The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3701 - Ohio GOP Abuse scandal; Reconstruction's Black Countermemory w/ Robert Bland
Episode Date: August 3, 2026Welcome back to The Majority Report On today's program: As calls for Rep. Max Miller to drop out of his re-election bid, Miller posts a response to his various domestic abuse allegations with the wors...t possible defense. Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) who is the father of Max Miller's ex-wife, finally responds to the allegations after it was no longer politically viable to remain silent on his daughter's abuse. Miller's Democratic challenger, Brian Poindexter's campaign ad calls for an increase in minimum wage, stronger unions and attacks Republicans only working for the rich and do-nothing Dems. Dr. Robert Bland, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee joins for a conversation about his book "Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation". In the Fun Half: Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) endorses state Rep. Austin McCollum who later that same day was arrested for domestic abuse. James Carville goes on Fox News to blast Hasan Piker and beg for money. HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. melts down and spews lies during a CNN interview with Dana Bash on COVID policy and pandemic preparation. all that and more. To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AM Quickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: ZOCDOC: Find and book the right doctor https://Zocdoc.com/MAJORITY SMALLS: Get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life, when you head to Smalls.com/MAJORITY SUNSET LAKE CBD: Visit SunsetLakeCBD.com and use coupon code DOGDAYS26 to save 30% on all CBD pet products. This sale ends August 5th at midnight Eastern time. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.
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It is Monday, August 3rd, 26.
My name is Sam Cedar.
This is the five-time award-winning majority report.
We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the
Heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA.
On the program today, Dr. Robert Bland, assistant professor of history and Afrikanah Studies at the
University of Tennessee, on his latest book, Requiem for Reconstruction, Black Counter Memory
and the legacy of the low country's lost political generation.
Also on the program today, Trump calls off.
imminent Iran attacks because of a deal that the Iranian say hasn't even been discussed.
Also on the program today, Todd Blanche agrees in writing to rescind the J6 slush fund and to barely narrow the Trump family IRS immunity paving the way for support.
of Republican holdouts.
I thought I had a surprise.
Oh, here it's.
Surprise, surprise.
Took a while.
U.S. military asks its troops for creative ideas on how to punish the Iranians.
Not a fake headline.
Bernie Marino, senator from Ohio,
feeling pressure because of his election with Sherrod Brown coming up in November,
says his son-in-law, Max Miller, has psychological issues surrounding his attacks on his daughter
and should not be a congressperson.
Doesn't call for him to drop out explicitly, though.
How brave.
Trump media will sell early access to Donald Trump's truth social post to investors
looking for an edge for the small price of 100%.
thousand dollars. Wildfires ravaged Spokane, Washington, and Western Canada. Meanwhile,
global temperature jumps trigger more alarms from climate scientists. The DOJ finds the reflecting pool
issues a function of a crappy renovation and drop the charges against the so-called
reflecting pool vandals.
100% disagree.
Janine, how could you do this to me?
He's pissed.
California Democratic Party endorses the billionaire tax
in its primary day tomorrow, Kansas,
Michigan, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington.
We will be covering the primary tomorrow night
and we will be starting the show.
We will have no afternoon show tomorrow.
We will start the show at approximately
615-ish
because once we're off noon
we don't we don't
subscribe to like specific times
exactly that we don't do it that way
we want to keep you on the edge of your seat
as to when we'll be on air
welcome ladies and gentlemen noon when we're always right on time
exactly Sam Cedar Emma Vigland
no I'm sorry
Marino is not running against Brown in Ohio
a correction
Husted is running against Brown
and Ohio
Marino had beaten Brown months ago, but I suspect he's feeling some pressure because it doesn't look good for Husted to, like, there's,
Marino's the first person who has to criticize Max Miller in the Republican Party.
Otherwise, no one else has permission to do it.
Like, why are you getting out ahead of the guy whose kid it is, who's getting abused?
and so Marino's getting this pressure to say something,
but Marino has some perhaps personal reasons to hesitate.
Yeah, some skeletons in his closet.
Well, I don't know if they're skeletons if they're not.
It's just maybe things he doesn't want to get out.
But maybe they are skeletons.
Unless the closet than an inbox.
Exactly.
I mean, closet's the operative word.
You're right.
you're right maybe i should call say he's got some twinks in this closet he's got some
on one hand this guy is abusing my daughter
on the other hand
i my son-in-law might know some things about me that i'm not trying to be too explicit about
like how i keep getting pranked by interns who
create Grindr accounts on my behalf.
You know, that's one of the things I also, I do a similar thing in this.
I want everybody to be able to joke.
Exactly.
The office.
It's, uh, it's for morale.
Yeah, it's for morale.
And, and I'm always encouraging people, sign me up for grinder.
Fraudulately.
Sign me.
Sign me up for some credit cards.
Yeah.
Use them yourself or something like that.
You know, oh, do the old.
Mail a bag of poop to me.
It's hilarious.
You love it.
Some people are like, yes, man.
I like to be humbled.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Max Miller put out a Instagram
video and it's really compelling.
Showing how innocent he is.
Yeah.
His argument's like, if I were a wife beater, would I really be wearing this white tank top?
Exactly.
I mean, it's literally.
Because the arguments that he makes in this just bolster the idea that he's an abuser because he sounds exactly like an abuser would sound.
He also, he also has released audio recordings of him and his ex-wife, which he believes were exculpatory.
But where it's like the water I poit on her was not technically boiling.
It came from the tap.
and then talking about denying that he had needles that ostensibly were for his
TRT, which he's taking in his 30s as he blocks trans care.
Testosterone replacement therapy.
In your 30s, you haven't really lost your testosterone as far, you know, as far as I know,
but you use it to juice yourself.
You can see that his frame is much more, you know,
sort of like a big than it used to be.
So you can feel like a big man as he, you know,
breaks the collarbone of his little daughter.
Well, it turns out he didn't break the collarbone.
She was afraid that he had.
Okay.
Oh, all right.
All right.
Yeah.
Lo, I was she so worried about that.
You know, there's some people who are just super neurotic about collarbones.
Here is Max Miller and that can drive a guy crazy.
Uh, here is Max Miller, um, uh, making it clear. And you know he's sincere because look at all of the kids pictures that he 100% did not slide into the face of his cabinet doors, uh, just for the sake of this video.
Can we put them in front of me?
Uh, the, the idea that that's where you put your kids art.
Highly suspect, but go ahead.
My former wife has claimed that during a custody exchange at my home that day, I assaulted her.
Here's what actually happened, and I have the ring doorbell footage that backs it up.
She came to my home in a good mood, and we have text messages to prove it, which you'll have,
to pick up our daughter early for a friend's birthday party.
She was inside my house for several minutes when she left.
The video shows her watch.
walking out, carrying our daughter calm, in the same good mood, showing no distress whatsoever.
And as they left, you can hear me say, goodbye, I love you, and I love you, Ruthie,
literally telling my ex-wife that I still cared for her.
Does that sound like somebody who would just walk out and who have been violently thrown
a wall and been abused?
Yes.
Let's ask Ike Turner, if that's actually the case.
Off camera, we don't know what happened, but on camera, I was behaving, everyone was behaving, like they put it on a face. Yeah, that might have happened.
It's also like the idea that he doesn't register that that might have been a way to prevent further violence is like the height of patriarchal blind spots.
chilling.
Incidentally, the lawyer, Max Miller's ex-wife lawyer, has sought a restraining order against
this guy.
Oh, and he has a previous accusation of violence from he was dating Stephanie Grisham,
one of the Trump press secretaries from his first term, and she claimed that he slapped her
across the face after she accused him of cheating.
So like, this isn't the first woman to even accuse him of violence.
Well, I mean, one never knows.
I'm sure the lawyer, the lawyer is probably still friendly with him too.
She had a good mood on the ring footage.
Okay, man.
Call the police after that.
She didn't go to the hospital, ladies and gentlemen.
Do you want to know what she did?
She went straight to a child's birthday party.
The very next day, we had a friendly phone call about our daughter's upcoming hospital procedure,
and I drove in from Washington to be there for it.
Six days later, she offered to cook empanadas for me for dinner just two days later after this alleged incident.
The day after that, she invited me and my girlfriend, which you'll have in text messages, to join her and our daughter at a playground.
And that day, I just went with my former wife to the playground to spend time with our daughter.
A week later on February 5th.
Also, this guy is reading this.
like the first time he's read it.
I just went.
I just went with my structure.
It's very strange there.
I wonder if she's like,
please bring your girlfriend so you will be less inclined to hit me.
Exactly.
And the fact that he's saying that she should have gone to the police,
but she went to the children's birthday party,
probably with her child to,
you know,
because she's tasked with the responsibility of keeping this household normal
as you freak,
wreak havoc upon all of us.
This is directed by the same guy did Kevin Spacey's
Kitchen video. It's good to sound angry too
when you're denying domestic abuse allegations.
She cooked for me.
She cooked for me. That couldn't have been a way to keep the peace in our
extremely chaotic...
She gives me an empanada, ladies and gentlemen.
I mean, that's what is so amazing.
Later, on February 15th,
she wrote to me, in her own words,
which you will see.
I think it's great.
You and I are in a friendlier place.
She then offered me more extra overnights with our daughter,
which I can prove to every single one of you as recently.
Every one of these messages is time stamped on our court-sanctioned co-parenting app
and is all in the packet.
Only weeks later did the story of February 1st assault appears.
So ask yourself,
if I had assaulted her,
would she had offered a cook me dinner six days,
later? Would she have invited me to spend an afternoon at the playground with her and our daughter?
Would she have written that we were in a friendlier place? No, she wouldn't have, ladies and gentlemen.
Would she have offered to cook for me? Yeah, you know, like, I mean, man, it's like out of the 1950s,
the misogyny. Taking from Trump, who's telling women to smile more, it's like we really have gone back so far.
And the reason he's even in power, by the way, is because Trump endorsed him over a primary challenger in 2022 who had voted for his impeachment.
So that's why there, you know, there's also this loyalty to him as well.
He's a good soldier for Mr. Trump.
I also didn't like Stephanie Grishman and thought she should be slapped the face.
That's why.
That's the other thing.
You had two things going for him.
He was compromised.
He was by him.
He was compromised.
He hit women.
She cooked dinner for me as an act of.
love, obviously, it wasn't an act of fear to try to placate me as a volatile, violent person around
me and my family since we have to deal with him all the time as the father of my children.
Couldn't have been that. It must have been earnest love and the fact that she has survived by nature.
Now, we know this, what do you call it? The, his, what is it order? It escapes me.
The, was issued, what, like a week or two ago?
The restraining order?
The restraining order?
And then the lawyers won.
The lawyers restraining order was just two or three days ago.
And like every great father, what you do in this situation is you wait and see how it shakes out.
And before you say anything.
And Bernie Marino, Moreno has weighed in as a father.
and husband, I can tell you the last two years have been pure hell from my wife, Bridget,
our daughter, Emily, and our entire family in the aftermath of Emily's divorce. It has been
horrific. To watch this play out in full public view, all while knowing an innocent two-year-old
girls caught in the middle. Our priority has always been protecting our daughter and our
granddaughter. Out of concern for the safety of the family, I hope to keep this matter private.
But Max Miller's increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior has made that impossible.
AKA you were willing to keep this private until it became more embarrassing for you to see,
to not stand up for your abused daughter.
Exactly.
I had no idea this was going to actually impact me in my public persona, in which case,
if I had known, I would have stepped in earlier.
If there had been any basic standards of character required to hold elected office,
Max Miller fails them.
He should not serve in the House of Representatives.
I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake.
I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does.
I ran for office because I wanted to make a difference for the country that gave me every opportunity to succeed and leave this nation better for my children and grandchildren.
That sacrifice has been especially hard on my wife, Bridges.
Sacrifice.
Whose big heart and steady support has never wavered.
I owe it to her, to Emily, and to my granddaughters to speak the truth now.
Oh, wow.
You're such a big stand-up guy with the sacrifice you made by crypto-breaking record, spending money on your behalf.
Give me a break.
Parenthetically, when I say I owe it to them to speak the truth now, I mean, parenthetically, as opposed to earlier when it could have actually had some material benefit.
But now I see I'm in some political hot water.
And the Republican Party may want to cut this guy loose and they can't do it until I come out and speak out about it.
The real question's going to be is Max Miller now going to say like, hey, let's revisit that Grindr account for a second.
Exactly.
But we shall save that for another day.
One of the reasons why I think you're going to see the Republicans not call for Max Miller to drop out is because Brian Poindexter running.
in Ohio 7th District is a pretty strong candidate. And this is looking more and more, particularly in the
House side, like a wave year for Democrats to the extent that we can have wave years anymore.
Here is Brian Poindexter for Congress. Here is his launch video.
With the way things are going, I don't think working people like you and me are going to hold on
much longer. I mean, we're working harder and harder. And we're getting less.
and less. Growing up in the 80s on the west side of Cleveland, we didn't have much, but
honest day's work was enough to provide for your family. My dad was a machinist with the IAM for 46 years.
That one job was enough to support a family of eight. That is obviously not possible anymore.
I got my first job at a machine shop at 15 years old. I worked seven days a week. It was 1995. I was
making six bucks an hour, which at the time wasn't that bad. You know what's really messed up?
is minimum wage is barely more than I made over 30 years ago.
We're hurting, man.
We're hurting just to boost the profit margins of those who have too much.
What really pisses me off is we're struggling to make ends meet,
and we got a guy on pace to be a fucking trillionaire.
Our whole district could be millionaires
with the amount of money that one guy is going to accumulate for himself.
And good people can't even get snap benefits.
That's crazy to me.
And I'm tired.
I am tired of the Republicans who are in the pockets of the rich
in the corporations. I'm tired of the sell-out Democrats, too. The ones who fight for everybody
else except for the working people. We have to fundamentally change who has power in our country.
The time is now. We don't have time to wait. We got to raise the minimum wage. We got to protect workers.
We got to strengthen unions, save Social Security, and guarantee health care. I'm Brian Pointexter.
I'm a dad. I'm a union iron worker. I'm a Brown fan. I'm a Brook Park City Council member.
and I'm running for Congress to end this corruption.
Our current Congress...
There you go.
Boom.
That's pretty good.
It's a pretty good ad.
I think I know who I'd vote for between him and Max Miller.
Max Miller.
Going to be interesting to see how that plays out.
Meanwhile, we have primaries tomorrow.
We'll be covering that later in the day,
so there'll be no normal show.
at noon will start around 615-ish.
Yes.
This is the classic primary time to start, 6-15-ish.
In a moment, we're going to be talked to Dr. Robert Bland,
assistant professor of history in Africana Studies
at the University of Tennessee on to discuss his book
Requiem for Reconstruction, a black counter memory
and the legacy of the low country's lost political generation.
and later in the fun half, although you may hear him during the ad read,
we're going to have a special guest on who's going to,
there's an array of things he's probably going to do.
I don't know.
Telltales out of school.
Hopefully will not be one of them.
I don't know what he's doing right now.
I think he's probably playing a video game.
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program, Dr. Robert Bland, assistant professor of history and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee
on his new book, Requiem for Reconstruction, Black Counter Memory, and the legacy of the low country's lost political generation.
Professor, welcome to the program.
Sam, thank you for inviting me. I'm glad to be here.
Let's get into some basics.
I mean, I hope this audience has a full understanding of what reconstruction was, but we always have new people.
just give us the basic outlines of reconstruction.
Obviously, in the wake of the Civil War, we have three reconstruction amendments passed by the radical Republicans, the 13th, 14th, and 15th.
But there was a lot more happening, at least in the states for, I guess, about 12 years.
I mean, you can give us a sense if you have a different timeline.
But tell us a little bit more about that.
Right, right, right.
I mean, Reconstruction is the effort to rebuild the nation after the Civil War, right?
It is the top-down process that is the reconstruction amendments.
It is the restitching of the nation's legal and political institutions,
as well as its cultural fabric.
And at the grassroots level, right, it is the first effort to truly make the nation
a multiracial democracy.
We generally give it the timeline from 1865 to 1877,
although some scholars want to push for a long reconstruction that goes into the 1880s and 1890s.
Maybe to put it bluntly, right, this is a grammar for understanding American history, right?
So in the way that we sometimes understand the arc of the universe bending towards justice,
the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice,
Reconstruction asks us to take a more tragic view of U.S. history, right?
It is the effort to live up to those highest ideals.
It is also the confrontation with white supremacy, with anti-examination,
anti-democratic practices, with the consolidation of big businesses, the kind of conservative term in the Supreme Court, that all lead to not only the Jim Crow era, but also, right, the broad, anti-democratic world that had to be undone by the New Deal and later the civil rights movement.
One of the things that astounds me about reconstruction is how it has been, and, you know, I went to college in the 80s.
I think we maybe barely touched on it.
I wasn't a history major, but nevertheless, certainly in high school, elementary school,
junior high, as we called it back then, I don't even know if I heard the word.
And we lived in this country with a completely bastardized version of the history that came from,
that was known as the Dunning School.
Just speak about this because this is very much about how.
reconstruction, how we came to understand, particularly how folks in the African American community
came to understand reconstruction retrospectively. But talk about the how in many respects,
reconstruction was both memory hold and then we had an entire redemption, lost cause,
sort of myth and then the Dunning
school and how that went away?
Right, right, right.
Before going to graduate school, I was a high school
social studies teacher. And so there's a practical
difficulty of reconstruction falls at the end of the fall
semester or the beginning of the spring semester.
So you get maybe a couple of days to cover it.
But there's a more insidious kind of reason
most Americans don't learn about it, which is
the United Daughters of the Confederacy
had a lot of power and controlling textbooks
at the turn of the century up through the 1950s, 1960s,
and those textbooks were sympathetic to the Confederacy,
sympathetic to the myth of the loss cause
that are not only venerated Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,
but also told the story of slavery as a beneficent institution,
talking about the various ways that the abolitionists were extremists,
characterized, the effort to provide African Americans
with the political and legal equality as misguided,
And that comes from a group of historians also known as the Dunning School.
These are the students of William Archibald Dunning, who was a professor at Columbia University, trained in political science.
But that training provides really the foundation for modern American history, right?
We don't understand, don't have a historical profession in the United States that takes seriously historiographical arguments, argues, and kind of builds on other legacy and work of historians.
And so in some ways, right, the Dunning School is both the foundation of the modern historical profession and the foundation for an incredibly dangerous mythological vision of history that ultimately is undone by folks like W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, John Hope Franklin, and contesting those myths, right, that slavery was a beneficial institution, that the Confederacy was not fighting for the protection of slavery, was fighting for states' rights that reconno.
construction was this misguided radical effort.
And instead, right, thinking about the democratic promise of the era, which later
historians brought back into our national narratives around U.S. history.
All right.
And before we get into sort of the black counter memory and its legacy, let's talk about
the low country.
Low country, as far as I know, South Carolina, Georgia, some parts of Florida.
Why focus there as opposed to across other parts of the Confederacy?
Right, right, right.
So historians have returned to the low country over and over again.
One, it was the site of the largest slave society on the Eastern Seaboard
and one of the most enduring slave societies on the Eastern Seaboard.
It had a black majority that the contemporaries of the time noted, right,
the planters had an absentee system where these kind of large,
rice and indigo and cotton plantations were left absentee while the great planter class lived in places
like Charleston and Beaufort and Savannah.
These are the architects of the secession, right?
The civil war begins because these planters, these politicians have the deepest criticisms
about the Declaration of Independence, about this idea of all men being created equal.
And later, right, during the Civil War, northern abolitionists, northern missionaries
traveled to the South Carolina low country
precisely because it has this black majority
because the planter class there was defeated
early on in the Civil War. It was the first place
where people began what we call wartime reconstruction.
This is the effort to establish a post-slavery society.
It is the beginning of a
post-bellum world, the world we call reconstruction.
And so to understand reconstruction,
historians have turned to the low country over and over again
because all the major themes that we understand
is happening in important reconstruction.
begin in the low country with regards to the destruction of slavery, the kind of expansion
of universal manhood suffrage, rebuilding the economy of the South, the Freedmen's Bureau,
as well as, right, the kind of enduring power of the Confederacy and kind of the way that they
bided their time until they got to this era we now called redemption, where they used incredible
amounts of paramilitary violence to overthrow multiracial democracy in the South.
Yeah, as we get into this, I just want people to keep in
to mind that we had like maybe a dozen major, I don't know what else to call them like programs,
political violence to take out black political class, some instances, moneyed class.
And South Carolina was one of those sites.
And South Carolina, like you say, had the largest black population, Friedman population, I guess.
And so they had the most success politically.
I think it's South Carolina and Mississippi, if I remember correctly, had the largest black populations.
And significant black political power.
And when it became clear to them, they couldn't get rid of it through politics.
They move on to essentially, you know, war.
And the federal government is nowhere to be found.
But so let's get into some of the people that you focus on in that era.
Two names stick out for me is William Whipper and Robert Smalls.
Tell us who they were.
Right, right.
So William Whippard, Robert Smalls really represent two ends of the counter memory of reconstruction
that is emerging in the black world in the late 19th and early 20th century.
William J. Whipper is born in the north.
He's the nephew of a prominent black abolitionist.
He travels to South Carolina as part of the United States colored troops,
remains as an agent as the Freedance Bureau,
serves in the state legislature,
will become later a judge in the kind of low country probate court.
He in many ways embodies a cohort that I call the Reconstruction Generation,
right? A group of black northerners who see the wheels of history
returning at this very moment during the Civil War and during Reconstruction and wants to take a part of that, right?
Kind of see his generation's political project in the same way that many who kind of traveled to Mississippi during the 1960s and 1970s saw Freedom Summer as a kind of generational historical project.
He's educated. He's a little bit of an elitist. He is in a lot of ways, right, that kind of represents this emerging talented tenth that W.E.B. Du Bois sometimes talks about.
On the other side, you have Robert Smalls, who's born into slavery, who is working in the Charleston ports at the time of the Civil War.
And it embarks at one of the most heroic feats that we've seen in kind of U.S. history, right?
Kind of at the dead of night takes a Confederate ship alongside his family, navigates that ship past several Confederate checkpoints,
masters all the kind of signals that you need to master to kind of get past those checks point,
delivers that ship to the Union Navy, right?
This is a kind of made-ford Disney movie in some ways.
It's crazy, crazy story.
Right, right.
Not enough people know about Robert Smalls.
He's an American hero in many ways.
Remains in the low country.
We'll become a congressman.
Will become a general in the State National Guard.
We'll be a kind of prominent leader in the Republican Party well into the 1880s, 1890s,
and will be an appointed collector of the customs in the Port of Beaufort well until 1912,
when Woodrow Wilson effectively segregates the federal government.
Robert Smalls emerges as a national celebrity, speaks for a more grassroots version of democracy.
Again, never formally educated.
Comes from a Gullah Ghi group in the little country that has more Africanisms, can tie
their cultural heritage in many ways to a kind of deeper, more robust.
grassroots democracy and putting them together.
They often were political enemies.
They confronted each other at various moments in both Washington, D.C. and the low country.
But they were critical in kind of ultimately forming a dialectic that produced a larger story
of the low country that I think is the foundation for what we understand is modern African-American
history.
And that story becomes a central story.
One thing I want to note about Smalls, he authored the
the law that basically started, you know, mandatory public schools in this country,
in South Carolina.
And, you know, people should understand the reason why you see people who are hostile to
racial parity in this country go after the Department of Education is because they know.
fundamentally one of the first sort of building blocks of of building the society that the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments
envision was public school. And that's where we, the idea of it being for everybody, came from.
And one note about, about Whipper. Whipper strikes me when I was reading about Whipper in your book,
he struck me as like almost like a there were whispers of Daniel Moynihan or in Daniel Moynihan who was a
senator from New York obviously you know but who had this notion of like there's a cultural
moral deficit that is you know not the fault of black people but it exists there that would
that that had their moment in I guess the 80s maybe it was I can't remember now but
Whipper had some of that as well.
Right, right.
Now, I think you can tie William Whipper to a W.E.B. Bois early W.
The boys, early W.E.B. Du Bois. You can tie him to almost think about the Bill Cosby pound cake speech.
There is a conservative strand, right?
Again, he's also a person who is fighting for women's right to vote in the South Carolina State Constitution.
So his elitism is a tricky thing to kind of.
put in a kind of 20th, 21st century context.
And again, Robert Smalls is also a figure who, in some ways,
I can see connecting to someone like a Jim Clyburn, right,
kind of a figure who, on the one hand, has incredible power,
understands how the inner workings of politics happened,
but also upsets many of the younger generation
who are more politically radical than him,
want to push the Republican Party in a more progressive direction.
And Robert Smalls in many ways,
like a lot of the political figures of his generation sees party loyalty above ideology in some
ways.
Tell us a little bit about, like, as we go through the sort of the book, the Port Royal
Experiment.
Right, right.
The Port Royal Experiment is that moment where many of these northern missionaries, white and
black, travel to the South Carolina Sea Islands during the 1860s, 1860s.
1862, 1863, and begin establishing a post-slavery society.
It's most famously documented by a historian by the name of Willie Lee Rose, who writes a book called
The Rehorsal for Reconstruction, and my book, in many ways, rifts, and kind of is in conversation
with her work.
But these are teachers like Lower Town, a white woman from Massachusetts, who's kind of
one of the most radical abolitionists of her day, founds the first black school in the South in
1862, the Penn School that's still on St. Helen Island in South Carolina.
and no longer a school, but as a historical center.
You have many people who are going to the South Carolina Low Country
to take part in building churches
and providing other types of educational institutions.
This is the work of the Freedmen's Bureau a little bit later.
And then there is the just broader project
of bringing what we might call free labor ideology.
This is the vision at the center of the modern Republican Party
that says, instead of building a society
based on slave labor, based on coercion,
We can build a society built on contracts, built on schools, building, about kind of people building, pulling themselves up from their bootstraps, right?
This is the vision of Abraham Lincoln.
This is the vision of a figure like Salman P. Chase.
This is the vision that the Republican Party begins the war in 1861, saying that if you're going to build a society, a morally superior society in the South, you build it on this.
economic and political foundation.
And in that era also, tell us about Francis Ann Rowland.
Right, right.
Francis on Roland is a fascinating and remarkable figure.
She's born free in South Carolina,
one of the prominent free black communities in the South.
She's educated in Philadelphia,
returned to the South Carolina Low Country during the Civil War,
precisely because it was this place where so much political firmament was happening because there
was so much energy in the area.
She starts off as a teacher.
She writes a biography.
A prominent black abolitionist by the name Martin Delaney.
She has to hide her name, calls herself Frank instead of Francis when she writes that biography.
But founds a newspaper.
She's going to marry William James Whipper.
She is going to, in many ways, represent a kind of feminist tradition that is in this reconstruction
generation. And she's going to remain involved in politics. She's going to move to Washington DC in
the 1980s, take part in that kind of black elite literary world. She will be one of the contributors
to a long-desired encyclopedia of black America. So her life, her journey in many ways
captures the marches, not only towards multiracial democracy, but also preserving this countermeory,
this history of reconstruction that is being erased at the same time by the law.
caused by the Dunning School by those violent redeemers in the South.
Let's, when we move to through into like the next era, I guess, as like the beginnings
of the remembering of reconstruction happen, walk us through some of the key moments in that
and how they're reconstructed.
Do you have the the Hamburg massacre in 1876?
And the attempts to minimize black political power by the creation of new counties.
I mean, I guess we see that, see a lot of that today with some form of redistricting.
I mean, walk us through that era as the success of reconstruction is now being undermined.
Right, right, right.
So this is one of these historical questions that remains evergreen, right?
When did reconstruction end?
In places like Mississippi and Georgia, when you get to the early 1870s,
Republican government had already been overthrothed, right?
This is the moment of the Republican Party being the party of free.
people being the party of multiracial democracy.
In South Carolina, you have the Hamburg Massacre, you have this big 1876 election,
Ruth Rue Hayes, sitting below the threshold to receive the necessary electoral college
votes.
South Carolina is one of those states where both Republican and Democratic parties say they
won the presidential election, Louisiana, Florida are also in that basket.
There's a lot of debate about was there a compromise of 1877?
And to the extent that the Republican Party pulls out of troops
and they largely leave the south of the Democratic Party, that is true,
but in places like the low country, in places like North Carolina, Wilmington,
you have a few political districts, a few congressional districts
where black political leaders can still hold local power, still send delegates to the statehouse,
and still congressman like Robert Smalls to Washington.
This is, again, not a triumphant battle.
You still have groups like the red shirts committing paramilitary violence in the 1870s.
Those who are askewing violence saying we don't want to reduce too much violence because that will bring the federal government back to the south.
you begin to see gerrymandering.
And one of the arguments I'm making in the book is that to find the origins of racial gerrymandering,
you have to really look at this specific moment in reconstruction, as well as the redrawing of district.
And then kind of Beaufort County is really the black hub of political power in the South Carolina law country.
And in the late 1870s, that district is cut in half.
And the half that is kind of has a higher white population is named after Wade Hampton,
it becomes Hampton County.
And Hampton is a slaveholder.
He was a general in the Confederacy.
He's the first Democratic governor of South Carolina after Reconstruction, even though Reconstruction continues to persist in the low country.
So we can see that Jim Crow doesn't happen all at once.
The low country remains a kind of site where Republican Party rule continues.
But this battle over Reconstruction is an important story in the late 19th century.
It continues and the struggle doesn't end all at once.
I mean, it's sort of shocking that 140 years later or so, we still haven't figured out how to deal with racial gerrymandery.
Right.
No, this is, I mean, it often, right, overlaps, right?
They didn't have that language.
They obviously didn't have the constitutional protections.
The people raised red flags at the time that this clearly is anti-democratic.
This is something that violates, if not the letter, the spirit of the 15th Amendment, but it often kind of fell in that same kind of category that the Tribune Court recently used that this is part of what the Constitution says about political redistricting, that political power, political parties, state political parties have the right to rewrite their districts every 10 years in response to the census.
And so this is a kind of persistent force in American political life, American political history.
So as we move through this sort of end of reconstruction and the sort of like, I guess, what in retrospect, we know, maybe they didn't realize at the time was the post-reconstruction era.
Smalls is the last reconstruction congressman.
Tell us of Decoration Day.
We're a month or two out, I guess, from Memorial Day.
but I don't know that people are aware of Memorial Day's origins.
Right, right, right.
Now, this is one of the great discoveries of David Blight
and his historical masterpiece on race to reunion.
In 1865, on the kind of weekend that we now know as Memorial Day,
black South Carolinians begin kind of to intern Union dead at a racetrack
in Charleston, that holiday becomes known as Decoration Day. It kind of expands beyond just
South Carolina becomes a kind of national holiday to remember the war dead. In the low country,
in particular, it becomes this really important holiday to preserve the union memory,
the memory of a war, not just about states' rights, not just about manly, heroic valor,
but about emancipation, about trying to build multiple.
to irrational democracy. And up until World War I, you had thousands of people, sometimes
tens of thousands of people descending on the low country to not only honor the union dead,
there's a national cemetery in the low country, one of the few national cemeteries that was
in the former Confederacy. But you also have people who are treating this like a grand holiday,
right? This is one of these places where there's a social component, a cultural component, right?
This is a kind of place where people feel the spirit of freedom, feel the spirit of emancipation, right?
It is in many ways a lost holiday because after 1915 or so, right, you have birth of a nation, you have segregation spreading across the South.
Decoration Day shrinks in the low country across the South that becomes a segregated holiday before essentially disappearing from our cultural vocabulary.
But in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, this was probably one of the most important holidays in the Black South.
And then let's talk about the sort of changes in education and how as we exit Reconstruction, there's a within the sort of black intellectual class, a split on how to sort of perceive Reconstruction.
And talk about that and its implications.
Well, as you mentioned earlier, Sam, right?
Robert Small is one of these architects of the Reconstruction generation.
is a firm believer in public schools,
helps found one of the first public schools
for black school children in South Carolina.
Laura Town, the white abolitionist that I mentioned before,
founds one of the first black schools in the south
for black school children in the South Carolina low country.
Education is the cornerstone of the reconstruction generation.
During slavery and slave, people were not allowed
to learn to read or write, right?
The kind of formal education was something denied
and that ability to access that really embodied
this specific idea of freedom.
You also have a kind of wide swath
of historically black colleges
that are formed during this moment.
Howard University, Howard Law School, Fisk,
many other historically black colleges.
At the turn of the century,
as the Reconstruction Generation begins to pass away,
you have a changing of the guard, right?
You go from a kind of reconstruction generation
that emphasizes the liberal arts education,
academic training, to a vision held by
many of your viewers and listeners
would know, Booker T. Washington.
who has a more conservative vision of education wants to emphasize industrial training, vocational skills.
He comes out of a school called Hampton.
What was in the Hampson Institute is now Hampton University.
The founder of Hampton is incredibly hostile towards Reconstruction and Booker T. Washington
inherit some of that hostility.
And one of the things they do is they set their side on many of these schools that were founded across the South during Reconstruction,
and they transform not only the education in the curriculum, but the historical memory, right?
They try to transform these institutions into vehicles for a more conservative political and educational class.
And this, again, is strategic, right?
This is a moment where Jim Crow is the law of the land, where disfranchisement has happened.
If you're going to have a school that is going to get support from local white rights,
you have to forget reconstruction.
And yet at the same time, as these teachers who are trained by Bookerty, Washington,
and trained in Hampton who have maybe some conservative ideals,
they're confronting people like Robert Smalls who's still alive.
They're confronting former reconstruction politicians
who are donating land and helping found buildings.
The Penn School, which again begins as a radical reconstruction institution,
is transformed by Burkutty, Washington,
and becomes a more conservative industrial school,
ultimately has a building named after Reconstruction Congressman,
the Gant Cottage.
And that cottage is one of the places where Martin Luther King
graphs the I have a dream speech, right? So we can think about the counter memory of
reconstruction moving forward in the meaning was that first reconstruction becomes the foundation
for the civil rights movement, which some scholars call the second reconstruction.
Well, analyze for me that decision that is strategic. I mean, I, you know,
difficult to judge in that moment where you're talking about first generation or, you know,
the second generation of best freed sleigh if freedmen um you know and education is hugely important
and the the primary mission is to try and develop some type of if not political power because
it's already been sort of violently ripped from you but at least some type of economic power and
some type of status within the context of society so uh you know easy on some level to understand
that we've got a compromise here because we have not many roots
but what were the implications of the black community also making these sort of calculations to
understate the success of reconstruction and to sort of validate some of the critiques of it
as a compromise of going forward with, you know, being able to maintain the existence,
existence of these institutions.
Right, right.
I mean, this is, right, the story of political history in the United States, right?
For those who are fighting for progressive causes, right, do you hold on to the ideology no
matter the cost, or do you kind of pursue a strategy where you take half a loaf where you
build where you are, you build a base in hard times, you have to hunker down, you have to
kind of wait for the tides to change to kind of really change your strategy, move from defense
to offense, right? And in a lot of ways, Booker T. Washington is a defensively minded thinker,
right? He is building institutions that will receive donations from the Rockefellers and the
Carnegie's and the kind of industrial elite who are also abandoned reconstruction, right?
This is a moment in history where the Republican Party, which once been the party of abolitionism,
which once been the party of radical republicanism, again, not the majority, but a strong wing of
the Republican Party.
And by the time you get to the 1890s, early 20th century, right, you see this is the party
of imperial expansion.
This is the party of big business.
This is the party of the gold standard.
And certainly in the South, right?
This is a moment where the Solid South emerges, where the populist and kind of democratic
movements that were trying to build multiracial democracy, but among poor whites and poor blacks
have been largely defeated by the conservative oligarchs, the New South business leaders.
And so there's not a lot of room to navigate, right?
Booker T. Washington is one of the few figures, right?
And again, this is giving Booker T. Washington a lot of countries.
But if you were to be generous to Washington, you highlight the fact that he is living in an era
where it is very difficult to imagine a progressive politics in the American South and that
any direction you're going to build something for black southerners is going to have to navigate
between Shula and Charbonus.
Because at that time, too, we realize, we realized, but it's realized by folks at that time,
like the cavalry is literally not coming.
Like the federal government has already said, we don't, we're not getting involved.
in essentially the trampling of the spirit, if not the letter of these new constitutional amendments?
Right. The last moment for that Calvary arrival would have been the early 1890s,
where there was a federal elections bill before the Congress. And there was certainly kind of
that last guard of the radical Republicans pushing for it. And Robert Small's kind of advocating
in the national press, there are crimes against people's political rights happening. When that bill,
is kind of stifled in the U.S. Senate
when Mississippi and South Carolina
rewrite their constitutions to allow literacy tests
disfranchise other disfranchisement measures
like grandfather clauses, you have a world where
it is nearly impossible
to imagine the federal government protecting
the political rights of those in the South.
What, as we wrap up,
what, thematically, in terms of
the because in many respects this is an intellectual history of a centered around how an idea or I should say how an era disappears or lives on in various ways.
As a historian of ideas, like what are the lessons in terms of what are the lessons in terms of what makes
things, what carries ideas through time?
Right, right.
I'll begin with this.
I'll end with this story, right?
I mentioned that I was a high school social studies teacher.
I taught high school social studies in Jackson, Mississippi.
And the high school was named Jim Hill High School, and it was named after James
Hill, the last black legislator to serve in the Mississippi State House before Jim Crow
officially disfranchised and removed black political power in that state for a century.
That school was on Lynch Street, which was named after John Roy Lynch, the last black congressman to serve for Mississippi in the U.S. Congress until you get to the post-voting rights era.
Again, we can think about history going backward.
And reconstruction in many ways provides us a grammar understanding that American history can go backward.
At any given moment, the generation of political change can be reversed.
And we're in many ways seeing that right now with the kind of undoing of the voting rights act.
And yet, right, people understand that in these moments, you can buy your time.
You can build counter histories and counter memories and institutions in places like Mississippi,
in places like South Carolina, places that were hubs of secessionism,
that were hubs of Jim Crow, that were architects of the kind of current political order
that is moving us away from the Obama era and the third reconstruction.
And so in a moment where many folks who are fighting for,
multiracial democracy, fighting for political equality, fighting for a more expansive social democracy
for all. You can kind of imagine that base building effort, right? Those institutions that might seem
small, might seem significant, but also could be foundations for future movements, can survive
the storm for the next political era. It's fascinating stuff. Dr. Robert Bland,
assistant professor of history in Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee.
The book is Requiem for Reconstruction, Black Counter Memory, and the legacy of the low countries lost political generation.
We'll put a link to that at Majority.fm and in the podcast and YouTube descriptions.
Thanks so much for your time today.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Have a good one.
Thanks so much.
All right, folks.
We're going to take a quick break and then head into the fun half.
maybe what we'll do is up front
have a
hear something from our special guest
and he'll
go away and then come back
a little bit later towards the very end
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We're going to be starting the program 615-ish-ish on the dot.
Right on the nose of 6-15-ish.
So don't panic if you, you know, we're not live.
It's going to be right on the nose of 615-ish.
I know what on the nose means.
Huh?
It's going to be on and around the nose.
It's going to be on the face somewhere.
Somewhere on the face of 615-ish PM Eastern tomorrow.
We're going to do our show and just roll it into our coverage of the Michigan primary is going to be the big one, obviously.
The press, as it were, the mainstream press, the conventional wisdom has it that if Abdul al-Said wins, it really is a watershed mode.
moment for progressives in this country because Michigan is considered particularly, you know,
when you talk about statewide, like a purpleish state.
And so this is going to be a big deal tonight.
And be assured, folks like Jim Carvel or James Carvel and all these.
sort of a centrist will be talking about how Michigan is really not really relevant.
Yeah.
Because it's not coastal.
It's not purple enough.
Well, you know, it's first, it was like, well, it's New York.
And then we're going to, you know, we have a very progressive candidate now in Maine as well, Troy Jackson.
But of course, that's coastal.
And then Michigan, well, it's so close to the Great Lake is like, honestly, you look at it.
you think like this isn't a lake.
Great Lake is basically a notion.
They're going to be like, well, when's a progressive going to win in a place like, you know,
Mississippi?
Tennessee, how about that?
That might actually be a test case just 48 hours later because there's Justin Pearson
who's going to be on the ballot on a Thursday in Tennessee.
You know, they're trying to make it as difficult for people to vote as spot.
possible by not putting it on the traditional Tuesday, but you have Pearson.
I have to have been at a good show in Tennessee earlier in the year, too.
And I'll just say, like, the center set thing that maybe if it was a less DSA candidate,
they would have won.
I think that probably, uh, no, I think she probably had a better chance because of her
the organizing with DSA.
If you don't have the name recognition, like Abdul al-Said does, because he's run statewide.
He's been an official in the state of health official.
DSA has shown so far to be a advanced.
for those kinds of candidates.
Abdul is not DSA.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah.
But I'm saying his name recognition is an exception in terms of his platform.
But there have been, you know, candidates who haven't had his platform, or who have had
DSA type platforms, but don't have name recognition.
Like Gonzalez in that in that Colorado race, I keep using that as an example, who could
have maybe benefited because she was outspent like 16 to 1 from DSA infrastructure because
she didn't have the name recognition.
I would also say that I think like it's probably even more problematic to not have that support when there is a high profile DSA candidate running in the same election, not necessarily against it.
But so like the energy you can go to heroes.
Yes, but this will be really interesting.
And the other thing that I have to say, and I'm sure we'll get into this tomorrow night, that has.
that has been absent from all the media that is around sort of like this progressive surge
is the abject failure on their own terms of the democratic establishment.
I mean, Janet Mills, Haley Stevens, these were the most prominent picks by,
Kristen Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer. And we'll see with Angie Craig next week in Minnesota.
And total flame out. I mean, just abject failure. And the important thing to take from this is that
the argument of electability and leave it to the professionals has completely fallen apart.
the the to the extent that we have seen victories uh from the more progressive wing of the
democratic party or uh you know or or those who are playing in that wing part of it is ideological
part of it is just a sort of like sense although you know it's certainly been adopted by
the more moderates as it were uh this idea of how of
of legitimately fighting.
But a big part of it is
there is
been a complete
hollowing out of that apparatus.
Yeah. In part because there's a
complete lack of
sort of like reason that
they're running.
Like you know, like why was Janet Mills
running? Battle tested.
She couldn't.
Exactly. She had no
reason that she was running.
Well, like what is?
She said,
I'll see you in court to Donald Trump and it went viral.
No, like, I understand why Chuck Schumer thought she was good.
But, like, why was she to do what?
Like, there's a complete absence of an a vision or an agenda.
But Brian's been pointing this out a lot how, and now I can't stop noticing it.
Every other sentence, Haley Stevens, that comes out of her mouth is about how she's going to run through something and just be very violent.
nothing. It's in the abstract.
And work hard.
But there's no agenda.
But there's no agenda to fight on behalf of.
But they have nothing to fight.
Yes.
Shadowboxing.
But that's also.
So like then you just take why that has no credibility is one, maybe in the past it
would have been sufficient to fight Donald Trump just be to be the fighter.
I'm proven to be the fighter.
Right.
In 2018.
But they don't have the credibility on fighting Donald Trump.
So then now they don't have credibility on policy either.
So it benefits.
Abdul al-Sayed in two ways.
They don't have the credibility to fight Trump
if that's your more shallow litmus test
as a Democratic primary voter,
but then you're also then more prime
to listen to policy arguments from the people
that have more credibility on fighting Donald Trump.
And what world are you trying to create,
even outside of Trump, because Trump's going to die?
Like, what world has, from like
Bill Clinton onward, what world have they been
trying to create, like, the world where
we cut Medicare and the corporations
come in and employ people? Like, this
is a, this is, this is, this is,
Republicans, we've said this all the time.
Like, they have a vision.
It's like feds in the streets chasing immigrants.
Yeah.
And starting wars.
What is the actual vision for any, like, establishment Democrat besides,
let's ask the donors what they want from Congress this year.
We'll get more into this later in the program.
Also, folks, just coffee.
Dot co-op.
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Use your coupon code.
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will be oh Matt what's happening in the Matt it's just coffee dot co-op we'll put the
link obviously in the show notes that yeah patreon.com says left reckoning David griskeman
I did a Sunday show for patrons we're talked about Sam Altman literally saying we're
very close to developing a genie that can grant any wish with AI and I'll just say we're
not close to that and you will not see that you'll not see that oh come on you won't see
Mars either. Like, you're not seeing any of this. Let's talk about we get
healthcare and stop thinking about data centers on the moon.
I walk into the office today. I saw Matt rubbing his computer three times.
Like it's a genius. Yeah, exactly. Sam already wasted one on a whistleblower,
I think. Probably down to two wishes.
We also talk about Shama Sawan's media tour and
why we haven't commented publicly on her run, which is
as a favor to her because we don't believe in it.
but we would love to be proven wrong.
I love how tech went from promising, like, sci-fi things on Mars
to promising literal magic with genies.
No, five more years.
Just give it five more years.
They think we're all so dumb.
A wish.
Just ask the computer what you want.
And if it's like, I want to own my hometown, it's like, oh, well, it's kind of a tough wish.
I don't know if, like, our computer chips can do that for you.
See you in the fun half
You are in for it
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And the alpha males are back
Back back
Just as delicious as you could imagine
The alpha males are back
Back back
Back, back, back, boy is back.
And the alpha males are back, back, back.
Just want to degrade the white man.
Alpha males are back, back, back.
I take all of it to my throat.
Alpha males are back, back, back, back, back.
Snowflakes has what?
The alpha males are back, back, back, back.
You are a madman.
And the alpha males are back.
Oh, Sam Cedar, what a, whoa, what a fucking nightmare.
Yeah, or a couple of them.
Just put them in rotation.
DJ Denner.
Well, the problem with those is they're like 45 seconds long, so I don't know if they're enough for the brakes to be here.
That's fucking nonsense.
You see white people doing drugs that look worse than normal white people, and all white people look disgusting.
And the alpha males are like, fuck them, fuck them.
Snowflakes says what.
What?
What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what.
Snobnick says what?
I'm making stupid money.
Hell of a lot of bank.
How's matter?
Have you tried doing an impression on a college campus?
I think that there's no reason why reasonable people across the divide can't all agree with this.
Psych?
And the alpha males are back, back, back, back, back, back, back.
And the Africans are black, black, black, black, black.
and the alpha males are black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, and the
Africans are back, back, back, back, black, black.
When you see Donald Trump out there, doesn't a little party you think that America deserves
to be taken over by jihadists, keeping it 100, can't knock the hustle.
Come up.
For the bigger game plan.
By the way, it's my birthday.
Happy birthday to me, Jew boy.
I have a thought experiment for you.
And the alpha males are back.
The price of blast to be a real.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
