The Glenn Beck Program - March 07, 2020


Ep 70 ｜ Don’t Feel Guilty Celebrating America’s Miracles ｜ Michael Medved ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 12 minutes

Words per Minute

141.61957

Word Count

10,299

Sentence Count

750

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

17


Summary

In a way, when you get to know his history, Michael Medved is like an intellectual Forrest Gump. His life seems to intersect with major political and entertainment figures throughout the decades. He was at the hotel that night that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. He became friends with Dick Cheney during the Ford administration. He co-hosted the PBS movie review show that was started by Roger Ebert. And that eventually led him to the world of talk radio, where in the last 23 years, his show has consistently been one of the most listened to programs in the nation.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I guess today, the first time I ever saw him, I knew him as a movie critic,
00:00:04.440 but he'd been a bestselling author for years before that. American history expert,
00:00:09.640 longtime conservative talk radio host. In a way, when you get to know his history,
00:00:15.620 he's like an intellectual Forrest Gump. And I mean it this way, his life seems to intersect
00:00:20.700 with major political and entertainment figures throughout the decades. I mean, he worked for
00:00:26.500 the Robert Kennedy campaign, and he was at the hotel that night that Robert Kennedy was assassinated
00:00:32.560 in 1968. His study partner at Yale was Hillary Clinton. He hung out with Barbra Streisand.
00:00:39.600 That's kind of the turning point for him, where he started to go, maybe I'm a conservative. He
00:00:44.120 became friends with Dick Cheney during the Ford administration. He co-hosted the PBS movie review
00:00:49.180 show, was started by Siskel and Ebert. As a young man, Democratic Party loyalty. He was a pretty
00:00:55.180 hardcore Democrat. And if he had continued along that track, he probably would have been a big
00:01:00.620 star on the left. But he had a six-week experience that'll let him tell you about that put him on a
00:01:06.140 very different political path. One that he never thought capable of traveling. And that eventually
00:01:11.560 led him to the world of talk radio, where in the last 23 years, his show has consistently been one of
00:01:17.520 the most listened to programs in the nation. He is a sharp cultural critic who is not afraid to take
00:01:23.880 his own side when necessary. He'll take it on. And he has. And it's made him unpopular at times and
00:01:30.520 very popular other times. But he lets the chips fall where they may. The left has never really learned
00:01:36.600 this over the last few years. But if you get into an argument with this guy, you're probably going to
00:01:43.900 lose. But he is decent and civil all the way along. He's written or co-written 14 books, many of them
00:01:51.940 bestsellers. His latest is God's Hand on America. It's the kind of subject matter that makes everybody
00:01:56.900 on the left squirm. But remember, he's Yale trained. So he's got the credentials to back it up and the
00:02:03.660 history to back it up. It traces some of the most remarkable coincidence and astounding events of
00:02:09.520 American history that are hard to explain if it wasn't for divine providence. He is one who still
00:02:15.320 believes in America, our Constitution, and our future. Michael Medved. He's just kind of old-fashioned
00:02:23.000 that way.
00:02:36.860 Michael, when I first got into the media,
00:02:40.060 uh, uh, I thought it was going to be glamour and exciting and everything else, everything that it's
00:02:45.600 not. Um, and, but the one thing I hung on to was that there were really good, decent people.
00:02:56.000 No, you are truly, uh, I can count them on one hand, uh, one of the real decent, uh, members of the
00:03:06.080 media. Thank you. Um, and you have tried really hard over the years and you have, you have come from a
00:03:15.780 surprising place. I mean, I don't know if most people know this, but 16 years old, you're at Yale
00:03:22.660 university. I went to Yale at 30 and barely made it. Um, uh, so you're obviously very, very bright.
00:03:33.840 Then you go to California and you try your hand at screenwriting.
00:03:38.780 Actually, I did politics first. Oh, did you? Yeah. Which is more embarrassing because at the time
00:03:45.800 when I was at Yale, my junior year, I took a leave of absence, um, second semester, my junior year to
00:03:51.960 work for Robert Kennedy. And, and I was there when I was there when the ambassador was shot. Yeah,
00:03:58.980 I write about that. Um, can you talk about it? Sure. Um, I was, let's see, I was, uh, 19 years old
00:04:10.340 and, uh, I, uh, I was very, very taken when, when Kennedy came in cause he, he, I still admired RFK and when
00:04:23.620 he jumped into the race and, and it was the new Hampshire primary where Eugene McCarthy didn't
00:04:30.040 win the new Hampshire primary, but someone challenging Lyndon Johnson, who I had come to
00:04:35.560 believe, and I still believe was a terribly corrupt, horrible man, um, destructive president
00:04:41.380 and who had lied and lied and lied about the war and everything else. In any event, uh, Eugene
00:04:48.460 McCarthy got 42% in the New Hampshire primary and RFK came into the race. President, brother
00:04:58.400 of the martyred president. I was so excited by it. Also to tell the truth, my girlfriend was
00:05:04.660 in California and, you know, so I, I, I, I came out and worked on the campaign cause the
00:05:14.600 California primary is going to be decisive. And, um, it was incredibly exciting and you
00:05:21.060 felt like you were part of history and there was a great sense that he would be president
00:05:27.720 cause it was going to be another Kennedy Nixon race cause Nixon was going to be the Republican
00:05:32.100 nominee. And I think he would have won. Oh, I think so. And, and by the way, of all those
00:05:38.320 brothers and all those children. Yeah. And partially cause he was the one who was sincerely religious.
00:05:44.700 Uh, but that's another story. Um, what happened was went to the victory celebration, worked all
00:05:55.260 day, I actually, uh, trying to get voters to the polls and, uh, organizing the polling operation
00:06:04.320 and Kennedy won that primary against Eugene McCarthy and he won it fairly narrowly. I think
00:06:09.500 it was four and a half points, but we're all celebrating. And then he came and gave his speech
00:06:14.240 and, you know, I remember everything about it because the thing was, I was like two rows
00:06:22.460 back from the podium when he's giving a speech in the ambassador ballroom at the ambassador hotel,
00:06:27.740 which was one of these creepy old Hollywood places was already seedy. It's since been torn
00:06:32.760 down. You know what they have there now where they tore the ambassador down? Robert F. Kennedy
00:06:37.840 high school. Wow. Yeah. But in any event, um, he gave his speech and, and I remember calling
00:06:45.700 out and in some of the tapes, you can actually hear my voice and I go, we love you, Bobby.
00:06:50.680 And, you know, as a kid, uh, and then he said, and, and so, and it's going to be on to Chicago
00:06:57.720 and we're going to win it there. And he flashed the V for victory sign, which is also a peace
00:07:02.420 sign, went into the, uh, hallway. Uh, and you know, everybody's breaking up and looking to
00:07:11.340 get a drink or something like that. And, uh, all of a sudden there's, you could hear the sound. It's
00:07:19.440 like popping balloons and people say firecrackers. This was not like firecrackers, popping balloons
00:07:26.000 and then horrible screaming. And I will never forget the scream, uh, came from that kitchen area where
00:07:34.340 he had walked off into. And it came from the front of the room and went all the way to the
00:07:39.460 back of the room, sort of a progressive scream and then back. And because his brother had been
00:07:47.780 killed just five years before, uh, everybody kind of knew what had happened. And then they locked us
00:07:56.860 up the, the, uh, FBI and the, um, you were not allowed to leave the building. Uh, and because,
00:08:04.860 and this is one of the reasons I don't, I don't hold by any of the conspiracy theories. I, I did not
00:08:09.500 witness the actual shooting, but I was in the front of the room. They could identify me by photographs.
00:08:14.740 And, uh, I was interviewed three times by the FBI and a really intense, who did you know? Did you
00:08:23.180 know anybody there? In any event, uh, it was, it was one of those things that, um, that made
00:08:33.500 me deeply involved in politics. And I was, so when I graduated and then I started in law school
00:08:41.480 and, uh, my first semester at law school, Hillary Clinton was my study partner, Hillary Rodham
00:08:48.220 at the time. Uh, but then I left law school, uh, to do politics, just like I'd left junior year.
00:08:56.380 And I got a job as a speechwriter for a Senate candidate and, and I came up to California
00:09:00.700 working and then, and I honestly believe it was providential for me. Um, I, uh, I got a job
00:09:10.420 working briefly as a campaign manager, very briefly because I quit for a really corrupt, horrible,
00:09:17.960 U S congressman. Six weeks you were with him or something. Correct. Ron Dellums, uh, who's
00:09:22.840 really far to the left. He helped make me a conservative because sometimes it's, it's actually
00:09:29.880 seeing the bankruptcy of liberalism. In other words, there, I still think there are good people
00:09:36.140 who identify as liberals. I think there's good people on both sides and good people who actually
00:09:41.820 believe it. And then there are the people who just use it right on both sides. Absolutely right.
00:09:47.960 So in any event, so, uh, you were just talking, so I was doing politics in, in California before
00:09:57.060 I got into screenwriting, actually got into screenwriting through doing book writing.
00:10:01.680 So wait, before you leave politics, um, you, was there one thing that happened that made you go,
00:10:09.280 okay, I'm, I'm out. It was a lot of things. I've always been anti-drugs. I mean, I'm, I'm weird
00:10:15.840 enough anyway, you know, and in that campaign, there was a, um, a great deal of drugs. I'm
00:10:22.720 not talking about marijuana. What do you mean? Yeah. Hard drugs, more serious stuff. And it was
00:10:27.360 crummy. And I was, began being worried. There was also a lot of, um, uh, paper bags with unmarked
00:10:36.940 bills. And wow. And this was a U S congressman who was running for reelection. Wow. And I was
00:10:43.760 afraid that, you know, I had not finished law school, but I take it out of law school. I did
00:10:48.860 not want to be indicted at a young age. And so I left the campaign. And what happened in
00:10:55.440 Barbara Streisand's living room? As she called me over, um, I was, I was working for her on
00:11:04.900 her screenplay for Yentl. Wow. And, um, I had become, uh, religious and conservative, um,
00:11:15.500 already at this point. And I had a book called the shadow presidents, which was about the, um,
00:11:23.780 chiefs of staff, the, the chief aides to all the presidents of the United States since
00:11:28.820 that institution was authorized by Congress, which was 1857 under president Buchanan. But
00:11:35.100 in any event, uh, Barbara was interested because I was working on the screenplay with her and she,
00:11:42.340 I'd given her a copy of my book, which had just come out recently. And, um, and she, uh,
00:11:50.660 called me over to, uh, talk about the book. And like everyone was shocked. And she had a number
00:11:58.120 of fairly famous people there and they were interrogating me because I'd done this stuff on
00:12:02.980 the white house. And I, I was saying good things about, uh, president Ford and, um, who had just
00:12:11.460 left office and you were letting the chips fall where they may. Correct. And I was saying good
00:12:17.240 things about president Eisenhower, I think was a great president. And, uh, and basically part of
00:12:24.520 what, and it's so funny cause Gerald Ford's chief of staff was Dick Cheney. And I was very impressed
00:12:32.240 with Cheney. I interviewed him several times and I thought he was really bright and good guy.
00:12:37.940 And they were so shocked that, and it basically killed my, my association, my, my, uh, ability to write
00:12:49.180 for Streisand, but they were so shocked that anyone could say anything positive about Republicans. Um,
00:12:57.600 and I don't think a lot has changed. No, no, it's gotten worse because, because now it's not just the
00:13:05.520 negativity about Republicans. It's regular negativity about moderate Democrats, uh, people who are woke.
00:13:13.540 Um, I mean, it's, it's a craziness. I, there was, I'll tell you an example of it. There's a piece in USA Today
00:13:23.840 by this woman complaining about the, the way that Trump handled the killing of Soleimani, which I think
00:13:33.420 was emphatically a good thing for the world that this guy was taking out. And she said, look at all the
00:13:39.380 pictures. It's all white males who are advising him. Why can't there be some generals who are people
00:13:48.940 of color and women? And okay, we're talking about national security here, right? I don't want to
00:13:55.620 balance. I want the best person. Exactly. And that's the point. And I, I, okay. I made the point that,
00:14:02.940 that if you look at that picture of Barack Obama, the best night of his presidency, when he killed
00:14:08.120 Osama bin Laden, no hardest night in 400 years, as Joe Biden said, it was the hardest decision in 400
00:14:14.500 years, right? It was a good night for president Obama, but they have a picture of him in the
00:14:20.420 situation room in the white house. And there's one person of color who was president of the United
00:14:26.140 States and one woman who was secretary of state, all the rest are white males. Okay. But I guess
00:14:33.340 that's okay because it's Barack Obama, but this whole idea of trying to judge people by the color
00:14:40.420 of their skin rather than the content of their character. Opposite. Right. It's the exact opposite.
00:14:45.640 And the left, you know, you say woke. I think, I think sometimes what the left says is the opposite of
00:14:54.580 what the word means. You know what I mean? Political correctness is for some reason, not scary to
00:15:00.920 everybody. Those two words that should scare the heck out of you. Politically correct, not correct.
00:15:07.040 Right. Politically correct. And you just said woke. And to me, the left has gone dead asleep because
00:15:16.760 at one point they still were the people that were fighting, apparently fighting for the little guy.
00:15:27.900 They were the ones who would stand up for the racial injustice. It's not, none of that I don't
00:15:35.120 think is happening now. The one thing that has changed, it seems to me, is if you go back and you
00:15:41.020 look at the American left, there was patriotism there once upon a time, once upon a time. Robert
00:15:49.180 Kennedy, the Kennedys. Kennedys wouldn't be allowed in the Democratic Party. Not, not a chance. You're
00:15:54.300 absolutely right. I mean, Scoop Jackson, who was the last Democrat I ever, ever worked for, was a real
00:16:01.300 patriot. People who loved America, understood America was no accident. The reason I write about
00:16:07.480 the Kennedy assassination in, in God's hand on America is because I remember right after the
00:16:14.460 assassination, I was very, I was addicted to watching the funerals and everything. The novelist
00:16:20.000 John Updike said, with the killing of Bobby Kennedy, God has now withdrawn his special blessing on
00:16:27.660 America. And I remember at the time being so chilled by that and at the same time enlightened by it,
00:16:36.620 because what it showed is that even this very liberal Harvard educated novelist
00:16:41.320 understood there was a special blessing on America. John Kennedy understood that. Franklin
00:16:47.020 Roosevelt understood that. Harry Truman lived that. Lived it. And, and again, it is only today
00:16:54.660 that the left has abandoned the idea that America has not special privileges because we have been
00:17:04.280 selected by providence, but special obligations. And that's the whole idea of the chosen people
00:17:09.180 notion in the Bible is it's not chosen for special benefits for more rights or privileges than anybody
00:17:17.040 else. It's special responsibilities. And that's something that Americans have understood from,
00:17:23.900 from the time of our founding, from long before independence. It's something that Jonathan Edwards
00:17:30.680 talked about. By the way, do you know who Jonathan Edwards' grandson was? Most famous grandson?
00:17:37.640 Aaron Burr. Which just shows you, there's one guy who's incredibly virtuous, this great
00:17:44.200 preacher who helped awaken American religiosity in the 1740s, which led to the revolution. And then he
00:17:51.660 has a grandson. Well, people have seen the musical Hamilton. They know it doesn't work out so well for
00:17:57.080 yeah. And it's, uh, it's not surprising. Um, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's one of the problems we
00:18:05.820 have now, uh, where people have worked so hard and we've come so far. I mean, I really 2005, 2000,
00:18:19.240 I really thought we were making tremendous progress on race. I'm from the Pacific Northwest. So you know what
00:18:26.120 that's like, no, we didn't have those kinds of problems ever. You know, we weren't a state. We did. We did
00:18:32.840 against the Chinese. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. There was actually lynching of Chinese immigrants.
00:18:39.700 Correct. Uh, Seattle was a really dicey place, really dicey place in 1800. Yeah, it is homeless. It is. Um,
00:18:49.120 but, uh, we didn't have the black, white issues. So I never saw it that way. Um, cause I wasn't raised
00:18:58.520 in that kind of situation, but I saw it elsewhere. I saw it in the rest of the country and I really
00:19:05.300 thought, wow, there's some bad places still, but on the whole, we've really come a long way.
00:19:12.040 But I think we've gone back so far because we've do it with the left has dismantled Martin Luther
00:19:22.060 King. Right. And, and they've, they, they have taken away from his memory. That's the last
00:19:28.660 major chapter in my book is Dr. King and, uh, it's Providence and the Prophet. And again, it,
00:19:37.720 it is impossible to read about his life or to read his speeches or to read his letters without
00:19:45.200 recognizing that he was accurate and seeing God's working in his life, that God had a purpose for
00:19:53.220 him. Uh, there was an attempted killing of Dr. King where he got, it was actually a letter opener
00:20:01.360 in the shape of a samurai sword. I didn't even know this until I read your book. I had no idea that
00:20:06.260 this crazy woman plunged into his chest and he was talking about it. It was 10 years before
00:20:12.300 he died. The night before he died in April of 1968, he's giving his final speech where
00:20:20.520 he says, I have been to the mountaintop and I have seen the promised land. I may not get
00:20:26.360 there with you. And next day he's, he's killed. He was talking in that speech about the assassination
00:20:34.360 attempt where if he had coughed, he would have died. It would have ruptured his aorta because
00:20:38.580 he had this thing that he had to remove surgically because he'd been stabbed. And he said, I am
00:20:44.840 so glad that God has given me this last time that I didn't cough because of what I've seen
00:20:51.680 and the progress that I've seen. And see, here's the basic thing. We're very lucky to be here in
00:20:58.820 America. I mean, your life is unimaginable anywhere else. My life is unimaginable anywhere
00:21:04.800 else. We're so fortunate. I, um, um, my, my grandfather, uh, decided to bring his family
00:21:12.620 from Ukraine in 1910. It took him 14 years because of the interruption of the revolution and civil war
00:21:19.200 in Russia to get my grandmother and her one surviving child. They lost during that nightmare.
00:21:27.580 This is world war one. Uh, she lost five daughters and, and then when he finally got her to America
00:21:37.580 in 1924, um, there was an assumption that she was terribly sick. Uh, and she like poor people
00:21:47.860 never been to school. She didn't want to go to the doctor. Didn't want to, she finally went
00:21:51.760 to the doctor and she was convinced because her neighbors had told her she had a terrible tumor
00:21:57.180 and she probably wouldn't survive. And so she's crying, crying. Doctor says, sit down, sit down.
00:22:04.060 And he says, do you know what the problem is? And she says, I have a tumor, right? He says, no,
00:22:11.160 you have a baby. Um, she said, I'm 49 years old. This is not possible. Says, well, your name is Sarah
00:22:19.080 and it is that baby was my dad. Whoa. This American miracle baby for a land of fresh starts and special
00:22:29.220 hope. And here's the basic thing. And the reason that I wrote this book is what happens is Americans
00:22:37.560 are so blessed. You're either going to feel grateful for that. And if you don't, you're going to feel
00:22:44.820 guilty because you, you understand that you have it so much better than people anywhere. I call it the
00:22:53.600 golden ticket. It's like Willy Wonka. We've won the lottery. We're born in America. Okay. If you don't
00:23:02.000 feel grateful for that, then you're going to feel guilty that we have gotten all these things
00:23:07.400 because our ancestors stole and they pillaged and they exploited and they destroyed and they were
00:23:13.000 uniquely racist and it's slavery and it's native Americans and it's despoiling the environment
00:23:18.080 and it's American imperialism. All that crap is, is a way that people can understand their own good
00:23:28.040 fortune, which is a very negative way. It's psychologically unhealthy. It's historically nonsensical.
00:23:34.580 And the right way of understanding it is, yes, God has blessed us uniquely, but not because
00:23:41.120 we're so great. It's because he calls us to be better. And he calls us to actually continue this
00:23:48.980 work. Dr. King said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
00:23:57.100 And he understood that we must as well.
00:24:00.100 I, um, about 10 years ago, eight years ago, I started reading Dr. King and I just devoured
00:24:08.920 anything I could, um, because I was convinced his message is the message for today as well. I mean,
00:24:16.980 it is the answer. Um, you know, Jesus knew that Lincoln knew that Gandhi knew that Bonhoeffer knew
00:24:23.980 that it's the same thing over and over again. Um, and, uh, but even if you tell religious people,
00:24:33.200 love peace, don't, don't, don't be angry, let it go. You know, they almost to a person I hear.
00:24:47.800 Yeah. Yeah. All that's fine, but we've got to do something. Well, he did do something,
00:24:54.620 but he just did it in the, the atypical way, unless you want to win. Uh, and, and people that
00:25:05.380 claim to have so much faith almost don't have faith that God's got us. Just do what you're
00:25:12.080 supposed to do. Well, it's interesting. King gave this remarkable speech to a high school
00:25:18.980 graduation at one point. It was a largely black high school. And he, he said, my message to you
00:25:27.800 is, um, uh, you know, and he, he went through the great people in human history and he said,
00:25:36.020 um, uh, we've had great people in human history and he didn't mention all black people. Cause Dr.
00:25:42.520 King, he mentioned Beethoven and, uh, Michelangelo and, and, uh, he said, not all of you are going to
00:25:52.640 be great artists, great athletes, great entertainers, great media people. He says, some of you are going
00:26:00.380 to be street sweepers, be the greatest street sweeper. You can be the Beethoven of street
00:26:07.340 sweepers, be the Beethoven of gardeners, uh, be, uh, and whether you're a doctor, whatever you are,
00:26:15.980 the, and the point about being part of America is you talk about love, love is important, but what love
00:26:26.780 is really based on is gratitude. And, and part of the reason that America, uh, Americans don't feel
00:26:36.480 thankful is we've forgotten to whom thanks are due and it's uncomfortable for people. And, and again,
00:26:46.180 it does create a sense of, of obligation. It means that you have to do more than, but how much
00:26:53.380 of this, how much of this is natural? Cause I think there is a natural tendency to forget about
00:26:59.640 divine providence, to divine providence, different than manifest destiny, but to forget about divine
00:27:06.560 providence and to forget about, uh, what came before you and, and the struggle today. It's just
00:27:13.320 me, me, me, me, me. Oh, poor me. And oh, poor us. Look at how bad things are right now. Um, how do you,
00:27:20.880 how do you get people to, um, look at that when, let me phrase it this way, how much of it is real
00:27:29.720 just lost and how much of it is intentionally been distorted and covered? Well, I think a lot of it
00:27:36.680 has been distorted and covered because it's, um, to actually look at America and to the history of
00:27:44.960 America. Uh, it is impossible to think it was an accident. And, um, my immediate previous book,
00:27:53.760 The American Miracle, has stories from early in our founding history where you can actually
00:28:02.180 calculate odds against it. In the new book, I talk about the Battle of Midway, which everyone who
00:28:08.160 participated, including people who, again, were self-described atheists. And yes, they existed
00:28:14.700 in America. They always have. Um, where what you cannot mistake is what Hegel talks about is the
00:28:23.940 will of history is that there is a pattern here. And yes, you can write it off as, oh, it's just happy
00:28:31.700 accidents, but a pattern of happy accidents is still a pattern and it's going somewhere. And I
00:28:38.840 think part of what's happened in America is this sour mood that we have, which is so profoundly
00:28:47.760 ungrateful, uh, for what we have. I, um, I was talking to you just off the air about, I had serious
00:28:57.900 medical problems. Uh, I know that you've dealt with that in your, in your family. Um, how grateful
00:29:05.400 that we live when we do, when they, when they can, they can prolong life and, and life in America is,
00:29:14.480 is so sweet. And I, I, you know, you know, I, one of the things that I, I despise about the left at the
00:29:23.920 moment is people will say, oh yes, uh, you say, do I love America? I love America for what it could
00:29:32.000 be, for what it might be someday. And okay. That's like telling your wife, uh, do you love me, honey?
00:29:40.520 Well, I love you for what you could be if you had, if you had to lose a few pounds and if you had to
00:29:45.800 change your hairstyle, please, uh, that that's, that's a way to head toward a divorce. And the
00:29:54.960 point is that I love America for its craziness, for its incredible variety. There's the Shakespearean
00:30:03.320 line about Cleopatra, neither time can wither nor custom stale her infinite variety. America is a land
00:30:10.420 of infinite variety, but it is also the kingdom of kindness. And there's a very great rabbi, the
00:30:19.500 last, the greatest rabbi, the last generation, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who, uh, who, who said that
00:30:26.560 he used the term, um, Malchus Shel Chesed, a, a kingdom of kindness. That's what America is.
00:30:33.480 And what I would do to call people back to some recognition of it, other than reading my book
00:30:38.840 is, um, to recognize the history of your own family. Because when I look at the history of
00:30:48.060 my family on my mom's side, my dad's side, my wife's family, um, every American family,
00:30:55.560 look where they were. Look where we are. Uh, this is, this is not a downward progress. It
00:31:05.160 is, it is a lie that America is in an irreversible moral decline. Uh, there's a, another poem by
00:31:13.200 Langston Hughes, um, great black poet, let America be America again. And what that requires
00:31:22.080 most of all is an appreciation for what we have been and what we are.
00:31:43.620 Are we, um, are we able to salvage it with where we are right now? If we
00:31:51.900 don't. Sure. And I'll, let me give you examples. Um, when president Reagan became president,
00:32:00.160 you know, think about it. We had just had four years of Jimmy Carter. We had just gone
00:32:05.180 through the Vietnam war, the Vietnam. Watergate. Watergate. We had the only American president
00:32:11.660 to leave office under a cloud to resign. Um, we had cities burning down when Dr. King was
00:32:21.480 killed. His, his memory was defaced. There were riots at 163 cities and most of them deadly
00:32:30.720 riots. Uh, we had, I don't know if you remember this, you probably are too young, but there was
00:32:36.200 a, there was a guy, math graduate student who was murdered at the University of Wisconsin
00:32:42.960 because he went to the building late and the left blew up the building. Uh, we had the Symbionese
00:32:48.760 Liberation Army. It had all, all these horrible stuff here. There was fighting on the streets.
00:32:55.000 The Democratic Convention of 1968. You know, the, I, I, okay. The country was a mess and crime was
00:33:05.560 skyrocketing in every major American city and drugs were a plague and this, this huge explosion out of
00:33:13.660 wedlock birth and the collapse of the family and all of this going on. It really did kind of turn
00:33:19.820 around and most of that stuff turned around. You know, that, that actually, and there's pretty
00:33:26.180 good evidence of this when we have this terrible problem with opioids right now, which we have to
00:33:32.300 get a handle on. But in terms of, uh, the heroin, even the meth things have been getting better a little
00:33:41.220 bit. Uh, the abortion rate in America is way down, is been cut by two thirds. And, uh, and all, all the
00:33:52.440 surveys show that this remains, uh, a country where, where people do well and people say, well, it's,
00:34:00.340 it's hard for people on the bottom to rise to the top, but it is still overwhelmingly people at that
00:34:08.740 bottom quintile. The next generation is higher, is higher. And the, the, the, that's unthinkable
00:34:17.200 elsewhere. Well, it is. They say there are reasons to believe that Europe is also, uh, now there are
00:34:24.300 European nations where there's also more social mobility, economic mobility. And yes, but, but that's
00:34:32.440 because the whole world, which has been blessed by America is, is so vastly better. The percentage
00:34:39.680 of people in the world, uh, I was, I was reading this recently and it's a UN number. Okay. So
00:34:45.960 a UN number that when the UN was formed, about 60% of all people living in planet earth were in
00:34:56.900 desperate poverty. They did not have enough to eat. That's down to 6%. I mean, we have, we have
00:35:03.980 made so much progress against, uh, and, and again, which is one of the reasons not to believe all the
00:35:11.160 stories about the end of the world and, uh, because of climate change, we're, we're going to have hundreds
00:35:16.720 of millions. If you look at the climate change predictions that Al Gore was making for 2020,
00:35:22.240 we were not supposed to be sitting here in Texas. I think Texas was going to be underwater.
00:35:26.460 Yeah. No, they just, they just had to change at one of the national parks, a glacier national
00:35:31.500 park. They had to change the signs. Correct. I love it said park gone. These glaciers will be gone
00:35:37.400 by 2020. Yeah. I mean, look, just the, the, the, the everyday miracles of American life. And okay. I got on a
00:35:49.600 plane last night and it threw, threw a snowstorm, flew here. Plane even landed pretty close to on time.
00:35:59.000 Thank you to Alaska airlines. And, uh, you know, these are everyday miracles. You think of what that
00:36:05.720 means. I have a chapter about the transcontinental railroad and the reason that railroads were so
00:36:11.980 amazing to people, Lincoln was the one who in the middle of the war, they passed the bill for the
00:36:19.440 transcontinental railroad because it was an obsession of Lincoln's always. And partially because you could
00:36:26.320 go back and there was, before the railroad came, before we invented railroads in the 1830s, uh,
00:36:36.320 no human being could travel faster than Pharaoh on his chariots in the Bible. Think about that.
00:36:44.900 You couldn't travel faster than a galloping horse. And all of a sudden you've got this amazing machine
00:36:50.940 that can cross the continent in seven days and relatively safely. Yes. Um, very safely. I mean,
00:36:59.760 unless you were working on it, correct. And, and even the working on it, uh, the, the sense of
00:37:07.260 godly purpose that drove, I, I write in my book about this unsung American hero who really deserves
00:37:15.400 more attention, whose name was, uh, Ted Judah. And he was known universally as crazy Judah
00:37:22.000 because he was obsessed with his dream of building a railroad that would connect the Midwest
00:37:28.920 to California, which is already a state going through nothing. And there was vast, vast emptiness
00:37:35.700 between. And he, he believed that that was the right answer to binding the nation together after the
00:37:44.100 divisions of the civil war and his story and the story about the role he played in organizing the
00:37:51.820 central Pacific and the churches everywhere gave thanksgiving for the creation of this railroad,
00:37:59.980 which bound us up as one nation. See that kind of story, um, which is the, it's the first
00:38:05.940 transcontinental railroad ever built anywhere. And before that, to get to California,
00:38:14.100 you had to either go over land, which took about six months, or you had to, to take a boat,
00:38:22.820 a ship that would go around the tip of South America. Theodore Roosevelt hadn't built the Panama
00:38:28.540 Canal yet. And, um, the, that would take two months and all of a sudden you could make this trip in
00:38:36.620 seven days. And all of that is incredible. I'll tell you another thing. Most people don't know this.
00:38:42.860 They should, it's, it's a blatant miracle. Um, when, when we were, had a war with Mexico and I know
00:38:53.900 it's controversial. We had a war with Mexico. Guess what? We won. Um, but president Polk sent down
00:39:01.540 the chief clerk of the state department, whose name was Nicholas Trist, who's fascinating guys, former
00:39:19.540 private secretary to Thomas Jefferson. He married Jefferson's granddaughter, former private secretary
00:39:26.420 to James Madison and to Andrew Jackson. Okay. He comes to Mexico to negotiate the peace. And Polk has
00:39:38.340 gotten it in his, uh, in his head at this point that we should take all of Mexico. They had the all
00:39:44.500 Mexico theory in the house because we had beaten them in the war. Why not? Now that would have been a
00:39:49.620 terrible idea that would have made us an imperialist power. And Trist didn't want to do that. So he's
00:39:56.840 negotiating, he's negotiating. The one thing he's concerned about is we'll get California.
00:40:01.500 Okay. And we'll leave the rest of Mexico to Mexico. So Polk fires him, sends a, says, no,
00:40:08.420 you're no longer represent the United States in these negotiations. So he tells the Mexicans,
00:40:13.860 you want to continue negotiating with me. And they did. He signs on, um, February 2nd, 1848,
00:40:23.040 the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Okay. Now if that date, he signed on virtually the same day
00:40:32.500 they discovered gold in California and had they known that California, and this is why America had
00:40:40.180 this huge economic advantage in the 19th century. Now, now all of this people who are participating
00:40:46.020 said this is, and by the way, Polk went from having fired Nicholas Trist and having ordered
00:40:52.600 troops to come and arrest him for disobeying the president to wait a minute, he got this treaty
00:40:58.480 and he got to California. We've got all this gold. Um, 300,000 people came out to California in the
00:41:05.240 first 18 months after discovery of gold. Wow. And it was a state year and a half later.
00:41:11.820 And it's another story in any event, this, this stuff, the, the idea that all of this
00:41:20.120 is accidental. I don't think holds, I don't know how we go from fire for 5,000 years to the light
00:41:33.620 bulb a hundred years after, you know, people are set free and able to keep their, you know,
00:41:40.880 the reward of their risk. Um, people have a hard time. Um, for instance, I, I, I'm a big
00:41:50.600 Churchill fan. Oh yeah. But if you read about Churchill from the Indian perspective, the guy's
00:41:58.180 a monster. And when I first started looking into it, I thought, okay, so how do I put these two
00:42:05.440 guys together? And then I just realized, uh, it's pretty easy. He sees one part that he's not
00:42:15.040 really there and been raised to believe this. He sees that this way, this another way. And by the
00:42:22.700 end of his life, he's like, you know, I really made some mistakes. Um, he didn't completely renounce
00:42:27.200 all the stuff that he said in India, but he was moving in the right direction. And I'm
00:42:32.160 comfortable with that. I'm comfortable with guy being wrong and really bad over here and
00:42:38.540 really right over here. Same guy. We can't give that to ourselves. We can't give that to
00:42:44.520 our country. It seems. And we have to absolutely have to, because it's not that, that America
00:42:50.900 doesn't lose. We lose, we have setbacks, but the, the pattern. And we make mistakes. Absolutely.
00:42:59.260 But the pattern is upward and for the enormous benefit of the world. There's a, um, uh, recently
00:43:07.880 retired historian at university of Pennsylvania, Walter McDougall, who writes, I think, very provocative
00:43:14.860 question. If you look at history, what is the biggest event of the last 500 years? It's a long
00:43:25.120 time. He says, without question, it's the rise of the United States of America because it's changed
00:43:32.240 everything, everything all around the world. I think the biggest, actually, if you had to tie
00:43:38.420 to event, what event would it be? Again, he, he talks about the rise of America. Okay. But that's
00:43:45.040 not an event. That's a, oh, he, okay. An event, event, a development, if you will. He uses the term
00:43:50.100 event. I, I, I, because I think that starts with the greatest mission statement of any person,
00:44:00.740 country, or business ever. The declaration. Declaration. Of course. It's like when people say,
00:44:06.260 you know, America, blah, blah, blah, even Martin Luther King talked about America, live up to your
00:44:12.040 promise, live up to your vow here. We so, you know, dismiss this mission statement. You want to get rid
00:44:20.820 of America? Great. You have a better mission statement. There's, there's also the fact that,
00:44:28.120 and again, this is one of those unbelievable accidents. Most important event of 1787 is
00:44:34.640 Constitution of the United States Constitutional Convention. Before the Constitutional Convention
00:44:39.580 gets together in September, August, September of 1787. Something else happens under the Articles
00:44:47.420 of Confederation. Northwest Ordinance. Now, the Northwest Ordinance forever bans slavery.
00:44:58.120 Mm-hmm. It, and what's amazing is this country, would people, people want to talk about America's
00:45:06.000 guilt for slavery, and of course we bear some, some guilt for slavery, but one of the things
00:45:11.120 that's very important to understand is that slavery was universal at a time when they organized
00:45:18.800 in the 1680s, the first anti-slavery society in Philadelphia, and what was not universal was the
00:45:30.840 move by Christians, particularly in Britain, and then later in the United States, to dismantle
00:45:39.780 the evil of slavery. And you know, when you talk about mission statement, in the Constitution,
00:45:44.840 at the Constitutional Convention, despite the fact that some of the delegates were slaveholders,
00:45:48.880 not a majority, but some. One of the slaveholders, George Mason, wanted to abolish slavery in the
00:45:56.620 Constitution. But in any event, they built into the Constitution the ability to ban the slave trade
00:46:03.220 in 1808, 20 years later, which they did.
00:46:07.720 Which you would think progressives would understand.
00:46:09.960 Yeah.
00:46:10.620 That's the progressive, you can't get it done, so let's put in one piece to take that first step.
00:46:15.600 Correct. And again, and it put, Lincoln used the term, putting slavery on the path to its
00:46:22.560 ultimate extirpation, to get rid of this evil, evil crime against humanity.
00:46:29.080 So I bought an 1830 engraving of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.
00:46:37.480 Wow.
00:46:37.960 Have you ever read it?
00:46:39.040 Yeah. It's before, by the way, it's one of the very few things that's ever been improved
00:46:45.260 by committee.
00:46:46.280 Yeah.
00:46:46.680 But it's because who was on the committee?
00:46:48.220 Yeah.
00:46:48.340 John Adams, Benjamin Franklin.
00:46:49.840 Exactly right.
00:46:50.700 Roger Sherman, Robert.
00:46:51.660 But in there, even his handwriting changes. Jefferson's handwriting changes. You know, this so-called
00:46:59.940 Christian king is now, it goes to people on the other side of the world who've never offended
00:47:06.820 him, and he enslaves them and then puts them on a ship. If they survive that, he then sells
00:47:15.200 capital letters, men, on the open market. Men.
00:47:21.040 All men are, he knew. Right. They just couldn't get it done. And I don't, I don't know how we
00:47:27.660 can't. It was a unanimous document. It had to be. That was agreed on beforehand. What is
00:47:35.180 it? Two states said no to it. Well, how can we not give ourselves the break? Because how are
00:47:47.380 we going to be judged? Are we perfect now?
00:47:51.580 Yeah. And again, and you think about the war between the states and what that meant. And
00:47:58.940 the battle hymn of the republic, and that was the title that Julia Ward Howe gave to it,
00:48:03.540 the battle hymn of the republic. The last line, last verse of the battle of the republic,
00:48:09.160 the ACLU hates it. It says, in the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,
00:48:16.480 with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me. As he died to make men holy, let
00:48:25.440 us die to make men free. And 330,000 union troops did.
00:48:31.460 I was in Richmond, Virginia. This is 2002, maybe. And holding a big event. There were about
00:48:41.220 30,000 people there. And I said, so on the program, I've invited this black gospel choir,
00:48:52.900 and they're going to do the battle hymn. And everybody in the room went, this is Richmond.
00:48:58.380 You can't do that. And I said, this is America. Yes, we can. And they gave me all these dire
00:49:04.960 predictions on what was going to happen. Everybody loved it. Of course. People were crying. People
00:49:10.920 don't, they're not who people say they are. Correct. Because we are the kingdom of kindness.
00:49:20.600 One of the stories that obsesses me, and also because there's a family connection,
00:49:26.000 is the story of the end of life for Franklin Roosevelt. And how close America came to having
00:49:36.460 basically a communist agent as president of the United States. Because the sitting vice president
00:49:42.900 in 1944, Roosevelt is running for a fourth term. He's terribly sick. And people who were close to him,
00:49:51.180 he didn't know it. But people who were close to him knew he could never live through his fourth term.
00:49:56.660 And his vice president, Henry Wallace, is, has a big man crush on Stalin, is a very clear
00:50:07.940 leftist who has a background of guru worship. One of the things in my book is I, I, I, I quote from
00:50:16.840 some of the guru letters that he sent to his guru, who was a nutty Russian named Nicholas Rorick.
00:50:24.080 And this is all exceedingly weird. There's a group of people who are all democratic officials
00:50:32.480 at the time. They all happen to be religious Catholics who get together and they formed what
00:50:37.740 they called the conspiracy of the pure of heart. They were led by a guy named Bob Hannigan,
00:50:42.400 who was a former baseball star for University of St. Louis. And their determination is somehow
00:50:50.840 to prevent Vice President Wallace from being re-nominated, because they knew. And they had
00:51:00.220 the idea, because Bob Hannigan was from Missouri, he knew the senator from Missouri, Harry Truman.
00:51:05.520 And the story of the manipulations behind the scene, this was a real conspiracy, the conspiracy
00:51:12.640 of the pure of heart. But it succeeded in giving us a pretty remarkable president, President
00:51:20.300 Truman, and, and sparing us from Henry Wallace. And what's fascinating about this, and I didn't
00:51:26.780 know this when I started doing the research for the book. As he approached the end of his
00:51:31.640 life, Wallace realized that they had done the right thing. He wrote a piece, which, honestly,
00:51:40.340 other history books don't have this. He wrote a piece called Where I Was Wrong, where he talks
00:51:45.460 about the indescribable, pure evil of communism. And this is a guy who, at one point in 1948,
00:51:53.640 he ran for president against Truman, an independent party, totally funded by communists, and creeping
00:52:00.260 with communists. In any event, like, like, some people, he came to see how wrong this was, how
00:52:09.740 fortunate, what a close call America had. And the story, the story is, they were about to
00:52:17.240 re-nominate Wallace for vice president by acclamation. And the conspiracy of pure of heart,
00:52:26.040 a lot of political bosses, frankly. And again, they're serious Catholics, they felt God was
00:52:32.980 behind this. Bob Hannigan, the key orchestrator, in any event, I'll get to him in a moment, but
00:52:40.180 what happened at the convention was they had this roaring demonstration on behalf of Wallace,
00:52:46.580 and then Senator Claude Pepper, who was another old leftist, had the idea, let's nominate him
00:52:52.960 right now, because with this hall right now, he'll be re-nominated. So he pulls for a microphone,
00:52:58.600 his microphone goes dead. He starts rushing the podium, and barreling up there, it's like a broken
00:53:05.340 field runner. And he's trying to get to the podium, so he can get to the podium. I move,
00:53:11.240 we nominate, re-nominate Vice President Henry Wallace by acclamation. And literally, he is 10 feet
00:53:19.680 away from the podium when the gavel comes down. The chairman of the convention at the time was a
00:53:30.020 senator who had just been appointed to senator from Indiana, Samuel Dillon Jackson. He only served in
00:53:36.560 the Senate for six months, taking the place of a senator who had died. But this was his one great
00:53:43.440 moment. He saw Claude Pepper coming. He put down the gavel. He said, okay, the convention, I move the
00:53:50.340 convention adjourn. And all in favor, aye. Aye. All opposed, no! The ayes have it. Convention is adjourned.
00:53:59.860 And it is because of that, that we escaped having Henry Wallace as President of the United States,
00:54:06.100 because Roosevelt died 82 days after his inauguration for the fourth term. Bob Hannigan
00:54:12.200 said, on my tombstone, I want, here lies the man who saved the United States from Henry Wallace.
00:54:23.300 And... Is it on his tombstone? No, because he died shortly thereafter. He had a stroke,
00:54:31.800 heart attack, heart attack in the stroke. And he was a young man. And he, a lot of people thought he
00:54:37.820 would be, he's a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, but the kind of very patriotic,
00:54:44.940 seriously religious Democrats we need more of. He would be called a Nazi in today's Democratic
00:54:51.400 Party. Let's talk a little bit about, you talk about Theodore Roosevelt, and... I know you don't
00:54:57.880 like him. No, I, I, there's parts of me, I love him. Okay. I love him. He's a product of his time.
00:55:05.460 You know, he's a product, and we saw what this turned into overseas. You know, this progressivism,
00:55:12.400 this Fabian socialism, it, it's ugly at the end. But you can understand it the first time. You can
00:55:19.360 understand it when everything is changing, and you don't know how to adapt. Here's a new scientific
00:55:26.180 way to look at things, et cetera, et cetera. But you, you, you go into the divine providence
00:55:35.680 of... Well, of his whole life. ...Theodore Roosevelt. Because he, he, he, his entire life was dueling
00:55:42.120 death. And it's astonishing the number of near-death experiences he had on the battlefield at the
00:55:51.080 San Juan Hill. He's the only one on horseback. Because they hadn't gotten their horses. It
00:55:57.000 was a typical army snafu. The Rough Riders had to charge uphill on foot. There are a fourth
00:56:06.680 of his regiment is either wounded or killed. He's riding on a horse with a big bandana around
00:56:12.580 his cab, leading his troops. Like Washington. Untouched. Right. Mm-hmm. And there are people
00:56:19.880 there, witnesses, and, and not one of them said, it is a miracle that he wasn't killed. And
00:56:26.840 it was the most foolhardy thing anyone had ever seen. He, he had near-death experiences as
00:56:33.580 a boy. He had this unbelievable dramatic situation where the same night, uh, that his, his first
00:56:45.580 child, Alice, was born, his wife died and his mother died. And he was crushed. And that sent
00:56:52.680 him out to the West to rediscover himself. And, um, he also, a lot of people don't know this.
00:56:59.840 He made his living. He lost all his money on these ranches. He, he had some inheritance from
00:57:04.640 his dad. But he lost it all on these ranches. And he made his living from that time forward as a
00:57:09.900 writer. He wrote 34 books. Mm-hmm. And some of them are pretty darn good history books. The Naval
00:57:15.800 War of 1812, still in print. He has a great biography of Thomas Hart Benton. In any event, what I talk
00:57:21.940 about is this moment in 1912, he's running for president as progressive and, uh, he's chugging
00:57:32.120 into Milwaukee and there's 10,000 people literally at the civic stadium who are going to hear TR
00:57:41.080 speak. Um, his voice is shot, things like, okay, he's coming out. He's about to go to the speech
00:57:47.540 after a dinner. And from 10 feet away, uh, he's shot, takes a bullet in the chest. He crumbles.
00:57:57.200 Blood is oozing out. They said, we have to go to a hospital, Colonel Roosevelt. He says, no,
00:58:03.900 I'm going to deliver this speech. And, and he delivers this piece. The first line, he says,
00:58:09.400 you may not know this, but I have been shot, but it takes more than a single shot to kill a bull
00:58:14.580 moose. And he spoke for more than an hour. And, and again, part of what is remarkable and he always
00:58:23.200 considered remarkable was in his coat pocket. He had, it was 50 page speech. He had folded it over
00:58:32.800 twice, stuck it in his pocket and he had his glasses case that slowed the bullet. And had it not, he
00:58:39.800 certainly would not have lived because it was right, right near his heart. It's like Reagan. It was
00:58:44.620 very close to his heart. So the question is, he was spared. Uh, this is 1912. He died seven years
00:58:52.900 later. What is it that he did in that seven years? He was the, the leading light for American
00:59:01.220 preparedness. At the time that he began beating this drum for American preparedness at the beginning
00:59:06.880 of the great war, said, we are going to end up getting into this war like it or not. It's,
00:59:13.160 it's going to happen. Uh, and, and he clearly was the, we had, we had, we had, our army was
00:59:19.480 the same size as Portugal at the, the beginning of the war. And, uh, and Roosevelt was a very
00:59:28.580 religious guy, always went to church and liked to walk to church. And, uh, there are stories
00:59:35.500 of him walking to church when he was president, um, with the secret service huffing and puffing
00:59:41.760 to keep alongside him because he believed in the strenuous life. And he spoke to a minister
00:59:49.020 right before he died. And he died very suddenly. And he said, this is, this is what I was kept
00:59:56.240 to lie for. And he said that even after his son, Quentin had died in that, which was the
01:00:02.260 most painful thing in his life. In any event, what's fascinating to me is that Roosevelt,
01:00:08.880 like so many other important Americans, virtually all the other important Americans,
01:00:14.520 believed that there was providence, that there was a plan and wanted to be part of it. And I think
01:00:23.900 manifestly he was, um, we, we don't have the Panama Canal without Udara Roosevelt and frankly,
01:00:31.540 establishing our system of national parks and national forests to, to be what they are,
01:00:39.080 which is a great gift to the country where they can take, take down the signs about the
01:00:43.800 missing glaciers in a glacier national park. That's also a, uh, Rooseveltian gift.
01:00:49.240 So let's talk about future history. You happen to make it to Ray Kurzweil's dream of 2030.
01:01:07.260 You're now, I don't know, downloaded. And so Michael Medved lives on. It's a hundred years from now.
01:01:14.100 So, what's being written about these days about America right now?
01:01:25.000 Well, for one thing, I, I think that, um, there, there are people out there and I know this who, uh,
01:01:36.480 believe that they see God's hand in our current situation, uh, because of the victory of president
01:01:44.620 Trump and because what president Trump has been able to achieve. And this is taking nothing away
01:01:50.760 from his achievements, which are real. But I think one of the problems that we have is putting too much
01:01:59.700 importance in a single individual. Now, sometimes those individuals can be, Reagan changed everything.
01:02:08.160 Pope John Paul II changed everything. Is it possible Trump will be remembered like that? I think it's
01:02:14.060 possible. Is it possible that, uh, he'll be remembered in very different terms? I think that's possible.
01:02:22.680 The point being that I, I, um, I go back to a biblical passage. It's actually, it's, uh, in, uh, book of Exodus, it's 33, uh, chapter 33, I think, um, 23. I'm almost sure.
01:02:45.500 Okay. Uh, Moses, clearly a man of God, a servant of God, as he's described, um, wants to see God's face
01:02:55.440 and God says, no man shall see my face and live. And he says, however, see places have been a cleft of
01:03:03.060 the rock and says, God passes by and Moses could see his back. What the heck does that mean? Does God have
01:03:12.900 a physical back? One of the ways it's understood in Jewish tradition is that it means that you can't
01:03:21.540 see history head on. Can't see what's happening. You can see God's back. You can see it as it passes.
01:03:30.260 It's like that, that Bismarck passage, listen to God's footsteps in history and then grab his coattails
01:03:36.540 and hang on. So I have no idea. Anyone who says they know what God has in mind or what American
01:03:45.580 destiny requires for the election of November, 2020 is, uh, puffing something that's legal in
01:03:52.660 Washington state, Colorado, but, uh, it, cause we don't know. We don't know. In other words,
01:03:59.280 when, when you look at things, I could give, there's so many examples, but one that immediately
01:04:06.460 comes to mind, something we were talking about, Harry Truman is never went to college. You know,
01:04:13.780 he was a failed businessman. He had a haberdashery store. It never worked. Uh, he was a small time
01:04:19.660 machine politician from Missouri, but Bob Hannigan, a number of others saw something in him
01:04:24.560 that was godly, that was a firm, that was smart, that was dedicated. If, if you were reacting
01:04:35.480 in April of 1945, Franklin Roosevelt and now Harry Truman is president, there's a lot of
01:04:41.220 disaster. It turns out what a great presidency, the whole network, the whole setup of what won
01:04:49.780 the cold war of, uh, of, of NATO and of the containment strategy and, and recognizing Israel
01:04:59.140 12 minutes after Israel's independence is proclaimed. Harry Truman was a great blessing
01:05:05.440 for this country. It was. Didn't think so, uh, on the April day he took over. Who knows? I, this is a
01:05:14.540 very, very, very long elaborate and emotional dodge of your question. I don't, I, I hope that they
01:05:22.900 write about the history of our country, that, um, America is going to make another comeback. It's
01:05:33.900 not make America great again. I don't think we've ever ceased being great, but we'll make another
01:05:38.740 comeback as we did in the 1980s under President Reagan. And not just economically, but you know,
01:05:45.520 you grew up, you remember what it was like when we were afraid of nuclear war and the Soviet menace and
01:05:52.440 the Russians were, I remember Mortsal, a comedian, had a joke. He said, well, today all of the, uh, uh,
01:06:00.480 optimists are teaching their kids how to speak Russian and the pessimists are teaching them how to
01:06:05.280 speak Chinese. Uh, okay. You know, America's here, still the dominant power in the world,
01:06:12.740 still the dominant force of the world. And it's not again, because we're better. It's because we are
01:06:19.080 an instrument. Lincoln used that term a lot. He said, I am an instrument, an humble instrument of divine
01:06:27.620 will. And that really is, is I think the situation for America. If, if you believe that there is a God
01:06:35.540 who has an influence on history, I think most people have to recognize that. What's he going to
01:06:44.600 use Belgium? We will, it'll be difficult, but he will if we don't do it. Well, yeah, no, I mean, we,
01:06:54.960 we, we, we, we are the, uh, the, the biggest, most significant, the last great hope. We are the
01:07:02.960 last best hope. Yes. Thank you. And the last best hope because we are, um, we are called upon to be
01:07:10.860 not only great, but good. Uh, let me just switch topics real quick. Uh, cause you know, you're film
01:07:17.880 critic for a long time. Yeah. Have you seen 1917 yet? Yes. What'd you think? I loved it. I did too.
01:07:24.880 I thought it was a fantastic film and unbelievably well made. I don't think we're going to ever have
01:07:32.160 a film that gets us closer to what, uh, that battlefield. I have to tell you, I, I, I went in
01:07:40.340 hoping that it would be better than, or I mean as good as saving private right. I think it was
01:07:46.400 better cause I felt like I was in it. I wasn't, it wasn't a star driven thing. And the way they
01:07:53.080 filmed it, I felt I was in the trash. It's, it's immediate and it's almost, almost done as if
01:07:59.300 you're experiencing it in real time. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of those things that people blog
01:08:04.040 about is like, it's one shot. You're following these guys and every step of the way. And it's
01:08:09.340 it's so well done. And, and again, and you think back on that war and, um, the waste and,
01:08:18.620 and the tragedy and, uh, you know, 125,000 Americans died in that war and 16 million people altogether.
01:08:29.320 But, um, again, if you look at 1917 to 2017,
01:08:38.100 and what's happened in the world and how much closer we are to justice, to opportunity,
01:08:44.840 I'll tell you one thing. Did you see that Peter Jackson movie, uh, about, yeah, where he
01:08:51.200 reconstructed the actual footage? Unbelievable. It was the first time it became, they became
01:08:56.760 people. Correct. What was the biggest difference between the Tommies, the British soldiers you
01:09:03.480 see in 1917 and the Peter Jackson people, you know, what was the teeth? Oh yeah. Yeah. The,
01:09:10.720 the people looking for something deeper than that. That's exactly right. The pictures of all those
01:09:15.680 people. And I, do you, do you know what a blessing dentistry is? No, it really is. I mean, for,
01:09:23.380 for guys like us, right? Teeth. It's, it's wonderful. Now all of this, you can say, oh,
01:09:29.860 that's so shallow. It's not shallow at the, at the end of the day, you know, it's flesh,
01:09:34.920 flesh, blood, the opportunities that, that we have. I mentioned before my dad, um, my grandfather
01:09:45.660 who came here from Ukraine was a barrel maker. Uh, my dad, because of public schools and, uh,
01:09:53.940 because he was very hardworking and clever, uh, ended up getting scholarships and then GI Bill,
01:10:01.600 um, and getting a PhD in physics and, um, doing, having an amazing life. He was in the scientist
01:10:10.300 astronaut program. And again, and my dad, he became religious later in life. But even when,
01:10:20.520 when I was a little kid, when he really wasn't religiously involved at all, he was, he was very
01:10:25.660 involved with the knowledge that America was evidence of God, that there was something godly
01:10:33.720 and special about America. And, um, and if you think about it, every single one of our patriotic
01:10:42.860 songs has some kind of God reference. Um, the last verse of the star spangled banner, uh,
01:10:50.360 uh, I love it. We should sing that one. Yeah. No, all the, all the time. I mean, this is one of
01:10:56.740 those things that, that people can recapture this be our motto and God is our trust. That's where it
01:11:01.760 comes from. It's from the star spangled banner and, uh, America, America, God shed his grace on thee
01:11:08.460 and crown thy good with brotherhood. Uh, and she wrote that song when she rode up to Pike peak
01:11:16.120 and looked out over the plane and, uh, even, uh, Woody Guthrie, um, who, uh, he, you know,
01:11:28.800 he wrote that song, this, this land is made for you and me. This land is your land. This land is my
01:11:33.100 land. He wrote it as an answer to God bless America because Irving Berlin was a kind of noted
01:11:40.200 Republican and, uh, big Patriot. And, uh, so Woody Guthrie, who was a communist, uh, but even him
01:11:50.660 writing about the country, this land is made for you and me who made it, uh, ultimately. And that
01:11:58.520 implication is there, uh, even, even where people who are not at all religiously minded would not
01:12:09.440 expect it to be, uh, which is seeing God's hand on America. That's the name of the book. God's hand
01:12:18.400 on America, divine providence in the modern era. Michael Medved, it's just so nice to have you.
01:12:24.180 Oh, it's wonderful to talk to you, Glenn. And thank you for being such an ideal, sympathetic reader.
01:12:29.820 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it
01:12:42.140 can be discovered by other people.