The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, Welcome, welcome. It’s Ed Martin, and it’s the Pro America Report it’s so great to be with you, so happy to be together. I hope that you have had a wonderful week and and I hope you are celebrating ah President’s Week. I call it Now.
I have an extraordinary conversation. I had to record it ahead of time with Lee Habib of Our American Stories, and he’s really cool. He does these great podcasts as well as radio programs, basically covering all the interesting stories of America. You’re going to hear from them in a minute, hear from him and Later on the show. And the thing that I tell you I love is we talked about Lincoln, we talked about Washington, he’s got all sorts of stories. And so hope you’re celebrating all week. Of course, February 22nd is the actual birth date of of General George Washington President George Washington. I hope you’ll celebrate by learning more about him. So many things to learn.
Lee was saying that there’s one famous thing about him that others got sick and in The time of war. In the revolution, there was all kinds of problems health wise – dysentery would kill people, right? And smallpox swept through a bunch of different places, and he he was like indestructible. Something about his his immune system and his personality. Who knows what it was he he just never. He never was felled by things. It’s extraordinary. So very cool story. Lee Habib. Check him out. Our American Stories. I think it’s ouramericanstories.com super cool guy. And hey, we are always go to phyllisschlafly.com. You can see Phyllis’s writings. On George Washington there, PhylliSchlafly.com. She wrote about George Washington a number of times in radio commentaries, which you can listen to also in written columns and other forms. And then of course, please visit promericareport.com where I’m giving you all the good stuff in a substack a little bit longer form. Quick hits, I’ve got a post that’s gowing up, probably in the next few hours as I’m talking to you and it’s on this topic we’re about to talk about, so look forward to that and a whole lot more. PhyllisSchlafly.com, by the way. We’ll get you the John Schlafly, Andy Schlafly columns also. So you want to make sure you get over there and get check in every now and then and see what they’re up to.
OK, well, one of the features of this radio program in the podcast and also standalone links is you get the WYNK. It’s called the WYNK. What you need to know the to is silent. They’re in this in the in the in the acronym that the to is silent what you know the WYNK which is by the way the name. Of the daily e-mail that goes out the daily WYNK at 8:00 AM East Coast time, and you can sign up for that anytime, anytime you want. Go over to PhyllisSchlafly.com, sign up there and you’ll be getting that in your inbox. I don’t sell your e-mail address. I don’t rent it. I don’t give it to others. I just use it to send you this message on the WYNK. The daily WYNK. You get a couple of links, a couple of stories. And then one point I make one point I want you To think about and I can tell you right now on this in this segment,
What you need to know is I finally came to I I finally captured the phrase and and it is this.
America held hostage. America held hostage.
Let me give you the background. In 1979. When the hostages were taken, and actually it could have been that the hostages were taken, they were held for 444 days. They might have been taken in the last days of of 1978, but the hostage crisis in Iran was extraordinary, and it riveted the country. Now I was only eight or nine years old at the time, so I only vaguely remember the whole thing, but for it it was. It was in a time where you had only the Evening News on the big three channels, ABC, NBC and CBS. There was reporting every night, and it was in the newspapers and there were all these people from our embassy in Iran who had been taken hostage. And so there were lots of coverage. I mean there was there. Was some somewhere north of? 50 -54 or 64 people taken hostage.
And so you heard you. You you saw in the newspaper coverage of who the people were, you know, background on them and writings about them. And it was a real big deal.
Well, a few weeks into the hostage crisis, Roone Arledge, the late Roone Arledge, who was famous for creating Monday Night Football. He was an an ABC TV executive and he created the idea of Monday Night Football, a stand alone game and all the sort of pomp and circumstance around it and all that stuff. Well, Roone Arledge was programming ABC News at the time. And he decided to program opposite Johnny Carson and the other late night television hosts. So on all the big three, ABC, NBC and CBS, they would at 11:35 East Coast time they would go to Hollywood, and you’d have Johnny Carson, for example, on NBC. And so Roone Arledge decided to put ABC instead of trying to compete with Johnny. He would run uh a a a show that he called America held hostage. America held hostage it actually the full title was The Iran Hostage, the the Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage, day one, day 2, day three and over time people were watching this and it was counting. And I have to say I I I cannot help but believe that in the 1980 election that it wasn’t a big Factor that this was ongoing. In fact, it must have been ’79 when that they it must have been ’79. I say it now. It was 1979 because it was the last few months, the last month or two of 1979 and all of 1980, 365 days. So and then freed on the 21st of January just as Reagan was inaugurated literally. Then they freed the Hostages, but so that whole year, an election year you had this situation where America held hostage. Day 42. American held hostage Day 220. America held hostage Day 300. It must have been 320 by The time it Was Election Day. It must have had an impact on the voting public and how they felt and. Here’s what I’m gonna tell you.
Right now in America, America held hostage Is how we feel. We’re held hostage by the the lies from the government. We’re held hostage by the lies from the media. We’re held hostage by an economy that makes no sense. We’re told it’s doing fine now. Stock markets up and inflation’s coming down. But nobody feels like they’re making it. Everybody feels like, well, I mean, some people do. I suppose rich people. The rest of us feel like, hey, we’re really struggling to figure out how to keep this thing going and how to make sure it goes right. And it’s a real challenge. It’s a real challenge and we feel we feel as, there’s a beeping. I don’t know what that is. There’s a beeping, and we feel held hostage by the situation. We don’t know what to make of what’s happening, and that feeling, the description of America held hostage, seems to me. To capture exactly what is going on, exactly what has happened, exactly what is at the center of the frustration that people are feeling, they don’t exactly know. Why they’re frustrated, they don’t exactly know what to make of it. They’re not exactly sure, but they know, and they’re being held hostage. They look up and the president of the United States is barely functional, and they’re told just to smile and carry on that there’s nothing to see here. It’s not something to worry about. They’re told that it doesn’t matter. They watch the world, they watch money pour out of America to the Ukraine, and they’re told that this is a war we have to care about. And yet the war seems unwinnable, it seems incomplete.
So everything we’re told seems like we’re being lied to now. Maybe that’s not all true, by the way. Ohh even. Oh, another one. Even the woke stuff. The American people feel like they they gotcha trap of wokeism is just holding us hostage. It’s making it so you’re you’re not supposed to say anything. That the censorship movement in this country is holding us hostage.
We’re held hostage by this dynamic that’s framing up. Who we are and how we’re living. So that’s my theme. That’s what I’m gonna tell you. And once I said it out loud, it’s right. It felt right. It felt like America’s held hostage by the situation. And and by this by the leadership, We’re held hostage by a government, a U.S. Congress and and a president that can’t agree on what to do to close the border. Now I know the President could close the border himself, but they should be able to agree somehow on to do that. And Americans looking up and think, wait a second, the borders open with millions of people pouring in. And we’re held hostage. We’re the ones that are held hostage here, and we’re just told so, you know, we’re. Just told that’s not Going to work out, that’s not going to work out and you know we’re gonna, we’re going to go on our way.
I think it captures the feeling and I will tell you this. If over the course of ohh one more example when you watch the lawfare waged against individuals, it doesn’t mean you have to like Trump, but you have to watch what’s being waged against him. You look up. And you say, what is this? What’s happening when our our Justice Department is targeting people when lawyers who are supposed to be representing clients are targeted, it doesn’t feel like something that’s serious. It feels like we’re being held hostage. Think about the ways. That that fits. Both the reality. And the feeling in this country right now. It it seems to me that that perfectly captures what’s happening.
America held hostage.
And you could say, well, it’s hostage by the circumstances or by the technology. Maybe. You could say it’s by the Chinese communists, maybe. But it looks like the people who could make a difference aren’t bothering. They’re not trying to change it they’re just saying how tough. That’s tough. They’re part of it. More on this, more on this. But for today, that’s what you need to know. I wanted to bring that to you. And I will. I’ll flesh that out over the coming weeks because I think there’s something important there.
And tune in here for more. Hang in. Come back from this break. We’ve got some great interviews. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report, back in a month.
