Nov. 23, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:46
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| 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 due. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| you 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 moon rise over a prairie, And old love that you've made new, | ||
| 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. | ||
| The incomparable Johnny Cash right there to help us start our Thanksgiving Day special. | ||
| It's Thursday, the 23rd of November, the Year of the Lord 2023. | ||
| We are here for the next two hours with one of the, I think, the greats. | ||
| A lot of people agree with me. | ||
| Not just an activist, a voice of reason out there in all the fights we've got today, but One of the great historians of our time, Larry Schweikart, the co-author of The Patriot's History of the United States, I think by far the biggest-selling history book of modern times, particularly on people who love this country, the center and the center-right. | ||
| It was a phenomenon over a decade ago, I guess a couple decades ago almost now. | ||
| A lot more that Larry's got in the hopper, a lot more writings as he's taken on some new topics from the Patriots perspective. | ||
| He joins us. | ||
| Larry, first off, a happy Thanksgiving to you and all your family and really honored to have you on here. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's always a wonderful day here on Thanksgiving in America. | ||
| Larry, and by the way, so Larry's kind of become an institution of the word. | ||
| I think the second or third year in a row we've done the Thanksgiving special with Larry, like we do the Combat History of Christmas with Patrick A. O'Donnell. | ||
| It becomes something that's a perennial and the audience just loves. | ||
| I want to start this year, I want to talk about, particularly in the times that we're in and the trying times we're in, I want to talk about President Lincoln. | ||
| And particularly President Lincoln in Thanksgiving. | ||
| He was central, you know, obviously the pilgrims and the settlers in Virginia were obviously initiated that. | ||
| I know you've got a lot to say to that. | ||
| But walk me through President Lincoln and his involvement in this National Day of Thanks. | ||
| The most amazing thing about Lincoln who issued the Thanksgiving proclamation that then became an annual national holiday on October 20th, 1864. | ||
| So note that date. | ||
| We were still in the middle of the civil war. | ||
| It looked like things had changed. | ||
| It looked like the end was in sight, but there was still a lot of fighting to be done. | ||
| And, um, So I just thought I would read this. | ||
| It's short, but I want your audience to listen for certain words and then listen to what he doesn't talk about. | ||
| So Lincoln said, it has pleased almighty God to prolong our national life another year, defending us with his guardian care against unfriendly designs from abroad and vouchsafing to us in his mercy. | ||
| Many and signal victories over the enemy, who is of our own household. | ||
| It has also pleased our Heavenly Father to favor us as well as our citizens in their homes, as our soldiers in their camps, and our sailors on the rivers and seas with unusual health. | ||
| He has largely augmented our free population by emancipation and by immigration While he has opened to us new sources of wealth and has crowned the labor of our working men in every department and industry with abundant rewards and let's see moreover he | ||
| Has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and our heights with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient to the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity and to afford to us Reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all of our dangers and afflictions. | ||
| So he then says, Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, hereby appoint and set apart the last Thanksgiving in November | ||
| Next, as a day which I desire to be observed by all fellow citizens, wherever they may be, as a day of thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God, the Beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe, and I do further recommend to my fellow citizens aforesaid, that on the occasion they do reverently humble themselves in the dust and from thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of Events, | ||
| for a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union and harmony throughout the land, which is now pleased him to assign me a dwelling place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations." Now, what you notice in that is that Lincoln uses the term God, the Almighty, he, words like that, | ||
| almost 20 times, and he makes reference to the Civil War once. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Let me go—I just want to make sure technically we got it. | ||
| You said last Thanksgiving. | ||
| If you go back to the proclamation, he said the last Thursday in November. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| I just want to make sure. | ||
| Last Thursday, so he's the first to select. | ||
| He put this out on the 20th of October, 1864. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| He said it would be commemorated essentially a month later, in the last Thursday in November. | ||
| I want to go to Lincoln for a second, because a lot of people say, you know, Jefferson and the Founding Fathers were not religious or they were deist, that Lincoln was really not a Christian, he didn't really attend church on a regular basis. | ||
| connection with divine providence, with God, and right there, 20 times, and he talks about the Civil War once. | ||
| I mean, I think he alludes to the conflict a couple times, but talks directly about the Civil War once. | ||
| Does this put to a lie that Lincoln was not deeply religious and deeply in the tradition of the Judeo-Christian West? | ||
| In fact, the first Thanksgiving was not set aside As a feast, or the first official, it was set aside as a day of national thanks to God Almighty. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Lincoln's religion and his Christianity has been a subject that historians have argued over. | ||
| One of his best biographers is Stephen Oates, O-A-T-E-S, and I think Oates deals with this pretty fairly. | ||
| Lincoln, in his early years, was not only areligious, he was anti-Christian, and he wrote some fairly hot diatribes against Christianity. | ||
| But then he started this lifelong transition to being a practicing Christian. | ||
| Now, he later said, he told a Baptist preacher, In 18, late 1863, I think, could have been early 64, I think it was late 1863, a Baptist preacher visited him. | ||
| And Lincoln said specifically, when the war broke, when I lost my son, I was not a Christian. | ||
| When the war broke out, I was not a Christian. | ||
| But he says, after I saw what happened at Gettysburg, he says, I am a Christian and I believe in Jesus Christ. | ||
| I mean, he used very specific words. | ||
| Now, historians, some of them say, well, that's the story of one guy who was there. | ||
| Well, you go with what you got. | ||
| We don't have any evidence to the contrary after that, that he ever in any way renounced that or claimed it didn't happen. | ||
| And you can see by his language here, That this is a man totally consumed with what God is thinking, how God is dealing with America, and how God is dealing with him personally. | ||
| So it's also quite a myth that all of the founders weren't religious. | ||
| The only one who even remotely was a deist or a non-believer was Jefferson. | ||
| Franklin was not a deist. | ||
| He believed in an interventionist God. | ||
| He's the one who tells the Continental Congress when they were stuck on an issue, let's stop and have prayer. | ||
| Let's all pray to the Almighty. | ||
| That's not somebody who's a deist. | ||
| Washington was a devout Christian and prayed to God in Jesus' name every month when he took his vestry man oaths. | ||
| So it's just kind of a piece of nonsense that developed from these anti-Christian historians that the founders were not Christians. | ||
| And Lincoln, I think, I believe he was a devout Christian. | ||
| I want to get back into Gettysburg and the timing of this proclamation. | ||
| So just for the audience, on 20 October of 1864, President Lincoln put out this proclamation and deemed that basically a month later, the fourth Thursday in November would be a national day of Thanksgiving to God. | ||
| I want to go to this concept of interventionist God and interventionist God. | ||
| Because the deist, I really think, one of the fundamental tenets of the deist is that God is the director of these forces, of these massive forces in the universe and on Earth, but that there's no active participation in the life of humans. | ||
| Of course, Christians believe that the starting point of really man's salvation begins on Calvary and on Golgotha with the death, the sacrifice of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. | ||
| When someone like Lincoln, who invoked divine providence all the time, Did Lincoln believe in an interventionist God? | ||
| When he was making these proclamations and other things around Gettysburg and these others around the Emancipation Proclamation, the magnificence of the Second Inaugural Address, which we hadn't heard yet, was still five or six months off. | ||
| Is he a believer in an interventionist God that actually God Almighty takes a direct interest in human affairs? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| Lincoln said We want God on our side, but we absolutely need to be on God's side. | ||
| And he would later say, we don't know whose side God is on in this conflict because there have been such outrageously high deaths and casualties. | ||
| But it was clear that Lincoln believed God had a plan in working that out. | ||
| And you can see now Where two years after he said those words, he now is pretty much saying, yes, we believe God has intervened on our side. | ||
| Paul Johnson, the great British historian, pointed out that Woodrow Wilson, future president, prayed for the Confederacy and Teddy Roosevelt prayed for the Union. | ||
| So each side wanted God on their side. | ||
| But Lincoln was bright enough to know that You don't get to pick and choose how God intervenes, but He does intervene. | ||
| Larry, hang on one second. | ||
| We're going to go out with Johnny Cash. | ||
| We're going to be back with our Thanksgiving Day special. | ||
| Larry Swickert in a moment. | ||
| I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| I'm grateful for... | ||
|
unidentified
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Welcome back to our Thanksgiving Day special. | |
| It's Thursday, 23 November, the year of the little 2023. | ||
| You know, we call Hank Williams the Hillbilly Shakespeare. | ||
| But I think Johnny Cash, what is the Hillbilly Marlowe? | ||
| Pretty close. | ||
| Just magnificent. | ||
| Thanksgiving Day. | ||
| We're playing that music in and out of today. | ||
| Really want to thank the team in Denver that's always here to help us with these specials. | ||
| Of course, our crack team. | ||
| I want to stick with Lincoln, and here's why we're starting this year a little differently. | ||
| Instead of going back to the first Thanksgiving of when it was, of when really the official Thanksgiving Day started, because it was a time of trial, and I mean intense trial. | ||
| If you go back to October, and we'll go back to Gettysburg in a second, but if you look at 20 October 1864 when the proclamation came out, There was something between that date, Larry, and the official first Thanksgiving, and that was called the election of 1864. | ||
| And I know we talk about elections, every election is the most important election in American history right now, and the one that we're facing next year. | ||
| But the election of 1864 was at that time, and I think all the way up to the current day, Maybe 16, maybe 24 was the most important election in the history of the country because it was going to decide the history of the country. | ||
| President Lincoln, as you remember Larry, was so concerned about the direction of the country and particularly the political direction. | ||
| He didn't really run as a Republican the second time. | ||
| They ran on national unity. | ||
| I think the union party that he got rid of his vice president Hannibal Hamlin from Maine and replaced him really with a Democrat from eastern Tennessee who I think was the only still one of the few senators In the South, and that was Andrew Johnson, as a unity ticket. | ||
| The reason he needed a unity ticket, President Lincoln was running, which a lot of people don't realize, he was running against his field commander of the first years of the Civil War, and that was McClellan. | ||
| And McClellan's basically pitch essentially was, we gotta make a deal with the South, we have to make a deal, and they either go in peace or we'll figure something out, but there's been too much bloodshed, we're not gonna win this. | ||
| Of course, Atlanta fell on 1 September. | ||
| But in August, correct me if I'm wrong, didn't President Lincoln draft this incredibly controversial memo that even Seward and others that were very close to him on the team of rivals cabinet said, whoa? | ||
| Because essentially the memo said to the cabinet, That, hey, we're in a great conflict. | ||
| We've gone all in on this. | ||
| The nation's all in on this. | ||
| But as it looks now, because Atlanta had not fallen, as it looks now, we could very well lose this election. | ||
| But didn't he say words to effect something that if we lose, then we, this cabinet, somehow have to bring this war to a successful conclusion? | ||
| And it left open Whether there would be a transfer of government in March of 1865, which would have been the date, is that the context in which Lincoln wrote this proclamation to set up the first Thanksgiving? | ||
| Well, let's go back through this a little bit. | ||
| In July 1863, the war had been going very badly for the Union. | ||
| They had won really in the East. | ||
| Now, they'd had many victories in the West, but for some reason, the West didn't count because it wasn't Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. | ||
| It wasn't in the eyes of all of the Eastern newspapermen. | ||
| And so you needed a victory in the war in the East to solidify things. | ||
| And they really didn't get one until Antietam, which was, it was a draw, but because Lee withdrew, historians generally ascribe that as a victory for the North. | ||
| But then you had all sorts of other defeats and some horrible things like Fredericksburg. | ||
| And so the war was still going very, very badly for the North until Gettysburg. | ||
| And in a four-day period, the Union won the Battle of Gettysburg and the very, very long ongoing siege of Vicksburg by Ulysses Grant finally came to an end and Vicksburg surrendered all within a four-day period. | ||
| And you would have thought, okay, war is over. | ||
| Well, it wasn't. | ||
| And by mid-1864, it was dragging on, and while the Union had had other victories, it hadn't yet gotten that knockout victory that they needed. | ||
| Well, hang on, hang on, hang on. | ||
| I don't want the audience to understand this about the tragedy of the country. | ||
| They fired everybody, brought Grant and Sherman, the entire staff of the West, to east of the White House, and they said, we're going to go to Richmond. | ||
| If it takes however long it takes, the casualty rates, the Overland campaign, by the midsummer of 1864, you've had more bloodshed than ever. | ||
| I mean, these campaigns are just wars of attrition, complete, just hit the South, hit the South, they're backing up to Richmond, but the casualty rates now, people like Seward and others are going You know, this thing is and people associate this with Gaza or Hamas. | ||
| This is this is out of control. | ||
| The blood here is is just too much. | ||
| And it's not going to stop because the Confederacy doesn't look like they're ever going to surrender. | ||
| I mean, the tragedy of the nation is actually getting deeper and deeper and drenched in blood. | ||
| Well, and Grant was highly opposed to these kinds of campaigns. | ||
| He had agreed, his own soldiers basically convinced him to launch an attack at Vicksburg, which he didn't want to do, he just wanted to starve him out. | ||
| But his own soldiers lobbied him so hard he went against his own better judgment and launched one Large-scale attack, and then his own soldiers, you know, this digging. | ||
| Digging isn't quite so bad as we thought. | ||
| Let's keep digging for a while. | ||
| So when he comes east, he really doesn't want to have to engage in a lot of these frontal attacks, and he keeps moving around to Lee's right, moving around to his right, moving around to his right, but Lee kept blocking him off. | ||
| And once or twice, Grant thinks, maybe we have a chance, as all of the generals on the Western Front thought in World War I, maybe we have a chance for a breakthrough to end this once and for all. | ||
| And of course, you end up with these horrific casualties at Cold Harbor and the Battle of the Crater. | ||
| And Grant finally says, no, we're not going to end this by head-on attack. | ||
| We've got to keep moving around until Lee's stretched so thin he can't fight. | ||
| But the key to all that is, That's a long process, and the politicians in Washington were getting extremely concerned that the war was never going to end, that we weren't going to be able to—Lee would escape again to the West, and this would go on for years and years. | ||
| So Lincoln was resigned to the fact, as you mentioned earlier, That he wasn't even going to be the Republican nominee that year. | ||
| He said, I've just got to go a different route. | ||
| He fires Hamlin. | ||
| He brings in a Democrat who was not like some moderate Democrat. | ||
| Andrew Johnson was a pretty radical hardline Democrat, but he was still in the union, one of the few Democrat senators who didn't leave. | ||
| And Lincoln's opponent, as you mentioned, was a very successful general, which up before Gettysburg, had given us our only major victory in the East, McClellan, the Napoleon of the West. | ||
| And so Lincoln is pretty resigned by October, despite the Atlanta falling, that he's probably not going to win re-election. | ||
| Now, your viewers need to understand Lincoln is not the most optimistic of guys many times because he personally was a chronic depressive. | ||
| Historians don't know yet medically how to term him, but he was such a depressive that when his first love, Ann Rutledge, left him high and dry, he literally vanished for almost a month. | ||
| Nobody could find him. | ||
| And they thought he killed himself. | ||
| And he made several allusions to the fact, don't leave me alone with a penknife, I might kill myself. | ||
| So you can imagine his mental state in October of 1864, when the Confederates still haven't surrendered. | ||
| I don't think news of Mobile Bay had come through yet, and Sheridan was coming through the Shenandoah. | ||
| I don't know if he'd reported back in yet that he'd finished off the Shenandoah Valley. | ||
| It was those three things, though—Atlanta, Mobile, Shenandoah Valley—that basically ensured the war couldn't go on much longer. | ||
| But yeah, Lincoln was prepared to say, we've lost. | ||
| Was it his depressed nature? | ||
| Was the nature of the overwhelming nature of the conflict, which you already said, seeing the horrors of Gettysburg when he went up there to give the address, when he saw the horrors of Gettysburg, made him a Christian? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Was it also the incredible sacrifice of the spring and early summer of 1864 and the Overland Campaign to Richmond at Spotsylvania, the wilderness, Cold Harbor? | ||
| Remember Cold Harbor where they didn't even let the New York Times and people report the casualties. | ||
| They thought the country would overthrow Lincoln if they did. | ||
| It was so horrific. | ||
| I think 17,000 men in like 20 minutes or something. | ||
| Is it that which forced him? | ||
| Is that what said we got to give thanks to God here? | ||
| We have to reach out to God to make sure that we're right with him and the nation has to show its thanks or open up its heart to God? | ||
| I think what happened was After Gettysburg, Lincoln's view that both sides are praying to God, both sides want God's support, we need to be on God's side. | ||
| And I think Gettysburg was the first time that Lincoln finally thought, God's on our side. | ||
| God's on our side, then he's real. | ||
| God's real, then his word's real, and if his word's real, Jesus is real, and I need to take action. | ||
| I think that, you can't prove it, but I think that's the thought process he went through. | ||
| You know, you mentioned Cold Harbor. | ||
| The soldiers were pinning their names and addresses to their uniforms so their bodies could be shipped back to the right place. | ||
| That's how Let's take a commercial break. | ||
| The last wave... Cold Harbor in June 1864 was so bad. | ||
| The last wave, when the officers got to the top of the trenches, the enlisted men said, we're not going to do this. | ||
| This is a slaughter pen. | ||
| That's the tragedy of the Civil War. | ||
| We're going to take a short break. | ||
| The connection between our greatest conflict and giving thanks to God next in the War Room. | ||
| Okay, thank you very much. | ||
| Make sure that you get a chance for this holiday weekend. | ||
| Okay, thank you very much. Make sure that you get a chance for this holiday weekend. | ||
| You've got four days. Birchgold.com slash ban it. Get the end of the dollar empire. | ||
| That's something that should be holiday reading to understand currency and how currency affects your life and how the gold standard and what was the gold standard is a central part of understanding. | ||
| I'm not arguing we should go back to a gold standard, although The BRICS nations are certainly thinking that. | ||
| They're buying gold at record rates, but that's what we've got to ask the Birch Gold guys about. | ||
| Birchgold.com slash Bannon. | ||
| You've got Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| Check it out over the holiday weekend. | ||
| Larry, why was this, you'd head, and we'll go in the second hour and go back to the pilgrims and to the original, the first Thanksgiving. | ||
| What happened after Lincoln's proclamation? | ||
| How did this become this cultural event that we have today that I do think people have lost the sense of It's family, it's getting together, it's great food, football, other festivities, but maybe thanks to God is not something that's deeply embedded in people now. | ||
| The immediate aftermath was that all the news began to come in that Mobile had fallen to David Farragut, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, that stuff. | ||
| That the Shenandoah Valley had been ravaged by Sheridan, so Lee could no longer draw food from that. | ||
| And, of course, that Atlanta had fallen a little bit earlier. | ||
| And the combined message of those three events led to Lincoln's reelection. | ||
| In fact, McClellan gave up the last month of the campaign and actually began to campaign for Lincoln and unity, which You don't see that too much anymore. | ||
| So I think the fact that the proclamation was followed by a period of victory and a period of unity, as rough as it was through Reconstruction, led people to say, well, maybe this is something we ought to do. | ||
| Maybe we ought to give thanks more often on a regular national basis. | ||
| And of course, well up until the In the 1980s, it was quite common for presidents to announce a day of prayer. | ||
| Even, I think, Bush announced a day of prayer during the war in Afghanistan before kicking that off. | ||
| So, this became quite a cultural thing, that we have a day. | ||
| And, of course, epitomized in that great painting by Rockwell. | ||
| And then cemented with football games. | ||
| The NFL was bright enough to play two football games on Thanksgiving Day, which kind of became a cultural joining together. | ||
| So obviously our culture has been torn apart. | ||
| And the number of nuns, N-O-N-E-S, not N-U-N-S, nuns who don't have any religion at all has grown from about 16 percent in 2000 to about 26, 27 percent today. | ||
| And you're seeing a lot less of religious observance, religious connection of Thanksgiving to what we celebrate that day and just more of the old football turkey. | ||
| And by the way, I have kind of a personal philosophy. | ||
| They're even trying to get rid of Thanksgiving by introducing the Early Christmas sales and by playing up Halloween and trying to almost do away with Thanksgiving altogether, but they're not having much success with that. | ||
| But hang on, hang on, hang on. | ||
| I want to get sick on this for a second. | ||
| Do you think, because of the concept of the Day of Thanks, because Halloween has now become very different than when I was a child. | ||
| It's almost so dark and satanic and demonic. | ||
| And then Christmas starts right after that. | ||
| Do you think that the merchants and the commercial interest really are trying to step over Thanksgiving because it's not particularly a time to consume? | ||
| It was one of these big feasts, etc. | ||
| But it's really, I mean, we just got off this thing a couple of years ago where the folks at Walmart and others had to go back, had to be at work at like five o'clock in the afternoon because they were starting the Black Friday sales early. | ||
| Do you think there was something behind that? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I mean, we know that several years ago, maybe about 10 years ago, there was a big emphasis on the war on Christmas. | ||
| I think some of the guys at Fox even picked that up and had great success with it. | ||
| And I think that has kind of been beaten back a little bit. | ||
| I think the forces of secularism, the Soros-type people, didn't have the success they wanted with their attack on Christmas. | ||
| There has been, as you mentioned, more of a serious, dark, demonic side of Halloween developing these days, which I think a lot of Christian parents are starting to say, you know, we really don't want to even celebrate Halloween anymore. | ||
| And it's gotten so dangerous that you have a trunk or treat at many churches where kids don't even—we had nobody come to our neighborhood at Halloween. | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| We'll see how that plays out, but I do think there was at one time an attempt to try to de-emphasize Thanksgiving and to go straight from Halloween to Christmas. | ||
| Lincoln was in the darkest days of the Civil War, where they were looking for Not just guidance, but like you said, they wanted to make sure that they were on God's side. | ||
| What lessons can we learn about that for today when we're clearly at the very beginning stages of something that could be quite dark and quite ugly and go on for a long time? | ||
| What lessons from the American experience in this of our leaders reaching out to God Not just for the civic religion or the civic optics, but a real reaching out to God. | ||
| Well, I think it was Davy Crockett who said, make sure you're right, then go ahead. | ||
| And that's really what Lincoln did at the beginning of the war. | ||
| He said, well, we think we're right. | ||
| We think we're on the side of justice. | ||
| We think we're on God's side, but we need to make sure we're on God's side, not that we try to get him on our side. | ||
| And so by the end of this, 1864, we're starting to see Lincoln says, okay, I think we're on, I think we're on God's side. | ||
| And I think he's on our side now based on the justness of our cause. | ||
| And so it is absolutely essential. | ||
| That the nation understand that we need to be on God's side and not try to undertake things that He isn't fully behind or supporting. | ||
| And that sometimes our national leaders are going to make mistakes and do things that are not on God's side. | ||
| And you can't expect divine support for programs like abortion that are just going to end up It was both a promise and a hope. | ||
| A promise that if you do the right thing, you can expect God, in most cases, to help you. | ||
| And if you're not doing the right thing, don't expect Him to be there and bail you out. | ||
| In writing the Patriots history and looking at this and discussing the proclamations of the first official Thanksgiving here, do you believe, in the research you've done, you've spent your life as a historian, do you believe that the story of this nation shows the unfolding of God's plan? | ||
| Oh man, that's a low-hanging softball. | ||
| Of course I do! | ||
| I mean, we wrote the Four Pillars of American Exceptionalism, and the very first pillar is the United States was a Christian, mostly Protestant, religious tradition. | ||
| And the reason that was so important was because of the structure of bottom-up church governance. | ||
| But clearly, and I know people have various motives, I'm not saying everybody came over here just for God or to Christianize the Indians, but that was a major motive in the whole reason Columbus sails the ocean blue to look for new lands, the whole reason the Puritans come over. | ||
| One of the main reasons was to practice their religion freely. | ||
| Of course, they had aliens who came along with them, strangers who may have had other purposes, but they all agreed in the Mayflower Compact to conduct themselves So, yes, I believe in the United States. | ||
| ascribe their work as that to God. | ||
| So yes, I believe the United States, you know, I've heard it said that, that God loves Israel because he chose Israel. | ||
| God loves America because we chose God. | ||
| We're the only nation in the world to choose God freely from our origin, from our very beginning. | ||
| And I think that says a lot. | ||
| Want me through the other pillars. | ||
| I've got a couple of minutes here. | ||
| I want to make sure, because in your book and in your writings, You, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you believe the United States is the New Jerusalem, correct? | ||
| And so what are the four pillars? | ||
| What are the things that are so special that make this an exceptional nation, not just in and of itself in world history, but in the eyes of God? | ||
| Well, the first pillar is we're a Christian, mostly Protestant, religious tradition. | ||
| Second pillar is very close to that, and it is we have a structure of common law. | ||
| And the reason that's so critical is that we have a bottom-up legal and justice system, political system. | ||
| Every other system in the history of the world was top-down at that time. | ||
| And so, right from the first two pillars, no other nation in human history has had a bottom-up religion and a bottom-up political structure from their inception. | ||
| Most of them don't have it today. | ||
| Pillar number three, very important, was private property with written titles and deeds. | ||
| And I want to go back to this new research that's come out. | ||
| We'll talk about, in the next hour, about Squanto, but there's new research on On the Indians, and this historian is trying to make the case, well, they have an oral tradition, and it was just a difference in traditions. | ||
| Well, it was a difference in traditions, but having a written title and deed made all the difference in the world, because without that, it's might makes right. | ||
| It's whoever's word is backed by the most guns. | ||
| And what made us different was that in theory, not always in practice, but in theory, you could go to an objective third party, a judge, and say, this is my land. | ||
| I have a deed to it. | ||
| And the judge would look at the deed. | ||
| And if he's honest, say, yes, you have the deed. | ||
| The other guy does not. | ||
| And then the fourth pillar was a free market economy, which the people in Plymouth had from 1630 on by establishing a mill to grind their corn, which basically required division of labor and a monetary or trade exchange all the time. | ||
| So no other nation has those four pillars. | ||
| Nobody in history has had the first two from their birth. | ||
| As we come back, I'm going to ask Larry that—do we still have those four pillars as we go to thank God today for this nation and for how this nation has been blessed? | ||
| Are we still a Christian nation? | ||
| Do we really have what English common law or the rule of law? | ||
| Do property rights really mean anything? | ||
| And do we live in a free market economy, or is this driven by oligarchs in the administrative state? | ||
| Those questions for Larry Sweikart after a short commercial break. | ||
| For blessings we've known through the years To join hands and thank the Creator Now when Thanksgiving is due And this year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| This year when I count my blessings... | ||
| This year when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord He made you. | ||
| This year when And make sure you're fully up to speed on everything related to precious metals in your own personal life. | ||
| President Xi of China, the CCP, make sure it's in their personal life. | ||
| They're buying it at record rates. | ||
| Make sure you understand why by asking Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| Also, HomeTitleLock.com, one of our sponsors. | ||
| This Thanksgiving weekend, let's check the box on a couple of worries. | ||
| You don't need more worry because you're manning the ramparts every day of the week. | ||
| Taking a short break on Thanksgiving Day to give thanks to God and also to enjoy your family and friends. | ||
| Hometownlocked.com. | ||
| Go check it out today. | ||
| You wrote the seminal work of really, and for homeschoolers, the families, and homeschooling is on fire in the country. | ||
| One of the reasons homeschooling is on fire is that their material, their courses, the resources out there, where your children become better educated than in the propaganda mills of the public schools. | ||
| And that's a tragedy because everybody, obviously the circumstances, don't allow everybody to homeschool. | ||
| But one of the reasons is books like The Patriot's History of the United States that Many public schools refused to address became a staple of the homeschool movement. | ||
| A brother You just said, hey, nuns, which means no religious affiliation at all. | ||
| In fact, no real belief is that a quarter of the American people. | ||
| So your four pillars in the Patriots history that made this an exceptional nation were a Christian nation, basically with the Protestant, underpinned by the Protestant faith and the Protestant work ethic. | ||
| English common law, right, the rule of law, property rights, and free market capitalism, which I think today you would admit is a joke. | ||
| Do we have the four pillars today as we give thanks to God? | ||
| Have we thrown those away, and should we be asking God to assist us in first of all getting those back? | ||
| Yeah, they're definitely under assault. | ||
| I think that we are on the cusp of of no longer being a mostly Christian nation. | ||
| Your viewers should probably know of a guy named Ryan Berg, B-U-R-G-E, who does an exceptional Substack regular column. | ||
| He has great research on faith, on religion in America, and he is one of the ones who tracks these nuns and who they are and how they vote. | ||
| It's pretty interesting that older Republicans have not abandoned evangelicalism much in about the last 30 or 40 years. | ||
| But where you see the line just going down to the bottom is with older Democrats who've been basically abandoning their religion. | ||
| Of course, the free market is under assault now with giant corporations, especially the tech sector. | ||
| And this is one of the reasons why they're so hostile to Trump, as he is one of the few arguing to bring back the blue-collar, American-made work sector. | ||
| Private property is under assault, although I do think that Trump's court has done a great deal to try to buttress private property in a lot, not all cases, but in a lot of cases. | ||
| And they have engaged in about three or four major decisions that I cover in Dragon Slayers against the deep state. | ||
| And it's an attack on the free market economy. | ||
| It's West Virginia versus the EPA, and the Jarkizi case that's going forward now is in the Fifth Circuit, decided correctly. | ||
| It's now going up to the Supreme Court, where I think it will also decide correctly. | ||
| But should today—hang on—should today people be giving thanks, or should they be begging forgiveness? | ||
| Both. | ||
| You always begin, I mean, Jesus said you begin by giving thanks, but we're going to need divine help to get through this because we're on the precipice in so many ways. | ||
| Our military, the very structure of government is so corrupt and rotten to the core that I don't think it'll be enough just to bring back Trump. | ||
| You're going to have to bring back President Trump with As the Bible would say, 50 mighty men, each one of them capable of slaying a thousand Democrats with the jawbone of a, you know, Mitch McConnell or something like that. | ||
| So there's so much work to be done in so many levels. | ||
| And this depresses people. | ||
| We've got to admit that this accelerates the lack of faith because people say, It's hopeless. | ||
| I don't see what we can do. | ||
| They'll just cheat again. | ||
| Even if they were to do that, that doesn't excuse you from going out and voting and doing everything you can to stop it. | ||
| There's that great line in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf is looking at the Hobbit, and the Hobbit's going, we can't beat all these orcs. | ||
| We're going to die. | ||
| We're going to lose. | ||
| And Gandalf says, yes, that's probably true. | ||
| And these are exactly the kinds of battles that need to be fought. | ||
| So, yes. | ||
| Thanksgiving, yes, we need to be asking God's support in this mission, because it's going to be a long one. | ||
| Okay, Larry Swyker is with us. We're going to take a short commercial break. At the top, always about 90 seconds. | ||
| We're gonna go out with the great Johnny Cash on his song on Thanksgiving, which we play every year. | ||
| We have, obviously, a lot to give thanks for, and as you know, here in the War Room, this is the fight club of the MAGA movement, the fights that matter, and we've got a lot of them. | ||
| We've won some, we've drawn on a couple, and maybe we've got two or three losses, but that's okay, you're gonna have losses. | ||
| Everybody's got them, you just gotta keep fighting. | ||
| Today is the day to think about the exceptionalism of this country. | ||
| We give thanks because you are blessed to be in this time and place in a country like this and called upon to save it. | ||
| Your place in history is reserved for you in this fight. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Johnny Cash will take us out. | ||
| Dr. Larry Schweiker will join us on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dr. Larry Schweiker. | |
| 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 moon rise 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. |
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