our family's been in this area since the 1500s.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_03: Like that's when our family first arrived in what is now the United States, what would later become the United States.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_03: We've we were here since the 1500s.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, Quetz lives out in the East Coast and she has friends in Boston and Massachusetts.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_03: And so a lot of those families are very proud of like how long their families have been there.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_03: And they asked her and she told them, and they were like, holy shit.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like they they they couldn't conceptualize because other people to them, the history that's usually taught, and and I try to go against this in my classes, it's uh it's an east to west history, right?
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: History in America begins with the 13 colonies and then moves west, and it's also a dichotomy between north and south and black and white.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so every time that I'm I'm teaching at least uh uh 1301, the first half of American history, I try to you know destroy those those mythologies and try to present history from a different perspective and and show them, like, hey, you know, you had these colonists over here that established themselves in the late 1600s, but if you go all the way back to you know the late 1400s and early 1500s, you had a whole different tradition of people that were already establishing themselves.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not even to you know say anything about the indigenous people who live there, right?
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it gets it gets very convoluted quickly.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I was just I was just curious to like these people who say this, like do they have any kind of like self-awareness to understand that just because you're a wife doesn't mean that you were one of the original settlers.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: You would also be considered an immigrant, likely.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: More than likely, you are a complete immigrant to this country.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it's ridiculous.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they're they're fucking.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: You can't expect these people to really think about these things very deeply, right?
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_03: Well, just look at their their dipshit leader.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_03: That guy's family was super recent, right?
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the 20th century.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: They don't even go back to the 19th.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_03: And they're out here pushing this fucking fantasy narrative that they're the uh that their opinions matter most because they're the original settlers or they descend from the original settlers.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_03: So shut the fuck up, man.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_03: And and like I said, uh until they're willing to actually sit down and have some honest self-reflection and listen to other people, goddamn, they can't even do that.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_03: They can't even just sit down and be like, okay, what's what's your uh what's your perspective?
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_03: What's your story?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's like we don't even matter.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_03: We're not even fucking human to them.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_03: I saw a uh I'm not gonna say his name because he's a dumbass, but there's a self-appointed historian on uh on YouTube who recently did a video telling like the real history behind what happened with Emmett Till.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_03: And his whole purpose is to just bring in all this irrelevant bullshit about that story and basically what do they call it, poison the well so that you know anybody who who responds to him in a negative way, he could just be like, well, hey man, I'm just point- you know, I'm just asking questions.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just pointing out just being a dumbass, is what that's called.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you're just being a piece of shit.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_03: What are you gonna do?
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_03: America 250.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_03: America 250, baby.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_03: We're going to be, uh, by the way, we're going to be having a uh fist fight on the front lawn of the Astlantes Capitol.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_03: And um we're gonna grease ourselves up uh with bear grease and fry bread grease.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_03: And uh it's gonna be a uh real to-do.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_03: So show up.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna be uh unveiling my my family's deep-rooted mastery of drunken boxing.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's not the kind you're thinking of that Jackie Chan popularized.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_03: Ours is more of uh a homegrown version of drunken fighting.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, okay.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_03: So tune in.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_03: So tune in, everybody.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna have a flyover by the Royal Chicano Air Force.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_03: There you go.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, you know, some kids from down the block are gonna be jumping over trash cans on on their recently acquired.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_03: Kicking the cans.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we're kicking the can too.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we're gonna be doing all kinds of stuff.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's uh it's the great Aslantis uh what do they call it?
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_03: State fair.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_03: State fair that we're gonna be having in my front yard.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_03: So admission is free, barring weather, and uh come out and uh we'll have some fun.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_03: But until then, uh keep searching for the truth because you know what I like to say about the truth, my friend.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think I have an idea.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_03: The truth is like medicine.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_02: You understand we are one of the only countries in the industrialized world that has birthright citizens.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm proud to be there.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_02: We are a country of immigrants.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_02: No, we're not, no, no, no.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_02: We're a country of settlers, not of immigrants.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's a big distinction.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_02: Let me tell you the difference.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_02: Settlers are people that build a new country that was barren.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_02: Immigrants come to a country already built.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: The people who built this country, they went west to an unconquered, barren country and built a new society.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_02: Immigrants helped enrich it, they helped grow it upon that.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_02: But the foundation of America were settlers, not immigrants.