Stephen Monticelli
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Stephen Monticelli’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Under the Ten Commandments bill, moral codes from other major world religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism would not be posted in classrooms, presenting a clear case of a state government violating the First Amendment. Princeton historian Kevin Cruz explained why such laws, like those signed by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, ignore the United States Constitution.
The film can be read as a metaphor about the Cold War, with the oppressive Egyptians representing the Soviet Union and the freedom-loving Hebrews standing in for the United States. At the beginning of the movie, DeMille appears and calls the movie, quote, the story of the birth of freedom, the story of Moses.
The movie also captures the racism and, ironically, the anti-Semitism of a country that had not yet emerged from McCarthyism. The historian Alan Nadell tells a revealing story of two cast members in The Ten Commandments. According to the story, during the film's production, Charlton Heston's wife became pregnant.
DeMille then told Heston that if his wife gave birth to a boy, the child would be cast as the baby Moses. When Heston's wife gave birth to a son, DeMille sent her a telegram saying, congratulations, he's got the part.
As Cruise documents, when the Ten Commandments film was initially released, DeMille came up with an ingenious marketing strategy. He teamed up with a conservative anti-communist organization, the Fraternal Order of the Eagles, to establish Ten Commandment monuments across the country.
Around the time that southern states erected new Confederate monuments to protest desegregation, Ten Commandment monuments appeared at the county courthouse in Evansville, Indiana, the Milwaukee City Hall, and near the U.S.-Canadian border in North Dakota. Nearly 150 such monuments were erected across the country.
Momentum stalled during the civil rights era to the extent that an Alabama state justice, Roy Moore, suffered ridicule when he placed, without authorization, a self-funded 5,280-pound monument in the rotunda of a judicial building housing the state's Supreme Court in 2001. The monument was ordered removed two years later.
But once fringe figures like Moore have moved closer to the American political mainstream because of the influence of people like Barton, Lieutenant Governor Patrick, and their allies.
On January 29th of this year, Trump issued an executive order mandating the withdrawal of federal dollars from any public school that allegedly imprints, quote, anti-American, subversive, harmful and false ideologies on our nation's children.
This could include teaching them about transgender identity, providing services to trans students, or educating students about America's long, bloody promotion of white supremacy, homophobia, or transphobia. The order also requires public schools to provide quote-unquote patriotic education.
Those like Trump, Barton, and others who have clamored the loudest about schools as centers of indoctrination are now imposing their own form of propaganda, returning history classes from kindergarten to graduate schools to the days of the 1920s and the 1930s when textbook writers praised fascist dictators for keeping unions in their place and those willing to die to end slavery were painted as the bad guys.
Thanks to Betsy Freehoff for reading passages from textbooks, and to Dan Glass for reading quotes from the Founding Fathers. Of course, thanks to you for listening. Thank you.
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