The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America’s First Female Terrorist Group by William Rosenau

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America's First Female Terrorist Group by William Rosenau “A deeply-researched and well-written account of” (Peter Bergen, author of United States of Jihad) M19—the first and only domestic terrorist group founded and led by women—as they waged a violent war against racism, sexism, and imperialism in Ronald Reagan’s America. 1981: Ronald Reagan declared that it is “morning in America” but a small band of well-educated women were planning to combat the status quo at any cost. Having spent their entire adult lives embroiled in political struggles—Vietnam War protests, Hispanic, Native American, and Black liberation, and more—these women had determined that it was time for a final stand. They might not be able to overthrow the government, but they could certainly disrupt it. Together, they formed the May 19th Communist Organization, or “M19,” a name derived from the birthday shared by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, two of their revolutionary idols. Together, these six women carried out some of the most shocking operations in the history of domestic terrorism—from prison breakouts and murderous armed robberies to a bombing campaign that wreaked havoc on the nation’s capital, its military installations, and New York City. For the first time, the full, fascinating, and terrifying story of M19 is explored by Cold War historian and counterterrorism expert William Rosenau in this “gripping account of this hitherto forgotten terrorist campaign” (Bruce Hoffman, author of Inside Terrorism). Three decades may have passed since these women fought what they saw as an essential battle for self-determination and dignity, but we’re still struggling to decipher which side of history their actions fall on and what we should learn from their motivations.

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go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have an amazing author, excuse me, we have an amazing author on the show and we just put in the Google machine, amazing authors, brilliant authors, and they just come up and we go, hey, we should invite those people to the show and they come on. Today, a hot new book that's just coming out in paperback, the paperback version of it. Tonight, we bomb the US Capitol, the explosive story of M19, America's first terrorist group. This has come out November 23rd, 2021 on paperback. You can get all the different variations of it by Dr. William Rosenau. He's going to be on the show.

He's going to be talking to us about it and telling us all the deets about his book, as the kids like to say. He is a senior policy historian at CNA, a federally funded research and development center, and fellow in the international security program at the New America Foundation. He is the author of this newest book that we just mentioned, published by Simon & Schuster. His articles have appeared in The National Interest, Foreign Policy, Spectator USA, The Atlantic, Politico, and War on the Rocks. He holds a Ph.D. in the War Studies from King's College, London, and an MA in History from Cambridge University and a BA in Political Science from Columbia

University. Wow, what an education record there. Welcome to the show, William. How are you, sir? I'm doing very well, Chris. How are you today? I'll be doing great if I can keep my voice from cracking. I don't know what that's all going on this morning. I guess it's Friday. It's a thrill to be here. What a gracious introduction. Yeah, we try, man.

I'd love to hear that. We try and give it the old college try. Absolutely. Absolutely. A lot of college content going on right now. I don't know what that's about. Welcome to the show. Congratulations on the paperback version of your successful book.

Give us your plugs so that people can find you on those interwebs. Yeah. So my biggest plug is my website, which is williamrosenow.net. There you can find all kinds of juicy stuff. Some of my other writings, my academic work, which will probably be of less interest to anyone who on the tenure track hamster wheel. But other stuff on there that I think you'll find enjoyable. I'm also on Instagram, but it's mostly pictures of my Cairn Terrier and my son, scenes in New York. Not so much terrorism. Ah, there you go.

So what motivated you to want to write this book and brought you to this story? I've been studying terrorism for a couple of decades. I used to work at the RAND Corporation, another federally funded research and development center. And I kept coming across this name. And I had always been interested in kind of 60s and 70s extremism, political violence in the United States and Western Europe. And I kept coming across this group, the formal name is the ear-catching May 19th Communist Organization. And the thing that struck me is that people would mention in the literature, oh, this group was started and led by women.

And that had always piqued my interest. And I discovered over the course of years doing some light research that basically nobody had written about them. They were just seen as a hiccup. They were associated with the notorious October 20th, 1981 Brinks robbery in upstate New York. Chris, I believe you, if I'm not wrong, you were not then, but you were part of the New York JTTF, weren't you? You're thinking of the other Chris Voss. I'm the original Chris Voss on the internet. He's Christopher Voss, who actually hijacked my stuff.

I got fascinated by the fact, as I dug in, here you have a terrorist group which was involved in tons of armed robberies, kidnappings, freeing people they consider to be political prisoners, including Joanne Chesimard, also known as Asada Shakur, convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper. It helped her escape. She wound up in Cuba. She's still there. You had the Brinks robbery. You had Andrew Cuomo commuting the sentence of Judy Clark, one of the May 19th women. So there were so many pieces in this that were so compelling on so many different levels. It's like, why were these women involved in terrorism? They all came from middle class or upper middle class backgrounds, very well educated, had all the privileges that American life has to offer.

Yet they went down this path. And this terrorism path for many of them began with the Weather Underground Organization in the 1960s. But for some of them who stayed in May 19th, they really weren't rounded up finally until 1985. So we're talking about the second Reagan administration. And so I was fascinated by this idea. How do you persist in this revolutionary terrorist underground for decades when it's clear the revolution ain't coming? Reagan's been elected twice, but you're still in the game. And that just fascinated me.

That's really interesting. So give us an overall arcing of the book. I think you've given us a little sum of it. Did we cover it? No. One of the things they did, they had sort of two phases. There was an earlier phase where they were allied with the Black Liberation Army, which was an offshoot of the Black Panther Party, a very violent organization.

Joanne Chesimard was part of that. They basically conducted armed robberies to finance the revolution never being very well defined and assassinating policemen. They assassinated at least 15 policemen around the United States. In New York, calling

in a 911 at a housing project, waiting for the cops to show up in their patrol car and shooting them to death. So the BLA, yeah, was definitely part of the story. One of the members who went on to be a key member of the May 19th group had been the, who's described as the only white member of the Black Liberation Army. So the story really begins, I have to say, really begins in the 1950s because one of the prime characters in the book, Judy Clark, whose sentence was commuted by Andrew Cuomo in 2016 or 2017 and wound up getting paroled.

So her parents were both high-level functionaries in the Communist Party of the United States. And dad comes home one day in the early 50s and says, kids, we're moving to Moscow. I'm going to be the correspondent for the Daily Worker. So Judy spent some formative years in Moscow under Stalin. Really incredible. Came back. The parents got very disillusioned with communism. Judy kept the faith throughout and had terrible rows with her parents over this, over revolution and communism and Marxism-Leninism.

Wow. So the book really, it starts there. And the trajectory goes through the 1960s, the usual campus radicalism, moving into real violent extremism with the weather underground. They had all basically known each other. Many of them had known each other, at least by reputation. And that's a common theme in terrorist groups, basically known each other. Many of them have known each other, at least by reputation. And that's a common theme in terrorist groups, that people are brought in by people who know them

through like kinship ties or friendship ties. So that was definitely the case here. They decide they're going to help the Black Liberation Army. They're going to be their armors. They're going to rent them safe houses. They're a bunch of nice, middle-class white women who aren't going to draw the kind of attention that black radicals did. They helped them with their armed robberies. They did surveillance, provided weapons, drove getaway cars. Then after this hideous Brinks robbery on October 20th, 1981, where two policemen and a Brinks guard were murdered. And I'm going to come back to someone who was recently paroled as a result of after his involvement in that case. They lay low for a few years.

The hunt was really on. The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and NYPD were after these people. They were cop killers. They were under intense pressure. They lay low and then they rethought their enterprise. And they decided rather than doing all this helping of these other groups like the FALN, Puerto Rican Separatist Organization, we're going to do our own.

And what we're really going to be doing is supporting those revolutionary forces in the developing world, like South Africa, anti-apartheid, Palestinians, others, because in their view, they were in the belly of the beast and they had a moral and political obligation to attack this imperialist monster from the inside. And so they went on a bombing campaign, went on for roughly two years. They didn't kill anyone in this bombing campaign. But it's interesting, in one of their communiques, after the November 7th, 1983 bombing of the U.S. Capitol, hence the title of my book, they issued

a communique that said, we deliberately decided not to target any individuals in this attack. So that option was there. And as things unfolded over time, this propensity to violent extremism became even more intense. Two of them were arrested in 1984 at a storage locker in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The storage locker had hundreds of pounds of TNT in very bad condition. In writing this book, I had to learn a lot about explosives, more than I wanted to learn. And I learned that TNT, if not properly handled, it weeps and the nitroglycerin oozes out and it becomes extremely unstable. The sound can set it off. But anyway, they're unloading this load, hundreds of pounds of TNT, detonation cord, blasting caps.

A lot of this they had stolen back in 1980 down in Austin, Texas. Thousands of rounds of ammunition and fully automatic Uzis, dozens of pistols, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. So it wasn't like, oh, we're just going to set off this stink bomb and make our point. I think they were really mentally preparing for a more violent campaign. And indeed, toward the end, they talked about in their internal documents, which I saw through the court, which were part of the evidence that the government brought in the various court trials, they used the phrase selective assassination. They talked about assassinating prosecutors, judges, Henry Kissinger.

And when each of them, each time they were arrested, not as a group, but in twosies, and each time the women had nine millimeter pistols in their purses, fully loaded with a round in the chamber. So these were serious, I want to say, I would say professional revolutionaries. They lived in a strange world of their own making, but all of them wound up in prison. Some served very long sentences, some and served their time and got out. Others were released for medical reasons and died. Two of the women, they had been arrested on weapons charges and rioting and stuff. They're still on the lambs. In fact, here I have, if you all can see this, the FBI wanted poster for Elizabeth

Anna Duke. She's probably about 80 years old right now. She's been on the lambs since 1985. And you said one of them's- Two of the people that they sprung from prison. So Joanne Chesimard, Assata Shakur, she's in Cuba. There's a multimillion dollar reward on her head from the Justice Department and, you know, police associations in New Jersey. She hasn't been seen in a few years. I think she's lying low, realizing that it might be in the interest of maybe some Cuban to help her off the island and come back with a few million. And another fascinating character they were deeply involved with, who was in the FALN, Willie Morales.

He was the FALN's chief bomb maker and was long suspected of making the bomb that went off at Francis Tavern. You're too young, Chris, to remember Francis Tavern in New York, lower Manhattan. 1975, bomb goes off at lunchtime, kills three people, wounds like 60. If you go to Francis Tavern today, there's a little sign there. But he, and tell me if I'm going on too long, but I do, I won't say I love my characters, but I've really been fascinated by them over the course of writing, researching and writing this book. So Willie Morales is in his Queens, some people call it a bomb factory. It wasn't really a bomb factory. It's a grotty

apartment. And one of his creations, he was actually making a pipe bomb. It went off and blew off nine fingers and about half of his face. Jesus. Okay, smoke, all the usual. The police come. They find him by the stove. And they notice that on one of the knobs on the gas, there was blood. And they realize that he, having been wounded like that, crawled over to the stove and turned on the gas

with his mouth, hoping that some cop would come in, light a cigarette, and everything would go up in flames. Holy moly! Yep. So he gets sent to the federal lockup, and through

various machinations, he winds up at the Bellevue Prison Hospital, where he's waiting to get outfitted with new hands. And his lawyer, who is part of May 19th, smuggles in bolt cutters. This is before they had a manometer or whatever, smuggled in bolts,

cutters under her skirt. He's able to improvise a rope out of ace bandages. He cuts the wire, the thin wire, lowers himself like two stories, and then the ace bandage breaks, and he gets stopped by an air conditioner. The FALN, the BLA, and the main are there below waiting. And they pick him up. He goes here. He goes there.

They hide him. He's in Mexico. He gets arrested by the Mexicans. Anyway, he escapes. How he got to Mexico, because he didn't have his fake hands. So how he got to Mexico. Anyway, he is a guest of the Cuban government today. So Willie Morales, there's not as big a reward for him, but he's an incredible character.

And I can't say, I don't have any sympathy for him. I got some empathy and I have a kind of grudging respect for someone who is that insanely dedicated to the cause to do that. So that's the arc of the book. Those are the highs or the lows, depending on how you want to look at it. This is crazy, man. Why did they get away with this for so long? Is it because no one's looking for women because women usually aren't behind terrorist organizations? This is a crazy time, the 70s and 80s, because there was a lot of wild stuff going on.

I was born in 68, and yeah, it was just crazy stuff going on. So what was it that allowed them to get away with it for so long? It was a couple of things. There were a lot of different groups. So in the 70s and really into the early 80s, the 70s was a really intense period in U.S. history for terrorism. People have forgotten about that. They think, oh, it was the 60s. No, it was really the 70s where, particularly in the early part of the decade, you had literally thousands of terrorist bombings a year in the United States. Some attributed, some not attributed. The police, I wouldn't say they were overwhelmed, but there was a lot going

on. And these women, I have to say, and it was like the Black Liberation Army. The police and the FBI had a difficult time getting inside these groups. They did phone taps on BLA people who spoke in code. And I've seen transcripts of these, the BLA people who were involved with the May 19th women. And I saw this 60 page transcript and the whole thing is in this code. Yeah, I got some spirit and we're going to have a fiesta, blah, blah, blah. And it's almost impossible to understand what it is impossible to understand what they're talking about. So the police and the FBI were never really able to get inside them. And with May 19th, which was a small group, it was a couple dozen people in the underground

part. It had an above-ground portion where people publicly identified as May 19th members, but the underground was small. These people were living together in their communes, their safe houses. You just could not... They knew each other for years

and years. You're not going to be some gal walking in off the street saying, hey, I want to be part of your underground enterprise. That was really tough. And I think, yeah, it was only a few lucky breaks over time. It took years. They were also, and I think this is important, they were very well educated. They didn't have fancy jobs or anything, but the jobs they had, they'd work as secretaries, a bunch of them were printers. And so they had skills. Like they had in some of these storage lockers, they found blank FBI credentials, social security cards, driver's licenses. And this was pre-digital.

So these things were pretty effective. And they were really good at disguises. They, including, there were two men who were in the underground with them. And he, when he got caught, he was, his red wig fell off his head. But the women were really good at disguises. And they'd live in kind of scruffy neighborhoods. They'd keep low-key. They would get various, they'd get a library card and they'd

use that to get something and then get a driver's license. So they were interviewing former FBI special agents. They had respect for their kind of revolutionary trade craft. They weren't, let's face it, most criminals aren't that smart. Okay.

Yeah. They're not. These people were very intelligent and very capable. And so the net, it took a long time for the net to really get them. But with the exception of the two women I had mentioned, they all got. Yeah. And they were using pay phones too, wearing disguises and all sorts of stuff. I'm looking at a photo here of the Mary Evans. I

think the FBI snapped this. Yeah. They had a complex system of using, they had numbers for pay phones and people would go to this pay phone in New York at the corner of 77th and Madison at this time. And it was all very elaborate. Of course, the more security you have, the more cumbersome things become. So they're spending a lot of time just maintaining security, but they were pretty effective at it. And so I think that's part of the explanation for why they were able to persist for so long. What about, did this have anything to do with the feminist movements in the ERA and all that stuff, National Organization for Women? Did that play into any of this stuff? Not really. They would certainly describe themselves as feminists. I'm looking at one of their posters here. They would certainly describe themselves as feminist. In fact, can I show? Yes, please. So this was a, there was a big trial of about six of them, and this front group did this poster to support what they call the resistance conspiracy trial.

And you have all these things that they were supporting around here, like solidarity, anti-racism, lesbian and gay rights, self-determination, women's liberation. But the thing is, with their ideology, they really thought that things like equality between men and women would only come about through revolution. And through Marxism-Leninism, their version of it. So they tended to look at the Betty Friedans and Gloria Steinems and the sort of mainstream feminists is out of it, not being very too incrementalist. The other thing is that certain parts of the women's movement, and Betty Friedan was particularly notorious about this, were anti-lesbian. Betty Friedan basically said, we don't want to be, we don't want those crazy lesbians associated with us. And many of the women in May 19th were self-identified lesbians. So there certainly wasn't a lot of love lost. But they, yeah, they talked about this stuff. They talked about women's liberation. They talked about internationalism and peace and all this

other stuff. But really, the only way to get there, in their view, was through revolution. So now, were they mostly communists? Tell us where the name M19 comes from. Yeah, it's an interesting story. They called themselves, they definitely considered themselves to be communists. May 19th was the birthday of two of their revolutionary heroes, Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh. And that was a very self-conscious choice because they were both seen as fighters for national liberation at home and abroad. They identified so closely with national liberation that those were real, real natural idols for them.

So hence the name, which is a little bit, doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, does it? But it's their thing. Was it Malcolm X's revolutionary? I know between him and Martin Luther King, Malcolm X was more of a revolutionary. I think if I'm using the right terminology, he was more about activism,

I think, or I think it wasn't even a little bit more for violence. I don't know. Yeah. Malcolm X is just a fascinating person. And I think he wasn't,, Malcolm X is just a fascinating person. And I think he was a revolutionary in a way that Martin Luther King was. He was imagining a very different society and wanted fundamental change. I think he wouldn't have been in favor of bombing or assassinating policemen, and certainly not toward the end of his life.

He himself, of course, was murdered and his house firebombed. And we've all been following the case in New York with the people who've been exonerated. But no, I mean, he certainly wasn't a Marxist-Leninist, but he was more of an icon and a very, very attractive figure, certainly not just for the women of May 19th. But I think at the time and in retrospect, Malcolm X, he's now described in the New York Times as this towering civil rights leader. When he was alive, yeah, a lot of people thought that he was this dangerous revolutionary. And probably helped with their alliance with the Black Panthers.

I remember the 80s Black Panthers and Ronald Reagan and all that stuff that went on, just insane. And Ronald Reagan issued up a whole new entrance of racism that was through all of his policies and what he did. What are the things that we touched on in the book that you want to tease out to readers? I guess there are a couple of things. One of the things that I found interesting, so there's a meta story. So there's the group, the individual stories, there's the group. And then there's the government and the broader culture. So one of the things I found very interesting was, and you mentioned Reagan. Reagan and people in the White House were really enthralled with this notion promoted by a writer named Claire Sterling called the Terror Network.

She wrote a book of that name, the Terror Network. Very influential at the time. Sorry, that's my carrier. Let me just mute for a second. Sure. Claire Sterling. This is interesting. Political assassination crime.

I hope that doesn't disturb your... No, we should be good. He just won on the show. He won his moment. He won on the show, yeah. He'll come over here. So the main thesis, and there were people in Congress who also subscribed to this, was that basically all the roads from terrorism lead back to Moscow.

So it could be the Red Brigades in Italy. It could be the Red Army faction in Germany. It could be the Black Liberation Army, May 19th. It was all kind of part of this global campaign by the Soviet Union to undermine this. But interestingly, William Webster, who was the FBI director in the early 1980s, he didn't subscribe to this. And his approach to terrorism was, this isn't some massive ideological struggle. This isn't some geopolitical Armageddon that's underway. This is criminal activity, and we're going to treat it as such. And we're going to do so within the boundaries of the law.

So they weren't doing FBI, J. Edgar Hoover-style black bag jobs and illegal wire tapping. They were pursuing criminals and they saw them as criminals and they got out of this ideological dimension, which I think was effective. And it's something that in some of my other writing I've talked about, viewing terrorism with the proper lens is very important. And after 9-11, for the first almost decade this notion of terrorism as this not existential threat, but as a thing inspired by our global superpower enemy. So that's something that I wanted to bring out. And a couple of other things. So there were people in May 19th.

I would definitely call them idealists. And I'm trying to get at, and it's very elusive. It's like, why did this group of people, these individuals, come together? There were many people like them, but very few actually became terrorists. So terrorism researchers have been grappling with this for decades, and there is no, don't believe them if they say it's because of x that somebody becomes a terrorist or it's because of y there's never a reason it's monocausal and i hope that comes through and the one other thing i would just um point to would be the

department of homeland security and the u.. government used the phrase homegrown terrorism sometimes, domestic terrorism, domestic extremism. There's a jumble of terms. But these people really were homegrown. They were all American in every dimension. And it got me into this notion that this is not – yes, terrorism kind of comes in waves. The 70s were a period of intense terrorism. We're seeing a wave of white supremacist terrorism right now.

We had anarchist terrorism at the turn of the 20th century. There are waves, but it's always there, right? It's not alien to our history, our culture, our political landscape. It's people have, since the time that we first showed up in Massachusetts Bay, terrorism has been a part of the repertoire. We need to remember that we're shocked by it. That's what terrorists want to do is shock us, among other things, but it's never going to go away completely it can be controlled but it's woven into the fabric of our society now and i think that's how i something i hope that the readers come away with yeah that's you addressed part of the question i was going to ask you is

what are the parallels between january 6th and then we're to we're again at that state in america like i remember the 70s, where I'm not afraid of someone from a foreign country. I'm afraid of white guys who look like me doing terrorism or shooting up a place. Like when I go into places, I look around and I'm like, where's the guy who looks like me, who looks like he's got some sort of axe to grind? And it seems to have calmed down a little bit. But, you know, you saw January 6th. Any parallels that you saw in your research between that and where we're at in this era where white domestic terrorism is really more scary than worrying about some air blowing things up? Yeah, you're definitely right. And actually, there's been some good

research, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and also Peter Bergen at New America, looking at the number of incidents since 9-11 and looking at the perpetrators. And overwhelmingly, the perpetrators of terrorism in the United States since 9-11 have not been jihadists. They've almost all been militia or white extremists. It's a different group of problems. It's, I think, in some ways, much scarier because I think the roots are a lot deeper. Marxist-Leninist violent revolution

never really had a huge amount of traction in the United States. It had some in the late 60s and early 1970s, but it was always pretty damn alien, that ideology. But the various ideologies that are swirling around right now and are in circulation, no, some of them have European roots. They're neo-Nazis who worship Adolf Hitler. But a lot of the stuff is truly indigenous in an ideological way, in a way that the Marxist-Leninist women and men that I wrote about weren't, you know, they were always on the outside. People who perpetrated, who perpetrate white supremacist violence, I'm not saying they're on the inside, but there's something much more, I think, rooted in the culture that they can draw on. Yeah. And they're facing the sources of all this. Again, figuring out who becomes a terrorist and why,

I think is extremely difficult, and if not a fool's errand. You look at deindustrialization, you look at the opioid crisis, you look at the immiseration of many Americans, and you realize there's a lot for political entrepreneurs on the violent right to draw on. Although I will point out that I think a lot of the idea that the people in January 6th, or the people who were involved with the Proud Boys, or the Three Percenters, or the Adam Waffen Division, now known as the National Socialist Organization, are these down-and-out, unemployed mill workers is wrong. I think a lot of these, a lot of the people are

actually middle class or lower middle class. But anyway, does that answer your question? It definitely does. I think nowadays, I don't know, instead of a communist slant or some sort of, I don't know, whatever sort of slants they had, it now seems to be more of a fascist, populist, authoritarian slant where people realize they're losing power and they're willing to give capitalism for complete control in a dying age or dying sort of light of like, we need to get back to the 50s or whatever. Yeah, that's actually, that's an interesting parallel with the women that, and a couple of men that I'm writing about in Tonight We Bomb the U.S. Capitol, because they also saw the United States project as being weak at its end. It's not delivered. It's in crisis. These various elites have brought us to this point of disaster. Free trade, our imperial adventures in places like Afghanistan, let alone Iraq. Those are some of the same. That was a thread running.

That's run continuously through certain kinds of U.S. terrorist groups for many decades. Yeah, it's really, I don't know. We're at a really weird point if you study fascism and authoritarianism. We're on the track for the fall of democracy. They that when hungary last year and i think one other country and so it's interesting how this is doing and and how it's mainstream i don't know some of the political things that we see the rise in violence is definitely alarming and the the penchant for even some of the studies you're seeing where people believe that violence needs to happen to we just had uh what was it uh gosar the congressman gosar right he's posting about literally assassinating fellow members of congress that's and there's a party that's

supporting that and you're like at least that messaging and you're like if you really look what's going on it's a very veiled violence thing that has come out of the January 6th thing and is ongoing. And this is where stuff gets really dangerous if you study history. I remember having Tom Hartman on the show about two weeks after January 6th. And he goes, you know what they call January 6th, don't you? I go, what? He goes, practice. It's a warm-up.

Do you remember the beer hall and the of hitler and and then in russia there was a there was a first uprising as well with the terrorist activity so it'll be interesting to see what's going on anything more you want to touch on or tease out on the book before you go out you mentioned the violence and and uh gosar i was immediately struck by that incident before the civil war where preston brooks the white supremacist slave ideology, slave-supporting senators from South Carolina, beat Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, nearly to death on the floor of the U.S. Senate. And there's a famous picture of Preston Brooks with his cane, like, wailing on Charles Sundberg.

So I'm not saying, obviously, the past is different. But Mark Twain said, it doesn't rhyme, but it echoes. I think there's, that's one of those strains that we were talking about earlier. Yeah. This isn't the first time in American politics. We are a, we've been a very tumultuous republic in many ways. And I don't see that, I don't see any tranquility coming anytime soon. Yeah, when you see the violence that came out of the Trump administration, the guy who was sending bombs out of his van in Florida, the Philadelphia attack on, there's crazy people out there, especially on these social media platforms,

that they get triggered and they start thinking of things that are violent. And we're not setting an example to the world, but it's important for books like yours to come out because, as I always say, it's my quote, the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. And thereby comes, you know, like you said, like you said with Mark Twain, the echoes. This Preston Brooks thing, I forgot about that.

I'm going to have to do some reading after the show to check that out, including your book. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. My website is William Rosenau. Lots of links there, articles, things of interest, upcoming events. That's probably my, and social media. Yeah, I'm on Instagram,

but as I said before, it's mostly dogs and on cavorting at parties and stuff like that. Yeah. Mine's like the podcast and mine's like great authors. And then Chris's lunch and his dogs every now and then my Huskies. Yeah, that's pretty much it. And then my gym workouts,

I post like motivational thing that gets me fired up at the gym. But hopefully influences the people who go to the gym. It's been wonderful, Dr. Rosenau, to have you on the show and talk to us about this because I think this is

an interesting time. You timed it perfectly too with the Malcolm X story that plays into this of getting those two men off. It makes me wonder, I'm sitting around going, who did kill Malcolm X?

Why did they get away? That's a good question. And was it ordered from Chicago? Now, even this many years later, 55 years later, there's still a lot of mystery surrounding that assassination. But Chris, I just want to thank you. This has really

been enjoyable. A lot of fun. My paperback will be out available on Amazon or wherever you get your books at the end of the month. And it's just been great sharing thoughts with you. Thanks, man. I think this is really important because we don't need to usher this time back. So thank you very much for being on the show. Thanks again. And happy Thanksgiving to you.

Oh, happy Thanksgiving to you, too. You can buy this book and happy Thanksgiving to you. the paper back so you can get a chance to read it and learn some about history so that we can prevent some of this stuff from happening in the future. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Go to youtube.com 4ChessChrisVoss. Hit that bell notification button so you get all the notifications of everything we're doing. Go to goodreads.com 4ChessChrisVoss. All the groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, just put them in the Google machine.

There's so many of them, I can't even keep track of them anymore. To my audience, thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character.

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