In this special thanksgiving edition of the War Room War Room, host Stephan K. Vanousky talks with the co-author of The Patriots History of the United States, Larry Swiker, about the history of thanksgiving and what it means for our nation.
00:00:00.000this is the primal stream of a dying regime pray for our enemies because we're going with the evil
00:00:10.860on these people i got a free shot all these networks lying about the people the people
00:00:17.480had a belly full of it i know you don't like hearing that i know you've tried to do everything
00:00:21.380in the world to stop that but you're not going to stop it it's going to happen and where do
00:00:24.760people like that go to share the big line mega media i wish in my soul i wish that any of these
00:00:32.480people had a conscience ask yourself what is my task and what is my purpose if that answer
00:00:39.440is to save my country this country will be saved war room here's your host stephen k van
00:00:54.760we've come to the time in the season when family and friends gather near
00:01:09.160to offer a prayer of thanksgiving for blessings we've known through the years
00:01:18.880to join hands and thank the creator now when thanksgiving is due
00:01:28.340and this year when i count my blessings i'm thanking the lord he made you
00:01:37.920this year when i count my blessings i'm thanking the lord he made you
00:01:47.220i'm grateful for the laughter of children the sun and the wind and the rain the color of blue
00:02:02.420in your sweet eyes the sight of a high ball and train the moon rise over a prairie
00:02:13.220and oh love that you've made new and this year when i count my blessings i'm thanking the lord he made you
00:02:27.220this year when i count my blessings i'm thanking the lord he made you
00:02:37.220and when the time comes to be going you won't be in sorrow and tears i'll kiss you goodbye and i'll go on my way grateful for all of the years i think for all that you gave me
00:03:05.220for teaching me for teaching me for teaching me what love can do
00:03:10.220and thanksgiving day for the rest of my life i'm thanking the lord he made you
00:03:19.220and thanksgiving day for the rest of my life i'm thanking the lord he made you
00:03:29.220okay that's the uh great uh johnny cash and no better way to kick off uh thanksgiving day in our thanksgiving special i want to thank everybody uh for joining us you're in the war room uh and i've got a very uh special next couple hours we're going to spend with each other so i'm sure a lot of the uh war room war
00:03:58.220war room war fighters or the war room posse are uh on the road now to um to mom's house or grandma's house or to friends uh getting together and we'll spend a couple hours
00:04:07.220and uh and go through the american tradition of thanksgiving and what it means for our nation
00:04:13.220and uh what it means for us as a people i couldn't think of a better uh way to do this than larry swiker at the uh co-author of the patriots history of the united states
00:04:23.220which really when it came out i think not just set a new tone but kind of uh brought back to people what they had forgotten even conservatives about the great love of this country its cultures its uh its mores its uh um you know customs and traditions
00:04:41.220traditions so let's bring in uh larry first off larry tell me about walk me through um just before we get into the thanksgiving part of it
00:04:50.220i want to go back and talk about the patriots history and particularly for those people maybe not familiar with you or not familiar with the book
00:04:55.900how important this book was for the culture of the united states not just for education for learning
00:05:03.280but when you guys this book came out it was it was a cultural it was really had a big impact
00:05:09.140on on culture overall it was like wow we never really thought of you know a lot some conservatives had
00:05:16.960but even most conservatives hadn't in the in the whole nation we had kind of lost a lot of what
00:05:22.180you and your co-author kind of the framing you put into the uh the country's history tell me about the
00:05:28.040how you wrote it how you pulled it together uh and why it's important we're gonna get into all the
00:05:32.760thanksgiving aspects today particularly the pilgrims and the first thanksgiving and then we'll talk about
00:05:38.260lincoln and the civil war and the traditions of what president lincoln did the national holiday what so tell
00:05:43.860us first about the patriots history well uh when mike and i started to even talk about writing this
00:05:50.500we were both college professors and we taught u.s history for a number of years and we were not
00:05:55.900satisfied with any of the textbooks and some of the ones you might consider more conservative or
00:06:01.320traditional like the national experience or the american pageant had steadily drifted to the left
00:06:07.880especially after reagan i used to joke that if you wanted to do a pregnancy test on a textbook to
00:06:14.180go to the index and look up the reagan section you'd immediately find out where it stood
00:06:19.360so we started working on this in the late 90s and honestly steve we didn't think we're going to get
00:06:24.760it published we thought we're going to have to go to kinkos or fedex and get it you know spiral bound
00:06:30.700and sell it out of the back of a van like you would you know plastic straws in california you know
00:06:36.800study plastic straws hatred's history you know something like that and uh it was 2 000 pages when
00:06:44.480we turned it into the publisher and my agent said no that that's not going to work so he chopped a
00:06:50.160thousand uh 800 pages and then the editors went to work trying to chop another 200 pages and finally
00:06:57.060we got it down to the magic number of under a thousand pages which brought it to a price point
00:07:02.460where they thought they could afford to sell it and it had really good initial success i mean it was
00:07:08.380accepted everywhere by claremont review of books national review everybody except the new york times
00:07:14.500uh loved it and and reviewed it very well and it quickly became a staple among homeschoolers which
00:07:22.180by the late 2010s i started to do homeschool conventions because i saw wow these people are using my book
00:07:28.660maybe i ought to go out and meet some of them and talk to them about the book
00:07:31.920so the book is now in its fifth edition and its 34th printing that's not bad for a thousand page
00:07:41.700history book right and uh we've updated it steadily uh with new research and probably the most important
00:07:49.280change that we made was beefing up the introduction and the early part of the book with what we call the
00:07:55.960four pillars of american exceptionalism that's something we'll get into today as we talk about the
00:08:01.480pilgrims because they are the epitome of the four pillars of american exceptionalism
00:08:07.780i just want to go back when you when you had the idea and you you had it so you guys did this totally
00:08:15.280on the come you didn't have any publishers lined up when you first started going to publishers
00:08:19.880was the book rejected by people or was it automatically uh people thought this is exciting and and people
00:08:26.380should understand 2 000 pages in modern publishing i mean modern publishers wouldn't publish war and
00:08:33.160peace in its original just because the cost of doing it would it larry i mean they would sit there
00:08:37.760and go hey uh can you cut can you take about 500 pages off can you make it a little tighter
00:08:43.020so when when you first when you first went around to talk to publishers what was the feedback you got
00:08:50.700and who were the who were the publishers that really got serious and took the project on
00:08:54.520well we had an agent at the time he's now deceased ed knapman and ed and i had worked together on a bunch
00:09:01.400of uh encyclopedia projects and facts on file books and things like that and he was uh really good to me
00:09:08.820really helped me out in my my career getting me into more uh pop publishing and just before this book i had
00:09:16.280taken a turn at a pop book as opposed to an academic book called um the entrepreneurial adventure and i
00:09:23.960wrote it to be a history of business in america because teaching business and economic history i
00:09:29.720wasn't happy with any of the business or economic history books and so i combined business and economic
00:09:35.240history into a single book well my mistake was i went with hardcore brace which was a textbook publisher so
00:09:41.720i didn't still get my goal of trying to see how i could get things out to the general public so we
00:09:48.520talked to ed we said we want this to be a popular uh book and if you can't sell it no big deal like i
00:09:55.000say we'll sell it out of the back of a van or something so i do not know how many publishers ed took
00:10:00.760it to all i know is he came back he said guys we've got two offers and one was a publisher i had never
00:10:07.000heard of but the other was he said sentinel which is um a subdivision of penguin books they're starting
00:10:15.160a new imprint a conservative imprint called sentinel and they want this book to be the premier title
00:10:21.960in their lead-off season and so uh we ended up with an awesome editor um and uh she um uh was a devout
00:10:33.640catholic and i recall her telling me that she as she was working on the book she looked down across
00:10:41.000her new york flat to um a marxist bookstore down there across the street and she said you know someday
00:10:50.120you guys are going to have to be carrying this book so uh uh it was really amazing to write and then one of
00:10:57.720the oddest things that occurred is that just as our book was released um tom woods and you probably
00:11:05.720know who tom is tom had a book come out called the politically incorrect guide to american history
00:11:11.720which is kind of a competitor it wasn't nearly the depth of patriots history or the analysis but it was
00:11:18.680the lead-off book to what was a very popular series called the politically incorrect guide series and he
00:11:25.880beat us by about three weeks and getting out and he got on all the talk shows fox and all the rest
00:11:32.120here's a new conservative textbook so interestingly when we came out of the gate with this great new
00:11:37.960book uh we didn't have a whole lot of of media coverage the first person to interview me about
00:11:44.440the book was laura ingram on her show she did a great job and then the great rush limbaugh called me
00:11:50.280up and interviewed me for his limbaugh letter and to this date that was one of the best interviews
00:11:55.640i ever had rush listened to you and and he he he wasn't ready to ask the next next question until
00:12:02.360he had heard what you had answered to the last question and uh i think he did us a great service
00:12:10.040when you and your uh and your writing partner mike sat down how did you break it out how did you say hey
00:12:15.880we're not happy with anything that we teach it for a living we clearly love history we studied it
00:12:20.760how did you take this entirely new look that quite frankly really did revolutionize people thinking
00:12:26.680about american history well how did you guys conceive it well that's a great question steve i met mike allen
00:12:33.800at the western history conference in about 1991 or 1992 in albuquerque he was a historian of the west
00:12:42.280and the mississippi river valley he also knew colonial history pretty well which is not my specialty i'm not
00:12:48.840as strong in colonial history as i am in some later histories and um then we kind of forgot about
00:12:55.000each other and when i decided after writing entrepreneurial adventure i want to see if i
00:13:00.360can do a national u.s history book i began looking for co-authors and i went through maybe two or three
00:13:06.440other guys strangely enough political scientists because i thought that they would lend a little more
00:13:12.520expertise to the early period in the constitution and um then i remembered mike and i said you know
00:13:18.680what he he fits everything i need uh to to flesh this out better than any of these guys so we got together
00:13:26.360by phone and he took the uh colonial period for the most part we were each adding stuff and putting stuff in
00:13:35.080constantly he took uh articles of confederation he did the majority of the west chapter and i didn't
00:13:43.000much of the rest of it again with him putting in significant amounts of stuff and in our very first
00:13:49.720iteration the hardcover version we had these uh boxes uh in which we would do vignettes about people like
00:13:58.360mike fink and daniel boone and other people like that and unfortunately as the book has has gone on
00:14:05.800to be revised many times we still have to keep it under a thousand pages so we lost a lot of those
00:14:12.520so what we did was we put a lot of those on the patriots history usa website and today it's available on
00:14:20.280me to offer a prayer larry we'll get to all that let's take a short commercial break the co-author
00:14:27.160of the hatred's history of the united states we're here on thanksgiving morning we're talking about
00:14:31.800the traditions customs history of the first thanksgiving and really the holiday season
00:14:37.640overall the thanksgiving holiday short commercial break be back this year when i count my blessings
00:14:43.400i'm thanking the lord he made you you know what's never good when your nation's supposed authority on
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00:16:20.360protecting your savings with gold okay welcome back to the war room it is thanksgiving morning and
00:16:41.080you're here uh in our thanksgiving special uh larry swiker uh the co-author of the patriots history is our
00:16:47.480guest i want to thank him for taking the time away uh from the family during this holiday season to do
00:16:52.760this with us larry i think a question i always get when we have you on talk about the book what
00:16:59.560the book is so amazing i recommend everybody that hasn't had a chance and it's a great holiday gift
00:17:04.600to give the patriots history no one you will give it to will ever say hey i didn't love it it's it's so
00:17:11.640it's so grabbing the writing of it's so grabbing it's it's amazing what was the thousand what was
00:17:17.880in the thousand pages you cut out because when you finish it it's a pretty definitive history
00:17:23.400although i could i could take another five thousand pages of it you know i love the way you guys write
00:17:28.200and i love history but what was what was the thousand pages that you cut and how tough was i know as a
00:17:35.160filmmaker the biggest fights are always over what you take out of the film and the biggest fights are those
00:17:40.440last couple of minutes you got to cut out so what were the fights like what did you take what were
00:17:45.400the thousand pages you took out what were the topics and how tough is it for you and mike to do it
00:17:50.920well we took out a lot of social history i'll admit i'm not i'm not as big on social history as many
00:17:57.560people are we try to keep as much political and economic history and uh as i said we had lots of
00:18:04.440these vignettes uh one page inserts on um daniel boone or um you know mercy otis warren or somebody
00:18:13.480like that and we ended up putting all that stuff on our website um on the patriots history usa website
00:18:19.880and now it's on the wild world of history website free and um but as we were leaving last time i i didn't
00:18:28.760quite get to this point so mike and i wrote this okay so that that's the size of the book we wrote that
00:18:40.200without ever meeting personally in the entire time we wrote it i had not met mike again since 1991
00:18:48.920until a year after the book came out and we did a convention together uh we wrote the whole book
00:18:55.080through email and phone conversations and steve the most amazing thing about this is there will be
00:19:02.360passages where i will say to mike you know mike i don't remember writing this this doesn't seem like
00:19:08.280my wording or my language and mike would say well it sure isn't my wording or my language i i truly
00:19:14.120believe there was a divine spirit involved in writing this because it's just not either of our our words
00:19:20.600or phrases or phrases and so we did get to that point we actually came in at 1200 pages
00:19:26.280and bernadette malone our great uh editor she cut what she could and uh there we still had to get 200
00:19:34.280more pages out of it and uh she said guys i can't do anything more your agent took a shot at it he cut
00:19:41.960out 800 pages i've cut out 200 but we still have to get 80 000 more words out of it so she said i'm going
00:19:49.160to an outside editor a guy named david frigoso and david did an incredible job steve if you could look
00:19:57.240at the cuts he made they you go how did he take that out and not change the flow at all but he did he
00:20:05.160was able to take out about 80 000 words and still keep the book to where it just flowed
00:20:11.000people have to understand that the publisher but 80 80 000 words is a book today i mean that's a
00:20:20.280that's the books you'll buy over the christmas period a lot of the a lot of the books that we
00:20:25.080that we you know bring authors on to help promote the book and and and reach the audience are 80 000
00:20:33.160words so he actually the the third guy that got to it took out basically another book that's amazing
00:20:39.640i tell you he took out a book really incredible let me let me before we get into the specific
00:20:47.080thanksgiving part what was the uh genius of it itself you guys had been historians you had taught
00:20:57.400history to college students you weren't happy even some of the great texts that are out there what was
00:21:04.280it when you first started off and never tell you met but what was it that said hey we we need to tell
00:21:10.440the story this way or we need to let the story tell itself this way but it comes out as very different
00:21:16.680and that's why i think people love this so much because you you don't avoid any of the controversies
00:21:22.200of american history you don't avoid any of the um i don't say scars but any of the we're like you know
00:21:29.400we're fallen people like everybody in the judeo-christian west you know our core beliefs
00:21:35.240you don't look away from the faults of america but you come away from your book uh every time
00:21:42.600you're reading it and you stop you feel kind of joyful or you feel like you're part of some greater
00:21:47.800what i call task and purpose how did you guys think of that at the time to actually conceive it and
00:21:53.000structure it that it would be like that well mike wrote the line in the introduction i think kind of
00:21:58.520defines the book and he said uh it's not my country uh always right um not my country right or wrong
00:22:07.880but it is certainly not my country always wrong which is pretty much where most of the textbooks had
00:22:13.960gotten by the 1990s it was just a litany of criticism and everything was starting even then to be framed in
00:22:21.640light of race class gender so obviously nothing that any of the founders did could possibly be right
00:22:30.120so it's kind of an interesting story about development in that when mike and i first write
00:22:35.560this we knew that there was a key element to the american character about what it was that made america
00:22:43.400special but in the very first edition we didn't quite nail it we we got close uh but we were still kind
00:22:50.600of grasping it if you read that first introduction and then as i went on to write uh other books with
00:22:56.600another fellow david doherty we wrote a patriot's history of the modern world and um in fact i think
00:23:03.240i have that one here this one and um yeah david david said you know and by the way this is an interesting
00:23:14.280story in itself david was the first reviewer on amazon to have a big review he's the first review
00:23:20.680up and at the time he said a a great great book or a terrific book but not without its faults
00:23:29.640faults our book has faults what faults do we have and so at the time you could uh they they had the
00:23:36.360email addresses of the reviewers and i contacted david i said hey i'm the writer of this i i like to know
00:23:41.880your opinion what did we do wrong and so he started to tell me a few things i said wait a minute that's
00:23:47.160that seems to be a lot of stuff that you think we got wrong so i said i'll tell you what i will pay
00:23:53.160you a token amount if you would go through the whole book and if you would just list every single
00:23:58.440error you think there is in there and so he did he sent me back 14 pages now it wasn't all errors a
00:24:04.840lot of it was was differences in interpretation so on but it was really eye-opening to see okay we
00:24:10.840we need to clarify this we need to address that but the main thing dave said was you don't come
00:24:17.160to grips with what it is to be uh to have american exceptionalism what is it that makes america
00:24:24.920exceptional and and i looked at our introduction i thought that's right we kind of danced around that
00:24:30.200a little bit and so dave and i set out and then we we got mike involved again and we came up with
00:24:36.280what we call the four pillars of american exceptionalism and that defined the book that
00:24:42.600that's what really made the book uh super special in that no one else has has looked at this and and
00:24:49.720you can read um things like nile ferguson or some of these other people who who've looked at american
00:24:55.880exceptionalism william bennett and they miss the boat they're they're just well it's a written
00:25:01.080constitution well i'm sorry cameroon has a written constitution they got a dictator you know i mean
00:25:07.960and so what we came up with was the the four pillars of american exceptionalism and that is
00:25:14.520a christian mostly protestant religious tradition which no other nation in the world had at its
00:25:20.440family none common law uh private property with written titles and deeds and a free market economy
00:25:28.520and what's amazing is you find all four of those present in plymouth at thanksgiving
00:25:37.080so let's go through that before we go to break i want to go through that to set the framework for
00:25:40.600for the uh for the audience we got a couple minutes walk us through what are the four pillars
00:25:45.880okay so you have a christian mostly protestant religious tradition how does that differ from england
00:25:51.880england's not protestant they were anglican they were a top-down religious structure
00:25:58.760but the uh pilgrims the the puritans were bottom up they were congregational common law says that god
00:26:06.840puts the law in the hearts of the people and the people elect or select leaders to carry it out
00:26:12.280totally different from divine right of kings or what later came with napoleon and civil law
00:26:19.560private property of the written titles and deeds very important we could spend 15 minutes just on this one
00:26:25.080and it's far more important than most people realize and is woven into the articles of confederation
00:26:31.960in laws that i think are our most important laws even aside from the constitution and then the last one's
00:26:36.920a free market economy which of course makes it possible for both jamestown and and plymouth to survive
00:26:45.800because until they changed to a free market economy they were dying literally dying
00:26:50.520larry why don't we hang on for a second we'll take a short break here on our uh on our thanksgiving um
00:26:59.160show by the way i want to make sure everybody goes to uh my pillow.com promo code war room go there
00:27:05.080we got the kickoff of the big uh the big sales 90% off uh 90% off up to 90% off on some of these
00:27:13.080liquidations take a short commercial break be back with the patriots just from the united states we're
00:27:19.480going to talk about the four pillars of american exceptionalism and how they started with the
00:27:24.520pilgrims the puritans that this year when i count my blessings i'm thanking the lord he made you
00:27:36.200this year when i count my blessings i'm thanking the lord he made you
00:27:43.640this year and when the time comes to be going you won't be in sorrow and tears i'll kiss you goodbye
00:28:01.800and i'll go on my way grateful for all of the years i think for all that you gave me
00:28:13.720for teaching me what love can do and thanksgiving day for the rest of my life it's hard to grasp why
00:28:24.520anyone would keep voting for record inflation skyrocketing crime in an open border likewise why
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