Andrew Clavin dissects Charles Manson’s life as a cautionary tale of 1960s chaos, tracing his rise from institutionalized psychopathy to cult leader exploiting disillusioned youth amid sexual liberation and utopian collapse. He contrasts Manson’s "lake of fire" death with Steve Bannon’s "special room in hell," framing both as symptoms of moral decay, while critiquing Glenn Thrush’s scandals as evidence of double standards. Clavin ties Manson’s cult to modern political hypocrisy—like Clinton vs. Moore—and rejects transgender ideology, arguing biological sex is immutable. Shifting to Thanksgiving, he debunks leftist myths, citing Governor Bradford’s 1623 edict and the Pilgrims’ failed communism, which capitalism fixed, calling it divine proof of individualism’s superiority over collectivism. The episode ends by linking today’s identity politics to tribalism, using Reed College’s King Tut debates as a modern parallel to historical conflicts. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, Steve Bannon's in trouble again at a gathering in Florida.
The Breitbart firebrand claimed that there's a special room in hell for never Trump Republicans.
Then Charles Manson died and reported that, no, it's all just one big lake of fire.
Bannon has yet to retract his statement.
Speaking of special rooms in hell, Michael Knowles will be in this room with us to discuss Thanksgiving trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshaw, dipsy-topsy, no round as it bitties in.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So if there are special rooms in hell, are they better than the other rooms in hell or worse?
Like, do you get, do you have to reserve like a special room?
And like, are all the like the rapists and murderers in one place and then the never Trump Republicans get a kind of nice, slightly nicer room in hell?
I don't, you know, I just always wondered how that works.
Why are there always special rooms?
And it seems like you could cover that.
Anyway, never mind.
The Clayfulness Weekend has come to an end.
For those of you who are listening to Another Kingdom, it wasn't quite as bad for Charles Manson.
He wasn't listening.
That's the way it goes.
Another Kingdom is our podcast that Knowles and I are doing over at iTunes and Ricochet.
It's a fantasy thriller.
We'll talk more about it when Knowles gets here.
But you know, while I was doing this, when we were doing this, I had no idea.
This sounds silly, but I had no idea how to do a podcast.
It's absolutely true.
You know, when you have to be the guy putting it up and getting it all together, it becomes very complicated.
And Knowles and I have talked about the fact that we felt that Satan was working against us because every single thing went wrong.
But I actually, I went on Skillshare, this collection of classes, online classes, that teaches you about different things.
So you go on Skillshare if you want to, I don't know, get a new leg up at work.
You want to come in and say, oh yeah, I know how to do that too.
I didn't know how to do it before, but now I do.
If you want to go off in a different tack in your career, or if you want to get a new hobby, go on Skillshare and you can take classes.
And I went on and did the podcast stuff because it really, it really is educational.
Skillshare has over 3 million members and over 17,000 classes.
It's like the Netflix for online learning.
You can take classes in graphic design, DSLR photography, social media marketing, digital illustration, much more.
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Perfect if you're looking to build your career or start the side career of your dreams.
So like I said, I did that.
I did the podcast thing and I did the writing one because I wanted to test it for you to make sure, you know, was it good advice?
And it was.
And marketing too, which I didn't know enough about.
Skillshare is giving my listeners a one-month free trial of unlimited access to its over 17,000 classes.
Go to www.skillshare.com slash Andrew and you get a free month.
Check it out because it really does teach you all kinds of things, even like calligraphy, crazy stuff like that, photography, things that you might not have tried before that you might learn a lot about.
So I got to talk about, I'm going to talk about the sex scandals.
I love the fact that Glenn Thrush, the New York Times White House reporter, is now caught up his women saying that he got them drunk and started mashing them and all this stuff.
And the only reason I like that is because Thrush is one of the guys who was exposed in some of the WikiLeaks emails as sharing his material with the Clinton campaign.
And he said, you know, oh, I'm just a hack.
So you tell me what to write, basically.
I'm a hack.
And then the New York Times hired him to cover the White House, along with Maggie Haberman, who is also identified by the Clinton campaign.
So the fact that he's now actually, you know, who would have believed that a guy who declares himself a hack also had some other problems that might be a problem for them?
I think he's been suspended by the Times while they investigate.
But before we get to that, I have to talk about Charles Manson, obviously the mass murderer, cult leader who died at 83 in prison.
And the reason I want to talk about it, you know, I spent my life as a crime writer, I'm a crime novelist.
I write crime novels.
And I started out very early on that I wanted to write novels that had meaning, that were rich, that were visionary, that had a vision, included a vision, and weren't just about who killed who and what action scene and all that.
I wanted to do all that stuff so you would get so wrapped up in the story, and it would only be later as you were kind of coming back out of the story that you would start to think, yeah, there was also a kind of a rich idea of what life is like.
And if you're listening to Another Kingdom, you'll see it's not just a story about like ogres and monsters and murder.
It's also a story that presents a vision of the world.
It's not just political, it's also personal and religious and all kinds of things.
But it's all kind of wrapped up in the story.
And as I was looking at Charles Manson's story, reminding myself of what it was, it came to me like a crime novel.
And I started to realize, you know, this was, in some ways, a meaningful, a meaningful story.
I mean, Manson, Manson was just a complete loser from the beginning.
I mean, in some ways, if you could have pity for somebody who did so much evil, you would have to have pity for him.
He was the child, the bastard child of a prostitute.
He was born when he was born.
This is kind of awful.
It's kind of heartbreaking.
On his birth certificate, it said no name Maddox.
That was his name.
No name Maddox.
Because nobody knew who his father was.
Nobody knew, you know, he's just this hooker basically gave birth to him.
Obviously, I think he was sexually abused.
Obviously, he was psychopathic.
He was in the system so much.
He was in prison so much of his life, even before the murders and everything, that he begged them to keep him in prison.
He said he didn't know how to live outside of prison.
He wished they would keep him, but they didn't send him out.
And then, I don't know how else to put this, Manson got his big break.
And his big break was the 60s.
And in the 60s, you know, people don't remember now how things fell apart.
They see the hippies, they see Woodstock, but they don't remember that the very fabric of American life kind of deteriorated in certain segments of society.
In certain segments of society, if you looked at it, it was still going on as if it were still the 50s.
But certain segments of society, college campuses, places where young people gathered, the underground artistic life, they really came apart at the seams.
It's hard, you know, it's hard to tell you what it was like to live through some of that as a little kid, or really I was a teenager, I shouldn't say a little kid.
You know, we had a, when I was a kid, we had a health class, and it was taught by Miss Rose from Florida.
I'm sure she's passed away by now, but like Miss Rose was like a nice southern lady who came in and she came in, this was her first year, and she came in to teach us about health.
It was called health.
But it was really sex ed, that's what it was.
And so she would come in and she would teach us how to be proper ladies and gentlemen.
And meanwhile, things had so fallen apart.
And I grew up in a very pleasant, nice suburb.
Things had so fallen apart that I was sitting next to a girl I was sleeping with.
Another girl right down the road had had an abortion.
Guys were taking drugs.
Everybody was screwing everybody else.
I mean, and if you had asked us a year before, we would have told you that we would be virgins when we were married.
I mean, that's how fast it fell apart.
It was really like if you had been talking, yeah, I think it would be the right thing to do.
And we weren't religious or anything.
It was just the way everybody sort of felt.
You know, yeah, you know, maybe you'd have a fling with a bad girl or something like that, and then you'd get married.
That was kind of the way you thought.
And the next year, you know, like I was 15, you were sleeping with nice girls, and everybody was doing it.
It was just what was being done.
So it was a complete unraveling.
It was unraveling where I was in a fairly staid, well-put-together suburbs.
Just think of what was happening in, you know, in other places.
Now, Manson wanted to be a singer-songwriter.
That was kind of the dream he had.
And just by chance, he kind of bumped into Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys.
And the Beach Boys actually recorded one of his songs, which was just awful.
It's just a terrible, terrible song.
But I don't think they released it until after he became famous with the murder.
They played just a little bit.
It was just terrible.
Come on, come on to the murder.
My love is your Lord, and you never will.
It's called something like Never Learn Not to Love or something like this.
But, you know, the other thing I want to point out about this, about the 60s, of course, is it's also hard for people now who didn't live through it to understand that we thought, even I, for about six months, although I was so cynical even as a kid that I didn't really buy into it, but people thought that a new world had come upon us, a new paradise.
There was not going to be any war.
It was going to be the age of Aquarius.
We're all going to love one another, the sexual freedom.
And a lot of times people say, oh, it was the pill.
The pill brought all this sexual freedom.
But that's only half true.
You know, the idea of sexual freedom has been in the Western consciousness from the beginning.
The idea that marriage is prison, the idea that marriage strangles the soul and our sexual lives should be free.
That's been with us for hundreds and hundreds of years.
The pill just made it more possible that you could sleep with somebody and she wouldn't get immediately pregnant.
That was the only big difference there.
So, you know, it's funny, I'm thinking about Forrest Gump.
You know, if you've seen the film Forrest Gump, Forrest Gump is about the idea that America has this essentially stupid decency that goes through all these changes in life and sort of passes.
Forrest Gump kind of represents an America that is stupid but also smart.
It's stupid but virtuous and this virtue is its smartness.
And yet, I can't help but thinking that Forrest Gump passes through that picture in some ways with his virtue unscathed, but I'm not sure that is what happened to America.
Anyway, so Manson fell in with Dennis Wilson and the Beach Boys and they recorded some of the songs and all this and there was also a producer, Terry Melcher, but Melcher refused to give Manson a record contract.
So Manson is now in California and he sets up this cult.
And what's fascinating about this cult, okay, is that it's largely white middle-class girls who come and become like his sex slaves.
And it's these girls who are some of them well brought up, you know, or at least from nice homes, who knows what they had gone through.
But a lot of them, it was the drugs.
You know, you started taking, did anything good come out of that culture?
I remember being told, oh man, if you want to be a writer, you have to take LSD.
And I kept thinking like, eh, that doesn't, it's not making sense to me.
You know, if you ever want to be a writer, your brain is all you got.
Why would I take something that's going to turn it to glue?
And I never did.
I never did.
You know, I smoked a little dope.
We all smoked dope.
But I must have smoked dope like five times.
And I thought like, duh, it's boring, you know.
But like, but everybody was pushing LSD on you, mushrooms, cocaine, all that stuff.
And I just kind of stayed away from it.
But like, nothing good came out of it.
So a lot of these women started out and they started taking drugs.
They started taking hallucinogens.
And Manson manipulated them.
And he would have sex with all of them.
And he would tell them who they could have sex with.
And he would tell them when they could have sex.
And he developed this cult that was largely based on these white middle-class women.
Here is one of them, Leslie Van Houten.
Van Houten was one of the murderers in the Tate Lobianka murders that are the big murders that Manson was put away for.
But she has received parole pending, I think, Jerry Brown's approval.
I don't think she's gotten out yet.
But here she is explaining to the parole board, this is an actual tape of her parole hearing, and she's much older now, right?
This is many, many years.
It was 69 when the murders were committed.
So we're talking like almost 40 years later, more than 40 years later.
Here she is telling the parole board how she felt about Manson at the time.
I believe that because I believed that Manson was Jesus Christ and that it was something that had to be done.
And that while it was not something that I felt good about or that it was like war.
And we were going through combat training at the ranch and really prepped like that.
But your belief system led you to believe that someone who was Jesus Christ would instigate racial wars between blacks and whites?
Yeah, he said that it was the blacks' turn.
That the white had been on top for too long, and all they ever did was put harm on other people that were not like them.
And that the last time he came, he had been crucified, and this time he would have to make himself known.
So Manson was Jesus Christ, and he was bringing about a race war for the sake of the blacks.
The blacks had been oppressed, so he had this crazy idea.
He called it Helter Skelter based on the Beatles song.
And the race war was going to be called Helter Skelter, and that he had some idea that these murders were going to start this race war, which would then elevate black people and he would be their savior.
I can't help but be fascinated with the fact that women were taken in by this guy and were attracted to this guy.
And we all know that when some of these sex killers and serial killers who go to prison, they get fan mail and love letters from women.
There's something about them that women find obviously not all women, some women find appealing, and this guy used that.
And I just want to play a little bit of this interview with Manson because when I look at Manson, I see like a street person.
I see like a guy, I mean, just an absolute psychopath.
Nothing he says makes sense.
I picked this little cut because it's where the interviewer asks him if he has any remorse for the terrible, terrible things he did.
And this is what he said.
From your words, as Mr. Emmons quotes them in this book, it's clear that you were guilty of murder.
And yet he says in all his conversations with you, he never heard you express remorse.
Have you never felt it?
Remorse for what?
You people have done everything in the world to me.
Doesn't that give me equal right?
I can do anything I want to you people at any time I want to because that's what you've done to me.
If you spit in my face and smack me in the mouth and throw me in solitary confinement for nothing, what do you think's going to happen when I get out of here?
Feel Guilty?00:02:04
Guilty.
Hmm.
I wouldn't do anything that I felt guilty about.
You don't feel guilty at all?
There's no need to feel guilty.
I haven't done anything I'm ashamed of.
Maybe I haven't done enough.
I might be ashamed of that for not doing enough, for not giving enough, for not being more perceptive, for not being aware enough, for not understanding, for being stupid.
Maybe I should have killed four or five hundred people, then I would have felt better.
I'm going to have felt like I've really offered society something.
So, you know, I look at a guy like that and I just see, you know, I mean, just a guy who's ranting and raving, obviously, should be in prison forever.
I mean, the only reason he got off without the death penalty is that the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was illegal in California, and so he didn't get the death penalty.
He spent his life, but he kept coming up for parole with his swastika like carved into his forehead.
So, you know, I mean, at least we can have enough faith in the system that he was kept in prison his whole life.
But there is something about this.
There's something about the fact that this was magnetic to people, and people went for this.
You know, the people who surrounded him, he became a cult figure to these people.
There was a woman who just about two years ago said she was going to marry him in prison, a beautiful, beautiful 25-year-old woman.
Now, I should say, before I play this clip of her, I should say that there is some talk that it was all a con, that she was just trying to get possession of his body so she could use his body as a museum piece or sell tickets to look at his body or something like this.
But here she is being asked, Ashton, I don't mean to, I shouldn't laugh, but I mean, it is just the depravity of humanity is quite amazing.
Her name was Ashton Burton, and Manson called her star.
And she's asked why she is marrying this guy.
Well, because I love him.
Sleeping Comfortably00:03:04
And I've somehow I've got half a brain that I can see that he is the one that knows what's going on.
He's the one that is in the truth whenever nobody else is.
And what is it about him compared to other people you've met in your lifetime that makes him so unique and different?
Charlie always tells the truth no matter what.
He always tells the truth, no one.
So I'm talking about this as a crime writer, a crime novelist, which is what I am.
I've been what I've been most of my life.
I mean, even Another Kingdom, even though it's a fantasy story, it is a crime story too.
I'm talking about what this story means and what kind of vision it presents.
And I'm going to get back to that in a minute.
But first, let's talk about sleeping.
Now, when I talk about sleeping, it's always theoretical because I haven't slept for 20 years.
I'm basically awake.
I'm awake so much.
I mean, I really, I just was thinking about this the other day.
I don't live an ordinary life.
I woke up this morning at 5 because I had to do an interview.
Usually I wake up at 5.30 and I'm working till about 8 and I really don't stop, you know.
And even then, I'm kind of doing stuff.
I just suddenly dawned on me that this is not a normal life, you know.
But I don't sleep a lot.
I love to stay awake.
So it's really, really important to me that my mattress is comfortable because I am in bed and I do read and I do a lot of stuff, you know, lying around in bed and thinking and taking notes and all that stuff.
So I want a very, very comfortable mattress.
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I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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You can watch the entire show right there.
If you just subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, a lousy 10 bucks a month, what are you doing with it?
50 Bucks for a Better Night's Sleep00:10:31
You probably just, oh, do something terrible that you'll only hurt yourself.
Give us the 10 bucks.
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You get a whole year, plus you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr, which magically fills up every time I speak.
So let me just, I want to wrap this up and I just talk about why I'm talking about it when all the sex stuff is coming up, all these sex accusations.
What happened was Manson finally decided to, the people in his cult would do anything he told them to do.
And a lot of people don't know this.
He wasn't at the murders.
He wasn't at the murders.
He just commanded them to commit the murders and he sent his minions out like winged monkeys and they did commit the murders.
And this record producer, Terry Melcher, that he had known, had refused to give him a record contract.
And so he was angry at him.
So he sent his minions to Terry Melcher's house, even though he knew that Melcher no longer lived there.
He knew they didn't live there.
Who did live there was this very beautiful actress named Sharon Tate.
She was a B-movie actress.
She was married to a budding director, Roman Polanski.
And the only thing that has ever in any way mitigated in my mind the fact that Roman Polanski drugged and raped a little girl has been this trauma in his life.
I mean, I think this would have done it to anybody.
This is a little grim, but I really have to tell you because I think it's an important part of the story.
You know, let's take a quick look at Sharon Tate.
I mean, you'll see exactly what kind of actress is.
This is Valley of the Dolls.
It was a soft core, there was no nudity in it in those days, but it was kind of a softcore, sexy story by Jacqueline Suzanne, who was a softcore, sexy novelist.
And here's just a scene with Sharon Tate in it.
Hello?
Yes, I'll accept the call.
Hello, Mother.
Well, I just got in.
I thought it was too late to call you.
But I just sent you $50 last week, Mother.
Okay, I'll send you $50 as soon as I get my paycheck.
You told me Grant's been sick, Mother, and I know about the oil burner.
Okay, I'll take the mink to Uncle Iris again.
He'll give me a couple hundred for it.
Mother, I know I don't have any talent, and I know all I have is a body, and I am doing my best exercises.
Goodbye, Mother.
I'll wire you the money first thing in the morning.
Goodbye.
Oh, to hell with him.
Let him drew.
So that's a very promo scene because she obviously doesn't have any talent, and she does have this body, and she's dressed with the, you know, so you can see as much of it as was at that time possible.
But here's the thing, and this is gruesome, but it's worth talking about because it is part of the meaning of all this.
She was eight and a half months pregnant.
And when these guys burst in with this insane mission to kill everybody in the room, they killed eight people if you include the, they killed six people one night and two people the next night at another house.
But it's eight people altogether if you include the unborn child.
She was eight and a half months pregnant.
She pleaded with them to let her live just long enough to have the baby, to deliver the baby.
And some of the story is that when she died, she was still trying to explain to him that she was going to be a mother, that she shouldn't kill him.
All right.
So, really terrible.
But it speaks to something, to where we are right now.
Because this dream, this dream of sexual liberation, which has been with us forever, doesn't take into account, as feminism doesn't take into account, as most commentary doesn't take into account, how deep and human and dangerous and exciting and creative the sexual impulse is.
The sexual impulse is at the heart of our physical humanity, and it is a vortex of both creation and destruction.
And one of the things that drives me crazy when we're talking about sexuality is people expect everything to go fairly, everything to go nicely, everyone to behave politely.
That's never happened in all of human history.
And so when some visionary clown or group of visionary clowns comes along and tells you that we're going to take the shackles off, we're going to take the shackles off.
We're going to get rid of these norms like marriage and all these imprisoning structures that people have built, it's like getting rid of a wall before you know it's on the other side of the wall.
It's like, what do I need this shark cage for?
What do I need this protective structure for?
This protective structure that we were so quick to throw away, so desperately want to throw away because it feels like our humanity is being shackled, was built for a reason.
And when they came along in the 60s and told us it was going to be the age of Aquarius, now everyone's going to sleep together and everyone's going to be fine and it's going to be free love, baby.
You know, it's all going to be Woodstock all the time.
Charles Manson was created in that moment.
Charles Manson was created by people with their dreams of utopian humanity, with their dreams of an age of Aquarius.
Charles Manson was the age of Aquarius.
He was the age of Aquarius the way it really looks because that's what happens when you let people free.
Our souls, our bodies are machines built to do things that our mind and souls know that they shouldn't always be doing.
And we have built these structures to protect ourselves from the vortex of our own brokenness and sin.
And, you know, it's just, so when he, and the women, and the women flock to him, the women who flock to him are also behaving in a way that is natural to them.
You know, I mean, this is also part of our humanity.
So when I see all these people being accused of things and how we're going to handle this and how it's all going to change, it's not going to change.
It's not going to change.
And we've reached this point now with all this sexual malfeasance, we've reached this point where it really is all about our political points of view.
People are saying, well, yeah, we'll throw Clinton under the bus because we don't need him anymore.
Well, what about Al Franken?
No, no, no.
We're not going to throw Al Franken.
We need that vote.
Well, what about Roy Moore?
You know, he was banging on the Ten Commandments, and aren't we going to not support him if it's true that he was messing around with a 14-year-old?
No, no, no.
We've got to support Roy Moore because we hate the other side so much.
All I can say is that we can't live where only one side is following the rules, right?
We can't live where Clinton gets off and Roy Moore has to be penalized.
It's not going to work.
I know a lot of people are saying, oh, this is terrible.
The conservatives are giving up their morals.
The left has already given up their morals.
But look, this is a political fight.
We can't live where only one side follows the rules.
I think that we're going to have to start thinking really about what the rules are.
And in order to do that, we have to stop getting rid of lies.
We have to stop.
You can't regulate a society through lies.
We can't tell ourselves that men and women are the same.
We can't tell ourselves they have the same proclivities.
We can't tell ourselves they have the same vision of life.
We can't tell ourselves they have the same sexuality.
We can't tell ourselves that you can magically become a woman by wishing it so or having pieces of your body cut off.
You can't.
It can't be done.
And until we look at ourselves truthfully, until we look at ourselves truthfully, we have no idea what the rules should be anymore.
We do not know what the rules should be anymore.
And all I'm telling you is that the structures that were put in place, we may need new structures, they may have to be modernized, but the structures that were put in place were put in place because underneath it all is Manson and his followers.
That's who's waiting there.
It is not paradise.
It is not sexual love and peace and Woodstock forever.
That's what it is.
That's who Charlie Manson was.
All right, have we got Knowles?
Ah!
Hey!
There he is!
She is the star of another kingdom, not to mention the Michael Moll show.
Come on.
It is pretty cool.
We did get a bunch of tweets over the weekend.
It was a tough one for Charles Manson.
He didn't listen.
But, you know, obviously the new episode came out.
A lot of people listened to it.
And you can get it on Stitcher, Google Play, or iTunes, wherever fine narrative podcasts from the right-wing conspiracy are downloaded.
I saw, I looked at it, and it had 700, over 700 five-star reviews.
This was the shocking point.
I do like the one that Hillary Clinton gave us that said, I don't like Michael Knowles, get him out of there, you know.
But that's fine.
Hillary is entitled to her free speech.
Even though she wanted to curtail our free speech, she's entitled to her own.
No, the reviews have been great, and the reviews for even you have been great.
Of course, they don't know you personally, or they wouldn't be.
People keep saying, are you putting up the reviews?
And I thought, I don't know anybody who would say anything nice about it.
It's true, yeah.
If it were Drew writing the reviews or like Sweet Little Elise or somebody, it'd all be like three stars, you know, five for you, one for me.
Exactly.
Even Zap.
Anyway, it's been a tremendous success, and it's been just a joy doing it.
The really nice thing about it is that it means that, it means two things.
One, conservatives aren't Philistines when it comes to art.
Yes, it's possible.
It is great, you know.
And the other is that conservatives can produce art that Hollywood can, they can keep the gates closed, they can keep the blacklist, they can keep conservatives out, but we can still make art that will be listened to by 20,000, 30,000 people per episode.
You know, one of the reasons I keep pleading with my audience and your audience to sign up for this thing and subscribe is because if we get enough success with it, I will push, I swear I will push this down Hollywood's throat.
I will force them to make it, but I need a lot of support, a lot of more, you know, audience, and then like I'll just cram it down there.
It would be, you know, for a year, it's, Target, we're at Thanksgiving.
I have a lot to be thankful for this year.
It's been a very nice year to me.
And to begin the year by shoving a blank book mocking Democrats down New York Publishing's throat, and then to end the year by shoving a conservative, written by conservatives, non-politically correct fantasy down Hollywood's throat, it would be the perfect bookend.
We got to do it.
We got to make it happen.
We'd have a parade.
All right, let's talk about Thanksgiving.
Your show comes on after mine.
Pilgrim Communal Failures00:09:26
You will be talking about Thanksgiving at length, but I want to give people a preview because one of the things I've been wondering about, there are all these myths about Thanksgiving.
And every year, Rush Limbaugh tells the story about how it was to celebrate the end of communism or something like this.
I've always wondered, is there any truth to this?
Is that a true story?
I mean, I know Rush, everything Rush says is true.
It is true by the very fact of Rush says it.
It becomes true when he says it, yes.
I wondered this too.
Obviously, I repeated the story blindly for years without really looking into it.
But I've wondered too, is that the true story?
So I looked into it, and the short answer is yes, it is true.
The left has tried to attack this version of the story.
They point out that the first Thanksgiving that we think of as Thanksgiving was in 1621, one year after the pilgrims sailed, and the Indians came and there were a lot of Indians who showed up.
Everybody ate turkey and duck and goose and the Indians brought some deer that they had just killed and they had a nice time.
But this was just a regular harvest festival.
It happened around this time of year, late September, early October.
It was a regular harvest festival.
They had these in England.
And in many ways, this wasn't a thanks for the abundance that they'd gotten from their harvest.
It was the last meal of a condemned man because they knew that this winter was going to be brutal.
They didn't have enough food to live.
And it ended up being a very difficult winter.
It became a very difficult winter for a few reasons.
One of which is that the pilgrims tried communism.
When they got there, and that's not an exaggeration, by the way.
I was reading William Bradford, Governor Bradford's of Plymouth Plantation last night, the definitive account of the Plymouth era written by the governor of the colony.
And he talks at length about the communal plan, the common course, frequently referred to as communism.
And he says, quote, At length, after much debate of things, the governor gave way that they should set corn, every man for his own particular, and in that regard, trust to themselves.
In all other things, they would do it as they did before, but instead of dividing up the land for everybody, they would give each man his own parcel of land that he had to work.
They had this problem where a lot of people were saying, oh, I'm sick, I'm tired, I'm coming down with people wouldn't work.
They wouldn't work.
They would stay home, they wouldn't work the fields.
People started to get a little angry.
So Bradford writes, This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble and gave far better consent.
The women now willingly went into the field and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability, they'd say, oh, and they didn't want to go out.
And Bradford, so as we don't miss the point, so I don't think he's talking about someone else.
He gets very explicit.
He says, the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times, applauded by Karl Marx of even later times than Bradford is writing, that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing as if they were wiser than God.
Oh, wow.
He even talks about how it bred discontent everywhere because you'd have a few women left in the colony and they would be forced to do all the work for all of the men.
And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery.
Neither could many husbands well brook it.
So the husbands didn't like their wives being used either.
And I take special interest in this because I'm descended from four of these people.
You are?
So yeah, believe it or not, I know I look swarthy and Sicilian, but I also am descended from one pilgrim, a guy named Dr. Samuel Fuller, the doctor of the colony, and three of the strangers.
So they were not separatists, they were not religious zealots, they just wanted to come and have a new life and make a little bit of money.
And those guys were Stephen Hopkins, who had earlier been on a shipwreck in Bermuda, which is what Shakespeare's The Tempest is based on.
Yeah.
He was a mutineer.
And you're related to one of the guys that they based the Tempest.
I am on Caliban, right?
Direct descendant, direct descendant of Caliban.
But he was a mutineer and he caused a lot of trouble on the Mayflower.
Then there was another guy, Francis Eaton.
He was fine.
And then John Billington, who Bradford said was one of the most profanest men he'd ever met.
He said his family was full of degenerates.
Yeah, that was the direct line.
And I think he was thrown into the stocks a number of times, almost killed.
Yeah, so that's the group that we come from.
Okay, so they did try communism and find it didn't work.
They found it didn't work.
And to Rush's point, this was the first time it was called Thanksgiving.
Was an edict from the secular government from Governor Bradford that said we will celebrate Thanksgiving, which was really, I suppose, the third Thanksgiving, it was the third year in 1623.
Rush, as always, absolutely right.
And there's so much disinformation about Thanksgiving.
I'm going to go into it.
I'm going to do a full show on it on Wednesday and we'll air it Thursday too.
But there's this idea that we came here.
The Indians were very nice to us.
They gave us corn.
They were all united.
They were just charitable, taught us how to eat.
And then we just butchered all of them.
That was our thank you to them.
And it really, it's so paternalistic.
It's so condescending to, first of all, it's anti-historical to say that these were united tribes.
They weren't united for more than 30-mile stretches.
But it's so condescending to say that they were all peaceful and naive.
There was nothing naive about these people.
They dealt with Europeans a little bit before, and especially they'd massacred some French and some Englishmen, and they were smart though, and they were relatively sophisticated statesmen.
And so they used the arrival of the English to get an advantage over one tribe or to consolidate power in this area.
and the English used them to some advantage, too.
So they were people?
They were people.
They were people.
They were political actors who went to war and were diplomatic and gave each other considerable respect.
And the real story is just much more complicated than the ridiculous left-wing narrative about it.
And by the way, there was a relative peace for well over 50 years.
There was a relative peace for a long time until poor decisions were made, particularly by the child of Massasoit, who was our ally and who benefited greatly from the English, and the English benefited greatly from him.
This Indian made a bad calculation, and it didn't work out very well for his tribe.
But this peace endured for half of a century.
Is it true that when the pilgrims arrived, they found an Indian who spoke English?
Talk about the divine providence.
That story has always struck me as divine providence.
It's really bizarre.
It's even more bizarre than you think it is.
So they were aiming for New York, for the mouth of the Hudson River.
They get blown way off course, and the master of the ship knew they were blown off course, but they weren't blown off course enough to end up at Boston Harbor.
They weren't blown off course enough to end up at a nice harbor.
They ended up off of Cape Cod.
They get off the boat, and some Indians start to attack them, basically.
They found huge stores of corn, just right where they were, just beautiful stores of corn where they were, and not a lot of people.
But they end up getting attacked.
They go a little bit further, end up at Plymouth.
The thing they notice is that the fields are completely cleared.
They're totally cleared.
They're ready for agriculture.
But all they find are the whitened bones of the dead.
Excuse me.
Because a plague had wiped out virtually the entire tribes of this area just within the previous two years.
So the land is cleared for them.
All is peaceful.
All is nice.
They're waiting for the settle skirmish with the Indians.
They then see one Indian boldly walk toward them alone.
They get their muskets ready.
They don't know what to do.
He just keeps walking toward them and he says two words.
Welcome, Englishman.
His name is Samasset, possibly Somerset, an English version.
He happened to be visiting from Maine, where he had run into a couple of English fishermen a couple years previously.
So he was just visiting.
The rest of the tribe did not speak English.
But then out comes Squanto, who was a prisoner of the chief Massasoit.
Squanto had been taken by John Smith, the English explorer, brought to Spain, escaped somehow, and might have been smuggled out by monks, ends up in London, then makes it back on another ship to the New World, ends up exactly where the pilgrims land.
Accidentally land.
Accidentally landed, not at the place they wanted to, not at the place they should have, but exactly where they do land.
And he comes out and speaks basically perfect English to them and converses, talks to them about Spain, talks to them about various neighborhoods in London, and also then uses them for his own political machinations.
But basically, the one guy in the hemisphere that speaks fluent English ends up exactly where the pilgrims accidentally land.
Unbelievable.
It is an unbelievable story.
Michael Knowles, the Michael Knowles show is coming up after this.
It's always good talking to you, Knowles.
I'll talk to you soon.
Unbelievable Encounter00:05:39
You know, I was in church this Sunday.
The reading was the parable of the talents.
And if you don't know the parable of the talents, it's where we get the word talent.
A talent was a block of silver and a block, yeah, block of silver.
And it's a parable about a guy who gives each of his servants a certain number of talents.
When he gives one talent, when he gives two, when he gives five, I don't know.
I can't remember what it is.
And he goes away.
And when he comes back, one of them has invested his five talents and made five more.
And he says, well done.
You know, you've done a great job.
And the other has invested his two talents and made two more.
And he says, great, good job.
You did what you could with what you had.
And the guy with one talent was so afraid of losing it, he buried it in the ground.
And the master, who kind of represents God in the story, says, that was the wrong thing to do.
You know, you could have at least invested it and given me interest on this.
And I was thinking, gee, God is a capitalist.
You know, he said he's obviously a capitalist.
So when they tried communism, said we thought we were wiser than God, they were actually right.
God is a capitalist.
He invests in us to use our talents.
And that's, like I said, that's where you get the word talent as we use it.
He invests in us, our talents.
He expects a return on his money.
He doesn't work for it.
He just gives us the dough, just like any capitalist.
All right, our crappy culture.
So many years ago, an exhibit came.
It came to New York.
I think he traveled all around the country.
And it was the tomb of Tutten Common, King Tutankhamun, the Egyptian pharaoh child king.
And it became a huge, huge smash so that they were selling t-shirts, tutten common, king tut.
You know, King Tut was everywhere.
And you know how these cultural things take off sometimes.
And it just became this big, big deal.
So Steve Martin, in a hilarious, absolutely hilarious Saturday night live routine, came out and said, this was too commercial.
And I'm going to sing a little song to bring us all back to our senses.
So here's just a minute of that routine.
I'd like to talk seriously just for a moment.
One of the great art exhibits ever to tour the United States is the treasures of Tutankhamun or King Tut.
But I think it's a national disgrace the way we have commercialized it with trinkets and toys, t-shirts and posters.
And about three months ago, I was up in the woods and I wrote a song.
I tried to use the ancient modalities and melodies.
I would like to do it for you right now.
Maybe we can all learn something from this.
He was a young man.
He never thought he'd see.
People stand in line.
See the boy king.
King Tut.
How'd you get so funky?
Did you do the funky?
You've got to use the ancient modalities, he says.
And my favorite line of the song is later on where he says, he's dancing on the Nile.
The ladies love his style.
Anyway, at Reed College, a small liberal arts school, I'm reading from Newsbusters P.J. Gladnick, at Reed College, a small liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, a 39-year-old Saturday Night Live skit, this one, recently caused an uproar over cultural appropriation.
In the classic Steve Martin skit, he performs a goofy song King Tut, meant to satirize a Tutton Common exhibit tour in the U.S. and to criticize the commercialization of Egyptian culture.
This is a guy writing in The Atlantic about this.
He says, you could say that his critique is weak, that his humor is lame, that his dance moves are unintentionally offensive or downright racist.
All of that and more was debated in a humanities course at Reed.
But many students found the video so egregious that they opposed its very presence in class.
Says one student, that's like somebody making a song just littered with the N-word everywhere.
This is a member of Reedy's Against Racism.
He told the student newspaper when asked about Martin's performance, she said, the Egyptian garb, she told The Atlantic, the Egyptian garb of the backup dancers and singers, many of whom are African Americans, is racist as well.
The gold face of the saxophone dancer leaving its tomb is an exhibition of blackface.
I just, you know, what gets me about identity politics, though it struck me about this as I was reading this, is identity politics.
They call themselves progressives.
But you ever notice that everything progressives say is actually the opposite of the truth?
Progressives, this is, identity politics is going back to an old idea of tribalism.
Identity politics, we were going past this, and it is in keeping with, it's in keeping with the tattoos and the piercing and these women who go out and protest that they're not allowed to bare their breasts in public and all this stuff.
It's as if, it's as if they want to return to a primitive state.
This is way, when I was in Afghanistan, this is all the people in Afghanistan do is fight over things that happened 300 years ago.
Your tribe member raped a woman in my tribe.
I'm going to kill you.
You know, this was 400 years ago.
Doesn't matter.
It's still alive today.
And this identity politics is just a throwback to this.
The progressivism is progressing right back to primitivism, basically.
It's progressing right back into the past.
All right, tomorrow, we have a guest tomorrow, don't we?
Oh, yeah, this is tomorrow, the Scott Adams.
Great interview.
You've got to listen to this.
Absolutely great.
The Dilbert guy who's also become a big, really fascinating and original observer of Donald Trump.