Bill Thompson

Otherwise, you are endangering this truly special experiment, which at least in its beginnings valued the individual.

It valued individual rights and states' rights.

And the founders, and this was another thing I said in that briefing, was the founders knew, yes, they were all slaveholders.

but they knew that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence would eventually lead to a system where we had to acknowledge these people as people.

And we fought a civil war where a million white dudes died to see this experiment through.

The scaffolding was there.

You have to look at the things, the zeitgeist of the time.

If they had just said, nope, everyone's gonna be free, there will be no slaves, you would have never gotten ratification through the Southern states.

But they knew that there are, and when you read the Federalist Papers, they knew that they were erecting this system.

When you look at Thomas Jefferson and some of these other great thinkers who, yes, he owned slaves, I get it.

They knew what they were building and they knew what it would ultimately terminate in.

And then we had a civil war where we destroyed our country from the inside to see this dream come about.

and now we're just gonna all go back and say they're all slave owners?

I know this has all been said here a million times, but this stuff animates me because it's built with blood and treasure.

For sure.

Did you know Joe had a gas-powered car?

Yeah.

Did you know that?

You consumed more.

He was a problem.