[theme music]

(SINGING) Huh

One small step for man--

Welcome to the first episode of our podcast called Free Speech with CR. And with me today are my co-host, Molly Blakemore and two guests, George Potamianos and Pete Blakemore. And, Pete, what's that shirt you're wearing, Woody Guthrie? What does it say?

This is the great Woody Guthrie. Most Americans will remember him as the person who wrote This Land is Your Land. And he used to, in the late 1930s, write about the-- I think, it was probably after the America entered the Second World War. He saw a tank, an American tank, probably after D-day obviously, going through Europe. It said, this machine kills fascists.

So what Woody did, he decided to put that on his guitar. And so the rest of the time he was playing the guitar, he would perform with a guitar that said, this machine kills fascists. And that's a shirt that my friend got for me at the Guthrie Center in Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma City.

Yeah.

And the reason why I asked you that, because I think that's a great lead in to our conversation today. So much has gone on in our country. And folks said, how did we ever get to where we are? And it wasn't fast. It was slow. But I think that there's a history that we can point to about where America is today and why we are in the place that we are. And, Molly, what do you think about our direction [inaudible] with this?

Well, I think one of the questions in this podcast over the next few months that we want to answer is kind of frame where we are today. And so I wanted to bring up some things that have happened in recent months that, I think, crystallize the moment that we live in, that seem out of place in America and maybe more at home in some historical eras that you might speak to.

So I have this list, and I'll read it. Higher ed and the media under assault. Mass deportations and civic intimidation. Military leaders and intelligence professionals being purged from the administration. Prominent Trump critics home-raided the Epstein cover-up by the justice system. A major corporation intel extorted by the Trump administration.

The Smithsonian ordered to rewrite history. Blatant gerrymandering in order to keep Republican control of the House of Representatives. And presidential control law enforcement in the nation's capital with the premise that or the promise that it will expand to other places.

Now taking in and of itself, these singular things don't raise an alarm. But if you look at them in its totality, it's nerve-wracking. We see things happening. So from your perspective as folks of history, give us some idea of how we should look at it, and especially over time.

So historians tend to be more conservative than other folks in other disciplines. So I would say, I mean, if I could just pick the first thing off your list where you say higher ed and the media under assault, this is not unprecedented.

And, in fact, tenure was created basically for the purpose of responding to the first Red Scare attempts to root out socialist and communist professors. And do tenure, this is post World War I.

Post World War I?

Right. Because the Wilson administration passed some legislation that may impose some significant limits on free speech. So tenure came out of that or the idea of tenure. And that's where it comes from. And it's there to protect the free academic inquiry. But then it comes back in the '50s, with McCarthyism.

McCarthyism.

So this idea of higher ed under assault is not super new. Now, it's obviously taken this DEI fold. In the American tradition, it's mostly been the communist, the idea that there is something here that these professors are promoting, that will subvert the United States.

So, George, although this is not new, why should we be concerned about what's going on here?

Well, we have to be concerned because it-- all these episodes, even though they are American, they betray the principles and values that this country is supposed to be about. So, I mean, the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the federal government from interfering with people's speech rights.

And so, if we really-- I mean, the story of this country is the story of people trying to make it live up to what it says it's about. I mean, if you really want my sense of the underlying narrative--

Please.

--that's it. So that's why we should care, because we are continuing to hold ourselves accountable to what the documents say, the founding documents.

And, I mean, I think it's important to point out that George Potamianos and I taught-- my name is Pete Blakemore. And George and I team-taught a class for about 12 years here at College of the Redwoods. It was US history, 1870 or so, and to the present, and critical thinking and writing.

So one of the things that we often had at the beginning of the semester, we would ask students, what's the value of history? And they would always repeat the same thing, which is a very old cliche, which is those who don't study history are going to repeat it, which we'd always have to say that doesn't ever happen. History never repeats itself. There's a lot of other little cliches about it and the rest of that.

But we would-- basically, we were trying to move people towards critical analysis and thinking about history and having history as a value both for the being empathetic towards people in the past, but also towards understanding how social organization and how people change. Societies change over time.

So if you want to understand where you are, I think, it's practically impossible unless you're willing to go backwards in time and understand how people have changed in the past. So you look for patterns.

And this is one of the things that, I think, George and I, both of us, we talked about this before. We're starting to see some patterns arise, and these things that you just mentioned, Molly. Molly is my much younger sister.

These things all represent-- they're patterns that like George just pointed out, that first one is something that we've seen in the past. So these are not new things. And it's always important. When I'm talking to very young people, I always say, well, I was a kid in the '60s. And I think, President Flamer and I were all-- he was also a kid in the '60s. And we saw some pretty strange, difficult times.

There's a little bit more speed going on right now and a little bit more emphasis on things that we would probably never have seen, the effort to change what's written underneath something in the Smithsonian Museum.

But that's what I was going to say. If these things happen, and they're American, then why should we be concerned about this? Why is there a sense of alarm right now? Why should we have a sense of alarm right now if these are things that have--

Well, there was a sense of alarm every time they've arisen? So that's not a reason to not be alarmed.

And so then, Pete, you mentioned that if we don't study history, we're doomed to repeat those things. Why is it coming up again and again? So what is to be gained by repeating history, with what type of reason? What's the objective here?

Well, there's obviously one objective, which is to dampen people's desire for effective change. So if you look back in American history especially, I mean, there are a lot of people talking about the Civil War right now.

But you don't even have to look back that far or anywhere near that far to see how frequently, in the last 120 years, American society has made massive changes. I mean, Black Americans getting the vote was a huge change. And people forget that that didn't really happen until 1964-- '65, the Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act was '64, Voting Rights Act '65.

So, I mean, people say, well, the Civil War, the slaves were freed. And it's like, oh, yeah, it's not real. And so understanding that historical period, the reconstruction and then the Jim Crow era really will help you to understand how hard it was for Black Americans to get the vote-- so studying that. Women getting the vote, that was another. So I think--

Today is the anniversary actually.

Is today the anniversary? What do you know? That's great. [inaudible] education in the 19th Amendment?

Yeah.

Good. But as I mentioned to you, Keith, when we were talking about this recently, as people outside of the mainstream get into higher education, you start to see change happening. So when Black Americans are getting law degrees, when they're becoming professors of history, when they're working at institutions, you start to see change-- when women are getting law degrees, when Native Americans are getting law degrees and starting to go to school. Higher education is promoting greater knowledge about the systems that operate upon you and how social organization can be changed.

That's the whole idea of the liberal arts education, right?

It's supposed to free you so you can see what your--

It's liberation. It's liberating your mind.

And you would say that those gave birth to the Civil-- the education gave birth to the Civil Rights movement?

Totally. I mean, all you have to do is look at John Hope Franklin, the first PhD in history. You look at the rise of the NAACP.

The whole purpose of the--

[interposing voices]

Yeah, right. And so when you see that Thurgood Marshall was the person who argued-- who became the Supreme Court Justice, he argued the case for Brown v Board of Education in front of the Supreme Court. He had to go to law school and work very hard. They worked very hard. So I mean, this is what you see is that education should be a key to freedom.

And so attacking it is basically a way to get complacency in society.

Would you expand on that for me?

Well, I mean, we've seen attacks on higher ed. And attacks on higher ed is usually designed to prevent the kind of population that is skeptical, that goes to the polls and inquires to ask their politicians probative questions as opposed to just--

[inaudible], yeah.

--nodding.

And reads the voter pamphlets. I mean, I think also right now, the reason why all these things are a little bit more-- well, I'm a little bit more conscious of them right now than I was even-- I mean, I was just a kid. We were both little kids in the '60s, but we watched it happen around us.

I remember.

I totally do. But it's because there's a lot of other things happening in our society right now-- I think, the social media and people walking around with supercomputers in their pockets and being affected by algorithms.

When we hear people-- and George and I heard this many times in our classes. Oh, I don't read newspapers anymore. I don't trust them. I'm skeptical of newspapers. Well, where are you getting your news from? Well, I'm getting it in Facebook. I'm getting it on TikTok. I'm getting it on Instagram.

And there's not the same sense of skepticism.

None of that.

And now you have artificial intelligence creating deepfakes. And, I mean, I made a little joke before we started filming about Winston Smith, who is the protagonist in the novel-- George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

For those of you who never read it, he worked for the Ministry of Truth. His main job was to-- they'd send him a newspaper. When something happened that Big Brother wanted to put a damper on, they would send him a newspaper. Like if they assassinated somebody, he'd cut the person out of the old newspapers and send them back. So you disappear people into the memory hole [inaudible] from history.

And so this is a time when we may need to pay a little closer attention, more careful attention to what historians are doing, for instance, because historians-- my own background is in literature. But I studied early American literature, which is basically studying early American history. And one of the things that you always heard among the literary people was historians are so much more conservative and careful than people writing about literature.

Now, is that because we always look backwards? So we try--

We're more empirically oriented. So we have to have evidence. If you make a claim about something, you have to document it. Where did that arrive? And then I can go chase down the sources that you used to make sure that I think you're interpreting them correctly. A literary analysis doesn't necessarily follow the same principles.

So is there a way or could you give an example of the times you see America is today? Can you draw a correlation between today's America and historically, what's happened in the world?

Well, in the late 19th century, there was a lot of discussion about immigration. It was a powerful motivating force for a lot of-- what would I call it, I don't know, claims about being overtaken by foreigners.

And so what you see is you see the rise of things like the prohibition movement, which is a lot of people wouldn't realize this was predominantly a movement targeting Eastern European and Northern European, Polish, people who-- Catholics primarily, a lot of Catholics, Greeks, anybody who used sacrificial wine for part of their religious--

Or even socially.

Yeah, or socially, right. And so you see this as a movement against a certain kind of person who's being in the--

So it wasn't--

And that's at a time when there's a massive movement of--

So it wasn't attacking alcohol per se, but it's attacking a segment of people [inaudible] to what we're seeing today.

Yeah, there's no question. I mean, it's deeply connected to that. But also, I mean, what we're also seeing is-- I think, we're seeing the logical extension of the Unitary Executive, you know, the imperial president, which is what Arthur Schlesinger wrote about.

And that kind of starts with FDR. I mean, during the Second World War and during the Depression, you had this president who wanted to add members to the Supreme Court because it wasn't supporting his New Deal. They were starting to rule against it, claiming that the National Recovery Act was unconstitutional and so on and so forth.

And then the Cold War amplified it because of national security. And then you start to see this pattern of the Congress really, which is Article I. The longest article in our Constitution is I. And they put it first for a reason, shoving its authority, like reneging, just saying here-- absolving itself, giving this authority to the executive. You saw that throughout the Cold War.

And then Nixon took it to a twisted extreme, where he was going to use the Justice Department to investigate his political enemies and--

Which we're also seeing now.

Well, and we drew a line at that point.

His own people drew a line. And the Republican Party--

That's a line. That's going too far. But the Unitary Executive, this idea of the executive branch being the singular, most powerful part of our governmental system, it didn't die with that. I mean--

I read something recently that said that there is a percentage of Americans who want that back.

What, the more powerful exec?

Absolutely. And we see that playing out.

I mean, Trump said people want a dictator.

And so where's the problem with that?

If we want a monarchy, then we should have a monarchy. I mean, so the basis of this country-- I mean, the Constitution starts-- the most important phrase is "We the people". In other words, whatever we have is dictated by what the people desire.

The government itself is a product of the people. I think, it's problematic for a number of reasons. Monarchy or dictatorship is probably not going to turn out to be what people really want, even though they may claim they do.

So tell me, what do you think people want? What do you think?

I mean, this is one of the reasons why, I think, both of us believe people need to read a lot more, study history more. I mean, probably people should be reading the Federalist Papers. These are the early documents where there were two arguments about how the government should be organized.

And they were doing it not in the kind of polarized competition that we see now, but they were doing it in the sense that we're going to try to promote an idea that people will read about and discuss together, and then make their decisions about.

And right now, this is the reason why I mentioned social media and the rest of that, and AI and the rest of that, and algorithms and how they affect people's decision-making processes and the fact that people are really reading a lot less than they ever were in the past.

I don't know whether people are informed enough when you say, what do they want? I mean, I'm not sure that they know what they want. I think, now people are more voting on what they don't want. And so they vote against things rather than for things. That's what--

It's very emotional, right?

It's totally emotional.

And when you have a lot of changes going on, I mean, I think, the '90s is going to turn out historically-- it's hard to see now, but I think in the end, it's going to be seen as a period of great global change. And anytime you have that, then people understand it.

North American Free Trade Agreement, people talk about the inheritance laws to eliminate the Soviet Union as a global countervail wait. The rise of China as a powerful part.

So there were so many things going on that I think is impossible to tease out because we're living it. But then those dislocations make people--

Angry.

And they can't understand what's happening to them. And so they search for scapegoats. The anti-immigrant thing, I mean, in the '90s, it was Prop 187. The California's response was to just deny illegal entries, all kinds of access to everything-- public services, everything. That would be--

In California?

Yeah. That was Prop 187. It was in California.

And then it was ruled to be unconstitutional, ultimately. But, I mean, we see this so many times in the past. I mean, the 1920s anti-immigration movement in the United States that led to the immigration limitation law, the quota system that lasted until the 1960s--

1880s and the Chinese.

1850s and Know Nothing party. I mean, these were periods of great change where people were like, OK. Pete and I used to have our students read a great chapter out of a book. It was called The Eureka Method. And it was basically describing-- it was a history of how all the Chinese people got kicked out of Eureka, right?

Absolutely.

And the woman, [inaudible], the author--

The historian.

--made a really astute argument that the living situation was so crappy for-- I mean, I'm going to give it in a nutshell. But it was so crappy for these timber workers, these White timber workers. And it was so crappy. And they were looking at the Chinese. And they were looking at their lives not being great either.

And for some reason, they came to this conclusion, if we get rid of them, our lives are going to be way better. And it was a way of attacking the thing that you are finding yourself to be lacking by eliminating somebody else. And then their lives got more miserable after the Chinese left.

And to bring this back to higher education, we used to teach this as-- like, about in the middle of our semester, because it's a really complex argument, and it's a fairly long. And you have these people who say, oh, the thesis should be in the first paragraph.

It doesn't matter.

This thesis for this article where she makes this argument, she has to give you all this background information. So you've got to really sift through this.

And the false narrative.

And a false narrative she gives you. I mean, if you ask somebody who had what we would call a social memory-- social memory is George Washington could never tell a lie, which is like, what does that mean? It means basically nothing.

It's not history, right?

History is, what did Washington do in the Bunker Hill?

In Bunker Hill.

But so Valley Forge. So she writes all the way into this, and you get to that argument through. So you have to follow this complex argument. And that's what I think you're not going to get until you start really focusing on things through higher education.

Higher education is where you're going to learn how to take apart a super complex argument like that, to find the-- because the social memory answer was the reason why all the Chinese were loaded up on these two timber ships and shipped out of Eureka in 1883 was because two Tong Gang members were fighting. And one shot at another one. And he hit a Eureka city councilman.

And so then everybody went and got him because they killed a city councilman. And her argument-- she takes that apart. She looks at it historically. And what you get is a context for what life was like in Eureka, California, in 1883. And it's brilliant.

It is.

And it's so richly detailed and documented that you look at that and you might stop and say to yourself, huh, are we being demagogued? Are we following arguments and ideas that if I really looked into how they were put together and why I'm responding this way, I might act differently?

And that's really what higher education should do. What I always taught my students was the best thing they were going to learn in a college education was how to ask better questions. And so that's what I think we need our society to be doing right now is asking more questions.

So what can we hope for? Because we don't want to wake up every morning depressed and looking at the negatives that our obedience [inaudible].

If we still have elections, then we do have hope.

This country changes quickly. I mean, I have to say that. I mean, we were just talking about Pete Wilson. I mean, that's not that long ago. We talk about, oh, California, Democratic supermajority. We had Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, wasn't that long ago either.

It's true.

So, I mean, things do change. I mean, in this country, they have the potential to change pretty rapidly. So, I mean, there's always cause for optimism as long as we still have the same Constitution and the--

And the elections.

And, I mean, I think, about what it must have been like to be Black in the South in 1940. Did you have hope? But you know what, a lot of Black people in the South fought back and went to law school. They did the work. And so--

And same thing with Native Americans.

Same thing for Native Americans. I mean, they didn't even get US citizenship until the 20th century. So I think, there is always reason for hope. And this is, Keith, to you. I would just say I tried to always talk to my class when I was teaching in a class called environmental ethics. We would go through about the environment and what was going on with it.

And by about 2/3 of the way through the semester, the students would always be like, oh, this is so hopeless. Like, no, no, no, we're done. No, you can't think that way because then you stop working. The hope brings us to work. And so we do have a society where all these things have changed.

So what's the role for higher ed?

If I wasn't hopeful, I wouldn't still be doing this job. And I'm teaching in Pelican Bay, which is like, these guys, they don't have hope. I mean, a lot of them lack a lot of hope. But that matters.

And so what's our role? What can higher ed do?

Higher ed needs, I think, can stop caving. Teach the truth. Expose students to ways of critically understanding the world they live in. Write new courses when they need to be. And we need new courses.

But when you say stop caving, what is that-- caving to the administration, caving to what?

Caving to demands that rub against its mission.

So you both are historians. So there's a strong movement to rewrite history.

Yes.

So what do you teach, if history is being rewritten?

No historian is going to say, look, we're not going to focus on slavery and how it affected Americans, economics and culture. What we're going to do is talk about the great things that happened.

That's what we had. And that's one of the reasons why a lot of historians will say, yeah, we focused all of our emphasis on Martin Luther King when there were all these other things going on. And as George used to teach in our classes--

Because Martin Luther King was the positive.

He was very positive, and he was a minister. And he was wonderful. He was wonderful. He was a powerful figure. He was a very prominent, important figure in the Civil Rights movement. But he wasn't the only one.

[inaudible] Malcolm X.

Or for just ordinary people or just the people who it takes the narrative away from the idea that average, ordinary people got together and actually did-- I mean, because we look at the bus boycotts. And you go, well, Rosa Parks. Oh, that was the first.

She was the first.

Or go [inaudible] on the bus. Because he just accidentally got on and all of a sudden, people--

He was his secretary before he ended up there.

See, that was King's first thing. But there had been so many more successful bus boycotts prior--

Prior to that.

--in small places, with nobody famous. And a whole lot of community members just decided to do it. And it might have been a local NAACP organizing. And yet we don't go there because you don't want to create this accurate sense that average Americans don't need a leader to actually affect change.

I mean, and that was the principle of the Occupy movement, which we don't even remember anymore. But that was like a canary in a coal mine to this White working class anger that a guy like Vance is tapping into, in a weird way, in almost a perverse way. It's like, we are the 99%.

Well, thank you both very much. This is a terrific intro to what we're going to do this year. We're going to talk about many, many things. And I think that you laid the groundwork for this. Clearly, the answers are uncertain. But I think that we have-- oh. But I think that it's also a very dangerous time for America. And as long as you keep your voices strong and keep teaching our students, I think--