Dec. 23, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
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I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day. | |
| I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas Day in the morning. | ||
| And what was in those ships, oh three, on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day? | ||
| And what was in those ships, oh three, on Christmas Day in the morning? | ||
| Our Savior Christ and His Lady, on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day. | ||
| Our Savior Christ and His Lady, on Christmas Day in the morning. | ||
| Pray, will you sail the ships, all three, on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day. | ||
| Pray, will you sail the ships, all three, on Christmas Day in the morning. | ||
| Oh, they sail into Bethlehem, on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day. | ||
| they sailed into Bethlehem on Christmas Day in the morning. | ||
| And all the saints were waiting along on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day. | ||
| And all the saints were waiting along on Christmas Day in the morning. | ||
| And all the angels in Bethlehem shall sing on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day. | ||
| And all the angels in Bethlehem shall sing on Christmas Day in the morning. | ||
| And all the souls in Bethlehem shall sing on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day. | ||
| And all the angels in Bethlehem shall sing on Christmas Day in the morning. | ||
| Then let us all rejoice, amain, on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day. | ||
| Then let us all rejoice, amain, on Christmas Day in the morning. | ||
| you you Saturday, 23 December in the year of the Lord 2023. | ||
| It is because of the structure of our Christmas season this time. | ||
| It is, this is our Christmas Eve special coming in on Saturday. | ||
| I want to thank everybody for sticking around for the second hour, bringing in Dr. Dr. Larry Swiker. | ||
| So, doctor, we've talked about this with Rahim and Ben and others over the last couple of days and then Dr. Carol Swain in the first hour. | ||
| In playing these carols from the 18th and 19th century, I don't think we're playing any from the 17th yet, but there's a certain... | ||
| Almost swagger. | ||
| There's a certain confidence. | ||
| The complexity of the music, but the way it's presented, the voices, it just seems like it is from a time and place that almost is disconnected from our culture and civilization today. | ||
| You're the co-author of The Patriot's History of the United States, which is still one of the most powerful books recently in the last 20 or 30 years written about American history. | ||
| Talk to me about that. | ||
| What is it about this music of the old carols that you don't hear much anymore? | ||
| You very rarely hear it on radio unless you listen to a specialty station. | ||
| You certainly don't hear it in the churches except on rare occasions. | ||
| Your thoughts? | ||
| Well, Merry Christmas, Steve. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| One of the reasons you don't hear it a lot is because these people were almost all Christians, and they were singing from a certainty of where they were going in the afterlife. | ||
| They were singing from a certainty of victory as promised in the Bible. | ||
| And so many modern people, even when they sing these kind of older songs, they lack that certainty because, well, let's face it, they're not believers. | ||
| They're having trouble with this stuff. | ||
| So it was a different era. | ||
| It was a different age. | ||
| It was a time when, let's face it, all Western Countries believed that they were to lead the world to a new era of hope and enlightenment and that kind of stuff. | ||
| So, yeah, it was different then. | ||
| Let me ask you that. | ||
| When you say hope and enlightenment to Western nations, that'd be Europe and ourselves. | ||
| And we find ourselves today, it seems like besieged on every side, particularly Christians. | ||
| But you look in Europe, where you're seeing the collapse of classical society, right? | ||
| I mean, they're on the edge, it seems like, of civil war because of what they've allowed for During the invasion, they call it migration, but the invasion of Europe over the last 10 years or so, been bad for 34 years, but I mean really accelerated over the last 10 and now you have France and England, they're beside themselves. | ||
| You're seeing the same thing starting to happen here in the United States in our inner cities because of the invasion. | ||
| What was it about then? | ||
| that gave them hope that they were the future. | ||
| It was about enlightenment and deeply imbued with Christian belief, cut to today when you have more material wealth and science and technology. | ||
| Remember, a lot of this music was done right around the time of the steam engine. | ||
| The steam engine, it changed mankind's history like no other invention, no other technology in the world. | ||
| So what was it about then that had them so, you know, positive and energetic and urgent in their mission as a civilizational society. | ||
| You can see it in the music and the voices, but here today, it seems like we're almost worn out. | ||
| Well, there were kind of two goals for those Europeans and Americans. | ||
| One was a material goal. | ||
| To improve the material world, when you get John D. Rockefeller, he would say, I want to give the common man kerosene. | ||
| He must have it good and he must have it cheap. | ||
| And then he would, he would make record profits and he'd turn around and give a million dollars a year to his Baptist church. | ||
| In Europe, the same thing. | ||
| You see this in the building of cathedrals. | ||
| And I wanted to kind of talk to you about this a little bit with regards to architecture. | ||
| I like chrome and glass as much as the next guy. | ||
| I do like modern architecture, but I don't like only modern architecture. | ||
| And what's interesting in our society today is you see none of the inspiring and inspirational and uplifting buildings like La Sagrada Familia or Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame or anything like that. | ||
| I mean, even some of Frank Lloyd Wright's stuff, you can't match that today. | ||
| And a lot of that comes because we have a much different view of where humanity is heading. | ||
| And it's overwhelmingly a secular view that says we're not going anywhere. | ||
| And if we are, it's not any place good. | ||
| So why would you create art? | ||
| Why would you create buildings? | ||
| Why would you create great music that would be a testament to man's enduring nature with God, not apart from God, but with God. | ||
| Talk about the difference between Europe and the United States, and particularly in your historical research and writing your seminal work. | ||
| You know, there are many of us, and now we're being said that you're Christian nationalists and you guys are the worst people on earth, you're domestic terrorists, you're violent extremists. | ||
| There's a big group of people in this country that think America is the New Jerusalem, that America is a covenant nation. | ||
| And from our founding, as you do such a great job laying out with the Pilgrims and the Puritans in New England, a little different than the more entrepreneurial cavaliers down in Jamestown in my beloved home state. | ||
| But is America, was America founded in a big part of that as a New Jerusalem and as a covenant nation? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, God loves Israel because God chose Israel, but God loves America because America chose God. | ||
| And from our earliest time all the way up through at least the civil war, there was this notion that America was a special place chosen and protected by God. | ||
| And then we couldn't fail for that reason that, you know, Lincoln said, we'd like to have God on our side, but we have to make sure that we're on God's side. | ||
| And what the Europeans have lacked is two of the pillars of American exceptionalism. | ||
| One is a common law. | ||
| Only England had that. | ||
| And that is the notion that law bubbles from the bottom up because God puts the law in the heart of every man and woman. | ||
| And we see that both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament where God says, I will write my law upon your heart. | ||
| The other pillar. | ||
| is a Christian, mostly Protestant religion. | ||
| And again, that's not due to theological issues, but it's due to the church structure of the Congregationalists where decisions were made from the bottom up. | ||
| So in America, you had this relationship to the common man, we might call it a populist relationship, that simply didn't exist in Anywhere in Europe, no country had those two factors. | ||
| So what kind of music are you going to get out of people like this? | ||
| What kind of architecture? | ||
| What kind of art? | ||
| You know, in Patriots history, we go into a long discussion about Norman Rockwell, who I believe is still the greatest living American artist, period. | ||
| You say Jackson Pollock, you know, maybe Andy Warhol, whatever. | ||
| Rockwell captured the essence of America, and it was this very same uplifting, heroic essence that you refer to in this music of the hymns that you were playing. | ||
| What, um, go back and give me the, what was the connection? | ||
| I don't want to make sure I understand this myself, of the common man. | ||
| You're saying this was different here in the United States than different in Europe. | ||
| What was that? | ||
| Well, because of common law, which only England had and none of the other European nations had, maybe Switzerland. | ||
| And because of a Christian, mostly Protestant religious tradition that was congregational. | ||
| So it was bottom up governance. | ||
| So at our very root, Americans are bottom up. | ||
| That's how the nation was founded. | ||
| And most of these people were Christians and were believers, were religious Christians. | ||
| They weren't just, you know, Sunday attenders. | ||
| They were, they were believers. | ||
| They're the most common book in any American household was the Bible. | ||
| So, um, and of course, we've been through this before in your show that almost all of the founders were, were devout Christians. | ||
| Uh, the, the exception probably being Jefferson, but certainly not Franklin who was, uh, a believer and he was not a deist, he may not have been a Christian. | ||
| Why are they accused of being deists? | ||
| Make the distinction for the audience. | ||
| What's the difference between a deist and a Christian? | ||
| They're accused all the time of being either Freemasons or being deists. | ||
| Yeah, a deist is someone who believes that there is a God, but he just doesn't get involved in human affairs. | ||
| He's not Alive in this world, he just sits back and kind of watches. | ||
| It's known as the clockmaker. | ||
| He creates the great clock and sets it in motion. | ||
| And practicing Christians, of course, believe that God is alive in our hearts, is involved in our daily lives, is involved in everything we do, gives us wisdom, direction, inspiration. | ||
| You know, the term walk with Jesus implies that there's a living person that you are with and around all the time. | ||
| And that's the big difference between a Christian and a deist. | ||
| So a Christian would expect that God would be involved in the activities of the United States of America, as with any nation who chooses to follow him. | ||
| We're going to take a break here and we're going to listen to some more music. | ||
| Dr. Larry Schweikart joins us, the co-author of The Patriot's History. | ||
| I've got a minute before we get back to some music. | ||
| I want to make sure people get to your website. | ||
| You're constantly putting things up about history and connecting history to current events. | ||
| Where do people go to get all of your stuff? | ||
| Wildworldofhistory.com. | ||
| Wildworldofhistory.com. | ||
| There's tons of free stuff. | ||
| But I also have a subscription service where I put up constant new videos. | ||
| Reagan, the American president, we put up about 21 videos. | ||
| The latest is Integrity featuring Winston Churchill. | ||
| I've got about seven up and I add one every couple of weeks. | ||
| If you're more interested in the political commentary, you can catch me at thewildworldofpolitics.com. | ||
| And I try to keep the two separate because homeschoolers may not Be too interested in politics or vice versa. | ||
| Very interested in the history. | ||
| You do a great job. | ||
| The Patriot's History is one of the seminal works for the homeschool movement. | ||
| Okay, we're going to take you out with some of this incredible music we've put together. | ||
| Our team, Avery and the team, want to thank him. | ||
| We're going to go ahead leave with some great music be back with dr. Swick in a moment | ||
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Oh | |
| is the King of Israel. | ||
| And let us all with one accord sing praises to our Heavenly Lord, that earth may heaven and earth adore Him, and with His child | ||
| mankind hath brought. | ||
| Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, the King of Israel. | ||
| Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel. | ||
| God rest you merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay. | ||
| Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day. | ||
| To save us all from Satan's power when we were gone astray. | ||
| O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. | ||
| O tidings of comfort and joy. | ||
| From God, our heavenly Father. | ||
| From God, our Heavenly Father, the blessed angel came, and unto certain shepherds brought tidings of the same. | ||
| Comfort and joy! | ||
| Oh, tidings of comfort and joy! | ||
| Comfort and joy! | ||
| Oh, tidings of comfort and joy! | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're in the war room with our traditional Christmas Eve on... | ||
| We're going to replay obviously the Christmas Eve tomorrow, technically the real Christmas Eve, and then on Monday, Christmas Day, we will have the Combat History of Christmas, something we've done now I think for 10 years between Breitbart Radio and The War Room and Patrick K. O'Donnell will join us, as he does every year, to go through that. | ||
| So I want to thank Patrick K. O'Donnell in advance for doing this. | ||
| Satan's power. | ||
| Larry, what's the line of demarcation in your research and study between the more traditional Christmases we're talking about And really, where we get into more of the commercial aspects and then see even some of what we call the traditional Christmases of this commercial aspect. | ||
| What's the line of demarcation? | ||
| And what were the old ways like? | ||
| From coming ashore with the pilgrims to all the way through the Revolution and to the Civil War, what were the old traditions? | ||
| I think probably you can mark sometime in the 90s, When we began to desacralize the Christmas music, you probably remember this maybe back in the 80s. | ||
| If you walked into a department store or a mall, the music was 50-50, what we call Christian music about Jesus and the birth. | ||
| And about half, it's winter, it's snow, it's fun presents. | ||
| You don't hear very many places, unless it's a Christian business like Chick-fil-A or something like that, you don't hear Christian music being played today at Christmas. | ||
| It's all about— Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it. | ||
| I thought when you're talking about the 80s, you're talking about the 1880s or 1890s. | ||
| Help me out here, because I've missed this one totally. | ||
| You're saying now when you're in malls, which it used to be in the old days, department stores used to hear many of the songs that we're playing in other religious music. | ||
| You're saying if you're going to malls today, you don't hear any of the religious songs? | ||
| It's all kind of the commercial Christmas songs? | ||
| Oh no, probably not since the early 90s. | ||
| I distinctly remember the change and going, wow, they're not playing any actual Christmas songs. | ||
| They're only playing things about winter or Yeah, it's Christmas, but you don't mention, as they say, the reason for the season. | ||
| Now, going way back, of course, you had very traditional Christmases, and this is where the Courier and Ives cards come from, celebrating the sleigh ride with the, you know, The Currier and Ives were from the 1880s, 1890s, the Gilded Age? | ||
| Is that where those lithographs came from? | ||
| The Currier and Ives were from the 1880s, 1890s, the Gilded Age? | ||
| Is that where those lithographs came from? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's that time frame? | ||
| Yeah, and then you get up. | ||
| Another kind of tradition that we used to celebrate was people would put up a model train around their tree. | ||
| I remember as kids, we used to do this all the time. | ||
| It was always a Lionel train. | ||
| Where'd that come from? | ||
| That came from Lionel Cohen, who invented the Lionel trains and was selling them and using them in department store windows at Christmas time. | ||
| And all of a sudden, everybody wanted to have a train. | ||
| that ran around their Christmas tree. | ||
| So you get these kinds of traditions and you get our music that we're still so familiar with. | ||
| The number one selling song of all time, isn't the Beatles, it's White Christmas, written by Irving Berlin, sung by Bing Crosby in a very popular movie, still popular today called Holiday Inn, which has its own weird story because the guy who created the Holiday Inns had set up all of the architecture, all the drawings for everything, and he didn't have a name for it. | ||
| And the movie Holiday Inn happened to be showing on TV. | ||
| And so he says, that's what I'll call my hotel chain. | ||
| So White Christmas is just an amazing song. | ||
| It only has two verses, no choruses. | ||
| It's one of the shortest lyrics ever written. | ||
| And it just became one of the biggest selling songs of all time, especially when Bing Crosby would take it. | ||
| On the USO tours to Europe, and a relative of Bing's asked him one time, what's the hardest thing you ever had to do? | ||
| And he said, well, in 1944, I had to sing in front of about 5,000 GIs in Northern France, and they insisted I sing White Christmas. | ||
| He said, I thought it was a little too depressing, but they insisted I sing it. | ||
| And he said, I had to sing it with dry eyes as all 5,000 of the GIs were crying. | ||
| And then not too long after that, most of those GIs would be in battle, in the Battle of the Bulge, and many of them would die. | ||
| So, uh, the song White Christmas then was redone in the movie, White Christmas. | ||
| So we have these traditions coming up all the way from the late 1800s through the early 1900s, but I think modern families have developed kind of more modern traditions, and of course you could Name your top three Christmas movies, but I'm sure many people today would say something like The Christmas Story, about a kid who wants a Red Ryder BB gun, or Chevy Chase's Christmas Vacation, which is of course one of our favorites. | ||
| Or if you're really a little weird, you might say something like the riff with Dennis Leary and Kevin Spacey about a dysfunctional family that gets taken hostage for Christmas. | ||
| So, number one, I pride myself, I've never seen any three of those, and I would literally throw anybody out of my house over Christmas that even mentioned they want to play it. | ||
| But I want to go back to, because I do know a lot of people watch the Chevy Chase thing, I want to go back though to White Christmas. | ||
| If you remember, because the song broke in the movie Holiday Inn, but when they decided after the war to make a movie White Christmas, they actually start at the Battle of the Bulge, where in fact the general that becomes central to the entire story of starting the ski lodge in Vermont that they've got to bail out, he's been relieved for cause. | ||
| He's been fired. | ||
| And Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye actually are trying to do a thing to perk people's spirits up, but they want to hear White Christmas, and they play White Christmas. | ||
| It's one of the most moving, in any war movie, it's an incredibly moving performance, and it actually kicks the movie off. | ||
| Now, they play it later at the Vermont, but they actually, I guess he takes that real life in northern France and he put it into the movie, but it's incredibly powerful. | ||
| Well, you know, it's not like we've totally forgotten these traditions. | ||
| For example, and I'm not hawking Michael W. Smith's album here, but he has an album called It's a Wonderful Christmas. | ||
| And in it, he's got five different choirs singing, Sing Noel, Sing Hallelujah, which is one of the most astounding and amazing performances I've ever heard. | ||
| It's just really amazing stuff. | ||
| So, but you know, you get You get these top five lists and people say Miracle on 34th Street. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| OK. | ||
| But you also get people like me insisting that Die Hard is a Christmas movie because any movie that says, oh, I have a machine gun has to be an American Christmas movie. | ||
| Have the other movies, did they pick up the same time that you've seen this demarcation between at the malls? | ||
| The playing of, all of a sudden you had Christian music or music about the traditional hymns maybe done in a more modern way and then all of a sudden over a couple of years that totally faded and you had more of this winter wonderland music. | ||
| Is that when also these other movies started to come out? | ||
| Yeah, very much so. | ||
| You don't get a whole lot of religiosity in Christmas Vacation, although there are some references. | ||
| Probably the one that does the best in terms of maintaining some of that tradition is Home Alone. | ||
| And the final turning point of the movie occurs when Kevin, who's been left home alone and is fighting off these burglars, goes into a church. | ||
| and meets an old man that he had previously been scared of, thought he was like kind of a boogeyman, and finds out he's a wonderful old man who's just missing his daughter. | ||
| Okay, uh, we're gonna leave with some, uh, hymns. | ||
| We're going to bring Larry Schweikert back after a short commercial break. | ||
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We've been waiting for this moment for so long. | |
| This day is so brief in law, but the babe is the son of Mary. | ||
| Why lies he in such mean estate, Where ox and ass are feeding? | ||
| ♪ Lord, Christians, hear, for sinners' gain ♪ ♪ The silent word is free ♪ ♪ All pains and speech shall listen through ♪ ♪ The cross be borne for me, for you ♪ | ||
| ♪ Hail, hail the word with which the brave ♪ ♪ The Son of Mary spoke ♪ ♪ The Son of Mary spoke ♪ See you next time. | ||
| So brave Angels we have heard on high Sweetly singing o'er the plains And the mountains in reply Echoing their joyous strains Gloria in excelsis | ||
| Come to Bethlehem and see whose birth the angels sing. | ||
| ♪ In whose birth they made us sing ♪ ♪ God of America's God of San Joaquin ♪ | ||
| ♪ Gloria in excelsis Deo ♪ | ||
| ♪ Sing in the manger made ♪ ♪ Whom the voice of angels brings ♪ ♪ Make yourself enjoyed while I sing of your grace ♪ ♪ Gloria in excelsis Deo ♪ | ||
| Merry Christmas, welcome back. | ||
| You're in the War Room. | ||
| It's our 23 December Year of the Lord 2023. | ||
| It's Saturday, but this is also our Christmas Eve show, which we'll replay tomorrow. | ||
| Larry Sweikart, I want to get to a movie both of you and I want to talk about that. | ||
| Interestingly enough, it's a classic today, but it was a horrible flop when it came out. | ||
| Talk to me about this kind of the break of the commercialization of what we know. | ||
| You mentioned Norman Wood Rockwell. | ||
| Talk about 1920s with so many of the traditions of the big department stores became an active part of the more secular part of Christmas, but it is looked at as some of the great traditions we have. | ||
| Strangely enough, because of a cracker. | ||
| Called, uh, you need a biscuit and you need it was one of the first ones to actually offer packaged crackers that had a longer shelf life. | ||
| And this gave rise along with Campbell's soup and some other products, Kraft cheeses to modern day grocery stores, where you found products on shelves and it changed the whole nature of shopping. | ||
| From going in, usually a housewife, going in asking a clerk, usually a male clerk, for help in finding this item or that item, and he would put it in her basket, to actually doing the shopping for themselves. | ||
| And so this was picked up by many of the department stores, and the larger department stores started to branch out in multiple cities, Wanamaker's and others. | ||
| To attract customers, they, of course, would have the store window. | ||
| This is a whole new side story in itself that the guy who designed the store window, of all things, was Frank Baum, who wrote The Wizard of Oz, so on and so forth. | ||
| At any rate, at Christmas time, they would decorate their windows huge in terms of a celebration of Christmas. | ||
| And in fact, there were department stores in Dallas that people would line up down the street the night before, almost like you would for some sort of rock concert today, to see what the store window was going to look like when it was open. | ||
| So part of the commercialization of Christmas came about simply because the nature of shopping itself changed between 1900 and 1904. | ||
| It changed a lot. | ||
| How much of the, I mean, so much of the music, so much of what we know about the perception of Santa all came from that time, right? | ||
| From the department stores and these kind of very homey, the Norman Rockwell paintings of Christmas, all of that. | ||
| That was all the 20s and 30s before World War II, correct? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we get the Miracle on 34th Street movie. | ||
| Which in fact is about a Santa Claus, a guy who thinks he's Kris Kringle and insists he's Kris Kringle and he's taken to court as a fraud. | ||
| And the way he finally proves his case that he is Santa Claus is that he produces dozens and dozens of bags of mail addressed to Santa Claus. | ||
| And it's endorsed by the U.S. | ||
| Post Office because they delivered the mail. | ||
| So Santa Claus must be real. | ||
| And so the idea of a department store having a Santa Claus became something of a tradition well before that movie. | ||
| Talk to me about one of our favorite films, that when it came out, I think at the time it was Frank Capra's biggest bomb, right? | ||
| This guy was a legendary director who came in on time and on budget and just did hit after hit after hit, all of which had kind of a sociological, you know, he was a message. | ||
| He made message pictures, although he would deny that, but he came out with this film Which I think is probably one of his greatest. | ||
| And yet it came to the box office and people didn't get it at the time. | ||
| It kind of bombed. | ||
| Well, the movie is a message movie. | ||
| You've got George Bailey. | ||
| Now think of this. | ||
| George Bailey runs a bank. | ||
| It's an SNL, but modern Americans can... So the hero is a banker. | ||
| A banker? | ||
| Oh no, they can't be heroes, right? | ||
| And what's his issue? | ||
| His issue is that some of the money's been stolen from the bank, and he doesn't know how to make good on it, not for himself, not because he wants to get rich, But because he feels like he's let down so many people in society. | ||
| And the way that the movie wraps up, he's going to go out and commit suicide. | ||
| He jumps off a bridge, but is rescued by his guardian angel who shows him what life would be without him. | ||
| And it's much worse. | ||
| Things literally go to hell in town. | ||
| And so when he comes back, and modern Americans would never believe this, he comes back and he's bailed out by the townspeople who make Donations to a bank to save the bank because it was such an important part of their lives and help them out so much. | ||
| I mean, modern people would have real trouble with donating to a bank. | ||
| You got a big kid in me. | ||
| That's just dumb. | ||
| And, you know, the famous line that I think it's every time a Democrat resigns from Congress, an angel gets its wings. | ||
| Isn't something like that in that? | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| So where's the idea? | ||
| No. | ||
| What is it about the film though? | ||
| They had a technical problem that it came off copyright and stations in New York and then others started running it and what you say in the film is ran the sprockets off it non-stop because it was free. | ||
| And then all of a sudden people started watching it. | ||
| The film is obviously It's a Wonderful Life. | ||
| It became what we call a cult classic and now it's a standard on TCM and others over the Christmas season. | ||
| But what was it when people actually got to see it that got them that when it came out in theaters, was it too close to World War II so it was too depressing? | ||
| There was already enough agony from World War II and people just wanted to get on with their lives now. | ||
| Why did it go from originally a big flop to later a cult classic and now a standard part of the repertoire Well, some of that may be just what you said, that it got out to much broader audiences. | ||
| You know, exposure is everything in movies, and you can point to any number of modern movies. | ||
| If they only open in 200 theaters, I don't care how good the movie is, it's very difficult for word of mouth to carry that to the 5,000 to 10,000 theaters that we may have, or screens that we may have in America. | ||
| Um, but the movie itself has an incredible message of redemption. | ||
| I mean, this guy's gonna commit suicide, and he has shown that every life is important. | ||
| That all the stuff he thought was terrible and meaningless, in fact, he played a key role in every person's life. | ||
| The suicide aspect may have been what hit people initially. | ||
| They didn't want to see any kind of death after World War II, after the Great Depression. | ||
| But then, not too long after that, they were willing to entertain that for the larger message of there's always hope and life is worth living. | ||
| And that's what you think because when he comes back, when he's saved from suicide and he comes back, what's happened to the town, which is just this wonderful, almost Norman Rockwell type town, right? | ||
| When he comes back, I mean, it's some of the darkest filmmaking. | ||
| There's about 20 minutes of that film, 30 minutes of that film. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| that makes you actually very uncomfortable watching it because of just the dark, and this is a PG-13 film, but the way Capra's such a genius, he and Jimmy Stewart, so powerful, but you're unnerved about what's happened to the town and previous characters who you saw as like good people or good people of the town have been totally changed, almost like demonic. | ||
| Yeah, well, and again, this is one of these movies you said you wouldn't allow in your home, but the Riff is a sort of modernized, a little bit different version of this, but you get these really bickering, angry... | ||
| I mean, literally the movie starts in counseling on Christmas Eve, where this guy's putting up with Kevin Spacey and his wife going back and forth and calling each other names and so forth. | ||
| How can this marriage ever be resolved? | ||
| And you later find out the kid is some sort of derelict. | ||
| But eventually, through being held hostage, By this kind of irascible Dennis Leary character, the whole family kind of comes together and the whole family begins to find redemption. | ||
| And that is the Christmas story. | ||
| The story of somebody who brings redemption to the whole human race. | ||
| No, having never seen The Rough, I was really talking about Chevy Chase's Christmas Vacation. | ||
| And I should tell you, there's a lot of people in the extended Bandit family that love that film and play it every year. | ||
| Of course, I excuse myself to go and crave... Larry, a great movie. | ||
| Just put in the heckle. | ||
| Okay, Larry, hang on. | ||
| We're going to take a short break. | ||
| We've got a very special thing on the other side of this. | ||
| The music here, and I want to thank the production team, particularly Real America's Voice. | ||
| It's not easy to do these specials over the Christmas season, the holiday weekend, whether it's Memorial Day, whether it's Fourth of July, our Labor Day specials, Christmas, the combat history of Christmas, always very proud about all of that. | ||
| I want to thank the Real America's Voice team, Patrick, Kate, O'Donnell, everybody that makes the Christmas Uh, the Christmas Day special. | ||
| And we do that because we want to make sure everybody understands that there have been patriots in this country that, um, it hasn't always been, uh, it hasn't always been easy. | ||
| It hasn't always been, uh, uh, the Christmas season with everything it represents hasn't been, uh, you know, it hasn't been that easy for a lot of patriots. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Short commercial. | ||
| Gonna grab some great music. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| back with Larry Swank in a moment. | ||
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♪ There lay an angel, all cribbed for his bed, ♪ The little Lord Jesus lay down His sweet head. | |
| ♪ The stars in the sky looked down where He lay, ♪ The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay. | ||
| ♪ The cattle are lowing, the poor baby weighs, ♪ The little Lord Jesus no crying He makes. | ||
| ♪ I love Thee, Lord Jesus, who come from the sky, ♪ And sit by my cradle to watch the world go by. | ||
| ♪ And sit by my cradle to watch the world go by. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. | ||
| Just like the ones I used to know. | ||
| Where the tree tops glisten and children listen. | ||
| you To hear sleigh bells in the snow. | ||
| I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. | ||
| With every Christmas card I write. | ||
| May your days be merry and bright And may all your Christmases be white May your days be merry and bright | ||
| If you have not had a chance to watch it, I can guarantee you it's a classic. | ||
| White Christmas. | ||
| Right there you see Danny Kaye, Dean Jagger, and of course Bing Crosby. | ||
| Dean Jagger, as everyone knows, is watching. | ||
| You should watch it if you're part of the War Room Posse. | ||
| 12 o'clock high. | ||
| Larry, very powerful in that song. | ||
| that he was nominated, I think, and won Best Supporting Actor from 12 O'Clock High, the Gregory Peck he had done for a few years earlier. | ||
| Those are all done with the living memory of World War II in everybody's mind. | ||
| Larry, very powerful in that song. | ||
| It kind of comes out of nowhere in Holiday Inn, but here it's central to the story. | ||
| You start the story off with the Battle of the Bulge and the firing of a general and you end, I don't want to give away the ending, but just magnificent, magnificent ending. | ||
| Larry, your closing thoughts on the traditions of Christmas, both the old and the new, and then I want to make sure everybody gets to your writings and to all your books and all of it. | ||
| Well, we almost forgot one of the most important, I don't know how we can leave this out, and that's a Charlie Brown Christmas. | ||
| Because this cartoon version of the Peanuts comic strip, originally Charles Schultz, they were going to have him cut the incredible scene where Linus actually drops his blanket for the only time he's ever seen without a blanket when he starts to do the nativity story from, I think it's Luke. | ||
| Uh, Schultz said, you're not going to show that show without that scene. | ||
| And so he stood up for it. | ||
| And that remains, that's very important. | ||
| It's one of the few places where you get the full nativity story, um, in modern media, modern Christmas media, all the way down to the present. | ||
| So, um, that we shouldn't forget that one. | ||
| Amazing, amazing story by the creator of Peanuts. | ||
| How do people get to you, Larry, all your writings, both the political and the historical? | ||
| You can get to me at thewildworldofhistory.com for history stuff, or the Wild World of Politics, where I do a Today's News show every day, five days a week, a little commentary on the news. | ||
| And we try to keep the two separate. | ||
| So if you're into the political side of me, go to the politics. | ||
| If you're into history, go to the Wild World of History. | ||
| And of course, Patriot's History is now, we just crossed 60,000 sales in this edition alone, which is pretty amazing. | ||
| And this edition is what, this is the 40th reprinting or something? | ||
| 40, we're in our 41st reprinting, our 5th edition. | ||
| And next year I will be putting up free on my website, a chapter that will take us from 2018 to 2023, and we'll call it the 20th anniversary edition. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The years of Trump. | ||
| Larry, thank you very much. | ||
| Larry's one of the smartest guys I know in politics, polling, all of it, demographics. | ||
| A renaissance man. | ||
| Thank you very much for being with us here on our Christmas Eve special. | ||
| Thank you, Steve. | ||
| Merry Christmas. | ||
| Merry Christmas. | ||
| Merry Christmas to everybody. | ||
| There'll be a replay of this tomorrow on Real America's Voice. | ||
| I think it may even be later this afternoon also. | ||
| I want to thank everybody, thank our entire crew, Grace and Mo and the entire team, Jane Zirkle, Natalie, everybody. | ||
| Have a Merry Christmas. | ||
| We're going to do one of my favorite shows of the year on Monday on Christmas Day and to show you the cost of patriotism and love of country. | ||
| We'll take you from the Battle of the Bulge. | ||
| We'll go to Korea and the Chosin Reservoir. | ||
| We'll go back to what you just saw there at Bing Crosby at Bastogne with the 101st Airborne. | ||
| Of course, we'll do Christmas night with Washington and the troops crossing the Delaware and surprising the Hessians outside of Trenton. | ||
| This year with Patrick A. O'Donnell, we've got also a new, we're going to go through the Civil War of a Christmas raid on Salem, Virginia. | ||
| a railroad hub that became quite important in the Civil War. | ||
| I want to thank everybody. | ||
| We're going to leave you some great Christmas music. | ||
| We'll be back here on Monday, 10 a.m. | ||
| Eastern Time, Combat History Christmas. | ||
| We'll see you then at the War Room. | ||
| Merry Christmas. | ||
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Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let every seeker give, and every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing. | |
| Joy to the world, the Savior reigns, let men their songs employ, and fears and thoughts, fears and pains, repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy. | ||
| He rules the world with truth and grace, and makes the nations prove, that all is of his righteousness, and wonders of his love. | ||
| Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let every seeker give, and every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature His righteousness and wonders of His love. |
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