Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Hey, we’ve got a great show and a lot going on. And I was trying to think of how to head into the weekend and important issues. I know I probably have tired people out with my ongoing discussion of China, of course, the issues.
Yesterday I was talking about impeaching Joe Biden over his conduct regarding China and having released the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and given it to Chinese companies. It turns out it looks like the Chinese companies that got the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are companies, can you believe it that Hunter Biden invested in. I mean, it just gets crazier and crazier, worse and worse. Sorry.
Today we’ve got a couple of important interviews. I will talk with Hugh Brown who’s The American Life League vice president. Great guy, impressive man. And say, we’re going to talk about what the American Life League has done for 50 years, about 40 years, standing tall for prolife fights.
And then we’ll talk with Mike Davis, our old friend Mike Davis of the Article Three Project, get an update on exactly what’s going on, what the Dobbs ruling, what he saw. I also want to put him on the spot a little bit. He’s been one of the earliest and most frequent callers for enforcement of the laws to stop the people who are protesting in front of the homes of justices. I’m going to put them on the spot and see if I can get him to tell us what’s going on with that. So a lot more.
But first, let’s talk about how we should end the first week of July, the first full week of July. And one of the things I want to do, with my son I have been listening to the David McCullough book 1776, and it’s an extraordinary book, I have to tell you that I have because of the fake news over the last five years and watching the fake academics, the fake universities, I worry about fake history.
And when I listen to David McCullough, he’s such a great writer, um, such an entertaining writer and such a popular writer. And he reads this book, 1776. It’s his voice. He’s got a wonderful voice. He had a sort of secondary career to his writing as a narrator. I think of a number of the Ken Burns documentaries that’s David McCullough, but I wonder sometimes about how much we’re getting fake history.
However, what I want to say and what I want to end this week on is an upbeat note of how great America is, how great Americans are, how blessed we are, and how positive and possible and bright the future is.
And my point here is that in 1776, until about December 15, I think David McCullough in the book at the end of the last chapter or so says, from August until December was about as bleak a period as we’ve ever seen or probably will see. It was far beyond anything. The whole American nation hadn’t really been going very long, and the experiment was really young, and it looked like at any point it could have turned against it.
In that context, Washington continues to lose. He loses, he loses, he loses, makes some mistakes, right?
General Lee is captured by the British, the number two in the whole army, sitting in a tavern in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, being an idiot. I mean, being dumb.
The whole thing is falling apart.
Until the last week of 1776, as Washington is facing almost all the army. Their enlistment tour was up on the 31 of December, and most of them were planning to walk away and go home.
They’d already served for years. They couldn’t afford it. They had families at home, wives, kids, farms. They needed to go there.
And so Washington is facing these tremendous odds, and then he gets the Battle of Trenton. And quickly thereafter, in the first couple of days of 1777, the Battle of Princeton, two wins that turned the tide of the campaign, the military campaign in the country.
Because people believed in him, they decided to believe in Washington. They believed in the vision that he’d already had. It kind of resuscitated what had been the beginnings of the War of Independence and this whole independence movement, which is to say, what an extraordinary thing.
And so when time seems tough, there are a lot of tough aspects of what’s going on right now in our economy, in our world, and the technology and the forces that are at play. Lots of things that make you wonder and worry.
In the face of all that, I have to say, there is such hope and such opportunity in America because of our exceptionalism and the basics, the people, the basics, the people.
I mean, we need a revival. It’s true. We need more. Return to our churches, return to our faith. That’s true. But that happens. It will come and go, and it’ll come back. I think. I hope, I pray.
But our fundamentals, our people are wonderful. Our system is wonderful. The nation is wonderful. It’s great.
And let me just finish this sort of, hopefully, encouragement over as you go into the weekend by just saying one of the aspects of that period that you cannot dismiss as fake history because it’s documented.
In other words, when someone tells you how so and so was Cornwallis, made great errors. The British general in his pursuit of Washington and ultimately lost the war. Later, he was the one at Yorktown that surrendered to Washington, all that. But you’re looking back again, it’s kind of fake history. The winners writing the history, right?
Washington is perfect.
Well, even in McCullough’s book, he’s talking about some of the problems Washington had. However, one part of it that’s really documented was the writer Thomas Paine with the beginning of 1776, writes Common Sense. And at the end of 1776, writes The Crisis, what he calls The Crisis, two sort of mini-books, pamphlets they call them at the time, booklets.
Well, the Common Sense becomes not the rallying cry, but the unifying vision. He puts vision to what people felt about independence starting in early 1776.
And there are stories, again, recounted, not rewritten, not recast as history, but recounted. I mean, not, written down letters home and all, where the men are around fires and people are reading aloud Common Sense. And it ignited the whole vision. It didn’t mean everybody bought in, by the way. It didn’t mean all the colonists said yes, still meant that it was a third or fourth or a third or half of the people wanted it, but it was a very unifying moment.
Then they slogged through 1776, and at the end, The Crisis, Paine says, basically, here we are at this moment.
The whole thing hangs in the balance. Who’s going to stand up and fight?
How’s it going to go forward?
And again, that one. The Crisis was less popularly galvanizing, I think, at least the way you read it, but certainly as important to understand the moment. And all these years later, centuries later, here we are. It’s a great, great story, it’s a great history, and it’s a great inspiration for us.
So let’s go talk to Hugh Brown. Let’s talk to Mike Davis.
Let’s celebrate America the end of this 4th of July Independence Week. Celebrate.It’s a great nation and we’ll take a break. We’ll be right back.
It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. I’ll be back in a moment.
