On today's show, we have a special guest on the show, former Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who joins us to talk about the Trump administration's immigration policies and how they threaten the rule of law and democracy.
00:07:00.060Frees unfurled, here once in battle farmers stood, and by the shopper ground the world.
00:07:15.200The whole long sins in silence slept, but like the conqueror's silence ceased, and tied the ruined bridge as sweat, down the dark stream which seaward frees.
00:07:41.420On this green bank, by this soft stream, we set today a bolted stone, that memory may their deep redeem, when like our sighs our sons are gone.
00:08:09.540Spirit that make those heroes dare to die and keep their children free, with time and nature gently spare.
00:08:29.540Where all shall we raise to them and lead.
00:08:36.540It's Saturday, 19 April, Year of Our Lord 2025.
00:08:43.580It's Holy Saturday, but also the 250th commemoration anniversary of the shot heard around the world right there at Lexington Common.
00:08:53.400Really want to give a hat tip to the reenactors.
00:08:56.360That was reenacted this morning, close to, it happened at dawn, and then at 11 o'clock, I think we're going to be at Concord Bridge, supposed to be a live event there.
00:09:06.700Overnight, what happened, you had a British expeditionary force under General Thomas Gage that was at Boston.
00:09:16.280Boston was the hot spot of this nascent revolution.
00:09:21.720The colonists basically controlled the hinterland, and you had some hothead revolutionary leaders, particularly Sam Adams and John Hancock.
00:09:30.280And the British were getting more and more concerned after the Suffolk resolves that with the committee as a correspondence, which you are the modern equivalent of the world posse, that things were going to be spinning a little bit out of control.
00:09:46.620Although this is probably only a third of the of the subjects in the colonies.
00:09:54.600One third were hardcore Tories, one third roughly were in the middle, as often in life and even today in America, to see how this played out, which side they were going to come on.
00:10:06.020It was decided that what they needed to do was to make sure that these hotheads, these colonists, didn't didn't have weapons and didn't have gunpowder and particularly didn't have the revolutionary leaders.
00:10:20.160And, you know, very equivalent to what the Biden regime tried to do with President Trump, you know, put him in jail, put him in prison for what, 350, 400 years to put his closest folks in prison or try to bankrupt them or de-platform them.
00:10:37.600And the imperial power of the deep state and the administrative state still working its magic in modern America, 250 years later, it's so analogous as to be scary.
00:10:48.220Of course, the opposition is having no King's Day because they say that President Trump is trying to be a king and this is autocratic breakthrough.
00:10:55.000So 250 years after this event, and this is one of the most important events in not just in American history but world history because this lit the fuse that started the American Revolution.
00:11:09.100And it was eight years in a tough fight, principally a lot of guerrilla warfare today in Lexington and Concord as the British, the 300 or 750 troops retreated on the long march back to Cambridge and to Boston.
00:11:25.880They were hit in guerrilla warfare style by people who had learned to fight during the French and Indian Wars as British subjects.
00:11:32.200What they did is they were going to go arrest John Hancock and Sam Adams in Lexington, which was en route to Concord, where there was a makeshift arsenal or let's say military stores with gunpowder weapons and other, you know, other military equipment.
00:11:55.160And so they started off, they were going to go, you know, in top secret.
00:12:02.340Gage said later he only told two people.
00:12:05.920He told his executive officer and then they didn't even get the orders to Colonel Smith and Pitt Caron, Smith's deputy.
00:12:17.820His XO didn't even know the orders until the order was ready to march.
00:12:21.800Before in the 18th, Gage later testified he only gave it to two to two people, his executive officer and one other.
00:12:31.040History are kind of not myth, but the people folks point the finger to is his wife, Margaret Kimball, who was an American citizen.
00:12:41.820She had married and she was a Tory and they had married into she had married Gage, I think, years earlier.
00:12:49.040And Kimball had tea late on the afternoon of the 18th with a very close friend of hers, Dr. Joseph Warren.
00:12:57.320These were all kind of this was the aristocracy in America.
00:13:01.660And Dr. Warren was part of the Sons of Liberty, unbeknownst to Gage and these guys.
00:13:07.580He was one of the top guys in this kind of not spy network, but but network of patriots that were organizing.
00:13:14.720It is alleged at that tea in late in the afternoon, 18th, Kimball told Joseph Warren, Dr. Warren, the plan to send the British in the dead of night to go march to Lexington and Concord to take to arrest Adams and Hancock in Lexington and then go into Concord and take the military stores.
00:13:35.240Warren told Paul Revere, and others, Prescott, to set up the ride, one if by land, two if by sea, to set the signal for the British there at Old North Church about how they were going to come and then ride on the road to Lexington and Concord and inform every house that the British are coming.
00:13:57.980And that's why they laid in wait and on Lexington Common, you saw right there, and I thought it was a great reenactment.
00:14:05.240And supposedly the person that shot or at least admitted or claimed the shot heard around the world was Solomon Brown, kind of a hard-drinking, tough-as-nails patriot.
00:14:16.620It's never been decided who actually fired it, right, whether the British officers, the British enlisted grenadiers who were nervous or actually the colonists.
00:14:24.980We're going to get into all this today and tie it to modern American history.
00:25:36.640The French and Indian War, what the British or what the folks in Commons were saying is that, hey, we really went in the hock on this thing.
00:25:45.560And, yes, the colonists are colonists.
00:25:47.460But, you know, America is kind of, you know, it's got its own kind of economics.
00:25:52.540And we're going to have to get payback.
00:25:54.660We need you guys to pitch in and give a little something for the effort.
00:25:59.080And the Americans, as Americans want to do, not big names in taxes, right?
00:26:04.020Later, the French coming in and essentially bailing us out with capital and troops later in the war, in the eight years.
00:26:12.160The recognition there was central to victory.
00:26:14.940The money they ran up, they had to call the states general together later to try to figure out how to take more money from the peasants and the church and whatever to pay for their crushing debt.
00:26:28.520Also, Sam Adams and Hancock, they were going to Lexington to get Adams and Hancock.
00:26:32.720Why were Adams and Hancock such leaders?
00:26:35.520Well, you could argue, and this is maybe a little rough, but Hancock and Adams were two of the freebooters.
00:26:41.860They were opposed principally not just the heavy hand of government but also the crown giving monopolistic charters or writs to things like the British East India Company, Rahim, who became so prominent and actually in India with Clive.
00:26:57.640In fact, the way they conquered, really conquered India was through a private company, right?
00:27:02.900Wellington and guys went over, there's young officers in the British Army, quite small.
00:27:06.560It was really Clive and people like that that were officers of the British East India Company, and the Americans didn't like these monopolies.
00:27:16.260They thought the monopolies were way too powerful.
00:27:19.640The last thing is, Rahim, I want you to stick around because we've got modern politics to tie it back.
00:27:24.060But the last thing is that even deals that were talked about, about representation in commons and maybe doing a commons or a parliament in the United States or having representation,
00:27:32.260besides the demographic, they were worried about the Americans overwhelming it, it wasn't enthusiastically grabbed because the Americans thought commons was bought and paid for.
00:27:44.100That it was basically the crown and the aristocracy in the interest of like the British East India Company, the monopolists, had bought and paid for commons.
00:27:54.500Do any of these, are any of these themes relevant today?
00:28:07.360In 1 o'clock in the morning, a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, in the dead of night, the Supreme Court let out a ruling last night, directly tied to our freedom, and goes back to 1798 in the Alien Enemies Act that was in, I think, John Adams' presidency.
00:28:27.840Then it was about the French and the dangers of the French Revolution and people over here from the French Revolution.
00:28:33.160That was used to ship these, the illegal alien invaders out.
00:28:39.440The Supreme Court says right now, no way.
00:28:42.740Heard me talk about MyPatriotSupply because I trust them when it comes to my family's well-being.
00:28:48.300And I just got word they're doing something they've never done before.
00:28:54.220Right now, you can get the best-selling mega three-month emergency food supply for the same price as the standard kit.
00:36:11.360Let's go back in time, because this gets to the heart of the MAGA movement's fight
00:36:17.000against the deep state and against the globalists, the nationalists versus the globalists.
00:36:22.260In the failure, and there were many people not just rooting for the colonists,
00:36:31.220but saying, hey, these guys may be right, and we ought to apply that to ourselves.
00:36:34.820There was a fundamental basic decision made in that time that England was going to be an empire.
00:36:42.520Before, England was just a small country.
00:36:45.200You know, you had part of France, but you were continually fighting the central powers
00:36:49.840or the powers in Europe, and you were not an empire.
00:36:52.820In fact, the crown always had a tough time paying the bills.
00:36:56.560This is why you guys had guys like Francis Drake and privateers, the Eric Princes of their day, right?
00:37:01.480There was a fundamental decision made by the business entities, the money and the aristocracy,
00:37:09.580and this is why people consider it common so corrupt, that we're going to be an empire.
00:37:14.280This is what happened in the United States at World War II.
00:37:19.760We were thinking about it before, but in World War II, we were never supposed to be an empire.
00:37:24.280Our revolutionary generation and framers warned us about this very thing that they saw happening to their mother country.
00:37:32.820Many of these revolutionaries and colonists had deep feelings for England.
00:37:36.080In the debates later, a year later, on the Declaration of Independence, which is essentially a declaration of war against the crown,
00:37:45.900Dickinson and these guys fiercely went after John Adams because they still had a love for their mother country as Englishmen.
00:37:54.620They were still Englishmen, although they set up a provisional government.
00:37:57.540The English interest, the elites, the oligarchs in England made a fundamental decision looking at India and looking at North America that they were going to be an empire.
00:38:08.960And they had the Navy and they had a strategy and how to do it.
00:38:13.360They had the Industrial Revolution basically at the same time.
00:38:16.320England changed and you lost all – remember, all the discussion about rights and liberty, all this, freedom, all came from our English – these were Englishmen that brought that up.
00:38:29.600And that's what's happening to the United States.
00:38:32.420The same thing that happened in England around that time of the Napoleonic Wars and the drive to become an empire by the elites in the country is what happened post-World War II.
00:38:44.140This is why so many people you meet, Raheem, say, you know, I just – there was no great awakening.
00:38:52.140They supported Bush in the wars in the Middle East.
00:38:54.640They just – as Republicans, they just naturally supported tax cuts for the wealthy, wars in the Middle East, just wars because of this expanding empire.
00:39:05.500The MAGA revolution is the scales come down off your eyes and you say, hey, this is not what this country was ever set to do.
00:39:12.480We were not ever set up to be everywhere in the world to be a policeman and be on all these global institutions in the United Nations and NATO and, you know, all these – the World Health Organization to take the sovereignty for the American people.
00:39:26.840What has our fight been for 10 years here?
00:39:48.660This is about empire and about imperial power.
00:39:51.060250 years ago today, a handful of people said, hey, guess what?
00:39:57.240They're not going to tell us what to do.
00:39:59.040And if we've got to stand here and fight, if we've got to fight on this commons and later if we've got to fight the foot of that bridge, we'll fight.
00:40:05.660And, you know, it took them eight years.
00:40:09.240And now that is what Nigel Farage and Rahim Kassam and others now – used to be UKIP and now the Reform Party.
00:40:16.420You're, I think, eventually having your revolution that you're not Singapore in the Thames.
00:40:21.660You're actually going to get the independence for England that you kind of let your fellow countrymen take in America and become free at least for a while, at least 200 years before we went down this path of imperialism.
00:40:40.560I think just to start, I haven't even managed to go through the details of the Supreme Court 1 a.m., you know, under the darkness of night.
00:40:52.760Usurpation, really, of justice policy and immigration policy.
00:40:56.760You know, we have spun for the last weeks and months now in circles arguing whether or not you can have judges making – and it could be the highest judge in the land, like the Supreme Court.
00:41:10.920But taking executive policy and kind of putting it under their belts.
00:41:15.980And this is just another example of kind of how – exactly what you said, kind of how you end up in a mess like Britain ended up in a mess.
00:41:24.560Because effectively what ended up happening – and here's the thing.
00:41:27.360When you guys remember and you guys learn about your war of independence, you kind of learn – and not you, Steve, because you've said it very eloquently.
00:41:35.700But most people kind of just learn like, oh, hey, the king, and he was trying to rule over us, and he was dictator, and we wanted to be free.
00:41:44.780The reality was these were one people.
00:41:48.680You can say it was two people because of the distinction over the seas.
00:41:52.600But they were kind of one people, and they were – it was a philosophical battle that was really taking place.
00:41:58.560And again, I'll keep coming back to it.
00:42:00.100It was the distinction really between the free-minded, whiggish, more small-L liberal class of people and those who were loyal to the crown and who were monarchists and who understood the British society had only got to where it was because of deference as a concept, right?
00:42:20.220This is what Badgett, I believe, wrote about.
00:42:24.220And it's interesting when you try to unpack how these people – they were all kind of pulling in different directions, right?
00:42:37.980Yeah, and it's like – for Americans nowadays, it's sort of hard to see how the Brits back then would have been like, well, of course, we shouldn't be following in their footsteps.
00:42:46.380But Samuel Johnson, I think it was, who said, how can we hear the loudest yelps of liberty from the drivers of Negroes?
00:42:55.060And so there was all of this pent-up concern over what the colonists were doing, how they were approaching the implementation of liberty.
00:43:06.820And I think it bears, you know, decades and decades more study into this because, as I said right at the beginning of our conversation about this, we haven't actually learned it in so very long that actually it's lost to us.
00:43:23.260The House of Commons today is nothing like the House of Commons back then.
00:43:26.220The people in power today are nothing like the people in power back then.
00:43:28.980And what you're seeing with Nigel Farage and with the Reform Party is actually a movement that is rooted in probably more whiggishness than even I'm comfortable with.
00:43:39.960You're probably more of a wig than I am.