Nov. 26, 2020 - Bannon's War Room
48:16
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Well the virus has now killed more than a hundred people in China and new cases have been confirmed around the world. | |
| You don't want to frighten the American public. | ||
| France and South Korea have also got evacuation plans. | ||
| But you need to prepare for and assume. | ||
| Broadly warning Americans to avoid all non-essential travel to China. | ||
| This is going to be a real serious problem. | ||
| France, Australia, Canada, the US, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, the list goes on. | ||
| Health officials are investigating more than 100 possible cases in the US. | ||
| Germany, a man has contracted the virus. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| Japan, where a bus driver contracted the virus. | ||
| Coronavirus has killed more than 100 people there and infected more than 4,500. | ||
| We have to prepare for the worst, always. | ||
| Because if you don't, then the worst happens. | ||
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War Room. | |
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| It's our Thanksgiving special. | ||
| It's the 26th of November, the year of our Lord, 2020. | ||
| I want to thank all of our distribution partners, John Frederick's Radio Network for the nationwide coverage, Real America's Voice, that's a streaming platform for the Trump Revolution. | ||
| Also, they are on satellite cable now, this channel 219 and Comcast Channel 113, of course, Newsmax TV and G News and G Media and GTV that puts us in Mandarin, subtitles us in Mandarin and blows it through the firewall. | ||
| And also it gets it to all the diaspora of the Chinese throughout the world. | ||
| They're looking for freedom. | ||
| So I want to thank you and thank everyone. | ||
| Now with over almost 21 million downloads in the podcast. | ||
| Podcast is one of the biggest, I think we're 15th, 16th biggest podcast in the country, in the 30th podcast in the world, in every category. | ||
| When you combine all the categories together, that's sports, entertainment, advice, personal advice, financial advice, and of course politics in the news. | ||
| So I want to thank you. | ||
| And I really want to thank everybody for making this Thanksgiving special. | ||
| One of America's top public intellectuals, someone you see on TV all the time. | ||
| Her writings are absolutely amazing. | ||
| Patriot's history of the United States and really a very special guy, Chad Robichaux from the Mighty Oaks, which is a group that works with veterans on PTSD and giving thanks today. | ||
| One of America's top public intellectuals, someone you see on TV all the time. | ||
| Her writings are absolutely amazing. | ||
| She was in a film I made, I think 10 years ago or so. | ||
| You see her on a lot about law and order and crime and different societal issues, but she's written a piece in The Spectator that really grabbed my attention and it's quite profound and very disturbing. | ||
| It's by Heather MacDonald and it's called, is the current situation more Salem or Thanksgiving? | ||
| And it's talking about the coronavirus and our response to the coronavirus has put America back a hundred years. | ||
| So I want to bring on now Heather MacDonald. | ||
| Heather, thank you so much for taking time and joining us on our Thanksgiving special. | ||
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Thank you. | |
| Heather, so walk our audience through this piece because it's pretty shocking when you go through and it's so detailed. | ||
| But you basically say that our response to this and this concept of safetyism has really put the country back a hundred years. | ||
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Walk through your theory of the case. | |
| Well, there's never been a more civilizational crushing mantra than stay safe. | ||
| It is spirit killing Entrepreneurial killing, depressing, and it is not the way America was founded. | ||
| If Anthony Fauci had been advising King James or had power over British subjects in 1620, when the Pilgrims set forth for the New World, they never would have left. | ||
| We never would have had a Thanksgiving holiday for the current day Fauci and his peers in the public health establishment in the media to cancel 400 years later because our early American colonists and frankly people who gave us Western civilization for thousands of years understood that risk is a part of life and you balance costs and benefits. | ||
| You put one particular risk in perspective Had the Pilgrims followed the Stay Safe mantra, they never would have left, because in the first year at Plymouth Rock, after they landed, nearly half of all people who came aboard the Mayflower had died. | ||
| Earlier, at Jamestown, established three years earlier, there was already a 50% death rate in the first nine months. | ||
| The Pilgrims set off anyway, because they had higher aspirations than staying safe. | ||
| The belief in religious freedom, entrepreneurship, a sense of adventure, a desire for greater freedom, and they put those risks in perspective. | ||
| Today, we are shutting down our prosperity, we are killing off business, we are killing our economy for a single-minded and absolutely hysterical focus on a greatly over-hyped risk. | ||
| And we are reacting more like the Salem witch trial frenzy with a whole host of imaginary threats and witches and pariahs, you know, the people who don't wear masks outdoors where there is zero chance of transmission, Steve. | ||
| You cannot get the coronavirus outdoors. | ||
| The circulating air disperses it to a point of negligible viral dose. | ||
| And yet, you see people putting their... Now, here, I'm in Irvine, California. | ||
| I now see professorial types not just being masked outdoors. | ||
| They are now putting both hands over their mask. | ||
| If I approach running at a five-yard distance, they are so terrified of these phantom threats, and they are willingly embracing fear. | ||
| This mentality, if it is not stopped, if we don't rebel against the tyranny of these experts who are using phony science to shut down the schools, to shut down outdoor dining in Los Angeles, this civilization is over. | ||
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Wow. | |
| Okay, so you have a history of not having your hair on fire. | ||
| Here's what I think I don't understand. | ||
| How did, from the time you talk about the Pilgrims and the Salem Bridge Trials and the Pilgrims, they had limited information, right? | ||
| Limited access to knowledge. | ||
| The world was just much more limited as far as travel, as far as ability to get hands-on books, material research, etc. | ||
| Whereas today, you know, a hundred centuries later, we're the most advanced post-industrial civilization. | ||
| We have instant access to every piece of information in the world with the Internet, with access to everything. | ||
| And the ability now to have advanced calculus and mathematically, we can do all kinds of statistical analysis, plus we have the microchip that allows us to compute and have tremendous computational power. | ||
| How can those two, this is what I think is a mismatch in helping people think about it, how can a society back then that has limited access to information and to knowledge, and a society 400 years later that has ubiquitous access to that, | ||
| How can that society be on the verge of collapse because of fear about the unknown, but to kind of think through what the probabilities are of what's going to happen? | ||
| How can we have that mismatch? | ||
| That is a very profound question, and I argue that it is the result of the feminization of our culture that has come out of the university. | ||
| The safetyism ethic, you can find, I wrote about it, A year ago on American college campuses, you have a bureaucracy, college bureaucracy dominated by females. | ||
| The faculty are increasingly dominated by females. | ||
| They are crushing traditional male virtues of courage, risk-taking, perseverance. | ||
| We saw this when Trump left Walter Reed Hospital from his coronavirus infection. | ||
| The most thrilling moment of his presidency, he took off his mask on the balcony. | ||
| And said, I'm a leader. | ||
| I have to go forward. | ||
| I'm not going to huddle in my attic or in my basement. | ||
| We cannot let this coronavirus stop us. | ||
| We have to move forward. | ||
| Those are traditional male leadership values. | ||
| The most extraordinary moment in the last four years was that the elite establishment, both the media and political leaders, denounced him for telling the American people, we will get over this, we will move forward, do not succumb to fear. | ||
| Their own hero, FDR, famously said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. | ||
| Now we have the female ethic of maximal risk aversion and a hatred of those male virtues of courage and risk-taking, and that is now spread. | ||
| And you're right, We have the science to not shut down schools. | ||
| I mean, this is what's so extraordinary. | ||
| The schools are being shut down across the country, Boston, New York City, you name it, when we already know that children are at no risk, zero risk of death, and they do not transmit to adults. | ||
| We're proceeding anyway in the face of science. | ||
| I get nauseated when I hear The left-wing hysterics claim to be the science party. | ||
| They are not. | ||
| They're turning their backs on the science. | ||
| Again, outdoor transmission does not exist. | ||
| No reason to wear masks outdoors. | ||
| And yet, they're in the grip of fear and hysteria that trumps the extraordinary advances of the scientific method, the greatest triumph of rationality in human history, In favor of cowering, and it's also based on something that you wrote about, or portrayed in the wonderful documentary that I had the privilege of being in, the utter ignorance of the economy. | ||
| These are people who actually believe that government stimulus spending is a superior substitute for private economic activity, that we can kill small business and just write the stimulus checks and everything will be okay. Well that of course is utterly ignorant. | ||
| I want to go to another part of this piece because I want everybody in this country to read this. | ||
| You make the analogy it's closer to Salem and then you go through and you list out how Salem was a rejection of rational thought even for that time when they had limited access to knowledge. | ||
| We've got a couple minutes in this segment, and I would love to hold you over for a few minutes in the other, but just walk through why this is closer to Salem, what we're doing today, than the virtues of Plymouth and the Pilgrims. | ||
| Well, you have the worship of fetishes, every sort of witchcraft, belief in supernatural powers, and a rejection and a belief in imminent threat. | ||
| You know, the belief that threat is everywhere, which is what the Salem Witch Trial—everybody could be a witch. | ||
| Well, now you have Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, telling Los Angelinos, assume that everybody you encounter is infected and can contaminate you. That's a ridiculous claim. | ||
| Even with the so-called rising cases, and that's largely a function of rising testing, and it's all young people, which is a good thing that we have rising caseload when young people are getting it because it leads us to herd immunity. | ||
| In any case, even with rising cases, the idea that everybody you encounter is infectious and will possibly kill you is ridiculous The worship of fetishes, you know, a classic kind of primitive view that there are these magical amulets and totems, the worship of the case count. | ||
| You know, we have, for the last four months, every single day, the press has been beating us over the head with rising case counts. | ||
| It's an irrelevancy! | ||
| Death rates are going down. | ||
| Hospitals are not overwhelmed. | ||
| Death rates are going down. | ||
| And yet, we are all on our knees before the case count. | ||
| We're looking for pariahs. | ||
| You know, we want to have scapegoats. | ||
| so we're scapegoating the non-mask wearers, outdoor mask wearers as responsible for the spread, even though we recently had the Danish massive randomized controlled experiment showing that masks do not protect wearers, and we see no correlation between high mask wearing countries and low mask wearing countries as far as cases or deaths. | ||
| We also are now making pariahs, people who have recovered from COVID-19, even though they are not infectious, and they're, again, a good thing. | ||
| It gives us herd immunity. | ||
| You have friends that refuse to even talk to them. | ||
| So all of this sort of magical thinking that characterizes mass hysteria we are seeing played out again here. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Heather, if you can just hold for one second, we'll take a short commercial break. | ||
| This is War and Pandemic. | ||
| It is our Thanksgiving special. | ||
| We have the great Heather MacDonald with really, I think, an incredible piece in The Spectator talking about really the collapse of our civilization around the thought process of the response to the CCP virus. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
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War Room. | |
| Pandemic. | ||
| With Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| We're back with our Thanksgiving special. | ||
| It is Thanksgiving Day, the 26th of November, the Year of Our Lord 2020, with the great Heather MacDonald. | ||
| Thank you so much, Heather, for taking time away from your Thanksgiving to join our audience. | ||
| One last thing. | ||
| The 400th anniversary, we started this show a couple hours ago with Tom Cotton's great speech in the United States Senate talking about how we've, you know, we're kneeling at the altar of the 1619 Project from the New York Times, and we have failed to do any commemorations, even though things are bounced down now because of the CCP virus, the COVID-19. | ||
| There really wasn't any real heat building on the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims. | ||
| Just real quickly, how were the Pilgrims different than us? | ||
| And what would they think of us? | ||
| What would they think of us today, 400 years later, given what they went through? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Because, you know, we talk about Burke's dictum here all the time about we owe as much to the people that came before us as we owe to the future. | ||
| What were the Pilgrims like? | ||
| How were they different from us? | ||
| And what would they think of us? | ||
| Wow, I would have to think they would be utterly stunned that a people that has achieved so much, that has so much prosperity, that has so much technological advance, could be bludgeoned into staying at home, not even hugging their loved ones, these just utterly absurd, irrational, groundless | ||
| Thanksgiving rules, that people would bow down and slink into their little hovels at the command of a group of, in large part, non-elected experts and then their elected toadies, rather than having the backbone to think for themselves, to value their freedom, | ||
| And to be grateful for the fact that people went before them. | ||
| And yes, you're absolutely right to bring up 1619. | ||
| I mean, that's the other pall hanging over our culture right now, which is the hatred of Western civilization by a bunch of ignoramuses who have no idea that Western civilization is the source of the very ideas that they purport to be defending, ideas like equality and liberty. | ||
| There's no other source on this planet than Western civilization, and yet we are so ungrateful, we are so opposed to the values of that first Thanksgiving, which is gratitude, and we are turning on our inheritance based on utter ignorance I think they would shake their heads and be utterly perplexed by how things came to this state. | ||
| Heather, you're one of the most significant public intellectuals out there. | ||
| How do people get more access to your writing, Twitter? | ||
| How do they stay up with your current thinking? | ||
| Oh, thank you, Steve. | ||
| I'm so honored. | ||
| Well, I do have a Twitter account that is used really just to put out my recent work And I'm not sure of the handle, actually, but if you Google me, Heather MacDonald, M-A-C-D-O-N-A-L-D, Twitter, that gets you the count. | ||
| And my recent books, of course, are The Diversity Delusion and The War on Cops, which are pretty good summaries of my thinking. | ||
| No, amazing books. | ||
| The article is more Salem than Thanksgiving. | ||
| Coronavirus panic has set America back hundreds of years and it's a must read. | ||
| Heather, thank you so much for taking time away on Thanksgiving Day to join us. | ||
| Thank you, Steve, for having me on. | ||
| It's a great honor. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| God, this show, this may be one of the best shows we've ever done. | ||
| I mean, the level of incredible content here. | ||
| I want to bring in now Matt Gatiss from Camp Freedom. | ||
| This is, and we're trying to alternate this between an intellectual that actually reminds us back to the roots of our greatness, and kind of how we've declined since that, with people who are out there every day making it happen. | ||
| Matt, tell us about Camp Freedom. | ||
| Tell us about how you're helping veterans every day. | ||
| You know, it's a great privilege to do what I get to do. | ||
| I get to serve real, true American heroes, our disabled veterans, disabled first responders, their family members, and I get to do it every day. | ||
| You know, we have 1,800 acres in Northeast Pennsylvania and we do all kinds of outdoor adventures. | ||
| We hunt and we fish and we shoot and we hike and we bike and we walk. | ||
| Anything that can be done in the outdoors in that 1,800 acres, we provide that free of charge to our disabled veterans, disabled first responders, and Gold Star families also. | ||
| And we just get the privilege of serving them because they serve this country in so many great ways. | ||
| How did you guys get started? | ||
| How did you come up with that idea? | ||
| Because, you know, when I met you in Pennsylvania, I was up there a while ago, I just thought it's an incredible idea to get people out and to get them out there in the fresh air and to clear their mind and do all this activity. | ||
| How did you come up with the idea? | ||
| Yeah, actually our founder, Bill Bockenberg, bought this 1800 acre piece of property several years ago with the intent of giving access to disabled individuals. | ||
| And then when Bill and I were talking about it, we really saw that the greatest need in our culture right now is to serve these veterans and these first responders who weren't necessarily getting this kind of care. | ||
| We find that they struggle, they battle, whether it's mental, whether it's physical. | ||
| And so we just combine camaraderie in the outdoors. | ||
| And we have found that to be kind of our secret sauce that just sees incredible change. | ||
| In these individuals' lives. | ||
| It takes them from a point of struggle often to a point where their life gets completely changed, where their life gets saved because of just caring for them and caring for them in the outdoors. | ||
| Again, it's just a great privilege. | ||
| Now, how do people qualify? | ||
| How do they get access to it? | ||
| If they know people, how do people get associated with this? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, in the local area, we have people coming every day. | ||
| I mean, people just show up every day, they come to the facility, they come to the site. | ||
| But for those who are looking for more information, they can go to campfreedompa.org and get information. | ||
| And that's also where you can apply for our extended stay events like our hunts. | ||
| There's an application process in that, like this fall, we're conducting 41 hunts and we had over 300 applications. | ||
| So, The need is great, and we're very selective in that vetting process to make sure that we're helping people that have that genuine need where we believe we can really, really help them with their struggles and with their battles. | ||
| So, do you have a Twitter handle? | ||
| Do you have a website that people can go to on Thanksgiving Day and find out what you guys are about? | ||
| Yeah, they can go to CampFreedomPA.org. | ||
| I don't have a Twitter handle, but they can go to our website. | ||
| And also, right now, we have a great raffle going on at CampFreedomNova.com, where we teamed up with Camps Customs, because we've had to be creative in this crazy year we're living in to raise money. | ||
| And so we're raffling off a great 1969 Chevy Nova right now, so they can check that out too. | ||
| If people don't want to go to the, don't need to go to the raffle. | ||
| They just want to contribute. | ||
| How did you just go to the website? | ||
| There's a contribute section. | ||
| There's a donate button right on the front page. | ||
| So you click on that and then there's all kinds of monthly opportunities and also one time gift opportunities. | ||
| So a lot, a lot of opportunity to give. | ||
| And again, it's been a tough year, especially for nonprofits because so many of our businesses are suffering with all of the Well, I call ridiculous regulations that have been put in place and the way things have been handled. | ||
| So we have people who are struggling and it's caused our numbers to go up because of the forced isolation. | ||
| We're seeing so many more veterans and first responders struggling. | ||
| We're up tenfold in the first responder area from just a year ago with people who are struggling. | ||
| Matt, thank you so much for coming and joining us on Thanksgiving Day. | ||
| We'll make sure a ton of people get to the website. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I appreciate you having me. | ||
| Have a good night, a good day rather. | ||
| Matt Gatiss from Camp Freedom. | ||
| I've got a couple minutes and I want to, I want to, my two colleagues. | ||
| First off, that's like you Pennsylvanians, man. | ||
| You can't get enough, God, getting out there hunting and getting in the outdoors. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| I am blown away today on the Thanksgiving special. | ||
| The level of depth Of the public intellectual, we've had Zweigert and Heather MacDonald, and we're about to have Peter Hunt on here, another great scholar. | ||
| Peter Wood. | ||
| Peter Wood's coming on about the descendants of the actual pilgrims themselves and what he's doing about it. | ||
| But then the people that are actually contributing every day and helping out, just make sure that it just reinforces how much we have to give thanks for. | ||
| We're trying to give a comprehensive show here. | ||
| We're trying to show what history we have to be thankful for. | ||
| We're trying to show that all of us have this internal strength and we know about it because we've had people who went before us. | ||
| And then we're also looking to people who have sacrificed for this country and giving thanks that those men existed, those men and women existed to be there on our behalf. | ||
| It reminds me when Patton said, let us not mourn. | ||
| That these men died. | ||
| Let us celebrate that men such as these lived. | ||
| Yeah, and something that struck me while they were speaking was the camaraderie that they both mentioned of getting out in the outdoors and being together. | ||
| And that's something that sometimes you can take for granted, but that camaraderie goes such a long way. | ||
| Boy, I tell you, in this year of the coronavirus, the CCP virus, it really took it together because it really cut through everything. | ||
| And talking about the hunting, I just got a text from a good friend of mine. | ||
| He just took his fourth deer this year, and here I am fighting on behalf of DJT. | ||
| No venison in my freezer. | ||
| God, I know it hurts you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Next up, we're going to go back. | ||
| We have a great public intellectual, Peter Wood, and the book is 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, but he was in this New York Post We're going to return in a second on our Thanksgiving special. | ||
| I want to thank everybody. | ||
| I want to thank the crew, particularly the guys in Denver that co-produces for us, the Real America's Voice team, always a crack team, John Frederick's Radio Network, and also you see the reruns all weekend or late at night on Newsmax TV, and of course, G-News and G-Media. | ||
| Remember, this is the first time we've been in Mandarin to actually celebrate Thanksgiving and to let the world know the celebration we do. | ||
| We thank God for all the great blessings we have here in the United States. | ||
| Greg Mance, Jack Massey, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We'll return with our Thanksgiving special in a moment. | ||
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War Room. | |
| Pandemic. | ||
| With Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Welcome back to War and Pandemic and our Thanksgiving special. | ||
| We're going to, in a moment, have Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars. | ||
| He's got a new book out, 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. | ||
| We've talked about that with Heather MacDonald. | ||
| We've talked about it with Larry Schweikert, the author of The Patriot's History. | ||
| And we're going to have Peter on here momentarily on our Thanksgiving special. | ||
| I want to thank everybody that is party to this. | ||
| And to help us produce this. | ||
| We want to take a little thing, kind of do something different today, actually talk about who the Pilgrims were, why it's so important. | ||
| We started the show with Tom Cotton. | ||
| In the United States Senate, the greatest deliberative body in mankind's history, and he's giving a speech that I think if the pilgrims heard it, they'd be shocked. | ||
| You've got to actually tell people what we did. | ||
| I mean, they're very humble people, but they knew they were doing something special, right? | ||
| They came here and it was the new Jerusalem. | ||
| They came here as very, very – not just ambitious, but they had a sense of history in what they were accomplishing. | ||
| And to know that in the United States Senate, in this advanced, post-industrial country, that you had to actually argue about the importance of the event itself and who they were and how seminal it was. | ||
| Versus, you know, this cultural decline, I think would have shocked them. | ||
| And Jack, we deal with this all the time. | ||
| One of the things I want to get to is that I think that, and not to too politicize it for, of this moment, but this is part of the thing about the fight. | ||
| Remember, every, Swickert and McDonald's said both the same thing, that one of the things that separated out the Pilgrims was their courage. | ||
| You know, they're absolute courage. | ||
| And there were more women and children than there were men. | ||
| I mean, the women had as much courage as the men had. | ||
| And you had Heather MacDonald saying, hey, the biggest problem we have here is the feminization of American culture and the feminization of the American university. | ||
| The first thing they do is, it's not the toxic masculinity, but they want to You know, go at the masculinity and courage and all that. | ||
| And I think it's one of the things we're seeing in this fight. | ||
| We've seen so many establishment Republicans are just prepared to throw in the towel and, oh, let's worry about it later. | ||
| And you know, Steve, I think this feminization that she's talking about, it's across the board. | ||
| It's not saying that men have become more... The whole country has become softer, right? | ||
| I don't see anybody of any sex in the youthful groups today who had the rough-and-tumble raising that you and I did, right? | ||
| A kid who's been watching TV for 20 years... I mean, I spent my entire life hiding in the woods from my mother. | ||
| I mean, these kids have never even spent a night outdoors. | ||
| It's a little bit different. | ||
| I mean, they send you out to go play at, like, early in the morning to come back at night, right? | ||
| Or they come back and grab a peanut butter sandwich. | ||
| Other than that, I don't want to say anything. | ||
| Don't bother me unless you're bleeding, you know? | ||
| And you're not laying on a sofa watching TV. | ||
| You've got to be out and about. | ||
| No, you're working if you're found laying on a sofa. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Putting it to good use. | ||
| The other thing I'm very impressed with in what we've had with today is That these organizations and they're out there helping veterans. | ||
| Now one thing we talked about it between you know commercial time. | ||
| I don't know why we have a situation where we have a $4 trillion budget and these things are not part of the budget in taking care of our veterans. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| Look, it's fantastic. | ||
| Camp Freedom and the Mighty Oaks, these are amazing programs and people have got to support them because they're helping our veterans. | ||
| But what gets me is you've got guys like Robo Shaw and you've got guys like Gaddis that have dedicated their lives to do this and a big hunk of their time is fundraising. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Not actually helping the people that need the help, but fundraising. | ||
| And I've never known, I know Brian Kolfage, the most wounded veteran in the history of the United States Air Force. | ||
| He, I think he had a special home built by the Wounded Veterans Program. | ||
| Wounded warriors who've done, do a great job. | ||
| And I've always asked, I said, why, why didn't we build him a home when he got back? | ||
| He gave three limbs for this country. | ||
| You know, he's, he's, he, he gave virtually everything. | ||
| Why is it with these PTSD cases? | ||
| Robert Shaw's done eight tours in Afghanistan, right? | ||
| And he said he struggled with PTSD when he got back. | ||
| Why does it take outside organizations to do this? | ||
| Well, one of the reasons I think it is, it shows you the limitations of government, right? | ||
| We take these young men, we put them in an awful environment, they come back with PTSD, they have struggles. | ||
| And government's not going to solve that. | ||
| I thought one of the most poignant things that Josh said was that there's a spiritual component to the damage that these people have suffered. | ||
| And the government's not equipped to provide that kind of support, I don't think. | ||
| Or certainly the government that we have today is not designed to provide that kind of support. | ||
| So I applaud the private sector stepping in and filling in the gaps. | ||
| Yes, the government should be responsible for their health care and everything. | ||
| But my gosh, if we had the government building them homes, what would they look like? | ||
| Cinder block boxes, you know, out in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| Navy housing. | ||
| Now, we've got Peter Wood on now. | ||
| Jones is the president of the National Association of Scholars. | ||
| Got a new book, 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. | ||
| We've talked about that earlier with Larry Schweikart in our Thanksgiving special, and Heather MacDonald. | ||
| But Peter came to our attention with the book, but also this article, the headline itself is grabbing, The Pilgrim's Descendants Defend Their Ancestors in the History of America. | ||
| Peter Wood joins us now. | ||
| Peter, why would the descendants of the pilgrims have to defend these giants? | ||
| Why would they have to defend them and why would they have to defend the arc of American history? | ||
| And particularly, not just the rise to greatness, but the rise to our exceptionalism that was founded upon the Pilgrims. | ||
| Well, you mentioned the 1619 Project. | ||
| That's one of the latest assaults on the legacy of the Pilgrims, Mayflower Compact, the founding of Plymouth. | ||
| It's not the only one. | ||
| Howard Zinn's infamous People's History of the U.S. | ||
| doesn't even mention the Mayflower Compact and mentions the Pilgrims only as expropriators of Native American land. | ||
| So I think it has become a standard reflex of the American left to treat the Pilgrims as somewhere between rapacious despoilers of the land and perpetrators of genocide on one hand and on the other side as sort of anti-sex, rigid ideologues who tortured themselves as well as other people. | ||
| So they're a joke, they're a scandal, and they are to be remonstrated with at best, if not just treated as the I want to go to your book. | ||
| Your book is a direct response to this. | ||
| In fact, you say it's a critical response to the 1619 Project. | ||
| Walk our audience through what exactly is the 1619 Project, why it's so controversial, and why it really kind of mocks American exceptionalism. | ||
| Okay, August a year ago, the New York Times ran a special edition of its Sunday magazine titled The 1619 Project. | ||
| It consisted of 100 pages of diatribes against America. | ||
| The basic conceit of it was that when slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia in August of 1619, that was the beginning of 400 years of racial tyranny on treatment of Africans as the basis of wealth and every other good American thing that had been extracted from them by their forced labor and other forms of subordination. | ||
| There's a lot wrong with that story. | ||
| The slaves that were brought by a pirate ship to Virginia in 1619 were treated as indentured servants and soon let loose. | ||
| Some of them did quite well and prospered. | ||
| Slavery didn't begin then, but never mind that. | ||
| The real purpose of the 1619 Project was to demonize America. | ||
| It was a kind of I hate America manifesto that treated every American achievement in medicine and our finances, the rise of free enterprise. | ||
| just about anything you can think of turns out to be a racist plot aimed at subordinating blacks. | ||
| So that was the story the Times was out to sell. | ||
| It was very closely tied to the Times' disappointment in the Mueller investigation. | ||
| They'd hoped to depose Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin, and that didn't work. | ||
| They held a summit and decided they were going to pivot to racial resentment as new narrative, and the 1619 Project was the vehicle to get that across. | ||
| It has been astonishingly successful. | ||
| They've managed to get it into thousands of American schools. | ||
| And it has been the target of, or I should say, the beneficiary of millions of dollars of New York Times investment to make it into a central narrative of American life. | ||
| The success of it can probably be measured by the post George Floyd riots that tore apart American cities over the last six months. | ||
| Hannah Nicole Jones, the New York Times journalist who's essentially responsible for this travesty, proudly declared the riots were the 1619 riots, drawing, I think, a true connection that if you go around preaching racial division and hatred, You will get the benefits of riots. | ||
| Peter, you make a case here in both the article and in the book that the 1620 is really the founding. | ||
| And for our audience on Thanksgiving Day, what were the pilgrims like? | ||
| And what was it about them that, coming from limited resources, limited access to information, they could be as strong and tenacious and have such a vision? | ||
| We've got about two and a half minutes, so just walk us through what they were like, who were they, and how did they get this vision for what they want to accomplish? | ||
| They were English religious dissenters. | ||
| They did not go along with what they thought were the long doctrines of the English church under the British crown. | ||
| They felt so strongly about this that they were willing to, in many cases, go to jail or pay large fines. | ||
| They tended to be people of sort of middle-class background in England, small tradesmen, people from villages. | ||
| Their descent led them, in many cases, to leave England and seek refuge in the Netherlands, in Holland, where they found more religious freedom. | ||
| But after being there for a space of about a decade, they realized their children are growing up to be Dutch rather than English. | ||
| They decided they needed to break away again and find religious freedom someplace else. | ||
| Well, they went from exile in Holland back to England briefly on a ship. | ||
| They had to change from one ship to another. | ||
| They joined up with a company of English settlers who were on their way to Virginia. | ||
| They got blown off course and ended up off the coast of Massachusetts. | ||
| The settlers that they were with declared themselves independent of British law, since they were now outside British territory, and that led to a confrontation. | ||
| So the religious dissenters, the people we call the pilgrims, the secular settlers, whom they called the strangers, agreed to be guided by election, by creating their own rules. We call this the Mayflower Compact. It was a short document that laid out a vision of self-government. | ||
| It's really the first such thing that existed anywhere in the English- speaking world and European world. | ||
| I want to take a short commercial break and come back. | ||
| I've got another couple of questions to go through with you. | ||
|
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Peter Wood, author of 1620, a critical response to the 1619 Project, talking about discussing the Pilgrims on Thanksgiving Day. | |
| Peter, can you hang on one second? We'll take a short commercial break and come back. | ||
| I've got another couple of questions to go through with you. | ||
| Peter Wood, author of 1620, a critical response to the 1619 Project, talking about discussing the pilgrims on Thanksgiving Day. | ||
| We'll return in just a moment. | ||
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Pandemic. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Peter Wood is our guest. | ||
| He's author of the book 1620, A Critical Response to 1619. | ||
| I want to thank everybody associated with helping us with our Thanksgiving special. | ||
| Peter, one last question. | ||
| What would the Pilgrims, given everything they went through, all the hardship, everything they accomplished, and really were the founding of the greatest nation in the history of the earth that's freed more people, created more opportunity, What do you think they would think of us today during this pandemic and kind of the way that American culture and civilization has devolved? | ||
| The New York Post has to write a story saying that the descendants of the Pilgrims have to defend themselves, have to defend the Pilgrims, and have to defend their place in American history and the arc of American history from that. | ||
| What would the Pilgrims think of modern America and the citizens of modern America? | ||
| Well, I think they would be appalled by the moral and cultural decadence of modern America, but on one level, being devout Christians, they would have been resigned to it as saying, this is the consequences of sin that is unrepented. | ||
| So I would think of them as a kind of stoic people who didn't expect a great deal of good to come from license and the readiness to indulge in the worst aspects of humanity. So I'm afraid they wouldn't think very well of us. They might, if they hung around long enough and talked to enough people, realize that their old ideals still live in the | ||
| hearts of quite a few Americans, but the immediate impression would be of a sorry state. Peter, how do people get more access to your head? | ||
| Do you have a website? | ||
| Do you have a Twitter handle? | ||
| How do people... I know the book's, I guess, up on Amazon. | ||
| We want as many people as possible to get this book. | ||
| How do people get access to your thinking? | ||
| Well, they get access to my thinking by going to the National Association of Scholars website. | ||
| That's NAF.org. | ||
| I've published a lot of books and widely published essays, so you can Google me and find how much the left hates me. | ||
| That's all out there to be enjoyed. | ||
| That's a badge of honor. | ||
| Listen, thank you so much for joining us on our Thanksgiving special. | ||
| We look forward to having you back on the show in the future, so thank you so much. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. | ||
| Boy, I tell you, we've had, with Larry Schweikert, Heather McDonald, Peter Wood, we've had, it's been extraordinary, fantastic show, Vish and team. | ||
| I want to finish now with another one of the givers, Francesca DiPaolo. | ||
| She's the Philanthropy Chair at the New York Young Republicans, but more importantly, she's Chair of Homes for Veterans. | ||
| And my understanding, Francesca, is your father actually started this? | ||
| Your dad founded this? | ||
| Yes, so my dad founded Homes for Veterans almost 10 years ago and first of all, I wanted to say thank you for your service because Mr. Bannon, I know that you're a veteran and our mission is to help veterans because we wouldn't be able to do this show or have this conversation without veterans. | ||
| So thank you for having me and thank you for your service. | ||
| But yes, my dad founded the organization almost 10 years ago and Unfortunately, it's always hard for me to bring this up because it's just a bit of a downer, but this is the topic of your entire show. | ||
|
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My dad was taken by COVID in April. | |
| It was really sudden. | ||
| He had no pre-existing conditions or anything like that. | ||
| We were the typical kind of story. | ||
| You know, I wasn't able to be at home. | ||
| I was in New York. | ||
| My parents were in New Jersey. | ||
| And my dad was a really humble guy. | ||
| He loved the veterans. | ||
| That's how I was raised. | ||
| And he worked tirelessly on this organization. | ||
| And what we do is we go into the existing homes of veterans and we create barrier-free renovations. | ||
| So we do a lot of roll-in showers. | ||
| We do a lot of ramps. | ||
| We widen doorways for wheelchairs. | ||
| Anything to make a veteran more comfortable in their own home. | ||
| And what sets us apart is the VA is amazing. | ||
|
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They do a lot. | |
| They do what they can, but they can't do everything. | ||
|
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So we try to make it as easy as possible. | |
| We make the application process very easy. | ||
|
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We don't make the veterans jump through a lot of hoops. | |
| We don't make them wait on the phone for hours and hours. | ||
| And that was my dad's mission, was to make it a very easy process and to get them what they need quickly. | ||
| And that's what we stick to. | ||
| So when I lost my dad, instead of losing the charity as well, I took it over. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| We've got a couple of minutes left, but what inspired your dad to do this? | ||
| How did he get the idea to actually establish this? | ||
| Because he was born in 1959, so it was peacetime when he was old enough to sign up to serve. | ||
| So we chose to kind of have a family and not serve. | ||
| And then as he got older, he wanted to give back and he felt this was a good way to do that. | ||
| Also, after the market crash after 9-11, he thought there were so many homeless veterans and he couldn't believe it. | ||
| So just doing a charity. | ||
| He didn't want to do just any charity. | ||
| This was a charity that he really wanted to do. | ||
| I gotta tell you, you're doing a great honor in picking up the mantle. | ||
| How do people get access to your work? | ||
| Is it a website? | ||
| Do you have a Twitter handle? | ||
| How do they actually find out more about Homes for Veterans? | ||
| The website's really easy. | ||
| It's homesforveterans.us, and we're also on Facebook, Homes for Veterans, facebook.com slash homesforveteransus. | ||
| I gotta tell ya, he raised a pretty good kid here, so you do him a great honor by continuing this on. | ||
| I know it's the first Thanksgiving without him, but you've got all the prayers and thanks from our audience. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| I really, really appreciate it. | ||
| Anything that we can do for the veterans, please reach out. | ||
| We're here for you. | ||
| And I really, really appreciate you having us on. | ||
| It means everything to us. | ||
| So, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Francesco DiPaola. | ||
| DiPaola. | ||
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DiPaola. | |
| It's so much easier than you think. | ||
| DiPaola. | ||
| That's easier. | ||
| Home for veterans. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Jack. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving. | ||
| Jack and Greg, we've got about a minute or two left. | ||
| Any special shout-outs? | ||
| Hey, you know what? | ||
| I want everyone to think about how many times this country has been saved by a beneficent God and His divine intervention on our behalf. | ||
| I was reading about Eisenhower, and he said of the weather break, At D-Day, he said, this day, eight years ago, this is sometime afterwards, he said, I made the most agonizing decision of my life. | ||
| If there was nothing else in my life to prove the existence of an almighty and merciful God, the events of the next 24 hours proved it for me. | ||
| Divine Providence acting. | ||
| Okay, we'll be back tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. | ||
|
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Happy Thanksgiving to everybody. | |
| Thank you very much. |
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