The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford “Lively and absorbing. . ." — The New York Times Book Review "Engrossing." —Wall Street Journal “Entertaining and well-researched . . . ” —Houston Chronicle Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head. Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war. However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos--Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels--scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over. Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas's struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness. In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn't alienate anyone. But we are not living in one of those times; the fight over the Alamo's meaning has become more pitched than ever in the past few years, even violent, as Texas's future begins to look more and more different from its past. It's the perfect time for a wise and generous-spirited book that shines the bright light of the truth into a place that's gotten awfully dark.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com, thechrissvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with a great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to give us a like. Subscribe to us on YouTube.com. Forch slash Chris Voss. You can hit the bell notification button. You can subscribe to all the amazing, wonderful videos we have, all the brilliant authors we have on the show. You go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfosh,

see everything we're reading and reviewing over there. You can go see all the bloody groups we have on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all the different places all the kids are at these days. You can see the Chris F fosh show as well today we have three three amazing authors we got tired of just having one author at a time on the show or two authors at a time we're just like screw it we're going for three and so we said who wrote a book that's uh coming out that has three authors and sure enough there one. And it's coming out June 8th.

It's entitled Forget the Alamo, the Rise and Fall of an American Myth. Seems like the ending should be like shots fired, but I suppose we'll find out what that's about. It's by Brian Burrow, Chris Thomason, and Jason Stanford. And they've been joining us today so they can tell us about this wonderful and amazing book and this episode is brought to you by our sponsor ifi-audio.com and their micro idst signature it's a top of the range desktop transportable dac and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones it has two brown burr dac chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now.

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But some insights to them as well. Brian Burrow is the author of six books, including The Big Rich, Days of Rage, Public Enemies, and the number one New York Times bestseller, Barbarians at the Gate. Chris Thomason is a columnist for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News and the author of the New York Times bestselling Thomason Hill about his family's slave-owning history in Texas. From 1995 to 2007, he reported from more than 30 countries and nine wars for the Associated Press. Jason Stanford is a writer whose bylines appeared in Texas Monthly, The Austin

American Statesman, The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, The Texas Tribune, and Texas Highways. The former communications director for Austin Mayor Steve Adler. Stanford previously worked as a political consultant and helped elect or re-elect more than 30 members of Congress. He publishes a weekly newsletter called The Experiment. And what do you know? All three are on the show. Welcome, gentlemen. Thanks for having us on.

Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the new book. It's coming out June 8th, so people should pick that baby up. Let's go all through three of you and give us your dot coms, your places or plugs where people can go find you on the interwebs. I guess I'm supposed to go first. I'm on Twitter, Brian Burr, and I'm on Facebook the same. That's pretty much it.

I'm on the HoustonChronicle.com and ExpressNews.com. And I'm at JasonStanford.substack.com. There you go. I guess we're working the alphabet. BCJ, is that what we're doing? Sure. There you go, guys. Welcome to the show.

Congratulations on the book. What motivated you guys to write this book? And the three of you get together on it, too, I think might be an interesting story. Brian, why don't you kick us off? It was Chris's idea. The three of us were sitting at breakfast one Sunday morning, as we did at the time, on Austin's South Congress Avenue, and throwing ideas back and forth. And Chris suddenly started talking about one of his columns for the chronicle about the alamo and jason and i were kind of eating our eggs half listening

until the story started telling got really good basically said everything you think you know about the alamo is wrong and as someone who grew up in texas and has lived here for a long time i started listening and chris went on to talk about how the Alamo as a symbol has been viewed in the Texas Mexican-American community often as a symbol of kind of Anglo oppression. This was entirely news to me, I think to Jason. And at some point, I remember slamming my hand down on the desk saying, this is a book. And 99 out of 100 times when a literary type says that, nothing ever comes of it. And this time, something has. Two years later, we have a book that we're tremendously excited about that we think breaks a lot of new ground and urging a reassessment

of the Alamo legend. And Chris, are you surprised now that Brian has told you that him and Jason normally aren't even listening to you during breakfast? I was going to object to that. I was hanging on his every word. Chris is fascinating. Brian, getting Brian's attention is like trying to have you ever raised a golden retriever with behavioral problems? That's what it's like getting Brian to focus. So the fact that Chris's idea got his attention at all really, I think, speaks to the power of the idea.

Yeah. I want to apologize. There's a very angry mockingbird right outside my window, and I'm asking someone to chase it away. Chris, little known fact, that's how they got the name to kill a mockingbird. It was a Zoom call. Yeah. It was a Zoom call. Yeah. It was a Zoom call. Yeah, I think Jason and Brian were fascinated about how long I was going to live after I wrote this column about the Alamo. Because obviously this is a story that people take very seriously down here.

And I was basically calling it out because the city is looking at spending $450 million on renovating the place and basically just reinforcing a lie. And that was what the column was, and I think that led to the book. There you go. Well, I'm not sure if I'm in a friendship intervention meeting or if we're talking about a book. But give us the overall arcing nature of what you guys have written in this book, and then we'll get into some of the details. Chris? Yeah? arcing nature of what you guys have written in this book and then we'll get into some of the details chris yeah so if you start from the premise that everything you think you know about the alamo is probably a lie we start out going back and saying hey what actually happened what do we know about what happened and then we we established, guess what? There was no line in the sand. Baby Crockett did not die swinging old Betsy.

He tried, he surrendered. They didn't fight to the death the night before. Travis tried to surrender, and Santa Ana wouldn't accept the conditions. So we established that. And then the next question is, where do the lies come from? And that was part two of the book. And finally, we end up with they're still telling lies at the Alamo because they want to build this 300 million dollar museum to house Phil Collins's artifacts that are guess what? Lies just like the stories we learned in seventh grade Texas history class. Is that Phil Collins, the singer? Yes. Yeah.

You got to get the singer has the largest collection of Alamo artifacts in the world. Chris, you have got to get to chapter 23. It's the end of the book, but in some, it's the, it's the excerpt is on the cover of the current issue of Texas monthly. Long story short, this big new museum at the Alamo is built around the largest collection of Alamo memorabilia ever assembled by the singer, yes, Phil Collins. Unfortunately, we got a tip late in the game that the Collins collection going into this big museum was not quite what it appeared to

be. That in fact, most of the items have little or no provenance. In other words, there was no way to know whether they were authentic. And looking at the big 12 or 15 items, those directly linked to Crockett and Travis and the heroes of the Alamo, most if not all of them appear, according to our research, to be fake. So that's made a little bit of news down here. But that's just one chapter, literally literally of a book that's about a 200 year story so let me lay a foundation really quick because we have an international audience too so for those it sounds silly to say this so i'll fit on offend a lot of texans but there are people in the world outside of the america that probably aren't too familiar with what the Alamo is. Can one of you explain what the Alamo is for those folks? Oh, if I were writing a dummy's book for the Alamo is a place where during the Texas revolt, Texas revolution of 1835 and 1836 against the Mexican government of Santa Ana,

a group of about 200 Texans manned an old mission outside the then small city of San Antonio called the Alamo, where despite copious warnings that an enormous Mexican army was on the way, they decided to sit and fight it out. They wrote many dramatic and beautiful romantic letters asking for help, which is really the source of history. Those letters so resonated then and now. Help by and large did not come. The Mexicans then swooped in, killed them to a man. But what happened then was the Texas, the reason the Alamo became so famous is the Texas Army under Sam Houston used the rallying cry, remember the Alamo, to rally their small army to victory at the Battle of San Jacinto against Santa Ana, thus giving Texas its independence.

Ten years later, it became a U.S. state. There you go. There you go. Those of us who've seen the Disney movies, I grew up watching the Disney movies of Davy Crockett and Disney. I was surprised that you guys talked about how that sort of romanticized that sort of thing. How true were those movies and what was the real story? What we found is that every generation uses the Alamo as a metaphor for whatever they're facing today. So Walt Disney was worried about global communism. He was worried about unionization of his movie studios. He was a hardcore right winger.

And so he ordered his producers to go out and find these examples of self-reliance and what he considered to be American values and rugged, rugged self-reliance. And they came up with Davy Crockett and then just took all the joy out of Davy. And instead of him being this comic, rabble-rousing politician, they turn him into this really stoic, mid-century American icon, which is what Phil Collins fell in love with. He loved the idea of this iconic stoic man voluntarily fighting to the death for a larger cause. And of course, that's not really what happened, but it's what everyone thinks happened thanks to Walt Disney. Yeah, that cemented in my mind. I grew up in that area of John Wayne and shows and stuff like that. And yeah, that really cemented my thinking process on that.

Anybody else want to comment on that before I move to the next question? It was really, the Alamo was very much a Texas thing until that era. And we argue that it was really Disney's Davy Crockett and John Wayne's The Alamo movie, and then the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who just adored The Alamo, that really took The Alamo from a local slash regional thing to a truly international icon, a story that is known around the world. Yeah, Lyndon Johnson couldn't stop lying about The Alamo to the extent that he invented relatives who died at the Alamo. Are you kidding me? Seriously?

No, I'm not kidding you. And he flew halfway around the world to address the troops and tell them about his great granddaddy or great uncle or something like that who died at the Alamo. And these are, even for the Alamo, these are easily disproven facts. And so he was so fixated on talking about the Alamo to drum up support for Vietnam, which if you think about it, is a really bad metaphor for Vietnam. Yeah, that's true. Some writers accused him of having Alamo syndrome. Wow. And to this day, the Alamo is used to whip up people into a patriotic fervor to go kill people

in another country. There are people in Congress during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars who referred to Santa Ana as a modern-day Saddam Hussein, or as a latter-day Saddam Hussein. Now, you guys talk about what the real battle of Alamo was about and what they were trying to do. What was the real battle of the Alamo about? That's what people argue about to this day. It's difficult to find an academic consensus over the last 50 years pretty much academics have looked at the whole thing and kind of thrown up their hands and called it a clash of civilizations to which we say well yeah but that doesn't really address the causes there's all sorts of causes that have been cited over the years some have cited ethnic hatred some have said it was about taxes. We say all that contributed.

But the central underlying thing, the only thing really, that the Mexican government and its Texas colonists had been arguing about for 15 years was slavery. Slavery was at the heart of the Texas economic model. Of course, it's the only reason people came to Texas was to farm cotton, and they only knew how to do it with slaves. The Mexican government that came into power in 1821, at the very beginning of the Texas colony, was rabidly abolitionist. And it was difficult then, and can sometimes be difficult now, for Americans to view the Mexican government as taking the moral high ground here.

But here, they clearly were. And if you go back and look at the correspondence and the books and everything, the father of Texas, Stephen F. Austin, tried every argument and every horn-swaggling move that you could possibly do to keep slavery in place. And ultimately, while slavery was not the trigger of the revolt, it was clearly, we argue, the underlying cause. It's about power and keeping industry going. It was about money. It was about how Texans made money and how much the Mexicans wanted to stop that. Wow.

This is crazy, man. So you guys talk about, let's see, discusses indispensable contributions by, I'm not going to pronounce this correctly, even though I'm a ZZ Top fan, Tejanos? Am I pronouncing that right? Tejanos. Tejanos. Okay. Reading ZZ Top album names help. Which are Texans of Mexican origin to Texas independence. How did this play in? Who are these people? Tell us more and how this played into the... The earliest settlers were Spanish and Creole. So when we say Creole, we mean that people of Spanish origin or people mixed with the indigenous tribes who had married into them.

And you get this mestizo mix. And these people who lived north of the Rio Grande and south of the Red River were called Tejanos because that was the province of Tejas in Mexico. And they were an independent lot. And in many ways, they started the revolution when Santa Anna declared himself dictator. And Santa Anna did away with a federal government. He wanted a central government where he could be a dictator. And the Tejanos were like, listen, you know, we've been here for four or five generations. We're unhappy with this. We're going to join our brothers in Zapotecas to rebel against Santa Ana and demand a return to the original constitution, the white Anglos who had come from the United States, many of them illegally crossing the border and settling in Texas. That's, to me, one of the great ironies, is that a lot of these Texans were illegal immigrants to Mexico. They co-opted this Tejano fight for a fairer Mexican government and turned it into a revolt to establish an independent

country, to basically steal a third of Mexico from the rightful Mexican government. And so we have people like Juan Seguin, who was born and raised third generation San Antonio, who was really critical to these early days of fighting against Mexican oppression in the guise of Santa Ana. And then you've got Lorenzo de Zavala, who was the minister of finance under Santa Ana, realized that Santa Ana was going to be a dictator, and then came to Texas to raise an army to overthrow Santa Ana and ends up becoming the first vice president of the Republic of Texas and is immediately shunted aside because the white racist from the United States didn't want any Mexicans in their government. And so for a hundred

years of Texas history, the role of these Tejanos and these Mexicans has been basically whitewashed out of Texas history. And that's something we try to bring back. That's great. Go ahead. Yeah, the thing to add there is that the Tejanos were the Anglo, the Americans, critical allies for and during the revolution. They supported the Alamo itself. Some fought and died there. Others fought and died at San Jacinto. And one of the great, maybe the great tragedy of early Texas is that once the Anglos won, they systematically pushed many, if not all, the Tejanos out of a lot of the towns and small cities of Texas at the time in a kind of ethnic cleansing.

And it was a real betrayal of our allies. And as Chris mentions, that is reflected in the way they are entirely written out for the last 150 years of Texas history. Wow. It's really only been about the last 50 years that modern research has played up the contributions of the Tainos. Yeah, it's amazing how much of our history is whitewashed. We learn that every day as we interview authors and have them on and learn about all sorts of different pieces of missing pieces of history that have been whitewashed.

So it seems like the Alamo, is the Al, the central keystone of this whole narrative that Texans are always running around bragging about or saying about how we should be independent. We need to succeed, secede from the United States. And of course, we saw how good they are at running their own electrical grid when they disconnect from us. Good luck with that. Is this is this is this part of one of those keystones where this is the independence of Texas? We don't need the U.S. comes from. Yes, absolutely. And it's not just the Texas chauvinism.

It's also a touchstone for modern conservative thought. In his last State of the Union speech, Donald Trump referenced the Texas patriots who fought and died at the Alamo. And then he ad-libbed the beautiful, beautiful Alamo. This is an incredibly important symbol to that school of thought. Wow. To the extent that Texas has an identity, Chris, it is rooted in what we all here call the Texas creation myth. And that myth is the Alamo. It is the Alamo, and to some extent, the San Jacinto. It is at the root of what many call Texas exceptionalism. That is the idea that folks in Texas are somehow a little bit more special than the rest of the country, a little bit of cuddle above Delaware and Rhode Island. And you give a lot of Texans, especially white Texans, a beer or two, and you'll hear chapter

and verse about this. I know I have. You guys are special. I thought about moving down there, and then I saw you guys' property taxes and said, nope. But Texas is a beautiful place. I love going to South by Southwest, but I don't think Austin counts. Is Austin in a different state these days, or how does that work in Texas now? They call Austin the people's republic of texas the people's republic okay all right you guys also talk about in the book some of the political battles of how the alamo should be taught in schools so continuing this liar

narrative tell us a little bit about that there is a widespread consensus among historians and academics that the the history we teach about te about Texas and that is required of every seventh and fourth grader in the state isn't the full story even close. But to get that story taught in public schools, you have to get it past what's the State Board of Education. And these are elected officials who determine what the curriculum is going to be. And they're elected officials. And so to get unpaid, by the way, Texas public officials, and you get what you pay for there, to admit that slavery was at least a cause of the Texas Revolution, or revolt as we call it, is near impossible these days. The real fight over the last

two decades of the State Board of Education hasn't been about teaching the full history of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution. It's been, do we include Hispanics in the hero part of the story? Everyone's fighting over how they teach it as a heroic narrative and not say, we teach the Civil War more accurately in Texas than we do the Texas Revolution. The Texas Revolution is so sacrosanct. Sorry? Tell them the fact that heroic is the law. Yeah, there is nowhere else in the Texas curriculum that teachers are required to teach that anyone is a hero except at the Alamo.

Are you serious? I am serious. They fought so long over whether or not they – how and what form of the word hero were they going to use in the state curriculum and who exactly that applied to. Wow. The fight was just applied to like the big three, Crockett, Travis, and Bowie, or is it applied to everyone there, and especially the Tejanos who died with them? Yeah. That's a law. Holy crap.

The force of government requires every seventh grader to be taught that they were heroic. I'd hate to be the teacher who goes to jail for that. You're like sitting in there in the bail office and what are you in for? I murdered a family. What did you do? I said that Davy Crockett was a bad guy. That wouldn't go over. I don't know.

You don't even have to say he was a bad guy. You just have to say he just died not heroically. Yeah, because he surrendered. Disney tells a completely different story, if I recall. It was well known in the early part of the last century that he'd surrendered. It was commonly accepted, but Fess Parker went down swinging his club, and so therefore that was history to most boomers. Yeah, there you go.

Well, movies are never wrong. The lieutenant governor in Texas, who's an incredibly powerful office, he runs the Texas Senate. And he's a, I think it's safe to say he's a feared politician in this state. He has a scale model of the Alamo in his state office. Wow. Yeah. Just embracing it. And these guys are just using it as a political cudgel or a thing to whip up votes, to whip up money, to fundraise. You guys talk about how the Alamo is part of the ongoing conversation around race and racism and how we need to reckon with it. How has it become more pitched in the last few years with the rise of white nationalists and Donald Trump and all this racism that we've seen? Yeah, there was. When I write newspaper columns in the San Antonio Express News and the Houston Chronicle,

and I talk about the Alamo, I always point out that it was more a battle for slavery than for liberty. And when I do this, the mountain of hate mail, A former commissioner of the land office who, the job that's now held by George P. Bush, his predecessor, Jerry Patterson, writes articles in newspapers across the state condemning me. I get angry emails from people saying, how dare you try to sully the Alamo with talks about racism because it's the conservative ideal fight to the death for what you believe in draw a line in the sand that you either are brave enough to cross it or you're a coward it's just it's such an integral part of right-wing political rhetoric that it's

almost impossible to go back and say, hey, this is actually a much more interesting story if you would just stop believing the lies. Yeah. And I think that's the problem with our history. We want to believe the lies because facing the truth is painful. It's ugly. It's not pretty in any way, shape or form. And there's a bit of shame to it.

Yeah. Chris, can i add something to what chris said just a second ago as as far as the alamo being a symbol of political thought these days when the gun rights groups when they have the come and take it machine gun that's a direct steal from the texas revolution when the mexican government was trying to take a cannon from a town called gonzalez and they sewed a flag that said come and take it with a cannon in the middle that's a texas revolutionary symbol and they sewed a flag that said, come and take it, with a cannon in the middle. That's a Texas revolutionary symbol that they're using for gun rights these days.

And, Chris, you can't underestimate the fervor with which this is still, in the 21st century, being promulgated. When one of the many plans for the new Alamo suggested that they were going to move this mammoth 60-foot statue that has the names of those who died. They were going to move it basically from one sidewalk 50 feet over to another sidewalk. Overnight, you get these militia types who show up in camo camping out overnight with AK-47s basically saying over our dead bodies it was at that point that chris and jason and i started trading texts saying hey let's not share our home addresses in this book that was giving you my next question how well has your book been received so far of course i guess it hasn't technically come out yet but there's probably uh you're probably getting some hate mail already from the rumblings.

Oh, yeah, I know, already. Just when the blurb came out, just the name of the book, when that was announced, hate mail started coming. And Brian's been getting criticized on Twitter. I got some crazy comments last night. And you're right, the book hasn't come out yet. But I'm shocked that the Wall Street Journal praised our book in a post today in their review. And so we can't be that

crazy if the Wall Street Journal doesn't hate us. Rupert Murdoch probably hasn't seen it yet. Someone didn't write a five. In all seriousness, Chris, we invite the criticism because we, if we have any goal, we're not politicians, but we do think, especially at a time where Latinos are poised to become a majority

in Texas, we do think that it's time for a constructive public dialogue about what the Alamo means, how it should be remembered, how it should be revered, whether it should be revered. It's the type of conversation that, frankly, has seldom taken place outside the city of San Antonio, statewide. In large part, we suggest, and I think the guys would agree with me, because state government and state media is still largely dominated by Anglo journalists and politicians. And alternate point of views, especially the Tejano Latino point of view,

just have really, a few times, people have popped up and tried to say the type of thing we're saying now. They have been knocked down pretty quickly. I've been always surprised by the white nationalist racism in Texas and stuff. And I don't know the Texas demographics, but I always was like,

it seems to me like there should be a large Hispanic community there. How soon are the Hispanic community looking to take over as a population there? Anglos only make up 41% of Texas today. And most estimates are by 2025, no later than 2030, Hispanics will be the majority in Texas. So we're not far from that date. If you look at any major public school system, it's 85% Latino. Wow. What Anglos, Chris, what Anglos really fail to appreciate, and that I know was news to me, and maybe to the guys, is the extent to which the Alamo has been regarded in the Latino community as really a symbol of oppression, a symbol of racism, a symbol of a beefy white guy going by a Latino guy, punching him in the arm and saying, hey, remember the Alamo, dude? It's just, it's been a subtle thing for a long time.

And I canvassed all my white friends with that over the last two years and not a soul knew it and i i think just if people would start talking about what this means and how hurtful it can be maybe we would have some change this is uh the question i was going to ask you next was is this a symbol like the symbols of robert e lee and other ones we've been taking down all the monuments that have been taken down, Jim Crow, I think. Of course, this is probably, I think, before Jim Crow. But is this, so once again, this is one of those symbols that's used for oppression. Certainly got caught up in the post-Charlottesville conversations and George Floyd.

In fact, after George Floyd, when there were all the marches and unrest around the country, someone went and defaced the, the Senate half, which was the statute that Brian was talking about earlier. And I don't recall exactly what was on there. Chris, Brian, do you remember what the guy graffitied on there?

It was a downward arrow and white supremacy, downward arrow, the Alamo supremacy down with the Alamo. Yeah. And that was the time Ozzie went there and peed, so there was that. Yeah. I don't think they really got caught up in racial politics, though.

Yeah, that was just a drunk guy. Yeah, what happened after that graffiti, there was some rumor that they were going to go and occupy the Alamo, and politicians took turns promising to defend the Alamo and criticizing each other for not being pro Alamo enough and the militia and a bunch of police and law enforcement surrounded

the Alamo that night it was a shocking sight damn it they really blocked us liberals that was our evil plan was to take the Alamo darn it yeah foiled again foiled again yeah this is pretty good I do like how do you have you guys hired security at all? Or are you pretty comfortable with the security you have right now? I got to tell you, Chris, it's by far the least well-known of the bunch. I haven't even gotten any hate mail yet, so I'm not going to spend any money on security. We'll be publishing this out. I got to tell you, the trolls that we have on the Chris Voss Show, there's a lot of them on YouTube.

They make you feel wanted. They make you, they stay involved in your life. People come and go and forget about you, but the trolls, we have on the chris voss show there's a lot of them on youtube but they make you feel wanted they make you they stay involved in your life people come and go and forget about you but the trolls they stick with you man they love you i gotta tell you i get so few trolls i have to tell myself bad things in the mirror when i shave do you do you you know what a lot of people get a wife for that so no no she's nice i got a nice wife you got a nice wife yeah she has a sister i'm just kidding uh so anyway, what have we covered or touched on in the book? I think all political roads eventually lead back to Trump. George P. Bush, Jeb's son, the governor's nephew and grandson of two former presidents.

He is the land commissioner, which is all you need to know about it for this conversation is he has jurisdiction over the Alamo and he is going to be running for attorney general against a big pal of Trump's who is, he's been under indictment and now FBI investigation, but because he's the attorney general, he got it moved to a friendly County and he's never going to trial. Serious? I know it's Texas. For all the stuff that guy's done? Yeah.

Wow. Yep. Wow. The political corruption in Texas, correct me me if i'm wrong but it seemed going back thomas delay and going back forever it seems like you guys seem to have a lot the political corruption in texas is so pervasive it's actually legal it's actually yeah i was gonna say if you don't pass any laws against corrupt practices, then you don't get to call them corrupt practices. Wow.

That's just astounding, man. That's just astounding. And what is going to be interesting with Texas is a lot of Silicon California people are moving there. A lot of my friends have moved there. A lot of people from Silicon Valley are moving there. I don't know if it's going to push the state blue, but who knows? It has upped our housing prices in Austin by 40% in one year. Wow.

Yeah. It's stunning just driving around Austin. The sheer number of out-of-town license plates. Yeah, that's where we're all moving is Austin. Somebody honks you're from California. But there are just a stunning amount of people at least certainly coming into the all scenario from from everywhere but especially california now it's is the new laws that texas passed on voting rights is is that going to be upheld in court do you think or is it going to

lawsuits the texas democrats walked out in the last hours and and blocked a vote. So the law did not pass. The governors promised to call a special session, but it already sounds like the Republicans are beginning to water down the voting restrictions. We won't know until the special session is called, but we know a lot of corporations are opposed. A lot of chamber of commerce types are opposed to these laws. So it'll be really interesting to see how they're resurrected. In fact, I think I just read this morning or last night, there's a, I think it's South Carolina or North Carolina County has banned Coke machines because of the Coke's opposition, spoken opposition to an Alabama or Georgia voting law. Yeah. Oh oh yeah i don't know is

that never gonna recover from that one yeah they're never gonna recover i'm sure it's some backwater town but it was interesting to me i was like that's an interesting blowback and then i think your guys's governor was claiming he'd defund the he'd defund the legislature if they didn't vote and go his way does he control control the funding? Can he do that? Or is that just a... He has a line item veto, but it's a pretty big cleaver because the way the line items are set up, he would have to basically fire all the janitors

in the Capitol building along with not paying the lawmakers. So it's an empty threat. I don't it's gonna you gotta keep those toilets running man you don't keep those toilets running clean everything goes to hell i think we found that out so i wanted to get back to a minute about the alamo as a symbol and i think it's really important to point out that it's the story that you tell at the Alamo, because the Alamo is 300 years old, and the Battle of the Alamo lasted 13 days. And so really the big debate now is not whether or not

the edifice of the chapel is a symbol of white supremacy. But whether or not you tell a story of white supremacy on the grounds of the Alamo. And that's where we are now, because you have people like George Bush, who is saying we're going to focus on those 13 days. Nothing else counts. Then you have the Tat Palam Kohatikans, a Native American group, 1,800 of their ancestors converted to Catholicism, and they were buried in front of the church, which right now is a busy street.

It's literally built on a Native American burial ground. So they want those 18 graves, 1800 graves recognized. Then you have the Woolworths department store. It was built on the old wall of the Alamo. And that is where African-Americans rallied to demand desegregation in 1960. And it's one of the first desegregated lunch counters. And they want their history recognized. So when we talk about the Alamo being the Western wall of Texas religion, it really is the Jerusalem of Texas. Everyone's got a claim to that land and how what we do with it will determine whether or not it becomes a symbol of white supremacy or frankly a symbol of all the

wonderful things that Texas represents. Holy moly. I did not know that was you nailed it right to the wall. That was the Jerusalem of this thing. Was that the Woolworth picture where they did the shake sit in? That was in a different state, but they did the exact same thing at that lunch counter. There just wasn't a photographer. Okay. Okay. But yeah, that's amazing that they built on top of a cemetery, but welcome to America. So yeah, that's really interesting.

And that's probably why this fight over this symbol is so hard. It's interesting what we're going through. We're either seeing the dying of this white nationalist, this racism, and us hopefully coming to grips with some of our issues surrounding 450 years of just ugliness with the building in this country, going back to the Puritans with the Shining Hill sort of crap. And although, who knows? We could be taking a turn for another dark run down the Trump fascist run. And it could be the rise of fascism. I mean, when Tom Hart was on the show, he said to me, he goes, you know what January 6th was?

And I go, what? He goes, practice. It was a warmup. It was really alarming to think about. And of course, he was going on our politics. So I think it's really important you guys have given rise to this and called it out and detailed it and everything else. Any further thoughts or last thoughts as we go out?

I guess one thing I'd say is that we've gone out of our way, Chris, to, as we say, to take the Alamo and its history seriously, but not to take ourselves too seriously in the book. It's not intended to be a sermon to you as a reader that what you know is wrong and all that we know that's right. It's really intended to be an encouragement to try to reclaim the historical Alamo, the actual Alamo, as opposed to the stories that have hit the stories of distortions that have arisen over the last 180 years that have made it so difficult for today's generations to go back and understand what actually happened. And so we try to keep the tone light. We try to keep the tone encouraging. And really, I found this entire project to be about the most fun I've ever had delving into historical material because there's so much

that's new there to tell and to share with people who care about history. There you go. Anyone else want to chime in? Knock on the top. That's exactly right. There you go. Nailed it out of the park. There you go. Good job, guys. I think this is important. We've spent the last year and a half, we have so many great book authors that have been talking about the breaking down of a lot of these American myths, a lot of them that were supported by white nationalism, of course, the whole narrative of George Floyd and dealing with racism in this country. And so I think this is great that we're talking about this. Do you guys see this maybe becoming a book or a documentary where someone goes into deeper?

Have you guys got option yet on it? We've had interest. Yeah. I think it would be a great movie just to dispel some of the Disney things. Maybe Disney will buy it and then they'll just do whatever they want with it or something. Star Wars series. They'll be like, no, Davy Crockett. No, I don't know. Did Davy Crockett

ever have that stupid hat? Was that just a myth? That hat was real. That hat was real. He was a politician and a good politician has a trademark. That's what he wore. So he fought at the Alamone

and he was Alamo and he was a fashion god. So who knew? I tell you, Chris, as far as other projects coming from this, I'm working with a musician named Walker Lukens, a friend of mine. And his mom was a history teacher, and he's real excited about this book. And we're doing basically a mixtape, getting other musicians to do original songs about this book. And when he approached other musicians in Texas about doing this,

ones who are Gen X and younger, at first they said, no, I don't want to do anything about the Alamo. You guys can screw that myth. And then when they found out, no, it's the real story, they were really excited. So if you're younger, this is finally the Alamo story that a lot of Texans have been waiting for. Do you guys think this book might influence what's going on with Phil Collins? And are you ever going to be able to listen to In the Air Again by Phil Collins? I think George P. Bush has a responsibility to figure out whether or not this collection really is worth $15 million.

Does he really have Jim Bowie's personal knife? Hint, hint, he probably doesn't. But before he spends $300 million to build a museum to this stuff, I think the state has an obligation to figure out what's right and what's not. And of course, Phil can take back his collection anytime he wants. So stay tuned. Stay tuned. We'll see how it turns out. Well, guys, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

It was fun to have all three of you on the show and learn so much about the true story, the Alamo. You guys just destroyed my whole Disney fantasy story that I was taught as a kid. That's okay. I'm used to it. We've already blown up John Wayne and everything else. So I'm on the Enlightenment tour. Sleeping Beauty also was made up.'m used to it. We've already blown up John Wayne and everything else. I'm on the Enlightenment tour. Sleeping Beauty also was made up.

Damn it! That's our next book. Prince Charming? Not so charming. He was kind of creeper. He's going in a girl's room at night while she's asleep and stuff. Kissing a sleeping girl around her door. You leave a woman with her dwarves. That's all we need to meet to that guy. You leave a woman with her doors.

That's it. Yeah, we need to meet to them as well. Guys, it was wonderful to have you guys on this show. Continuous success, and I hope the book is a smash hit and helps people realize some of these myths that we have. Thanks to all of you for being on the show. Give us your plugs as we go out. Hi, yeah, Chris Tomlinson,

Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express News, and Forget the Alamo. Jason Stanford from the Substack Newsletter, The Experiment, and other bylines. Brian Burrow from Audible.com and Vanity Fair Magazine, and I hope you enjoy Forget the Alamo.

Thanks, guys. That felt like one of those NFL things where they profiled each of the players in the introduction to college they went guys. That felt like one of those NFL things where they profile each of the players and they introduce them to the college they went to. That's how that felt there for a second. So thank you very much, gentlemen, for coming on the show and sharing all that with us. Guys, order up the book. Be the first on your blog to read it, first on your book club to read it. You can brag that you got it first.

Pre-order that baby up. Forget the Alamo, the rise and fall of an American myth. I think it's going to be really important by Brian Burrow, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. You can order it up wherever fine books are sold. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Be sure to go to YouTube.com. You can see the video version of this. You can also go to follow us there, and you can also go see us on all the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places.

Follow the show there. Stay safe. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.