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When we did our declaration episode last year, Hannah, author and Harvard professor Daniel Allen

told us the document was a masterclass in political philosophy unto itself.

That you can hear pro-slavery and anti-slavery voices in it. And then there was something that we

didn't talk about in the episode. In a recent interview on Vox, she said one of the big things we

get wrong when we talk about the declaration is that we think it was written entirely by Thomas

Jefferson. He put on his tombstone author declaration of independence, and that was a real self-aggrandizing

gesture. In fact, he was the scribe, the intellectual work of the declaration was driven

significantly by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. That's an important thing to say out loud because

Adams is somebody who never owned slaves, and Franklin was somebody who wasn't in slave or

earlier in his life, and who repudiated his slavement. And in fact, became a proactive,

vocal advocate of abolition. And when we spoke with Daniel, she noted this that there are pro-slavery

and anti-slavery voices in the declaration. But then she followed up that there is one community

that shared no such duality. You can't say the same thing about the treatment of Native Americans.

You can't see a moment of sort of positivity in the declaration on that front. This is really for

me the worst moment in the declaration. The one piece of the declaration that's still I think

really hurts. I'm Nick Capedice. I'm Hannah McCarthy. And this is Civics 101, the podcast

refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works. Today is our second revisit to our founding

document. We wanted to focus on that particular grievance and its social and political reverberations.

I spoke with author, activist, and independent candidate for president, Mark Charles.

And I'll let him introduce himself. Yeah, so, uh, Yacht A, Mark Charles, you know, she

sinned the kid to net initially, the toe of the Gleeningbusters chain, sinned the kid to net,

...