Ep 910 ｜ Are We on Stolen Land？ ｜ Guest： Dr. Jeff Fynn-Paul
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Summary
Dr. Jeff Finn Paul, a historian who recently wrote a book about this subject, is here to dispel some myths that many young people today are learning about the history of the United States and the discovery of America. In this episode, Dr. Finn Paul talks about his new book, Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, and why he thinks Thanksgiving is racist.
Transcript
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Are we living on stolen land? Is Thanksgiving racist? Dr. Jeff Finn Paul, a historian who
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recently wrote a book about this subject, is here to dispel some myths that many young people today
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are learning about the history of the United States and the discovery of America. This episode
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is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout.
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Dr. Finn Paul, thank you so much for taking the time to join Relatable. I think I saw an email come
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across in my inbox with your book title. Maybe someone pitched you for the show and we get a lot
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of pitches, but I came across this one and I was like, oh, I definitely want to talk to him. This
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is a fascinating subject for a book, Not Stolen, the truth about European colonialism in the New World.
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So just go for it. Tell us, what is this book and why did you write it?
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Yeah, well, it all started several years ago when I kind of got fed up with what was going on in
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academia and I said, it's time to find a way to celebrate indigenous cultures without also
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trashing Europe. So everybody's gotten into this weird binary where if you say something nice about
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indigenous people, you have to trash Europe. And I thought, why not do both? Let's tell a history
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where we can celebrate all of those great things about indigenous culture without making Europe look
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as bad as possible. Okay. So tell us what is the truth then? Because let's go along with that
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narrative that I think that we hear a lot now. I mean, as you know, we can't have Columbus Day
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anymore. It has to be indigenous people's day. And we have kind of heard in the past several years
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that it is wrong to even say that there was a discovery of America that it was exclusively the
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exploitation of indigenous people. We disrupted their very peaceful harmony that they lived in.
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We came and we brought disease. We brought violence. Yes, we brought technology, but it's been a net
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negative for the world that the United States was eventually established. So what is the truth?
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Like, are we on stolen land? Is America completely illegitimate because of that?
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Well, that's just it. I think that the truth is that it's complicated. And that's really a big part
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of what I want to say in this book is things are never one sided. So, yes, there were treaties that
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were broken. There were certainly massacres that were perpetrated by European Americans. But there were
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also many European Americans who dedicated their lives and careers to trying to ameliorate to make
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better the lives of natives. And, you know, for many decades throughout our history,
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there were peaceful relations between the Europeans and the natives in a way that most people don't
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understand. Things like smallpox blankets, which everyone has heard of, it turns out that's almost
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a total fabrication. The numbers of natives who are massacred are far fewer than anybody would guess.
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So there's just so many fundamentals that that nobody hears about anymore in the media.
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And I thought it was time to just bring some of those things back up to the surface.
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So smallpox blankets, I don't think actually everyone knows what that is. That is the idea
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that basically natives were purposely infected with smallpox?
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Yeah, well, it turns out that something like 90 or 95 percent of all the casualties in the new world
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were caused by disease, not by deliberate European massacres. But then what that means is a lot of
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people have tried to say, OK, well, maybe they did die of disease, but they died because Europeans were
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intentionally spreading disease through infected blankets and clothing. Well, it turns out that there
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is only one chronicled example of European-Americans trying to spread disease through a smallpox blanket
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in all of American history, one time. And yet most students think that that's what happened every day.
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Do you attribute this kind of misunderstanding and this negative interpretation of
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this portion of history to the people's history of the United States, which is, you know, that left-wing,
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I don't even know if I would call it a textbook, but it's kind of been used as a textbook in a lot
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of schools and a lot of colleges, that a lot of progressive students, they read and they realize,
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wow, the history of the United States has exclusively and unconditionally been oppression and,
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you know, discrimination and things like that. Do you attribute some of the myths that you bust in
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this book to that book? Yeah, you know, I mean, so Howard Zinn, that dates from the late 1970s,
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people's history. And I mean, the title says it all. It was intended as a Marxist rebuttal to the
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standard story of American history. Basically, Marxists on campus were angry that American history
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was making capitalism look too good. And so, yeah, unfortunately, with the rise of social media,
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I think Zinn's book has gotten more and more popular until almost everybody now is assuming that
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that is the standard history of America. When, of course, for many decades, most historians thought
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of Zinn as kind of a wild-eyed radical. But here we are, suddenly things have shifted so far to the
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left that he's being considered gospel. Right. And I think that he has actually admitted in the past
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that it was more of a narrative that he was, or a point that he was trying to make that, look,
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this could be another perspective to offer to the history that we have accepted. It's not
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necessarily historical fact that he is relaying in all of the different pages that he wrote. He is
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trying to make a particular point about the downside, as he would say, to capitalism and Western
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civilization. I mean, that's propaganda. It's propaganda is what it is.
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Exactly. Well, I mean, for many decades, you know, maybe people erred a little bit too much on the side
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of, you know, rah-rah versions of American history in the earlier 20th century. And so, sure, it was
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good for some people to come along and say, hey, this is a genuine critique. You could look at things
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this way. I have no problem with Noam Chomsky coming up with critiques of American history and maybe
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making people think about things a little bit that they might not otherwise would have. However,
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it needs to be understood that these things are indeed radical critiques. These are meant to be
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fringe interpretations. They make you think, but they're not supposed to replace the standard
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narrative about the Constitution, about George Washington and all that good stuff.
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Yeah. Let's talk about Christopher Columbus, because we hear that he was simply a mass murder and that
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there is no reason to celebrate him at all. And so there should be no honoring. You shouldn't get
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off work. It's Indigenous People's Day. What's the truth about Christopher Columbus?
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Well, I mean, the main thing is, is the numbers that have been attributed to Columbus. I mean,
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there's websites now that are saying that 8 million people died on the island where he first landed,
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Hispaniolo, which is now Santo Domingo in Haiti. People were saying 8 million people died there. And it
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turns out that number was made up out of thin air by a couple of Berkeley professors in the 1970s,
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and almost no specialists have agreed with it. Even Zinn says that that island maybe had 200,000 people
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on it instead of 8 million. So it turns out a recent genetic study has now found that in fact,
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only about 40,000 people were living on that island. And that's almost the exact number, which was counted
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by a Spanish census 50 years after the Spanish arrived. In other words, people were thinking
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that the island's population had dropped by nearly 8 million people, when in fact, it now looks as if
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most of those people had simply interbred with the Spanish, and the Spanish had hardly killed any at
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all compared to what people used to think. So it's basically just exaggerated. You're not saying that
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he was a perfect person, that the whole arrival was, you know, rainbows, but it's been hyperbolized over
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the years. And it's crazy how distorted the figures have been. And so you get the same thing with
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Columbus and slavery. Yeah, after one war, he actually did load up a couple hundred people on
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the ship, but then the Spanish ransomed them and actually sent them back and forbade Columbus from
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doing that ever again. So, you know, the idea that he was this mass slaver and inaugurator of the
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Atlantic slave system is also greatly exaggerated. He was practically forced to do this by his
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creditors at one point. So in other words, things are much messier if you actually look into what's
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going on. Most of the myths we're being told in the news stories are, again, mostly made up.
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Yeah, the truth is people are really complicated. The founders were complicated. A lot of American
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history heroes that people on either the left or the right would admire are complicated. The truth
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is that they're not all, you know, completely and totally virtuous. There are even things that
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Martin Luther King Jr., someone that we would all say did a lot of good that he said and did that I
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would not agree with, that I would not say is moral. But why do you think people are so reticent
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to simply rest in the fact that history is complicated? Historical figures are complicated.
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It's not just this nice and neat dichotomy of oppressed versus oppressor or black versus white
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or settler versus Native American. It's really messy. Why do you think people just resist that reality?
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Well, gosh, you know, I mean, there's something called the Dakota 38. And this is held against
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Abraham Lincoln, where he ordered the execution of 38 natives after an uprising in the Civil War.
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It turns out he had actually pardoned over 90 percent of the people who were originally supposed
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to be hung. So Lincoln is blamed for this when he actually pardoned most of them on humanitarian
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grounds. So yes, this complication, we see it all the time in history. And that's why using history
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as a sort of political stomping ground or a social media stomping ground is usually wrong. But I'm afraid
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that since social media, people have really wanted to pick teams. And they're trying to turn history
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into a sort of spectator sport where everything the other team does is bad. Everything our team does is
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good. But as you say, if you look at it that way, well, pretty soon our students or our kids are going
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to grow up thinking that the entire world has been black and white. There's no gray areas. It makes it
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Now, Thanksgiving specifically, there are even people who say Thanksgiving, the history of Thanksgiving
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is racist. And our thought of Thanksgiving as pilgrims and Native Americans coming together
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and sharing a feast. We hear that that's just all wrong. That in itself is propaganda. It really is
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yet another story of American colonial oppression. So what's the truth about Thanksgiving?
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Yeah, I know. I mean, so yes, it was whitewashed to some degree in the 19th and early 20th century.
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It was a story told to schoolchildren. Again, very few of these were natives. And so it was told
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to the majority of children. But when you dig back in the history again, it's just as wrong to say that
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that this is totally racist or totally anti-Native American as it is to say that it was all flowers and
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wine. So you go back and you see that there were truces made with Native groups. Natives were
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intentionally coming to live with the pilgrims or near the pilgrims because they gave them lots of useful
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things like metal tools, for example, things that they really found useful. And one of the treaties
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with the local Indian tribes lasted for 50 years after the first Thanksgiving. I mean, by most
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by most measures in world history, a 50-year truce is a pretty serious truce. And also the idea of
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Thanksgiving, Native tribes actually celebrated a version of Thanksgiving themselves. And so it was
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originally celebrated in the 1620s as a way to bring both people together. So the idea that this was
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only about oppression or race or warfare has been greatly exaggerated. And there's actually a lot to
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celebrate if anyone wanted to find a positive reason to celebrate Thanksgiving.
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Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about that? About the, I know that you just mentioned a lot of the
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things that brought the two groups together, but is there any more about the relations between Native
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Americans and pilgrims that we may not know that we can look back and be thankful for?
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Yeah. Well, you know, one thing is that people in the 17th century weren't really racist in the way
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that we think. So people in the 17th century thought that skin color depended on latitude. And so they
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expected to find people lighter skin further north and darker skin further south. So the concept of race
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didn't really exist. And we find that with Pocahontas and with many other natives in the early
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colonial period, we find Europeans trying to marry the daughters of Indian chiefs because they thought
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that this would make them noble. This would ennoble them. And remember in the 17th century in Europe,
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being a nobleman or noblewoman was the thing that everybody aspired to.
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Right. So they thought that by marrying, say, Pocahontas, who was the daughter of a chief,
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this would actually raise their social status. So again, the idea that people look down on Native
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Americans or saw them as a group which should be, you know, exterminated or something like that.
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Actually, when you look at it, they were thinking these people can actually raise my social status.
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The nobles of the Native Americans are higher status than most Europeans are.
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So that flies entirely in the face of the idea that these people were racist or exploitative.
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Right. They didn't have any concept of white supremacy. They might have thought these people
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are different, but they, you know, respected their nobility as nobility. They didn't see themselves
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as better just because of the melanin count that they had in their skin.
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Yeah. OK, another question that I have, because we hear this a lot. Well, actually,
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let me ask this first and then I'll go into the reparations question. So the specifically the claim
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about stolen land that America lives on or that we as Americans live on stolen land and therefore
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we don't have any right to sovereignty. We don't have any right to close our borders. We don't have
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any right to call this ours. And we owe Native Americans reparations. We hear this phrase land
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back. OK, we should give them their land back, distribute all of our wealth and resources because
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this was their land to begin with. What do we do with a claim like that?
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Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, we need to remember that for a very long time, and this is
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accepted by almost every mainstream historian, for a very long time, Europeans were not attempting to
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take over this continent at all. And even by the 1820s and 1830s, they barely had a foothold in North
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America. They only were living along the East Coast. Most of that land along the East Coast had
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actually been purchased over centuries of slow development of a property market. For example,
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in Massachusetts all through the 17th century, we see Native Americans selling their land voluntarily
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to Europeans, often as their tribe shrank in number due to disease, because the Europeans offered them
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gunpowder, shirts, metal tools, things that they absolutely wanted. And the natives would often trade
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away scrub land that they no longer needed. So in fact, most of the land of the original 13 colonies was
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actually purchased in a land market, sometimes conquered in war, which can be seen as a violation
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of a treaty and was certainly legal by the prospects of the time. And then most of the land, most of North
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America actually flipped from Native control to European control over only a 50-year period, right in
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the middle of the 19th century. So most generations of Americans who have lived before and after that,
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you know, they weren't even involved in theft of land in any stretch of the imagination.
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And then that middle period of the 19th century, we saw most of that land was held by hunter-gatherers
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who didn't really have a definite title to the land in the center of the United States anyway.
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There were often only 2,000 or 3,000 natives living in an area the size of a U.S. state,
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and they often roamed around. So these groups didn't really have any more claim to the land
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than anybody else did. And besides, by that point, hunting and gathering was gone for good,
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because with the introduction of firearms, people were going to have to settle down and farm,
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and they didn't need nearly as much land as they did for hunting and gathering. So between all of
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these things, the idea of the idea of stolen ground is, again, an exaggeration and very hard to justify
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using. Right. And I guess you could say in some way, the entire world is basically stolen land. I mean,
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you could say that we've all been on the side of the conquered and the conqueror at some point in our
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lineage. And we've all been in our lineage, probably our ancestors have been on the side of the
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enslavers or the enslaved, the oppressed or the oppressors. As you said, history is very complicated.
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Is it true that the U.S. government killed Buffalo in order to starve Native Americans?
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Yeah, this is another one of those rumors that, you know, everybody has heard of and they think,
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oh, they're definitely guilty of this. Well, then you look at it and you realize that only about 10%
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of Native Americans were dependent on the buffalo when the great slaughter happened in the 1870s.
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So we're talking, you know, if we're trying to starve the Native Americans, that's a silly way
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to do it because only 10% of them are even going to be affected. Second of all, the real reason the
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buffalo were slaughtered is there were advances in firearms during the 1870s. So within a few year
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period, it became much easier to hunt buffalo. This actually took everyone by surprise. And
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the U.S. Congress actually passed a law against the slaughter of buffalo in the early 1870s. It
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got vetoed by Grant, but still the legislative will was there. Another thing people don't realize is
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about a quarter or a third of those buffalo who were killed in the great slaughter were actually
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killed by Native American hunters. So again, this whole thing, when you dig into it, it's astonishing
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And about this issue of reparations for all of these injustices that people say have occurred,
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Native Americans, I mean, have received forms of reparations, right, throughout history?
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Yes, there's been lots of reparations going on from the beginning, actually. I mean, even in the
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Trail of Tears, most of the people affected were offered a farmstead and several hundred dollars
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cash, which was the equivalent of several years' salary. This would have set them up for life.
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So usually the U.S. government has been compensating
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all along, more than people realize. And there were forms of welfare that were adopted for various
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Native American groups already in the 19th century, long before the average American had it.
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And to this day, we have agencies, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education,
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which are paying out money to Native Americans. So that compared to African Americans, I think Native
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Americans are getting something like double the amount of money from the government per person,
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as African Americans are today. So they're already today, you know, the most compensated minority
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group by a long shot. Yeah. But of course, nobody really wants you to know that. So it's pretty
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hard to find those figures online. Yeah. And, you know, last year, right before Thanksgiving,
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we had an author, Naomi Riley, on. I'm sure you've heard of her. And she wrote a book about the reality
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of these reservations, that not only have they been given so many reparations, but also a lot of
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immunity from the law. There is a different law, set of laws or set of policies that really protects a lot
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of these Native Americans that live on these reservations. And unfortunately, it hasn't led to
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freedom and prosperity for the people that live there. It's actually led to rampant, rampant abuse.
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There's child abuse that is absolutely pervasive in many of these reservations,
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because they are protected in a different way. And that's an unfortunate form of so-called
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reparations that they really fought for. But it's actually concluded in a lot of destruction and
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despair, especially for women and children on these reservations. So this, to me, is just another
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example of how social justice and left-wing revolutions have maybe good-sounding,
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reinstated intentions, but end badly. Exactly. It's not always the best thing. You know,
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they started giving more freedom to individual reservations in the 1960s and 70s during the
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hippie movement, basically. And as you say, kind of absolving people from normal federal laws and other
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laws that have become standard. Well, I think that something like 70% of Native youth have admitted to
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never wearing a seatbelt. And they have the highest incidence of automobile accidents of fatalities of
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any group, of course. So and also, you're right, in Canada, there's so many reservations where
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violence against women has become practically an epidemic. And yet people are sort of, you know,
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they have immunity from normal laws, and it makes it a lot easier to get away with these things.
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Yep. Yep. Tell me a little bit about the Conquistadors and Cortez. That's another group that
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obviously we hear only about their violence. So what did the groups then, though, think of them?
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Yeah, exactly. I mean, I wanted to bring in the Mexican angle because something like 50% of all
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natives in the New World were living in Central Mexico. So the reason why most Mexicans today are
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mixed race is because there were so many natives living down there compared to up here.
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Interesting. We never hear that Mexicans are living on stolen land. It's only Americans.
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You know, and I mean, the Mexicans actually celebrate Columbus as sort of the, you know,
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one half of the father of the Mexican race, they call it that day. And so, I mean, people still
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celebrate this, they realize they're mixed race, and they realize that Europeans have something to
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offer. So this is a very North American liberal idea that we only should look down on Europeans.
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And the same thing happened in Mexican history. I mean, many Aztec tribes, the reason why Cortez
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could conquer the Aztec empire with 500 men is because he had 20,000 or 30,000 allies at his side,
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and they were all natives. So the people who didn't like the Aztecs, who the Aztecs were warring against,
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allied with Cortez. And so that's the reason why Cortez was able to conquer. Also, he had a wife,
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a concubine, Marina, and she was his voluntary lover and helped him to conquer the Aztec empire.
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And so she actually played a pivotal role in his success. And we see that the Spanish then come in
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and their religion forbids the human sacrifice. So they think that even within 10 years,
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the Spanish may have saved hundreds of thousands of sacrificial victims from being killed by the
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Aztecs. That's another one you never hear. And then the Spanish imposed peace across Mexico when
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all these tribes have been at each other's throats for centuries. Again, where's this bloody conquistador
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story when you actually look at the facts? You know, that is a very uncomfortable part of
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colonial history is that that portion that you just talked about, the stopping the human sacrifice
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and the Aztec culture. That was also true throughout Africa when Christian colonizers,
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if you will, went there and with the order of the British empire said, you can't do this anymore.
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You're not going to do child sacrifice. You're not going to do human sacrifice to your gods and
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witchcraft and things like that. I mean, you can call colonizing oppression, but the fact of the
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matter is, is that that saved tens of thousands of innocent lives by stopping the practice of human
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sacrifice in several countries across the world? Oh, and wherever they can, my colleagues will say,
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actually, they were only doing human sacrifice because European influence had somehow been there
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before the Europeans even arrived. You know, so they'll concoct these crazy stories that they were only
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doing bad things because of European influence when everybody knows, you know, that that's a fable
00:27:18.620
that's made up. But in Mexico City, yeah, they had a skull wall, which held 100,000 skulls and
00:27:25.680
skulls tend to fall apart after a couple of years. So those were all recent victims. So they know
00:27:30.680
there's proof that that was going on in a major way. Yeah, this is kind of more Howard Zinn
00:27:35.940
romanticizing pre-civilization. I see this a lot on the left, romanticizing time before civilization,
00:27:43.200
before societies really existed, before the rule of law, before Westernism, pre-Christianity.
00:27:48.700
They kind of romanticize, especially like Native American life is something that was just
00:27:53.300
peaceful harmony, that they were one with the land. They respected the land. They respected the
00:27:59.480
power of nature. And then the evil white man, European, came along and, you know, brought in
00:28:05.340
capitalism and exploitation. So is it true that before the settlers came, that before Columbus came,
00:28:13.480
that Native Americans were living in this beautiful harmony with each other and with nature?
00:28:17.800
Yeah, I mean, that's another one of these wild myths that now everybody takes for granted. But of
00:28:24.220
course, right up to the 1960s and 70s, everyone, including Natives themselves, realized that they
00:28:30.200
were a very warlike culture. The main thing in the 1950s and 60s that American culture celebrated about
00:28:35.940
Natives is what good warriors they were. And then the, you know, the 70s hippie era comes along and
00:28:42.400
suddenly the hippies want to rewrite Native history as if they were always smoking peace pipes and they
00:28:47.120
never went to war unless they absolutely had to. But of course, as in any tribal society, when a chief
00:28:53.940
only monopolizes violence in an area, you know, maybe 10 miles around, that means there's going to be a
00:29:00.060
lot of people living in close quarters and they're all going to be tempted to take over each other's land.
00:29:05.660
So warfare was absolutely a fact of life. Genocide was a fact of life. When you conquer a tribe, you try to
00:29:10.940
wipe them out. You take all of their women and incorporate them into your tribe to basically erase them from
00:29:16.820
history. And that was absolutely normative. And the idea that they lived in harmony with nature,
00:29:23.300
once again, I mean, we see when the first Native peoples actually come into the New World in the
00:29:29.180
Stone Age, they actually were responsible for killing off about 60 species of megafauna,
00:29:36.700
all sorts of creatures, horses and buffalo and elephants and lions. They used to live in the New World,
00:29:42.720
but they don't anymore. You know, so the idea that one group of people was more environmental than
00:29:48.900
another group is silly. Everybody's been the same.
00:29:51.320
So let's fast forward a little bit to cultural sensitivity today, because something else that's
00:30:09.740
shifted in the last few decades, and I think has kind of accelerated in the last few years,
00:30:15.960
is this idea that we cannot use any part of Native American culture today. Like, you can't be called
00:30:21.780
the Indians, and you certainly can't have like a depiction of a Native American alongside the word
00:30:27.680
Indian. You can't be called the Chiefs, and you can't be called anything if you're a sports team or
00:30:35.680
whatever that pays homage to Native Americans because it's seen as cultural appropriation. Don't dress up
00:30:42.420
as one for Halloween. And so, I mean, is this, are we moving in the right direction there? I don't think
00:30:50.440
so, but what do you think? Yeah, exactly. I think this is, this really perfectly exposes the
00:30:56.260
schizophrenia of the left in the United States, because they're saying, you know, on one hand,
00:31:01.580
they're saying you're erasing Native culture, you're erasing Native voices, you're not giving Native
00:31:06.520
people a proper representation in your histories. And then, you know, in the next breath, they'll say,
00:31:14.160
wait, you're not allowed to dress as Indians, you're not allowed to, you know, use, have any cars named
00:31:19.100
after Indians, you can't have military things named after them, can't even use the term Indian. And that
00:31:25.340
says to me, that's, that's like a ridiculous PR move, actually, because Native Americans are famous the
00:31:32.360
world over. So if you're a Native American, I mean, Europeans are using dream catchers and things like
00:31:38.580
that. Everybody knows about Native Americans. But there's so many Native groups around the world that
00:31:43.540
nobody has ever heard of. And so in some ways, if you're a small minority group, and you've had this
00:31:50.600
outsized effect on the world, where almost everyone thinks of you in a positive way, why not go with
00:31:57.260
that? I mean, that's something you could capitalize on in so many different ways in the modern world.
00:32:02.360
But if we ban everything about Indians and Natives in America today, in about 20 years,
00:32:10.080
nobody will ever have heard of any of these legends. Nobody will have heard of any of the
00:32:13.740
good things about Native culture. And so it seems to me ridiculous and short-sighted.
00:32:20.200
Yeah, I think so too. Is there anything else, any other myths that you want to bust or any other
00:32:25.460
thing that you want people to remember going into Thanksgiving? Maybe they are sitting across the
00:32:31.240
table from their progressive cousin who just graduated from Colombia and thinks that they
00:32:38.740
know everything about American history and is protesting Thanksgiving because it's racist.
00:32:42.840
Is there any tools that you would put in their toolkit?
00:32:47.080
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the number one things is to remember that Natives and Europeans were
00:32:53.080
living side by side. They were intermarrying in a way that almost nobody understands today,
00:32:58.960
just like they did in Mexico. And so there has been much more peaceful interaction. There have
00:33:07.080
been so many schools. Did you know that Harvard University opened a Native American college in the
00:33:12.660
1640s right after it was founded? I mean, nobody knows this stuff. So there have been so many
00:33:19.460
fertile cross-cultural pollinations, so many ways that people have been getting along.
00:33:26.080
And all you hear in the media today is that there was constant warfare. The people only hated each
00:33:33.080
other. So our history is very much a history of an American melting pot in a very positive way if
00:33:41.140
people would actually look at the facts. Yeah, I think so too. Well, thank you so much for being a
00:33:46.540
historian that actually cares about history and is doing this work because I think it's important.
00:33:50.980
I think it's important for our health as a country to be able to see things as they really were,
00:33:55.140
which, as you said, is complicated, but not quite as exaggerated and negative as people today would
00:34:02.680
like us to think, who really have political goals behind their negative interpretation of history, by the
00:34:08.920
way. Exactly. And I mean, yeah, I think that we have to remember that the United States is still the
00:34:15.200
greatest bulwark against authoritarian evil in the world. We're the only ones who are even capable of
00:34:21.700
being a global policeman. So if none of our young people believe in America, why are they going to
00:34:27.380
want to fight and die for this country? We need to think of the big picture and what's actually keeping
00:34:32.280
us safe and actually keeping human rights alive in the world. It's basically us and our military
00:34:37.980
and our self-image is so integral to that. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I
00:34:44.800
encourage people to go out and get your book, Not Stolen, The Truth About European Colonialism in
00:34:50.080
the New World. Very necessary. Dr. Finn Paul, thank you so much. Thanks so much.
00:35:00.260
Okay. Thanks so much for listening and watching. I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving. We will
00:35:05.280
have another episode tomorrow. A fun Q&A for you to listen to, but I hope everyone has a wonderful
00:35:11.060
restful week. I did want to remind you, maybe a fun thing to do one night this week with your family
00:35:16.840
is to watch The Blind. This is the amazing transformation and testimony of Phil Robertson.
00:35:22.720
You know him from his Unashamed podcast on Blaze TV, also from Duck Dynasty. He and his wife have an
00:35:28.680
incredible story. They had a really rough and tumble start to their marriage. The life that he was
00:35:35.620
leading was completely lost. I think he would say degenerate, but then Christ transformed him. And now,
00:35:41.560
of course, through the power of the Holy Spirit, he is an amazing minister of the gospel. So go watch
00:35:47.040
that if you want to be encouraged. It's a really great movie. Go to blazetv.com slash the blind to
00:35:52.120
purchase for $19.99. That's blazetv.com slash the blind for $19.99. All right. That's it for today.