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July 26, 2025 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
59:43
THOUGHTCRIME Ep. 92 — Bring Redskins Back? What Makes An American?

Charlie, Jack, Andrew and Blake look back on the life of American icon Hulk Hogan, and also ask: -Should America bring back the Washington Redskins, Cleveland Indians, and other names lost in the great madness of 2020? -What actually makes a person American, and can one person be more American than another? Support the show

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From the agent.
If they want to get you, they'll get you.
DNSA specifically targets the communications of everyone.
They're collecting your communications.
*Dramatic Music*
Okay, everybody, it is Thought Crime Thursday.
We're finally back to regular order.
I'm in an undisclosed location, and we have the whole gang here.
I believe we have Blake, Andrew, and Jack.
Is that correct?
We have Blake, Andrew, and Jack.
Hello to all of you.
And Jack, I'll just kind of say, how are you doing?
Are you enjoying your summer?
My enjoying my summer.
I mean, it's been a wild summer, right?
You know, in terms of obviously the week, you know, it's, you know, we've lost a couple of legends.
We lost Ozzie.
We lost Hogan.
So that's definitely been something that's put a damper on things.
But other than that, you know, summertime has been great, you know, with the family, going out, swimming a lot, getting a lot of sun.
We have been enjoying it from that perspective.
So it's an interesting question.
It's enjoying, but also not enjoying.
Blake, you don't seem like much of a summer guy to me.
You seem more kind of like autumn to winter.
Are you a summer guy?
Do you enjoy winter's?
I mean, Phoenix summer has been unusually gentle, though.
Yeah, well, I always tell people when they ask how Phoenix is since I moved here two years ago, you know, what it's like.
And I always tell them that I feel lied to because I was told I was moving into a desert.
And the actual weird thing about Phoenix is it rains all the time here.
It's apparently the wettest desert in the entire world.
And like it's rained like three times in the last week.
So I feel, I think I enjoy.
Do you understand how much we love rain?
Do you understand like this?
This makes me so bitter.
I haven't been in town the last week.
I love rain in Arizona.
And we're traveling every time it rains.
It's terrible.
So don't rub it in my face, Blake.
Andrew, are you enjoying your summer?
Oh, yeah.
I'm a summer guy.
You know, the news cycle has been interesting, but the family, the weather, the off hours, which maybe are sparse at times, have been amazing.
But yeah, I'm a summer guy, big time.
So with that, some people decide to spend their summers on cruise ships, of which I don't know why people would do this voluntarily.
Is this some sort of a punishment?
Walk me through this, Blake.
Are these people being sentenced to the cruise ship?
Is this like in lieu of community service after they committed arson?
Yeah, no, I don't quite get it, but it is true.
People do, like, they'll decide to spend a bunch of money to leave their comfortable homes and instead sit on like a cramped boat in quarters that are typically smaller than their homes, I will note.
And then they're on this boat and it's filled with like noisy people and like a lot of like sometimes gross people.
And it's like often very unsanitary.
And then they like float on this boat between various, like usually, you know, straddling the line between first and third world a bit countries.
And they just hang out with a bunch of people.
And if they get sick or die, like the cruise is going to aggressively try to get them off the boat because they don't like it when people die on their boats.
And that's what they do.
They pay thousands of dollars to do this.
They book it years in advance, Charlie.
You're reminding me of COVID when like everybody's getting trapped on the cruise ships, when the COVID outbreaks would happen.
It's like I vowed then because then it was like a wake-up call to everybody about just how disgusting most cruise ships actually are.
I was like, never going to go on a cruise at that point.
No offense.
I guess we're never going to get a cruise sponsor on this show, but so be it.
I don't think we are.
What's the word?
I ship enough?
Listen, and then Blake can walk through this latest news with it, but let me just tell you my whole experience with cruises.
Believe it or not, I have been on a cruise.
I was done largely against my will.
I was stuck on a cruise ship with Brent Bozell, Joe Piscopo, Jason Schaffetz, Alan West.
Those are some flash from the past.
And some other people.
Jack doesn't like this topic.
Fine, Jack, whatever.
Cruises are a very important topic.
And I want Blake to be able to.
So were you on like a national review cruise or something?
No, it was not a national review cruise.
Okay, it was a media research center cruise.
And we started in Rome, of which I wanted to stay longer.
And I got super seasick.
And we went from Rome to Athens.
And we were supposed to then go to like Santorini and then Istanbul.
I got off at Athens and I said, you guys have a great cruise.
And bye.
And I flew back to America.
And so I don't understand they're so dirty.
They are crammed quarters.
I get seasick all the time.
But Jack, I suppose you like cruises a lot.
So Jack, make the argument as to why you want to suffer.
I hate cruises.
I don't know why anybody would want to go on a cruise.
I think cruises are ridiculous.
I don't think it's a good time, a good way to entertain anything.
Tanya's been trying to get me on a cruise since pretty much since we've been together.
And I'm just like, look, I was in the Navy.
I've spent a lot of time on ships.
I have no idea why anyone would want to put them through such.
So here's what it's like, right?
I always explain this to people this way.
And I feel the same way about cruises, right?
So let's imagine you, and I'll say it in a very short manner, is imagine your work, right?
You work at a corporate office.
Do you like everyone you work with?
Would you like to spend time with everyone you work with all the time?
Now imagine you live in that building and you have to see those people every day.
There's no home.
There's no leaving them.
There's no getting away from there.
And also, you're not allowed to leave the building ever because you are at sea.
That's what being in the Navy is like.
And that's what I think about every time I set foot on a cruise ship.
So why, God, why would anyone think that this is an enjoyable way to spend your time?
But then why did you do so many cruises?
Was this a parent-led thing, Jack?
And you seem to me like a carnival cruise guy.
No, no, no, no, no.
I mean, no, when I said I've taken so many cruises, I meant because when I was in the Navy, like from being in the Navy.
Oh, I see.
So you've never been on a recreational cruise.
Got it.
I know Jack doesn't like this topic.
I've been on one.
Listen, listen.
Let's all take a step back and let's just kind of look at the horizon here, okay?
Now, there's all these different types of cruise companies, okay?
So they're, and by the way, they are, they are relentlessly running ads.
I don't know what, I don't know what SEO I have on my YouTube, but I get lots of cruise advertisements.
I don't know why, but I get a lot of them.
So they go from lower level to higher level.
So there's Carnival, there's the Carnival Cruise Corporation.
There's the Royal Caribbean, the Norwegian cruise line, the MSC, and then the Disney cruise line.
There's the Viking Ocean Cruise, Ponyat, Asmara, Seaborn, and Windstar cruises.
And so the Blake's, it's funny, Blake says you get these because you're a right-winger who raises money.
That is probably true.
Do you understand how many cruises I've been invited on?
Andrew, can you attest this?
Hold on.
I get invited to cruises to Alaska and to Vancouver.
I was just.
Yeah.
As somebody who gets the incoming, the inquiries like, hey, would Charlie be willing to do this cruise and we'll make it worth your while?
And it's like, oh my goodness, no.
How many times do I have to say this?
I just, at this point, I just say LOL.
When I get the invite, I respond.
I'm like, LOL.
It's such a, but the mentality of who goes on these cruises, and the reason this is topical, and Blake will tell us why in a second, it is, it's like a floating old country buffet meets a bingo hall with everybody getting sick all day.
That's a very waspy interpretation of what it is.
Oh, but there's another type of cruise.
There's another type of cruise that we, shall we say, call it, I don't know, the Spirit Airlines cruise?
Okay, so that's a good question.
Would you rather fly a cross-country flight at 5 a.m. from Spirit Airlines, LAX to JFK, or would you rather have to do two nights on the Carnival cruise?
I think Spirit Airlines, I would take Spirit Airlines.
Spirit Airlines.
So this is in the news.
Blake, why is this in the news?
And apparently there's like two forms of people that go on cruises.
There's older kind of retirees from the Midwest.
They love cruises.
And then there's the rambunctious types that seem to be causing a lot of problems right now.
What's going on there?
Yeah, so you're basically correct.
I can attest to many, many Midwesterners loving their cruises.
I feel this will probably offend a lot of people.
I feel like cruises appeal to the same demographic that likes going to Disney World a lot, but like older.
So like people, you have like Disney adults who go to Disney World and spend a bunch of money on that.
If you're an older kind of group of the same thing, you like going on, you know, you go on like a cruise every year or two cruises a year.
Anyway, as you know, there are several tiers of cruises.
You have the higher end.
What are the nicer ones than Carnival?
I can't remember all of my cruise lines.
Well, there's Viking.
I'm trying to remember which one I want.
Viking?
Viking does like Disneyland.
There's like something.
The Disney ones.
Disney does have cruises, of course.
Yeah, the Viking are the ones that do like river cruises, I think.
Maybe they do normal ones too.
Here's the ranking.
Best luxury cruise overall.
This is from Forbes.
All these people probably paid for this, but take it with a grain of salt.
Ritz Carlton Yacht Collection is the best luxury cruise.
Best river cruise.
Viking.
What are you talking about here?
That's a whole separate thing.
I'm just saying, there's a whole boundary.
There's an apartment building that floats, okay?
That's all that it is.
Okay, keep going.
Yeah, so the mid-tier ones, like Royal Caribbean, of course, they're kind of the standard ones.
And then I'm looking at one ranking, and what's great is they refer to them as entry-level cruises.
Like that's one way of describing it.
But anyway, one of the entry-level cruise brands is Carnival.
My understanding is Carnival, especially, they became even more entry-level than usual during COVID because COVID obviously completely bungled up travel.
Tons of things got canceled.
Cruise lines were absolutely deep in the red, really looking for money.
And one thing about cruises is you often book them quite long in advance.
They try to fill them up way, way in advance to make sure, you know, they don't have a ton of people buying tickets last minute.
And so they were offering these incredibly steep discounts that opened up cruise lines to all sorts of clientele that previously did not go on cruises very often.
And this gave Carnival the, as Jack was alluding to, the Spirit Airlines reputation.
It is a reputation for not always being the most pleasant thing to go on.
And so this led to what we're discussing, which this went viral a few weeks ago, and it kind of went re-viral in the last week or two.
It's like echo viraling across the internet.
Anyway, Carnival Cruise Line has some updated rules that people are noticing.
And I'm just going to read the rules as a summary I found describes it.
Number one, stricter drug enforcement.
Cannabis, even if legal in your home state, is banned on board because it violates U.S. federal law.
And if you do it, you will be removed and banned.
Second, a youth curfew.
Guests 17 and under must leave public spaces by 1 a.m. in the morning unless accompanied by an adult or part of a supervised teen program.
I'll leave number three for last because I think it's the funniest.
Number four, Bluetooth speaker bans.
Guests may no longer play their own music in public areas.
Carnival says this is for general comfort, but some see bias in this.
Number five, we have stricter enforcement of drink packages.
So Carnival sells a cheers package that gives you a 15 alcoholic drinks per day Limit on how many drinks you can get at their bars.
And apparently, in the past, the enforcement of this was a little flexible.
They wouldn't flip out too much if you asked for a 16th or a 17th or a 20th.
But now they're cracking down.
You only get your 15.
They are reporting, this is not an official rule, but this is being reported that their music genres that their DJs play at the various dance clubs that are on cruise ships, they've been reduced.
They are cutting away on hip-hop and rap music that their DJs play.
And reportedly, they even decline guest requests far more often than they used to.
And then we're going back to number three.
This is the final rule that I think is the funniest.
They are banning handheld non-battery powered fans, like, you know, like the one like a southern lady would fan herself with in a movie or something.
Those are banned, and they say it is due to safety concerns.
Specifically related, there is a viral song that goes, it has a title that is apparently where them fans at.
And as part of the music video in this, they click the fans repeatedly.
And I guess that became a meme.
People would bring handheld fans on cruises and they would click them and they were hitting people and probably annoying people a lot.
So what do you think of that, Charlie?
And you can already tell me, I bet, why people are mad about all of these rules.
Well, and so then there was an article from The Root.
Carnival's new rules got black folks all in their feelings, but others say the cruise line is justified.
Yeah, I mean, I don't, I mean, they say, right, the Carnival rules are racist, is what they are saying.
It seems so.
Take that for whatever you'd like.
Discriminating.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Oh, man.
Carnival has some very funny tweets in it.
One of them they have from someone going by Geechee Barbie.
I hope that is not like a gross slang term because I don't know slang.
And she tweeted, so Carnival Crews banning fans now because y'all won't stop putting boots on the ground and clacking them, laughing emoji, crying emoji.
They even banning hip-hop music.
That song has Black America in a chokehold L-M-A-O.
I don't think I've ever heard this song.
Can we get like a clip of the fan clicking?
I've got to wait to pass judgment on how annoying this song might be.
Well, I think we're all in agreement.
Cruises are no good.
And I'll tell you, I couldn't be punished for being on a cruise.
I would throw something else out there.
And by the way, if you want to take like a regular cruise, fine, whatever.
But there's this whole culture I've noticed of people like older couples getting reverse mortgages and then spending the money immediately on those like massive, lavish cruises.
And it's like, guys, that's going way too far.
You're putting yourself and your estate in debt so that you can go on some cruise.
Like it's the most ridiculous and flagrant just waste.
It's just straight waste that I've ever heard.
That's a juicy vein of topic, actually.
It's just like you get to a certain point and you're like, I'm not going to pass along any of my wealth to my offspring.
I'm going to spend it all as quickly as I can because I earned it and screw them.
And like, there's a whole bunch of people that think that way.
And reverse mortgages, like, I get it if you're up against the wall and you don't have money coming in, you need the expenses for whatever reason.
But, you know, to spend it on a cruise line, like if this is what you're getting for your money, think about it.
You could have had generational wealth and legacy or you could have this.
Andrew, that's the perfect point, though.
Back against the, we need to put people who like cruises against the wall.
Is this like a tweaking or twerking joke?
No.
Andrew, don't you know your idioms?
When you put people against the wall, they go before a firing squad.
Ah, no.
That is a very blaked joke.
That's the thought crime tonight.
The thought crime tonight isn't that carnival cruises are bad.
The thought crime tonight is that all cruises are bad.
And you should feel bad if you go on them.
I've never been on one.
They are the lowest form of vacation there is.
I'm going to stake that one out.
Cruises are bad.
Like anything, any type of vacation you could go on is better if it's not on a freaking cruise ship.
Like do you like a beach?
Go to a beach.
You don't want to don't sunbathe on a boat.
Just go to a beach.
I could see myself doing like a kid-friendly one, if I'm going to be honest.
No, do a normal kid-friendly thing.
I mean, that's what we do, but I'm just saying, like, if somebody was like, hey, they've got water slides and they take you to the next cool kid location.
And then we're, you know, go to the, I don't know.
What's a single cool kid location that a cruise ship goes to?
Kids just want to go to Disney World and Disney World is inland.
Well, that's true.
Let's go to the next topic, shall we?
No, no, I feel like we need to actually lay down the law here on the cruise question.
Lay down?
I found one for Andrew.
There's a great one that is called, let's get this one for Andrew.
Ah, it's Carnival Celebration Miami.
This one sounds perfect for Andrew.
You're not going on Carnival now.
Oh, no, 100%.
I'm booking this for you.
I'm going to send it to you.
How about this?
Boots on the ground?
By the way, they're like soup...
It's because they make a ton of money on the liquor and the extras while you're actually on there.
So it's, this one sounds perfect for Andrew.
The seven-day Western Caribbean from Miami, Florida, the carnival celebration.
You go to Celebration Key, Mahogany Bay, Cozumel, and you end back in Miami.
Andrew, I'm booking this for you.
It's just great.
And it's, that's right.
You're trying to send me on a cultural experience, Charlie?
Hey, you said you wanted to bring your kids.
I didn't say, I said, like, you know, I mean, here's my theory.
It's like, just like I would spend more to not fly spirit airlines, I would probably spend more to not go on carnival, I think.
I think that's fair to say.
Okay, let's go to the next topic since we're all so spirited about it.
Blake, what were we supposed to talk about today?
All right, our opening topic we were supposed to do, Jack really wanted to hit this, so he might know the best lead-in to it.
But the question is, what is an American, Charlie?
Yeah, so this has been, you know, just probably the most viral thing on, certainly on X all this week.
You know, that's sort of in the culture war space, if you will.
It really stems from the back of this, I believe was the endorsement win by Omar Fatah over in Minneapolis, and then sort of this impending race in New York City regarding Zoran Mandami.
And you're seeing people now who are running for mayor of major cities.
There was another, I think it was a city council or representative, a Somalian out of Maine, Maine, you know, was going viral as well this week.
And people started really kind of asking the question, you know, guys, can we, you know, can we can we step back for a second here and say, what is an American?
Because this has gotten way too far where we're having people who weren't born in this country, in some cases only became citizen a couple of years ago.
And now they're stepping up to now, yeah, South Portland, Maine, okay, and now stepping up to be leaders of some of America's most iconic cities, certainly in the case of New York City.
And I think it represents a broader question for the movement and for America writ large when we ask this question, because it gets into all of these issues that we've been talking about, mass immigration, mass migration, the balkanization of America, the Brazilification of America, the fact that many nations are now being created inside the United States in various locales where we've had these mass migrants be emplaced really predominantly throughout the Obama administration and
where our country simply isn't looking like America anymore.
And I think it does beg us to actually start asking the question, what is an American?
Andrew, you had some thoughts on this late last night as I was falling asleep.
Andrew, what are your thoughts on this?
I mean, should I read it or do you want me to riff it?
Both.
All right.
Well, I'll read it because I don't know how good it is, but I was feeling inspired last night.
An American is first and foremost someone born in America who speaks English, who is raised here, who is steeped in the Anglo-traditions of common law, blind justice, equal rights, and believes in, or at least has reverence for, the Christian traditions that undergird our laws, customs, and values.
An American is also someone who we allow to move here, who works without crime, nor harbors animosity for the country, and who, after a time of painstaking pursuit, gains the incredible rights, freedoms, and privileges of our citizenship.
The former should be given extreme deference.
The latter should be given away sparingly, far less than we are currently allowing.
And then I talk about they should know who George Washington is, Thomas Jefferson, you know, that kind of thing.
I mean, I really, it's like, I hate to use the analogy, but it's like, it kind of reminds me of that Supreme Court ruling on porn.
Like, you know it when you see it.
Like, you know an American when you see one.
Everyone knows what an American is.
Yeah.
You know it when you hear their turns of phrases, their cultural references, how they interact with you interpersonally.
It's not somebody that goes and runs for mayor and says, you know, our home is Somalia.
I'm sorry.
It's not.
I don't care if you were born here.
That's not us.
So I would say also an American is someone who is loyal to a creed, which would be ordered liberty under God, revering the Constitution, owns his land or her land, and believe rights come from the Creator.
It's really the birthright of the Declaration of the Constitution, but I would go a step further than that.
It's fidelity to this nation.
And it's also you're an American once you have skin in the game.
This is very important.
You become an American when you demonstrate that you're part of this project and that you do not have fidelity to another nation.
Let's play cut 434.
This is the new Maine mayor, Daka Dalakawak, says that her goal is to help our country of Somalia.
Play cut 34 for Deleka Dalakawak.
Play Cut 434.
Policies, how can the politics in Somalia resonate what we have here in the United States, the democracy that we have?
How can you help us be a better country and build back what we used to have back in a long time ago?
So hopefully we will be able to help our country, our former country, Somalia.
So I don't want to take her out of context there, but it seems like she's talking about her country being Somalia.
And just first a little bit of a history lesson, that is South Portland, Maine.
South Portland, Maine.
Maine is a very remote state that has been completely transformed by mass immigration.
Blake, what is an American?
You know, I think kind of the follow-up question of what is an American, and I think what can really like supercharge this is the question, can two people, let's say two people who are both American, both American citizens, both born here, can one be more American than another?
And that is where you can really charge it up.
And I think it's certainly possible to say the answer is yes.
I think Andrew's on the right track where, you know, there's an element of loyalty to America.
There's an element of like creedal nationalism to it.
But frankly, I think one thing that is underplayed is there are identity elements to Americanness.
And so like, for example, I would say you are more American if you identify with America's English heritage.
So if you, I mean, if you read like Americans from the 1800s, they very much see their country as a successor to the English nation that we broke away from.
And so they would see as elements of American history, not just the American Revolution, not just the settlement of Massachusetts, the settlement of Jamestown Colony, they would also be looking to the Glorious Revolution, the Reformation in England, the Magna Carta, the Magna Carta, of course, Battle of Hastings, if you want to go all the way back to that.
That they would see America as an English nation, an Anglo-Saxon nation that broke off.
And even if you are not Anglo-Saxon ethnically the way Charlie is, like, I think you actually need to assimilate that fast.
Like, if you assimilate that aspect of American identity into yourself, you become more American.
And you have to take kind of America's side implicitly in all American things throughout its history.
I think I've heard before, I can't remember where, but like the best, a great marker for whether Hispanic immigrants to the United States have assimilated to America is if like you can ask them, you know, who lost the Battle of the Alamo.
And if their answer is, we did.
And because by we, they mean the American Texans who were fighting at the Alamo.
And if they're instead identifying with the army of Santa Ana because they're Mexican, then they're not fully assimilated yet.
And I think that's an important aspect of American identity is you really have to try hard to identify with the earliest Americans and where they culturally came from.
You are not saying, I am a German or a Russian or a Middle Eastern or an Indian or a Chinese person who happens to have just plunked into America within the last 50 years.
And it's not a racial thing.
I know they're going to try to cut.
Yeah, it was phenomenal.
It's not a racial thing, but I love that.
So what we should do, and I'm not being sarcastic, Jack, maybe we could riff on this in real time.
We should develop five or six similar questions of the one you just developed, right, Blake, as a very simple litmus test, which is, and I don't even know off the top of my head, but that one of the, well, the Alamo's amazing.
The Alamo one is really, really good.
And I think that's so smart, which is like, oh yeah, actually, I think, what it, Poncho Villa or whatever, the Mexican general one.
Okay, great.
So now we know that you haven't fully assimilated to this country.
Probably like the internment of Japanese Americans or something like that.
There's maybe some Asian ones that you could do.
I don't know, but that example is great.
I don't have any off the top of my head.
One should probably think of five or six others.
Jack.
One that went kind of viral yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security posted a famous painting of Manifest Destiny.
And that went super viral because people were saying, how dare you?
How dare you do this?
This is colonizing.
So, you know, what is your opinion of westward expansion?
Which isn't necessarily a war in a sense, but it, you know, I suppose you could say it.
It is in certain contexts.
So do you agree with Manifest Destiny?
And just, again, it's a great listness test because you're going to see, or you could say westward expansion if people don't know what that means.
What are your thoughts on westward expansion?
Do you agree with that?
Is that something you have a sense of?
It's pretty good, Jack.
I like that.
That's a good one.
Yeah, because right, right, the whole debate is like, are we on stolen land?
It's like this stolen land debate.
We settled it.
All right.
We settled it.
And by the way, you know, if you go back through history, this one always upsets me because if you go back through history, every piece of land has been stolen from somebody else.
At what point do you, you know, and it's like that, what's it?
Who's the MSNBC?
Excuse me, excuse me.
Conquered.
Conquered.
Not stolen.
Yes, right.
No, that's fair.
But what's the, what's Mehdi Hassan, right?
And he went on the Jubilee, which Charlie made famous.
Thank you, Charlie.
This is another one of the viral things.
Yeah, this is one of the viral things that we need to do.
Charlie was the original Jubileer.
Charlie, I felt like they didn't have it quite dialed in yet when you went on.
You went on one of the first episodes, and it just wasn't.
Not only that, let me just as a side note, the Jubilee thing, they were just so petrified at how violently the rhetorical violence that occurred during mine.
I don't think they've been able to replicate it.
I have this superpower.
Andrew will be agree, agree.
I can get some people to just say and act in ways that they'll never act in any other environment.
And literally, they didn't have the word triggered until Charlie was born.
Charlie is just wishing harm upon my daughter.
It's like crazy stuff.
Anyway, no, Jack, I think you're right, Jack, is that the format was so out of, I was the first one in that whole thing, and now it's kind of been a rite of passage in American politics.
Yeah.
You know, I'll throw a sop to you, Charlie, on the American question.
And I can get away with saying this.
I think actually like a real facet of being American, and you are like more American if you hit this than if you don't, is like being, frankly, being a Protestant, actually, and having like Protestant Christian ethos, if you will.
And that like America was founded, again, by this specific, by like a pretty narrow specific group of people.
It was substantially like dissenting Protestants from like Northwestern Europe.
And then later, like other Protestants came on.
And then later you had some Catholics from that region.
And like, you know, you get more and more sense then.
But it's definitely a country that's found on, for lack of a better way of putting it, Protestant values.
There's a great book that I recommend to a lot of people.
I read it a couple years ago.
It's Lone Star by T.R. Fahrenbach.
It's a history of Texas, but it's really a history of America.
And it just happens to use Texas as the example.
And one of the things he points out is he's pointing out when there's these conflicts between Texas and between Mexico, which happens with the Alamo, but it happens repeatedly over the course of the 1800s.
And he points out that the key difference between them is civilizational, and that the Texans are all Protestants, even the Catholic ones.
And the Mexicans are all Catholics, even the Protestants and even the atheists.
He says it that way.
And I think there is sort of this ideological component to Americanness.
So what would kind of Protestant values be?
I'd say there's a lot of like autonomy.
There's a lot of go-it aloneness.
Like you Protestants love to break away and form your own churches as soon as you disagree on one point of doctrine.
You do that a lot.
And that's an American thing.
The American thing is it was founded by people who said, screw you, I'm leaving to go start my own club way off on another continent.
And that's why America was actually so awesome.
Why did the American West get settled?
The American West get settled because it was a bunch of people saying, screw it, I'm leaving to start my own thing.
The Spanish, Charlie, the Spanish got to America more than about 100 years in advance of the English.
They conquered Mexico by 1520.
That's 90 years before Jamestown is getting off the ground.
Yet it's the Anglos, the English speakers who are the ones settling into Appalachia, settling into the Great Plains.
Why?
Because that was, it was basically in their blood to do that.
And it's really astonishing when you read about New Spain in comparison to California.
The Spanish want to settle California.
They want to settle Texas.
And they can't get people to do it.
It only happens when they take soldiers and practically abduct people and make them go there.
Meanwhile, the English, like the British crown, one of the reasons the revolution happened was the British crown was trying to stop people from settling Appalachia and they were just going off and doing it anyway.
Over and over, American settlers would like run off and start their own states, start their own settlements.
And then years later, they would kind of come back and be like, hey, America, can you come in and like help us out?
We're setting up states and stuff.
I just feel like all of that is, that is a huge part of the American ethos, the American identity.
And I think we do have to be careful, though, to not separate the identity as well and try to say that it's that you can like import any one, you know, like piece of paper type of creed and say, well, if you just agree with this, you're going to like, like, there's, there's plenty of, for example, I tweeted this earlier this week.
You know, there's plenty of Protestants in Africa.
There's plenty of Protestants in India.
You couldn't just import them here and have America be formed.
Like it wouldn't make any sense.
So it's true, but you are also talking about, again, the original Anglo-Saxon settlers and that's who originally, you know, founded America.
Those are the people that came here.
And it's funny, you know, people be like, oh, Pesobic, you're like some Polish Ellis Islander.
And it's like, yeah, I never once said that like Hamilton has to be a bunch of Polaks, right?
Like, sure, there were Polish people here, but it was, you know, a couple of generals here and there.
You know, the vast majority were Anglo-Saxons.
And when you see a lot of these ethics, so again, America was founded by the British Empire.
And so you just can't separate the people.
And I see people trying to do this over and over and over.
And I got into it with Curtis Yarvin a little bit because I was saying, like, that'd be like saying that Rome was just founded on the worship of Jupiter.
And he said, ah, but the Romans did worship Jupiter.
I said, no, I get it.
I'm not saying they didn't.
What I'm saying is it was founded by the Romans.
And you couldn't just, you know, put some other group of people there and get the same system out of it.
You just wouldn't.
So I think it's much more multifaceted than a lot of people want to put into it.
Obviously, it's changed over time and it's certainly grown and people have assimilated in over time.
That's what we're talking about.
But if you mess around with that core, if you get too far away from that core too much too fast, that's what leads to this massive instability that we have.
And let's flip it around, right?
Talk about what we're dealing with now because we don't have assimilation now.
What we have are these mini ethnic enclaves that have turned into mini nations.
And you don't have to take my word for it.
Go listen to them.
They talk about our former country.
They talk about our home.
They clearly view themselves as part of this like greater Somalia or the Somalian diaspora, which has a direct connection to home.
And by the way, they do.
If you go look at their culture, thanks to technology, you can be on a video, you know, voice chat or, you know, FaceTime with home all day long.
Your remittances go back home.
So a certain percentage of however much money you make is getting sent back home.
You're consuming media from back home all the time.
You're speaking many cases in the same language.
And you can find, go find me, by the way, one of these deport.
I've yet to find a deportation video where the people can even speak English.
I have yet to see a single one.
Everyone wants to attack Tom Homan about this, but you can't even find one where people have assimilated enough to speak the language.
They'll say, oh, I've been here for 20 years, 30 years.
And why are they not speaking the language?
Because they don't have to, because they're living in these mini ethnic enclaves that exist in our own country.
And that's the problem.
We're sitting there acting like, oh, these are all Americans.
And, you know, the Supreme Court's got birthright citizenship.
I got to say, that's a separate question, but I'm not confident that they are going to overturn birthright citizenship.
I just, I'm not confident.
I think that's got to be changed probably with a new amendment.
It's not going to just be that.
We're going to lose that as well.
We're going to lose that.
Which is crazy because it's such an open issue.
No, but I do agree.
Listen, I do agree with Jack.
First of all, I love Catholics.
That's well demonstrated.
But Catholics did not start America.
There was one significant at the founding, and it was Charles Carroll.
Charles Carroll, correct.
And Maryland, literally land of Mary, Maryland.
Catholic integration came later with the Irish, the Italians.
All the Catholics there.
Right.
So again, Catholics integration came later, mid-1800s, with the Italians, the Poles, and the Irish, which is great.
I mean, it was a phenomenal contribution.
The only difference between the Roman analogy, which I don't love from Curtis Yarvin with Jupiter or Saturn or whatever, is that Catholics and Protestants at least have a baseline belief in Christ our Lord and the Incarnation and the inerrancy of Scripture.
I mean, they have a shared ethic of ethical monotheism.
And so, look, but Blake is right, and I know it triggers people like Jack sometimes on social media.
Protestantism shaped the American ethos.
Self-government, individual liberty, moral responsibility, and suspicion of tyranny are all Protestant contributions.
And especially Reformed and California.
I think that's more Anglo-Saxon than well, yes.
I mean, but Anglo-Saxonism-Saxonism.
That was the point I was going to make, right?
Is that the Anglo-Protestantism blend is why the Protestantism in Africa does not necessarily hold on because the Anglo-tradition of, which, by the way, is an outgrowth, just so we're clear, of Protestantism, or at least Christianity, separation of powers, consent of the governed.
You see this in Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex, who was a Protestant thinker.
You see this in Blackstone, who was a Protestant thinker.
And again, I'm not here to bash on Catholics, even though there was a huge anti-Catholic sentiment that was widespread among Jefferson, Adams, and Madison.
They all viewed the Pope and papal supremacy as a threat to the American Republic.
But that's fine.
I mean, as you all know, the 1774 Quebec Act, which extended Catholic rule in Canada, was cited as one of the intolerable acts leading to the war.
And even Catholics were legally barred from going from office or voting in several columns.
But Charlie, I'm not making that argument.
AKA the Pope.
No, no, no.
I'm not saying you're, I'm not making a parody.
I'm like, wrong argument.
Like, I haven't said that.
I've said the country was founded by Anglo-Saxons and Protestantism was circumstantial to that.
I disagree with, That's correct.
It's not correct.
I mean, again, so in order for that to be correct, again, 55 out of 56 of them were Protestants and they were like fiercely anti-reliants?
Right?
No, that's the whole point of Protestantism, right?
Is that there's Presbyterianism, there is Reform, there's Calvinists, there's Congregationalists, there's Quakers.
But no, but I mean, again, I just, it's just, I would like Jack to point beyond Charles Carroll that, okay, so I know that Jack is not making the argument that America was founded by Catholics, but you're saying that it was strictly Anglo.
Of course, I'm agreeing that it was Anglo, but you have to acknowledge, Jack, if you're being intellectually fair, the robust Protestantism mixed with Anglo.
It was not Anglo at all.
If it was only Anglo, then other Anglo colonies that were not Protestant explicitly would have founded great powers.
There's something special about that combination that started America.
Go ahead, Jack.
I cut you off a couple times.
No, I'm not necessarily saying that it's not.
And I don't want to be very clear about that, nor have I said that anywhere.
What I'm saying is that I think a lot of those ethics and those ideals are found in the Anglo-Saxon culture in general.
And there's a much deeper discussion as to say how much of this arises naturally within the Anglo-Saxons.
And that's why Protestantism took off there so much because of this nature of the Anglo-Saxon.
And by the way, I say this as a polak, right?
And so it's just something I've noticed.
And I suppose you can say it's one or the other.
And I don't think you can.
I do think you have to say it's both.
And it's certainly both.
But it's definitely something that you see in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
If you look at the history of England, if you look at the history of the New Zealand.
No, but I mean, Jack, you would agree.
If you look at the Catholic Church, let me ask you a question now.
Even before, certainly well before 15.
Do you think in 1700s Catholicism, resistance to tyranny was a Catholic value?
I'm not, again, you're making an argument.
No, you know the answer is no, and that's fine.
I'm not trying to pick on Catholics.
It's that the idea of rejection of tyranny, there was literally something called the Calvinist resist.
Again, there was literally something called the Calvinist resistance theory.
Of course, Charles Carroll, a Catholic, signed on to it, but Catholics were far less likely in the 1700s to have a comprehensive theology to reject power.
And part of that just came from the overarching supremacy of the Catholic Church.
Of course they were.
But there was something, I'm saying, though, that fundamental Catholic ideas and values in the 1700s, and they might have grown and church teaching has evolved, Catholic values were not necessarily as articulated resistance to tyranny in Calvinism.
What Catholic church were they breaking away from at that time frame?
The British had already broken away writ large.
So the Church of England they were coming away from.
Sure, fine.
I mean, but I guess I'm not sure.
You keep bringing up the Catholics, but nobody else is bringing that up.
Okay, yeah, so again, I just, the question I have to repeat, which is that, again, yeah, there's a lot going on in the chat.
Do you think that resistance to government tyranny is a Catholic value in the 1700s?
In the 1700s.
Well, certainly it was in France.
Okay, I don't know enough about that.
But they set up to the French Revolution.
I don't think it was Catholics setting up the French Revolution, Jack.
Standing up to the Revolution.
Fighting against the French Revolution.
Yeah, I'll let Blake.
I don't know enough about that.
Blake will be our historian here.
Look, and I'm not even anti-Catholic in this way.
I just want to make sure I don't know, Jack, why you're hesitant to just give a hat tip to Protestantism and be like, thank you for this incredible.
What I'm saying is, from a deanalysis perspective, I think you can't separate it from the fact that it's the Anglo-Saxons.
That's all I'm saying.
No, I mean, of course we agreed that.
But I mean, the picture of the people.
It's a chicken or the egg argument.
Were they Protestant because they're Anglo-Saxon, or did they act in that Anglo-Saxon way?
This is the first thing that they're trying to say that you can separate.
I think it's for our policies today, the way we talk about it.
Well, interestingly enough, Jack, when I was writing that thing that I started this whole conversation with, I remember thinking like Protestant, and then I took that out and I put Catholic.
And I was actually raised Catholic, but I became kind of evangelical in college.
And so I feel very ecumenical spiritually, right?
Where I feel a part of both worlds.
So do I. And I'm not.
I know you do.
I know you do.
We've talked about this.
I've got to get this argument at all.
Oh, no, totally.
But so, like, and I think it's funny because I actually, I find this, what you guys are talking about, like infinitely interesting.
But I was going to add something.
We were talking about a brand.
Charlie and I were talking about a brand that will remain nameless, but we called it spiritually boomer.
And I feel like in some ways, what is an American?
You just, it's like, you're almost spiritually American, you know?
And I don't necessarily mean Protestant or Catholic.
It's like it's an ethos.
It's a way you carry yourself, a way you believe, who you obey, who you salute, what you value, what you honor.
And I think that, listen, Christians of all stripes are very welcome.
And I think once you get outside of that, I think part of the challenge when you're trying to decide what is an American is you have to make it broad enough to something that even everybody on this chat, if we can't all agree what an American is, then we're going to have issues trying to define that as a country.
Let me just, yeah, but I totally agree.
And Jack, I just want to make one final thing.
What you are praising is Anglo-Saxon values.
After the break with Rome from Henry VIII, it was not just a political break, it was a cultural rebirth.
So it was Protestantism that created the Anglo-Saxon values that you're praising.
So you go back to the original catalyst.
It was this idea of the King James Bible, which of course Tyndale was killed by the Catholic Church for that, the Book of Common Prayer, and Puritan theology.
So again, we can go back and forth, chicken, the egg, but what started Anglo-Saxon values that you appreciate?
Anglo-Saxon values go back to the break from the Catholic Church.
And that happened in the 1600s, 16 church.
Or predate the Protestant Reformation by quite small.
No, but the Anglo-Saxon values that you appreciate, which both you and I, free speech, common law, separation of powers, all of that was catalyzed and really was put in motion once Henry VIII broke from Rome.
That was the breaking point.
Why?
One example.
Individual liberty became to be a huge idea once people could then have widespread literacy because of the King James Bible.
They started reading.
They started to say, well, I'm made of the image of God and I can govern myself.
And so, look, I know it seems like it's chicken and the egg, but to go back to the original source, the source was the separation of the Catholic Church and England.
Why would you say public literacy has not been a success then, Jack?
You know, there's an interesting school of thought on that.
I generally like being able to read.
Yeah, I mean, I've never heard the argument that public literacy is bad.
I mean, I might be a Catholic, so you can get those.
The founders were highly influenced by Montesquieu, who was raised in the Huguenot Catholic tradition.
Huguenot is not Catholic.
Huguenot is a good idea.
You're right.
Sorry.
I'm reading from Google.
I apologize.
Besson is descended from the Huguenots.
Huguenot family, but received a Catholic education.
Sorry, that's why I messed that up.
Montesquieu was born into a Huguenot family, but received a Catholic education, outwardly conformed to Catholicism.
Yeah, it's all complicated.
So when I brought that up at the start, just the Protestant thing, what's interesting is if you go 120 years ago, you have European Catholics who get really annoyed with American Catholics because they literally had a heresy they called Americanism.
And it was basically being too American in your outlook, which was basically like kind of individualist, a little bit like dissident.
They associated a lot with the theological, we would say, liberalism of the time, but it was different issues than we had today.
And it caused like the Europeans a lot of angst.
And it's kind of funny because now you loop it around the other way and Europeans get irritated with the American Catholics because the American Catholics are often too trad and they're like all dissident.
And like, what do American Catholics do?
American Catholics go and they do things like they set up Latin Mass parishes where they like hear the Mass in Latin.
Like they don't actually do that in Europe much at all.
That's a pretty good point.
That's a really good point.
Yeah, you don't have these.
I think it's really far away from the original topic.
Yeah, what is an American?
It's not a religious argument.
Jack, your turn then.
What is an American?
I don't think an American is an inheritor of Protestant value.
I don't think it's a religious question.
What do you think it is, Jack?
General, yes.
Well, I think.
Individual liberty, Protestant value, limited government, Protestant value, rule of law, Protestant value, work ethic, and thrift, Protestant value.
Self-governance, Protestant value.
You can launder them through Anglo-Saxon, but if you peel back the layers to its core, to the seed, to the birth, to the beginning, it's Protestantism.
And everyone has benefited from that, including Catholics.
So what does it mean to be in America that we're embracing Protestant values, which is the word geographically, for example?
Yes, that's why Eastern and Southern Europe is still predominantly Catholic.
Because I would argue, by the way, in the same token, that Polish culture, like I'm from, is inherently more communal, which tends towards more Catholicism.
Of course it is.
No, I mean, there are downsides to over indulging in the idea of individual initiative and liberty.
Hungary is amazing, obviously.
No one here is like anti some of the beauty of Catholicism, but there's something special here.
And we're asking, what is an American, not what is a Hungarian, right?
And that's a different question.
And we just have to be honest.
Again, we're not going to come to some conclusion is that the founding fathers drew from a tradition all the way back from the Magna Carta to the Mayflower Complex to the Declaration to the Constitution, a through line.
And the catalytic event was when all of a sudden there was a separation from Rome, King James Bible, mass literacy.
People read for themselves.
And they said, well, if we can read for ourselves, we can grow for ourselves.
We can work for ourselves.
We can now toil for ourselves.
Why can't we rule ourselves?
And that sequencing of thinking started upon the separation of blind obedience to Rome.
And that is what built the West.
I rest my case.
I have a different way to phrase this one.
And, Jack, I still want to hear that.
There's non-blind obedience to Rome prior to the founding of America.
I mean, there's wars, there's all sorts of things that happen.
So, Jack, I have a question for you.
Is Mom Dani, Zoran Mom Dani, is he an American?
Is he not an American?
And why?
No, he's not American.
And why?
Why is he not American?
It's quite simple.
It's everyone knows what American is.
And he's so far beyond any of the, like, what Charlie and I are getting into, which was a great conversation, by the way, but it's very parochial, right?
We're still talking about, vastly speaking, the European Christian tradition.
And certainly the Anglo-Protestant tradition and Anglo-Protestant people, the British Empire, right?
Because that's, who ran the British Empire, founded America.
So the British Empire founds America.
America breaks free, becomes a nation state.
And yet you've got this Zora Mandami who's from a completely separate, completely disconnected nation.
Because the question is, what is a nation?
A nation is made up of its people.
And so, yes, Charlie is 100% correct in saying that is the nation that comprised America at its founding.
There are also other nations.
Mexico was a separate nation.
So there's this idea of magic dirt that anyone can just magically come to America and transform into American.
And it's just not true.
You know, this is the difference between being American like for real versus being an American on paper.
So is he on paper an American in terms, does he have legal citizenship?
Of course, the same way that in Rome, you could have legal citizenship as a Roman, but it didn't necessarily make you a real Roman if you were not actually a Roman.
And it's just as simple as that.
And by the same token, I would say Omar Fatah is not an American.
He is a member of a different nation with all of these multi-layers combined is the argument that I'm making.
So yes, it's cultural.
Yes, it has to do with where you're from.
Yes, it has to do with religion.
It has to do with your ideas.
It has to do with all of these things writ large.
Can you become an American?
Can people come an American?
Yes.
But it's a multi-generational product.
It's not something that can be project.
It's not something that can be done with just a piece of paper.
We have to get going here.
We only have a couple minutes left.
Andrew, I'll throw it to you if you want to play a couple pieces of tape here.
Yeah, I want to, so this is why I was asking that, Jack, is because this Medi Hassan clip has gone viral.
This is a white guy.
They frame it as far right, but I'll let you be the judge.
466.
This is him saying he is a Native American, and I think Medi Hassan is shocked by a white guy saying that.
466.
I don't know where you're at in the UK.
You're from India, so I don't know.
I'm not from India.
Oh, sorry, your parents are from India.
So you have your own stake.
I'm an American, you know.
You're an American citizen?
Okay, fair enough.
I don't know how you got that, but fair enough.
Here's the thing.
Are you an American citizen?
Absolutely.
But here's the thing.
I'm sure how you got that, okay?
Born here.
Okay.
Born here in my family lineage as settlers from the 1500s, so I have some stake in the claim here, okay?
But a little different than that.
You're a descendant of immigrants.
I didn't know.
Colonialists.
Yeah, nobody else.
You don't look very Native American to me.
I am Native American.
Whites are Native Americans.
What are you talking about?
No.
What are you talking about?
Whites are Native Americans.
Charlie?
I mean, well, first of all, I love the applause in some ways is just like, oh, because I wasn't anticipating that.
So, look, if you look at it, the technical part of America, yeah, I mean, he is native to America.
Yes, that's correct.
And if you're talking about natives prior to the founding of America, they also could be called indigenous people or whatever.
And so, look, I mean, the more important question is not the question of who technically is an American.
I think Jack is correct on this.
No one's interested in the paperwork question.
Like, okay, great.
The question is, what is this thing that we're trying to uphold?
And it is wrought with a lot of people getting angry over it and getting fired up.
And I would love the chance to sit down with Mr. Hassan at some point.
Is that his name?
Mendi Hassan?
We could work on that.
Mehdi Hassan?
I would radical.
Jack knows his bio better than I do.
Jack's got the receipts on Mehdi.
He's quite radical.
Well, by the way, Mehdi Hassan also claims to be a native British.
Yeah.
Yeah, because brown people can be native to anywhere.
Only whites have native people.
White people aren't allowed to be native, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, this is interesting because I want to contrast this in our final minute here with what, and we don't have to play the clip, but Matt Walsh went after Maria Elvira Salazar, who's a Republican out of Miami.
She's Cuban.
I believe she's born in America, right?
Am I wrong?
In Miami, yeah.
Born in Miami.
Still has a very thick Hispanic accent, Latin accent.
She's a Republican, former TV anchor.
And Matt Walsh is coming under some fire for saying, deport her.
She's not an American.
So he's saying she's not American.
But when I see that clip, it feels completely different.
Now, we have blasted Maria Elvira Salazar for her soft amnesty push, probably more than anybody else, actually.
But I would say, like, you know, Cubans, the ones that have come to America and largely are in Florida, they embody an American ethos to me.
Like, when I look at it, they're grateful.
Our Secretary of State is Cuban.
Yeah, exactly.
Marco Ruby has 10 out of 10.
They're grateful.
They love markets.
They love the Constitution, the rule of law.
They're anti-tyrant.
I mean, they have so much about them that I love and that I naturally feel kinship with.
And so, again, it's sort of like, what is an American?
It's not necessarily, I even wrote in my little thing, I didn't read that part, but it's most likely you're white.
I mean, just by stats, by history, yeah, white probably helps be an American.
But if you're not white, don't be antagonistic to those who are and don't be bitter about it.
Be grateful to live in the country.
I think those things matter still, right?
And I guess, you know, if you go down certain rabbit holes online, that wouldn't fly.
For me, it does, especially when I look at the Cuban community in Miami.
But I would say, like, in general, we have to, I would love to see us do an immigration moratorium.
We got to deal with how many we've had come in this country who are not American, and yet they're living here, they're walking around us, and they don't represent kinship or community or brotherhood from a nation standpoint.
We got to dash everybody.
Just as a reminder, though, I do want to reiterate, we're not saying that being an American is inherently anything racial.
We actually reject that.
We are saying, though, that it's more than just paperwork and it's more than just a set of ideas.
I think that it's very good to ask the question this semester, hey, not only what is a woman, but what is an American?
Something to think about.
What do you think an American is?
Email is freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.
God bless you guys.
Keep committing thought crimes and don't you dare step foot on a carnival cruise.
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