The Matt Walsh Show - The Legend Of Ernest Shackleton And His Insane Rescue Mission

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00:00:54.060 In January of 1915, Ernest Shackleton, the captain of the ship Endurance, was trapped in the ice along with his vessel and 27 crew members about 85 miles from his intended landing point in Antarctica.

00:01:06.740 It was what passes for summer in that part of the world, which meant temperatures hovered around negative two degrees Fahrenheit.

00:01:13.820 Within a few short months, winter would settle in fully, temperatures dropping toward negative 30 and the sun disappearing entirely for weeks at a time.

00:01:23.040 During the blizzards that swept across the region, wind chills could fall to extreme levels thanks to sustained winds of 60 to 70 miles an hour.

00:01:31.240 In those conditions, exposed skin freezes within a matter of seconds.

00:01:36.020 Severe hypothermia follows soon after, then unconsciousness, then death.

00:01:41.280 The 28 men of the Endurance were then trapped in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth.

00:01:47.320 The conditions were already severe, and they were only going to get worse, much worse.

00:01:52.960 But the situation was even more dangerous than that.

00:01:55.640 A ship trapped in Antarctic pack ice is not like a car buried in snow on your driveway.

00:02:01.880 The vessel was not resting on something stable or fixed.

00:02:06.280 The ice itself is a shifting, grinding, violent mass of enormous slabs constantly in motion,

00:02:13.960 compressing and colliding with whatever lay between them.

00:02:17.180 When the wind rose, the ice would buckle into pressure ridges,

00:02:21.260 towering walls of frozen blocks of ice that could rise 15 feet or more.

00:02:26.460 Slow-moving, but immensely powerful, like icy battering rams.

00:02:31.680 Shackleton could attempt to remain aboard the Adorants

00:02:33.860 and wait for the ice to release them when it melts,

00:02:36.640 but he also understood that there was no guarantee it ever would.

00:02:39.820 It might be weeks, it might be months, it might even be years.

00:02:43.980 In 1829, for example, the British explorer John Ross became trapped in the Arctic ice

00:02:49.000 and remained frozen in place for four entire years before finally breaking free.

00:02:55.220 In 1845, another British expedition under the famous John Franklin set out in search of the Northwest Passage

00:03:00.980 and became trapped in Arctic ice aboard his ships, the Erebus, in terror.

00:03:05.280 Franklin and several of his men died in the stranded ships, waiting for the ice to melt, which it never did.

00:03:10.100 the remaining survivors eventually abandoned ship, tried to march south, and they were never seen

00:03:14.840 again. But the real danger the one Shackleton would have been thinking about in January of 1915

00:03:19.720 was not simply being trapped, it was what came next. If the Endurance were crushed by the ice

00:03:25.320 and sank, the men would be left stranded on the drifting ice, exposed and isolated, with no ship,

00:03:30.980 no shelter, and no supplies beyond what they could carry. They would be adrift on a frozen ocean,

00:03:37.620 dozens of miles from the nearest solid land, which itself was an empty, hostile wasteland.

00:03:45.500 If you're looking for an environment comparable to Antarctica, just to give you an idea,

00:03:50.220 you won't find it on Earth. In practical terms, it's closer to another planet than anything most

00:03:54.660 people have experienced on Earth. Indeed, being stranded there in 1915 would have felt less like

00:04:00.460 being lost somewhere on Earth and more like being stranded on Mars. And in fact, 90 years later in

00:04:06.540 2005, a French-Italian research facility named Concordia Station would be established on the

00:04:12.400 Antarctica Plateau. The station, dubbed White Mars, is still used as a Mars analog by scientists to

00:04:18.260 study the effect of Martian weather and isolation on human beings. And this is where Shackleton and

00:04:24.040 his men were now trapped. The only saving grace for Shackleton was that, at least at first, food was

00:04:30.300 not an immediate concern. The Endurance had been well-provisioned. Bacon, rice, canned meats,

00:04:35.220 other preserved stores, including supplies intended to prevent scurvy, which is a horrific

00:04:40.400 disease caused by vitamin C deficiency that had killed thousands of sailors across centuries of

00:04:45.780 exploration. And most importantly, of course, there was rum and lots of it. But if the ship

00:04:50.460 were crushed by the ice, as Shackleton already understood, those stores would be lost, almost

00:04:55.360 all of them, beneath the sea. From that point forward, survival would depend on what could be

00:05:00.320 taken from the environment itself,

00:05:01.860 penguins, seals, seabirds when available.

00:05:04.960 And when those inevitably ran out,

00:05:06.560 there remained only one last resource, the sled dogs.

00:05:10.140 By early 1916, with food supplies exhausted

00:05:12.920 and the men on the edge of starvation,

00:05:14.760 each of the dogs would be taken away behind the ice

00:05:17.720 out of sight of the others and killed for food.

00:05:20.220 It was done quietly without ceremony

00:05:21.800 and those who carried it out later

00:05:23.500 described it as the worst moment of the entire expedition.

00:05:26.960 But standing on the Endurance in 1915,

00:05:29.760 Looking out across the pack ice,

00:05:32.140 stretching to every horizon,

00:05:34.640 Ernest Shackleton could not have been entirely surprised.

00:05:37.320 He knew exactly what he was getting himself into.

00:05:39.660 This was Shackleton's third expedition to the frozen South.

00:05:43.300 His first came in 1901, when at the age of 27,

00:05:46.640 he joined a team led by the Antarctic explorer,

00:05:50.200 Robert Falcon Scott,

00:05:51.620 in an attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole.

00:05:54.440 They made it to the continent and set out over land,

00:05:56.960 traveling on foot and with sled dogs. But the expedition was poorly planned. They didn't bring

00:06:01.940 enough food, nor the right kind of food, and they didn't yet understand how to manage a team of sled

00:06:07.160 dogs in polar conditions. They pushed farther south than anyone before them, but eventually

00:06:11.640 had to turn back. And by that point, Shackleton himself had fallen ill with scurvy. He had

00:06:16.800 progressed past the early stage of the disease marked by severe fatigue and joint pain. He was

00:06:22.340 entering a more dire phase when hair begins to fall out and the skin develops dark, putrid

00:06:28.040 splotches. Later stages are even ghastlier. The gums deteriorate and bleed. Teeth fall out. You

00:06:34.400 cough up blood. Old wounds begin to reopen as the body loses its ability to maintain connective

00:06:39.820 tissue. And in its final form, scurvy becomes a systemic collapse in the whole body. Organs fail,

00:06:45.720 internal bleeding, the body slowly breaking down and eating itself from the inside out. Well,

00:06:50.760 Shackleton was ultimately sent home before it reached that point, but it was a fate that had

00:06:54.440 defined centuries of maritime exploration. During the age of sail from roughly the 1500s to the

00:07:00.740 1800s, it's estimated that as many as half of all sailors on long ocean voyages died in this way.

00:07:07.880 Any sailor setting out on a long expedition understood, at least implicitly, that the odds

00:07:12.560 of survival were far from certain and that the cost of failure would be an agonizing,

00:07:17.460 nightmarish death. And still, they went. Shackleton survived the ordeal, but the expedition failed.

00:07:24.420 They had made it farther south than anyone before them, but not far enough. Robert Falcon Scott

00:07:28.560 would continue the pursuit of the Pole. Eventually, he made it there in 1912. Along with a small team

00:07:34.960 of four men, Scott reached the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer,

00:07:40.880 had already been there and planted his flag weeks earlier. Defeated, Scott and his men turned for

00:07:45.660 home, and none of them survived the return journey. Amundsen himself, by the way, years earlier, had

00:07:50.840 already been the first to successfully navigate the Northwest Passage, a route through the Arctic

00:07:55.380 that had defeated explorers for centuries. After reaching the South Pole, he would continue to push

00:07:59.820 into polar exploration more broadly, eventually becoming the first person to fly across the Arctic

00:08:04.280 by air. In 1928, at the age of 55, he set out in a seaplane as part of a rescue mission for a fellow

00:08:10.800 explorer who had become stranded near the Arctic, and he never returned. Amundsen's legend was born

00:08:16.940 in the polar regions and was perhaps destined to die there. That was true of many of these 1.00

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00:09:24.280 But back in 1907, only a few years after his near-death experience with Scott's expedition,

00:09:29.820 Shackleton mounted his own attempt for the pole, this time in command. He explored vast,

00:09:34.360 uncharted regions of Antarctica and once again set a new record for the farthest south reached.

00:09:39.580 But again, he fell short of the goal, turning back just 97 miles from the prize. After Amundsen

00:09:44.840 reached the South Pole in 1911, Shackleton's ambitions shifted. He proposed a new objective

00:09:50.800 to cross the entire Antarctic continent over land from sea to sea, passing through the pole itself.

00:09:57.420 Now, he knew the risks better than anyone. He had already been pushed to the edge more than once. He'd

00:10:02.460 already nearly died, and yet he returned once more to the ice. So put yourself in Shackleton's shoes

00:10:08.700 in January of 1950. You have 27 men whose lives depend on you. You're on a ship trapped in the

00:10:15.520 ice, cut off from the outside world completely. No way to send for help. No way to communicate

00:10:20.300 with anyone back home. The nearest land is a continent where no permanent human settlement

00:10:25.420 exists. You are a student of exploration history, so you know the kinds of dangers that have defined

00:10:31.100 these journeys, and not just the natural ones, but the human ones as well. Stranded expeditions,

00:10:36.760 especially in the polar regions, have been known to break down into chaos, madness, and in some

00:10:43.020 cases, murder and cannibalism. One of the most infamous examples occurred in the early 1880s

00:10:48.060 when an American expedition under Adolphus Greeley set out to establish a polar research station in

00:10:53.320 the Arctic. Twenty-five men departed, only six survived, and one of the 19 who died was executed

00:10:59.480 for stealing rations, most of the rest died from starvation and exposure, and in the final stages,

00:11:05.460 the survivors, emaciated, desperate, resorted to cannibalism. This is where situations like this

00:11:11.180 can lead. These are the stories that would have been rattling around in Shackleton's mind. He knew

00:11:17.380 that in conditions like these, good leadership was the only thing standing between order and

00:11:22.480 collapse. You had to keep your men alive physically, but you also had to keep them steady mentally.

00:11:28.300 You had to preserve discipline and morale and purpose.

00:11:32.240 You couldn't be too lenient or order would dissolve.

00:11:35.220 You couldn't be too harsh or resentment would turn into mutiny very quickly.

00:11:39.260 The line between the two was narrow,

00:11:41.580 and failure on either side of the line is fatal for everybody.

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00:12:39.000 with promo code Walsh. That's M-A-C-K-W-E-L-D-O-N.com. Code Walsh. Shackleton was, of course, 0.81

00:12:48.000 not a god or a superhero. He was a man with all the faults that that implies. He was capable of

00:12:53.860 pride, irritation, and resentment. And so we can assume that standing on the deck of the Endurance

00:12:58.400 in 1915, he felt what any man would feel in that position. Fear, uncertainty, a terrifying awareness

00:13:05.140 of how easily everything can go wrong and what the consequences of that would be. But he also knew

00:13:09.980 that these feelings could never become apparent to his men. He was the leader. The buck stopped

00:13:15.020 with him, so there was no venting of frustrations or finding a shoulder to cry on. Everyone else

00:13:20.960 could have visible moments of weakness and despair, and they did, but he could not. As the months

00:13:26.300 passed, with the ship locked in the ice, Shackleton imposed structure on the crew's life aboard the

00:13:32.700 Endurance. There were regular wake-up times, scheduled meals, daily chores, physical exercise,

00:13:39.340 scientific observations continued. The expedition, as far as Shackleton was concerned, and as far as

00:13:44.940 he told his men, was still ongoing.

00:13:48.280 At that stage, they still had sufficient food

00:13:50.500 and the ship itself provided relative warmth and shelter.

00:13:53.560 The greatest threat Shackleton understood

00:13:55.040 was not immediate physical danger,

00:13:56.540 but psychological collapse, the slow erosion of morale,

00:14:00.420 the creeping sense that they might never escape.

00:14:03.640 And once that feeling took hold

00:14:05.260 and spread like a virus through the crew,

00:14:08.420 there would be no cure.

00:14:10.440 To counter it, Shackleton organized theatrical performances

00:14:12.980 on the ship, comedy, sketches, games.

00:14:15.240 The ship's banjo player was kept busy.

00:14:18.180 One of the most famous photographs from the expedition

00:14:20.160 shows a group of men playing soccer on the ice

00:14:23.040 with the Endurance standing in the background.

00:14:26.240 Birthdays and holidays were observed and celebrated,

00:14:28.320 and throughout it all, Shackleton ate with his men.

00:14:30.500 He remained present among them, maintaining authority,

00:14:34.160 but also familiarity.

00:14:36.060 And nine months passed like this.

00:14:38.620 In October of 1915, the first unmistakable signs

00:14:41.300 of structural failure appeared.

00:14:42.860 the men began hearing sharp unsettling noises from the ship

00:14:46.840 as though it were being squeezed in a vise,

00:14:48.800 and in a sense it was.

00:14:50.480 The ice was closing in from multiple directions,

00:14:53.400 exerting pressure that the hull

00:14:55.020 could not resist indefinitely.

00:14:56.820 Timbers began to crack, beams flexed.

00:15:00.240 The ship was no longer simply frozen in place,

00:15:02.340 it was being actively crushed.

00:15:04.460 It was the moment Shackleton had been preparing for.

00:15:07.700 He gave the order to abandon ship.

00:15:10.120 The expedition, in its original form, was officially over.

00:15:14.020 What remained was survival.

00:15:15.840 All 28 men, along with the dogs

00:15:17.500 and what supplies they could carry, evacuated onto the ice.

00:15:20.540 They established a camp nearby, which they called Ocean Camp.

00:15:23.620 A few weeks later, the Endurance

00:15:24.900 finally gave way completely and sank beneath the ice.

00:15:28.600 Their last connection to the outside world was gone.

00:15:31.000 They were now well and truly alone.

00:15:34.340 Now again, try to imagine this.

00:15:35.460 You're stranded on a sheet of ice somewhere near Antarctica.

00:15:38.360 Nobody back home knows where you are,

00:15:39.780 Even if they did, they couldn't reach you.

00:15:41.820 From a statistical perspective,

00:15:43.160 your chances of surviving this experience

00:15:45.600 are basically zero.

00:15:47.880 The only question is what will kill you?

00:15:49.780 Frostbite, starvation, mutiny.

00:15:52.860 Maybe a fissure in the ice will open up

00:15:54.640 and swallow you while you're sleeping.

00:15:57.420 Maybe a killer whale will break through

00:15:59.820 the thinner portions of the ice

00:16:01.180 and drag you into the deep, mistaking you for a seal.

00:16:03.940 That was not a far-fetched scenario, by the way.

00:16:05.580 In the early days of Robert Falcon Scott's

00:16:07.240 doomed Polar Quest. The expedition's photographer was standing on an ice flow when out of nowhere,

00:16:12.020 a pod of killer whales swarmed around and tried to break the ice into pieces to tip the photographer

00:16:17.800 and his dogs into the water. He narrowly escaped with his life. And the point is, there are hazards

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00:17:32.560 nonprofit. Learn more at gcu.edu. The men survived on the drifting ice for months.

00:17:39.700 Food stores steadily dwindled. Then came the desperate moment when they killed and ate the

00:17:44.540 dogs. But even those dozens of dogs would not sustain 28 starving men for very long. Your body

00:17:50.560 burns enormous amounts of energy in extreme cold. Add to that the constant labor required just to

00:17:54.940 the camp going and they were likely burning several thousand calories a day. Starvation in that

00:17:59.900 environment does not arrive gradually. It closes in fast and once it has you in its grip it doesn't

00:18:05.660 let go. But in April of 1916, 20 months after leaving England, 15 months after their ship became

00:18:11.580 trapped in the ice, about six months after they abandoned it, the flows that had imprisoned them

00:18:17.020 finally began to break apart. If this had happened when they were still on the ship it would have

00:18:20.620 have been cause for celebration but now they had no ship only three small lifeboats and the ground

00:18:26.300 where they had pitched their tents was disintegrating around them shackleton ordered his men into the

00:18:30.860 boats it was the only choice they had they they fought freezing spray rising winds exhaustion for

00:18:36.700 days across open water before finally reaching a small island about 150 miles off the tip of

00:18:42.300 the antarctic peninsula it was the first solid ground any of them had touched in nearly 500 days

00:18:48.220 but it was not salvation not even close elephant island as it's called is a barren desolate

00:18:54.460 windswept void far from any shipping route no one knew they were there no one was coming they could

00:19:01.560 not stay if they did they would all die there slowly but inevitably starvation and scurvy lay

00:19:06.880 ahead for certain the only question was whether hunger would claim them before the cold one way

00:19:12.460 or another nobody was getting out alive shackleton realized their only real chance was to sail to the

00:19:18.160 nearest inhabited island, which is called South Georgia Island. The problem, and it was by all

00:19:23.780 rights an insurmountable one, was that South Georgia Island lay roughly 800 miles across the

00:19:29.820 most violent ocean on earth. The route cut through the so-called furious 50s, where powerful westerly

00:19:36.660 winds circle the globe uninterrupted by land. Waves there routinely rise 50 feet or more,

00:19:42.640 sometimes more than 100 feet. They would have to cross it in a 22-foot lifeboat about as

00:19:48.080 long as a standard parking space.

00:19:50.920 In the Southern Ocean, waves do not behave like water.

00:19:53.660 They act more like moving walls,

00:19:55.580 long, heaving ridges of water taller than buildings,

00:19:59.320 rolling endlessly around the planet

00:20:01.280 with nothing to break them.

00:20:02.520 They would have to thread this small wooden boat

00:20:05.180 through this landscape of moving, freezing, liquid mountains.

00:20:10.180 Shackleton knew most of his men were in no condition

00:20:12.480 for that kind of journey,

00:20:14.780 so he organized a rescue party,

00:20:16.320 which he would personally lead along with five others.

00:20:19.080 They set out in a small boat called the James Caird,

00:20:22.380 aiming for a speck of land 800 miles away across open ocean.

00:20:26.140 They had no modern navigation equipment,

00:20:28.280 only a sextant, a chronometer,

00:20:30.620 and brief sightings of the sun and stars

00:20:33.620 whenever the weather allowed, which it rarely did.

00:20:36.720 If they missed their target,

00:20:37.740 the next nearest land was an uninhabited volcanic island

00:20:40.500 nearly 1,000 miles farther than that.

00:20:43.080 Beyond that lay South Africa,

00:20:44.700 more than 2,000 miles beyond.

00:20:47.560 In other words, if they missed South Georgia,

00:20:49.840 which they almost certainly would, they would die.

00:20:52.880 And more likely than not,

00:20:53.960 they would die before ever knowing

00:20:55.360 how far off course they were.

00:20:57.200 They could carry only a small supply of food,

00:20:59.120 enough for perhaps two or three weeks at sea.

00:21:02.400 And just so you appreciate the navigational challenge,

00:21:04.440 800 miles, so for reference,

00:21:05.860 that's roughly the distance between Baltimore, Maryland,

00:21:08.960 and the small town of Oswego, Kansas.

00:21:12.080 Now imagine being dropped in Baltimore,

00:21:13.740 told to find Oswego with no GPS and no map.

00:21:18.260 You're not allowed to ask for directions

00:21:19.700 and all the highway signs along the way will be covered up.

00:21:22.820 Now go, good luck.

00:21:24.460 Now, of course, that challenge,

00:21:25.540 given that you're on solid ground, you can drive a car,

00:21:27.960 you can stop for food whenever you want,

00:21:29.780 you're not already exhausted

00:21:31.120 from spending 500 days stranded in the Antarctic,

00:21:33.640 is vastly easier than what Shackleton faced.

00:21:37.000 Your expedition from Baltimore to Oswego

00:21:39.300 would require only a tiny fraction of the skill

00:21:42.000 ingenuity and courage and yet i'd be willing to bet that most people today could not do it now

00:21:48.240 imagine i put you on a tiny boat took away your gps your radio maps and means of communication

00:21:52.960 pointed vaguely towards an island 800 miles away and gave you enough food to survive less than a

00:21:58.160 month i'm betting that almost everybody in the country myself certainly included would be dead

00:22:03.440 within a couple of weeks i'll even let you attempt it in the comparatively mild waters of the mid

00:22:08.560 Atlantic, and it would still be a death sentence. And yet, 16 days later, after braving towering

00:22:16.040 seas nearly capsizing more times than they could count, and exhaustion so deep that they were

00:22:21.660 barely conscious, they reached South Georgia Island. Every man aboard was still alive. They

00:22:27.580 had completed what is widely regarded as one of the greatest small boat voyages in history.

00:22:33.260 But even then, the journey was not over.

00:22:36.060 They had landed on the uninhabited southern coasts of the island.

00:22:39.600 The whaling stations they needed were on the northern side.

00:22:42.680 Now, they couldn't sail around to it because the boat was too damaged.

00:22:45.980 Their only option was to cross on foot.

00:22:48.500 And that meant traversing an unmapped mountainous interior that no one had ever crossed in history.

00:22:54.840 Now, at that point, they could barely walk.

00:22:56.760 They were malnourished, starving, frostbitten, soaked to the bone, exhausted beyond measure.

00:23:02.660 And still another journey began.

00:23:04.740 For 36 straight hours without stopping,

00:23:07.260 they climbed and descended through mountains,

00:23:09.340 over ridges, across glaciers, and through terrain

00:23:12.840 no human had ever charted or even seen,

00:23:15.700 until finally they reached the whaling station

00:23:18.580 on the far side.

00:23:19.800 They arrived looking less like men than ghosts,

00:23:23.560 as you can imagine, but there was no time to rest.

00:23:25.980 Shackleton immediately took a ship

00:23:27.380 and set out to rescue the men he had left behind,

00:23:29.540 and he did.

00:23:30.600 It took several attempts and a few more months,

00:23:33.220 but eventually every last man was recovered.

00:23:35.400 Not a single life was lost.

00:23:36.900 All 28 survived.

00:23:38.860 It stands as one of the greatest feats of leadership

00:23:41.700 in the entire history of the human race.

00:23:45.160 Now, when people hear the story of Ernest Shackleton,

00:23:47.060 the first question is always, how?

00:23:49.620 How did he do it?

00:23:50.660 How did he keep 28 men, including himself, alive

00:23:53.940 after their ship was crushed?

00:23:55.460 How did he maintain order under conditions

00:23:58.100 that should have descended into chaos almost immediately?

00:24:01.260 How did he navigate 800 miles

00:24:03.280 of the most turbulent seas on the planet

00:24:05.780 in a boat the size of an SUV?

00:24:07.980 How did he cross an uncharted mountain range

00:24:10.140 after nearly two years of deprivation?

00:24:13.520 Well, the how is an interesting question,

00:24:15.500 but the why is more mysterious.

00:24:18.100 I mean, why do any of it at all?

00:24:20.280 Why leave the safety of home

00:24:22.020 to sail toward a frozen wilderness

00:24:24.000 that offers only suffering and death?

00:24:27.360 Why go somewhere where so many people before you failed and disappeared and froze, starved, went insane or worse?

00:24:35.500 The modern mind struggles with questions like these because we've been trained to think in terms of utility.

00:24:40.660 We ask what something achieves, what it produces, what practical benefit it delivers.

00:24:46.600 But some things resist that kind of calculation.

00:24:48.840 There's nothing practical about crossing oceans and wooden ships to reach unknown lands.

00:24:52.840 There's nothing practical about climbing mountains simply because they exist.

00:24:56.400 nothing practical about pushing into deserts and jungles and ice fields and all the blank spaces

00:25:01.860 at the edge of the map. And yet civilization was built by people who did exactly those things.

00:25:07.620 That's why these stories matter.

00:25:11.860 Several years after returning from his ordeal, Shackleton set out to the Antarctic for his

00:25:16.720 fourth voyage. While anchored in a ship off the coast of South Georgia Island, he had a heart

00:25:20.960 attack and died in his cabin. He was buried there on the island, his grave facing south

00:25:25.920 toward the pole. He tried for the pole the first time, had to turn back with scurvy, tried again

00:25:31.260 and fell short, tried to traverse across the whole continent, but wound up stranded in the ice,

00:25:36.200 went back a fourth time and died before he even left the ship. Now, in a way, you could say that

00:25:40.940 Shackleton failed at everything he ever tried to achieve, but I'd prefer to say that he was a man

00:25:46.280 who simply never took the hint, which is maybe the defining characteristic of all great men.

00:25:51.700 It's what makes them worth remembering.

00:25:54.540 It's up to us to make sure that we always do.

00:26:06.640 Once upon a time, there was a country.

00:26:09.940 Not just a country, but a big one, an empire.

00:26:12.760 And in that empire, there was an upper middle-class family

00:26:15.680 where two boys were raised by their mother,

00:26:18.560 They loved books, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Bible.

00:26:22.060 Their father admired the country's leaders,

00:26:24.500 were patriotic and happy.

00:26:26.440 Both sons went to universities where they were radicalized.

00:26:30.000 One of the brothers read a book

00:26:31.480 and convinced him to try to shoot the country's leader.

00:26:33.900 He was hanged.

00:26:35.320 The other brother read the same books,

00:26:37.780 but decided to lead a movement.

00:26:39.640 First they came from the universities,

00:26:41.660 no one seemed to care.

00:26:43.220 Then they took over the unions,

00:26:44.220 and again, no one seemed to care.

00:26:45.960 Then they created their own media organizations

00:26:47.920 took over the cities.

00:26:49.260 And again, most people just ignored it.

00:26:51.580 Change, after all, was something they could believe in,

00:26:54.740 until it was too late.

00:26:56.260 Sound familiar?

00:26:57.640 This is the real history of communism,

00:27:00.280 the Russian Revolution.

The Matt Walsh Show - July 15, 2026

The Legend Of Ernest Shackleton And His Insane Rescue Mission

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