The Eric Metaxas Show - Michael Wilkerson (Encore)

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Michael Wilkerson is in the studio for an in-depth look into his brand-new book, "Why America Matters: The Case for a New Exceptionalism," which points towards an American renaissance. (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m.investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. They say it's a thin line between love and hate, but we're working every day to thicken that line, or at least to make it a double or triple line. Now here's your line jumping host, Eric Mattaxas.

Hey there, folks. Welcome to Friday. Friday. Or as our friend Shannon Bream calls it, Friday. I don't know. That's pretty lame, Shannon. But we like Shannon Bream. Okay, look, we every now and again on this program, we re-air something. We say it's an encore. Why do we do that?

Because we're out of other material? No. Because sometimes. It happens not that often, but often enough. We have someone on the program with whom we have a conversation that we just say, this was so important or so wonderful or so generally important and wonderful, that at some point we need to re-air this because we know most people don't listen to this program every single day or they miss stuff. I have a friend, Mike Wilkerson. In fact, weirdly enough, I'm having dinner with him tonight here in New York City.

He's written a book called Why America Matters, the case for a new exceptionalism. Or is it the case for new American? Yeah, it's the case for new exceptionalism. Why America matters. It's an extraordinary book, folks, as you'll hear me say in the conversation with him. and we did the better part of both hours in talking about it. And I said to Albin, obviously, you know, at some point in the future, we got to rear this because it's that good. It's that important that we understand why America matters, whether America matters.

And then if we say, yes, it does, then why? He makes that case so beautifully. I mean, I can't say enough about the book, Why America Matters, the case for New Exceptualism. So we're going to be talking to him in both hours today, my friend Mike Wilkerson. I guess I also want to say, Albin, you know, for Eastern Orthodox people, this weekend is Easter weekend, Resurrection Sunday, this Sunday today, good Friday. And I'll be, of course, with my family in Connecticut celebrating Greek Orthodox Easter, which is very, very different from the normal Easter. Actually, it's not very different. It's just the food is different.

It's the same thing. The bunnies hop backwards. Well, the Greek bunnies are very different from the non-Greek bunnies. The Greek bunnies, they kind of have a, I don't know, kind of a gruff attitude. They smoke cigarettes, but that's just the Greek culture. But let me say that the actually, this is true. The Greek Orthodox Easter eggs are different. They are still eggs from the chicken because the chicken is laying the eggs, not the rooster,

as they are saying, in the trans community that the rooster can lay eggs. not possible, but the chicken is laying all the eggs. But the difference between the eggs, the Greek Orthodox Church always dyes the eggs, this like blood red color. They're actually beautiful. So they don't have the rainbow of colors. It's these beautiful, really vibrant red eggs. So that's part of it.

But anyway, I, on Monday. I promised that because my book Fish Out of Water, a Search for the Meaning of Life, is just out in paperback. I'm going to be doing a series of dramatic readings, perhaps overly dramatic, perhaps absurdly dramatic readings on this program. Starting on Monday,

I'm going to read about my experience in the Greek Orthodox Parochial School in Queens in the early 70s. And Alvin, we just, we recorded it yesterday. and you you made a great effort not to laugh while I was read some of it is it's insanely funny

it's like true I mean I'm just telling this what exactly what happened and I held back from laughing because I was afraid I was going to throw off your timing and no no I went next time don't hold back because like honestly some of the stuff it's so loony you need to pause for laughter like

because you just feel like what did I just hear did he say that? Yeah I did So I'm going to do a dramatic reading on Monday on this program. That's part of what we're going to do on Monday. We're also going to interview Larry Loftus about his book on Corey Ten Boom on Monday. But the dramatic reading is it's what happened to me in third and fourth grade with a very, very dreaded Greek teacher, a frightening figure named Okirios Siambas, who was a very, basically he would beat the children about the breast, chest, neck, and head.

Only the boy children would get smacked hard. I was a good kid, so somehow, but I mean, anyway, you'll see Monday coming up. But in my book, Fish Out of Water, I also talk about Greek Easter, my experience growing up in Greek Easter. And you know what? I don't know if I can do this justice in the time we have, but there are a number of things that happen. in church at Greek Easter that are very beautiful. Everybody lights, you're standing there in the dark at midnight, before midnight, with a candle.

And the priest right at midnight, just as Easter dawns, effectively, right? As Easter begins, he says, thefte lavet de force, the light of Christ comes into the world on Easter. And he lights the candle. And then he lights the candles of the altar boys who go to the first pew and light the candles of the people in the first few who turn around and light the people behind them. And slowly the church, which has been darkened, utterly darkened, fills with the candlelight. It's a very, very moving thing. So I write about that in my book, Fish Out of Water. I also write about the freaky, freaky thing that happened to me when I was, I guess I turned 21.

I was, no, turned 20. I was living in New York that summer. And I, it's one of the funniest stories in my book, Fish Out of Water, but I lived with a kindly older gentleman, a Greek man named Andreas Vlastos. And my nunna, Effie, said, Adres, he's Bohemian type, which means not very clean, but he was very kind to me. and I found out that he was the inventor and soul manufacturer of the plastic cups that you put around the candle so that when you're holding them at Greek Easter, they don't drip on your hand and burn you and make you scream. He invented that.

And I tell that story. It was like the most bizarre. When I realized, like, this is the guy who invented this thing that has become part of not just my life, but the life of Greek Orthodox Christians and others around the world. It was, it's, anyway, it's in my book, Fish out of Water. Okay. So Greek Easter's this weekend, Kalianastasi, Christos Anesti. We want to say, Albin, before we go, before we get to my conversation with Mike Wilkerson, I'm interviewing George Foreman at some point today. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not making that up.

George Foreman. It's not going to be on the program today. We're going to air it next week, I guess. But there's a film about his life. I get to interview the man himself, George Foreman. George Foreman. I can't believe that's real. I'm frightened, but it's going to happen. I'm prepared. Can you be prepared to talk to George Foreman? I don't know. But I'm going to get to talk to George Foreman today. So that's coming up. We should also mention Soxie's in the City, April 28th. Don't forget

to sign up for the live stream, Socteasnitin City.com. You've got to sign up at least 45 minutes before the actual event. It's going to be on the West Coast. The time is all screwed up. Sign up. today socrates and city com it's like 10 bucks for the live stream trust me that price is going way up but at this point we want to keep it low as an introductory price anything else

I'm forgetting oh I don't want to forget the film nefarious that is coming out today ladies and gentlemen today nefarious look it's a great film we've both seen it it's not for little kids but anybody else drag them to see it

It's not a quote-unquote Christian film. It's just a great film with amazing elements of faith, the demonic. It's unlike anything I've ever seen. Screw tape letters meets Silence of the Lamb's nefarious opening in the theaters. All right. We'll be back with my friend Mike Wilkerson. Legacy precious metals has a revolutionary new online platform that allows you to invest in real gold and silver online. In a few easy steps, you can open an account online.

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I am really blessed over the years just to get to know. so many people not imagining that sometime in the future they might write a book and I might get to tell the world about it on my radio or TV program. But today, I have to say, I have a dear friend with me as my guest, Michael Wilkerson, no relation to David Wilkerson, my former pastor. Mike Wilkerson is a strategic advisor. He was a managing director at Lazar Frere. Some of you, that might mean something to he's an investor. He's a former CEO of Fairfax, Africa. But right now, I know him in this new capacity as an author, as someone who writes about American history, about current events. And I'm just thrilled to have him with me in the studio to talk about his brand new book, Why America Matters.

Mike Wilkerson, welcome. Thank you, Eric. It's great to be here with you. It is amazing, you know, as years pass and your friends, you know, go through their careers and things. And only recently have you morphed from this investment guy, this financial guy that I've known for so long, into somebody who writes in many places about what's going on in the country today. And if you would, share a little bit of that journey before we get to the book, because the book titled Why America Matters is kind of, of it ends up being sort of a summation of what you have learned on this journey from, you know,

investment guy to author, who's still an investment guy, but who's writing big books. Thanks, Eric. Let me back up and just describe a little bit of the trajectory. So I started my career on Wall Street as a merger and acquisition advisor for Luzard, as you mentioned, spent over a dozen years advising large companies on complex cross-border transactions. And over the next decade, during the last decade between 2012 and lockdowns in 2020, was running an investment company focused on investing in quality businesses in Africa around a thesis of food security, energy security. We're investing in financial services companies, agribusiness companies. And during that entire time, I was very focused on what was going on in Africa, which was politically, socially, big transformations happening all across the continent.

But I think in fairness, I had lost track of what was happening in my own country here in the U.S., here in America. And as everyone who is here with us today will know, in 2020, life as we knew it came to an abrupt halt. When lockdowns came in March 2020, travel restrictions came. The life that I've been living for a decade or more, which involved a lot of international travel, bouncing around from place to place came to an absolute halt. And when it did, my attention turned back, as it did for all of us to,

what in the world is going on around us? Like these seem like very strange things that are happening. The word unprecedented was overused, but it certainly was unexperienced by anyone in our generation to see something like this. And so during that time, during 2020, early on in the lockdown,

someone said to me, if you're not picking up a new hobby, you're doing something wrong. And for me, that was to begin to write publicly about some of the things that I saw going on. It was something that I'd always wanted to do, had been too busy with work, had a moment in time where not only did I have the time to do it, but I had, I would say, a burning interest in trying, even to understand for myself and articulate what is happening? What is this thing? Well, you and I are both men of faith. I know you from way back, back. There were not many serious Christians in Manhattan, you know, 20-something years ago.

You were on the board of my daughter's school, Christian school, here in New York City. So I think anybody who's a serious person of faith, when the lockdowns happened, you just said, this smells really weird. This doesn't feel, it just doesn't feel good. It feels like something is happening. And so you and many others were trying to process this. I was one of them, obviously. But you pretty quickly transitioned to writing about it and writing quite a bit. I did.

So one of the things that happened to me personally was I started to, I needed to do my own research. I needed to understand. I was being told one thing on a media headline. And there's something about it, and this happened over and over again, that just didn't feel right. And so I would go to the source. I'd go look at the original transcript of a speech. Go look at the original video of something that happened. And it started to dawn on me for the first time in my life that fake news was real. Now, many yourselves and others had come to this awareness long before. So I was late to the party. But as soon as I did,

it was a wake-up call that I felt compelled to point it out that this stuff was happening, that something was being said that didn't comport with reality, didn't comport with the fact. And I started to do it around things that I knew best, which was around the markets, the economy, finance, things that were going on. I started to write in 2000 in the summer about a looming inflationary crisis. And at that point, that was French. I was already immediately discounted by a lot of my, call it, Wall Street peers, because that didn't happen. We lived in a deflationary period for three decades, 30 years. But I could see it that we were creating a scenario where this was a likely outcome.

And like you, as a student of history, I know that there are patterns that can be seen over time. The problem for most of us is we only have lived a half a century plus or minus, which isn't long enough to really understand what's going on. So to answer your question, I think I started to write because I was increasingly concerned that the wool is being pulled over our collective eyes on that issue and on a number of others. And I want to say, you know, to my audience, folks listening here, it is not easy to face the horror of what's going on. It took me quite some time to understand, you know, because we talk about fake news,

we talk about these things. I have seen, I mean, the moment I was born again and accepted Jesus, I understood, I now live in a world that's crazy, because that world pretends Jesus is not Lord, there is no God. they actually pretend as though that's okay, as though saying that, I think math is stupid and I'm going to live my life without math or science or what, you know, and I thought to myself, so once you accept that you're living in a crazy world, in a fallen, broken world that doesn't embrace truth or the one who is truth, now you have to figure out where are we on the spectrum, right? And so I start noticing, okay, we have secular bias, we have left-wing bias, in the New York Times. So for years, I'm watching this. I'm watching this. But it got worse and worse and worse. And when Trump became president, I had never seen anything like it. I said the left-wing New York Times went crazy. The left-wing CNN has gone crazy. These folks are now committed to a cause

that has nothing to do with truth or journalistic standards. So, but I want to say to accept that is not easy. It's like suddenly you're living in a new world, and none of us wants to live in that world. But it kept going. And you just said when 2020 hits and we have lockdowns and we're hearing things, I think I'm saying this, Mike, just because I know there are people who are still having a hard time processing that these things have happened in America. One of the things that happened to me at the time was I have two then late. teenage boys and we would have dinner together and they would bring up an event that had happened that day something on the news a social unrest a Black Lives Matter

riot as they turned out to be or otherwise and they took very different perspectives on this you know one tended to be very sympathetic on a basis of just justice and fairness the other who had been at a military school very much backed law enforcement thought you know to find the police that sounds terrible and we would have these debates and what I realized is that that I wasn't smart enough about what's going on. I needed to get smarter, but that part of it was being able to make sure

that, because they both had their own version of fake narratives, and yet to be able to articulate the truth. And it led me to, I started writing, as I mentioned, op-eds and things like this, but all of a sudden I realized I had so much to say so quickly that to finally answer your question, I wrote my first book, Stormwall Observations on America and Peril, about the madness of 2020.

The idea of that book was that, look at these four different waves that are happening to us. The pandemic, social unrest domestically, economic issues, especially looming inflation, and finally the rising challenge with China and all the things that had gone on around it. I basically said that each of these individual waves are severe enough, but they're coming together in what physicists call constructive amplitude. They come together in a perfect match, they mount and it creates this giant tsunami of events. Lo and behold, as I wrote, this is happening as we're about to enter the most controversial election in American history, at least since the mid-19th century.

So that was a lot of the motivation initially to get really to answer the question that you just asked, to say how is it Americans are looking at and thinking about these issues? Let me just say we're going to go to a break. Folks, you can find out about Michael Wurkleson's first book, Stormwall. You can go to stormwall.com, stormwall.com Michael Wilkerson. When we come back, we're going to talk about his new book, which is out today. It is called Why America Matters. And it is, according to me, an astonishing achievement.

We'll be right back. Tell me why Relief Factor is so successful at lowering or eliminating pain. I'm often asked that question just the other night. I was asked that question, well, the owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. That's right, designed to heal, and I agree with them. And the doctors who formulated relief factor for them selected the four best ingredients, yes, 100% drug-free ingredients, and each one of them helps your body deal with inflammation. Each of the four ingredients deals with inflammation from a different metabolic pathway. That's the point. So approaching from four

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now an author of two books. The first book, Stormwall, you can find at stormwall.com. But the brand new book, which is out today, is called Why America Matters. And I have a number of friends that write books, and they ask me if I can give them an endorsement or something like that. And it's very tough because I don't have time. But I managed to read all, I think it was 400 pages of why America matters, because it's, so good. It's so compelling. And when I was finished reading it, the blurb, the endorsement that I gave is Why America Matters by Michael Wilkerson is an astonishing achievement. Wilkerson's masterful

synthesis of our history as it relates to where we are right at this moment. And how we can and must go forward is an inestimable gift and can hardly be praised enough. Mike, your book, why America matters, the reason it's amazing is there are at least two reasons. But one is you get right to the heart of this question. It's the ultimate question, why America matters. Let's try to figure out who we are, whether we matter, and if we matter, why we matter. But in order to do that, you really do, as I put it, you do this masterful synthesis of our history. You take us through our history in a way that is valuable, at least because most Americans have forgotten. Most of us either were never taught in school or we've kind of accepted the narrative of the last 40 or so years,

which pretty much ignores this history. That's what I find fascinating, is that if you don't know this history, you are really ripe for deception. But so in the book, you choose to tell that history on your way, to getting to where we are now and how it matters. So I don't know where you want to start, but let me just maybe address the question of why I did that. I think you said, you described two types of Americans. One is people who have forgotten their history. So perhaps of our generation have been around for a long time during a period of time that has been laden with cynicism about the meaning of America, about whether America was special,

about whether there was anything of value in our national patrimony. And even if we grew up in an environment that still said the Pledge of Allegiance, still taught American history, still taught civics, that foundation has been eroded and eroding away for an entire generation. So I'm 50 some years old. I remember getting those kinds of instructions, but I also remember what life was like in a graduate, with schools at elite liberal arts colleges and the intentional undermining of those.

Well, look, you and I have lived through this because we're old enough to remember when America was still vaguely patriotic and when these basics were taken for granted and when the older generation certainly loved the country and many of them had fought for the country. But you and I had the fortune and misfortune of going into these elite institutions where we pretty much picked up, there's another narrative, there's an anti-American narrative, and the cultural elites today almost universally have adopted that narrative. And as a result of that, several decades worth of Americans have not been getting the memo that America is special, that America matters. That's exactly right. And the second group that you described were

those who have never learned it. So for a younger generation, we call them Gen Z, Gen Z, that age group, that cohort, have probably never had even the foundational experience that our generation might have had, at least getting the basics down. And we're facing a time when an entire generation doesn't know its own history, doesn't understand the meaning of America, have lived with the narrative that you just described, what I would say is a false narrative about America's meaning and its history. And you see it when you look at their beliefs. So you look at all the polls. They no longer really believe in democracy. They see it as one choice among many. Maybe socialism's great. Maybe communism's great. Maybe being run by a technocratic elite

is just fine. They really don't appreciate the value. And why American Matters was written for those two groups to help remind and to perhaps instruct for the very first time just for someone to say, wow, I never knew that this was true about this place we call home. Well, it's an astonishing thing to realize that, I mean, I think everybody says this. You know, you get older, time kind of speeds up, and you really can't help but live in the past. Because it seems like five minutes ago, you know, we were kids and we lived in this kind of America. And it's hard to believe how far America has drifted. And so waking up during the pandemic, you suddenly look around and you think, wow, I see a lot.

lot of the earmarks of Marxism. I see communist-style state control of the people. In other words, the kind of thing that would have been antithetical to any generation before suddenly became possible. And a lot of people who, you know, I mentioned before that, accepting that there are these elites trying to manipulate you, that's not easy. I can understand why people would drag their feet and saying, well, it's overblown. Come on. because it's too painful to think that there are people like Blue State governors putting COVID patients in nursing homes that they would be that cavalier about life. It's just never happened in America, or at least not in our America. So when it does happen, it takes some time to kind of recalibrate.

And I think that's what your book helps us do. You have written in many books around issues like this, Bonhofer being the most notable example of how an entire culture, can be assumed with a false ideology, a political ideology, that actually supplants the real values of the nation. America was special in one way because it had seen forms of tyranny, forms of oppression, it had seen them in the pre-colonial era and coming out of England, looking for a place for religious and civic freedom. Forgive me, this is a very terrible interruption because this is radio.

We're going to cut you off mid-sentence. we will be back with the rest of that sentence. And Mike Wilkerson, the book is Why America Matters. Tell me, Eric, why is relief factor so successful at lowering or eliminating pain? I'm often asked that question. The owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. That's right, designed to heal. And I agree with them.

So the doctors who formulated Relief Factor for them selected the four best ingredients, yes, 100% drug-free ingredients, each helps your body deal with inflammation. Each of the four ingredients deals with inflammation from a different metabolic pathway. And that right there approaching from four different angles may be why so many people find such wonderful relief. So if you've got back pain, shoulder, neck, hip, knee, or foot pain from exercise or just getting older, you should order the three-week quick start discounted to only 1995 to see if it will work for you. It works for me. It has for about 70% of the half a million people who've tried it and have ordered more. Go to relieffactor.com or call 800, 4.5.4.5.com.

relief to find out about this offer. Feel the difference. Folks, welcome back talking to Michael Wilkerson. His new book is Why America Matters. And Michael, I just cut you off in the break there. You were talking about American history. You reminded me. You made a comment that described how Americans have experienced, let's say, in the last decade, an increasing degree of what feels like totalitarianism. surveillance from government, surveillance from corporations, various forms of tyranny. And I was beginning to make a comment that, you know, America was birthed in a less technologically sophisticated rejection of tyranny. So pre-colonial period, the Puritans and others left England

in order to find religious freedom, civic freedom to create a different kind of government that hadn't existed before. Contemporaneous with our American Revolution, the French Revolution was going on, but it became extremely autocratic, extremely controlled, extremely tyrannical. And something unique happened in America at that time that allowed this nation to go in a different direction than where the French Revolution went. You've written about 20th century variations of this with Bonhofer and otherwise, where in Europe, in authoritarian movements, whether labeled communism or fascism or otherwise, a more modern manifestation of this. And America's been largely free of that for its three centuries of history. We're now at a period where those

same forces in disguise are taking root in our own nation, in our own country. And it's coming in ways that are more or less obvious, but from points of origin that one would not have expected. It isn't just a fascist leader who's taking control of the police state, although there are elements of concern now in our national security apparatus, in our intelligence apparatus, in the Federal Bureau of investigation, or federalized police force, that gives rise to the same kind of concerns. It's also happening in the private sector in a way that hasn't been seen before. Prior to this technological revolution, it was not possible for a small group of very large, very powerful companies more powerful than most nation states to be able to influence what we hear, what we see, and

what we think. And this is where it's very subtle and very dangerous, because this indoctrination is going on day after day after day. And when you're able to step away from it through perspectives that you provide or others provide, it's only then when you can start to see the forest for the trees and realize, hold on, this looks awfully familiar to a student of history, somebody who's seen these patterns before in new garb, in modern garb. That's what so interesting to me is that people always, you know, expect things to happen in the same way, right? Like, oh, we're going to get a fascist dictator. Oh, it's Trump. He's, you know, Hitler 2.0. Simple. No, it's often dramatically different. What you just said, I mean, who could have foreseen

social media, big tech, who could have foreseen that core? Who could have foreseen that corporate America would get woke and be effectively, you know, pro-diversity, quote-unquote, that they would have swallowed that pill of madness and that that would come into corporate America. So we see a kind of collection of bizarre, unprecedented things working together. And it really isn't easy to step back and to see it, although sometimes it's clear, Like when you make the point between there's the French Revolution and the American Revolution, when you really understand how dramatically different those revolutions were from where they were coming from and where they ended,

when you see, when you understand what happened in Nazi Germany, you have, in a sense, a vocabulary to process this. But a lot of people haven't been processing it, which is one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on. Because it's just, I'll say it again, it's simply not easy to. swallow this, this is an amazing thing that we're going through. Yeah. One of the things that made that transition unique in America is that at the time, the French Revolution, for example, the Enlightenment movement that represented the revolutionary France was completely anti-religious. It was a secular movement. They wanted to erase the infamy of the church. They wanted to basically destroy an entire civilization's legacy.

Something different happened in America. which was because of our pre-colonial history, the Enlightenment embraced the Church, and the Church embraced Enlightenment. And I argue, as others do, that the only way that the American experiment could have happened was by that successful integration of the virtues of the Enlightenment around knowledge,

around political thinking that arose out of it, around separation of powers, around the rights of, that the citizens were the actual rulers of the country. Novel idea. That that was actually embraced. alongside a very unique American theology that believed that God had a special place in his heart for America, that there was something new, a new experiment, that God was undertaking for a purpose that was intended as a blessing to America, but more importantly, or equally as a blessing

to the world, that the role that this country would play would resonate as it has over time. Well, that's what's so interesting is that, you know, I wrote a book called, if you can keep it. And one of the big takeaways for me as I was processing this, and thanks to Oz Guinness, to try to understand what America is. And so the title of your book is Why America Matters. And part of the answer, why America matters, is because America is unique and exceptional in that it doesn't only exist for itself. There's something really wild about that. And there's something profoundly biblical about that. A nation that exists for others, a nation that cares about other nations,

a nation that cares about transcendent ideas like liberty, not just being an American, but what does it mean to be an American? What are these concepts? These are universal concepts. And so when Jefferson writes, we hold these truths to be self-evident, it's amazing because it is universal.

So we're talking about this thing called truth, and there hadn't been nations before that were wrestling with what is. is truth. And so there is something beautiful about America, and that's been largely lost in the last decades, and we're talking about that. And you're talking also about another unprecedented thing. Of course, Tocqueville couldn't believe, like he thought, my goodness, Liberty is always at war with the church, but in America, which is what you just said, bizarrely, amazingly, they're actually bolstering each other because we don't

have an established church. The church is not a powerful organization like the monarchy. It's kind of this free thing. So we're going to continue to explore this with Michael Wilkerson. The new book, superb book, it's called Why America Matters.

We'll be right back. Hey there, folks. We're talking with the author of a new book, Why America Matters. And Michael, there's a lot to talk about here, but we're kind of reprising the history of America, and you were touching on this idea, which is so utterly important of how in America,

we sort of took the best of the Enlightenment. We didn't take the hyper-secular atheistic part of it, which, of course, is false the way France did. So we took the good part of the Enlightenment and wedded it to these new ideas of freedom. And we created this nation that, I mean, if anybody wants, it's sort of funny when people celebrate Bastille Day, I think, do they even know, like, what a mess? Right. What an absolute, a bloodbath and a mess. The French Revolution is just the most bizarre, checkered way, you know, to begin anything. And I think we could argue that it totally didn't succeed.

I mean, it's kind of weird because they act like, oh, it was a good thing. And we believe in these values. But how did that go? You know, it led to Napoleon, it led to whatever. I mean, it did not lead to anything comparable to what our revolution led to, because those kinds of revolutions simply by definition cannot. You know, you said something earlier, the famous quote of, we hold these truths to be self-evident.

The interesting thing is they were hardly self-evident at the time. The idea of equality that all men were created equal was novel in history. You know, no civilization really had practiced that. There were always classes. They were always cast. That enlightenment idea succeeded in the U.S. in America, I would argue, because of the Christian foundation that went alongside of it. It's often been said that the founding fathers, you know, may not necessarily have been Christians

the way we understood them, but they were steeped like a tea in a long cultural history, the importance of religion in America and the idea that virtue was necessary for a republic to survive. And so it was a very different, a very different foundation. You mentioned Talkville. By the time he started writing about America in the 1830s, 1840s, a real narrative of who America was had began to coalesce. It was a time when history was an most important category of books, that American history was becoming extremely popular.

And a lot of it was about, for the first time, laying out the foundations of who are we as a people? Where did we come from? What is our destiny? And of course, right in the middle of a terrible conflict, which was the unresolved issue of slavery, that the founding fathers were not able to, are willing to address at the time of the Constitution and the foundations of the country, which unfortunately then echoed as a contradiction to the founding ideals of the country that, unfortunately, ultimately tore the country apart in order to resolve it and even then not perfectly. Well, and of course, it's still tearing the country apart.

I mean, it's so fascinating to look back. And let's be honest, many of the founders despised slavery. I mean, the idea that they were okay with it is a joke. They despised it, and it was sickening to them that they had to make this evil compromise. It was clearly sickening to them. But they didn't know any way forward but to do that. And, of course, it resolves it. itself as bloodily as can be with 600,000 men dying, not to say how many wounded.

Just, you know, again, we're living through these kind of the woke madness of our day that forgets that 600,000 men died in a war over this issue. It would have been very easy for Lincoln and company to kind of let it ride. Like, who cares? We'll just keep going and we'll figure it out as we go along. But it came to this bloody clash because Lincoln was obviously really, to my mind, kind of a profit. We're out of time. When we come back, we're just going to continue the wonderful conversation.

At least I think it's wonderful with the author of Why America Matters, Michael Wilkerson. Don't go away.