 Greetings to everybody. I'm Jeffrey Sachs. Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. And I could not be more thrilled and honored to be speaking today with the Dr. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, who's just published another fantastic book. She is a world leading historian, and we're talking about her new book out just this week, Not a Nation of Immigrants, Big Capital, Not. So this is a book calling on us to rethink, reconceptualize American history, because certainly when I was growing up in the 1960s, and she explains why it was in that period, I was told all the time as I was growing up that we're a nation of immigrants. And that seemed somewhat natural to me because I myself come from a family that came from Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century and early in the 20th century, so I thought that was what America was. And this remarkable book, Roxanne, really calls for a fundamental rethink of America, that America is not a nation of immigrants, as you'll describe and we'll talk about it's a nation of settlers, or settler colonialism, as, as you describe it. And that this is a very different perspective. And by the time one finishes the book and I hope by the time we finish the hour. It also becomes clear that this is not only a matter of getting history right, it's a matter of understanding our immediate presence, even the crisis in Afghanistan I would say because it's a matter of America's role in the world as reflected in America's role on the North American continent. So welcome. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here. You know, I love your writing and love your books and this one is is spectacular. You talk about for everybody just joining in most who will run out and get your book afterwards. What is the theme and why are we not in the United States a nation of immigrants even if we're constantly told that we are. Thank you, Jeff so much for having me on your, your wonderful podcast. Yes, the, the theme is really about what the United States really is a settler colonial state founded as such from the initial settlements in Jamestown and and Plymouth. This is the intention and was kind of an extension of British settler colonialism in Ulster in Ireland, you know, colonizing Ireland. So it was not a first time they were very seasoned settler colonialists who came and took land from the existing people push them to the peripheries. And that doesn't mean there are immigrants there certainly are immigrants but immigrant settler colonialists come to steal, steal land take land move people out and take that land themselves and settle it. Immigrants come to an already existing polity and already existing society. They had nothing to do with creating it. They're either fleeing the refugees fleeing like the Irish famine refugees in the 1840s you could say, they were the first immigrants. And that's when immigration started, although they were refugees and there is a difference. They, they were being pushed, rather than choosing, you know, should making a choice. Settlers have already set everything up and of course it's hundreds of years it's been set up so generations of other settlers came after the they kept coming, but they were still building what it was those 13 colonies. They immediately upon independence started moving, you know, the British were keeping them from moving over the mountain chain so they were hugging the Atlantic coast and they immediately started annexing and taking more land and needing more settlers. So up until the 1840s, everyone who came came for land. They came for land except of course enslaved Africans who were brought to do the work of that land. In part the colonialism of the era was mostly around mining and taking resources and you know in India and Mexico Spanish colonialism. But for the British, it was agricultural production, particularly cotton and and tobacco. Tobacco was was indigenous to North America. It was a sacrament for the native people, highly addictive. So it spread all, you know, all over Europe and was a major commodity. So, these plantations that get formed and are work by slave labor. They deplete the land so they have to get more land, you know they they move away from Virginia into and of course into the Mississippi Valley. So the, you know up until 1860 that was the process of settler colonialism. So, the first immigration act to exist at all the United States, the Irish came Irish. They were problematic to the existing order they were Catholics and a Protestant country. But they can they found a way of Americanizing by affiliating with the Democrats, the party of Andrew Jackson, the very racist party they worked as they worked in slave patrols and they worked in policing, you know the police were getting started at the time. So there was a certain Americanization, but the first immigration act was actually exclusion, exclusion of Chinese in 1870. That was that was the first immigration act. Yeah, exclusion. So it could I just go back for one moment just to check the basic facts and, and to help people conceptualize the dates. So the Irish start coming in the early 17th century in the early 1600s. The first settlements, as you said in Virginia in Jamestown and in Massachusetts in Plymouth, and it's in the 17th century that these are settlers who are coming for land. They are coming for agriculture. And people should remember that it was only 150 years after that. That's when the, the colonies broke away from Britain, and they broke away as you mentioned in passing, so that they could get more land. And that the American Revolution was really because the British authorities in London that were telling the settlers, the British settlers in the colonies, don't cross the Appalachian mountains to the west. But they said, why not, we want more land and broke free from the British control. And then, as you described in in the book. It's the Northwest Territory so called the Ohio Valley to the west of Appalachia that the settlers first move. And then you mentioned Andrew Jackson of the 1830s. We'll come back to him in a moment. He is, in my view, one of the racist criminals, presidents of the United States we've had a few, but he is involved in more land expansion and pushing native Americans to the west. But then you mentioned in the 1840s, what you're calling and I think it's eye opening. And I hope people are catching this important nuance. Roman Catholic Irish refugees from famine, and from British imperialism in Ireland, come to the Americas but they're really the first immigrants coming to an established political system as workers, and they end up working in the army and in the to enforce this settler system is as you're describing it. Well, two groups that you, one, you haven't, you mentioned in quick passing. But of course, it's a central theme of America and that is the slave slaves brought by millions to the Americas by the British. The fact that when the settlers came, it wasn't an empty country. You haven't mentioned yet the indigenous population so I'd like to ask you about that. Just to get us at the picture filled out. It's very important to understand that the mythology of the wandering Indian out in the woods hunting, not not cultivating the land which was a Puritan argument that they were actually sinful because they were not cultivating the land. But in fact they were cultivating the land, the eastern part of North America, what is now the United States was one of the seven sites of the founding of agrarian civilizations like the Nile and Euphrates and the pole river and the Mesoamerica and the Inca, there are seven that are designated and the eastern, eastern North America up to the subarctic all the way to the Gulf and from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi river. So this was had been curated by these agrarian native nations. You know their names Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and Creek, Muscogee, people and then many others but those were the very large populations in the southeast. So they, what the settlers did, they came to already cultivated land and appropriated it. The forests were curated. They burned the underbrush so that they made roads to the forest. John Smith, the mercenary John Smith, wrote that he could take a buggy, you know horses and a buggy, all the way from Virginia to Massachusetts through the woods on the roads that were built. And how that meant a large army could easily use these roads to conquer the people. So, generally people feel very sorry for native people but they think they were kind of half naked, you know kind of going out and hunting and eating. They all lived in villages. It was a continent of villages basically. And they were self subsistence but they also did trade but they didn't raise commercial crops. Tobacco was a wild. They did nurture it. It was a, but it was a sacred, you know, it wasn't for massive use at all as it became. Cotton was indigenous they used cotton for clothing and so forth. So I think this was, you know, to understand that it was colonialism, appropriates what already exists they don't come into a wilderness there was no wilderness in North America, it didn't exist that's an invention. One thing Roxanne that amazed me this year because I hadn't ever focused on it. I think when I read John Locke as a student, almost 50 years ago. We hail the philosopher John Locke, who wrote around 1690, the second treatise on government. And in Locke's writings in 1690, he talks about the right of private property and he imagines private property coming from a person who works uninhabited land and makes it his own by adding his labor to it. Then he says, well in the Americas, they use the land so badly that it is our right to take it because if we increase the production from the land it's not really like we're taking anything away from civilization, it's making a net gift to civilization. It's an extraordinary justification of colonialism by this hero of liberalism. Yeah, and it's completely made up because he had never even seen anything the up in the French colonized territory they were amazed that the Haudenosaunee, you know, the corn that they raised and they had they created silos, you know the silo came from for storage and the women were all in charge, you know, the distribution of food. They found tons and tons of they said they burned tons and tons of of stored corn that they used through the winter so it is show this not only that they were very productive but they were before capitalism which John Locke was a major contributor to the for the ideological formation of there was no such thing as private property, the land itself being a commodity to sell and I think there's a relationship between the founding of private property as a as a something that could be bought and sold and the enslavement of human bodies. They could be bought and sold, because the land is sacred just as a human body is and once you, you know, and it came together with the founding of capitalism in the looting of the Americas. It links the enclosure movements in England which took customary land away and made it into private gentry with the settler idea of taking native land away and making it into private ownership. I had never made that link. And women were so important there to, you know, with the commons in in Europe and Britain is maintaining the commons. And they were that's the burning of the witches, you know that burning of the women who took care of the land that was one way to in Europe yeah Europe really preceded and it was repeated then in the Americans and basically taking up the native commons in the Americas. Roxanne your book opens with a real myth buster which was a little sad for me because it did break some myths that I held. And it's the first chapters about Alexander Hamilton, one of the wonderful Broadway plays of recent years. I'd like you to describe this context, but let me just set the stage as it were a little bit which is that the richest British colonies in the 18th century. I think it's right to say we're in the Caribbean the sugar colonies, which were all slave colonies, and actually quite, of course very ruthless slave colonies and very profitable for the British slave owners and the sugar magnates. And out of that milieu comes Alexander Hamilton, but not in the way that I thought so could you actually describe this because it is setting the scene for what we don't understand properly about American history. US historians you know make up a lot of things about the so called founders, and turn off, you know who wrote the Hamilton biography that that Lin-Manuel Miranda created the musical from. He just told lies that the idea that Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant. This is a nation of immigrants. Extravaganza, you know the Alex, I never thought I would see. I was already already on to the nation of immigrants thing. From 2005 I wrote a kind of rant about stop calling this a nation of immigrants and you know, giving my thesis. But that play came along and I had this is the, this is the embodiment of that concept, you know, and making Alexander Hamilton. An immigrant when he was a British citizen, you know they were a tiny minority in the Caribbean, whether they were French or British or anything else because these were. These were total slave colonies the sugar colonies. This is this commodity of sugar everyone in the world got addicted to it, just like tobacco. And opium, you know that these drugs that built the Western civilization. And so Alexander have to want to make money going, if you want to make money go into a business of addiction. You have your credit there. Right, exactly. He was, he was white, that meant he was privileged he was a British citizen. And, although his, his parents died. He, he was taken care of, you know, he was actually trained taken as a, as a, we would call it an intern now you know an apprentice apprentice. And what, what were the books about what was being traded slaves. That was the only commodity slaves and sugar. Everyone was involved in the slave trade. So the idea was an abolitionist an immigrant. It's just, you know, absolutely ridiculous he was sent by these, this wealthy men to Columbia University. And the British colony of New York to go to college. He was not an immigrant. He could, they could move around anywhere they wanted they didn't have to have papers or anything else to move within the British Empire, British Empire. That was totally privileged. You know that was a very privileged thing. He was already well to do he immediately married into the wealthiest family in New York the Shilers who are also the biggest slave owners and slave traders in in the north in New York. And as you mentioned, you know, wonderful scenes on the play but they don't mention that the Shilers are our slave, a major slave or family. And slaves at all and they don't have characters that are slaves. I mean it's the whole thing is really the poet Ishmael Reed here in the Bay Area, made a play of where he's talking to Lim Manuel about his fantasies you know it's a wonderful one act play he put on in New York Tony Morrison was still alive and sponsored it and so he, you know, he, he, he exposed a lot but I think the other really kind of tragic thing about Lin Manuel Miranda is he called himself an immigrant, and it comes from Puerto Rico which is a colony of the United States. So this fuzziness about who's a colonized person who's a settler who's an immigrant just gets, you know, wiped out, and that's, that's what the American story loves is the new level of homogenization so we don't have to deal with all of these, you know, really complicated contradictions. And you note that Hamilton was opposed to real immigrants coming to the United States. He was terrified, especially of the French revolutionaries, you know, the French Revolution, France, the monarchy supported the US, the revolution. And then the French Revolution started and, and by the time they were, you know, writing the Constitution. He was for the most rigid alien and sedition acts, and to particularly to keep French, you know, any French people out. He was a main spokesman for everyone having to be vetted each and every person but I think the other thing about Hamilton that people don't understand is he was first and foremost, a military man. He was second only to George Washington in the command of the army. He's the one that led 15,000 troops to put down the whiskey rebellion. It was Alexander Hamilton that did that George Washington was involved and then he had second thoughts and went away it was completely Alexander Hamilton's thing of crushing these peasants over this tax, you know, on their whiskey, they were, they were making, they protested the tax and they were being taxed, you know, for to pay for the military. So he's basically a military man and he was the most important person in writing the Constitution in the actual, well the Federalists were Madison but it was mainly Alexander Hamilton he was a brilliant. I would say he was a brilliant evil genius. And what what now there's a lot of literature that has looked at the Constitution and come up with this, this term that's really borrowed from the development of the Britain, you know, the British state is a fiscal military state that is a state made for war. And I think that's really important to understand that the United States has never seen a day in its existence from the time of the revolution without war. You can't find a day when there was an aggressive war, not defensive war, aggressive war. What struck me, Roxanne, about that, I've thought about that fact, how militarized our society is, and how British that fact is, because probably one could say there was hardly a day without war for Britain, from maybe around 1400 onward, and then Britain just rolled across the whole world. There's a famous map which I like the 23 countries of the world that Britain never invaded, because British troops. British troops have been in roughly 170 countries of the world during this period but the US is a British settlement and it created a fiscal military state because the US then had war as its central theme to create the territorial United States to dispossess the native American villages and nations across the country. But I had not made the connection with Hamilton, I think of Hamilton as just creating a central government creating the basis for industry and infrastructure for manufacturing, but also creating the institutions to enable an ongoing military campaign as it were, which continues around the world of course. He also created the first corporation during the fighting, the 10-year war, and it was for manufacturing armaments. The Springfield Armory in Massachusetts still exists, that's where all the guns are made. You know, we're a nation of gun manufacturing too. It's survived offshore, none of them ever moved offshore, and it's a major export from, you know, especially the war machinery but small arms as well. The United States exports 60% of the world's small arms around the world, you know, so, and domestically even more. So it's a very martial nation, you know, people don't think of themselves in the United States as a military, a military state, and that's dangerous. One of the many remarkable quotations you have in here is a statement by Thomas Jefferson who ironically was Hamilton's foe, but in 1801, Jefferson says the following. Your present interest may restrain us within our limits. It is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent with the people speaking the same language governed in similar form by similar laws. So 1801, and the very birth of the country. I thought it came later but Jefferson is already saying, we're going to spread out across the entire North American continent, and the entire South American continent for that matter. Fortunately, there were no people there right. And he put it into action, you know, he sent, he sent military spies into what was then Spanish held northern Mexico. And he, he sent to explore, you know, and explore how how to make war and then the Monroe doctrine 1921. In Texas, Texas, taking, taking the province of Texas the slave owners taking, taking Texas and, you know, Mexico was independent and declared a abolished slavery. They never accepted Texas, so called Republic, but then the war that took half of Mexico so definitely they were in the. I think, you know, just just their main competitor. And that's why I think they weren't able to take all of Latin America and the Caribbean was a British competitor. British capital was also very important and controlling. But that more or less, they handed over, you know, with the Monroe doctrine kind of handed over to the United States. Okay, that's your sphere of interest now. They're not a common to a few colonies. The US conceives itself as a country of law. And somehow under that law comes all of this war, genocide, expropriation, enslavement. And one of the features of the law, which you have written about beautifully and talk about in this book is this doctrine of discovery. And, and even the Supreme Court validating that could you describe that because it's really fascinating what comes under the quote rule of law. Yeah, most people I think in the United States have no idea that one of the fundamental laws in the United States is based on a papal bull from 1493, which gave the Americas to Spain, you know, to Castile and Aragon. After Columbus's voyage. And that that had been preceded by a papal bull that gave Portugal all of Africa. So that was the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. And that doctrine of discovery then was adopted by other countries, you know, even if they even Protestant England and, you know, all colonial powers started invoking it. And in the United States, it was say exactly, I mean, from the context of say of Protestant Britain, what is the doctrine of discovery exactly that you have the right to do. You had the right of possession, if you discover it, discover another territory without that is turn no less. And turn analysis is what that means is that the humans that are there are not considered. People who have the knowledge of land, even though they're farmers throughout the Americas, they're, they're farmers throughout Africa, they're farmers and herders, you know, the fishermen. They're human beings living quite well actually, and living longer than Europeans because they take baths, and when Europeans didn't. And that that disappearance of any people who were not Christian see it's a Christian doctrine. So if they're not Christian, they're not human. And you can take their land, or you take their land and then Christianize them, and then maybe they can be for the Spanish you know worked into absorbed, but they're not in charge. The US adopted it Thomas Jefferson actually stated, it wasn't law but he stated that that it's just built into the Constitution of the United States and the reality that that the doctrine of discovery applies to the United States that they possess it by the right of discovery. And then it was in the Marshall decisions about the. In the Supreme Court, no less in the Supreme Court. Yeah, so it entered into law in the Supreme Court. It was most recently validated by the Supreme Court in 2007. You know, in a case of, yeah, in a land case of the own IDA. You know, part of the whole nationality. It was a clear cut case of really very clear cut case of own IDA land that should have been restored to them. And it was a, it was a Scalia court, but it was a unanimous decision to deny that, based specifically on the doctrine of discovery, naming it, and you know who wrote that opinion. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Oh, yeah. Wow, based on Marshall's precedent in a way. Yes, and based on the doctrine of discovery being a law. And what she was saying, and you know it's really kind of scary is that all of native claim plan in North America then is could be taken away it's a it's a horrible precedent. You know if anyone wanted to use it. You know, it's extraordinary, Roxanne. One of the very deep reflections, you know, we have come to know much better that an original sin of the United States of profound and deep one is enslavement and that reason, the Dred Scott case in 1857. We've said that a slave could not be a citizen of the United States, but was just chattel and that this was obvious is so incredibly shocking and of course it was one of the steps on the way to the Civil War itself. But your book is all on the theme that there are really two interrelated original sins, even the other might be more fundamental. And that is the, the colonial settler taking what doesn't belong to you by dispossessing or committing genocide against native populations native peoples who were here before. I think there's a great line I think it's quoting by colleague of my food bandani saying that American history is, to some extent being deracialized but not yet decolonized. I think that there's one part is being faced, although with all of the incredible turmoil around that, but the colonial part is not being understood, and I just reflect that while we know the Dred Scott decision. I kind of knew about the doctrine of discovery but still I was shocked to read the Marshall opinion. And I didn't know what you just said about the Peter Ginsburg for a unanimous court renewing it so this part of history is still not this is of course the theme of your book, which is that maybe we're coming to grips with some dimensions of what really happened, but we're not coming to grips with this other absolutely fundamental reality, which is that this was a place conquered nonstop relentlessly from other and that is a very, very different vision of what what our history is. Yeah, it's. It's also that the two are really inseparable they're wrapped together the enslavement of Africans and slave labor. The land being taken, you know historically you can't really separate this that's why almost every history book texts that's written is is very partial history and therefore distorted. The wonderful historian Eric Foner who's done so much good work on abolitionism and slavery I mean just the monumental work which I treasure. Has never been able to put put these two. I don't think he's really tried. Because Roxanne we're going to I'm going to be speaking with him about his new book, the second founding soon so I will put the. Yeah, and asking what was going on in the Civil War and Minnesota and the Southwest you know with the, with the war against the Dakotas and the hanging mass hanging and the same creek massacre, and the long walk of the incarceration of the novel is. What does that have to do with it you know how did Lincoln take time for all of those still fighting Indians, you know during. So that's not included you know in civil text on the Civil War. I think it's because historians can't because the basic framework of doing us history is almost like it's, it's written in stone. And you can only, you know a few rocks fall off the stone and you kind of rearrange them. As civil rights comes up you've got to lift up and look underneath. But it, it doesn't include genocide. It doesn't include you know ethnic cleansing genocide, how the land was taken, how it got transferred from 500 nations in the continent. To white people, basically Europeans on most of the land still today is in the hands of descendants of the original settlers so. And and a whole government built around that. But, you know, back to a nation of immigrants I think one of the reasons I wanted to write this book and, and break that down and demystify it is because it's one of the main modern. The most World War two curtains that have been created to camouflage the history of settler colonialism and genocide. And you know it's not old. John F Kennedy created that term a nation of immigrants, he published a book in 1958. And I'm pretty sure it was a kind of propaganda book for him running as a Catholic and a son of immigrants is up to that time. Every single president have been either an original settler or a descendant of original settlers, either. It's all British Protestant descent angle. Yeah, Scott's angle, Scott's Irish, or, you know the colonizers of Ulster, or Anglo, Anglo Scott's or Anglo Brits, and up until John F Kennedy ran so I think he was trying to show that immigrants were good as mostly about our you know the Irish famine refugees and and immigrants. It doesn't include never mentions the border or Mexico, which you know you think you would think a book on at that time operation wetback was going on, which he had to vote for in Congress, you know the deportation. They're removing Mexican workers. Yeah. Right. So I think that it was created and it was picked up you know and and then it made its way into textbooks and all and now it's just, you know it is literally the world slogan for the United States is that's a nation of immigrants. And it's a big lie that you know does make people want to come to the United States Oh there's a place where I can be totally accepted, you know, people who are. I think most people have come as immigrants for jobs, because it's an economic powerhouse, and you're. I'm sure that that was true of your ancestors who came the Eastern Europe, they were running away, running away from those are who. Yeah, from pogroms and a lot of the jury, a lot of the Germans who came were socialists who were running away from persecution as socialists and that's why we had a moment of socialist organizing in the late 19th century even where I came from in Oklahoma was mainly German socialist immigrants. Organize it. I mean my grandfather was involved. He was just a old Scot's Irish settler guy. But they were mostly German, German socialist, many of them Catholic Catholic too. Yeah, so immigrants have come for various, you know, political reasons, but also fleeing just poverty like the Sicilians who came the southern Europeans, tenet farmers. Starving meeting remittances to send back to their families, you know, basically to work and, but the whole idea that it's a beacon, you know, the Statue of Liberty and all that. It's been very cruel, very cruel to, you know, I mentioned the exclusion of Chinese. The second immigration law was to extend that to all Asians, all Asians. And the third big one. Yeah, and then 17 and then 1923 only Western Europeans and strict quotas on everyone else and one of the outcomes of that tragic outcomes, and I think United States is responsible for a lot of deaths of Jewish. You know, refugees trying to escape. The United States had a strict quota on Eastern Europeans and could only take, they took less, they took fewer Jewish refugees than Cuba and Mexico, poor countries. Wow. So that that was a and they also picked and chose, you know, intellectuals and nuclear scientists. Who they would, you know, who they would bring not the poor suffering masses, you know, but so that would that, you know, has consequences has tragic consequences this this exclusion. Rex and you, you've been campaigning for the truth and for advocacy of expanding the, the understanding and the narrative of America for, for a long time are, and now we're in the midst of the history wars, which are extraordinary, but showing how touching on these issues is so fraught with the, with political division, even Mitch McConnell one of my least favorite politicians in the world, writing to the Secretary of Education, don't teach this stuff it divides us as if the truth should be suppressed so that the white settler slave owning narrative would be the only truth that was told in America. Has history is his, are we making progress that you've been watching this for a long time and and leading. Is there a change as America itself changes. Demographically as we have voices coming from indigenous historians, of course, African American historians telling the history from the perspective of those who suffered this fate. Yeah, I think, I think that definitely the horse is out of the gate for truth that it can't be, it can't be stuffed back in, you know, it just, it's out there, and I, I credit the civil rights movement and you know that, of course it started long time ago, early in the, in the 20th century but really picked up after World War two and then that spawned, you know, the red power movement. Donnell Mexican Puerto Rican women women's liberation. lbgtq and trance that liberation is very very hard to take. very strong repression that the United States is not prepared for. They've mainly used drugs, sex and rock and roll and, you know, diversions, films and all. They keep us all pacified. And mass incarceration. And if you rebelled mass incarceration. And another, you know, an actual sometimes killing people. So that has worked pretty well for a long time. But I think they really don't know who they're dealing with. Even in very remote places, people like me, you probably also hear from people in small towns and rural areas and parts of the country. Everywhere you go, there is at least five or six people, if not a dozen or two dozen, who are dissidents to this right wing stuff that's all around them. And they're fighting it in various ways. So it's, I think the pandemic, I've gotten a little pessimistic because I get my recharge going out and talking in places like this and realizing they're there. But it's hard when you're just watching the screen and reading the news feeds to see what's really out there, what's going on. Because I think, you know, truth and beauty and looking to the future as being better is something addictive, you know, in a good way that is hard to suppress, especially in young people. Because they want to see a future and they don't want to see armed goons spouting racist things on capital steps everywhere or in the nation's capital. That's not the future they want to see. And so I do think that I say, bring it on, you know, this attack on history, because this is our opening to tell the real story, you know. Critical race theory was a very obscure thing until they bought it up. Everyone's buying all these books and wanting to learn. Well, you have launched a critical imperial theory or critical colonial theory with this book. Roxanne, I was really floored by the last sentence of the book. It's not a spoiler alert because I want everyone to read all the richness that comes up to this. But for me, I watch foreign policy a lot. I watch the United States from outside the United States a lot. It's stunning to me how militarized American foreign policy is on almost anything. The first resort is a military resort. If you can't do a military resort is crush them with sanctions, but crush them. Be sure to crush them. So this is how our foreign policy works. And I just want to read the last sentence of the book, which is fantastic. It says the United States will not be colonized until it is forced to do so. And unless colonization and imperialism are understood to be inherent in the very founding and all U.S. institutions, we cannot begin to dismantle the fiscal military state. And this really makes clear we're not arguing about the truth of history. We're arguing about the nature of America here. And you're talking about how to make a country that is not obsessed with conquest. Because after a long time, after, as you say, a country that has been in a conflict every day since its founding, this is certainly the tonic that we need. Yes. And I know you do a lot of work on China and the ridiculous war making that the U.S. is, I'm just so afraid this pulling out from Afghanistan is what they're saying it is. We have to pay attention to China. They say the same thing, Obama said, we have to pivot to China. And this is one of the most important chapters in the world. You might think it would be a pivot to peace, right? But no. Right. You pivot to the next continent. But the yellow peril thing goes back to Marco Polo saying, you know, those people are really organized. There's so many of them. They're going, they have roads and everything. They could take us over. They can overwhelm us. They get, there's been this paranoia and then it got named in the 19th century as the yellow peril that we have to be afraid of. And the whole trade union movement in the United States was corrupted by anti-Chinese bigotry, Jack London and, you know, famous people, absolute bigots. And so I think we have to really, really support our, you know, our Chinese American scholars and activists who are doing amazing work. A new book out by Maggie Nguyen, NGAI. It's a very important book. Viet Nguyen's books, of course. Nothing ever dies. Vietnamese writer and his wonderful novels. Everyone should be reading this stuff and understanding that we must stop this war making. Take those warships out of the South China Sea. Roxanne, that is a wonderful place for us to end a fantastic discussion. But let me say thank you for helping shine the light on historical truth to help us to understand our predicament today. And especially a kind of national addiction to militarism. But as you say, in the history, we were founded as a fiscal military state. And it's quite an eye-opening notion and idea and an extraordinarily powerful book. So let me again please encourage everybody listening to read Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's wonderful new study, Not a Nation of Immigrants. So powerful. Thank you so much for being together and conversation with me today. I'm always so delighted to speak with you and so honored to speak with you. Next month, we will continue on related themes on Monday, September 13 at 11 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. We'll have my wonderful dear colleague, Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University, talking about his fantastic new book, The Second Founding. So please join us in a month. Thank you again for everybody being together. And please stay safe, stay well, and we'll be together with you next month, September 13, 11 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff.