Jan. 8, 2022 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the political cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
And welcome
everybody once again to tonight's live broadcast of TPC on this Saturday evening, January the 8th.
It's off to California we go.
I'm your host, James Edwards.
I've been dreaming about having Mark Weber back on the show since last November when he gave a speech that I think will be of particular interest to our audience this evening.
And so on this winner's night, we're back out in California with Mark Weber, the director of the Institute of Historical Review.
He's going to be with us this evening to talk about the speech he gave on the East Coast back a couple of months ago.
The title of the speech is, How and Why Did It All Go Wrong?
The passing of the Founders America.
Now, that's a provocative question, and to give it a great treatment tonight, once again, one of our favorite guests and most interviewed guests, Mark Weber.
Mark, how are you?
Happy New Year.
Thanks for being back with us for another run.
Thanks.
Thanks very much, James, for the great introduction.
It's great to be back on with you.
I wanted to thank you very much for playing that clip from California Dreaming.
I'm old enough to remember when it first came out, and I think it's a very appropriate piece of music.
I've cited it many times myself because it underscores the tremendous contrast between the America of the time when that song came out and today.
One of the lines of the song is, I'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A.
Well, nobody, they might be warm in L.A. compared to Nebraska maybe or Minnesota, but nobody says today I'm going to be in L.A. and I'll be safe.
It's a very, very different world, and it's very difficult sometimes for me to communicate just how drastically the mood, the attitude, the kind of feeling that Americans had when I was young and when that song came out, there was a much, much greater sense of a very widespread sense of kind of upbeat, of optimism, especially among younger people, and a much, much higher level of just trust in a trust level in the society.
And America today is very, very different.
And for younger people who grew up just in the last 10, 20 years, it's very hard to communicate just how differently the mood is.
But that song really does illustrate how things have drastically changed.
I don't think it could be.
I'm sorry.
No, no, no, no, by all means.
I was just going to say the mental synchronicity is off the chart because you and I did not collaborate on that.
I was not born until 1980, but as regular listeners of this program know, typically the only thing that plays in my car is 50s and 60s music.
I love the time period.
I love the bubblegum pop.
I love just everything about it.
I love the harmonies.
I love the instrumentations and the arrangements and things like that.
But I was thinking, hey, California guests, it's a winner's day, and here we are.
So that actually worked out fantastically.
Right, right, right.
There wasn't any coordination on that.
I mean, the songs, there were songs like Say When You Co to California, Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair.
I mean, the music of that time was much more upbeat.
And that gets us to the point of this broadcast.
I don't think your listeners need to be reminded, if anybody needs reminding anymore in America, just how anxious, how divided, how uncertain, how gloomy the mood is today compared to what it was back in those days.
Last year, there was a poll, for example, by Axios Ipsos that showed that an astonishing 80-some percent of Republicans and 78% of Democrats agreed with the statement that the country is falling apart.
That's an astonishing high percentage.
You can hardly get much agreement on any issue over 60% on any issue.
Numerous polls over recent years show a majority of Americans think that life for their children or grandchildren, if they even have children or grandchildren, will be less secure and prosperous than it has been for them.
I mean, people have, there's a widespread awareness, of course, in America that things are, something's gone very wrong in American society.
And that's what I want to try to deal with today.
And what I tried to deal with in the talk I gave in November in Arlington, Virginia.
How did it go wrong?
If America is such a great country, if things were so good, how did we get to where we are today?
I mean, there are so many markers that people can point to.
Many people have their own of just how disappointing, how bad things are.
I mean, one of them, just off the top, is just the other day it was announced that the number one brand of automobile company car sales in the United States in the last year were more cars were sold by Toyota than they were by General Motors.
It's never happened in American history before that a foreign automobile manufacturer sold more cars than any American.
And it's the first time since 1931 that General Motors was not the leading seller of automobiles.
That's just one of just numerous examples.
In the last few weeks, it was announced that last year 10 major cities in America had all-time high crime homicide rates.
I mean, this is all kind of just amazing and a terrible indictment of what's happened.
But the point I wanted to try to get is why did it go wrong?
What happened?
And the basic point I made in that talk, and I want to try to make today is it's the accumulation of decisions or lack of decisions that we Americans collectively have made or didn't make for many, many years now.
We've been on a trajectory for a long time, and the problems of America today are the inevitable result, the inevitable consequence of what we didn't do or did do over a long period of time.
And that therefore it's really foolish to think that any one president, any one administration, anything is going to turn this around.
And that's one of the reasons why Americans are so frustrated, because they have lost the confidence in the ability of leaders of either of those political parties to really lay out any plausible, credible idea of how the terrible trajectory that we've been on now for so many years can somehow be reversed or turned around.
I think this is a topic certainly that we could have gone two hours with, but in radio you always want to leave the audience hungering for more as you do so well, Mark, every time you're a guest.
So again, this is the speech.
How and why did it all go wrong?
The passing of the Founders America.
So we're going to be talking about what Mark just said.
How did it all go wrong?
And what may come next.
We'll get to that too.
But as I asked Mark to do, I've seen the notes from this speech, or at least some of the promotional material of it.
And I said, let's make a made-for-radio condensed presentation for this listening audience.
And so that's what we're going to try to do when we come back here from this first break of the evening.
Mark Weber, the director of Institute of Historical Review, you can check out his website at ihr.org.
He is a really good friend and a fantastic guest.
So I'm looking forward to really sinking our teeth into this topic over the course of this, our first hour.
We will be back right after this first break of the night to do just that.
Stay tuned, everybody.
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Well, ladies and gentlemen, Mark Weber is the guest, and I think you know the topic.
I'm going to quickly read through some of the promotional material about this speech, which we are reformatting to radio version for you tonight.
When the U.S. was established in 1776, Americans were already the most prosperous people in the world.
And for the next two centuries, this was a land of unparalleled opportunity, wealth, and confidence in the future.
But that's no longer true.
As numerous public opinion polls and recent election campaigns show, Americans today are cynical and contemptuous of their political leadership, distrustful of each other, confused about their national identity, and worried about the future.
Political leaders of both major parties warn of grave dangers from fellow citizens who allegedly threaten to destroy everything.
Prominent Americans who were once honored and esteemed are now scorned as bigots and oppressors.
With each passing year, the U.S. is ever more obviously becoming a third world country.
What went wrong?
How did such a successful and envied country become so divided, contentious, and anxious?
That is what Mark Weber returns to the program tonight to talk about.
He is going to trace how and why things went bad with the review of the trajectory of American history.
Mark, settle the score.
How did we get from there to here?
Well, as you quoted, it's important to realize that right from the get-go, Americans were better off.
Already when the United States declared independence, the average American, I mean white American, lived better than anybody anywhere else in the world.
And the success of America, the tremendous prosperity, and eventually the tremendous power of the United States was the basic reason for that.
Well, people give desperate explanations.
Some people say, well, we had a great constitution, or Americans were more religious, or there's various explanations.
But the basic explanation is very simple and obvious.
It's because people came from an advanced culture or civilization from Europe to a continent that was there practically for the taking, with very little effort.
A continent bursting with bountiful resources of every possible kind.
North America was able to be taken by settlers from Europe with very little regard for having to husband or carefully worry about resources because there was always more.
This was a continent with millions of acres of very fertile land, huge forests, teeming with game, a great climate, tremendous advantages from the bounty of nature, and it was there without any, with very little effort.
The only people living were Indians who were Stone Age, had no written language, no modern tools.
And unlike people who had to fight in Asia or in Europe for small scraps of land, this huge territory was able to be taken for almost nothing.
You know, when Thomas Jefferson was president and the Louisiana purchase, he more than doubled the size of the United States by buying the whole Louisiana basin from France for a song.
It was before even the Constitution that we now have was in place, that the Continental Congress took possession and control of what's called the Northwest Territories.
That is now the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois.
I mean, these are huge territories by European or world standards that America was able to take advantage of.
And the people who came here overwhelmingly from Europe were people who were, because of the difficulty of travel, were more adventurous, were usually more far-sighted or whatever, and could very quickly exploit this entire continent.
And that's one of the reasons why the living standards and prosperity was true not only in the United States, but also in Canada.
Even though Canada didn't have a revolution or a conflict to break away from Britain, even though Canada didn't have a Declaration of Independence like the United States, they lived equally well because the same basic realities were in place.
That is, people from Europe were able to take advantage of this tremendous continent with all of these resources and exploit it very quickly.
Now, the attitude that people had when they came to this country was they came here not because they really wanted to build any kind of society here in America, but because life was going to be better for themselves and their families than it was where they came from.
And that's always been true of immigrants who've come to the United States, whether from Europe or from other countries.
They didn't come here because they particularly were loyal to a particular kind of government or society in the United States.
They came because it was going to be better than it was from where they came from.
And that's both a huge plus or strength of America, but it's also a weakness in that the motivation of people who came to this country was first and foremost, what's in it for me?
How am I going to benefit?
In other words, a very, very strong individualistic ethos or outlook that was very, very important and even maybe essential in quickly developing the North American continent and exploiting it and settling it and so forth.
But an outlook that's very difficult to sustain a nation or a collective or a national outlook because it is very individualistic.
It is very, it's sort of based on the idea that my loyalty is really conditional upon how good things are for me, not what, not based on a kind of loyalty like a family requires that's not based on whether it's good for me, but whether it's going to be good for the future.
Anyway, my basic point is that right from the beginning, the outlook of America was very much conditional upon a, or very much characterized by a very, very strong individualism.
And that individualism has made it very difficult to have an identity that's national or a clear identity that's national.
Because the very identity that people have is in terms of how is it good for me?
How much, what about my rights?
And that's a big, that's always been a big feature of American life is what's in it for me.
And my point is that that's a strength, but it's also a big weakness in sustaining a healthy society over a long period of time.
And we're seeing the results of that now.
I think that's a fantastic statement.
And you're right about that.
I wanted to get on something that was also included in that promotional material for your speech, which we're now covering in a radio-condensed format here from last November.
You were talking about how America's founders understood the most important issues that threatened the country's future and anticipated with remarkable foresight the challenges that did in fact arise.
We'll spend more time talking about this in the next segment.
I mean, now, obviously, looking back, hindsight being 2020, now so many years and decades and even centuries later, we can look back and say, wow, you know, Monday morning quarterback that we are, we would have put this in the Constitution.
But you still defend the actions that they took at that time, saying that they did understand the issues.
I'm going to explain what I mean by that and how they foresaw the very problems that we're dealing with today.
This was understood by political leaders who had much greater foresight and I think sincerity and honesty than the leaders we have today.
But that's something we'll get into in a moment then, I guess.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, we are here, of course, with well, actually, Mark, I'll tell you, we have this is like a no man's land part of radio, about a minute or so remaining before the next break.
Do you want to just go ahead and get into it a little bit?
We'll cut it when we need to and then jump back.
There's a great deal of emphasis in America on the Constitution.
But when the men who founded the well, everybody has heard, of course, about the huge debate.
Everybody's aware of the big debate about a national identity that we've been dealing with over the past year or so, exemplified or manifest in the so-called Black Lives Matter movement.
And one of the basic points of this movement and of the critical race theory thing that we see promoted in our schools is that America was always a racist country and a bad country.
Well, there's some truth to that in the sense that the founders of America, the Constitutional Convention, at the Continental Congress that declared independence, did want and were very clear about their notion of America as a white republic.
Hold on right there.
That is exactly where I want to come back on.
That is a perfect stopping point, a perfect teaser for what's going to come in the next segment.
We will pick it up at that exact word when we come back.
Stay tuned, Mark Weber.
Pursuing liberty, using the Constitution as our guide.
You're listening to Liberty News Radio, USA Radio News with Tim Berg.
The Biden administration is facing a difficult week in the fight against the pandemic as the United States recorded a record new 1 million COVID cases last week.
Republican Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama gives his take on the Biden administration's handling of the ongoing pandemic and President Biden's campaign pledge to stop the business on Fox News.
Well, the virus is definitely impacting the success of this administration because credibility plays into success.
The Biden administration, for that matter, before it was the Biden administration, during the campaign, made all sorts of promises that could not possibly be kept.
For example, he was going to stop the virus.
No way was that going to happen.
The travel nightmare continues this weekend with over 3,000 flights delayed or canceled on Saturday.
You're listening to USA Radio News.
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The Supreme Court is weighing the legality of President Biden's federal vaccine mandate.
More than a dozen states are suing the White House, saying these requirements are unconstitutional and are devastating their communities.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been tasked with implementing these mandates for businesses.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt, appearing on Fox and Friends, says there's more at stake in this case than just vaccine mandates.
It's individual liberty.
It's the power of the administrative state and the mass firings of healthcare workers.
It's all on the line, and the impact would be incredibly significant.
We've had rural hospitals in Missouri that would close, nursing homes that would close.
President Biden is among those paying tribute to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Saturday.
Biden, former President Obama, and other Democratic leaders among the speakers taking part in the memorial service in Las Vegas.
USA Radio News.
I am all away on a winner's day.
I didn't tell her, I didn't tell her.
I believe today I believe today.
I fought your head for you.
I thought you winners dreamed.
I thought you winners dreamed.
I thought you winnered.
Well, thank you again, folks, for joining us on this winter's day or night, wherever you may be.
Yours truly, James Edwards, and Mark Weber, who is our man in California.
It takes a particular kind of man to hold his ground in California.
Mark Weber does it for all of us there with the Institute for Historical Review, IHR.org.
Mark, of course, is an accomplished historian, lecturer, current affairs analyst, and author.
He was educated in both the United States and Europe and holds a master's degree in modern European history.
Why he's so perfectly suited for conversations such as this.
And you left us on a cliffhanger there, Mark, at the dawn of the last break.
And I would say this about the Founding Fathers.
This topic comes up a lot, looking back in retrospect on what they did and didn't do.
My general opinion of the Founding Fathers is, of course, very positive.
I would say, in being fair, that perhaps they were a little bit drunk on the French Enlightenment.
They were, after all, a product of their times, as we all are.
I think it is unfair, though, to look back and say that they could have possibly foreseen everything that would have come in America.
There's no way they could have anticipated things such as homosexual marriage or even interracial marriage and a lot of the transgenderism and just all of the latest progression of radical egalitarianism.
It would be as if if we started a country, if we had our own nation and you and I, Mark, were charged with writing its constitution.
I don't know if we would ban intergalactic relationships because that's just not something that we can foresee happening, that interstellar travel doesn't exist.
So I don't know.
But I would say this.
The Haitian Revolution took place just a few years after the American Revolution.
And the Constitution that came in its wake banned any sort of citizenship unless there was a racial commonality.
So I wonder then why the founding fathers couldn't have done that if the murderous and genocidal Haitians had enough foresight to do so.
Well, they did so because the Haitian Republic was founded on an explicit, well, it was founded by killing all the white people, basically, who lived there.
So they put it there.
Whereas that's not what happened in America.
But my point is, we have a big question right now of identity.
And broadly speaking, I'm being very broad.
Most liberals or leftists and even many conservatives believe that the identity of America is contained in the phrase, all men are created equal in the Declaration of Independence.
Now, it's true that that phrase appears there.
But what Jefferson and what others meant by that at that time was that they rejected monarchy.
The big, the revolutionary aspect of the American Republic was they did not believe that people should have power or authority because they were born into it.
They believed that it should be based on merit.
They wanted a meritocracy, a white republic meritocracy.
And that's the reason why that phrase exists there, because the whole point of the Declaration of Independence was to present an indictment of the British crown, the British monarchy, and the fact that power was held by a country, Britain, that was alien.
They were across the seas, and Americans had a long history already of running, of governing themselves, more or less.
I mean, all of the colonies had parliaments or lawmaking bodies of their own, and the leaders of the American, early American Republic were people who were already leaders, politically and socially and economically, in America.
And so it wasn't a big transition, unlike the French Revolution, for Americans to govern themselves because they had a lot of experience doing it themselves.
And they resented Britain coming in.
But anyway, that's the basis of that.
But now, liberals and even many conservatives have taken that one sentence, that one phrase from the Declaration of Independence to say that's America's identity.
That's not true.
The founders at the Continental Congress and also at the Constitutional Convention had disagreements about religion, about the size of government, about the role of government.
But one thing they all agreed on was that it should be a white republic.
This was so basic that it wasn't felt even necessary to spell it out because everybody took for granted.
It was that obvious.
Pardon the interruption very quickly, Mark.
I was just going to agree with you in whole.
It was the thing with Jefferson, all men are created equal.
I mean, it looks silly now, but you've got to take the context of that and the context of it, of course, was it was a brother's quarrel with King George.
The colonists were equal to King George.
That's the context of it.
Now, of course, because we've been so separated from our history and from our past, it's easy to muddy those waters.
And, of course, it's been done intentionally.
But the idea that all races and all civilizations were equal, obviously, that's not the intent there.
That's what it's being taught now and what people are now led to believe.
But going back to it, any number of founding documents laid bare the fact that this was to be a nation for our posterity, our people being the founding stock.
And you look back at the original Immigration Acts and things like that, but it is not specifically spelled out in either the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, because as you said, it was taken for granted.
They didn't see a need for it to be.
Right.
And that's one of the problems is that because it wasn't taken, it wasn't spelled out, people did take it for granted.
And that was a weakness because later when people were challenged, it became more difficult to defend that because it was not spelled out.
But going back to a bigger point, the Declaration of Independence was largely the work of Thomas Jefferson.
And Thomas Jefferson wasn't a hypocrite when he wrote all men are created equal, and he also owned slaves.
He understood it in a different way.
But the bigger point is this.
There's a monument to Jefferson and one to Lincoln and also to Washington, D.C., in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Capitol.
And in the Jefferson Memorial, there are cards on the wall a number of quotations from Thomas Jefferson.
And one of them is this.
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people, referring to black slaves, are to be free.
And that quote is often cited to show how liberal, how egalitarian, I guess, Thomas Jefferson was.
But it's misleading.
It's actually a deceit because the quote, as accurate as far as it goes, is misleading.
It's incomplete.
It's from something Jefferson wrote in 1821.
And here's what he actually said about slavery and the place of blacks in American society.
He said, nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than these people are to be free.
Nor is it less certain that the two races equally free cannot live in the same government.
That is the same society.
Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.
He didn't hate blacks.
He wasn't a hater.
He just regarded them as different.
And that people who are different should not live in the same kind of government or society.
They should be, because they cannot really be, their basic assumptions about what's important and basic identity are going to inevitably be different.
He didn't think it was any more wrong to say there should be a separate country or society for blacks or whites than people agreeing that Croatians and Serbians can live in different countries, or Czechs and Slovaks can live in different countries.
They might be very similar in many ways.
But if people regard themselves, have a different identity, then for Jefferson and for many people, of course, it's obvious that they should have a different government.
And Jefferson certainly did not believe that whites and blacks were going to be able to live together in the same society on anything like a basis of equality.
And anyway, this is important to understand.
Jefferson was convinced that black slavery must and would be ended, but he was also convinced that blacks should not be freed without first having in place a program to remove them from the country.
Now, I know that's astonishing, but he thought that this was such a big dilemma that in 1824, two years before his death, he repeated this view that for the sake that blacks should be freed from slavery, but that then it should be accompanied by forcible deportation of blacks from North America, probably to Africa or to the Caribbean West Indies.
And he worked out a plan for the mass removal of blacks from the United States.
He calculated that it would cost $900 million to purchase and then deport the 1.5 million slaves in the U.S. at that time over a period of 25 years.
Now, that sounds pretty astonishing to people today when they like to think that Jefferson's views were the ones that are now fashionable or, well, they have been fashionable for many people in trying to understand our history.
But he basically he took this view and this was widely held view, that there was no way to deal with this problem without the separation of the races.
I guarantee you, a lot of people listening to this broadcast right now just learned something about Thomas Jefferson they'd never heard before from Mark Weber.
And with regard to the famous Jefferson quote that you were talking about a moment ago, it's so interesting how the system just cherry-picks the first phrase of it and just leaves off the rest because it's inconvenient.
Take what they want and leave the rest.
And people don't know any better because they don't go to IHR.org.
Go there, folks.
We're going to take a break.
We'll be back with Mark Weber right after this.
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Why don't we say to the government writ large that they have to spend a little bit less?
Anybody ever had less money this year than you had last?
Anybody better have a 1% pay cut?
You deal with it.
That's what government needs, a 1% pay cut.
If you take a 1% pay cut across the board, you have more than enough money to actually pay for the disaster relief.
But nobody's going to do that because they're fiscally irresponsible.
Who are they?
Republicans.
Who are they?
Democrats.
Who are they?
Virtually the whole body is careless and reckless with your money.
So the money will not be offset by cuts anywhere.
The money will be added to the debt, and there will be a day of reckoning.
What's the day of reckoning?
The day of reckoning may well be the collapse of the stock market.
The day of reckoning may be the collapse of the dollar.
When it comes, I can't tell you exactly, but I can tell you it has happened repeatedly in history when countries ruin their currency.
You know where the solution can be found, Mr. President?
In churches, in wedding chapels, in maternity wards across the country and around the world.
More babies will mean forward-looking adults, the sort we need to tackle long-term, large-scale problems.
American babies in particular are likely going to be wealthier, better educated, and more conservation-minded than children raised in still industrializing countries.
As economist Tyler Cowan recently wrote, quote, by having more children, you're making your nation more populous, thus boosting its capacity to solve climate change.
The planet does not need for us to think globally and act locally so much as it needs us to think family and act personally.
The solution to so many of our problems at all times and in all places is to fall in love, get married, and have some kids.
Welcome back to Get On The Show.
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Ladies and gentlemen, our guest again, this second show of our 18th broadcasting year here at TPC, is Mark Weber, director of the Institute of Historical Review, ihr.org.
He's one of our most frequently interviewed guests because his insight on any given topic is always so sharp and well-informed.
And, of course, tonight is no different.
He is breaking down a speech he gave in November, as you know.
How and why did it all go wrong, the passing of the Founders of America?
And I think he answered in that last segment that the founders perhaps did understand more than people, even in our circles, give them credit for the issues that threatened the country's future, anticipated it with remarkable foresight, as I read a moment ago, the challenges that did in fact arise.
But this was the last sentence in that promotional material we've been reading tonight.
In modern times, Americans reject their wisdom to embrace the delusional world view of life, society, and history that inevitably has brought cultural decay and societal breakdown.
So, that, Mark, will set up our final segment together this evening.
We look forward to the next time already.
I'd like to ask you to conclude your treatment of this speech you gave, and then at the end, if you could remember, answer this question: Are we resigned to this dystopian hellscape that is manifesting itself, or is there a way out?
Well, first I want to get back to the point about how Jefferson and how other American leaders up until the 1920s or 30s saw the racial issue.
They all understood that whites and blacks, perhaps other people, the differences are so profound, are so deep, that the idea that whites and blacks are going to live together on anything like a trusting or equal basis is delusional.
And this view was held not only by Jefferson, it was also held by Abraham Lincoln.
He was emphatic about this.
And one of the most remarkable things he ever did was in 1862, he called a delegation of five black community leaders in Washington, D.C. to urge them to support his plan to remove blacks from the United States.
This is an astonishing thing, also very little known.
Very few people know this.
They've seen the movie Lincoln by Stephen Steele Spielberg.
I've seen it myself.
But it's highly misleading for a number of reasons.
But my point is, Lincoln did not believe that whites and blacks could live together in the same society on the basis of equality.
And we're dealing with that question now.
The leaders of both parties today keep trying to say that that can happen.
One of the most remarkable...
Mark, if I could interrupt you just for a second, my friend, I would point to an article that was written by Jared Taylor, and I believe I'm going to stand near the title here, and that is What the Founding Fathers Really Believed About Race.
It was commissioned by Bill Regnery and the National Policy Institute some years ago before Bill's passing, of course.
And we mentioned it every 4th of July.
And he talks about, and you mentioned this, which is what triggered my memory, that the founders of this nation, really all the way through every major leader of this nation until the 1950s and 60s, had that agreement that you're expressing right now.
Well, it began changing already in the 1930s, I would say.
Already, an egalitarian view, for reasons we won't go into right now, started taking hold, especially in academic life and in major newspapers and media outlets already in the 1930s.
And then during World War II is the first time the U.S. government, as the U.S. government, began promoting this idea that America is a country for everyone, that people are individuals and they're basically can be, one can be replaced with the other.
That became an official view promoted by the U.S. government in propaganda during the Second World War.
And then it was after that that the United States began moving very, very inexorably toward what we have today.
This idea that people are simply individuals, that distinctions of culture, race, religion, so forth, ethnicity, are really meaningless and should be obliterated if possible.
And that is so crassly in contrast to what Americans believed and the founders wanted for most of American history that it's impossible for me to see how America can hold together because the identity Americans are supposed to have today is so crassly in contrast to what Americans believed and American leaders laid out that it's schizophrenic.
There's no identity really to hold the country together except a kind of free-floating belief in democracy.
And that's why much of the media, the mainstream media, keeps on talking over and over about our democracy, as if that's more important than the reality of people's lives or how they actually live in a society.
Who would want such a democracy?
I mean, who would, you know, why would you want to live under the same roof with people who have nothing in common with you?
Nobody wants that.
White, black, and white.
Nobody wants that.
But this is a comment that came in from a listener who's tuned in right now from North Carolina, the founders knew human nature and it doesn't change.
That's a good comment.
And you can force at the point of a bayonet equal opportunity, and certainly that's been done here, but you can never generate equal outcome.
Well, this is a very important point that I also made in the talk, is that when we try to look at the gap, the disparity between whites and blacks, which people are aware of, one of the most astonishing things is that the gap or disparity in terms of income, wealth, educational achievement, neighborhood crime rates, is as great today as it was, depending on your source, in 1950 or 1960.
In other words, despite more than half a century of programs, policies, and laws to try to create an egalitarian America, to eliminate this disparity or gap, the gap is as great as it was in 1950 or 1960, depending on the source you happen to consult.
I mean, a paper by Duke University and University of Chicago researchers found that the median income, median earnings gap between whites and blacks, this was issued in 2016, is what it was in 1950.
I could cite others.
We don't have time to go into all of it.
But the idea that we're going to, if we just carry on with policies that have failed in the past to create this kind of utopia, is the definition of insanity or foolishness.
If it hasn't worked for 50 years, there's no good evidence that just pressing ahead with the same policies that have failed will somehow result in success if we just keep pushing further and further.
IHR.org, ladies and gentlemen, make it among your daily reads.
I certainly do.
Mark Weber, its founder, its director, is with us and with us again.
He will be soon, I hope.
He has informed me about a book regarding Stalin that we certainly want to sink our teeth into.
We'll do that on his next appearance, which I pray will not be too far in the future from now.
But Mark, again, the question, are we resigned to this increasingly dystopian hellscape that we see manifesting itself?
It's that's hard to say.
I think what you can say, James, that it's very clear that millions of Americans, in fact, maybe even the majority, have come to understood that the American system, American-style democracy, modern liberal democracy, whatever you're going to call it, is failing by its own standards.
Things are not working out.
You know, we have a new president who's pledged to eliminate what he calls systemic racism in American society.
After four years, of course, in office or eight, however, years he lives or is going to be in office, that will not be achieved.
We are characterized, the leaders of both parties keep promising a future that they can't deliver.
I mean, whether it's Donald Trump or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden, and the result will be ever more disillusionment, cynicism by the American people about our political leaders.
Policies have to be based on reality and programs have to be based on reality.
If they're not based on reality, they inevitably will fail.
And that's the big point, is that America failed to really come to grips with these issues of race because this has been a very wealthy country, and we could put off dealing in a consequential, a rigorous way with these issues because we have so much abundance here that people could just move to some new place and avoid a lot of these problems.
When Ronald Reagan was president, he said, when I was young, we didn't know we had a race problem.
Well, the race issue has always existed, even during those times when Americans wanted to pretend that it didn't exist.
And just ignoring it or trying to pretend that it's not true is no solution.
And that is basically why we're in the trouble today, because we have not faced forthrightly and boldly this reality.
And as long as we fail to really come to grips with how life is, humanity is, people really are, and history, we will continue on the path that we have been going on for the last 10, 20, 30 years.
The truth has to be told.
Let the truth be told.
And what you said a moment ago is so precious.
We have run out of interstates.
We've run out of exits down the interstates to which we can run.
That's right.
I mean, I even hear so many people, even you might say people who generally agree, they just say, well, I don't like it here.
I'm going to Idaho.
I'm going to someplace else.
Well, all that will do is just put off the day of reckoning for a little bit longer.
I mean, we've been doing this for years.
The cities became bad, so people moved to the suburbs.
They become bad in some suburbs, so they moved to some new state or some new place.
Americans have a history of this.
And this is what, to bring it back to the beginning, is part of the American, you might say, DNA, is that when things go bad, we just move to a new place because the immigrants who came here, our ancestors, came here because it was better for one reason or another than the places they came from in Europe or wherever else they came from.
But that's not a solution.
That's not really coming to grips or dealing with problems because America has had the wealth, the opportunity to be able to avoid making very hard decisions.
But the debt reckoning, I mean, either we die out or we come to grips with this.
Well, I'll take the least we can do.
And I'll take the latter.
Let's turn and face this and correct these problems.
We've had an abundance of a lot of things in this country, including space and room to move.
But enough, enough, because the hour is late.
It's been late for a long time.
Mark Weber, another magnificent hour of radio, my friend.