Nov. 24, 2022 - Bannon's War Room
48:47
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because we're going medieval on this, people. | |
| I got a free shot of all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
|
unidentified
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MAGA Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
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War Room, here's your host, Stephen K. Babb. | |
| We've come to the time in the season when family and friends gather near to offer a prayer of thanksgiving for blessings we've known through the years to join hands and thank the creator now when thanksgiving is dear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| you And this year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| This year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| I'm grateful for the laughter of children, | ||
| The sun and the wind and the rain The color of blue in your sweet eyes The sight of a high ball and train The moonrise over a prairie An old love that you've made new And this year when I count my blessings | ||
| I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| This year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| And when the time comes to be going, you won't be in sorrow and tears. | ||
| I'll kiss you goodbye and I'll go on my way. | ||
| Grateful for all of the years. | ||
| I'm thankful for all that you gave me. | ||
| For teaching me what love can do. | ||
| On Thanksgiving Day, for the rest of my life, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| Thanksgiving Day for the rest of my life, thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| Okay, that's the great Johnny Cash. No better way to kick off Thanksgiving Day and our Thanksgiving special. | ||
| I want to thank everybody for joining us here in the War Room, and I've got a very special next couple of hours we're going to spend with each other, so I'm sure A lot of the war room war fighters or the war room posse are on the road now to mom's house or grandma's house or to friends getting together and we'll spend a couple hours and go through the American tradition of Thanksgiving and what it means for our nation and what it means for us as a people. | ||
| I couldn't think of a better way to do this than Larry Sweikart, the co-author of the Patriots History of the United States, which really, when it came out, I think not just set a new tone, but kind of brought back to people what they had forgotten, even conservatives, about the great love of this country, its cultures, its mores, its, you know, customs and traditions. | ||
| So let's bring in Larry. | ||
| First off, Larry, tell me about, walk me through just before we get into the Thanksgiving part of it. | ||
| I want to go back and talk about the Patriots history, in particular for those people maybe not familiar with you or not familiar with the book. | ||
| How important this book was for the culture of the United States, not just for education, for learning, but when you guys, this book came out, it was, it was a cultural, it was really had a big impact on, on culture overall. | ||
| It was like, wow, we'd never really thought of, you know, a lot, some conservatives had, but even most conservatives hadn't in the, in the whole nation. | ||
| We had kind of lost a lot of what, You and your co-author, kind of the framing you put into the country's history. | ||
| Tell me about how you wrote it, how you pulled it together, and why it's important. | ||
| We're going to get into all the Thanksgiving aspects today, particularly the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving, and then we'll talk about Lincoln and the Civil War and the traditions of what President Lincoln did the National Holiday. | ||
| So tell us first about the Patriots' history. | ||
| Well, when Mike and I started to even talk about writing this, we were both college professors and we taught U.S. | ||
| history for a number of years, and we were not satisfied with any of the textbooks. | ||
| And some of the ones you might consider more conservative or traditional, like The National Experience, I used to joke that if you wanted to do a pregnancy test on a textbook to go to the index and look up the Reagan section, you'd immediately find out where it stood. | ||
| So we started working on this in the late 90s and honestly, Steve, we didn't think we were going to get it published. | ||
| We thought we were going to have to go to Kinko's or FedEx and get it, you know, spiral bound and sell it out of the back of a van like you would, you know, plastic straws in California, you know, buddy, plastic straws, patrons history, you know, something like that. | ||
| And it was 2,000 pages when we turned it into the publisher. | ||
| And my agent said, no, that's not going to work. | ||
| So he chopped 1,800 pages. | ||
| And then the editors went to work and tried to chop another 200 pages. | ||
| And finally, we got it down to the magic number of under 1,000 pages, which brought it to a price point where they thought they could afford to sell it. | ||
| And it had really good initial success. | ||
| I mean, it was accepted everywhere by Claremont Review of Books, National Review. | ||
| Everybody, except the New York Times, loved it and reviewed it very well. | ||
| And it quickly became a staple among homeschoolers, which by the late 2010s, I started to do homeschool conventions because I saw, wow, these people are using my book. | ||
| Maybe I ought to go out and meet some of them and talk to them about the book. | ||
| So the book is now in its Fifth edition and it's 34th printing. | ||
| That's not bad for a thousand page history book, right? | ||
| And we've updated it steadily with new research. | ||
| And probably the most important change that we made was beefing up the introduction and the early part of the book with what we call the four pillars of American exceptionalism. | ||
| And that's something we'll get into today as we talk about the Pilgrims, because they are the epitome of the four pillars of American exceptionalism. | ||
| I just want to go back. | ||
| When you had the idea and you had it, so you guys did this totally on the come. | ||
| You didn't have any publishers lined up. | ||
| When you first started going to publishers, was the book rejected by people or was it automatically people thought this was exciting? | ||
| And people should understand, 2,000 pages. | ||
| In modern publishing. | ||
| I mean, modern publishers wouldn't publish War and Peace in its original, just because of the cost of doing it, would it, Larry? | ||
| I mean, they would sit there and go, hey, can you cut, can you take about 500 pages off? | ||
|
unidentified
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Can you make it a little tighter? | |
| So, when you first went around to talk to publishers, what was the feedback you got, and who were the publishers that really got serious and took the project on? | ||
| Well, we had an agent at the time, he's now deceased, Ed Knappman, and Ed and I had worked together on a bunch of encyclopedia projects and facts on file books and things like that, and he was really good to me, really helped me out in my career, getting me into more pop. | ||
| Publishing. | ||
| And just before this book, I had taken a turn at a pop book as opposed to an academic book called The Entrepreneurial Adventure. | ||
| And I wrote it to be a history of business in America because teaching business and economic history, I wasn't happy with any of the business or economic history books. | ||
| And so I combined business and economic history into a single book. | ||
| Well, my mistake was I went with Harcourt Brace, which was a textbook publisher. | ||
| So I didn't still get my goal of trying to see how I could get things out to the general public. | ||
| So we talked to Ed. | ||
| We said, we want this to be a popular book. | ||
| And if you can't sell it, no big deal. | ||
| Like I say, we'll sell it on the back of a van or something. | ||
| So I do not know how many publishers it took it to. | ||
| All I know is he came back. | ||
| He said, guys, we've got two offers. | ||
| And one was a publisher I had never heard of. | ||
| But the other was he said Sentinel, which is a subdivision of Penguin Books. | ||
| They're starting a new imprint, a conservative imprint, called Sentinel, and they want this book to be the premier title in their lead-off season. | ||
| And so we ended up with an awesome editor, and she was a devout Catholic, and I recall her telling me that she, as she was working on the book, she looked down across her New York flat to a Marxist bookstore down there across the street. | ||
| And she said, you know, someday you guys are going to have to be carrying this book. | ||
| So it was really amazing to write. | ||
| And then one of the oddest things that occurred is that just as our book was released, Tom Woods, and you probably know who Tom is, Tom had a book come out called The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which is kind of a competitor. | ||
| It wasn't nearly the depth of Patriot's history or the analysis, but it was the lead-off book to what was a very popular series called The Politically Incorrect Guide series. | ||
| And he beat us by about three weeks in getting out and he got on all the talk shows Fox and all the rest. | ||
| Here's a new conservative textbook. | ||
| So interestingly, when we came out of the gate with this great new book, we didn't have a whole lot of Of media coverage. | ||
| The first person to interview me about the book was Laura Ingram on her show. | ||
| She did a great job. | ||
| And then the great Rush Limbaugh called me up and interviewed me for his Limbaugh letter. | ||
| And to this day, that was one of the best interviews I ever had. | ||
| Rush listened to you and he wasn't ready to ask the next question until he had heard what you had answered to the last question. | ||
| And I think he did us a great service. | ||
| When you and your writing partner, Mike, sat down, how did you break it out? | ||
| How did you say, hey, we're not happy with anything. | ||
| We teach it for a living. | ||
| We clearly love history. | ||
| We studied it. | ||
| How did you take this entirely new look that, quite frankly, really did revolutionize people thinking about American history? | ||
| How did you guys conceive it? | ||
| Well, that's a great question, Steve. | ||
| I met Mike Allen at the Western History Conference in about 1991 or 1992 in Albuquerque. | ||
| He was a historian of the West and the Mississippi River Valley. | ||
| He also knew colonial history pretty well, which is not my specialty. | ||
| I'm not as strong in colonial history as I am in some later histories. | ||
| And then we kind of forgot about each other. | ||
| And when I decided after writing Entrepreneurial Adventure, I want to see if I can do a national U.S. | ||
| history book, I began looking for co-authors. | ||
| And I went through maybe two or three other guys, strangely enough, political scientists, because I thought that they would lend a little more expertise to the early period in the Constitution. | ||
| And then I remembered Mike and I said, you know what, he fits. | ||
| everything I need to flesh this out better than any of these guys. | ||
| So we got together by phone and he took the colonial period for the most part. | ||
| We were each adding stuff and putting stuff in constantly. | ||
| He took Articles of Confederation. | ||
| He did the majority of the West chapter and I didn't much of the rest of it again with him putting in significant amounts of stuff. | ||
| And in our very first iteration, the hardcover version, we had these boxes in which we would do vignettes about people like Mike Fink and Daniel Boone and other people like that. | ||
| And unfortunately, as the book has gone on to be revised many times, we still have to keep it under a thousand pages. | ||
| So we lost a lot of those. | ||
| So what we did was we put a lot of those on the Patriots History USA website, and today it's available on the Wild World History. | ||
| Larry, we'll get to all that. | ||
| Let's take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're here on Thanksgiving morning to talk about the traditions, customs, history of First Thanksgiving and really the holiday season overall, the Thanksgiving holiday. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Be back in a little while. | ||
| This year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| And this year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| Over a prairie, an old love that you've made new. | ||
| And this year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| Okay, welcome back to the War Room. | ||
| It is Thanksgiving morning, and you're here in our Thanksgiving special. | ||
| Larry Sweikart, the co-author of The Patriot's History, is our guest. | ||
| I want to thank him for taking the time away from the family during the holiday season to do this with us. | ||
| Larry, I think a question I always get when we have you on and talk about the book, what The book is so amazing. | ||
| I recommend everybody who hasn't had a chance. | ||
| It's a great holiday gift to give the Patriots history. | ||
| No one you will give it to will ever say, hey, I didn't love it. | ||
| It's so grabbing. | ||
| The writing of it is so grabbing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| What was in the thousand pages you cut out? | ||
| Because when you finish it, it's a pretty definitive history. | ||
| Although, I could take another 5,000 pages of it. | ||
| I love the way you guys write, and I love history. | ||
| But what was the 1,000 pages that you cut, and how tough was that? | ||
| I know as a filmmaker, the biggest fights are always over what you take out of the film, and the biggest fights are those last couple of minutes you've got to cut out. | ||
| So, what were the fights like? | ||
| What were the 1,000 pages you took out? | ||
| What were the topics? | ||
| And how tough was it for you and Mike to do it? | ||
| Well, we took out a lot of social history. | ||
| I'll admit, I'm not as big on social history as many people are. | ||
| We try to keep as much political and economic history. | ||
| And as I said, we had lots of these vignettes, one-page inserts on Daniel Boone or Mercy Otis Warren or somebody like that. | ||
| And we ended up putting all that stuff on our website, on the Patriots History USA website, and now it's on the Wild World of History website, free. | ||
| But as we were leaving last time, I didn't quite get to this point, so Mike and I wrote this. | ||
| Okay, so... | ||
| That's the size of it. | ||
| We wrote that without ever meeting personally in the entire time we wrote it. | ||
| I had not met Mike again since 1991 until a year after the book came out and we did a convention together. | ||
| We wrote the whole book through email and phone conversations. | ||
| And Steve, the most amazing thing about this is there will be passages Or I will say to Mike, you know, Mike, I don't remember writing this. | ||
| This doesn't seem like my wording or my language. | ||
| And Mike would say, well, it sure isn't my wording or my language. | ||
| I truly believe there was a divine spirit involved in writing this because it's just not either of our Our words or phrases. | ||
| And so, we did get to that point. | ||
| We actually came in at 1,200 pages. | ||
| And Bernadette Malone, our great editor, she cut what she could. | ||
| And we still had to get 200 more pages out of it. | ||
| And she said, guys, I can't do anything more. | ||
| Your agent took a shot at it. | ||
| He cut out 800 pages. | ||
| I've cut out 200. | ||
| But we still have to get 80,000 more words out of it. | ||
| So she said, I'm going to an outside editor, a guy named David Fregoso. | ||
| And David did an incredible job. | ||
| Steve, if you could look at the cuts he made, you'd go, how did he take that out and not change the flow at all? | ||
| But he did. | ||
| He was able to take out about 80,000 words and still keep the book to where it just flowed. | ||
| People have to understand that 80,000 words is a book today. | ||
| The books you'll buy over the Christmas period, a lot of the books that we bring authors on to help promote the book and reach the audience are 80,000 words. | ||
| So he actually, the third guy that got to it, took out basically another book. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I tell you. | ||
| He took out a book. | ||
| Really incredible. | ||
| Let me, before we get into the specific Thanksgiving part, what was the genius of it itself? | ||
| You guys have been historians. | ||
| You had taught history to college students. | ||
| You weren't happy, even with some of the great texts that are out there. | ||
| What was it when you first started off, and never to have met, but what was it that said, hey, we need to tell the story this way, or we need to let the story tell itself this way? | ||
| But it comes out as very different, and that's why I think people love this so much, because You don't avoid any of the controversies of American history. | ||
| You don't avoid any of the, I don't want to say scars, but any of the, we're like, you know, we're fallen people like everybody in the Judeo-Christian West, you know, our core beliefs. | ||
| You don't look away from the faults of America. | ||
| But you come away from your book Every time you're reading it and you stop, you feel kind of joyful, or you feel like you're part of some greater, what I call, task and purpose. | ||
| How did you guys think of that at the time to actually conceive it and structure it that it would be like that? | ||
| Well, Mike wrote the line in the introduction, I think kind of defines the book, and he said, it's not my country always right. | ||
| Not my country right or wrong, but it is certainly not my country always wrong, which is pretty much where most of the textbooks had gotten by the 1990s. | ||
| It was just a litany of criticism and everything was starting, even then, to be framed in light of race. | ||
| Class, gender, so obviously nothing that any of the founders did could possibly be right. | ||
| So it's kind of an interesting story about development in that when Mike and I first write this, we knew that there was a key element. | ||
| to the American character about what it was that made America special. | ||
| But in the very first edition, we didn't quite nail it. | ||
| We got close, but we were still kind of grasping it, if you read that first introduction. | ||
| And then as I went on to write other books with another fellow, David Doherty, we wrote A Patriot's History of the Modern World. | ||
| And in fact, I think I have that one here. | ||
| This one. | ||
| And David said, you know, and by the way, this is an interesting story in itself. | ||
| David was the first reviewer on Amazon to have a big review. | ||
| He's the first review up. | ||
| And at the time he said, a great book or a terrific book, but not without its faults. | ||
| Faults? | ||
| Our book has faults? | ||
| What faults do we have? | ||
| At the time, they had the email addresses of the reviewers, and I contacted Dave. | ||
| I said, hey, I'm the writer of this. | ||
| I'd like to know your opinion. | ||
| What did we do wrong? | ||
| And so he started to tell me a few things. | ||
| I said, wait a minute, that seems to be a lot of stuff that you think we got wrong. | ||
| So I said, I'll tell you what, I will pay you a token amount if you would go through the whole book and if you would just list every single error you think there is in there. | ||
| And so he did. | ||
| He sent me back 14 pages. | ||
| Now, it wasn't all errors. | ||
| A lot of it was differences in interpretation and so on. | ||
| But it was really eye-opening to see, okay, we need to clarify this. | ||
| We need to address that. | ||
| But the main thing Dave said was, you don't come to grips with what it is to have American exceptionalism. | ||
| What is it that makes America exceptional? | ||
| And I looked at our introduction, and I thought, that's right, we kind of danced around that a little bit. | ||
| And so Dave and I set out, and then we got Mike involved again, and we came up with what we call the four pillars of American exceptionalism. | ||
| And that defined the book. | ||
| That's what really made the book. | ||
| Super special in that no one else has looked at this. | ||
| And you can read things like Niall Ferguson or some of these other people who've looked at American exceptionalism, William Bennett, and they miss the boat. | ||
| They're just, you know, well, it's a written constitution. | ||
| Well, I'm sorry. | ||
| Cameroon has a written constitution. | ||
| They got a dictator, you know, I mean, and so what we came up with was the four pillars of American exceptionalism. | ||
| And that is a Christian, mostly Protestant, religious tradition which no other nation in the world had at its founding. | ||
|
unidentified
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None. | |
| Common law, private property with written titles and deeds, and a free market economy. | ||
| And what's amazing is you find all four of those present in Plymouth at Thanksgiving. | ||
| So let's go through that. | ||
| Before we go to break, I want to go through that to set the framework for the audience. | ||
| We've got a couple minutes. | ||
| Walker, what are the four pillars? | ||
| Okay, so you have a Christian, mostly Protestant, religious tradition. | ||
| How does that differ from England? | ||
| England's not Protestant. | ||
| They were Anglican. | ||
| They were a top-down religious structure. | ||
| But the pilgrims, the Puritans, were bottom-up. | ||
| They were congregational. | ||
| Common law says that God puts the law in the hearts of the people and the people elect or select leaders to carry it out. | ||
| Totally different from divine right of kings or what later came with Napoleon and civil law. | ||
| Private property is written titles and deeds. | ||
| Very important. | ||
| We could spend 15 minutes just on this one, and it's far more important than most people realize, and it's woven into the Articles of Confederation in laws that I think are our most important laws, even aside from the Constitution. | ||
| And then the last one's a free market economy, which of course makes it possible for both Jamestown and Plymouth to survive, because until they changed to a free market economy, they were dying. | ||
| Literally dying. | ||
| Larry, why don't we hang on for a second? | ||
| We're taking a short break here on our Thanksgiving. | ||
| By the way, I want to make sure everybody goes to mypillow.com, promo code war room. | ||
| Go there. | ||
| We've got the kickoff of the big sales, 90% off, 90% off, up to 90% off on some of these liquidations. | ||
| Make sure you go check that out. | ||
| Take a short commercial break. | ||
| Be back with Patriots History of the United States where we talk about the four pillars of American exceptionalism and how they started with the Pilgrims. | ||
| The Puritans that were the pilgrims of King Israel. | ||
|
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Next. | |
| Here comes the King of the Church. Next. | ||
| I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| This year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| When the time comes to be good, it won't be in sorrow and tears. | ||
| I'll kiss you goodbye and I'll go on my way, grateful for all of the years. | ||
| I thank you for all that you gave me, for teaching me what love can do. | ||
| And Thanksgiving Day for the rest of my life, and thank rain. | ||
| The color of blue in your sweet eyes, the sight of a high ballin' train. | ||
| First off, is it a Christian nation, or is it a nation that has the foundations of the Judeo-Christian West? | ||
| First off, is it a Christian nation, or is it a nation that has the foundations of the Judeo-Christian West? | ||
| I mean, when you say Christian, you mean the Judeo-Christian part of it. | ||
| And obviously you're saying it's not Anglican or Catholic, because those are really top-down. | ||
| Being a Catholic, I can tell you that's very top-down. | ||
| The Anglican Church is just Catholicism with the high Anglican Church is just Catholicism with the sovereign in England running it, not the people. | ||
| But is it Judeo-Christian or is it Christian? | ||
| It's a Judeo-Christian structure, but the important point that we emphasize is not theology, Protestant, Catholic. | ||
| That wasn't what made it different. | ||
| What made it different was, as you just mentioned, the congregational bottom-up structure, which no other nation in the world had with its religious system. | ||
| And when you combine that with common law, which is bottom-up, right there, just in the first two pillars of American exceptionalism, there's nobody else who's ever had that from their origins. | ||
| Now, England has common law, but they didn't have a Protestant religious tradition from their origins, that is, the idea of bottom-up church governance. | ||
| And, you know, our point is that This is what kind of imbued Americans with the idea of revolution. | ||
| We aren't going to be dictated to from above. | ||
| Everything has to come from, as Lincoln said, of the people, for the people, by the people. | ||
| It's got to be from the populist base. | ||
| Walk us through, let's go to the beginning, the Pilgrims. | ||
| Now, I come from the Commonwealth of Virginia and I remember as a little child it would be these heated debates of whether the first Thanksgiving was at Jamestown or the first Thanksgiving were the Pilgrims at the colony in Massachusetts. | ||
| So walk us through, what was it? | ||
| I think today, generally, the consensus is it was the Pilgrims. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Because both of these were very, the Virginia Company was a collection of essentially, I call them freebooters, right? | ||
| Entrepreneurs, I guess you would say in your book. | ||
| Whereas the Pilgrims were probably among the most serious religious people I think have been created on Earth. | ||
| Larry Swickert. | ||
| Well, you're both right. | ||
| There were thanksgivings in Jamestown and there were thanksgivings in the Plymouth Colony before the official Thanksgiving. | ||
| But Plymouth was the first officially announced by the governor Thanksgiving holiday. | ||
| So the reason that we like to say that Plymouth And not, Jamestown is the real focus of America's origin, is that Jamestown, as you just mentioned, it did not have a Protestant religious tradition, they were all Anglicans, it did not have common law, they had a, they were directed by England and by the king over there. | ||
| Both of the colonies ended up with private property with written titles and deeds, and both eventually ended up with a free market economy, but not Not at the outset. | ||
| So what makes Plymouth special is that it has these four qualities, these four pillars, all from the start. | ||
| And the last one to come along was a free market economy, which they got in 1630 when they created a grinding mill. | ||
| And some of their number had to actually work the mill and be paid in grain from the other farmers. | ||
| They could no longer be farmers themselves, right? | ||
| So, what the two colonies did have in common, of course, was that they starved until they They released socialism. | ||
| They came over with a socialist structure. | ||
| And you know what happened in Virginia? | ||
| The starving time, they lost literally half of their colony. | ||
| And the diaries and so forth say people were eating rats. | ||
| Dung, shoelaces and you know, my wife and I like to watch these chopped, these cooking shows. | ||
| The guy goes, open your basket, your market basket of goods. | ||
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I've got a wrap, I got dung, I got shoelaces and a rock. | |
| I know exactly what I'm going to do. | ||
| I'll make a nice rat puree and fry up some shoelaces, you know. | ||
| So both of them had the same problem, and it was that socialism did not work. | ||
| And in each case, they both said, OK, enough. | ||
| Here's your land. | ||
| Here's your green. | ||
| Beat it. | ||
| You're on your own. | ||
| John Smith, of course, said he who will not work will not eat. | ||
| Governor Carver was much the same way. | ||
| William Bradford, who was a young man at the time, said it was as if we thought we were wiser than God. | ||
| to have this, he wouldn't have called it socialist, but to have this socialist system. | ||
| So that's what saved them and of course allowed the Pilgrims to even have a Thanksgiving was they had an abundance for the first time after they got rid of this socialist structure. | ||
| People don't realize they lived in pretty tough and dangerous times. | ||
| I mean, you'd had, I guess, the English Civil War. | ||
| And these people were considered radicals. | ||
| I mean, today in the United States, they would be considered kind of fringe. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And when they left England and went to Holland, they were kind of kicked out of there because they were not easy to get along with, right? | ||
| They had a worldview that was quite different than the accepted norm. | ||
| And I think people kind of miss that as the founders of our country. | ||
| They came here, not only they were a little ornery, They're very tough people. | ||
| Obviously kind, but very tough. | ||
| But they had a unique vision of the world that was not acceptable to their own mother country, correct? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Hence the name Separatists, right? | ||
| But what's so interesting is that when the Pilgrims come over, half their number are not Puritans. | ||
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They are called strangers. | |
| So, One of the most amazing things is on the Mayflower, before they ever get off and go ashore, they draft this compact. | ||
| And it does three things. | ||
| Now, people will remember that they landed off course. | ||
| They landed up in Massachusetts, as opposed to they were supposed to be down in Virginia. | ||
| And technically, that put them at risk of being called traitors. | ||
| I mean, they weren't where they were supposed to be. | ||
| They weren't where the king told them they could be. | ||
| And so, in this Mayflower Compact, the first thing they did was they pledged their allegiance to the King. | ||
| Oh, King, oh dude, man, we love you, man. | ||
| We're not trying to be rebels here. | ||
| The second thing they did was to establish that the strangers We're going to be treated as equal members of society, even though they weren't pilgrims or Puritans. | ||
| And the third thing they did was they established that they were going to elect their own governor. | ||
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That's common law. | |
| So this is amazing. | ||
| And you look at the Mayflower Compact, it's a short little document, right? | ||
| And that they accomplished these three things was really quite remarkable. | ||
| And so from the outset, they said, we believe this way, and we firmly believe this, and you might know that the pilgrims, the Puritans at the time, to be accepted into their church, you had to go through quite a process. | ||
| You had to give your conversion story, and it better be a good one. | ||
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You couldn't just say, well, I kind of thought about it, and I decided I liked Jesus. | |
| No, that wasn't going to do it. | ||
| You had to say, well, I was drinking four bottles of Jim Beam a day, and I was mainlining mayonnaise. | ||
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I was just shooting mayonnaise right in my veins, and I hit rock bottom. | |
| And that's when I decided I needed God. | ||
| You had to have a good conversion story for these guys. | ||
| And the problem, of course, came over time, is who's really saved? | ||
| How do we know who is really saved? | ||
| And this, of course, is one of the problems for any religious group. | ||
| How do we know who's truly accepted by God and who isn't? | ||
| And their solution to this was the halfway covenant, right? | ||
| If you say you're a Christian, we're going to accept that you're a Christian. | ||
| And that's how they finally got around all that. | ||
| They barely, talk about when they came, particularly the Mayflower, these boats are incredibly small. | ||
| It was a very tough passage. | ||
| And then when they get here, they barely hang on. | ||
| I mean, they have to bring, and people got to think back, this is a very hostile environment and just daily survival. | ||
| is difficult. | ||
| Walkers who even got a foothold before the abundance came and they could give thanks to God, I mean, they barely hung on. | ||
| I mean, it was a hair's breadth of the experiment being a failure, like in Roanoke Island and other places that had tried to get a foothold here in North America. | ||
| Well, the first thing they did, people kind of think that the Mayflower arrived and they hopped on these little boats and they rowed ashore. | ||
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And that wasn't the case. | |
| They stayed on the Mayflower for some time as they sent out scouting parties and they looked around. | ||
| One of the great myths is that they took the land from the Indians. | ||
| Absolutely not true. | ||
| The Indians had evacuated that land Many, many years earlier, because apparently of a plague. | ||
| We're not sure, but most anthropologists think they left because of signs of a plague. | ||
| And so, I mean, how's that for an inauspicious beginning or landing in a plague zone? | ||
| And when they finally do come ashore, their first task is to set up some really cruddy little huts. | ||
| They're going to be cold like nothing you can believe. | ||
| They can't seal these things off, so they're going to be incredibly cold. | ||
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If you have to have a window, you have to tape, not tape, you have to nail over cloth over the window to close the window. | |
| They didn't have glass. | ||
| They had dirt floors, you know. | ||
| Sometimes you'd get hay or thatch on the floor, but basically dirt floor. | ||
| You can imagine trying to vacuum that. | ||
| It's going to be a problem. | ||
| And so much of their early food came from the sea, and they would fish a lot, mussels and clams, a lot of seafood and so on. | ||
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They brought English growing methods. | |
| Not all of them were suited to Massachusetts. | ||
| And of course they could hunt, but you don't always find the game you need when you need to hunt. | ||
| And so eventually what happened was that with the Socialist system of land ownership, people were doing less and less work. | ||
| There wasn't the incentive necessary for people to invest in the land and really improve the land. | ||
| And then, at about the same time that they decide to ditch that system, they meet Squanto, this Indian who spoke English. | ||
| And this is another thing that the Pilgrims did not have to deal with that the guys in Jamestown did, which the people in Jamestown were under constant Indian attack all the time. | ||
| I mean, they had to really, anytime you go out to work the fields, you had to post a guard. | ||
| This wasn't the situation with the Plymouth colony as much, and they made friends or at least cordial relations with the Indian tribes there. | ||
| And this is an important point that I think our viewers need to understand. | ||
| Larry, why don't you hold that right there. | ||
| I'm going to use it to keep the audience hanging as we come back. | ||
| This is absolutely fascinating. | ||
| Of course, what about Divine Providence, that you come upon an Indian in the middle of a primordial forest that speaks English? | ||
| We're going to find out about Squanto and the Plymouth Colony next when we return to the world. | ||
| And this year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| And this year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| And when the time comes to be good, it won't be in sorrow and tears. | ||
| I'll kiss you goodbye and I'll go on the way, grateful for all. | ||
|
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| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| Thanks for joining us. | ||
| If you're on the road or at home, I appreciate you either watching, listening, or on the podcast later. | ||
| The co-author of The Patriot's History of the United States, Larry Schweikert, joins me. | ||
| So, Larry, you left us hanging. | ||
| Give us the punchline. | ||
| Okay, well, I found this in the break. | ||
| I wanted your viewers to hear this. | ||
| This is Bradford describing what happened under their socialist system. | ||
| He said, young men that were most fit and able for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. | ||
| We thought it was injustice. | ||
| And the colonists, after they changed and divided up the territory, saw, quote, no want, W-A-N-T-E, that summer. | ||
| And, of course, that's when they meet Escuanto. | ||
| And I made the point that the colonists did not take the Indians' land, but rather the Indians at the time. | ||
| And this is something people just kind of forget or miss. | ||
| They didn't see the white man as an existential threat to their civilization. | ||
| Maybe they should have, but they didn't. | ||
| Instead, they viewed the whites as just one more Indian tribe. | ||
| And so you constantly see alliances between the Iroquois and the Mohawk and the Huron and all these different Indian groups and white groups, whether they're British or French, and that's why you end up with something called the French and Indian War. | ||
| The French did not fight the Indians in the French and Indian War, the French and Indians fought The British. | ||
| And so it was quite common for these tribes, often for very short periods of time, to ally with whites, to ally with the colonists, both at Jamestown and at Plymouth, in order to get an advantage over another tribe. | ||
| This is one thing I think a lot of people that You know, attack Americans or the whites for taking the land. | ||
| They had very sophisticated alliances. | ||
| And they were continually flip-flopping. | ||
| And the tribes were almost... This wasn't... It's not like you came into some peaceable kingdom. | ||
| They were constantly at war with each other. | ||
| In fact, I think the pilgrims arrived at an inflection point of this conflict. | ||
| And Squanto was looking... He was representing his tribe looking for an ally. | ||
| Tell about how... | ||
| The surprise, but how a Native American kind of appears out of nowhere and he speaks pretty good English. | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| And how shocked were Bradford and the Plymouth colony? | ||
| Well, you know, Squanto had been captured earlier by another expedition, taken back to England, where he was basically a slave for a short time. | ||
| And then he, I forget exactly how he returned, but he returns there. | ||
| So obviously these guys are going, well, this guy speaks English. | ||
| He probably spoke English better than some of them, right? | ||
| But your point reminded me of where you say that this was not a peaceable kingdom. | ||
| These Indian tribes are engaged in alliances. | ||
| I used to teach a course called Technology and the Culture of War, which is kind of a military history course, and I would show a picture of a group of Apaches, and they were wearing U.S. | ||
| Army cavalry uniforms, and they were cavalry Scouts, they were personnel for the U.S. | ||
| Army who were going after other tribes that they didn't like, right? | ||
| So this was, this is a very common stratagem among all of the early tribes. | ||
| And again, they didn't figure out that the whites were the biggest threat to them until much later. | ||
| Talk to us about how did they come up with the concept? | ||
| What did they have to go through that they came up with the concept as a group that they wanted to set aside time to actually give thanks, give thanks to God? | ||
| This is very common. | ||
| I mean, obviously they had regular church services. | ||
| There are a number of church services that probably make most of us blanch. | ||
| Nobody today could sit through an all-day church service on Sunday as they did every Every Sunday, right? | ||
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I mean, it was very common to do that. | |
| And they had set aside many of these days of Thanksgiving already, as I said, as they had in Jamestown. | ||
| So it was a very common thing to say we need to acknowledge that our gifts came from God. | ||
| But Carver decided to set aside this one Particular day after, for the first growing season, they really had a surplus. | ||
| Otherwise, they'd just been getting by, as we said. | ||
| And so, this was the first time they had a surplus. | ||
| And it's not what many of the teachers say, that the pilgrims were giving thanks to the Indians for bringing them stuff. | ||
| Now, they did teach them how to grow some potatoes, yes. | ||
| But no, they were giving thanks to God, and they invited the Indians to join in their ceremony, which they did. | ||
| I tell you what, what I want to do is I want to take a break. | ||
| We're going to take a break at the top of the hour. | ||
| We're going to come back and I want to talk about the four pillars to bring it forward. | ||
| We're going to talk about Lincoln. | ||
| We're going to talk about the holiday going forward and what it's meant to American history. | ||
| tpusa.com slash war room. | ||
| We're going to have this big gathering. | ||
| It's actually the 17th. | ||
| I've been saying the 16th. | ||
| It's the 17th, I think, to the 20th in Metro Phoenix. | ||
| Tucker Carlson is going to be there. | ||
| Candace Owens is going to be there. | ||
| I'm going to be there. | ||
| Of course, Charlie Kirk and the team at Turning Point USA is going to put it on. | ||
| And they got Jack Posobiec, Darren Beatty, many, many of the people you see on the war room. | ||
| All the time as our contributors will be there, plus much more. | ||
| It's going to be quite intense and really lay out a path to go forward in 2023. | ||
| So I want to thank Charlie and everybody for putting it on and inviting us. | ||
| Also, if you go to tpusa.com slash worm, you can get Charlie's got the book, The College Scam, right? | ||
| That talks about the cartels that run college. | ||
| And you get a sense of that trillion dollars that a federal judge has told the Biden regime. | ||
| They can't just fob that off on working class people. | ||
| You've got to get Congress to pass a law about it. | ||
| But you understand the college cartel and why you're paying for deadbeat social justice warriors that can't get real employment. | ||
| Okay, we're going to take a short break. | ||
| Larry Swype at the co-author of The Patriot's History of the United States. | ||
| By the way, a gift that if you give it for the holidays, people will always thank you. | ||
| An incredible, incredible book. | ||
| Fifth edition, 34th printing. |
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