We call them Nazis and the reason why it's easy to say Nazis is because we don't feel complicit in that evil.

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And welcome to the award-winning Best of a Left Podcast with clips today from Counter-Spend, Off-Kilter, The Young Turks, The Ralph Nidder Radio Hour, Backstory,

Redacted Tonight, Friend Jell-A, The Final Word, Code Switch, and Politically Reactive.

It has been noted that Donald Trump's response to the violence in Charlottesville is not new or unique to him.

One of the angles is that the removal of memorials to say Robert E. Lee, which some will maintain was the sole motivating factor of the people flying swastikas and yelling about the Jews,

is an offense against history itself. You could hear that view from Fox's Laura Ingram who decried, quote,

people who have no idea it seems about the history of this country just roundly denouncing anyone who had any connection to the South, close quote.

She went on to declare, quote, this is about the control of the narrative and a destruction of historical recognition, close quote.

And she's not wrong, except about who is in the main doing the controlling and the destroying.

Carrily Merritt is an independent historian and author of Masterless Men, Poor Whites and Slavery in the Anti-Bellum South.

Her recent article, White Supremacy in the Age of Trump, appears on BillMoyers.com.

She joins us now by phone from Atlanta. Welcome to Counter-Spin, Carrily Merritt.

Thank you for having me.

Well, in a conversation about White Supremacy, sometimes references to class are deflections from the irreducibility of anti-Black racism.

But sometimes ignoring class divisions among whites is itself a kind of deflection.

What are you looking to convey in this latest article?

Well, I think the most important thing, not letting poor working class whites off the hook in any way for their racism,

but just trying to understand the ways in which elites not only benefit from racism but use racism to their advantage,

long history of this throughout America, particularly in the labor sector, bosses long keeping Black and White workers apart,

...