Media. Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and I wanted to talk about something that is important to me, important to
everyone else at cool Zone. We have not really covered it in detail, but on June tenth, twenty twenty four, a man named Leonard Peltier, who is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ojibwe Ancestry and is the longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be appearing before the US Parole Commission for the first time since two thousand and nine.
The FBI is vigorously resisting any thought of him being paroled because he allegedly killed two FBI agents and a firefight on June twenty sixth, nineteen seventy five. Said agents had shown up on reservation land to execute a pretextural warrant. The initial firefight occurred during what's called the Reign of Terror on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Knee. It was a time of extreme violence by the federal government, who had installed a puppet tribal
chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted Indigenous traditionalists. Everything that led up to these events and the subsequent investigation and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction, and sentencings was characterized by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were separately tried
and acquitted on grounds of self defense. Mister Peltier was railroaded and his cases tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the trial judge to dismiss and a vowedly racist juror, to the apologetic gymnastics of courts affirming his convictions in the wake of meritorious legal challenges and admitted
evidence about rageous government misdeeds. Mister Peltier has been in prison for more than forty eight years and is almost eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions for which he receives insufficient and substandard medical care.
If you want to take action to hashtag free Leonard Peltier, and I should tell you his name is spelled l EO nar D p E l t I E r. You can call the US Parole Commission at two two three for six seven thousand and sign the petition at n d nco dot cc slash free Leonard Peltier at n d nco dot cc slash free Leonard Peltier all one you Know thing, or follow the n d N Collective on social media for more ways to support him.
For more information on Leonard Peltier, you can listen to Margaret's podcast on the Locoda Nation and read In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matheeson. Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that you're listening to right now, unless you're you're listening to more than one podcast right now to I think I've done this joke this like this, this bit about the brain hacking people who like I read seventy books a week. Yeah, Jason, do you have any brain hacks? How do you hack
your brain? How do you? How are you so such a such a a triple quadruple threat of a musician, writer, author, podcaster. I guess two of those are technically the same thing. But coffee entrepreneur, Yeah, yeah, how are you him?
I mean, as a few of them? I think one of the main brain hacks is child labor. So if you just that's a big one.
That's a big yeah.
You just find a little a little young hungry you know what I'm saying. Kid, don't want to get famous.
And you just yeah make it we work too.
Yeah, I mean, I'm telling you, man, it's like we.
Call that British umpire Maxing. Yeah, yep.
One of my one of my mentors, used to say, everybody has the saying twenty four hours, but if you work for me, I get eight of yours. So so like, dude, I got thirty two.
Now. So that's there's your free advice for everybody today. Go steal a child. That actually ties in very well to the subject of this episode. Wow, because the guy we're talking about this week is one of the most famously productive human beings in history and and one of the most influential American in the history of our nation. And he did it by stealing a bunch of children. We are talking this week about Thomas Jefferson.
Hello, hello, oh man, the man loved him some black women.
Oh boy. We'll have a lot to say about all of that. But first cold opens, dozen shut. We're back, and you know, prop I said we at the introduction of this the only way to get those extra eight hours a day is by by stealing them someone younger. But there is one other way, and it's crudely made kretom tea mixed mine with macha and coffee. Today, I was like, are we doing product placement in the first minute of this coffee? Because this is just free the concept of cretum.
Be cool if that coffee was owned by me.
I it was up until oh recently, I ordered like four or five greats of your of your cold brew. But I finally I need to I need to make another order because I finally made it through. That's been my early afternoon coffee. Just like crack a. Can go go do some squats or sit down and finally write for the day. Yeah, yeah, good stuff.
It's like I will still say, I it is magical that these scripts, that these are actually scripts, that you write them. I'm like, do you type? Do you type four thousand words a minute?
I can get about four thousand words. That's like a normal night. That's like one one episode usually four to five thousand words, so that's usually.
Not a minute, not a minute. Minute though, I was like, no, did you count my joke here? Bro? Like I was like, nah, okay.
Once I finish like researching, it's usually about like five hours of writing per script, Yeah, yeah, something like that kind of depends on the script. Some of them take more. Sometimes it's more like eight or ten for the same amount, because like, ye, word count is one thing, but it all depends on like how well you understand, Like if it's one of those things. If I'm like writing about like Thomas Jefferson, thank god, at least the basics of
his history. Yeah, we were all raised with his kids, So it's not as much as like if I'm reading about Chow Chesku or whatever and I've got to like you, Ye, let's get into Thomas Jefferson, and specifically I want to. I want to dissuade people who might be worried at the start. This is not even going to be four episodes about Thomas Jefferson his whole life, because there's so much written about this man and surrounding context we have,
we're drowning at him. These episodes are purely about Thomas Jefferson and slavery.
Right, I'm gonna say this. I've got to say this Yeah. I've gotta say I love the rhythm that the bastards guests have. It seems like like some people get you know, child murder.
We have our dead baby guests.
Yeah, you have a dead baby. Guess you have your you know, crack doctor. Guess I get horrible acts of racism guests.
Ah, yeah, I mean I'll take it. Shit, I'll take it.
You're on the Mount Rushmore, Yeah, Rushmore.
So is Thomas Jefferson. I think I'm pretty sure he has to be right. Yeah. Now to start with it, to really, like, I think, to ground the story of Thomas Jefferson because it's not really even calling it Thomas
Jefferson and slavery is not fully accurate. We're really talking about Jefferson and like the concept of freedom, because Jefferson is going to be seen in his own time as something of like a profit of the concept of human liberty, yes, to an extent that bleeds surprisingly far, both in time
and geographically. And to make that point, I want to talk about September second, nineteen forty five, which is when a guy you might have heard of named Ho Chi Minh gave a speech at bod Dean Square in Hanoi, Vietnam. By this point in the Vietnamese struggle for liberation, the hated Japanese occupiers had been forced out in August, but French imperial forces still controlled much of what was then
called Indo China. The war between France and the Vietmen would take almost another decade until nineteen fifty four and lead inexorably to an even bloodier conflict between the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Given the brutality of that conflict and how it has come down in memory, particularly among their Western left, it may surprise some of you to learn that Ho Chi Minh opened his Boddean Square speech with a quote from the US Declaration of Independence,
written by former President Thomas Jefferson. Quote, all men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Here's what Ho Chi Minh had to say about that line. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in seventeen seventy six. In a broader sense, this means all
the peoples on the earth are equal from birth. All the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free. Now that is a lovely statement. That is not what Thomas Jefferson meant by writing it, which is the at of what we'll be talking about.
Yeah, Like I would say Thomas Jefferson when when I was teaching high schoolers the phrase cognitive dissonance came up, and I'm like, if cognitive dissonants were a person, it would be Thomas Jefferson. Because there are things that have came out of his mouth that are that I quote to this day.
Like him some of the best things anyone ever wrote. The best is the concept of human liberty.
Yeah, yeah, sure, even about the institution of slavery. Like if he was like if God is just yeah, right, that's about favorite one. If God is as just as we say he is, then oh shit, is we're gonna be fucked.
We'll getto that line in its context and history. I want to talk a little bit more about Ho Chi Men because I don't think this is known enough, which is that prior to the US really get involved in Vietnam, he was a little bit of an America boo, right, Like he kind of stannd the Founding Fathers just a little bit and part of you get in this speech he's got these like very valid complaints about the French occupiers.
He doesn't just quote the Declaration of Independence. He quotes the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which is made in seventeen ninety one during the French Revolution, and is like, basically, hey, these are great things. You guys are saying, why aren't you acting that way? Do
you should do it? Yeah, there's there's a heartbreaking line in here where he's like, we are convinced that the Allies, which at the Tehran in San Francisco conferences upheld the principle of equality among the nations, cannot fail to recognize the right of the Vietnamese people to independence. Oh boy, they share dead buddy. Yeah. Oh, will apologize for that one. But uh. He was generally Ho Chi Minh generally a guy who like gauged the moment correctly. He was pretty
good at that. But he did not in this moment.
No no, no, no, no, no no no.
So if you care at all about understanding the history of human freedom as an ideological concept and a value system, you do have to study Jefferson, not just because he wrote eloquently on the matter, but because his words influenced revolutionaries in the world over his lifetime and do so today.
At the same time, you can't study Jefferson without coming to understand what ho Chi Minh eventually did about the Allies, which is that it's one thing to express nice sentiments about human liberty, and it's another to take any concrete steps to further that end, especially if they might exert a cost from you. So again, we're not doing a political biography on the man, or even an exhaustive look at all of the bad things he did in his life. We are instead, Yeah.
He's like he just called cap and yeah and had right to because it's like, bro, and that's to me, Like, I'm glad we're doing this to me, because that's to me what is so fascinating about history, and specifically American history, the history of racism, the history of all of it is like when you drilled obviously I am a recipient of all of this stuff, but like when you drill down into what's going on in the heart and the mind of a person that knows intellectually and even morally
and spiritually what they're doing is wrong, yeah, and continues to be a part of it that you know, three hundred years later, we could be like, I don't understand what the hell you're doing. You know, obviously this isn't on the same playing field. But like fast forward to me tomorrow hopping on this plane to sure fly, you don't say like that's knowing full well, yeah, you know what I'm saying.
That's particularly a good point because one of the chief, if not the primary, moral issues that we are dealing with right now is like the damage that we're doing to the planets holding capacity for life. Yes, and it's damaged especially all of us in the first world contribute to because like it allows for our lives to be very comfortable in comparison to most human lives. And that's what's happening with Jefferson. Kind of at the end and at the beginning, this is the guy we're gonna trace him.
He goes through changes, but kind of ultimately a big part of why he betrays his principles on slavery is because he builds kind of a first world life for himself in the seventeen hundreds, and he's not willing to give up that comfort. Right, There's more to it than that, but that is ultimately what we're building too, because people don't know enough about Monticello. So Thomas Jefferson Tommy Jeffs was born in what biographer Dumas Malone called a simple
wooden house in today's Ablemarle County, Virginia. In those days, Virginia was the property of King George the second of Great Britain, ancestor to modern sausage fingered potentate Charles. The calendar was different when Jefferson was a baby, but using modern measures, we'd call his birth date April thirteenth, seventeen
four to three. So calling his family home simple probably accurate enough, especially by like our modern you know, judgment, but it loses some context, which is that his father is quite wealthy for his time period and for his era, and he's also kind of like famous. He's local boy who made good. Specifically, he had helped to map and lay out the boundaries of what became Virginia as a young man, and as a result of that, in like the work he did during that time, he comes to
own thousands and something like eleven thousand acres. I think it was and a significant number of enslaved human beings.
To work that acreage.
So his dad, it's important to note, does not inherit like builds what he has right primarily at least, that is not going to be the case with Thomas. Thomas's family home was called Shadwell, but when he was a little boy around age three, his father moved the family from Shadwell to a nicer plantation that he had been hired to manage as the executor of his friend's estate.
Yeah, you can't tell me you come from meager beginnings. If your house has a name.
If your house has a name, yeah, that's really the easiest quick way to like judge people's so geoeconomically, they call your house. That's not just the apartment complex, like the one what the this window?
Yeah yeah. If you come from like you know, Imperial Courts, that's a housing project. So I'm like, okay, that's the name of the projects. But you're telling me your house itself as a name just shaf Well.
Yeah, that's that's a rich guy house.
I'm sorry.
Thomas's first memory is, as a three year old, a fifty mile ride on horseback through the woods to come to this new home, and he's carried He's on like the lap of one of his father's enslaved people. Right. That is his earliest memory is being carried by one of the people his dad owns to a new plantation. His parents would have several more children, three other sisters or three sisters and one brother, and Jefferson spent age three to about nine or ten wandering freely through the
semi wilderness around the plantation. He grew up on and reading obsessively from works of classic history. We are talking Roman shit. Yeah, he had an odd relationship with his family. One biographer I have read said that he adored and admired his father Peter, but had it best a strained relationship with his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson Dumas, who is
Jefferson's most detailed early biographer. He writes like the first kind of definitive Jefferson biography simply says there is no positive testimony about her in Jefferson's notes and describes her as a shadowy figure.
He got none sad about his mama.
He has. He has mom issues. They are mysterious mom issues, but they are mom issues.
That's weird. Homie like I don't know she alright, I guess, like, well's.
Weird he doesn't say shit about her.
Yeah yeah, well, you know in him being a product of his time because all the mom duties was offloaded to slave black women. Yeah, Dot, you know what I'm saying, Like you said, like we're riding in fifty miles, you sitting on the on the on the lap of the help rather than your mom. You know what I'm saying. Of course you're gonna feel feel some type of way about your mamma because you don't do shit.
Yes, that is it, And I think that might have Yeah, that's an interesting point. Actually, yeh, I've had I think I've mentioned this on the show friends who like grew up who were rich and had like a nanny, like a full time nanny as a kid, and like express that like, yeah, it was kind of confusing. It's like a three year old I wasn't really sure which one was my mom.
Yeah.
Now I find this interesting because immediately after saying he could find no positive testimony about Jefferson's mom, he describes her dumas Malone describes her as having physical endurance beyond average, bearing a total of ten children, and raising eight of them to adulthood, which is like, that's hard. That's that's that's a not a bad. Eighty percent survival rate in that time for kids is solid.
Kids.
You're kind of knocking it out of the park if you're doing eighty on the percent to ten kids.
Yeah, it's pretty good.
Yeah. Yeah, we are awarding her a behind the Bastard's T shirt that says, only two of my ten children died here it is. Yeah, we love giving that shirt out. I just can that out at show.
Yeah, there it is. So I got two. I got two awards under my belt. We got the No Diddle Award. That's right, right, like, hey, you know I'm bad eight hundred ki.
I got some bad news on the No Diddling Award here. Thomas Jefferson is not going to win that, bad boy.
Oh no, no, absolutely no.
But he's still young. Pins not sure. Yeah, oh yeah, maybe if we get a good pen guy. Yeah. So, her husband, Thomas's father Peter, was significantly older than her. This will prove to be a Jefferson tradition, and he died young at age forty nine when she was thirty seven. She lived nineteen more years after this and was a widow longer than she was ever a wife. When Thomas was ten, his father, who was still alive at that point, gave him a loaded gun and told him to march
into the forest and find food. The goal here was to increase the boy's self reliance. Thomas failed at first, but eventually found a wild turkey that had accidentally been caught in a pin. He tied the captive animal to a tree, shot it, and brought it home for the family slaves to kill it. I might add that if like you need the slaves to process your game, you're not really living independently. It's kind of a huge part of it. Actually.
Yeah, I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait wait, I think the kids just figured out the system found so, which also plays well into who he becomes. It's like, oh, you just got to work the system. Here's a turkey that's already caught, so I'm just gonna shoot it. Yeah, and it has somebody else do to dirty work.
Yeah.
Yeah. Take it credit for tie it to its tree so I could shoot it, come throttle its neck. At that point, man, you have the turkey. I don't know, weird kid. So Thomas's family right about the time of this hunting adventure, probably a little bit afterwards, his family moves back to the Shadowell plantation, but they do not take Thomas with them. He has left behind to live
with a teacher, Anglican minister William Douglas. Douglas was not and Thomas's later beckoning a very good teacher, but Thomas lived with him for five years, alongside several other kids, I think five others. So this is like a pretty normal thing at the time, right, Like you have your childhood and then it's time to go to school, and you know, there's not like us. We all live out in the country on these you know, manners and stuff.
So we're just going to send you to live with the teacher for a while and he'll take care of you too.
Far like your school's far. Yeah, yeah, well did you just stay there?
Basically during his adolescence, he's only ever home for like short periods of time and only occasionally. His best friend at school was another boy who also lived there named Dabney Carr, who became his best friend. The one story that Dumas Malone gives us about their friendship is that Danny had a fast horse, but Jefferson had a slow one, and everyone gave Jefferson shit for this, and so Thomas tricked Dabney into agreeing to have a race on February thirtieth,
a day that does not exist. Dumas rites. Not until the last day of the month that the others discovered they had been taken in. You know, he's a little smarter than them, although I might add they're not that bright. Yeah, oh, that's not a good one. How many days are there in February?
Yeah, yeah, that's like two days more like bro like yeah, yeah, yeah, come on, guys.
So Peter Jefferson died in seventeen fifty seven, when Thomas was around fourteen. Thomas later wrote of his father's sudden death when I recollect that at fourteen years of age, the whole care and direction of myself was thrown entirely on myself, without a relation or friend qualified to advisor guide me, and recollect various sorts of bad company with which I associated from time to time. I am astonished I did not turn off with some of them and
become as worthless to the society as they were. Now. That suggests a lonely boy and one who had a pretty low opinion of most of his friends and like companions. Yeah, they're all worthless to society, and they nearly dragged me down with them. He also doesn't really seem to be
very close to his family. It's interesting to me that his father seems immune to these criticisms, even though by all accounts I can find, he must have been the one who locked Thomas away for that at that school for five years and kept him away from any kind of emotional companionship or whatever. Now it's worth noting that Thomas's own recollections during this period ignore the fact that he did in fact have someone to advise and help him.
This friend was an enslaved boy, Jupiter, who was, in the style of the time, raised alongside Thomas to be his companion and servant. This was not an uncommon state of affairs for the landed gentry and the colonies. In the book Master of the Mountain, Henry Winsick writes he had grown up with Jupiter, born at Shadwell the same year as he. If they followed the custom of the time, the two of them were playmates and companions in fishing and hunting. Though Jefferson left no recollection.
Of this yeah, he was that house what we would call a house and okay, got it?
Yeah yeah, and maybe you know, you have to. I do think you have to. Like theoretically I can see how because as a kid, Jefferson's not to blame for the system either. How as little kids, this could be something where like you legitimately see them as a friend. But Thomas doesn't seem to have right because he doesn't write about this guy, like he ignores him. And like when I read that, like you were supposed to hunt together and play together, I'm like, well, was he the one who found that turkey?
You know? Yeah? Yeah, he was a living robot? Like okay, you're a you're a man that's alive. You're a living teddy bear. So it's like, yeah, I don't you know, how many toys do you write about? How many toys did you just kind of leave you forgot when you moved, you know what I'm saying, Like, if he's just that, it's like, oh, hey, look I got you a black dude, you know what I mean. It's like, oh great, thanks Christmas, you know, and then by Christmas dinner you forgot about your new toy, you know.
Right, Yeah, And I you know, there's definitely people white people from this time who write about the relationships they had with these kind of these house slaves that you're like raised with as your friend and write about it being complicated and it leading them to question the system that they live under. Thomas does not do that, at least we have no evidence that he does that at all. Yeah, So Jefferson grows into a robust young man and he's
very tall by his late teens. He's always noted as having been extremely healthy, although Dumas cites many contemporaries who also described him as thin skinned and extremely shy while his father sat on the House of Burgesses, which is like a Virginia congressional sort of thing. Prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. He's a prominent his dad
had been a prominent local politician and leader. Thomas was noted from kind of his late adolescence as being anti social, or at the very least not what you'd call an extrovert. Dumas interestingly describes him as being indifferent to clothes as a young man and basically a little bit of a feral youth prior to finishing school and starting college. At Williamsburg. Dumas credits him finally getting interested in fashion to the fact that he had started to notice the girls. It
is many such cases. Yeah, that'll do it. Time to not be naked outside. I guess ladies don't like that so much.
Turns out I smell like this wild turkey I caught.
Yeah, but exactly, I gotta take care of that.
Yeah.
So in seventeen sixty, freshly Koift, he leaves for college, and while he writes little about this period, Winesack notes that Jupiter accompanied him on his next adventure. Quote. When Jefferson attended the College of William and Mary and Williamsburg, Jupiter went with him as his personal servant. Decades later, when Jefferson drew up regulations for the University of Virginia, he forbade students to have their slaves with him, which
he thought ruined the character of young white men. Now, okay, we simply lack. I don't know if anything happened at his own college experience that made him do this, or if he's just being like these new kids are lazy, like not like me. It was great for me, but not that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I uh this you brought up something that I feel like might be lacking in my knowledge of like African American history, Like where's like the writings of a Jupiter character, Like, oh yeah, a person who had to play this well, Like I can't think of any book I've read, Like yeah, I was like, you know, I actually never thought about that, like because I'm imagining this situation from his perspective, you know, obviously, Like so I'm like, that's where I could put myself
in that Parce's shoes. And I'm like, I just I don't know of any writings from that perspective.
You know, you get very few of them. We're all going to read some quotes. There's a decent amounts, particularly of later in his life of like and this where these were interviews that were conducted after he died, often but of people that he had owned in some cases later freed who talked about him, right, Yeah, didn't talk
about that time. We do have some of those accounts. Yeah, but it's very rare and like you just don't get and I don't know if it's like obviously, in a lot of cases, slaves were just outright forbidden from learning to read or write or even if they did, they had to be very careful about who knew. Jefferson was less strict about certainly not like a hardliner on that particular issue. But we still don't have We have basically
nothing ye on Jefferson or on Jupiter, very little. And I Yah, it's made me kind of think because obviously part of why you want to do that is because it makes it harder for them to find their freedom. It makes it harder for them to forge papers and stuff, It makes it harder for them to live if they escape from you. I wonder if some of it's it makes it harder or impossible for them to like give a different account of what their lives were, Like that's exactly like.
Yeh, that's one of the biggest things. It's just like, don't nobody want to really tell you because because like we did with the Lost cause stuff like you're you're trying to convince the world. They're like, no, they like it, don't you you know, And of course you can't trust
nobody's statements under duress, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, The only like you know, this is why the writings of like a Frederick Douglass, you know, are so important to the American story, you know what I'm saying, because he was like, oh, look I've been I've been slaved and I've been free, and I ain't worried about none
of what y'all saying, you know what I'm saying. So I think you know, yeah, so like when you like you said, it's like so when you know, the gentry gets to say no, the experience is like this, It's like what's Dixie? And then somebody goes, uh, actually it ain't like that, fam you.
Know, yeah, yeah, And I it's interesting because we do know Jupiter seems to have occupied a place of extreme trust in Jefferson's life. Like later in his life he's going to like carry explosives like independently for his master and stuff. So like yeah, that's like a you know, there's a lot of trust there. Same thing with.
Like yeah, so that's what's so interesting about it because it's like you're a slave, but you're not. You're not you know, I mean, we could talk free on this. I don't know why I'm censoring myself, but you're not a field nigga, you know what I'm saying. No, So like a field Nigga's story is going to be very different, very much so than a Jupiter is, you know what
I'm saying. And so it's like I just I just I like I know, like I can tell you of like readings about what it was like to work in the house versus working in the field, but like this particularly, I was like, dang, I don't think I know any well.
And that's you know, when it comes to because we're going to read a quote kind of about the amount of loyalty a lot of these the the like the like the people who lived in his househouse once had and it's you know, you have to keep in mind when you're trying to figure out, like, well, why would they be so well, they were raised with him, right Like.
We can talk about the objective morality of this system and how evil it is, but like to Jupiter growing up in this, this is also the dude that you were raised with, right like, And we really that's kind of in I mean, it's incomprehensible to me, you know, of course, but I'm going to I'm going to read a passage about that. Dumas Malone writes about Jefferson at age twenty.
Hey, but before you read that passage. Though, before you read that passage.
Should should I do an ad?
Plug?
Is it? Type of ads? Speaking of products and services? We weren't, but here's some. We're back. So Dumas Malone writes this about our boy tj at age twenty, on his way to the county court and to Williamsburg. He generally went on horseback or in a one horse chair. His servant, Jupiter, who was just his age as a rule, went with him or followed close behind, possibly carrying his
luggage in a cart. The name of this trusted companion of the road, who had been going with him since his days as a law student, recurs in his account books with regularity. Jefferson was always giving money to Jupiter to pay a saddler and Staunton, to pay for ferriages to Williamsburg and for bread and candles there. He even borrowed small coin from Jupiter at times when he himself ran out.
And yeah, man.
It is you have to again not to not to take away from the immorality of this system, but you also in order to understand what it was like living under them, you have to get that there is a kind of intimacy that often develops between these people, right, and it's yeah, and just the kind of people you know. Yeah, and just the like you said.
The emotional complication of like okay, what what what we would call now like survivor's guilt, where it's like, Okay, I know I made it, and I know, like my situation is not as bad as everybody else is. I'm looking at this person that I could truly as I'm on this carriage, nicely dressed and smelling good, seeing somebody that could be my brother, cousin or uncle or auntie or mom on the side of the row picking cotton, knowing full well, and I know what they think of
as they see me, you know. And then you're like, well, you know I and in reality is I would much rather be on this cart than over there, you know what I'm saying, And like, yeah, just the complicated Yeah.
Yeah, it is complicated. And it's also like that whole thing about like I could be related to this person in the field in a lot of cases is not the case with Thomas and Jupiter, but it's going to be the case with Thomas and a lot of the other people that he owns. You are also related by blood to these people. Right, that's why Daddy, there's that's that's your uncle. That's a cousin by marriage, you know.
That's also and these the fact that these people, these that like these these white families, these like slave owning families often raise their kids together with like usually there will be a family or a couple of families of like privileged enslaved people who live in and around the home. That is, it creates these bonds that I think pervert but often exist in the image of the concept of family bonds. Right, I think this is a perversion of
family bonds, but it does mimic that, right. And A Master of the Mountain Windset goes into more detail on this phenomenon. I'm gonna read this quote than we can talk about it as after the Civil War. Visited after the Civil War, visiting Northerner, astonished at the stories she had heard, asked a former slave how he could risk his life for the family that enslaved him. The answer was that the slaves had not lost a sense of
common humanity. Often we left our own wives and children during the war in order to take care of the wives and children of our absent masters. And why did we do this because they were helpless and afraid, while our families were better able to take care of them and had no fear. When they saw their oppressors stricken with fear, they did not rise up in vengeance but offered help.
Yeah.
And that's, you know, e a mess.
Yeah, it's both both a malady and a testament, you know to like you said that, like, well, we didn't lose humanity. I know we were being treated like we weren't humans, but we know we were. We knew we're humans, you know, And like you said, like I still see this little boy who's the child of or this little girl who's the child of my master. But I'm like you, like, yeah, that's that's still a child, you know. And I know we're both human, you know, Like maybe you don't, I do.
And I'm not gonna let you take that from me, you know. I think that there was a lot of stuff that I was even raised with where it's like you can't let you can't let your oppressors strip you from your humanity, Like, don't let them take that also,
And I think that that that's something there. But the thought actually crossed my mind as you was talking about this weird family bond that like, Okay, it's absolutely obvious to everyone in this house, including the master's wife, that that little girl, that little light skinned little girl who works in my house, looks just like my husband. So like,
I know that's your child, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, And I just wonder if that played a role between the relationship of white women and black women where there's a level of resentment. That's another thing I never thought about.
And that's the thing part of the difficulty of getting I think. I'm sure that happens. I'm sure that's a part of the story that's significant, But they also didn't really like let women write a lot like you know, it was also not a lot of you don't get as nearly at least not as much as we get of Yeah.
I just and I just wonder if like that element like plays such a role of like maybe some of the vitriol and like besides just run of the middle racism, the specific vitriol towards specifically black women, Like I just wonder if, like I wonder if that's a thing where it's like, well, I mean and that's all in my face and rather than rather than like directing the anger
where it's supposed to be. You'll say it where it's like, well, she's properties she didn't have no saying this your husband raped her, Like I wan't to understand what you don't understand about that, you know.
But yeah, and also, as we'll talk about later, often forced her to be like a nurse maid to your kids, right, which I'm sure also especially when you're talking about like a woman like like Martha Jefferson is going to be his future wife who is sickly, right, and so yeah, like that's that's another complication to it. But I think we have established these are very complex relationships that we
are going to be looking into and breaking down. That doesn't impact the evil that we attached to them, but it is worth understanding if you want to get a context for what life was like.
Now.
When it comes to where Jefferson lands in the intellectual history of slavery, I think it's important that during this time he is a voracious reader and he's kind of you know the term web we use for like I think it came out of initially like like white Americans who are obsessed with Japan, right, He's kind of that, He's kind of a web for the Roman Republic. Right.
He is a huge fan. He's in love with his idea, this distorted idea of the history and culture of that place and time, and he understood it through the scholarship of his day as like kind of a golden age that was lost in a lot of ways, and this influences the attitudes and opinions of these ancient Romans he's reading, influences his early feelings on how slavery ought to work right, and on the morality of slavery, and in a lot of ways his opinions on this are more Roman than American.
In his youth, he's going to age into an acceptance of what we now call scientific racism as an older man, but that's not entirely where he starts with things. At college, Thomas gains a reputation for being, in biographer Joseph Ellis's World Words, an obsessive student. Ellis writes in the book American Sphinx that Thomas would spend sometimes fifteen hours with his books, three hours practicing his violin, and the remaining six hours eating and sleeping. He was an extremely serious young man.
Wow.
Jefferson would later write about the two years that he spent at college as the happiest years of his life. He was active in sports, and he built a sizable friend group, which included Dabney Carr. His mentor was a math professor William Small, who was a prominent deist and whose views on religion shaped Jefferson's own. This is a big part of how he comes to see himself as a dist He has this kind of this guy, William Small,
this professor, as kind of a mentor. He graduates, he's gonna have a couple because he doesn't have like a dad anymore. Right. He graduates in seventeen sixty two because life moved to a lot faster in those days, or at least school did. And he took an apprenticeship in the law with a guy named George With its spelled withy, but it's pronounced with apparently. So this lasted five years, and it acquainted Jefferson with the nuts and bolts of the kind of law that he was practicing, which was
mainly land title law. He was representing planters in cases involving land claims. For the most part. With was also an intellectual inspiration for Thomas, who called him my second father and described him as the American Cato. Now, this is going to get us into our detailed talk about one of the Romans that Thomas reads a lot, and that is Cato the Elder. There's a Cato the Younger too.
Both Catos are related and both were known to be kind of these moral paragons of a very specific set of austere agricultural values.
Right.
They are these kind of guys who still are with us today. Right, you know, this kind of like conservative, obsessive sort of love of the concept of being a farmer, often attached many real knowledge of what being a farmer requires.
Right.
Kato the Catos, but particularly Cato the Elder is like he's he is ground zero for that. He is like the first guy in Western literature to be like, ah, we all need to be farmers.
Yeah, that particular, I think it's important to like drill down that type of personality. Like and and while it's it's actually very telling that he goes to Kato, because it's like if somebody were to say they were a karate master or a jiu jitsu master and you're like, oh, word, like how many tournaments have you been in? And they're like No, I just studied it and I know all the things. So it's like, oh, you you're a master because you read it, not to dread.
A lot of guy karate karate for you.
Yeah, So it's like, no, I can teach karate in a classroom, not an adult jo in a classroom, that dude Kato.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's this this reality, this thing that's really starting to happen in a major way while Cato the Elder is alive. That's like, basically the backbone of the Roman military had always been these small, independent farmers, right. These guys are freemen. They're soldiers when they're not farming if the state needs them. And this is like, you know, Rome is going to constantly deal with the problem of that.
Like once they start to get big, you start having all these rich people buying up all of this land that smaller farmers had and working it with slaves, and this kind of destroys the social backbone that had supported the military. A lot of Roman politics is going to like revolve around this change that happens.
Right.
It's more complicated than we're going to get into today, but what's important for you to know is that if he were alive today, Cato the Elder would have a TikTok, right, and it would be the kind of TikTok where he's like, he's like giving these angry rants over ai generated images of farmhouses and wives with too many fingers, handling handing plates of indistinct food to broods of Norman rock well looking kids. Yeah, and he would go on all these lives.
It'd be a split screen with somebody playing the lies on the other side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would be going these long rants about returning to tradition. He'd be really angry about women in video games. I have that my suspicions, Oh for sure.
Oh wow. Yeah.
In his own day, Cato wrote a lot about his idealized concept of the free citizen farmer, a tough and morally upright creature who formed the backbone of Roman military might. Of course, this citizen farmer was also a slave master, and Cato had very specific ideas on how slaves should be kept. From Plutarch's Life of Cato the Elder quote, a slave of his was expected to either be busy about the house or to be asleep, and he was
very partial to the sleepy ones. He thought these gentler than the wakeful ones, and those who had enjoyed the gift of sleep were better for any kind of service than those who lacked it. In the belief that his slaves were led into most mischief by their sexual passions, he stipulated that males should consort with the females at a fixed price, but should never approach any other woman. So he makes his slaves pay him to have sex.
Wow, there's something to be said about I don't want to go down too big of a tangent, but just like what the Romans meant when they said slaves being rather different than what we meant. Yeah, but also the
way that they viewed sexuality. It's so interesting that they that you brought that up, because sex was, at least in the ancient Romans, was much less about pleasure than it was about dominance, you know what I mean, And and social status and order, you know what I'm saying, Like it's a way to display power.
So certainly when you're talking about like your the people that you own, yes.
Yes, So then to say that, like because if for your slave to be able to have choice in who they sleep with, is to say that you're letting your slave exert power or some sort of authority, and it's like, I can't let you do that, Like that's not in our worldview.
Yeah, and Cato seems to be saying that, like, if you do that, that little bit of that little bit of agency you give them will like lead them spark likely could be the foundation of rebellion. Yes, right, yes, and yeah, his attitude basically is that, like, slaves are living tools, right, so they should be either working or unconscious, having exhausted themselves at the end of every single day.
Because people don't like living this way, and because Cato, despite talking about like austerity and how it's great to not be to lose yourself to these modern comforts, Kato is a guy who seeks a life of comfort provided by human bondage, the people who work for him without being paid, right, And he understood that in order to maintain that life, he has to keep his slaves divided and befuddled beneath him. Quote and this is from Plutarch.
At the outset, when he was still poor and in military service, he found no fault at all with what was served up to him, declaring that it was shameful for a man to quarrel with the domestic over food and drink. But afterwards, when his circumstances were improved and he used to entertain his friends and colleagues at table, no sooner was dinner over than he would flog those slaves who had been remiss at all and preparing or serving it. He was always contriving that his slave should
have feuds and dissensions among themselves. Harmony among them made him suspicious and fearful. So he's like beating his slaves after dinner, not even if they didn't do anything, just so that, like what, they'll get angry at someone else, right, at one of the other people. You know. Yeah, this is one of the guys that Thomas Jefferson is reading obsessively. You know the fact that he compares his mentor to moderate the American Kato is meaningful rites a lot, yes, yeah,
and yeah, Kto is. He's a conservative, right, and he's someone who believes in the maintenance of his own comfort through this suffering and subjugation of others, but also someone who fetishizes this idea of independence and hard work despite
getting a lot of their station through inheritance. One of Kato's noteworthy sentiments was that a good Roman should seek to earn more than he inherited, and Jefferson would always obsess over this image of himself as a great businessman, even though he never is able to really do that. While practicing law, Jefferson entered into adult society found himself walking in some of the most respected circles in Virginia.
He gained easy access to this scene due to his father's wealth and reputation, and Jefferson constantly spent more than he could afford to spend, burning away his inheritance trying to impress his wealthy society friends. It was during this portion of his life that he fell in love for the first time to a young woman named Rebecca Burwell. Her parents had died when she was young, but left her a fabulous fortune. Her uncle, who has made her guardian,
was the governor of New York. When he fell in love with her, Thomas he was twenty and she was sixteen. And so, unlike Robert E. Lee, our boy, TJ's going to fail early to the coveted behind the bastards didn't flirt with children.
Award made to his twenties.
Yeah, you're almost you're almost in line with that one Texas Romeo and Juliet law Right twenty and sixteen. So he's not as bad as some people, allowing for the fact, well, yet he's going to be actually much worse than most people not too long from now, yes, but allowing for the fact that this was more common back than wellolk
on that a little bit later. I also do want to acknowledge something most people already know, which is that guys who flirt with women who are a lot younger than ye them often have issues with control and self confidence that make them want to be with someone who
is less able to exercise agency. And we can infer that this may have been part of what's happening with Jefferson, from the fact that he is too shy to flirt with her directly, and so like, after meeting her and falling in love, he flees to Shadwell for nine months and then he like he spends the whole time basically like getting his courage together, and then when he comes back to Williamsburg he does so he tries to reconnect with her in this horribly awkward way, being like, hey, sorry,
I was gone for nine months. I absolutely intend to ask for your hand in marriage, probably in the future, probably in the near future, but I gotta go to England first, Is that cool with you? And Rebecca seems to have been like, I don't know what to fucking do with this, And so another dude gives her an actual marriage proposal and she marries that guy. Dumas writes he explained this inactivity to us on the ground that
he had been abominably lazy. But the probability is that he was now deeper in the law than in love, by which Dumas means he was just obsessed with his job. Yeah right, speaking of workahol, Do you know what cleans my palate is the products and services that support this podcast? Is that accurate?
Clean?
Jo Buck too cleans? Whatever you'll do if we sell that? Yeah, and we're back. So. The most noteworthy consequence of these early years in law and high society was that it started bringing Jefferson into contact with some of the men who had become influential voices of the revolution. This was seventeen sixty five and he was training to be a lawyer still when he first listened to Patrick Henry extempt against British tax policy. In this case the Stamp Act. Henry,
you're all familiar with Henry. They give me bride er ging me death guy. Right, he's a fiery orator. That's kind of what he's still known for. Yeah, and he is he is a very like he's a hardliner for independence, right.
Yeah.
And Jefferson, he's a hardliner because he doesn't believe that Parliament has any right to tax the colonies. And Jefferson agrees with this very strict stance right that there's no reason Parliament should be able to tax American landowners and farmers for any purpose in American Sphinx Ellis describes Jefferson as turning into kind of a fundamentalist on this point.
From his earliest days in the House, he opposed all forms of parliamentary taxation and supported non importation resolutions against British trade regulations. Now, while Jefferson felt strongly about this, his participation in the debates of the day was mostly limited to watching and listening. He was still very shy and not confident in his voice or perhaps his mind.
Ellis continues, he seemed to most of his political contemporaries a hovering and ever silent presence, like one of those foreigners at a dinner party who nod privately as they move from group to group, but never reveal whether or not they can speak the language. He had a deep seated aversion to the inherent contentions and routinized hurly burly of a political career, and was forever telling his friends that life on the public stage was not for him.
Just as his political career was getting started, he seemed poised for retirement.
Wow, I do know. Just dudes that like are just introverted in quiet and just whenever things are happening right now, like they actually have a trillion amazing things to say, they're just yeah, I just don't feel like I need to jump into this. And I actually in some ways admire that because I am very much the like, like there's lava in my mouth, I have to talk like so.
Like yeah, for to.
Loquacious, we'd say surprise, surprise, surprise. Yeah.
Jefferson is very much one of those, like discretion is the better part of being a smart guy. Yeah, but he's also he's going to kind of it's gonna cost some problems for him too. But he gets chosen to represent his district in the House of Burgesses in seventeen sixty eight after it had been dissolved by the Royal Governor after a dispute around taxation. We're not going to labor on this much because I think this kind of stuff gets covered in school a lot, and it's not
super relevant to the bastardrey in Jefferson's life. But the basic issue here is that Parliament wanted Americans to pay taxes like everybody else, and Americans felt this was unfair as they weren't really represented in Parliament. The French and Indian Wars, which had concluded a little bit earlier, were a major inciting incident here because they had driven up debt for the Crown, which inspired a lot of the taxes and duties on American goods that Jefferson and his
cohorts are going to rail against. And it was during his time in the House of Burgesses that Jefferson first comes into contact with George Washington, who led an effort to have Virginia join the Association for the Non Importation of British Manufacturers. This was an effort of intracolonial solidarity to protest British taxes on goods and support domestic manufacturing.
Jefferson hated the idea that the Americas would have to import basic necessities from elsewhere in the Empire instead of having their own manufacturing base for those products, which is going to be strangled by the taxes and duties that
Parliament was pushing through. Like a lot of problematic dudes, Jefferson is going to grow increasingly obsessed with these ideas of autarchy, right of radical self reliance on both an individual and a national level, and he kind is going to come to believe that the basis of the society he wants to build should be these independent Yalemen farmers who produce all the necessities of life on their own
independent properties, or at least most of them. Yeah, and kind of the nation that these people build in common together will itself be independent. Right, It's not going to need anything from elsewhere. Now, this kind of life, the reality of it, Like as with Cato's fantasies, it's only really possible with large numbers of insides.
It requires slaves. Yeah, yeah, to that point from what I understand, Like, yeah, his picture were of America was not big city, you know, and that that that that actually became quite a point of contention because of like just the very his very just his imagination of what
this world could be is not modern. It's not so that played such a role in his view of slavery and a view of this and like yeah, so like that that in turn, if you took another like Founder, that was like, nah, dude, we could be modern, Like let's we can be the future, you know.
Yeah, yeah, like you know, And there were a lot of these, a lot of those guys. Jefferson his his vision of kind of his ideal society. For as much as he talks about democracy and his interested in progress as he is, and he's going to label himself an ally with the progressives of his time. Yeah, what he talks about really seems like feudile to me in a lot of ways. These like little feudal independent states run on slavery, right, you know, which is kind of their
version of serfdom. It's made clear kind of how some of his beliefs are moving along. In seventeen sixty eight, which is the same year he joins the House of Burgesses, and that's the year he decides to build a house for himself on top of a mountain Monticello, on a parcel of land inherited from his father. Building Monticello is going to be the work of a lifetime and in some ways the most insidiously evil direct action of Jefferson's life,
but at this stage his plans were unsettled. In seventeen seventy two, he married Martha Whale Skelton, who had been widowed young and thus had a huge amount of wealth and property to offer him. The family slaves who were later interviewed about this marriage describe it as a love match, though not something done for property, which is interesting and probably suggests that that's what it was.
Right.
They wrote about this as different from a lot of the other arranged marriages that they saw among the white people who were kind of at the top of their society. We don't really know much about the relationship because Jefferson later destroys most of his correspondence with Martha.
Great.
Yeah, I don't know what's going on. There may have just been a thing he did out of grief, because she's not going to live a long life, and neither is her father John. He is less of a mystery, though, because he was a slave trader. Henry Winsick writes quote when Jefferson courted the beautiful Martha Wales. He spent evenings by the fire with her father, Old John, who undoubtedly talked business with the young suitor, discoursing on slaves and
the peaks and valleys in the market for them. The incoming tide of slaves washed up against the steps of the county courthouses every late summer and fall. The lawyers and magistrates had the routine of land transactions and debt collections interrupted when overseers herded gangs of newly delivered African children under the courthouses through the magistrates to scrutinize, their
task being to assign each child in age. When children reached sixteen, they became taxable, So the planters had an interest in low estimates.
Wow.
Yeah, the idea that like you don't even really have your age. Yeah, that's something that like these guys are kind of hash out independent of you.
Yeah.
Now, from what he would write later, we can infer that Jefferson was horrified by aspects of what Wales told him, particularly about the passage like from Africa the Americans. Yeah, and so much so that he eventually is going to take action. Not long after this point, soon after joining the House of Burgesses. Sometime at the end of the seventeen sixties or the start of the seventeen seventies, he
submitted an emancipation bill anonymously through a cousin. Jefferson himself hated face to face conflict and the vicious reaction to the bill. His cousin was accused of hating his country reinforce his fear of speaking out on the issue. But he does at this point, he does try something. Yeah, it's nothing, I think.
Yeah, And and to know that, like what gets outlawed first is the importation of new slaves, you know, which I still which I think indirectly is connected to Jefferson being like, yes, some about this is crazy.
And it's connected to Jefferson's this belief he's going to express for a while about how slavery should be brought to an end. He's going to consistently advocate for that. But yeah, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Ye, yeah.
Yeah. In seventeen seventy three, Jefferson's best friend, Dabney Carr died. He had married Thomas's sister, Martha, and his loss was an understandable blow to Thomas. What's Harder to understand is how he responds to Dabney's death, As described in an article by the National Park Service, while slaves were preparing Carr's grave, Jefferson sat nearby taking notes on the time required to turn the soil. Two men spent three and
a half hours at this job. Thus, Jefferson calculated one man would take seven hours and could therefore be expected to turn an acre of ground in four working days. Now, that's a weird response to losing your best friend.
Ji.
Like I normally I say there's no wrong way to grieve, But carefully studying the number of slave man hours needed to bury your friend while you watch them dig his grave is the wrong way to gree.
Can you imagine a bad way? You imagine sitting next to somebody grieving, putting your arm around him. They just real quiet, and you're like bro mans On as you know, you could talk to me about anything. Man, I love you, homie, Like, I what do you have? What's what's how you feeling right now?
Man?
What's what's what's feel in your mind?
I feel like you could turn an acre of soil in about four days.
I'm sorry, Yeah, wait, that's what you were saying about right now, okay, such a weird Now I'd be like, oh yeah, all right man, Yeah, what do you say to that? Like all right, all right, all right, Thomas, okay, well let me know if you need anything, bro, Like.
You're welcome for burying your friends, how about that?
Yeah?
So that same year, the same year that Dabney dies, his father in law is also going to die, and you know, fuck him. Uh, he leaves Martha Jefferson, eleven thousand acres of land, thirty five slaves, and what biographers generally describe as innumerable debts. The exact reason for those debts is important to understand. If we're going to grab fully how the man with the post abolition.
It just says innumerable.
Debts, innumerable debts.
That's hilarious.
This man is under fucking water, and it's we're going to talk about why he's underwater, right, because.
We're vague but also not vegue. Yeah, it's strangely accurate. I was like, all right, all right, copy that, sir, Yeah you're yeah, what is he what's being communicated? Yeah, what's what is said is vague, but what being communicated is spot on. Yeah.
Yeah, and his again this guy Wales, John Wales, I think has been a wholesale of human beings. And he had shortly before dying, set up a big deal in seventeen seventy two for a consignment of enslaved people coming in on a boat called the Prince of Wales. Only two hundred and eighty of the four hundred people aboard survived, which was a high rate of loss. I mean, it was never a low rate of loss, right, but this was it was bad. Scene is bad, and this shrank
their potential profits. But then they sold two hundred and sixty six of these people, and they did so on credit to quote unquote wealthy planters who claim to be good for it. And the planters were buying on credit because they needed these guys to harvest their tobacco and then they were going to sell the tobacco and then
they were going to pay back Whales. But then the tobacco market crashed that year and the planters had no cash, and thus Wales and his business partner had to make good on the payment to the original slavers in London. Thomas Jefferson inherited this debt in seventeen seventy three, and he is it's going to take He's not really getting out of this, right, Like this is going to be hanging. It's like a student loan. It's like an evil student loan.
Student loans are a different kind of very different Yeah.
Yeah, study loon only for slaves.
Yes, yeah, it's like a student right, and like with a similarly ruinous rate of interest. Right, So he's not going to be able to really pay any of these or the debts that he has accrued off. Situations like this are not uncommon for the wealthy Virginia planting class, right, these guys are wealthy in quotation marks. To explain this, we have to talk about what Jefferson and his peers considered wealth, right, because they're not talking about like cash, right.
They are talking about primarily land.
Right.
Wealth is land to a lot of these guys, and the fact that all of them are hideously in debt, mostly to British lenders, is inconvenient and a problem, But it doesn't change their impression of themselves right as wealthy men. But it does cause all these problems because that land can be taken away, right, and debt is inherited in this period, and so debt is going to be a central issue for Jefferson. Over the course of his decades
in public life. He would often advocate for the elimination of American debts held by English bankers during post war negotiations, and, like Robert E. Lee a generation later, he came to see the human beings that he had inherited as a path out of the debt trap that his relatives and his own spending had locked him into. In seventeen seventy four and seventeen seventy five, the conflict of a British taxation and rule of the colonies reached a fever pitch
and boiled over into armed resistance. Jefferson became a major figure in Virginia and increasingly well known throughout the colonies for his full throated, or at least full pinned because he's not really a talking guy at this point, defense of the Boston Tea Party. Now he writes a lot about the tea Party, not historically accurate shit, but what he writes sets the popular conception of this moment to
an extent that it still exists today. You can draw a line from what Jefferson writes about these people to like the tea Party that we had in the early odds, right,
And I'm going to quote from American Sphinx here. In Jefferson's account, a dedicated group of loyal Bostonians risked arrest and persecution to destroy a cargo of the contraband Samuel Adams, a major figure in the Continental Congress and the chief organizer of the Tea Party, must have chuckled in satisfaction, knowing as he did that the loyal Bostonians were really a group of hooligans and vandals who would disguised themselves as Indians in order to avoid being identified, and who
had enjoyed the tacit support of the Boston merchants, many of whom had made their fortunes in smuggling. Sam Adams realized that the Tea Party was an orchestrat act of revolutionary theater. Jefferson described it as a spontaneous act of patriotism, conducted according to the etiquette of well a tea party. But then again, perhaps Jefferson's version was itself a propagandistic manipulation,
just as self consciously orchestrated as the Tea Party itself. Now, the whole point of that book by Ellis American sphinx.
The reason he calls it American sphinx is that Jefferson has really hard to pin down about this and other stuff, right, you can you can make a case if you're arguing about like modern politics, he would be on both sides of most issues of his day or of like today, right like, because he's he's very inconsistent and he's really had He's fine with lying to protect his own image. He does it all the time. But he's also really good at writing. He's a great writer, and so like
the stuff he writ. Ellis describes his writing on the Tea Party as being like a fairy tale, right and obviously the fact that that distortion gets passed down to such an extent is a credit to his ability to craft reality, which is very much what he is doing. Right. He's building Ellis describes as like a fantasy world for himself that is robust enough to occasionally admit the rest of the country.
And that's a good way.
Yeah, that's a good way to say him. Yes, yeah, wow, yeah. And we're going to talk about that and a lot more in part two. But prop yo, it's the end of part one. I hope you all had a good time. Prop, You got any pluggables to play?
And Politics will Prop. We do a hood politics vyballs which don't have a don't have no cuss words in it, and it's a little shorter so he could play to the kiddos. But yeah bull Politics will Prop. Go to prop hip hop dot com. You could find the pod on all of the things and uh yeah man, and I'm gonna continue to rock with y'all. Man, oh, I wrote a book of poetry book Terror.
You sure did? Yeah and yeah man excellent. Well, everybody, that's it for part one. Come back tomorrow where we'll talk about more. Thomas Jefferson Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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