The

The Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood, a violation of received protocols today, three guests, three segments, a power trio.

Aaron Thompson will talk about the re-sanctification of Confederate memorials.

Luen Robani makes a return appearance to talk about Trump's preposterous Gaza peace plan, and Ted Ham will tell us about Zoron Mundani.

First, the politics of public art.

Aaron Thompson was on their show back in 2020 when BLM-inspired demonstrators who are pulling down

Confederate statues, and again in 2022 when her book, Smashing Statues, on the rise and fall of

public monuments, came out. Now, the Trump and Company are trying to put some of those statues

back up,

it seemed like a good time to have her back. She's a professor of art crime at John Jay College,

City University of New York. Aaron Thompson. Five years ago, we were pulling down Confederate

memorials, and now we're talking about putting them back up. I get that these fights around

public monuments or fights about the present, but what, if anything, does all this dickering around monuments accomplish?

Well, fights about monuments are never really fights about a heap of stone. They are about how we understand our past and our future.

So the reason that Black Lives Matters, protests coalesced around monuments,

are, as let me stress would say, a thing to think with. You can use them to talk about

intangibles of justice and history and honor. So I think Trump is doing pretty much the same thing. I do disagree with you and you said

that we're putting them back up because he has announced that things are going to be put back up.

But so far the administration has been a lot better at deleting things, removing various websites

about what they're calling DEI history, et cetera.

Not anything has gone back up yet. And it's a lot easier to announce you're going to

reinstall something than get the millions and millions of dollars it would cost, say,

...