Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - EPISODE 399： WAS AMERICA FOUNDED ON SLAVERY？

00:00:00.760 Happy President's Day, everyone. Welcome to the Human Events Daily President's Day special.

00:00:05.640 We're going to be asking a simple question. Was America founded on slavery? Was the 1619

00:00:11.540 Project correct in that? I don't think they were. But we're going to have a discussion

00:00:15.860 all about it. First, I want to remind you to sign up for the Poso Daily Brief. The Poso

00:00:19.820 Daily Brief at humanevents.com slash Poso. That's humanevents.com slash Poso. Read what

00:00:24.520 I read. It is completely free. It will be delivered to you every single day. Save you

00:00:28.640 from endless scrolling online. The Poso Daily Brief, humanevents.com slash Poso. Let's get

00:00:33.060 into it.

00:00:44.200 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to today's edition of Human Events Daily. Today is our

00:00:48.480 President's Day special. And I decided to take aim at the 1619 Project today and to really

00:00:57.860 focus on this indelible question that they posed for us. Was America founded on slavery? Was the

00:01:05.820 founding of America done in order to perpetuate the institution of slavery to protect and potentially

00:01:13.300 expand slavery in the 13 colonies? And that is why America, of course, as we know, the early

00:01:20.360 presidents led this revolution against the British Empire, pulled the United States, pulled the 13 0.78

00:01:26.440 colonies out of the British Empire, which was sort of the global international trade system at the

00:01:32.440 time, set themselves up as their own shop, created their own country, their own declaration,

00:01:37.740 constitution. Was all of this done, all of the stories that we've been told for generations in

00:01:43.580 this country, was all of it done in furtherance of slavery? Well, to help me on this, bringing back

00:01:50.180 to the show, editor in chief of the Post Millennial, Miss Libby Evans. Libby, thank you so much for joining

00:01:54.520 us today. Sure thing, Jack. Thanks. So Libby, I mean, I've actually did a little research. I know, crazy,

00:02:01.640 right? But it turns out that Poso has the receipts as usual. British imports from the colonies, 1768 to 1772.

00:02:10.180 Turns out that from New England, hardly any. From the middle colonies, hardly any. From the Chesapeake,

00:02:19.480 maybe if I were being generous, I'd say 8%, but it looks like about 10. From the Carolinas, maybe 5%.

00:02:26.760 Yet the West Indies, it turns out, the British imports, over 30% came from the West Indies.

00:02:37.740 Now, Libby, correct me if I'm wrong, were the West Indies part of the original 13 colonies?

00:02:44.440 They were not part of the original 13 colonies.

00:02:47.160 Oh, they were not. They were not. So the Caribbean was not part of the revolution, at least in terms of the

00:02:52.440 areas that rebelled. They had revolutions and rebellions later on that were not connected.

00:02:58.700 Many of them were, by the way, slave-driven. Obviously, Haiti is, of course, a great example of this, 1.00

00:03:03.420 even though it was French, not British. But when you look at this, and in fact, we're all taught

00:03:08.960 in school about the triangle trade, the triangle trade. British goods and then raw materials from

00:03:14.900 America become British goods. British goods are then sold for slaves in Africa. Those slaves are 0.96

00:03:19.580 then brought to the United States. That's the triangle trade. But it turns out that the majority 0.99

00:03:22.920 of those slaves were actually going, again, to the Caribbean. They were not going to what later

00:03:27.940 became the 13 colonies in North America. And I think a lot of people miss this, that the British

00:03:33.480 empire at the time, right, for sugar, for rum, et cetera, that the British empire wasn't just the

00:03:39.380 13 colonies. And so we have this kind of warped view of what colonial America was like, because

00:03:46.220 obviously there were even Canadian colonies that ended up becoming the Tories that were royalists that

00:03:50.840 didn't rebel. And so you saw, by the way, a lot of royalists move up there. This was the only time,

00:03:55.720 of course, that liberals actually left the country and fled to Canada, even though they always claim

00:04:00.020 they're going to an election doesn't go their way. But this idea that, you know, I'm not going to sit

00:04:06.640 here and say that slavery didn't exist. Of course it existed. We knew it existed. It existed everywhere

00:04:10.260 in the world prior to the events of the Christianization of Western civilization, the Western 0.70

00:04:16.940 world, et cetera, that these are the areas where slavery was done away with. There still is slavery in 0.53

00:04:22.400 parts of the world today. There's the fact if, depending on how you, how you judge it, how you

00:04:28.480 measure it, there is potentially even more slavery in the world today than there has ever been

00:04:33.180 in the past. And so if you're, if you're looking at it in terms of human trafficking, which is

00:04:37.780 arguably the same thing, we're talking about human trafficking of the 1700s versus human trafficking

00:04:42.800 today, it essentially becomes the same deal. But this idea that, okay, the Southern colonies had

00:04:49.460 slaves, but Libby, did the, were the Northern colonies reliant on slavery as well? Is this true?

00:04:56.880 No, their economy was not reliant on slavery. You do have New Jersey, which was an agricultural

00:05:03.040 colony. And so they outlawed slavery in that colony in 1804. The rest of the Northern colonies had

00:05:11.120 outlawed slavery for the most part shortly after the declaration of independence, which actually opened

00:05:17.160 many Americans' eyes to the horror of slavery because the language in that document is unequivocal.

00:05:24.160 I would say as regards to slavery globally now, I think one of the reasons that American slavery comes

00:05:31.860 under such a microscope is because it was the last government sanctioned slavery that we, that we

00:05:40.080 really see. So now a lot of that is it's black market slavery and things like this. I mean, unless you

00:05:45.600 want to talk about Dubai and the, the, um, the men there who are building Dubai and their passports

00:05:51.920 are confiscated, that's a thing for sure. I mean, human trafficking is so people should understand

00:05:58.800 that, that when we're talking about trafficking, we talk about it in terms of, uh, labor trafficking

00:06:03.840 and sex trafficking. So you see this currently in the United States, there's labor trafficking.

00:06:08.560 Of course there's sex trafficking. It's rampant in the Middle East. It's rampant in Asia, particularly

00:06:13.460 Southeast Asia. And yet we're supposed to act and, and as we're supposed to pretend like none of this

00:06:19.000 is going on and the United States is the only country that's ever done anything like this.

00:06:23.340 Yeah, certainly the United States is not the only country that ever had sanctioned slavery,

00:06:27.620 but it is, I believe thoroughly to our credit that we eradicated that practice and that we even went

00:06:34.560 as far, you know, in eradicating that practice. We fought a war over it. It's interesting too. We're

00:06:40.340 constantly taught as children, um, you know, we're taught that the civil war was about slavery and then

00:06:46.220 we're taught that the civil war wasn't about slavery. And then it turns out that in fact, the civil war was

00:06:51.080 about slavery and it was about eradicating that practice and our founding fathers, um, John Adams,

00:06:57.780 who is absolutely one of my, maybe my favorite of the founding fathers, um, you know, was entirely

00:07:04.220 opposed to slavery as was his wife and they fought against it really hard. So did Ben Franklin. I mean,

00:07:10.840 you know, the founding fathers, all of them, they're, you know, Washington, Jefferson, Madison,

00:07:15.940 Hamilton, Adams, Franklin, they all knew that slavery was a scourge and was not

00:07:21.000 in keeping with human dignity. And to be sure there, there are, by the way, if you talk to

00:07:25.960 someone from the South, and I know we have a lot of, a lot of viewers down there that I'm sure

00:07:29.460 someone will say, well, it was, it was also about States rights. We didn't want it imposed on us from

00:07:33.660 the federal government. We were working this out internally, this institution, putting all that

00:07:39.380 aside. I'm putting all that aside right now because we are talking specifically here today about

00:07:43.960 the founding of the United States itself. We're going to get into that after the break, but I wanted to

00:07:48.080 also say, you know, a lot of people complain about the state of our country or the way woke

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00:08:38.580 And we're back with Libby Edmund. So Libby, when we left before, you were telling us how

00:08:44.860 racist the country has always been from the start, how much you hate the Declaration,

00:08:49.120 the Constitution, or founding documents, and that when the next time that we take our kids down to

00:08:54.400 the National Mall, you're just going to be pointing out how the Washington Monument,

00:08:58.360 while that's nothing more than a phallic symbol, that the Freemasons have been in charge from the

00:09:02.640 very start, and how really this entire country was founded on nothing other than the suppression

00:09:09.680 and oppression of colored people. Is that right? That doesn't sound like me. I think you got me 0.56

00:09:15.060 confused with Nicole Hannah-Jones. Oh, I must have been listening to another podcast in my ear.

00:09:21.100 And Producer Angelo, you're fired again. That must be it. That must be the thing. Yeah. You know,

00:09:27.240 I think that obvious, I think it's so clear when you look at the 1619 Project, and when you listen

00:09:32.980 also to the historians that came out after that work of journalistic madness was released in the New

00:09:41.960 York Times, complete with educational manuals so that it could be shipped off to all of the schools

00:09:47.360 across the country, colleges, high schools, you know, it came with a whole manual of how to teach the

00:09:52.720 1619 Project. And if you actually read the essays, some of them are interesting personal accounts.

00:09:59.940 The writing is not necessarily bad, but the facts are tortured into the submission of this ideology

00:10:06.760 of the founding of our country that actually just does not hold up to scrutiny.

00:10:10.380 I got to say this one. So as I was doing some research for this, I said, look, we've only got

00:10:15.460 so much time on the show today. We can't bring up everything because I really want to talk about this,

00:10:19.880 that the colony of British North America, the economy, was not reliant as a whole on slavery.

00:10:28.200 It just wasn't. Certain regions, sure, but those weren't the only regions that rebelled. There were

00:10:33.080 other regions that had economies like the North, which was primarily industrial, that were not reliant

00:10:38.680 on slavery that also rebelled. So just right there, just based on that, then they had widely,

00:10:44.600 as to your point, widely divergent views on the institution of slavery,

00:10:48.660 extremely divergent views. I mean, as a son of the Philadelphia area, very familiar with Benjamin

00:10:56.620 Franklin and his outspoken opposition to the institution of slavery from the very start.

00:11:02.520 But what gets me is actually, there's a line in the 1619 Project, one of the essays, I forget exactly

00:11:10.100 which one of the writers it is. We can look it up later. He says that the system of accounting

00:11:15.780 accounting that we have today, Microsoft Excel, and even the spreadsheet itself is based on slave

00:11:24.260 ledgers, that the entire practice of accounting... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Double entry bookkeeping

00:11:29.040 was not invented in America. It was invented far before that. No, no, no, no, no, no.

00:11:36.220 Double entry bookkeeping was invented in Byzantium. I'm pretty sure double entry bookkeeping. Yeah,

00:11:42.680 I mean, the double entry where you have the credit and the debit, you know, and you can actually see

00:11:46.200 things. And then it really came to the fore in Venice with their whole shipbuilding thing. And

00:11:51.400 that's how Venice got rich. Venice got rich because they figured out how to properly account for things.

00:11:57.340 I'm pretty sure that's right. For a while, I was really obsessed with accounting. I thought it was

00:12:00.560 really fascinating. I know that's really dorky, but it's so interesting, double entry bookkeeping.

00:12:05.680 We found Libby's trigger on this one. So double entry bookkeeping, it's all based on slavery, right?

00:12:12.920 No one had ever done this before. The Medici's were doing, the Medici bank was doing this in the 14th

00:12:18.520 century, literally. Yeah, that's because it was invented in Europe, double entry bookkeeping.

00:12:24.300 I think Florence, the Medici's, I mean, of course, of course, it was the Italians, right? 0.51

00:12:30.560 Um, and it was actually invented in Byzantium. Yeah. But right. It actually is saying, I'm just

00:12:37.640 looking at something now. It's saying that there, it was pulled from, it was brought there,

00:12:40.900 um, by, by merchants. And, you know, I'm sure if I can. And then Venice got rich because they were

00:12:47.560 able to not only track what they spent, but what they earned and they were able to track inventory.

00:12:54.200 Why would they do that? Why would they, why would they lie to us about technological developments

00:12:58.640 of the middle ages? What? Why would they lie to us about something so obviously wrong,

00:13:04.580 just so obviously false? Well, you can, there's a couple of different ways you could look at it,

00:13:08.340 right? I mean, for example, they could be lying, um, in order to prop up a perspective that doesn't

00:13:15.240 actually hold up to scrutiny. Maybe they actually believe it. I mean, the, you know, the best liars are

00:13:20.380 the ones who actually believe what they're saying. Um, but there is this penchant for revisionist

00:13:25.780 history in the United States right now. And we see it all over the place. We see it also on Disney

00:13:31.500 plus, which some of, um, some of the viewers may have seen the reboot of the proud family on Disney

00:13:37.920 plus. There were some clips circulating of some teen, um, some teenagers on a high school stage.

00:13:45.180 It was a cartoon and they were doing basically like a spoken word thing about how the country

00:13:49.880 was built on slavery. Uh, and this was the, this was the entire purpose of the little song and

00:13:56.080 dance. And by the way, I'm going to point this out that I saw conservatives defending that I saw

00:14:01.340 particularly defensible. Um, I saw conservatives saying, well, you're just, uh, your white fragility

00:14:10.980 is showing because you are threatened by the, the true history that's being portrayed here by Disney.

00:14:17.340 And I said, no, I'm pointing out that it's wrong. Number one, it's vertical revisionism saying things

00:14:23.220 like Lincoln didn't free the slaves. I mean, you can not only freed the slaves with the emancipation

00:14:28.840 proclamation, which he could have titled it anything. He could have titled it something very simple

00:14:33.980 about the law or what have you, but he chose to title it the emancipation proclamation so that anyone

00:14:39.640 upon hearing the title of this speech would know what it was about and know what it was intended

00:14:44.800 to do. So if you're an enslaved person and you hear that there was an emancipation proclamation

00:14:50.100 given by the president, you know, right away what that's about. You don't even have to read the whole

00:14:54.380 thing, which probably, you know, you can't read anyway, but you can understand those words for sure.

00:15:00.800 Keep in mind, as we talk about the civil war, we're still a hundred years after the founding of

00:15:07.080 America. We're talking about things that occurred a hundred years after the founding. So this is what

00:15:12.240 the 1619 project does again and again, is that they constantly jump between the found, the, the

00:15:18.700 singular founding project and the founding generation of America. And then they'll jump forward to things

00:15:24.680 like the, the, the emancipation proclamation, which of course, uh, affected the Confederate States

00:15:30.800 that were, uh, that had been occupied by union troops first, later on the amendments to the

00:15:37.480 constitution, 15th amendment came in and freed the, the rest of the slaves in the union States.

00:15:42.180 Again, we're not going into all of the nuance here, but we're pointing out as you were teaching

00:15:46.700 children, number one lies about the United States, you're teaching them to hate their country and you

00:15:51.860 are teaching them that there is something wrong with them because of the color of their skin

00:15:56.260 inherently. And that is insane. There's also something very important, which is the history

00:16:02.520 of slavery in the United States. It's not a straight line at all. There was an awful lot of

00:16:06.980 nuance. Um, and in preparation for talking to you, we are coming up on a break here, but I want to get

00:16:14.500 into that research. We're going to use that folks as our, as our teaser for when we come back after the

00:16:19.960 break, Libby is going to explain to us the true history of slavery in the United States. And

00:16:25.980 it's certainly not what Disney plus. So Libya, I gave everyone a huge teaser and you were about

00:16:35.040 to tell us how slavery was not a straight line in us history. Libby, are you telling us that

00:16:40.300 the history of slavery wasn't all black and white? Oh my goodness. Yeah. I'm telling you that

00:16:47.660 I'm a dad. You're allowed to make these kinds of jokes. Um, yeah, there were black men, African men 0.92

00:16:54.980 in the South, uh, prior to the cotton mill and all of that who owned land and who owned slaves and who

00:17:02.600 also contracted indentured servants from Europe. So, and these, these men had good standing in the

00:17:08.300 community. Um, and this was true for a long time that, that this was acceptable, that this was all

00:17:13.980 right. Uh, yes, there was probably bias and that started to rear its ugly head. And some of these men

00:17:20.740 were later disenfranchised of their property, but it does stand that they were engaged in these same

00:17:27.040 practices as the white landowners that were their neighbors. And they were all on equal footing with

00:17:33.040 that. And I learned that information in a podcast from slate in 2015, that was reported by Jamel Bowie. So

00:17:41.440 I'm even getting this from the progress. Right. So there, there actually was this period where in, in the

00:17:47.540 second Obama administration and, um, you know, a lot of wokeness came about in Obama's second term

00:17:54.180 because, um, you know, I think he harbored a lot of these sentiments, um, probably cause he got too many

00:18:00.000 driving tickets, too many speeding tickets going between Chicago and Springfield. Um, that he actually

00:18:04.660 talks about this. He's actually mentioned this before that he believes he was pulled over so much

00:18:08.560 because it was because you were speeding. It wasn't the color of your skin. It was because you're

00:18:11.180 speeding. Senator, you know, that's it. That's all it was. And, and, and, and yet somehow this

00:18:19.240 all, you know, I really think that all of wokeness goes back to Barack Obama's speeding tickets.

00:18:24.520 And that's a really funny theory. You have this period where there were people in academia that were

00:18:33.460 completely opposed to wokeness and would just talk about history the way that it were, or I should say

00:18:38.540 not opposed to it, but you know, it hadn't quite hit yet. It wasn't, it wasn't quite all the way

00:18:42.140 there. Right. And, you know, I, it was interesting listening to this podcast about the history of

00:18:47.580 American slavery because so much of it was just straightforward and honest and nuanced and

00:18:53.540 really fascinating to hear the way that things changed, like the change, um, in America to change

00:19:00.780 so that the status of a child was not the father's status, but was the mother's status instead.

00:19:06.540 And that was an adjustment from British common law at the time, um, or to hear also about,

00:19:13.200 and this is something I've read and I know that you've read to hear about the founding fathers,

00:19:17.340 even those who owned, uh, slaves and who were engaged in that economy knew that it was not an

00:19:25.140 appropriate way to treat their fellow men. They wrote about it. They spoke about it. Jefferson was

00:19:31.560 sort of amazing on this and he was very troubled and so was Washington. They were both very troubled by

00:19:37.420 the institution of slavery. They were concerned about the future and how harshly they would be

00:19:44.940 judged and how the nation would be judged. And they, they talked directly about this.

00:19:50.000 I was, as, as we're, as we're in our last couple of minutes here.

00:19:53.980 And I highly encourage everyone to listen to it.

00:19:56.280 They did. No, I believe they did. And, and I would highly encourage everyone to listen to those,

00:19:59.900 those podcasts that you can find them, but also encourage, you can find it on YouTube.

00:20:03.800 You can actually find recordings of former slaves. Um, some that were made later on in their years.

00:20:09.860 Uh, the left never, ever plays those recordings, but I just, I find that stuff to be absolutely

00:20:15.040 fascinating when you can hear people describe what the, I did. I remember that. Um, I don't even

00:20:21.500 think I posted it. I think it's just fascinating for us to be able to hear the living history.

00:20:25.260 Uh, and the fact that with the internet, we have the ability to find this stuff now and share it.

00:20:28.720 That's why they always trying to shut us down. But this, this historical revisionism that we're,

00:20:34.080 we're engaged in, in this country, this idea that we should go throughout all of the past and judge it

00:20:39.780 with the social mores and the moral scruples of today. Uh, this is a huge problem. And I think

00:20:47.980 that for a lot of the time that we, um, we judge people not based on the world they were born into.

00:20:57.240 And that's what the founding fathers were, uh, came about. I mean, to take someone out of their

00:21:03.040 time, to take someone out of, I mean, keep in mind, they were using bloodletting and leeches and

00:21:07.560 all these, we don't judge them for that. We just know that that's the point that they were at at

00:21:11.940 that time. And I think there's going to be things that we're judged for today. I think, uh, abortion

00:21:16.900 is something that will certainly be judged for as a country. I think that's also, you know, certain

00:21:21.520 things that we'll take as precepts, uh, just from a medical perspective, right? Take the moral element

00:21:26.840 out of it. The idea that we, we fatten ourselves with seed oils and synthetics and this, this plant

00:21:33.100 based crap that is actually chemical based crap, uh, and tell ourselves that it's health 0.94

00:21:38.280 food. It's something that will obviously be judged on in the future. And so I don't think 0.99

00:21:43.140 that we should necessarily judge them in, in a vacuum, I guess is all I'm trying to say.

00:21:47.840 And how dangerous is it if you teach that's important. Yeah, I think that's really important.

00:21:52.740 And I also think that there's something else that we can consider when we do seek to judge

00:21:57.640 these men who, you know, it's so amazing that they all found each other at the exact same place

00:22:03.140 and were able to found this glorious country. But when we look back and we think about John Adams

00:22:08.560 and we think about Jefferson, uh, Washington, Madison, John J. Hamilton, in a lot of cases,

00:22:14.160 when they did have the power, they were not necessarily able to just go out there and abolish

00:22:21.560 slavery outright in large part because of the political climate at the time. And we think

00:22:28.960 about, yeah. And if we think about that from our current perspective, how many situations and things

00:22:35.440 are there today where we would really like to just have there be a decisive, um, you know, decision

00:22:42.020 made to abolish something or to uphold something. And people are not able to do it. Politicians,

00:22:49.200 our elected leaders are not able to do it because for me, it's cargo, expediency.

00:22:52.980 For me, it's just straight up cargo shorts. Abolish, criminalize federal law. Absolutely. Lock

00:22:58.360 everybody up. Sure. But you know what I'm saying? Public executions. You know, I'm just saying,

00:23:03.000 you know, why are they not? But maybe just maybe the manufacturers, the makers, the importers.

00:23:08.980 But Congress is not going to go forward with a full abortion ban because it's not politically

00:23:13.180 expedient and they can't get it through right now. So when we look at that. Yeah. And

00:23:19.080 so the country wasn't ready for the abolishment of slavery, um, prior to the time when it was

00:23:25.040 abolished either. And even then it was very difficult. Um, but I think that we need to

00:23:29.700 consider that when we judge, when we judge our founding fathers. Yeah. With this, we actually

00:23:35.580 should be looking at ourselves with these concerns as well. Couldn't, couldn't agree more. And I think

00:23:40.900 that we also run the problem of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, that the declaration of the

00:23:46.420 United States, the constitution, the founding of this country as a nation state, which was meant

00:23:51.000 to be separate from the global system at the time that we discussed with Norbin Laden, the British

00:23:56.440 empire was the, was globalization, right? We had globalization before it was called the British

00:24:02.260 empire. They were the, the world government. They weren't just the government of, of one.

00:24:07.200 And I never said, right. And so the idea that the United States would be founded as a country

00:24:13.300 that was completely separate to that, it didn't mean that the country was perfect. Okay. It didn't

00:24:19.180 mean the country, it was, Hey, we're, you know, we're buying this thing warts and all, but at the

00:24:22.640 same time, it also set forward a plan for a new nation that would be separate. They weren't, they

00:24:29.040 weren't going to join the Spanish empire. They weren't going to join the French empire. They weren't

00:24:32.620 going to do any of these other things. They were going to form a nation state Libby Emmons. Where

00:24:37.540 can people follow you? You can find me at Libby Emmons on Twitter, and you can check out what we're

00:24:43.320 doing at the postmillennial.com every day. Hey Libby, happy presidency. You too. Ladies and

00:24:51.360 gentlemen, as always, you have my permission to lay ashore.

Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - February 20, 2023

EPISODE 399： WAS AMERICA FOUNDED ON SLAVERY？

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