Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. This is the audio version of each episode of the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English. You can watch every episode at the Empire Files. TV.

Donald Trump hit his lowest moment as president when he blamed both sides for the murder of Heather Heyer, an anti-racist protester killed by a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville, Virginia.

You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that

was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that, but I'll say it right now.

What about the alt left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?

Do they have any semblance of guilt?

But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?

And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.

You're changing history, you're changing culture.

The Unite the Right Rally, which unified various neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups,

tried to mask itself as simply defending Southern history.

But the Confederate monuments they claim to protect are open symbols of white supremacy,

proven by the fact that

the vast majority of them were erected long after the Civil War, during Jim Crow and the

Civil Rights Movement. Understanding how a neo-Nazi sympathizer got in the White House requires

breaking apart the myth underneath it all, the glorified story of the creation of the United

States in 1776, honored with countless

holidays and monuments. To learn more, I sat down with Professor Gerald Horn, Chair of African

American Studies at the University of Houston, an author of more than 30 books, including

the Counter-Revolution of 1776, Slave Resistance and the the origins of the United States of America.

You mentioned the memorials for civil war heroes, right, these Confederate soldier statues.

But the thing is, people will defend this and say, no, this isn't about racism. This is

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