YouSaid · the spoken record

Deborah Baker

lines on the record: 28
first: 2025-07-13
most recent: 2025-07-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Indigenous genocide. It's hard history. It's threatening history to certain people, but it's really important if we're to be the country that we think we are.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Artists to say, okay, we've got however many 5,000 pounds of these bronze ignits come to us with a proposal for a work of art or whatever you think is appropriate. And give us something that will represent all our stories. And so that's an ongoing project. And I just think that what can we do that with history? I don't know. I don't know. I do feel like Trump is doing his best to destroy the history that we've only recently discovered. And I feel sorry for the generation of children who are in these schools now and not being Not having the benefit of this really hard earned story that we've been trying to tell of, not me, but historians have been trying to tell things that, you know, I only recently have learned myself about. About slavery, about.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think that's eventually what happened to the Robert E. Lee statue. It's the only Confederate statue that's actually been destroyed. Most of them are sitting in city storage facilities that have been taken down because in the summer of 2020, a lot of these statues came down really all over the world. But Confederate statues came down in America. Even Christopher Columbus statues have come down. So, you know, and Trump is now threatening to bring them back. But there were women, visionary women in Charlottesville who understood that this was going to be a flashpoint. The statue was going to be a flashpoint. So they melted it down and the idea that they came up with, this is a project called Swords into Plowshares, whereby they put out a bid for.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With this book. You know, that was like, yeah, you know, I have. Family members who weren't there on the streets and who are threatened by that kind of. Shouting and obscenities and signs. And yeah, it's, and so I did want to, and there's part of me that also, you know, I'm not a bullhorn kind of person. And so I wanted to interrogate that. It's about self-reflection as well. I talk a lot in the book about this sleeping dog and this fear, like especially with Trump, don't get them too upset. Curb yourself. Don't use bad words. Someone else is going to pay the price if you make too much of a fuss. And I think that's a real thing. But if you just are always worried about the sleeping dog and not waking up the sleeping dog, then you're never going to see anything approaching justice.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These immigration raids. And there's just something about people on the streets just scares people. But hopefully I maybe eventually will get past that because there's nothing else between us and the abyss but these street protests.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The report that was done by Tim Heife was a really good report. You know, he spoke to a lot of the activists City officials, he pointed out where the failures had happened. And what is interesting is that it's a total parallel with January 6th, which he also was the main investigator on. You know, the amount of intelligence that the FBI, Homeland Security, Capital Police had on what was going to happen on January 6th. It was just, it's just stunning. Yet they also had this blind spot. They just could not see these people as a threat. And so they were completely unprepared equally. And so I was very interested in that, the construction of that blind spot, the ear of activists, the fear of street protests. You know, and even now we see Democratic politicians, you know, telling people in Los Angeles, what is an appropriate way to protest?”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that people understand just how dangerous they were and how much of a threat they posed to the community. But also, you know, tell the story of the activists, the anti-racist activists, the anti-fascist activists, and not use the language that, you know, you saw, you see, you hear the media using, you know, black block, all that can't, which is really far right cant that they appropriate.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discussions over the statue about the clan rally that happened a month before. And, you know, what was so I really wanted to tell what happened from a local point of view, from the point of view of the people who saw what was coming and tried to warn city officials, tried to warn the university. And, you know, we're just basically ignored. or treated as a threat themselves. So that was the story that I wanted to tell. I'm not a journalist. I felt no obligation whatsoever to interview Richard Spencer or any of the alt-right neoconfederate neo-Nazi neo-fascist people. I feel like the media was obsessed with them and giving them enough ink as it was. So I just want, but I obviously I needed to tell how they came together too to understand.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, to me, I watched all that unmediated coverage. And it's very hard to know what was going on, who was fighting whom. You know, it just looked amorphous. And then you saw that footage of the car attack over and over and over again. And so much of the coverage, you know, of that weekend. First of all, there were no mainstream media outlets covering the torch march. It was all citizen journalists who were close to the ground who understood what was going to happen. There was one Washington Post reporter who was there. The Times saw it as a local story. They weren't interested in covering it. They were prepared to cover the rally itself. But I just thought there's so much that's not that you don't know unless you live there in Charlestville about the buildup, about the...”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think he was trying to provoke. I mean, he was building his brand. Was a very clean cut look, these were the polo shirts and the khaki pants and the sharp navy suits and ties. Fancy sunglasses. They were sort of. Normalizing this expression of This is our ground. This is our ground. Charlottesville is our home territory. He was a graduate of the University of Virginia, and I was interested to figure out that he was a student, an undergraduate student at UVA studying music and history. At the same time that the whole Sally Hemmings DNA controversy came to a head. So I think he got a really clear sense of how he could use Jefferson and our sense of Jefferson on his behalf. He wasn't just about the Confederate statue. He really wanted to appropriate Jefferson for white nationalism. That was his agenda”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the activists from making a move on the statue, so it became a very fraught situation and it was into this kind of fraught local tempest over the statue that Richard Spencer decided to make some hay.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the city council decided to have this commission. So there were hearings, there was public feedback. And in the course of this commission's hearings, which I listened to, I heard how White Charlottesville saw and thought of these statues. And initially they far outnumbered the voices of the black community, the voices of the activist community, but eventually in the course of the hearings. Activists managed to create a consensus that it was time to get rid of the statue. And a lot of the older white Charlottesville people were very upset about that. But then there was this sort of appearance suddenly in the park where the statue was another group called the Virginia Flaggers began showing up. These are people who were guarding the statue with guns and basically they were there every night.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Initially, it was raised by a petition that was a young Charlottesville, born and bred Charlottesville black student named Ziona Bryant, who was asked in her high school freshman class, if you could change one thing about Charlottesville, what would it be? And Ziana decided that she would like to get rid of the Confederate statue. That was her homework assignment. It became a petition. It stirred up a lot immediate pushback from the community. Then a very ambitious young city council member named Walt Spellmy took it up. It became sort of a platform for him to get this done. The laws had changed so that it was a possibility.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Statue of the week preceding the statues unveiling and the week that followed it was accompanied by a massive clan march down Main Street of Charlottesville. There was a cross burning on a mountain near Mondicello. There was a church bombing, a black church bombing that a cross was erected in its ruins. So it was very clear It was a moment of celebration for White Charlottesville, but for the black community, the formerly enslaved, the freedmen, they got the message very clearly about what the statue meant for them.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ethnic cleansing with those two statues, and then you had in the downtown area a statue of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. both equestrian statues. And this fellow whose name was Paul Goodlow McIntyre. He also donated a big park to the white community and then another sort of smaller park to the black community. And UBA has the McIntyre School of Commerce. His name is really everywhere. There's a McIntyre Road, the McIntyre Park. So, yeah, he's literally inscribed all over the city. And it was this, the statue, he He put in up in 1924 was dedicated to his parents. He was a young boy when the war took place.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Charlotte had a benefactor who made a lot of money in the Chicago stock market and just loved Charlottesville and retired there and he bought up little bits of land and threw up all these statues. The Robert E. Lee statue wasn't even the only statue he put up. There was a statue of Mary Lewis and Clark, Mary Way the Lewis grew up just down the road from where I grew up I be west of town as did Clark as did Clark's brother who was instrumental in clearing the west of native and Indigenous tribes. So you had this monument to”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the time desegregation actually happened, she was a total pariah in her community and in her family. So I did find that was a tragic story because Charlesville now prides itself on being so progressive and so democratic, but it's actually a deeply conservative place in ways that they don't even recognize.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have him over to her house, for example, because that would just be too unsettling. And of course, all he wanted to do was go to law school and make some friends. And, you know, he wasn't, he didn't see himself. He just wanted to lay low and to get his law degree. But she kept inserting herself into that situation. And eventually he just left because it was not a pleasant experience being the first black law student. But it was eye-opening for her and she ended up befriending this local black newspaper man. And he had her write letters as, you know, to for his newspaper, you know, putting out her argument that, you know, that the best people in Virginia would step up. And they very much did not. And that was. Quite an awakening for her, and probably.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Upbringing. But she was also raised as a devout Episcopalian. Her father was a minister, an episcopal minister, or Anglican, I guess, minister. And she saw this as a moral cause and that she felt that the good people of Virginia, people like her and first families of Virginia, would do the right thing vis- ⁇-vis their dusky brothers. You know, there's just something about her sort of lady bountiful, you know, patronizing, well-meaning, but totally clueless that really resonated with me. And so she decided she was going to be provide the one woman sort of welcoming committee for Jeffrey Swanson. You know, to school him like on what lines he couldn't cross in case, you know, he thought, you know, she couldn't.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, she's Sarah Patton Boyle is what is called FFB in Virginia, first families of Virginia. I'm not FFB, but you were a distinct. And I just never stopped hearing about them. That meant that she was descended from the original settlers of Virginia who received these land grants from the crown her Grandparents were league slave owners. They had a huge plantation not far from Shadwell where Jebison was born. So, you know, her mother would drill into her mind that she was descended from the very best people of Virginia, the very best of the very best. And since these families tended to marry each other, they were a pretty discreet genotype. So that was her.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and this is the way history gets whitewashed is that unpleasantness of that period, you know, there was a petition, the vast majority of white Charlottesville signed a petition to not desegregate their schools. They were in total defiance of the Supreme Court decision. And it was signed by 20,000 White Charlottesville people. And that petition is gone. I look for it everywhere, seeing who I would have known, who signed that petition. And so, and I already see certain ways in which the university and the city of Charlottesville is trying to forget and erase what happened in 2017.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, wanted to stir up some trouble. So on Pound's advice, he chose Charlottesville and he went down to Charlottesville with the intention of starting a race war. And Charlottesville at that time had a Jewish mayor. And basically everyone was blaming the Jewish mayor for putting Charlottesville was one of the first cities, the NAACP, was trying to get desegregated. So the relationship really was Dixie flavored kind of white supremacy pound sent this fellow down. His name was John Casper, along with all these sort of speeches. He had a rally in a local park and was basically read out town speeches, you know, making the connection between sort of dixet slavery supremacy and desegregation. And the role that Jews played in putting, making Charlottesville the target.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Appearing at Pound's knee and getting this full on dose of not just fascism and antisemitism, but which was surprised to me because I knew Pound as a fascist and an anti-Semite, but I hadn't realized his investment in white supremacy. So this one fellow, Columbia University graduate who showed up at St. Elizabeth's, which was the name of the hospital.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what their ideological orientation was, I came across this story of Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound was, you know, an American poet living in Mussolini's Italy in the 30s and throughout the war. And he did these series of war broadcasts, you know, trying to convince America not to come into the war. And after he was eventually arrested, imprisoned, and put on trial for treason because he was such an influential poet and translator, eventually his lawyer got him institutionalized in this insane asylum in Washington, D.C. So in the wake of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision when the South was being forced to desegregate, all of a sudden these men started.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, when I first saw the footage of the Unite the Right, I wasn't really, and the Nazi flags and stuff, I couldn't really understand what the connection between Confederate statue, because supposedly this rally was organized to protest the city's decision to remove this statue of Roberty Lee from what was then Lee Park. So I couldn't really figure what is the Civil War and the Confederacy have to do with Hitler and fascism. That was just sort of, I just couldn't make that connection. And it wasn't until, you know, I was, I didn't think I was going to write about the Unite the Right. I mostly work out of archives. I mostly write about dead people. And I sort of in the course of trying to figure out where these people came from.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His bedroom, his study, it's very overwhelming. And of course, you know, when I was, you know, being taken around by a guide with my class, we heard about the servants, but we didn't get much information about Jefferson as an enslaver.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I experienced that story as a school child. There's Colonial Williamsburg where every child in Virginia goes to Colonial Williamsburg. You see reenactments of how they lived and how they made candles and soap and things like that. And then, of course, there's the visit to Monticello, which is this beautiful plantation home on a hill overlooking Charlottesville. You know, and you said in your introductory remarks that Charlottesville used to be the home of Thomas Jefferson. He's so much still lives there. You're just aware of this house. You can see it practically from all over the city. Look up at this mountain. And it's a beautiful house. It's, you know, it's got his libraries. It's got his various inventions, clever little clocks.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was perceived, first of all, it was preceded by a sort of pop up rally Ober Mother's Day weekend in May where a very well-known white nationalist named Richard Spencer suddenly showed up in the park where a statue of Robert E. Lee was staged. And they sang the Hitler Youth song from Cabaret. They chanted You will not replace us. Jews will not replace us. They chanted Russia's our friend and then they disappeared. But that sort of got the summer going. And then a local sort of troller, white raist, decided he wanted to stage an even bigger rally. So he applied for a permit with city. And that was the rally that became the Unite the right. And so, yeah, that was in August 12th, 2017.”
2025-07-13 · Intelligence Squared · What can Charlottesville teach us about America’s national story? With Deborah Baker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT