What History Teaches Us About Today's Political Violence with Heather Cox Richardson

I am Michelle. And I am Craig. Craig here is my big brother. We are so excited for you to listen to our brand new podcast. It's called IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. Together, Craig and I are going to take your questions about the challenges you're grappling with in life. So get in touch, send us your questions and join us on IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Lemonada. 2026. So to kick off season two, and as President Trump begins his second year of his second and final term, we're stepping back to look at the moments that recently have mattered and what narratives have taken hold and where we might be heading from here. And there's no better person to help us do that than Heather Cox Richardson. Heather is a historian, a professor, and an author who every day helps millions of readers and listeners make sense of the news and the historical context through her widely read newsletter, which my husband and I both read, Letters from an American, as well as her books, including Democracy Awakening, How the South Won the Civil War, and To Make Men Free. Heather, it's such an honor and pleasure to meet you, and thank you for having this conversation with me today. Hey, listen, I'm going to be all maternal here. You've sound just like your mother. It's so lovely. It's so lovely. You know, when you see a generation, like it's not the tone of your voice. It's the cadence, which is just lovely. Yes, I do sound a lot like her. And we also both sound quite a bit like my grandmother, to whom I was incredibly close. She passed away, goodness, 15 years ago now almost. And it is wild. Genes are real. So I have a painting of my great, great, great grandmother that was painted during the Civil War. Oh, wow. And we could be sisters. I mean, we were born literally a hundred, more than a hundred years apart. But genetics, there really is something. There's just no doubt about it. Did you grow up with that portrait of your many great grandmother? And is that what got you interested in the Civil War? Yes and no. I still live in the town where my people came before the pilgrims because they were fishermen. And so the history was very much a part of our lives. But I don't think I got the genetic portion of it until I had children of my own. And I will never forget looking at my oldest child when he was maybe 18 months, and he did something that was my father, who died 25 years or so before he was born. And I'm like, oh man, some stuff really does get handed on. Yeah, completely. I mean, I look at my daughter and it's eerie how reminiscent some of what she will do like ricochets me back to when I was her age. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I think I did exactly that. Well, really, Heather, thank you so much. It's just a joy for me to be in conversation with you. Both my husband and I are longtime readers of your newsletter, And I wonder if we could begin with kind of how you toggle the different parts of your brain, or does it just feel fundamentally organic to you to both be kind of thinking about and analyzing events from very long ago and analyzing events from moments ago? How does that all kind of fit in your brain, and does kind of one help the other, or are they kind of separate tracks? You know, that's a really good question. I think the answer to it, first of all, is that my brain does flit around a lot. So it is possible for me to read very, very widely in a way that maybe other people would have a harder time doing. But it matters a lot that I am trained as a historian. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that I'm a journalist, and I am not a journalist. They're trained differently than I am. What historians do is we analyze the events that happen in a society in order to see how that society changed or didn't, although we're usually looking for change. And what that means is that we are able, in a sense, to filter a lot of material and say this matters and this doesn't matter. And in my case, what I believe changes history is the way people think about things, is ideas. and other historians would tell you something very different. They would argue that what changes history is popular movements or natural disasters or great people. I think ideas change society. So I am always filtering everything I see through what in this moment will change or has changed the way people think. I'm sort of the person who can step back and say, hey, this looks a lot like the 1870s or, hey, this looks a lot like the 1840s. And one of the things that does, again, to get back to the training in history, is it says, this is what happened, and crucially, here's why it matters. And that, by the way, again, is because of my training as a historian. It's not that I have some unique hotline to the history gods. It's that this is what historians do. I want to return to what this moment is reminiscent of for you, whether it's the 1870s or another era in American history. But one of the things that we do on this podcast is we try to start or at least have early in the conversation a clip or recent news and then ask ourselves, well, that can't be true or can it? And if it is, what does it mean? And before we do that, has there been any one event, one idea, one piece of legislation, one act from the president or another leader that has really surprised even you with how close attention you pay to current events and your historical understanding of them? I feel like at this moment, Americans are still resistant to the idea that we really could have secret police beholden only to a political elite, in this case, Donald Trump and the people around him, essentially making war on us. And that, I think, I'm not really surprised by that, but the images that are coming out, especially of Minneapolis, are images where you have to look at them and say, is, you know, what country am I looking at here? What dictator is breaking down doors and, you know, going into houses with guns? And then you have to realize it is, in fact, the United States of America. And that, I think, no matter how largely we play that, I think a lot of Americans simply do not believe that it could be happening here and is happening here and are not, I think, perhaps as aware of what that means unless we stop it. And Heather, do you think that disbelief is partly because so many of the touchstones in our history often have dark things happening in darkness. Do you think we're somewhat not able to believe it because it's happening in broad daylight? We might be more willing to believe if we were told there were people in a dark room shrouded in smoke plotting X, Y, or Z. But because it's happening in front of our face, it's so counter to how we've been told darkness develops. That's really interesting. And you know, one of the arguments for why Trump has managed to get away with as much as he has is because he just says it right out. You know, people want to be able to dig down and say, well, that's not really what's happening. And he just puts it in neon in the headlines. So a lot of people are like, well, it can't be that bad if he's just throwing it at us. But I actually think that part of what I just identified is a reflection of what you just identified, that, you know, we think it should look more nefarious. But I actually think that there's something else going on. Of course, the United States has always had this dark underbelly, and certainly Black Americans and people of color and women have been very aware of that. But I think there has also been a complacency and a sense of security on the part of most Americans, who simply thought that the post-World War II guardrails that we put up after that war, both to restrain the extremes of both business and political extremism, and the social safety net that was designed to make sure you did not create, or not designed to make sure of it, that did make sure that there would not be a radicalized underclass, if you will, that could rise up to destroy American democracy. I think we just believed those things would be secure. And you saw this in a number of people who would say, oh, there's no difference between X politician and Y politician. They're all the same. And while that was a source of frustration for a lot of people, I think it was also a source of comfort to people. I don't have to pay attention to politics. It's just like baseball. No one cares. Well, now we are discovering to our chagrin that it does matter and that all of those guardrails can go away and that the things we thought were so secure because we had not shored them up, because we had not protected them for so long, turned out to blow away like, you know, ash in the wind. And that, I think, has taken a while to sink into people. But also why I think the shooting of Renee Good mattered so much is a lot of people who simply said, oh, it can't happen. here. That's only radicals. That's only those left people that Trump talks about, oh, they'll never come for people like me. They saw a 37-year-old white mother trying to deescalate a situation and getting killed for that. And that, I think, is why there has been such an extraordinary outcry over that death. That and the fact, of course, that the administration is acting like a classic authoritarian government trying to rewrite what we actually saw happen there. Which I'm sure you're particularly perceptive to as a historian. You know, I certainly think often about the Orwell quote that no doubt I'll butcher that, you know, the people who control the past control the future and the people who control the present control the past. Yes, exactly. You know, I do now want to play a clip from President Trump's recent interview by The New York Times, because I did think that it was not surprising to use your heuristic from earlier and yet still incredibly revealing. Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to? Yeah, there's one thing, my own morality, my own mind. It's the only thing that can stop. Not international law. And that's very good. I don't need international law. I'm not looking to hurt people. Do you feel your administration needs to abide by international law on the global stage? Yeah, I do. You know, I do. But it depends what your definition of international law is. When you hear President Trump say that he's constrained only by his own morality and his own mind, which of course is all of our ultimate constraints, But without any even performative nod to Congress or the courts or international norms laws how do you contextualize that kind of in American history Have there been other presidents or administrations who you think would have given similar answers have asked a similar question And what concerns you most about this president's answer to those questions from the New York Times reporters? Well, I want to start somewhere that you may not expect me to start. And that is that I think it is way past time for us to be talking about the fact that this man is not mentally okay. Like he doesn't know if he's a foot or horseback. And that has left this- Wait, a foot or horseback? What is that? Yeah. I've never heard that. It means he doesn't, he ain't there. Oh. The lights are on and nobody's home. I mean, I don't know what else to say this. I think he is, he has lost his mental acuity. And the fact that we are continuing to treat his extraordinarily erratic behavior as something that we need to incorporate into our rational understanding of the world is putting those of us who are concerned about American democracy very much on their back foot. That is, you're trying to make sense of things that are nonsensical. And so have we ever had somebody like this before? The only thing I would say on that front is that there are some wonderful, in a historical sense, biographies of Richard Nixon at the very end, when people recognized that he too had real problems with reality and mental health, and that he believed that because of the importance of the United States of America and its control at that point of so many nuclear weapons, that you must support the president over everything else, or you were anti-American and possibly anti-Earth, anti-humanity, and that he fell into this sort of paranoia, anybody who disagrees with me must be trying to destroy, not me, but to destroy the United States of America. And of course, the Republicans in the House and also in the Senate got Nixon out of office. And so when you ask if there's any moment like this. I can certainly think of governors like this on occasion or state representatives. We certainly have some people who nobody's heard of nowadays in the 19th century who had visions, for example, of making statuary out of the skulls of their enemies. But to have somebody like this at the head of the most powerful nation and in the most powerful position in the world is a calamity of epic proportions. And no, we've never seen anything like this before. You know, certainly, I mean, I'm not comfortable speculating on the president's mental health, but his grandiosity and his sense of kind of being a singular force. And as you said, you know, very much conceptualizing himself as my Southern grandmother would have said, a better seems to be a through line throughout his life. And it's quite sobering to hear you say that we don't have an analog, that this is kind of, while a uniquely American moment, also a unique moment in American history. Let me walk that back a little bit, because I do think you could make an argument that there were leaders in the American South during times of extraordinary segregation, who certainly thought of their power this way. But again, they were not national figures. I do want to call out what your grandmother just said there, though, a better. Because we were talking the other day about a weird main expression that we hadn't heard since our parents used it. And that was the, now that you say that as well, that injection of that sort of 1930s concept that some people are better than others. Right, which she didn't believe, She was very clear trying to kind of inoculate me from ever even thinking that could be true of anyone. I grew up with the same thing, the same word that, again, in this small town, it was used to indicate disdain for those who thought they were better than everybody else. Yes. Did we have that after the 80s? I couldn't remember. I don't think so. I don't think I've heard it since I was a kid. So it's interesting it's coming back, that idea that we're starting to recognize some people do think they're better than everybody else. Because when I heard somebody say it, somebody much older, I kind of did a double take and went, I don't think I've heard that since mother died. And mom was born in 22, so she picked it up in the 30s when we were at a point very similar to where we are nowadays. And I thought that was really interesting. And now to hear you say that, it's like, wait a minute. Yeah, I feel maybe those terms are back. Heather, one of the things that we were talking about earlier is just the intentional chaos and the purposeful velocity of news every day that is created or amplified by this administration. You know, in your role as a historian and kind of as someone who works to distill kind of what you think is historically important every day for your newsletter readers, how do you help people just navigate what often feels quite overwhelming to people? And even if it's purposefully so, that doesn't make it necessarily easier for people to stop feeling overwhelmed and weed through what actually merits kind of their attention, their energy, and their time. So, you know, I'm going to answer that in a way that I've never answered it before, but I think your listeners will appreciate this. really the key to what I do, the whole key to what I do, is that I'm never afraid to ask questions. You know, I will never forget when Tom Cotton, Senator Tom Cotton, was at the time a junior senator from Arkansas, wrote a letter to Iran, you know, saying don't pay any attention to anything that President Obama does, because we're going to change it when we get into office. And all these article said, well, he's violated the Logan Act. And I thought, I've taught American history for 25 freaking years, and I don't know what the Logan Act is. Why are we pretending we all know what the Logan Act is? So I went and looked up what the Logan Act was, and it was really very simple, and I could explain it in two sentences. But the reason that I am giving you that story for your listeners is because here's the reason that I can do that. Because when I was in fifth grade, I am extraordinarily math challenged. That is, I get the concepts, but the numbers to me are just squiggles. They really just have almost no meaning. And I asked what apparently was an incredibly stupid question, and the whole class started laughing. I was in fifth grade. And the teacher handed them their, you know, what's on a platter and said, the only stupid people in the world are the people who don't ask questions. She now knows the answer to this question. And all of you people who were laughing don't. And, you know, I walked out of that room feeling like I was seven feet tall. And I got to say, it actually made a big, we were a very small class, by the way. It made a big difference, I think, in terms of the intellectual curiosity of the class going forward. But ever since then, I have never, ever been afraid to ask a question. And what you will discover is many people pretend they understand stuff and they really don't. So when something happens and it shows up in the news, 99 times out of 100, I'm like, what just happened? Who's doing what? What's the G20? What's the G7? Who's the head of Denmark? And I'm not afraid to admit that and to dig down until I understand it. And that's all the newsletter is. It's that me saying, I finally understand this. And if you want to understand it too, here it is. And if you don't want to understand it, that's absolutely fine as well. But in terms of making it easier for people to understand the world about them, that is literally all I do is I ask questions until I understand it, write them down, and that makes it accessible for other people. And that I think is actually the magic, if there is magic to that newsletter, is a fifth grade teacher saying to a kid who did not understand math, keep asking questions. Something that I think is extraordinary, and now I find extraordinarily painful that we're walking away from, is the dramatic decline in children dying on their first day of life and their first year of life and their first five years of life for many reasons. though a key certainly has been the global expansion of vaccine coverage for vaccine-preventable illnesses. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., updated the vaccine schedule without kind of any of the processes that historically have been undertaken to make such consequential decisions and dramatically reduce the number of disease-targeted, And really, while maintaining that parents could still access whatever vaccines they thought were important for their kids will cause huge confusion for families. And I just wonder, I know you said before we started you're not a public health person, but how you contextualize these decisions and everything else we've already talked about today. So talking to historians about vaccines as anything other than extraordinary miracles is a non-starter because we know what the world looked like without them. And I'm probably not going to go down that road just because I've read the accounts of losing entire families of children. And, you know, and I'm old enough to remember when it was a miracle that we got some of these vaccines. And, of course, I know people from my childhood who suffered desperately because not only they didn't get the polio vaccine because they were older, but from things like diphtheria. Somebody said to me once, which is so true, when scientists went after diseases, they didn't start with the easy diseases. They went with the worst ones. So when you're talking about vaccines, you're not talking about vaccines for mild diseases. These are deadly. And, of course, anybody who studies indigenous Americans knows exactly how that played out through the indigenous community. But I think there's a couple other things that make that significant in this moment. One is, again, I think the fact that people don't remember those diseases makes them think that the chances of some kind of issue with a vaccine are more dangerous than the diseases themselves. That is, you know, if it never happens, you think, oh, it can't be that bad. And, you know, I know somebody whose infant got whooping cough. And she was like, I just had no idea. It was such a bad disease. And of course, my head was exploding. And you don't want to say to somebody who's terrified, what were you thinking? But as a historian, that's exactly what was in my head. Now, to go a step further, that idea of attacking expertise based on a vibe, if you will, or a worldview, takes us back to that idea that some people are better than others. Hey, listen, I don't care that you spent your entire life studying this. I know better. That, I think, is a hallmark of this administration. But now I want to go really big. And this was something that bothered me a lot during the confirmation hearing for the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy If you are trying to weaken a nation the place you start is by weakening the people by weakening their literally weakening their health And that not just vaccines but also the changes in laws in the Affordable Health Care Act that have forced a number of rural hospitals to close, made it much more difficult to get maternal care so that, you know, they live in, there are certain people who live in obstetrician deserts. So, you know, you're in trouble if anything goes wrong with a pregnancy. And those of us who have had children know that, you know, if you're lucky, everything goes just fine, but an awful lot of times it doesn't. And that attempt to undermine American health worried me from the very start. And I would put that together with the apparent attempts to undermine American education. That matters deeply as well. And to undermine the concept of what our history is. All of those things are ways to really weaken the vitality of a society. And that, on all of those levels, worries me desperately. But I will, again, give a shout out to those people who are getting good information out there, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has been on the front lines not only of vaccines, but also of health issues generally. One of the things that I found so particularly perverse about Secretary Kennedy's announcements of the vaccine schedule alterations was his claim that he was doing it to increase public trust. And I wonder kind of what is salient from history about the ways in which different administrations or different political leaders have used kind of trust as a reason for certain actions, but actually, clearly they're purposefully undermining trust and doing so while hollowing out institutions to make them less trustworthy, to make them less competent, to make them less effective. Well, I think it is important to remember that it's not really until World War II that we start to get a robust federal government that is involved in people's daily lives. Now, that's not entirely true, certainly during and after World War I and even back into the progressive era, the government was much more involved. And, you know, if you're looking for a parallel, one of the things that's interesting about World War I is, and the period around then, is the recognition of how many Americans live with malnutrition. and the government efforts to get people access to the kinds of vitamins and minerals that they need in order to be healthy. And, you know, it's funny, we were talking about just this the other day. Did you ever give any thought to Popeye? Popeye, the spinach lover? Yes. Popeye eats spinach, makes him big and strong, right? Why does Popeye eat spinach? because people need to eat their vegetables, which at the time was associated with immigrants and therefore thought to be not as healthy a food as, say, straight meat. And his girlfriend, olive oil? Yeah. So the government has done those sorts of things before, but it's really after World War II that you get the larger institutions that are surrounding Americans the way that they are now. But this idea of characterizing the federal government as untrustworthy, has certainly been a hallmark of that radical right movement that was within the Republican Party and now has taken over the Republican Party. And, you know, I think you see it and what that the political power of that and what that movement meant in the fact that until very recently, the hallmark of that movement was don't tread on me, right? Get out of my face. And now they have flipped to do what we say or you're un-American. And if you happen to get shot, it's your fault. And what do you think explains that flip? That flip? I don't think it was ever about don't tread on me. I think it was always about I don't want a government that is informed by women, Black Americans, and people of color to tell me what to do. A government of white guys, everybody should do that. I have absolutely seen that as a reflection of this concern on the part first of that radical fringe that has taken over the party. The idea that especially after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, women and people of color really managed to determine a lot of what was happening in the federal government. And of course, by 1980, that population is overwhelmingly siding with the Democrats. And what they're saying, I think, is, you know, if your government is doing what the majority wants, but that majority consists of a major population of women, Black Americans and people of color. We don't want any part of it. And you think it's really that simple? I do. I do. And if you want, I can explain the history of that in the 1970s. And there is a history of it. But that idea that a government that incorporates the votes of Black Americans quite literally begins to talk about socialism in 1871. The idea that if you permit Black Americans in the South after the Civil War to vote, after the Department of Justice is established in 1870, it's no longer safe, if you will, to attack your Black neighbors and their ability to vote on racial grounds because that's, of course, something that the Department of Justice is going to prosecute and does in those years. But what happens after the establishment of the Department of Justice in 1870 is in 1871, all those same people in the American South who had been attacking their black neighbors based on race say, we never had a problem with race. Race is just ducky. We're fine here. Our problem is these people are poor and they are uneducated and they are voting for things like schools and roads and hospitals. And the only way those things can be paid for is by taxes. And because white people are the only ones who own any property in the post-war South, that's a tax on white people to provide goods that black people will benefit from, white people would too, but that black people will benefit from. And this, they said, is socialism. And that is the exact same language you get after the Brown versus Board of Education decision of 1954, where white Americans increasingly say, hey, we're not against black people voting. We're not against minorities. We're against socialism. And those people voting for these things are socialists. And you can see that line all the way through from William F. Buckley Jr., who starts National Review in 1955, through to Trump saying that the people in Minneapolis are radical left. I forget what the noun was there. Radical left somethings. A Marxist is often in there a lot. That's a reflection, I think, of a political expression of this idea that white men should run everything. Heather, I am curious because I imagine you get lots of reader feedback. What advice do you give people about how to stay engaged? Because I do think it is ultimately the safer option for all of us to be engaged right now, even if it understandably might be exhausting and even scary. My first advice is don't do it alone. Find friends. Find your squad, as some people say, and recognize that it is absolutely okay to take a break and to throw yourself into things that give you joy, whatever those things are. Because in this game, all of us have skills to bring. And you might think that your particular set of skills is not useful. You feel like you should be out protesting, but you live in someplace nowhere near a major protest. There are things you feel like you are not able to do. Whatever your skills are, bring them, both at the local level, the state level, and at the national level. Because fighting back for democracy is not just about making sure that our government is not taken over by a hierarchical system that privileges a very few people. It's about reinforcing the idea that the American people are the source of our power. So, you know, you don't even have to run for school board. Go to a school board meeting and sit there and smile at the person saying stuff you like and frown at the person saying stuff you don't like, or even just ignore the person saying stuff you don't like. That contribution at both the local level and then, as I say, state and national level really matters because it enables people to recognize that they are not alone and that this is, in fact, a movement that empowers Americans. And also that in true democracy, you are not going to agree with your neighbors. You're just not. They're going to have different ideas about the way that your town should be run, your state should be run, and so on. But there is a difference between disagreeing in a democratic system and feeling like one set of ideas should be able to impose their will on everybody else. And those people who are trying to do that are very much in the minority right now. So the more that people can see that you are not supportive of that, the more courage they will have. You know, somebody sent me a poster the other day, just a beautiful poster that she had made. And you're like, it cheered me up all day. Well, what difference does that make? well, maybe not a lot, but, you know, sometimes when it's three o'clock in the morning and I'm exhausted, you know, it helps that sort of thing. And you think about those things rippling out farther and farther, changing the mood of your town, changing the mood of your state, changing the mood of the nation are all part of you being rested and able to bring your A game to whether it's fixing somebody's printer or organizing to start a new newspaper or just helping out in a nursing home. All of those things really matter right now. But you do not have to be glued to the news if it is distressing to you, because that doesn't really do anybody any favors. So engage however you can, but engage and engage with a friend. I think that's really good advice. I often say, you know, we're not just citizens on election day. We're citizens every day. And I think, you know, those acts of solidarity and citizenship and supporting our community and supporting our neighbors, you know, regardless of whether we agree with them or not, I think is really vital to the health of our country and certainly to the health of our democracy. I also, though, don't want to be glib in any way about the real kind of shimmer of violence that seems, you know, painfully persistent and the real painful consequences and examples of political violence. Certainly, we just had the 15th anniversary of the shooting of Gabby Giffords. I think we're still very much keenly aware of the couple of assassination attempts against President Trump, the horrific murders of the current and former politicians in Minnesota last summer, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the threats that certainly painfully my parents and arguably maybe every former president and politician continue to receive our very real dynamics in America right now What historical context do you think can help us kind of think about this how to yes continue to find courage to engage and also to try to move forward to a time where we don't have this kind of shimmer of violence and we don't have kind of this recent litany of, you know, attempted assassinations and assassinations of political figures like we've seen so recently? Of course, that's a really complicated question. But we have to recognize that the United States has often gone through extraordinarily violent periods. And in fact, the 1890s, which looks a lot like where we are today, was a very, very violent time, including with the use of state violence. You know, one of the reasons that we have the Posse Comet Tadus Act was because in 1877, the President of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, actually called out the Army to put down a nationwide railroad strike that had been started on the railroad company of the man who had helped to put him in office. It certainly looked as if the United States was going to start using its army against the American people. So we have had these times in American history. Look at the 1960s and the bombings of civil rights leaders. You know, Birmingham briefly was known as Bombingham because so many people were bombed. There are a couple of things to say about that in this moment. One is the one that is often overlooked, and I always like to call it out because of that, because I also study the role of the economy in history. And when we have times in which wealth is more fairly distributed than it is in the present, say in the period from 1933 through 1981, violence tends to decrease, especially racial violence tends to decrease. You know, people who are desperate get violent. And that's a very, very simplistic way to put it. But that's worth thinking about in this moment, divorcing the just, the political from the larger economic story, which is a story that has to be addressed as well. So that's one thing. But another thing in this moment, I think, is the degree to which there is sort of an edgelord feel to the idea of saying extreme things and saying really horrific things. And simply speaking up and saying this is not acceptable, you know, this is not, you know, putting social pressure on people who put that on social media, I think is at least something people can do. And of course, you know, one of my big things is this whole concept of guns being accessories is very, very, very new. The idea that you need to carry a gun everywhere in order to be a symbol of a certain kind of political masculinity. You know, I grew up in a town full of guns. This is a hunting community, and we just never had that before. People forget that. Younger people forget that. This is not normal, the idea that everybody should have access to an AR-15 and use it sort of as a political accessory. I think that is really important. I mean, I also, I grew up in Arkansas with a deep kind of culture of hunting and also a deep sense of real understanding of the responsibility that comes with kind of owning and using a gun. And I think that framing of not accessorizing with a firearm is really helpful. I want to pivot now to where we always end on this show, which is a section called Fact or Fiction. If okay with you, Heather, I'll throw out a handful of things that kind of seem to circulate rather widely, both online and off in this time. And feel free to answer Fact or Fiction or to give us some greater historical context. With the caveat that I check everything, so I'll do the best I can without checking. Well, I think these are kind of very much kind of in your domain. So the first is we often hear, or at least I often hear, that America has never been this politically divided. Fact or fiction? Fiction. Also something I think we often hear, again, I often hear, is that we're living through the most dangerous moment for democracy since the Civil War. Fact or fiction? For American democracy? Fact. Something I wish we actually paid more attention to, political corruption is worse now than it was 100 years ago. Worse in the extraordinary size of the sums and worse in the fact that the U.S. government is actively working to promote it. Absolutely. That concept of corruption, though, what the role of the government is, is it to help a few wealthy people or is it to help everybody? That philosophy is the same as it was in the 1850s and the 1890s. It's just the scale now is off the charts. The media used to be in some halcyon time gone by objective, and now it's all partisan, fact or fiction. Oh, that's a hard one to do, fact or fiction. In the United States, media was partisan, deliberately partisan until really the 1890s. And that's when we start to get the idea of having an independent media. And by independent, they meant independent of either political party. Literally, political parties used to pay for the newspapers. We get the idea of independent media. That raises the idea that what they're really supposed to do is put different sets of facts in front of people and let them choose. And that, of course, gets them into terrible trouble by the 1950s when McCarthy uses that so effectively to throw crap at the wall that gets reported and people think is fact. So that, you know, then we get into this era of corporate media when you should think of many of the legacy media outlets as branches of a corporation rather than as news organizations. All of those things are true. That has created in the modern era a real problem with the idea of both sizing stuff under the guise of being fair, which is, I think, a huge problem. But that has had the effect of giving us the rise of a new, again, independent media that looks much like the independent media of the 1890s. And so while there are certainly outlets to avoid, there are plenty of new independent journalists and, I hope, historians doing really, really, really good work that previously would not have been able to get a foothold in the country. So I feel like media is very much in transition. Sorry, that isn't fact or fiction. It's kind of both. Helpful. I feel like I have to ask this probably last question, which is if you could assign us, anyone listening, or maybe all Americans, kind of one piece of historical homework right now, What would it be? Something to read or watch or listen to, to learn more about through kind of whatever means and mechanism someone may have access to. What would it be? read the Declaration of Independence. Really read the Declaration of Independence because it's all laid out right there. And people forget that the Declaration has three parts. That document is a letter to the world about why the people who are rebelling against the King of England are not just a rabble, why that there is a principle behind this. And what they say in that introduction is we believe in a fundamentally different kind of government than exists right now in our world. Rather than saying you get to be king because of the fact you were born king hereditarily, or that you get to rule over everybody because you have money, or because you're of a certain religion, or because you come from a certain place, we believe that everybody has the same inherent rights. And if they have the same inherent rights, they also have the right to construct a government that they agree to live under. That is freaking huge. And then they go on to list all the reasons why the king has broken their trust and has broken their faith. And they're instructive. And a lot of people skip over that part because it's a little repetitious. He has done this, he has done this, he has done this. But what they're outlining is what it means when a tyrant takes, which is a word they would have used, when a tyrant takes over a society. And an awful lot of that nowadays is going to look familiar. And then at the end of it, they give a message to the people in the United States. And I mean, they're not the United States yet in the colonies. And they say, we recognize that what we are doing is extraordinarily audacious. And remember that if the revolution went the wrong way, their signatures on that document would have been their death warrants. They would have been executed for treason. And so they write this very legalistic document. And at the end of it, they say, to these principles and to each other, and that's not the direct quote, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. And, you know, you think about that and you think of that echoing down the years and the fact that we are sitting here now watching our elected representatives lie to us, you know, say things that we know are not true. And I think of those guys who were taking on one of the great empires of the world on principle and saying, we're doing it with our lives, with our money. but also with the way we will be remembered for eternity. I feel like that's kind of a message that people need to hear right now. And that we need to hear individually and collectively. Yeah, it's a pretty powerful document. And then, you know, if you want to stick around, I could give you another 4,000. Well, hopefully, Heather, maybe next time. I certainly will go reread the Declaration of Independence later today. I'm incredibly thankful for your time here today and for all that you continue to do to help educate and empower Americans as you clearly write as your kind of stated mission in the name of your newsletter. And I look forward to my next piece of homework and hopefully another conversation in Maine or elsewhere. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. You can follow Heather Cox Richardson on YouTube, and I hope you'll definitely subscribe to her newsletter, Letters from an American, at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week. 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