| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Not only in this country, it's being watched around the world right now. | |
| Mike said before, I happened to listen to him, he was on C-SPAN 1. | ||
| That's a big upgrade, right? | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
| We are still at our core a democracy. | ||
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Joining us now is Henry Olson. | ||
| He is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and he also hosts a podcast called Beyond the Polls. | ||
| Henry, welcome to the program. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I want to start with an opinion piece that you wrote in the Washington Post. | ||
| And you wrote this before Charlie Kirk's memorial service out in Arizona. | ||
| And you said this is the rights moment to forge a super majority. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| What I mean is that what's been happening for the last decade is over-the-top vitriolic attacks on conservative politicians, conservative people, conservative personalities that in some way contributed to the murder, assassination of Charlie Kirk. | ||
| Most Americans are against political violence. | ||
| Most Americans are against that sort of vitriolic rhetoric. | ||
| But too many, as we see from the reactions online on the far extreme left, are not. | ||
| And what I meant by that was that this is a moment to say, we are against this. | ||
| We are against this sort of vitriolic rhetoric that excites passions and drives mad, unstable people to murderous acts. | ||
| And you should be with us. | ||
| And what that does is it forced mainstream people on the left to disown those activists, which you've seen very many of them are unwilling to openly do. | ||
| And that's something that can work to the rights' benefit and to America's benefit. | ||
| I want to play you a portion of Vice President JD Vance's remarks when he talked about the causes of political violence, and then we'll discuss it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| When Democratic politicians incur doxing, when they encourage us to unmask ICE enforcement officers, what do you think is going to happen? | ||
| When the mayor of Los Angeles encourages violent protesters to get in the face of our law enforcement, what do you think is going to happen? | ||
| What's going to happen is political violence and political violence has gotten out of control in this country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've got to stop it. | |
| We've got to condemn it. | ||
| And that starts, unfortunately, at the very top of the Democratic Party. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you want to stop political violence, stop attacking our law enforcement as the Gestapo. | |
| If you want to stop political violence, stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi. | ||
| If you want to stop political violence, look in the mirror. | ||
| That's the way that we stop political violence in this country, and we've got to do it. | ||
| He very clearly blames the left for political violence in this country. | ||
| What's your reaction? | ||
| Well, let's put it in the context. | ||
| He's talking about the attempt yesterday, the murder of people outside of the ICE office. | ||
| And the fact is you did see Governor Newsom, as well as others, who called ICE agents Gestapo. | ||
| And, you know, I see people on my Facebook feed who are my friends, but they're progressives, who draw analogies between the number of ICE agents and the number of Gestapo agents. | ||
| Yes, that absolutely does encourage, again, unstable minds to take things into their own hands. | ||
| And if you want the unstable minds to stop doing those things, you need to stop having the rhetoric that pushes them over the edge. | ||
| And what role do you see from the right in bringing down the temperature in this country? | ||
| Well, I think the right needs to also bring down the temperature. | ||
| But let's be clear that there's been no assassination attempt on a Democratic presidential candidate. | ||
| There were two presidential assassination attempts last year on President Trump. | ||
| There's been no crazed shooter who is attacking California police officers or Los Angeles police officers for trying to do what they do. | ||
| There have been people who have attacked ICE agents who have, now we know, yesterday murdered people. | ||
| So yes, I think the right needs to not be engaging in huge rhetoric that incites and potentially pushes unstable minds over the edge. | ||
| But the political violence in the last few years has been disproportionately, overwhelmingly on the left. | ||
| And that means you take the beam out of your own eye before we take the moat out of ours. | ||
| In your opinion, in your column, you did say that Charlie Kirk's funeral would be a chance for the right to do the right thing. | ||
| It was a huge platform. | ||
| And Charlie Kirk's widow, Erica, did do that. | ||
| She said the answer to hate is not hate. | ||
| It is love, and it is always love. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She forgave the alleged shooter. | |
| What did you think of President Trump's comments at the funeral? | ||
| Yeah, I think that most of the media has picked up on Mrs. Kirk's comments, which I think is the right way to take. | ||
| I think the president should not have said what he said about he disagrees with her and with Charlie about loving your enemies. | ||
| He hates his enemies. | ||
| And he does not wish them well. | ||
| And he does not wish them well. | ||
| Look, the president has a responsibility to lead. | ||
| And I think the right way for him to lead is to do things like what we just heard Vice President Vance say, you know, which is to say, you camp down the rhetoric which is causing this violence, but you should also not engage in the sort of rhetoric that means that the mainstream left, the mainstream person, is also beyond the pale. | ||
| And the president crosses the line sometimes, and I think he ought not to cross the line. | ||
| I think things like what Secretary of State Rubio, what Vice President Vance, what Mrs. Kirk did, strikes the right balance between rightly calling out the left's rhetoric, but not jumping the shark and moving into a similarly extreme hit, but could very well have violent circumstances, violent reactions. | ||
| If you've got a question or a comment for Henry Olson, you can start calling in now. | ||
| He's a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. | ||
| The lines are bipartisan. | ||
| So Democrats are on 202, 748, 8,000. | ||
| Republicans are on 202, 748, 8,001. | ||
| And Independents, 202748, 8,002. | ||
| Former First Lady Michelle Obama famously said, when they go low, we go high. | ||
| But you say that some conservatives are taking a different mantra, which is when they go low, we go lower. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| First, yes, she said that, but I think we've seen in the last 10 years that that's advice that many, too many on the left have not, both the mainstream left and the extreme left have not taken. | ||
| They have gone low, they have gone lower. | ||
| I have friends who have lost jobs, who have received death threats and so forth, all spurred by the hateful rhetoric of people who did not take the First Lady's advice. | ||
| But the fact is there are people on the right who are basically saying we're in a war and what that means is that it's a total war and any means are necessary. | ||
| And I don't think that's a democratic solution to a democratic problem. | ||
| Democratic, I mean small D, not big D. | ||
| That what we need to do, people on the right, need to say, look, America needs to come together around certain principles. | ||
| We believe these are our principles. | ||
| We are not Nazis. | ||
| We are not authoritarians. | ||
| And if you call us that, you are not only beyond the wrong, you are beyond the pale. | ||
| And that has happened too often. | ||
| Anyone who turns into the view can see that on a daily display. | ||
| And that needs to stop. | ||
| Because again, when you are engaged in that, when you tell people that there is no difference between Adolf Hitler and the man in the Oval Office, you should expect diseased minds to take that seriously. | ||
| Henry, what are the words that you would say should be completely off limits? | ||
| You mentioned, obviously, calling somebody Hitler or a Nazi, but what about the word authoritarian? | ||
| Authoritarian or tyrant. | ||
| These are often used political words that don't have the emotional connotation. | ||
| Certainly Republicans attacking Franklin Roosevelt called him things like that. | ||
| It's something that the right engages in with respect to calling people like President Obama un-American or beyond the pale. | ||
| But it's when you're basically making a claim that the existence of America is at stake and these people are so evil they can be compared to and in fact are no different than the worst mass murderers in world history. | ||
| That ought to be beyond the pale. | ||
| And if it's not considered to be on the pale, I suggest you look at your own soul because if you believe that's true. | ||
| What about the word fascist? | ||
| I think the word fascist ought to be beyond the pale. | ||
| I also think on the right that the word communist ought to be beyond the pale. | ||
| Is that to say Zoran Mandami is a socialist? | ||
| He is not a communist. | ||
| Many people on the right are extreme, but I don't know a single person who would be anywhere close to being considered fascist if you actually know what the word means. | ||
| Let me show you the statement by DNC Chair Ken Martin on the Dallas shooting at ICE. | ||
| He said this. | ||
| Let me be clear. | ||
| It will take all of us, not just one side of the aisle or the other, to quell this epidemic of violence, which has no place in our democracy. | ||
| Democrats remain committed to resolving differences through debate and elections, not with weapons. | ||
| We also remain committed to enacting common sense solutions to curb gun violence all across the country. | ||
| Yeah, well, again, what would be very nice is to have somebody on the Democratic side with authority say Donald Trump is not a fascist. | ||
| Donald Trump is not a Nazi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I disagree with him. | |
| I think he's taking the country in the wrong place. | ||
| I think he's eroding democratic norms. | ||
| But let's say what he's not. | ||
| He's not these things. | ||
| And we can win with democratic means and democratic persuasion. | ||
| We are not on the brink of an authoritarian dictatorial takeover that will throw people in camps. | ||
| I've literally been in rooms with progressives when they wonder when will they be thrown in the concentration camps. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| It's utterly insane. | ||
| And it's aided and abetted by the constant drumbeat of people in authority, institutionally, politically, telling them that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That must stop. | |
| Here is George Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts Democrat. | ||
| You're on with Henry Olson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I'd like the guests to respond to this sentence that I see in today's USA Today. | ||
| The sentence is a study earlier this month by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute found terrorists motivated by extreme right-leading ideology killed six times more people than those on the opposite side of the political spectrum between 1975 and September 10th of this year? | ||
| That's a sentence. | ||
| No, I mean, I have not read the study. | ||
| I don't know how they're defining that, but I don't know any person. who is politically motivated from the right who has attempted to kill a leading Democratic politician. | ||
| There's no, you know, we had a man who was politically motivated on the left who tried to get into Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home to kill his family. | ||
| There's no one who's getting into Katenji Brown Jackson's home wearing a MAGA cap or affiliated with the Proud Boys. | ||
| There was a man who was a Bernie Sanders supporter who took an automatic weapon to the congressional baseball practice in 2017. | ||
| And but for the presence of a member of the House Republican leadership who has security, whereas at that time the average member does not, he would have murdered 10, 20 Republican congressmen because it was only the presence of that security that saved those people's lives. | ||
| And Steve Scalise almost lost his life and was in the hospital for a long time recovering from his wounds. | ||
| There is no one who is taking an automatic weapon to kill Democrats at the Democratic baseball practice or something similar. | ||
| Again, take the beam out of your own eye before you take the moat out of the right. | ||
| I'm not saying the right is innocent. | ||
| I said in my article that we should not on the right go down the path of saying that we should go lower. | ||
| But the fact is political violence directed against political figures has come exclusively from people motivated, warped as it is by someone on the left for the last few years. | ||
| And that must be called out for what it is, both by people on the right, which we heard Vice President Vance do, and by responsible leaders on the left. | ||
| That if you believe this, you are not my friend. | ||
| And this is what George was referring to. | ||
| So this is the article. | ||
| It's dated September 17th, updated on the 18th. | ||
| It says, study showing far-right extremists have committed more violence has been removed from the DOJ website. | ||
| And here is Akiva in Clifton, New Jersey, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Amy. | |
| Good morning, Mr. Olson. | ||
| I have two questions for you, but I have to just say that before Charlie Kirk died of his gunshot wound, but after he was shot, Gabrielle Giffords posted on X that she was praying for his recovery. | ||
| Anyways, my first of two questions is, you know, we had Frank Lobiondo here in New Jersey serving in Congress, and he says, I'll be driving in the car and I'll turn the radio and the people on the radio will be saying things that did not happen on Capitol Hill. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| I'm a congressman. | ||
| So is the media trying to overexaggerate what's actually going on in Washington, D.C., you know, Capitol Hill? | ||
| And my second question for you is, you know, Tom Dashall and Trent Lawton wrote a book called Crisis Point nine years ago in 2016, and they write, they mention that the media used to be the referee and now they are the participant. | ||
| And so my second of two questions for you is, did the media decide that in order to boost ratings, excuse me, rather, it'd be better for us to boost ratings and cover conflict every single night on cable news or on ABC News, and therefore we won't cover how life is getting better and how Congress actually gets most things done on a bipartisan basis. | ||
| What is the media trying to do by lying to us? | ||
| I think there are strong elements of the media that do not engage in partisanship. | ||
| I'm on one network or entity that does that, but too many do. | ||
| And I think it's very clear. | ||
| I'm old enough to remember when the bias that one might claim would be slight inflexes or slight preferences as opposed to the very slanted opinions that one gets from cable news or even many mainstream reporters. | ||
| It's a bias that comes from almost all one direction, which is not to say it is only one direction. | ||
| I mean, certainly I can point to certain elements on the right, which is every bit as biased as things that we will see on the left, whether it's in print or whether it's on new media or whether it's on cable. | ||
| I do think that what responsible voices in the media should want to do is go back to the idea that they are there to inform rather than to rally, rather than to be partisans. | ||
| And that is something that's very hard to do, given that people have political passions. | ||
| But if your role is to be a reporter, you should report. | ||
| If you want to be an activist, there are many ways to do that, and that includes writing and persuading. | ||
| But that's different from the mantle that people in the media have cast upon themselves that many people left and right now say is just not being upheld by the vast majority of people who report on the news. | ||
| Here's Guy in Sigler, Oklahoma, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, Nini. | |
| You look very nice today. | ||
| And Henry, this is a great topic. | ||
| I'm glad that you're on the show today. | ||
| Back in the 70s, I was a very high-ranking intelligence officer, and I was recruited in 1980 to go to work for the CIA. | ||
| I've worked for every agency over the last 40 years, except for the NSA and the DEA. | ||
| Been a contractor, DOD, SCI, SAP. | ||
| And what we're seeing, in my opinion, is we're seeing taint-no-prisoner politics run by the Democratic Party with a disintegrative warfare outcome. | ||
| They are willing to do anything to destroy President Trump. | ||
| Indictments, impeachments, trying to bankrupt him. | ||
| This is and all the propaganda we're seeing, fascist, Nazi, bigot, racist, you know, all these things are so disintegrative that this is a, this, this is, the Democratic Party has taken this from the Nazi Party in 1929, where the Nazi party was coming into power. | ||
| And how did they turn the German people against the Jews through propaganda and hate speech? | ||
| And that's what we're seeing. | ||
| And they did it in four years, from 1929 to 1933. | ||
| Joseph Goebbels told Hitler this will work. | ||
| Hitler didn't believe him. | ||
| And they put it to the test. | ||
| And they turned the whole German population against the pillars of their society. | ||
| The Jews were business owners, doctors, lawyers. | ||
| They were the pillars of their society. | ||
| And in four years, they turned them. | ||
| Okay, we got that point, Guy. | ||
| Let's get a response. | ||
| Look, what the caller says is not the Nazi part, but with respect to the Democratic Party, it's a very widespread view among the right. | ||
| And it's widespread among people who are average citizens and people who are prominent people who actually get called fascist, Nazi, get the death threats, get deplatformed, and so forth. | ||
| But Henry, what do you think of, you know, we've talked about not calling somebody Hitler, not calling somebody a Nazi, but like what Guy just said was this comes out of the Nazi playbook. | ||
| This is what the Nazis did. | ||
| And we're hearing that on both sides. | ||
| Democrats will call and say what Trump is doing now comes right out of the 1930s. | ||
| This is what Hitler did when he took power. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's there is a real element of truth to it. | ||
| Yes, it should be off the table. | ||
| I mean, just because somebody engages in varulant speech doesn't mean it's out of the Nazi playbook. | ||
| Just because somebody is making a particular stance on immigration doesn't mean that immediately we have a reductio ad Hitlerum. | ||
| This shows a paucity of historical understanding and a paucity of understanding of what's actually at stake. | ||
| Hitler was an evil man. | ||
| The Nazi Party was an evil party. | ||
| It was outwardly and expressly against liberal democracy from its foundation. | ||
| There is no element of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party that is seriously engaged outwardly in saying liberal democracy must end and the dictatorship of one group must succeed. | ||
| And I don't think we should encourage people to believe things that simply aren't true. | ||
| Here's Gary, a Republican, Odenton, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning, Gary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hi. | ||
| I'd like to ask the guest if he would put, I'm going to ask, can you be just a little stronger on your side? | ||
| I'm a Republican, and I'd like to say when we say, look at what the rhetoric is producing on the left, and then they say, like the host said, well, what about the right? | ||
| And you said, well, we're not perfect ourselves. | ||
| The challenge with saying that is we're out to, in a Christian way, decipher the truth about what is going on in our world right now. | ||
| All of us, left and right, we all have friends, family, we love on both sides. | ||
| But there's something that has to be peeled back to see the actual truth of what is going on. | ||
| It's 30,000 feet up in the air, and it gets manifest on big media, big tech, etc. | ||
| And it does have something on all of us. | ||
| So if you listen and look at Trump, he seems very much devastated. | ||
| He said, yes, I have to, you know, he was honest. | ||
| He said, I, yeah, I kind of hate him because of all of what's been done to him. | ||
| And if the media would show and run the specific details and stories about the backgrounds of what was done to him already, and he's got to peel it back now. | ||
| But when you're in your position, I don't think we need to peel back the truth when we call out the truth. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Look, I wrote a piece about eight years ago called The Flight 93 Decade. | ||
| You can find it online. | ||
| And I bemoaned the possibility that we were moving towards exactly the situation that we were in. | ||
| And that I said that this is something that is coming from both sides. | ||
| What has happened since then is that one side, which holds the commanding heights in terms of communication and institutional support, which is not the right, has intensified its rhetoric. | ||
| And it has done so in a way that has actually caused, as I documented both in my article and on the show, numerous actual attempts at political murder. | ||
| I called out January 6th. | ||
| After January 6th, I called it out repeatedly in print saying that the election lies were lies, that Joe Biden won fairly, and that we ought not to be walking down that path. | ||
| But when what we have is an attempt to silence the criticism of the left by saying, isn't it both sides? | ||
| If we're involved in a dispute with somebody that we care about, it is much easier to say, I apologize if the person who threw the first punch, the punch that landed, apologizes first. | ||
| Let's hear the apologies from the leading forces of left to say, we are wrong. | ||
| Voices who are encouraged to vote for Democrats who take extreme views are wrong. | ||
| Ronald Reagan said repeatedly, you know, I'm for states' rights, but if you are somebody who believes in racial inequality or the Ku Klux Klan, you have no role in my party. | ||
| You are not my supporter. | ||
| I do not accept your support. | ||
| Let's hear that from the Democrats about their extreme left. | ||
| As small as it is, it is vocal. | ||
| But to be honest, if you hear them apologize first before people say, well, let's move on from what happened by having you. | ||
| President Trump also never disavowed any of the Klan, the wasn't as quick. | ||
| I mean, yeah, if you go back, I watched those things, and he has, but you would have wished that he had done it more readily and unambiguously in the way that Ronald Reagan did. | ||
| But he did. | ||
| I followed that controversy rather closely. | ||
| And he also is the first modern president to say, I hate Democrats. | ||
| I hate my opponents. | ||
| This is half the country, Henry. | ||
| Well, you know, and when you say, well, I would like to see a Democrat say that in power, there's nobody in a higher power than the president of the United States. | ||
| But again, that's just a false equivalency. | ||
| Yes, there are people who are. | ||
| We had a president, Joe Biden, who was the highest power, who used a presidential speech, not a political speech, a presidential speech to accuse his political opponents of wanting to end America. | ||
| That's what the Philadelphia speech in 2022 was. | ||
| Wanting to end America. | ||
| Well, that's essentially what he said. | ||
| I wrote a column about that and called it out in the Washington Post after he made it. | ||
| But there was the attack on the Republican Party, the MAGA-Trump Republican Party, that called them anti-democratic, called them what you will, and had the dark, ominous red background against Independence Hall. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Apologize for that. | ||
| Okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Let's talk to George. | ||
| Fayetteville, Georgia, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, George. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Just a couple of points real quick. | ||
| Leadership does not take sides when leading the nation. | ||
| Leadership at the very top, whether it be the president, whether it be Congress, all those leaders should be speaking on behalf of all Americans, not running to a political party and saying data versus them. | ||
| Second, when you start a conversation by calling names, nobody's listening. | ||
| Nobody's listening at all. | ||
| So all the name calling is for performative conversation only. | ||
| It's not about getting things seriously done. | ||
| And then lastly, I would ask the gentleman here to write an article. | ||
| Just write an article asking everybody, everybody, don't even put a party in there, just to ask all people in places of leadership to bring it down. | ||
| Don't say you did this, you did that, and before you did this and you did that, and you apologized first, and then I'll apologize. | ||
| That's what children do. | ||
| Those are children games. | ||
| Adults see that the house is on fire and they call the fire department to put it out. | ||
| You, sir, can be the fire department. | ||
| Help put the fire out. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I have written many articles calling. | ||
| Again, I would ask you to go back and look at the Flight 93 decade, which I wrote in 2017, which basically does say, look, we don't want to walk down this path. | ||
| Both sides, we do not want to walk down this path. | ||
| In the moment, I am not going to surrender the position that what has to be done is the people who are doing the shooting need to stop having cover given to them by people who don't share their violent ends, but share their deepest fears or encourage them to have those deepest fears. | ||
| And as respect for the president being somebody of all the people, that may be, that is an element in which they have, but I'll turn you to the idol of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in his Madison Square Garden speech in 1936 talked about the people who are opposing him. | ||
| And he said, they are united in their hatred for me, and I welcome their hate. | ||
| That's what Franklin Roosevelt said in the 1936 election, because he was engaged in a political warfare. | ||
| And he did not shirk from, he did not shirk from political rhetoric that we would consider to be inflammatory. | ||
| He always divided average Republicans from what he called a small group of selfish businessmen and Republican leaders, which is something I would wish that President Trump would emulate as a political matter. | ||
| But the fact is, what has caused the death of Charlie Kirk? | ||
| What has caused two assassination attempts on President Trump? | ||
| What has caused attempts on Brett Kavanaugh's life? | ||
| What has caused actual attempts, the 2017 baseball crisis shooting? | ||
| This is a thread that now goes back eight years. | ||
| It is a poisoned well that comes from a poisoned source, and part of the poison source is people outside the well saying things that run downstream and turn into poison. | ||
| And they need to say, okay, we hate Donald Trump. | ||
| We hate what he's doing. | ||
| But our side has to move first. | ||
| You know, as Michelle Obama said, maybe it would be nice to see the Democrats in this moment go high to encourage Republicans to follow suit. | ||
| And I would encourage Republicans to follow suit if I could see Democrats follow and make taking the first step. | ||
| That's Henry Olson, Senior Fellow at Ethics and Public Policy Center. | ||
| He also hosts a podcast called Beyond the Polls. | ||
| You can find him at ePPC.org. | ||
| Henry, thanks so much for joining us. | ||
| Well, thank you for having me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | |
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 7 p.m. Eastern, former independent West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin discusses his career, political polarization, and the importance of centrism. | ||
| Then at 8 p.m. Eastern, Independent Institute senior fellow Philip Magnus presents his critique of the New York Times magazine's 1619 project, which told the story of the United States with a focus on slavery and its legacy. | ||
| At 9 p.m. Eastern, a conversation about the influence of Karl Marx's work in America, a country Marx never visited with Illinois State University history professor Andrew Hartman. | ||
| And at 1015 p.m. Eastern, Stephen Grant on his memoir of his year working as a mailman for the U.S. Postal Service during the pandemic. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | ||
| This weekend, as America celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2026, join American History TV for its new series, America 250, and discover the ideas and defining moments of our founding. | ||
| This week at 11 a.m. Eastern, we'll explore the creation of the Continental Army in 1775 with Duquesne University professor and former U.S. Army officer Holly Mayer. | ||
| And then historian and author Don Hagist examines the British Army before and during the Revolutionary War. | ||
| Then at 3 p.m. Eastern, legal and constitutional scholars highlight landmark debates and Supreme Court cases in the evolution of the U.S. Constitution. | ||
| Also at 2 p.m. Eastern on the Civil War, historians talk about Robert E. Lee as a complex figure whose legacy has evolved over time. | ||
| And at 8 p.m. Eastern on Lectures in History, when Kentucky became a state in 1792, it had a choice, keep slavery or abolish it. | ||
| University of Kentucky professor Melanie Gohn teaches a class on the state's decision and its unique relationship with the institution of slavery until the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. | ||
| Exploring the American story. | ||
| Watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN invites you on a powerful journey through the stories that define a nation. | ||
| From the halls of our nation's most iconic libraries comes America's Book Club, a bold, original series where ideas, history, and democracy meet. | ||
| Hosted by renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein, each week features in-depth conversations with the thinkers shaping our national story. | ||
| Among this season's remarkable guests, John Grisham, master storyteller of the American justice system. | ||
| Justice Amy Coney Barrett, exploring the Constitution, the court, and the role of law in American life. | ||
| Famed chef and global relief entrepreneur Jose Andres, reimagining food. | ||
| Henry Louis Gates, chronicler of race, identity, and the American experience. | ||
| The books, the voices, the places that preserve our past and spark the ideas that will shape our future. | ||
| America's Book Club, premiering this fall, Sundays at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| I see you interviewed the other night. | ||
| I watched it about 2 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| There was a little thing called C-SPAN, which I don't know how many people were watching. | ||
| Don't worry, you were in prime time too, but they happen to have a little rerun. | ||
| Do you really think that we don't remember what just happened last week? | ||
| Thank goodness for C-SPAN, and we all should review the tape. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everyone wonders when they're watching C-SPAN what the conversations are on the floor. | |
| I'm about to read to you something that was published by C-SPAN. | ||
| There's a lot of things that Congress fights about that they disagree on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We can all watch that on C-SPAN. | |
| Millions of people across the country tuned into C-SPAN. | ||
| That was a made-for-C-SPAN moment. | ||
| If you watch on C-SPAN, you're going to see me physically across the aisle every day, just trying to build relationships and try to understand their perspective and find common ground. | ||
| And welcome forward to everybody watching at home. | ||
| We know C-SPAN covers this live as well. | ||
| We appreciate that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And one can only hope that he's able to watch C-SPAN on a black and white television set in his prison cell. | |
| This is being carried live by C-SPAN. | ||
| Is being watched not only in this country, but it's being watched around the world right now. | ||
| Mike said before I happened to listen to him, he was on C-SPAN 1. | ||
| That's a big upgrade, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Trump announced a deal to allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States. | |
| That announcement, as the president signed a number of executive orders, he also answered reporter questions during this 50-minute Oval Office event. | ||
| Thank you very much. |