Nov. 15, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
47:58
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We now have more founding era documents from about 1770 to 1830 than anybody but the Library | ||
| of Congress and the National Archives. | ||
| We just bought a massive collection that, I mean, the Smithsonian was in the running. | ||
| I mean, it's massive. | ||
| That is all of the Pilgrim history and all of the history of Jamestown and everything. | ||
| So we have the largest collection and we intend on putting 1619 In its place because that is an absolute lie and there's something to say When you go, that's not true. | ||
| Oh, well, who are you? | ||
| you? Just the one that has all of the documents in their own handwriting to say what happened. | ||
| All right, guys, I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| We are live on location today. | ||
| Well, live to tape on location today in Dallas from the Blaze Studios with a guy who knows a little something about the Blaze Studios. | ||
| Glenn Beck. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Welcome to your studio. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's good to have you here. | ||
| Well, thank you for letting me play around in your studios today. | ||
| I'm just bouncing around between a hundred different shows and talking to people and seeing what's going on. | ||
| It's kind of like our little chocolate factory, Willy Wonka the Chocolate Factory. | ||
|
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It's a fun place. | |
| You sort of at some level, I call Michael Malice the Willy Wonka of politics, but you might be the original Willy Wonka of politics. | ||
| And you've got a big Willy Wonka poster out there. | ||
| Yeah, we have a lot of, I have the golden ticket from Willy Wonka. | ||
| We have lots of costumes from Willy Wonka. | ||
| I'm a collector of almost everything. | ||
| You're a true collector, and you've got stuff. | ||
| I didn't even tell you what I wanted to talk about today, and so as we're taping this right now, it's Friday afternoon, and supposedly Trump's about to give a big speech, so let's not even dive into the day-to-day stuff. | ||
| I think people sort of know what we think about some of these things that was on your radio show this morning. | ||
| We'll keep picking it up over the next couple weeks, obviously. | ||
| I did talk to somebody who is a big Techie and he was like these voting machines. | ||
| I talked to him since we talked. | ||
| Yeah, he said these voting machines. | ||
| He said At 100% he believes there is real foul goings-on with the voting machines Well, I suppose we shall see. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| And by the time we finish in here, Trump either could have dropped the bomb or, well, it depends what the bomb is, I suppose. | ||
|
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With him, it might actually be the bomb. | |
| It might be the bomb. | ||
| And, by the way, today is Friday the 13th. | ||
| So, you know, it's all, the whole world has led us to this moment. | ||
| But instead, you actually, because you're a collector, you have tons of stuff. | ||
| I mean, you've got Darth Vader's helmet. | ||
| You've got Darth, these ruby red slippers. | ||
| It's both the good and the bad. | ||
| Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket, but you also have some incredible stuff, | ||
| and you're building a museum right now dedicated to really the history of America, | ||
| and the stuff that you talk about all the time. | ||
| It's both the good and the bad. | ||
| My partner in this project is David Barton, and he's been collecting all the good things about America. | ||
| And my daughter, she wanted to go to school, and they both hated history, but they would come home, | ||
| and I'd say, "What are you learning about history?" | ||
| And then I would tell them the story. | ||
| And so they both, both my older daughters majored in history and ended up loving it. | ||
| But my daughter came home and she said, dad, I'm going to, I'm going to major in history. | ||
| And I said, great. | ||
| And I said, we need great American historians. | ||
| And she said, uh, You know, Dad, your view of America is just so utopian and, you know, it's red, white, and blue and apple pie. | ||
| Which wasn't exactly true, but kind of. | ||
| And, uh, she said, uh, it's just too ugly. | ||
| It's really an ugly history. | ||
| And I'm thinking, if my child is saying that in my home, what kind of nonsense has been filled in? | ||
| And I said, I tell you what, first of all, what are you taking? | ||
| She said, Greek and Roman history. | ||
| And I said, oh, well, that's completely bloodless. | ||
| Yeah, you're good to go. | ||
| No problems there. | ||
| And I said, here's the deal. | ||
| That's cool, but I will read all the dark things about history. | ||
| You have to read and research some of the good things. | ||
| Because it's like Winston Churchill. | ||
| You read about him in Europe, he's a great guy. | ||
| You read about him from the Indian perspective, he's a frickin' nightmare. | ||
| And it really bothered me when I looked at both sides, because I'm a huge fan of Winston Churchill. | ||
| Who's that guy? | ||
| The answer is he's both of them. | ||
| It's the same. | ||
| Both of them. | ||
| History is about a trajectory. | ||
| Are you getting better or are you getting worse? | ||
| Like our Constitution says, a more perfect nation. | ||
| Not a perfect nation. | ||
| We should be striving to be more perfect every day. | ||
| So I started collecting all of the really dark things. | ||
| We now have We have guillotines from the French Revolution. | ||
| That was an odd way for me to show up in Texas. | ||
| You bring me immediately into the room and here's the guillotine! | ||
| And the electric chair. | ||
| We have the first or second electric chair ever made. | ||
| It was used in the New York penitentiary and I have that because I hate Edison. | ||
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I hate him. | |
| He was a bad dude. | ||
| And the electric chair was all about just getting People to get away from Tesla's DC power or AC power. | ||
| So when you say he was a bad dude, you're talking about what he did to Tesla and just the business type things that he did and the way he controlled everybody. | ||
| Our history is just not told right. | ||
| So I started collecting these things. | ||
| We now have more founding era documents from about 1770 to 1830 than anybody but the Library | ||
| of Congress and the National Archives. | ||
| We just bought a massive collection that I mean the Smithsonian was in the running and I mean it's massive. | ||
| That is all of the Pilgrim history. | ||
| And all of the history of Jamestown and everything. | ||
| So we have the largest collection and we intend on putting 1619 in its place because that is an absolute lie. | ||
| And there's something to say when you go, that's not true. | ||
| Oh, well, who are you? | ||
| Well, just the one that has all of the documents in their own handwriting to say what happened. | ||
| Yeah, well, you've been ahead of the curve on a couple things over the years, and I suspect that this is going to be another one of those times, because people are ready. | ||
| People, you know, there was the pushback against 1619. | ||
| It took a while, but there was a pushback, and then they started slowly retracting some of it and deleting tweets and things like that. | ||
| But the next piece is actually giving the counter-narrative and having the real breadth of work behind it. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Don't take it from me. | ||
| Look at the original documents. | ||
| We're going to start a class online. | ||
| It'll be free. | ||
| And you can either do it in person here or you can take it online. | ||
| And it is the truth about our founders and our nation. | ||
| Who are we? | ||
| What did we... Let me show you. | ||
| Yeah, so you brought a ton of stuff here. | ||
| I don't even know what you have here. | ||
| We're doing this on the fly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is something nobody ever sees. | ||
| This is the engraving of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson's handwriting. | ||
| It's four pages as the other two pages. | ||
|
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Unbelievable. | |
| All right. | ||
| Notice on the sides, you'll see on the margins, if you've ever used Microsoft documents and you've made a change, It always puts off to the side who made the change, what the change was, and date. | ||
| Right here, Mr. Adams. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It's in their handwriting. | ||
| When they changed something, they crossed it out, and then they put on the margin, B. Franklin, J. Adams, and what they changed in the date. | ||
| Is that not crazy? | ||
| God, it's like, wait, so I asked you this yesterday, but can you just explain to people how, first I think it's hard for people to understand that these things still exist, right? | ||
| I think that's one thing. | ||
| But how do you, how do you possibly attain these things? | ||
| Like how does this come to be? | ||
| Some of these things have been donated to us for preservation and because they don't want them in Public hands. | ||
| They don't want them held by the government. | ||
| They don't want them held in universities. | ||
| Because we want them to always be on display. | ||
| Always to be available online. | ||
| So you can go use it as an original source. | ||
| We're currently taking all the documents we have and digitizing them. | ||
| So it's not just a big book or, you know, something online that says what it is. | ||
| It shows you in their own handwriting. | ||
| You know, it's incredible when you look at this and you think about all the all the bills that are passed now and you see the, you know, the stacks of paper that, you know, nobody's read. | ||
| And it's like the most important document in the world. | ||
| Four pages. | ||
| Four pages. | ||
| OK, so the declaration is first a Dear John letter. | ||
| The first part. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Except it's Dear George. | ||
| It's not us. | ||
| It's you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's because you don't understand us. | ||
| This is who we are. | ||
| And then it goes into the second section, which is the usurpation. | ||
| These are all the things that you've done to us, okay? | ||
| If you get to page three, and this turns everything around on its head, and this is available, you can find this document online. | ||
| People always say, and I have too, how did Thomas Jefferson say all men are created equal and not know what he was saying? | ||
| Well, then I've always had to go to, well, it was a different time. | ||
| He did struggle. | ||
| He couldn't give his slaves away because he was in debt, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But that's not a good answer. | ||
| It's not a good answer. | ||
| This in his own handwriting, every usurptation from page two to page four is about one to two lines, okay? | ||
| This usurptation goes from here. | ||
|
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That is a whole large paragraph. | |
| And if you look at it, his handwriting changes. | ||
| And he said, That this king has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating them and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere to incur miserable death in their transportation. | ||
| This warfare on humans, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare, and then it's capitalized, Christian and underlined, the Christian King of Great Britain, determined to keep an open market where Capital letters, the only thing capitalized in this document, are the words United States of America at the very heading. | ||
| He capitalizes where he has on an open market, men should be bought and sold. | ||
| He is saying the African-American is not a slave, he's a man. | ||
| Now, he goes on to say, we've been fighting him. | ||
| He blocks us every turn. | ||
| We've tried to get rid of this poison, but we can't. | ||
| He keeps blocking us. | ||
| Now he's telling the slaves, you can gain your freedom if you kill us. | ||
| And we're trying to free him, so he's doubly injuring these people. | ||
| It's an amazing paragraph. | ||
| So why isn't it in the Declaration of Independence? | ||
| Because John Hancock stood up before they selected even who would write the Declaration. | ||
| They stood up and said, okay, we know if we aren't all 100% in lockstep, the king is going to say, Virginia, you know what, you don't agree with him, and he'll divide us. | ||
| We cannot be divided. | ||
| Who here says we have to be unanimous? | ||
| Before this was written, all states said unanimous. | ||
| That's why the Finnish draft says the unanimous declaration of the United States of America, or Declaration of Independence. | ||
| He brought this back. | ||
| Every word, every line had to be voted on. | ||
| When they got to that, out of the 13 colonies, two Two said no. | ||
| That leaves 11 colonies, and importantly, Virginia, which is a southern colony. | ||
| George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, all of the big names are in Virginia. | ||
| They said yes to that paragraph. | ||
| Only two colonies said no. | ||
| So help me out. | ||
| How are all of our founders Racist dirt bags didn't know what slavery was. | ||
| They clearly did. | ||
| So, a couple of other things that I think change history. | ||
| You know what this is? | ||
| Have you ever seen this? | ||
| I mean this, it's got to be, well there's Japanese markings on there, right? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Oh god, well that's not dropping of, no no, it's certainly not the dropping of the nukes. | ||
| Okay, but that's what this is about. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Okay, the back. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There were 70 million of these dropped by Allied Air Force, the American Air Force. | ||
| And it gives the name of 12 different cities. | ||
| It says, we have a bomb that has more powerful, that is more powerful than all of the weaponry we have dropped in Europe. | ||
| In one bomb. | ||
| If you're in one of these 12 cities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were two of those cities, please leave now. | ||
| If your country, if your emperor will not surrender, we will be left with no choice, but it is so horrific. | ||
| Please take food and water and clothing and leave these cities. | ||
| We're not targeting you. | ||
| Please leave. | ||
| Those supplies will be in very short supply afterwards. | ||
| You were shot if you picked one up. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| What country tells their people, we're coming, we have this bomb, we're going to drop it by this date and it's going to happen in one of these cities? | ||
| Well, there's one country that does it now, but the left's not thrilled with that country, right? | ||
| One? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How come we don't know about that? | ||
| Every time we hear about America is so bad, they always bring up the atomic bomb. | ||
| Well, can you throw this in? | ||
| This is incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is an original letter to the Hitler Youth from Neville Chamberlain. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| This talks about, I welcome the intention of the German youth movement to devote a special issue of the magazine to your ideals. | ||
| In it he talks about he's met with the Fuhrer, he's a man of peace. | ||
| All the hopes of Germany are set upon you. | ||
| The Hitler Youth. | ||
| Neville Chamberlain. | ||
| That one I got just because appeasement never, ever works. | ||
| Listen to the last line. | ||
| I mean, I know you've read it, but the admirable motto of the year of understanding, which you have chosen for the year of 1938, shows the part that you are playing in this work. | ||
| I mean, talk about appeasement and confusion. | ||
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Yep. | |
| Wow. | ||
| A couple of other things. | ||
| This is wonderful. | ||
| Read it. | ||
| I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. | ||
| So help me God. | ||
| Ronald Reagan, January 20, 1980. | ||
| And on the top, to Nancy, who brightens the corner. | ||
| Is it the corner? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who brightens every corner. | ||
| Who brightens the corner where we are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's the one. | ||
| That's the one that was held right in front of him as he was taking the oath of office. | ||
| And how many people, how many people really mean that? | ||
| Mean that, yeah. | ||
| Mean those words. | ||
| Have you ever heard of Colonel Stone? | ||
| He was a guy, he was military, actually the guy who first protected, kind of our first Secret Service agent, first protected Abraham Lincoln when he was coming into Washington for the very first time. | ||
| He's the guy who said, we got to get you out We're going to have you go into a theater. | ||
| We're going to have you change clothes. | ||
| You're going to hunch over like a little old lady, and we're going to get you out the back into a carriage, and we're going to get you on a train, take you to Pittsburgh, because everybody's going to think that you're going to Washington. | ||
| We'll get you to Pittsburgh, then we'll take another train into Washington, and no one will know. | ||
| It saved his life. | ||
| Saved his life. | ||
| He became a colonel in the Northern Army in the fight in the Civil War, and he refused to hate the other side. | ||
| He just thought they were wrong, but he refused to hate them. | ||
| That caused a lot of problems with a lot of politicians because they were whipping up the hate. | ||
| It's why Lincoln's vice president walked out and was so upset. | ||
| It's why we have a picture of The only picture that is of John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln in the same picture and Booth is behind him and it's at the second inaugural address and he actually tried to kill him there because he was so enraged that this guy would say Let's come together. | ||
| Let's heal these wounds He was enraged by that and really wanted to kill him with his own hands and attempted to do it. | ||
| Yeah, well I This colonel became a colonel in the Civil War. | ||
| He was blamed for something that he never did. | ||
| It was a trumped-up charge because he became very unpopular with Congress. | ||
| Congress tried him. | ||
| He wasn't allowed to even put on defense. | ||
| He wasn't allowed to speak in front of Congress. | ||
| They never came to a verdict because they know that he would have been set free. | ||
| So he was held in prison. | ||
| He was held in prison, I think, for about six months. | ||
| Lincoln found out about it and said, what the hell are you doing? | ||
| Charge him, convict him, or let him go. | ||
| And they didn't. | ||
| They waited another six or eight months. | ||
| Lincoln found out about it again and just said, get him out. | ||
| He was so upset, he went over, he left the United States, and he went over and he was working for the French in Egypt. | ||
| Years later, he comes back. | ||
| He's thinking, he's hoping everybody is going to forget about those things that they said about him. | ||
| He's at home. | ||
| He gets a knock on the door. | ||
| No one will hire him. | ||
| They do remember. | ||
| No one will hire him. | ||
| He opens up the door. | ||
| It's two representatives from the United States government. | ||
| And they said, Colonel, we understand you were in Egypt and you were working with the French. | ||
| And he said, yes. | ||
| And they said, so do you speak and read French? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Good, because we just got a big box of stuff and we don't know how to put it together. | ||
| It was the Statue of Liberty. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| This is his purchase order for all of the stones for the base of the Statue of Liberty. | ||
| He's the guy The guy who could be the worst on America has every reason to be pissed at America. | ||
| He builds the Statue of Liberty. | ||
| This is incredible. | ||
| Colonel, please inform us at what price you can furnish during the summer of 1884 about 8,000 cubic yards of stone according to the sample furnished to you. | ||
| Is that nuts? | ||
| Just incredible. | ||
| So this is an example. | ||
| This is Early American texting. | ||
| Do you know who Matt Anthony Wayne is? | ||
| I feel that I should. | ||
| He's a general on the American side in the revolution. | ||
| He was great, but he was an animal. | ||
| This is a picture of him in the In the battle of... I'm trying to remember which battle. | ||
| The Stony Point. | ||
| So, Stony Point. | ||
| He's shot in the head. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| He's got a bullet. | ||
| A big, huge bullet in his head. | ||
| And he keeps going. | ||
| And they're like, General! | ||
| General! | ||
| General! | ||
| And he's like, Come on! | ||
| Let's go! | ||
| And so they win. | ||
| And they bring him in and they're like, We have to get the bullet out of your head. | ||
| He's like, Fine. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But I need a piece of paper and pencil. | ||
| So this is his letter to George Washington that says, hey, we won. | ||
| And it says, it says, before he's got the bullet, before he's got the bullet, he writes this letter. | ||
| And it's from Stony Point, 16 July to 2 a.m. | ||
| Dear General, the fort and the garrison with Colonel John Stone are ours. | ||
| Listen to this line. | ||
| Your officers and men behaved like men who are determined to be free. | ||
| I read that line and I thought, what does that even mean to live your life determined to be free? | ||
| Most Americans are not there. | ||
| So he writes it to George Washington. | ||
| George Washington, it's folded up. | ||
| George Washington then takes it and he puts it in his letter. | ||
| This is a letter to the governor. | ||
| Who says, hey, I want to tell you about the war. | ||
| Here's the colonel's message. | ||
| So he takes this message, puts it in his letter. | ||
| That's his signature. | ||
| No, it's this. | ||
| It's one of these. | ||
| I think this is the Washington signature. | ||
| No, that's George Washington's signature there. | ||
| Yeah, there he does it. | ||
| He puts that letter in here. | ||
| He sends it to the governor. | ||
| This is the governor's letter where he takes both of these letters. | ||
| This is texting. | ||
| This is early American texting. | ||
| God, that these things exist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you know who... Do you know who Raoul Wallenberg is? | ||
| He got Jews out of Russia? | ||
|
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No. | |
| He was killed by the Russians. | ||
| He was in Budapest. | ||
| When I got this for Christmas one year from my wife and she handed me a box and she gave it to me and then she took it back and she said, I can't give this to you. | ||
| And I said, why? | ||
| She said, I'll give it to you tomorrow. | ||
| I said, what? | ||
| She said, it's Christmas. | ||
| You will spend all day crying if I give this to you. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm not going to cry. | ||
| She said, promise, because I know you, you will. | ||
| And I said, I won't cry. | ||
| She gave it to me. | ||
| I spent all Christmas crying. | ||
| This is one of the most powerful things I own. | ||
| This is a Schutzpass. | ||
| This is a letter of protection signed by Raoul Wallenberg. | ||
| He went. | ||
| We asked him. | ||
| The United States went to him. | ||
| He's like, I don't know what you would compare him to, the Nordstrom family. | ||
| The Wallenberg family was like the Nordstrom family on steroids. | ||
| And they were very powerful, very influential, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I think he was one of the younger sons. | ||
| And the United States went to him and said, listen, We think the Germans are killing the Jews. | ||
| We need somebody to be our eyes and ears. | ||
| Would you go over with your government and work in your embassy and tell us what's going on? | ||
| He said, reluctantly, yes. | ||
| He knew what was at stake. | ||
| He gets over there. | ||
| He sees what's going on. | ||
| He not only reports back, he starts doing this. | ||
| And his king, in letter after letter, says, Stop! | ||
| Do you know we have the Germans here? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| We are in trouble because you are making all of these Jews citizens. | ||
| This was a pass that said they don't have to wear the star. | ||
| This person now belongs to Sweden. | ||
| He would take these and he'd print them and sign them and he'd go to the trains and he'd stuff them in between the cracks of the of the cattle cars where all the Jews were in. | ||
| He'd stuff them in and he'd stand on the top of the last car and he'd say, stop the train! | ||
| You have the wrong people! | ||
| These people are my citizens! | ||
| And they would unload and everybody who had one was free. | ||
| The problem is, he didn't know when to stop. | ||
| The Russians were coming in, and one of the people with the Schutzpass said, Rell, you've got to come with us. | ||
| You've got to get out now. | ||
| And he said, no, the Russians are right there. | ||
| They can't be as bad as the Germans. | ||
| There's too many people that we'll leave behind. | ||
| So he was last seen running into the soldiers of Russia. | ||
| We don't know whatever happened to him. | ||
| The United States of America didn't even ask, didn't even ask until Gerald Ford. | ||
| There's a couple of endings to the story. | ||
| One, that he died in a work camp in the late 60s, early 70s. | ||
| Others was that he was shot on the ground in Budapest, which we doubt because Stalin wanted to interrogate him himself personally. | ||
| The most likely death was that he was tortured and And treated horribly and died before 1955, I think. | ||
| Wait, I just want to clarify one thing, though. | ||
| You said that they were my citizens of Sweden, but you meant Budapest, right? | ||
| Or am I crossing something up here? | ||
| No, he was making the Jews in Budapest citizens of Sweden. | ||
| So he was invoking the protection of the king of Sweden, which caused Sweden all kinds of trouble. | ||
| I thought you were saying that he was somehow being able to do this in Germany by saying that they were citizens of Budapest. | ||
| No, they were in Budapest and they were being claimed as Swedish citizens so they could travel. | ||
| I'm embarrassed that I don't know more about this guy. | ||
| Most people don't know who he is. | ||
| This is I found this in auction and this is so nothing on its own. | ||
| I bought this, it says January 2013. | ||
| This is a Russian cigarette case that happened to be carried and it was all explained but no one tied it to this and when I saw it for sale I was like, oh my gosh! | ||
| This cigarette case was carried by a man that was in the brigade that went into Budapest, that he ran into. | ||
| This cigarette case on it says, in Russian, let's kill all the Jews and go home. | ||
| As he's saying, they can't be as bad, this is who he's running to. | ||
| One last piece that I brought. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I saw this one right when we sat down. | ||
| I said, whose is that? | ||
| You said, wait. | ||
| I am John Huntsman. | ||
| John Huntsman Sr. | ||
| was a dear friend of mine. | ||
| And he said, who are your heroes? | ||
| And I told him a few people and he came to my office a few weeks later. | ||
| And he sat down, he looked at my desk and he said, I see the pictures of your family. | ||
| Where are your heroes? | ||
| And I said, what do you mean? | ||
| He said, if you don't gaze upon the faces of people that you want to be like, If you don't, when you have a tough moment, you have to look down and see somebody who stood. | ||
| That's why I like Raoul Wallenberg so much. | ||
| This amazing, amazing man. | ||
| This is a copy of Mein Kampf, all in lambskin, given by Hitler himself. | ||
| And if you see the book plate... | ||
|
unidentified
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Franz Schenck, Friar von Stauffenberg. | |
| You know who that is? | ||
| Von Stauffenberg. | ||
| General von Stauffenberg. | ||
| Or what was he? | ||
| I think he was a general. | ||
| Von Stauffenberg. | ||
| Do you see the Tom Cruise film? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh. | |
| That's von Stauffenberg. | ||
| Von Stauffenberg fought against the Nazis from the inside. | ||
| He's the guy who went and planned, placed the bomb. | ||
| Placed the bomb, yeah. | ||
| I actually don't have it here, but I have the napkin from that bombing that was said to be the one that Hitler had at that time. | ||
| It's bloodstained, shrapnel holes through it. | ||
| This is his copy of Mein Kampf. | ||
| When he said, I'm not a Nazi, you know not only because of what he did, but the pages are perfect. | ||
| These books had never been opened. | ||
| God, it's eerie just holding this. | ||
| It is, isn't it? | ||
| And it's a weird thing because it's Mein Kampf, but it's von Stauffenberg's. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And don't judge people by what they read or what they have or what they might have. | ||
| Don't judge people. | ||
| And he and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Raoul Wallenberg, these guys all acted because nobody would act when they could. | ||
| Knowing the people. | ||
| I went to Auschwitz and I brought my kids. | ||
| This is 2012. | ||
| And we were going to Israel for a vacation. | ||
| And I was bringing the whole family and I said, you can't go to Israel for the first time. | ||
| Unless you pass through the gates of Auschwitz first. | ||
| And my wife said, Honey, that doesn't make it really a vacation. | ||
| And I said, I want the kids to understand why Israel is there, and I want them to make a choice now, when they're young. | ||
| Who are you going to be? | ||
| If the world goes insane, who will you be? | ||
| And I engaged a woman. | ||
| She was, oh, in her 80s, and so sweet. | ||
| She was one of the righteous among the nations, which are the Christians that saved Jews. | ||
| And we went through Auschwitz, and then we met with her. | ||
| And as we were leaving, she told us this. | ||
| She sat down with the family for like an hour. | ||
| It was just amazing. | ||
| And she told us how, at 16 years old, she saw a Jew on the street just starving. | ||
| You could only feed a Jew, I think, 400 or 800 calories a day. | ||
| And just starving. | ||
| And it was a girl her age. | ||
| And she said, please, do you have any food? | ||
| She said, I don't. | ||
| But if you come here tomorrow, I'll bring you something. | ||
| So she came, she sat down at the dinner table that night with her mom and dad and they were eating dinner. | ||
| And this is a death sentence. | ||
| You feed a Jew, you get the same thing as a death sentence. | ||
| And she said, mom and dad, I have to tell you something. | ||
| She said, I promised I would bring some food tomorrow to this Jewish girl who was starving. | ||
| And she said, she remembers the whole room just stopping and her mom and dad putting their spoon down And looking at each other and staring at each other, not saying anything. | ||
| And then her mom got up. | ||
| She started pulling a big pot out and put it on the stove. | ||
| And Paulina said, What are you doing, Mom? | ||
| She said, Well, if she's coming for food, she'll clearly have hungry friends. | ||
| They saved about 100 Jews. | ||
| So after I talked to her, I said to her, Paulina, how do I water the seed of righteousness in myself and in my family? | ||
| What do you do to strengthen that? | ||
| That seed is there. | ||
| How do we make it into a tree so we stand? | ||
| And she looked at me and said something that I thought was profound, but up until recently, I didn't truly understand. | ||
| And she said, you misunderstand. | ||
| The righteous didn't suddenly become righteous. | ||
| They just refused to go over the cliff with the rest of humanity. | ||
| That's fantastic! | ||
| We don't have to do. | ||
| You don't ever have to get to von Stauffenberg. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| All you have to do is say, now that's crazy. | ||
| I know what I saw. | ||
| That's a car burning behind you. | ||
| That's Antifa. | ||
| That's a riot. | ||
| That's looting. | ||
| That's wrong. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Mostly peaceful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not mostly peaceful. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| You're going over the cliff into insanity. | ||
| I'm standing where I've always stood. | ||
| You know, it's interesting, I often think now, now that I've been taking some of these positions that aren't thought of as popular or okayed by mainstream or whatever, that the only thing to fear is fear itself. | ||
| And I've been thinking about that a lot lately, that the more that I say the things that I believe to be true, that happen to be against the mainstream things, The more I get over that, because if you can get over the fear, then if it's true that we're on a list, and they're coming for us. | ||
| Then we're on a list. | ||
| Then we're on a list. | ||
| And by the way, pretty much everyone's on the list. | ||
| And that's why there's that famous thing, you know, they came for the Jews first. | ||
| It's like, we're all part of this thing. | ||
| But it's a very strange time that you can show me some of these things, founding documents from the United States. | ||
| Only if people don't find their courage. | ||
| during World War II, and it feels like something that's kinda now. | ||
| Only if people don't find their courage. | ||
| I truly believe, and this is why I think you're so powerful, courage is contagious. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Not everybody's a leader. | ||
| Not everybody's willing to step out into danger. | ||
| You know, not everybody's willing to lose all their friends or to whatever. | ||
| But when they see someone risk everything, and they see them on a list, If you can get them early enough, they'll step out. | ||
| But the longer you wait, the worse it gets. | ||
| That's Bonhoeffer, was a pacifist, was involved in von Stauffenberg's coup. | ||
| How? | ||
| He's a pacifist. | ||
| He said there's nothing else we can do at this point because it's too late. | ||
| The people's hearts had turned to stone and you couldn't turn them. | ||
| We have to find a way to make sure that our hearts and the hearts of everybody we know stay soft and see people as people, not enemies. | ||
| You know, when I was on tour with Jordan, one of the things that he would bring up often, because he would talk about the parallels to Nazism, to some of the authoritarian movements of the day, and he would say to everyone in the crowd, he'd say, you know, there's 3,000 of you sitting out here right now, and I guarantee you that every single one of you would think that you wouldn't be a Nazi if this was 1936 Germany, and that proves probably that you would be. | ||
| And I always thought that was pretty powerful. | ||
| We all think we would do the unpopular thing. | ||
| We all think we would do the risky thing. | ||
| We all judge everybody by our standards of today. | ||
| I'm not sure I'd stand in the end. | ||
| I mean, a friend of mine, Marcus Trell, I said to him, how do you stand torture and not break? | ||
| And he said, Glenn, everyone breaks. | ||
| Everyone breaks. | ||
| He said, but the ones who break the fastest and the loudest are the ones who will say, I'm never. | ||
| I'll stand. | ||
| Oh, I'll stand. | ||
| Because they haven't Thought about it. | ||
| It's why I wanted to bring my kids to Auschwitz. | ||
| I need you to feel it so you can think about it and really look at this as a possibility. | ||
| And once you do that and you realize, by the grace of God I'll stand, then you're ready. | ||
| But we have got to prepare ourselves now to be ready. | ||
| Because if you're ready now, the problems go away. | ||
| They think you're sheep. | ||
| I mean, I asked you on a podcast with you the last time, where's the line? | ||
| What line do you have as an individual that you say, I won't cross? | ||
| Well, I won't go there. | ||
| I mean, if I said to you last summer, yeah, they're going to tell us that we can't have Thanksgiving with our family, that we have to wear a mask all the time, and the president's going to make that mandate, and they're going to shut down the economy, you and I and everybody else would have said, never, never. | ||
| I would have said, you know, maybe they're right about that, that guy. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| You would have. | ||
| You would have. | ||
| It's insane to think. | ||
| Look where we are. | ||
| And now all of a sudden, that's normal. | ||
| It's the new normal. | ||
| Yeah, they get you with that phrase, the new normal, because there's an implicit, oh, accept it. | ||
| It's implicitly, it's here, so you better accept it. | ||
| So the thing about war is, war is just about changing leadership, borders, and financial systems. | ||
| That's what war is really about for the people up at the top. | ||
| And it's usually so horrible that society, even great ones, never go back to the way they were. | ||
| Because you're so willing to accept peace, I just want to go back to normal, that you never reset back to normal. | ||
| And you'll accept almost anything. | ||
| Here we are, Look at what we're willing to accept at this point. | ||
| And I know I did. | ||
| When they started talking about the new normal, I was like, no, no, no, I don't know. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I don't want a new normal. | ||
| I want normal, normal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Regular normal will be just fine. | ||
| How many people now would just be happy if we just, if we had, okay, this is a new normal and they're going to start, you know, letting, letting things back up, but it's never going to get the way it was. | ||
| Lots, lots would accept that. | ||
| Is that why you care so much about history and these things? | ||
| Because you feel like it kind of grounds you to do the current events that you've got to do? | ||
| You've got to wake up every day. | ||
| You do how many hours a day of talk? | ||
| At least? | ||
| Five. | ||
| At least. | ||
| I mean, that's a lot. | ||
| That's a lot of air time. | ||
| I know how much I talk and it ain't five hours a day. | ||
| But is that why you care so much about history? | ||
| Because otherwise you're just sort of spinning in the morass of the day. | ||
| I know clearly what I'm fighting for. | ||
| I know clearly what I'm fighting against. | ||
| And my son was eight, maybe, and he started taking Taekwondo. | ||
| And he had to go in to get his first belt. | ||
| And I don't know why, but he didn't expect there to be a crowd there. | ||
| And when he was really young, crowds scared him because of The stuff that has happened to me that he witnessed as a little kid, crowds scared him. | ||
| And he didn't want to be around crowds and he didn't want to be noticed. | ||
| And so we're going and he's like, no, no, no, there's a crowd, no, there's a crowd. | ||
| And I'm like, Rafe, it's going to be fine. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| It's just the parents. | ||
| They're just like us. | ||
| We're just watching your friends. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| And he really freaked out. | ||
| So I had to take him home while his sister got her belt. | ||
| And I'm driving home and I'm like, what do I say to him? | ||
| And I quite frankly, I was a little pissed, but I didn't want to be pissed at him because he wasn't, you know, he wasn't misbehaving. | ||
| And, uh, And we drove home, and I held his hand the whole time, but we didn't really talk, because I'm thinking, what do I say? | ||
| Pulled into the house, got into the house, and I knew exactly what I needed to do. | ||
| And I said, come into my library. | ||
| Come on, sit down in the library. | ||
| And at that time, my whole walls were covered with artifacts and men determined to be free and Raoul Wallenberg and the picture of the woman that he saved and a picture of him. | ||
| All of the heroes, Rosa Parks, everybody, Winston Churchill. | ||
| And we sat there on the couch. | ||
| I said, just want you to look at the walls. | ||
| And he did. | ||
| And I said, why do you think I have them up here? | ||
| And he said, because they're all heroes and they weren't afraid and they do the thing. | ||
| And I said, no, because I know each and every one of them was terrified of doing what they knew they had to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They were terrified, but they did it. | |
| That's the lesson of history. | ||
| They're just like you. | ||
| Abraham Lincoln was not a big tall statue. | ||
| He knew he was going to die. | ||
| He knew it. | ||
| He did it anyway. | ||
| He didn't want to. | ||
| Nobody wants to. | ||
| You think Gandhi? | ||
| Well, Gandhi may have because he was doing the hunger strike, but that was against his own people, his own followers. | ||
| He was like, you want to be full of anger and rage? | ||
| I'm not with you, and until my followers stop acting that way, I'll starve myself to death. | ||
| I mean, these people were amazing, but all of them, all of them had a change of heart and didn't want to do it. | ||
| Bonhoeffer, he was here in America. | ||
| He escaped Germany, and he came here to America, he was in New York, and he was so guilt-ridden that he left his people. | ||
| In this dark hour that he went back. | ||
| I think was on one of the last boats that went back and you could get back into Germany. | ||
| He went back and he said to all of his pupils. | ||
| Okay, let's say you're an atheist. | ||
| Let's say you're an atheist. | ||
| You really believe that, but you don't have any other choice than to take somebody's life. | ||
| They didn't realize at the time. | ||
| The example, he was trying to get them to convince him that there's no way you could do that, or to accept, convince him that, yes, I can do that. | ||
| He's involved with von Stauffenberg. | ||
| He's taken to a concentration camp. | ||
| In the end, he's in a cell with a guy who took the Jews up into airplanes until their heads popped. | ||
| He took people and covered them in ice and freezing in the cold water and all of that stuff. | ||
| In every hospital in the world, that book from the Nazis, all of those stats are in every hospital in the world. | ||
| And that's why he was sent to a concentration camp. | ||
| Because Hitler, he released all this information and Hitler said, what the hell are you doing? | ||
| He said, you know how many lives will be saved by this information? | ||
| He said, we're saving German lives, not everybody's life. | ||
| He, a prostitute double agent, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were in the same cell. | ||
| They were all executed four days before Hitler died. | ||
| The guy at the gallows remembers Bonhoeffer because he thanked him. | ||
| He walked up the stairs. | ||
| He got there and the executioner kind of helped him up and then put the noose around his neck. | ||
| And Bonhoeffer looked at him and said, thank you for your kindness. | ||
| Good guys. | ||
| That's the person I want to be. | ||
| But that's not a person you just become. | ||
| That's a person you work hard to become. | ||
| Glenn, I didn't know what we were going to do when we sat down. | ||
| I said to you right as we walked in, I said, let's just figure it out. | ||
| You had some stuff here. | ||
| And this is truly like, people can't understand, this is half a percent of some of the stuff that you've got. | ||
| And so you're building this museum. | ||
| So where can people go after this? | ||
| Because this is actually, without me knowing what we were going to do, this is exactly what I wanted to do. | ||
| And I think it's a nice break from the minutiae of the day-to-day crazy stuff. | ||
| So if you want to know more, you want to sign up for the classes, again they're free, you'll just be notified. | ||
| We'll just have you on a list so we can shoot an email out to you and tell you it's happening. | ||
| Go to mercuryone.org, that's my charity, and look for the American Journey Experience. | ||
| And do you know when the museum is actually opening? | ||
| I mean, I saw you guys are putting it together. | ||
| It ain't easy, COVID and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, because of COVID. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was supposed to be open last summer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's just a mini museum. | ||
| We have plans for a massive museum that we're working with the city on. | ||
| But hopefully, as soon as this COVID nonsense stops, we'll open it up. | ||
| It will be open for those who are willing to have a test and everything else. | ||
| You can come in and actually take the classes here at the center, but most people will take them online and it's free. | ||
| So just sign up. | ||
| Glad I think you're on your way to becoming one of those people. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| On your way? | ||
| Fair enough? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Hopefully. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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