The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome. Welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on The Pro America Report. Hey, happy, happy birthday to America happy birthday to America as people, I hope, are celebrating Independence Day all across the country in all the various ways they do, I hope people have a great weekend. I know a lot of folks will be working. I remember when I was young, I worked a number of Independence Days, 4 July, especially when I was working in the supermarket, for many years, I would end up working that weekend, but get out soon, sometime late afternoon, hopefully, even for those who are working. But have a great Independence Day celebration, I hope. We’ll talk about that in a moment. What you need to know in a few minutes.
We’ll talk with John Schlafly. John Schlafly’s column this week is about Roe, but I’ve got a bunch of questions for him. We’ll roll it through. Then I’ll ask him about his thoughts on Independence Day.
And then we’ll also speak with Eddie Scarry, who is a columnist over at thefederalist.com. He’s a very good writer, and he’s written a new book from Bombardier Press, and it’s called Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks the Joy Out of Everything and Everyone. He’s a very good writer. He’s really good. And we’ll talk with him also about that book and in general, about what’s going on.
So let’s see what you need to know today. What you need to know today. It is really hard not to get sort of depressed about how messed up things look. And what you need to know is things are really, really good. Things are really, really good. They’ve never been better in many ways for people. If you lived a hundred years ago, or let’s say if you lived in 1776 at our founding, you’d have a lot more challenges.
First among them, health. People died of all kinds of diseases hat now we take for granted. And so that’s the first thing.
But second of all, life wasreally hard until 100 years ago. I mean, no matter who you were 100 years ago, you were participating in the production and the living of life. You couldn’t eat out like people do now. You couldn’t travel like people do now. You couldn’t move for work like people do now. It’s just an amazing thing. So we’re living in an absolutely blessed time.
If you want to see how blessed we are, and as a matter of America’s specialness, there’s an essay from 1988, I believe the late Phyllis Schlafly wrote an essay. It was actually a speech that she gave, and the speech was about patents and the American system of inventions. And in the speech, she goes through the specifics of what Americans have done in the last, well, at the time, she was writing ‘88. So in the last about 80 years, and she’s really 100 years, she’s from about the 1880s, 1890s through till when she gave the speech, 100 years. So about the last 130 years for us, invention after invention, the cotton gin, the steamboat, the telephone, the airplane, one after another. And she wrote that in ‘88. She gave the speech in ‘88. That’s before we had another 30 years of these unbelievable inventions, everything from smartphones to cell phones, technology that allowed you to do everything with the Internet, of course, but just amazing. We live in a time, and in that essay, she talks about how much an improvement life has been for someone like her to have all these inventions take place.
So what you need to know is we live in an incredibly blessed time and America is just a bastion of creativity, a bastion of the rule of law, where you don’t have to wait for the king to give you permission to have a patent. You just invent it and it’s yours for a period of time. You might have to fight about it, someone might try to steal it, et cetera, but the system is pretty darn good.
So when back at the founding, 1776, that time was very precarious, but at the time, they were equally divided. Excuse me. They weren’t equally divided. The estimations of the historians is that a third of the country stayed tory supportive of the king. A third was for independence, and the other third was trying to wait and see which way the wind blew. And that’s kind of where we are today, isn’t it? A third of the country thinks that everything is wrong, everything is bad, everything is corrupt, everything is terrible, everything about our history is bad. The other third, I would call it the conservative side says, yeah, it’s pretty good. We may have to fight to keep it this way, but this is a pretty good system. This is a pretty good system. It’s filled with people, people that are creative, people that are interesting, people that have opportunities. It’s a pretty good system.
And so you contrast those worldviews on the 4th of July and you watch what they say, what people say and what they think about things, and you see people.
One side is running things down.
One side is acting let me see if I could try this. Here’s one for you that I haven’t tried. One side, the left is acting like a spoiled child. You ever have a child who is particularly in one of those periods of their life, probably teenage years where they’re just spoiled. They get everything they want, and they expect to get it, and when they don’t get it, they bang on the table and they yell and scream, and they want to be able to do whatever they want to do when they want to do it, they’re spoiled. The left right now is a spoiled child. When things don’t go their way, they bang on the table, they yell at things, and they say, this is the worst thing that ever happened. It’s the end of the world.
And the other side is kind of like the parents and the parents in this situation are saying, yeah, look, things aren’t perfect. You got to get things better. You’ve got to clean that up. Let’s focus on this. But let’s not mistake what’s happening for something really bad when it’s not.
I think that’s what you need to know right now. And I have said for many years that America as a nation feels like a young nation. It feels like a nation that’s in its youth, it’s in its teenage years, it sometimes makes impetuous decisions that you look at and say, if you had a little more maturity as a nation, maybe you wouldn’t do that. And now we’re at a point where our leadership in the country and even some of the Republican side I shouldn’t be too quick to say it’s somehow magically one part or the other, but there’s a bunch of people that are just moving from spoiled kind of experience to spoiled experience. They’re like spoiled children. Both parties, the ruling class, the establishment, when it doesn’t go their way, they yell and scream, and they do a select committee that’s full of lies. They do a Russia hoax that’s full of lies. They have the media be full of lies. They use the narrative machine against us. And then the other side, what I’d say is conservatives, you can call them MAGA, ultra MAGA, I don’t know. But people would say, it’s a pretty good system. Let’s preserve it. It’s a pretty good system. Let’s stick to our rights. Let’s stick to the basics. Let’s make opportunity available to everybody. Let’s not lie and distort and scream and yell either about the past or about what we think should have happened. Let’s look forward and let’s celebrate our successes, improve on our failures, and move ahead. Well, Independence Day is a great day to remember that America’s greatness is not in our failures or our failings. It’s in our successes. And it’s in our acknowledgment that we’re not perfect. We just spent 50 years killing millions of babies because we had a law that said they could. And right now there’s still places in California and New York where they’re still killing babies. It’s a failure.
But it doesn’t mean that America is bad. Well, let me say it differently. It doesn’t mean that America’s gone forever, lost forever. What you need to know is the specialness of America, our nation, is that we the people said we’ll be in charge. We’ll be parents. We’ll grow up in this. We’ll be the adults. We’ll make hard decisions and hard sacrifices for each other and for our nation. But it’ll be worth it. We won’t be kids.
Happy birthday to America. You have a great Independence Day celebration and we’ll be right back. Ed Martin here in the Pro America Report.
