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July 15, 2024 - Louder with Crowder
12:04
The History of the U.S. Navy: American Masterclass with Historian David Barton | Louder With Crowder
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The history of the United States Navy.
So at the time of this video, it's 2024.
For those watching from the future, from our great AI overlords, we have right now budding AI, drones, even laser weapons.
So who really cares about boats?
The truth is that boats and the United States Navy are as relevant today as they've ever been.
Sea travel, Has played one of the largest roles in history as it relates to global trade, lifting the world out of poverty, and bringing huge swaths of the population into what you now know as the modern world.
Today, you throw in chaos in the Middle East, a gutted defense industrial base, and the looming prospect of a great power war between the United States and China, and you start to get the nautical picture.
To understand, though, The crucial importance of the United States Navy, what role it's played, and really what role it will play going forward, it's imperative that you understand its history.
and hopefully this helps.
Hello, happy 4th!
I'm sitting crisscross applesauce.
Can I say crisscross applesauce?
I think I can.
In front of a teepee of firearms.
You know what that means.
David Barton of Wall Builders is with us today.
And we're going to be talking specifically about, this will be a little bit shorter, because we've covered the First Amendment, Second Amendment, we've covered sort of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, a little bit in some other videos, but this was something that was really interesting to me.
You were talking about the history of the United States and its wars with Islam.
Yeah, what happened was, as soon as we finished the American Revolution in 1783 and 1784, Congress sends Ben Franklin, John Adams, and they sent Thomas Jefferson to say, we're getting attacked all over the world, all over the Mediterranean, which was our world, our commercial world, by all these Muslims.
They're attacking us as Americans.
Find out what's going on.
So they dispatched these three guys as ambassadors to go meet with Muslims and say, what are you doing?
And so what happened was Jefferson Adams wrote back a letter to the State Department in 1786
that said, we asked the Muslim ambassador, why did they attack us?
We've never provoked them.
We've had Muslims in America since 1619.
Why are they attacking us?
And in the letter that was sent to the State Department, it says,
the Muslim told us that it was because of their Quran.
The Koran says they have to do this, that they have to subdue us, and that if they die in battle, they go to Heaven.
And so they went through it, and it's like, oh my God, are you kidding me?
And so Adams and Jefferson, being there in London with this negotiation, actually went out and bought a Koran.
It's 1746, two volumes.
They got it, and they said, I've got to see this myself.
You go to Heaven for killing people?
And so they read that, and so what happens is, over the next years, this escalates.
And they finally reach an agreement that says, look, What would it take for you guys not to attack our ships?
Because every time they saw an American flag going across the Mediterranean on a commercial ship, they attack it, they enslave the crew, they enslave the captain.
They made a ton of money.
In our terms, it'd be up to a million dollars a ship because they sell the captain back for $6,500, they sell the officers back for $3,500, and they sell the sailors back for $1,500.
So we'll give you your crew back for a million bucks.
So we're financing their jihad, essentially.
And so the question was asked, what does it take for you to not attack us?
And they said, well, If you'll build us two or three frigates, and if you'll give us several million a year, we won't attack you.
We had five nations that were going after us.
We had Algiers, and Tunis, and Morocco, and you had Turkey, and you had Tripoli.
And so we signed these treaties to stop that.
And Washington comes into office, and this is the very... This is what you were saying, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, this is the very first federal budget.
This is 1789.
This is the federal budget, 1789.
And right here... That's the whole budget.
That's the entire federal budget.
How did earmarks work at that point?
Yeah, the earmarks are over on the side of the page.
Took a little while.
So at this point, but what's interesting is the biggest line item for the next four presidents, single biggest line item, was paying money to keep Muslims from attacking us.
And so it becomes up to 10% of the federal budget.
So effectively that almost seems as though we started off negotiating with terrorists.
We did.
We negotiated tariffs because at that point we didn't have a Navy.
We had a few ships, privateers.
We had the American Revolution.
And that's why in Washington's seventh year, after having paid this money, he said, would to God that I had a Navy able to crush these enemies of mankind into non-existence.
And so we asked Congress, will you fund me a Navy?
Congress gave him the funding to build our first Navy.
And so it's now congressionally funded.
It was built under John Adams, who's called the father of the American Navy.
And so now Adams is out and Jefferson comes in in So, the reason we have a Navy is entirely due to ships being attacked by Islamic terrorists.
That's the reason.
Because, see, the Constitution does not allow a standing army.
To this day, we do not have a permanent army.
If we do not every two years pass the budget for the army and military, it all goes away.
The Founding Fathers did not want a standing military.
So, it's called the NDAA.
We do this every two years in Congress.
So, what they did was they built a Navy, and when Adams built it, and then Thomas Jefferson inherits the Navy, and at that point, he's paying about 15% of his budget on Muslim terrorists.
He said, not anymore.
I've got a Navy.
I'm putting the Marines on them.
We're taking care of this problem.
And so he, that was the motto back then, millions for defense, not a penny for tribute, because we were paying this huge amount to these Muslim nations.
And that actually brings up, I've read about this, but when I first came here, I said, well, what is this?
It looked almost like an amulet.
Yeah.
He said, no, this is actually, can I touch this?
Absolutely.
This is where the term leatherneck comes from.
Because they got over there and they were going through these nations fighting these Muslim groups that were attacking Americans because the Muslims said you either have to pay well or fight well.
Well, we've been paying well, now we're going to fight well.
At first I thought it was like something from the Game of Thrones, you know, a craft truck for the unsullied.
But, I mean, that's a small neck.
Oh, it is.
And those weren't big guys back then.
Right.
And by the way, this is one of the muskets.
You see the bling all over this musket.
This actually was a British American musket.
It was taken from British Americans, and then the Muslims kind of bedazzled, is what we say.
So the Muslims took this off of one of our guys, and they turned it into one of their muskets.
They were big on bling with it.
They were!
And so our guys are in battle, and they're getting beheaded, and they find out Muslims like going for your neck with swords, and that's where they started wearing leather.
And I noticed, if you can see this, there are what appear to be blade marks.
Do you think this was something that actually might have stopped an attempt?
I doubt that it was, but it certainly is what they used to try to stop attempts, and this is what the attempts were coming with.
That's actually one of the blades from back then, and so this is called a quicksword because it leans out in front, and it gets to your neck pretty fast.
Does the curvature Does your catcher help with decapitation?
It does.
It does help with decapitation, and when you're swinging it, you've got the momentum out front, and so it's real easy to slash and pull.
So they went into battle with an armament designed almost exclusively for beheading.
Well, it is designed for beheading, and it is a very lethal sword.
It's easy.
You can feel it's lightweight.
Very light.
You can go back and forth with it.
It's also capable, you know, if I come this way in a crowd and see you, I'll just come back after you this way, or after I catch you, maybe I just put your eyes out with it.
Oh, geez, I didn't even see that there.
It looks almost like a termite tail.
It's pretty messy.
Wow!
Now, how long did this go on for?
Well, after five years of fighting on the ground conflict, the Muslims came to the table and said, okay, we'll sign a treaty with you guys.
And so they signed a treaty with us, and at that point, this book came out in 1806.
The war went from 1801 to 1805.
This is 1806, and what this is, This is the first Koran ever published in America.
First English Koran published here.
It says Koran 1806.
We've just finished the war.
And the question is, why did we spend so much time fighting these guys?
We don't understand what this is about.
So the largest publisher in the country at that time, Isaiah Thomas, kind of like the Simon Schuster today, put this out with a two-page introduction.
He said, guys, Americans, if you will read this, you'll understand why they went to war against us.
And he says right here, he says, Now obviously a lot of people in the Muslim world say, well there isn't any accurate, you can't really read the Quran unless you read it in Arabic.
Right, right.
of what is contained in this book will render that law contemptible.
Now, obviously a lot of people in the Muslim world say, well, there isn't any accurate...
You can't really read the Quran unless you read it in Arabic.
Right, right.
So what would they say about that book?
See, that is translated into English out of Arabic.
And for Americans, it's, guys, if you want to understand what we're fighting, read what they say.
And so, you know, the other guys say, well, you can't understand it in Arabic.
Yeah, you can.
And the philosophy comes through, and they say, when you see this, you'll say Sharia law is a really bad deal.
And that was the deal.
Sharia law is incompatible with the constitutional freedoms.
There's just no way around it.
Dr. Ben Carson got a lot of flack for saying that.
He didn't say Muslims can't live in the United States.
He said Sharia law because it is a legal doctrine.
It is superior to the Constitution, and it does not give the freedoms or due process or anything else.
So that's what we had, and we thought we were okay, and now Madison becomes president, and we get involved in the War of 1812 against the British.
And at that point in time, the Muslims go, oh look, they're all occupied, let's attack them again.
So they started attacking us again, and that's where we first learned that you need to be able to fight a war on two fronts.
Because Madison is so tied up with the British, we couldn't do anything with the Muslims.
And so as soon as he finished with the British, he went over and whacked the Muslims again and got another peace treaty.
But it was 32 years that we fought Muslims in Barbary Power War.
And if you even think of the Marine Corps hymn, From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli, Tripoli was the nation.
This is the map that was used in 1780.
Tripoli is the entire nation right here that we call Libya.
And by the way, Benghazi is sitting right there.
It was a problem even back then.
Yeah.
So the nation of Tripoli, this is where we spent so much time with Marines and fighting Muslim terrorists.
So that's a 32 year war that America has.
So this idea that it's a new sort of radicalized portion of the Islamic world, and I want to make really clear, we're not talking about all Muslims, we're certainly not talking about all Muslims living in the United States, but this idea that the war in the Middle East or the Islamic portion of the world is really new with only more recently radicalized factions.
It sort of is refuted by the mere notion that the Navy was created solely with the express purpose to fight.
And we have a number of newspapers recording the atrocities done to Americans by Muslims after they would capture them, and it's ISIS kind of stuff.
So this is not a new philosophy.
It's been around for at least 200 years that Americans have dealt with.
What we're doing today is only the second American war on terror.
The first one we had was 32 years.
You know, this one's gone almost two decades now.
But we think this is a new thing and that we can sit down and negotiate.
Adams and Jefferson found out back then you can't negotiate with the philosophy that says you go to heaven by killing people.
And while not every Muslim believes that, certainly the radical, what we call the radicalized parts and the more devout parts, whatever you want to say, that's incompatible with our thinking.
That's why we had to go to war because you can't negotiate with the, we say, hey, let's all be nice to each other.
They say, well, if we kill you, we go to heaven.
And is that why we sort of create, or at least it's seen as a truism, the policy of we don't negotiate with terrorists?
That was part of it, because we were negotiating so heavily back then, it irked the Americans, and that's why that pen came out that says, not a penny for tribute, but millions for defense.
We'll fund the Navy, we'll send the Marines over, we'll do what we have to, but you're not going to hold us captive by making us pay you.
We're funding your war.
And by the way, they were attacking nine nations at the time, not just America.
Yeah, but Great Britain and they were going after France and Spain and Sweden and the Dutch and others, what they called Christian nations.
They had a war against all Christian nations.
So that was a lot of it.
That's why we don't negotiate with terrorists.
That goes back to those shared values.
It's not necessarily about how much you spend, but it's about not bowing down for people who will make sure that you kneel no matter what.
Mr. Barton, thank you very much.
You can watch the other videos that we've done, the other installments on Second Amendment, First Amendment, Civil War, and we are going to have to come back and do a whole segment on World War II because this is just an absolute museum.
Thank you so much, sir.
Thanks, bro.
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