website is your guide to our nation's commanders in chief. from george washington to joe biden. find short biographies, video resources, life facts and rich images that tell the story of their lives and presidencies. all in one easy to browse c-span website. visit c-span.org/presidents to begin exploring this rich catalog of c-span resources today. good evening. thank you for tuning in. it's my pleasure to welcome you to a virtual evening to discuss "smashing statues, the rise and fall of america's public monuments."

erin has written in "the washington post," "new york times" and art in america. to moderate tonight, we are joined by ariel sabar, who is a journalist who appeared in "the atlantic," "the new york times" and other publications. he is a harvard professor. ase or copy of smashing statues from books and books below by pressing the green button. we appreciate each and every order and the generous donations from viewers and everywhere. and now without further ado. i'd like to welcome our guests to the virtual stage. hi, wow. so, thank thank you all so much

for coming dr. thompson is written a really timely and compelling book and you should all buy it first. she's terrific writer. so the book is just a pleasure to read but more importantly i think her book lets us peer behind the bronze and guilt surfaces of the statues that adorn our public squares and let's just see the people who made and paid for them kind of gets us into the heads of the politicians ideologues and yes grifters who put them on a pedestal and let us hear the voice is the communities on the losing and these public displays. i forget which mythical figure turned human beings to stone but dr. thompson does the opposite here she turns stone back to flesh and she doesn't in a way that gets past the often simplistic takes that so many of us heard in the aftermath of george floyd's murder. so let's just kind of get into it here. you know, you're you're a scholar of and much of your past research has focused on antiquities. looting private art collecting

and fakes. how did you come to write this book? well, it's essentially because my girlfriend makes really good negronies, so i had a couple of those very tasty cocktails and and open twitter. so don't tweet after drinking unless apparently you want to feel and i saw a video of the toppling of a statue of columbus in front of the sea palsy have a saint paul state capital. and i jokingly wrote a tweet about that tweet went viral. and i've got you know denounced by tucker carlson for leading armies of nihilist at topple statues blah blah. so what was consult with the pre was without getting in trouble and it was something like as someone who studies the deliberate destruction of cultural property, which is one of my specialties. i just have to say next time.

they should use chain instead of rope because it'll go faster and i actually ended up interviewing the organizer of that particular protest my forte profile him in a chapter and he ensure me it came down mighty quickly. he didn't need any advice for me and i got to delve into the complex reasons why he thought it important to do this protest this act of civil disobedience as the prosecutors in minnesota ultimately termed it when sentencing him to community service. and but what was interesting to me was? not so much the treatment all the arguing that went on in the comments of the suit. there are thousands of them and people would say some things like well what's wrong with columbus anyways, or it's it's somehow uncivilized or unhuman to tear down statues at all. like this is something that people don't do and i thought have have none of you ever, you

know, ripped a photograph of your ex from the fridge before this is very human tendency and and as someone at my phds in ancient art history, so practically everything that i study is a classicist was at some point toppled and thrown into a pit by people who wanted to forget about it. so this i wanted to explain how changing statues is something that happens really any time regimes shift any time communities come to a new understanding of who is and who should be in power and america has just been exceptional and having a long period of stability of statues so to speak because we have had a very dominant model of who should run the country for a long time. and now that we are starting to really have shifting questions about who should be in power. it's not really no wonder that. these debates are crystallizing around monuments. and this really is perfect segue to my next question. i mean, let's let's quantify

here about 170 public monuments came down in the united states in the year after george floyd's death about a hundred of those were monuments the confederacy and about 70 were monuments to other historical figures like christopher. columbus has america ever bore ever before senior period when so many monuments came down so quickly. no, not at all. i'm there were periods of questioning monuments and after dylan ruth's massacre and charleston in 2015 and after the deadly unite the right rally in charlottesville in 2017, and those also were periods in which debate focused a lot around naming and flags. so you saw a lot of removal of images of confederate battle flags from state flags. but the statue still stayed in place or were even more protected so there was a sort of backlash to protests of the enactment of laws to protect

monuments from being moved. so this is something that in quantity is unprecedented, but again, not in human history just in america and also if you want to talk about statute removal, it's it's happened all along. so one of the things that i am happy to have written about in the book is a number of instances in which statues were removed because they offended people with the power to remove them from the halls of congress etc. but also i start with the book with the fact that the very first metal statue put up in america the very first equestrian statue lasted only seven years before we tore it down. it was a statue of george the third put up in 1770 in downtown new york city and then as soon as the declaration of independence was red newly proud rebelling americans tore the

statue down it was made out of lead, so they melted into bullets and then use those bullets to fight the kings army. so that's right. so well told in the book it's worth the price of mission alone. what a wild story. yeah so good. so go actually melt it down to to make bullets that the that would be fired on the british, correct? okay. yeah, they talked about how there would be melted majesty fired it at the king's truth. so if this is unprecedented in > yeah. they talked about how there would be melted majesty fired at the king's troops. >> if this is unprecedented in american history, where do we look into world history to find something roughly equivalent in terms of the number and speed of the statues coming down? i'm probably sending you back to grad school here. where do we find this? or do we not?

is there something singular about this? >> i think it is singular. there are certainly lots of instances of massive statue removals like in former soviet states, independence from the soviet union, iraq with the fall of saddam. any type of big transition of power, look at the very satisfying videos of blown up swastikas and hitlers at the world war ii. there hasn't been a regime change in america. we haven't arrived at the idea of who do we not want anymore and who do we want. we are seeing many more arguments and discussions about statues rather than, all right, that one is off. >> what was different this time? there were periods in american history -- let's say the late

1960s, when large numbers of protesters were just as angry about the rights and living conditions of minorities and women. why did the protest take this specific form this time? why this now? from the research you conducted for your book. >> there is a book by karen cox that compliments my book in looking at the history of protests against confederate monuments up until 2017. so she finds some people discussing even century, any time we walk through the city square, we would have something sharp to scrape away at the statue of john c. calhoon or whoever to see we weren't accepting the statue. student protests in the '60s and '70s that would paint messages on confederate statues.

but i think that in that period, there's more of a focus on adding new statues. let's increase the representation in representatio monuments and there was a hopefulness of that that by adding countermonuments, you can change the way that public base operated. but i think the last few years, we have been realizing that these monuments continue to have -- to encourage harmful behavior to solidify people in their hatreds and add in new monomentes is not enough. you have to address the ones. >> so i think people who watch some of these takedowns on tv probably remember the most dynamic, eye grabbing images, which were like these images of mobs taking them down. but you put out some 80% of the

monuments were moved by public officials. did that surprise you? what do you think is significant? >> if you looked at the headline, you'd think the monuments were destroyed by irrationally acting mobs. and a lot of people including the replies to that tweet of mine said maybe we should remove moneys, but we should have a the democratic discussion. so the majority, 80% of monuments that have been removed have been done so officially. for different reasons. some because the officials agree ed that the monuments should not be there. others to put it into storage to protect it.

>> we can still hear you. >> how oumpb monuments that were torn down in 2020 had been the object of peaceful petitions, others for sometimes not just amusement, decades. people's entire lyes. and there was just simply no way of those complaints being heard. it's not surprising to me that if people lose hope that there be a peaceful way of resolving their difficulties that they will turn to acts of civil disbead yens. >> the book tells so many gripping stories about the historical figures to put up the confederate statues.

fpz was there a particular story that you discovered in your research that really surprised you or changed your understand ing of the history of these monuments. >> how long do you have? what mops to mind? >> we were talking about stone mountain. so i had actually never heard of stone mountain before i started writing the book. and it's the world's largest confederate monothe. it was carved starting in 1914 by a sculptor who would go out and become better known for carving mount rushmore. but he was hired by a local

confederate widow to sort of think about doing this project just carving a single head, and he said, no, no, no, we need hundreds of figures, sweeping across the mountain and did so because he got paid per figure. he got a proportion of the total price. so he wanted to glorify the continue fed ra sit in order to make some more money. and he ended up really promising much more than he could provide so he collected all his money without carving out anything. he only finished ahead of lee after several million of of the dollars and they fired him in 1925, hired another sculptor and the head of lee, off of the mountains. so the world's largest confederate monument has large one head of the figure.

>> this is a sculptor who previously done statues of lincoln and union leaders. he had no ideological backbone. he was looking to cash in. >> he made his fame sculpting union leaders and lincoln in particular. he was gunning for being chosen to do the lincoln monument memorial. it's so hard that he even name ed his son lincoln. he didn't get chosen. and so he was really down on his luck when stone mountain came up. >> one of the most surprising and counterintuitive passages for me, the argument that many confederate mouments were designed to chemowhite southern earners in poverty.

when they think about the monothes, how did they actually be sort of silent statues and many can describe those. what did they communicate to white southern erinism in that political order. >> well, i sort of see this because as me asking a series of stupid questions and then tracking them town. so one of the stupid questions, do these monuments actually honor people's ancestors, because that's a big defense of the monument that's encapsulated in heritage, not hate. so they are about heritage of the people who fought in the civil war, not about hating. so i started to look at what

people said about these monuments as they dedicated them. there are a lot of historical newspapers that are digitized and they just love to report at length all of the speeches. at the dedication of monuments, because the vast majority of monuments are not anything in general. they are an unnamed. and what was being praised was this soldier's devotion to duty and self-sacrifice and obedience. i thought, wait a minute, that's not knowing your own mind or heroic. who is paying for this? who wants to make this? and it turns out that many of these confederate monuments is from the turn of the century until round world war i were paid for by factory owners, mine owners, white collar

entrepreneurs dependent on having a low paying workforce. and they were praising these working class men for accepting a life of social stratification, of not getting really ahead of of listening to their betters. in the hopes they be better employees. and not just in general. i also found that often you'll see a confederate monument with this type of medication go up precisely in reaction to unionization efforts. the case is most clear in what i write about in the birmingham monument, which would have been two parts, nine years apart, both in reaction to a strike and both times the strike was organized interracially. so it was really appealing to

white working class families to say don't cross the color lines in hopes of your lives. you should pay attention to us and keep things as they were. one of these speeches even talks about descendants of vet ans, you are you are working as they did to resist the racial effect wit ty. >> so sort of divided along racial lines, they won't recognize they share that. is that the message? i'll ask the next question realizing that it might sound a little fake, but i think definitions are important. so i'll just ask it. why do civilizations put up statues. i want to get that out there. why do we put up statues. what is the world we are supposed to do? >> statues are community selfies. they are showing ourselves at

our best angles and they are all about the future, not really the past. they are to show us what we think should be be honored, give us ideals,s a rations, so we can make life better for ourselves in the future. to show us who we should emulate. >> so i think when we have a certain type of person honored in the monument to the exclusion of others, that make it is hard for everybody to see themselves on monuments. that's really a waste. shouldn't we be encouraging everybody to live better lives rather than saying, you over there, you can't really do much. just be happy earning your low wages and paying attention to them. >> so what politicians including a certain former president have said that to remove a statue is

to erase history. do you agree? >> when trump was going on about how he needed to create a national statuary garden of american heroes, there's an equal executive order to this. he said that they can't be in modern style. they have to be traditional in representation style. one of the person listed is columbus, which i foundly deeply ironic because we don't have any portraits of columbus. we don't know what he looked like. it would have to be speculative. so i got this a lot. mornmentses are not how history is taught. monuments themselves erase history by depositing certain

narratives and ignoring others. something that i talk a lot about in the book is how northern civil war memorials, hardly had ever even acknowledge the existence of african-americans, despite an incredibly highs percentage of black men fighting in the army. instead if they acknowledge their existence, they are depicted in certain rags, kneeling, as a gift rather than in reality fighting for their own lives for others. so to take what history is erasing it's erasing a particular picture of history designed to enforce social norms at the time. so i'm not -- and i think that history doesn't get erased unless you erase all forms to have communication. and if you are walking around in

your community and you think, i'm not really sure who is that guy over there. you'll know that not owl do a great job of communicating any information whatsoever. >> when you interviewed the activist, he said tearing down history, no, we're exposing it. i think he saw tearing down that as a historical reckoning. which i thought it was quite effective. >> just so ta sha, he's a very interesting perspective. he tried to get the statue removed for decades, but he didn't want it to be torn down and destroyed. he want it is to be on display in terms of the hall of shame with information about why it was there, the role all of of us played, the ole of america, so

he wasn't given a choice besides this the desperate act. they issued to be preserved in rather the museum. the argument goes he's sort of retrograde monuments can be surround by interpretive panels or if they are counterprograms for the statues. it's skeptical. even a visa approach, if you could tell us about what happened about the american culture. after they took in the statue and how that affected your view about the extent of which the statuary can be disarmed. >> i think it doesn't erase history, but it does lesson honor. so if you are concerned about history. how else can be displayed to

learn not just about the history it purports to represent but the history of its use as a monument. so a lot of people say a duh answer, put it in a museum. i really don't think this is as simple as one might think. first of all, storage is expensive. display is expensive. preservation is expense pivot. who is going to pay for all of this. a lot of professionals, they are not america's attic for racist stuff. that's not the role of the museums. they are open to different perspectives no not have a gallery become a site of it was

a removed monument. so what they did was really take a lot of steps to ensure that this monument didn't exert the power it was designed to have. because it is a powerful monument. it's a beautiful guilded statue of an attractive person. winged, nude, representing the ideals of the confederacy. his body draws you in. so they put him in a closed courtyard. they surrounded him with other art works that are sculptures of eyes to make sure he knows he's always being watched. and they have had a number of art cysts and residents who make other performances to have symposiums, they have a goal. not just we don't want to

destroy history. they want to use this statue to get to a better future. it's around to having conversations what it was like to resist discrimination while under the eyes of so many monuments like that. >> i think the head of the museum said it was the statue was too beautiful. it still exerts its influence even if it's surrounded by the programming. but in the end, he makes the decision to keep it. i like to keep the evidence and equal can later live in denial. but you make the point that this a lot of work has to go into getting this just right. it matters whether the museum is run and managed by people of

color in this case versus white folk who is are having it out there. >> you said earlier i was a good writer, but i really feel like i was just getting to put together all the dynamite ideas and quotes. >> how long did it take to write this book?

>> write a full length. it was not spent with my kids. they have heard a lot of those real writing on the stone mountain chapter which has a lot of plan involved. i was in the middle of the countryside in vermont for the pandemic. i had family members who are

compromised. so i couldn't go to protests. i was outside of the city. >> whether it's liberal activists taking down the statues or conservatives banning library books and curriculum. the company seems to be in an all-out war. there's the headline of controversial memorials are surprisingly had easy to pull down. fixing the world that built them is harder.

it's a quick cathartic release for real change or did they find takedowns help launch more sustainable forms of collective action. >> first to challenge the beginning. >> it's a particular feature of the present. they are just able to happen more in public. because one size not winning. so i quote a letter that frederick douglas wrote to a washington newspaper after the ta after the dedication of the freed man's memorial complaining about its representation of a plaque man. it's more like an animal than a man. so people have been spotting the issues in problematic statues went up, it's just those voices

have been effectively squashed through very concerted campaigns to shape what vision of history gets taught. so the group would do things like ask school boards to stach unfair to the south in textbooks that they thought attributed the war to slavery rather than state's rights. so i think what we're seeing now is not suddenly new complaints or new defenses. it's just a change in perceptions and coming out into public. and yes, so i think i have seen a lot of analysis of statue protests with commentators thinking they knew what protesters wanted from it.

but not a lot of people actually asking for this. which is why i wanted to talk to them. what do you want to do? why did you do that? he's someone who has had a loif of really direct action, of caring for indigenous elders and on people protesting oil lines. so he's risking his reputation, his freedom potentially, he didn't have a criminal record at all. to do what might seem to be a highly symbolic gesture of pulling down a statue. but he explined it as a way of making more visible the people who weren't present on the state house lawn. whose histories had ignored so he passed the ropes to indigenous women and they took down the statue in many memory of missing and murdered indigit nous women in the community whose cases aren't prosecuted as

often or solved as often. so sure maybe in some cases chopping the head off a poston in the middle of the night is just surpassing somebody that doesn't mean anything. but in other cases, these removals even the debates, the welcome of removal have lead to really ongoing conversations about the values that community wants to see represented. >> so we have two audience questions around the same thing. >> it's as well as historic and

representational and should be preserved with how inappropriate they maybe that they maybe seen by someone. the argument is to these statues have artistic values separate in part of their politics and shouldn't that artistic value continue to have a certain merit for preservation. >> a lot of confederate monuments were mass produced 23 you look at videos of activists pulling down the cofederate monument in durham, you'll see they tied a rope around its neck and it's very thin i'm not too

sad it's like throwing away old dvds. you know what they look like. this is a theoretical viewpoint. but i also think about all of the things that have been allowed because they weren't thought as important. there was an interesting magazine investigation that found over the previous four years american taxpayers said $40 million to preserve heritage sites. whereas there's all sorts of african-american or indigenous sites and historical landmarks and monuments that crumble. if you're going to say artworks

should always be preserved, we do have a limited amount of of funding. so let's have that preservation dollars be spread around more equally than just public money. >> about how complex decisions about monuments can be, you write at one point, should we honor only partfect people. if not, how much imperfection should we tolerate. who should make these tegss and how? you offer sol advice for how communities should go about deciding whether to put out or move along a monument. can you tell us about how you think that process should work in an ideal world and how we make those decisions now? >> the way we make those decisions now is very limited in who gets to participate. so when you hear public monument, you might think there's some sort of public participation in monuments. you'd really be surprised how

little this is both in when they come down or go up. so they are put up by small groups of people. fpz even new monuments today. even after the death of ruth bader ginsburg, then governor cuomo announced a couple days later, brooklyn is getting a statue of the great ruth bader ginsburg. and i think she's great, but i thought, wait a minute, shouldn't there be more discussion in this community of who may want to honor. so statues have often been air dropped into communities. sometimes against their will and are now often also plucked from them without enough debate. so something that i feel strongly about, especially after writing this book is that these debates shouldn't be just about the character of the person represented, but they should be about investigating how this

monument has been used as a monument, who put it up, what were their motivations, what do they want the monument to do, what messages did they want to communicate and how has it been used since. has it continued as stone mountain continued to foster hatred, the kkk was revived not once by twice on the slopes of stone mountain in association with this project to do with con fed rat memorial. or has these been changed. so the lincoln memorial was put up in a very questionable way. the dedication ceremony was segregated. but it has been transformed by its use as a rallying point for marches. it's much different now than it was. so in some ways, it might seem like a complex project, but as i said, you can really look into

historic newspapers. there's a lot of digital archives online. you can figure out what people said they were doing when they put these things up and people are often surprisingly candid about things they would not be saying today. and just think about is this ab object that's encouraging us all to come to a better feature or are we hanging on to it through some sort of inertia. >> are there communities that are actively using this more democratic process you describe? it seems like the =s of the book, the political action surrounding this as more of a reaction where you have legislatures quickly in the south enacting laws that say don't touch our monuments. don't move them and created all these criteria for laying a a finger on them. so are there places that you look to as hopeful examples of community involvement in deciding what the public visual

space looks like? >> it's hard to find. because there are some states that have passed laws to protect monuments and remove them from democratic discussion whatsoever. and then in state where is that hasn't happened where laws don't necessarily need monuments, there's very often a lack of procedure for raising questions for the monument. but i will say that just a few weeks ago, new york city finally took down a statue of theodore roosevelt that was the object of protest and there's a large number of public hearings and discussions about that monument that resulted in that. and similarly, boston took down a copy of the freedman's memorial that had been in a large number of hearings. so they take a lot of effort and take a lot of expense frankly.

but i think it's worth it. because who cares what happened. when all keep talking about how america is fractured. i think that's a really good place to start. >> the idea that statues that contain just one figure we put on a pedestal. that is limiting. i think in some places, you're arguing to live more abstraction and figurism s that the word? so more people can see themselves. so it's more open. and america needs new monothes

that honor ideas and actions that would have horrified the makers of those older monuments. at what point, it's tricky. it's so abstract. and everyone kind of seeing what they want to see, what does that honor? at some point, you are taking sides. so i wonder if you talked about more abstract monument might lend itself to more open readings. but also how do you still have it mean something and not just be i see ab airplane, you see a bird, i see the face of jesus. what's that -- how do you strike that balance? >> i think the veterans memorial is a perfect example of this tiend of extraction where people can read into what they want. you can see that honoring or as an antiwar statement. it really depends on how you

come to it. but it does raise emotions. it's an emotional experience to visit that. and that type of heightened state which leads us to ask questions is what i think monuments can do. so most of american monuments, especially traditional style, don't want you to ask questions pap they want you to feel that and keep living life as you're living. but i think monuments that are a bit more confusing that don't speak is reaching you. can lead to more debate about what america should look like. and it's tricky. i thought at first i would have a whole chapter about what monothes should look like and then i was like i doe don't know. i will note a lot of current discussions about what new monuments should go up are sort of replacing the person on the

horse. but i think as you put it, nobody is perfect. even if you found a perfect person, that person wouldn't represent every single person who might look at them. so i think it's time to think creatively about monuments rather than struggling to keep to a model that hasn't worked for us. >> i should ask our host. how much time do we have? i know we're running up against the time. can i ask one more question? >> we have some time. no rush. >> so let me ask you one more question. you don't cross over the complicated cases where you have statues of columbus in which italian americans draw the line. but native americans see him as a catalyst for genocide. you talk about the minneapolis

statues. how do you negotiate these discussions where different groups we the to honor. but may have been logger heads, we take different meanings. what is the discussion we have if they honor in this statue and sees them as different. fpz. >> it has surprising to me that there is not more sympathy felt by those who are defending columbus statues because they are saying give us -- leave us columbus. we have been a marginalized group. we know how it feels to be rejected by america by less. but that's the same feeling that many people are saying that

columbus is reminding them of. so why resist so intensely in this experience. and i also think that columbus is maybe not the best figure to cling to in terms of representing italian american identity. so many of the statues of columbus in america went upstarting after the 1924 restriction act. so many are their roots in integration shortly before this. there's a lot of discrimination, a lot of essentially regarding italians from southern italy. not fit for any intellectual labor. there are a lot of efforts to restrict immigration.

so that act passes in 1924. worries are unleashed about a wave of immigrants and the task turns to assimilating the imgrants to leaking them to americans and not italians. and columbus is a symbol of the assimilation of the argument that italians can be of service to america, just as columbus had been. and more deeply of an argument that italians should count as whites. which was very unclear before. so by pinning a new identity on columbus, i say that as a tool for assimilation was he forced a lot of people to cut off a lot of parts of themselves that had been important. it's the ruch yules and other customs and in a certain way,

there's a real attempt to fit in. and i think there's a lot wider range of italian heritage that can be explored in a way. and normally that doesn't directly sort of remind other people of genocide of their culture. i feel like a little. >> we have an audience question here. s have you seen the document on the apron of city hall in philadelphia honoring the 19th century african-american leader considered for voting rights having been assassinated on election day in 1971. are you familiar? >> what about the -- has there been much research or social psychological research? there's a lot of research on the effects of representation on

children. but you write quite pointedly the shuffling -- one of the things that's interesting is these statutes have been taken down, they are not out. most of them have not been melted down into something else like bullets or recycling. so they are still in storage or being held in a warehouse where they might rear their heads again, but shuffling statues around our cities is like moving an abusive priest to another parish. may not be around as many potential victims, but still in a position to abuse. you write not a single child deserves to grow up looking at a piece of stone or metal that tries to convince them they are not equal to other americans. i think a lot of us when we see -- most people when they walk through a park, they don't pay attention. there's another old horse.

to we get a sense of these statues being implicated in shaping children's understanding of who they are and whether they belong. any research specifically about statues opposed to other kinds of representation? >> there's not enough of it for me to feel comfortable sending in the big discussion because not because it isn't there, but because not enough people have had the research funds to measure a statue specifically. but the research, the preliminary findings, smaller studies, the theoretical discussions, i it point to seeing statues that especially those that honored someone who had a history of oppression, of

people from the group you belong to or statues that contain a stereotype or racist vision of someone from the group you belong to have a slow but steady effect. they are like mite gro aggression in a visual world. and i came across a lot of really moving and disheartening quotes from people saying the statue with the kneeling of black men in washington, d.c., they are like i don't want my kids to walk past us. every time we come to the park, my kid says that's not the representation. that i want to see. so i think that i too often thought, they are just statues. i don't pay attention when i'm walking. but i realize when we're writing the box, that's a privilege of disregarding stuff. they were very much the person

and can't send that to everybody. >> the lag thin before we wrap up. anything you want leaders to come away with after they read this book? or wherever they go. but that left out literally thousands of monuments in the u.s. all our communities have that. i really hope that people take another look at something they might walk or drive past every day. maybe to some research, maybe do some thinking to themselves or

out loud whether or not the monuments should be because this is a period where nobody has very clear ideas of what should be. so i think it gives an opportunity for everybody's voice to be heard. >> that's fascinating. thank you so much. really interesting talking to you. i'll toss it back. >> thank you both so much for this conversation. thank you for moderating today's conversation. thank you again. and thank you everyone who joined us to be the. don't forget you can purchase our copy of smashing statues online or in our stores. thank you all again. i hope everyone has a great night. there are a lot of places to get political information. but only at c-span do you get it straight from the source. no matter where you're from.

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