The Matt Walsh Show - Reviewing Milestone’s In The War For American History

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

On this 4th of July, let's revisit some of the moments in the last couple years that were pivotal moments in the war for American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

More from the war on American history. Kamala Harris spoke at the National Congress of American Indians. It's their 78th annual convention. This is on Tuesday. And she just had one. She began, of course, as they must, with one long apology for American history. And here's what that sounded like. Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shore. of the Americas. But that is not the whole story. That has never been the whole story. Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations, perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past, and we must shed light on it and do everything

can to address the impact of the past on native communities today. Yeah, those dastardly European explorers, those bastards bringing civilization to this part of the globe. How dare they? Yeah, we ought to apologize for that. We really should. Just like we should, and frankly, as a white man, I would like to apologize for all. of the deeds of white Western men. Because white Western men have done a lot of terrible things, including bringing civilization to this part of the globe, you know. I guess they never should have come.

I guess that's the stance, people like Kamala Harris. They never should have come. Civilization should have stopped, should have stopped dead on the other side of the Atlantic and never traveled across. And then it'd be a utopia here. The indigenous tribes were three, thousand years behind uh you know but behind behind civilization and it should have been able

it should have it should have stayed that way where you've got one side of the globe advancing and everything and then this entire part of the globe is just left to be in the stone age that's what that's what should have happened right so we should apologize for i think also as a white western man i should apologize for you know modern medicine apologize for science, for space travel, for electricity, for air conditioning, for democracy, for automobiles, for airplanes, for human rights, for computers, for plumbing, for the printing press. All of those terrible deeds of white Western men, I apologize for all of that.

But I want to make one other point about this. Because, you know, one of the other problems here with all of this constant apologizing and the way that this clash of civilizations, European versus. versus the indigenous tribes. One of the other problems with the way that it's presented is that, yeah, we've talked about how the Europeans are turned into these cartoonish villains in this black and white scenario.

But also we make the Indian tribes into these sort of lame victims when really they weren't. Yeah, In terms of technological advancement and philosophy and government and in every other way, they were far behind most of the rest of the world. But even so, I mean, take, for example, the Comanche tribe, just as one example, one of the tribes of the Great Plains.

And there was, I've told you before, about a great book written by the author S.C. Gwyn, who has several really good history books, including one about Stonewall Jamies. called Rebel Yell that you should read, but he wrote a book called The Empire of the Summer Moon. And this is about the Comanchee tribe, focusing primarily on the Indian wards, which were not in Columbus this time. Of course, this was in the mid to late 19th century. But the Comanchee tribe, very impressive and a very impressive and interesting history. You know, they were masters of the horse, the Spanish broad. I mean, the horses are not indigenous to this part of the globe.

So the Indian tribes didn't have them until the Spanish brought them over in the 16th century. And that just revolutionized so many things among the Indian tribes and the Comanches. Many of the tribes in the Great Plains became masters of the horse, even more so than the Europeans. The Comanches especially, what they were able to do with a horse riding bareback on the horse is like something out of, you know, it's something out of an action film, what they were able to do. and they had this entire empire but they were also a brutal warfaring violent people and they struck terror in the hearts and minds of other tribes around them and also the white settlers whose settlements they would would often raid and murder everyone take a kidnap and enslave people that's see that's that's that's part of the story but when you know with the way that the indians are presented people like camille harris they don't want to talk about that stuff they don't want to

tell you about the raids that they would do the violence and everything they want to leave all of that out but then in the process by by sanitizing this history and by sanitizing these people and their culture you end with something that's just kind of lame and uninteresting you turn all of the Indian tribes into a bunch of just these sort of like loser victims who were sitting around utterly helpless until the big bad Europeans came in and wiped them all out all at once when in fact this was a violent clash of civilizations that went on for centuries and many of these Indian tribes especially at Comanches and others were more than able to hold their own for quite a long time because they knew how to wage war

because they've been doing it for centuries before the Europeans came. So it's a fascinating period of history with fascinating figures on both sides of it. And you just lose all that when you try to sanitize it. July 4th for many other Americans is not a time for something so frivolous as happiness. It is rather a time for anger and sorrow. These other Americans who profess to hate this country, though they choose to still live here, gorging themselves on the bounty of Western civilization. civilization while bitterly complaining about the people who provided that bounty to them.

Most of these ungrateful whiny losers can't even really explain why they hate this country so much as this recent video from campus reform demonstrates. Are you proud to be an American? No. I feel embarrassed to be an American every day. Not really in this climate. No, like I'm a black person. So obviously I experience a lot of, you know, there's like oppression that comes with that? Um, not most of the time. I think sometimes it's just a little embarrassing.

We'd know. Be proud of what? And what is there to be proud about if you're black in being? Like, you know, because it's just like it's still a lot of stuff that goes on for black people. I think that's a complicated question for me. I think I, I think most of the time, no, at least over like the past four years. It's been tricky to, you know, love to be an American. Well, like America sucks, you know, because like it oppresses black people or whatever.

How does it oppress them? What is the exact nature of this oppression? That's never explained. The people who hate America are like sullen teenagers who go around complaining that their lives are so difficult and miserable, even as they enjoy the easiest and most painless existence that the world can possibly offer to a human being. In fact, those same sullen teenagers crying that they're being oppressed by their parents because they aren't allowed to stay. stay out until 1 a.m. on a school night or whatever it is, often grow up and turn into the sorts of adults who cry that they're being oppressed by society or systemic racism or the patriarchy for reasons that are even more superfluous. July 4th has now become an occasion

for such people to air their grievances. And while this is annoying and pathetic, it's also illuminating. Because in airing their grievances, you're able to see just how stupid are those grievances and how hypocritical and also stupid are the ones airing them. So here's one. representative example that is worth, I think, some special attention. This comes from a Twitter account called Lakota Man. His bio tells us that he has a BA in sociology. You perhaps can already guess where this is headed simply based on the fact that this is the kind of guy who brags about having a bachelor's degree in sociology. On July 4th, Lakotaman BA tweeted this. He says, Hey America, F you for desecrating our sacred mountain. Hashtag happy fourth. And it's accompanied by a picture

presumably himself and two other people, pointing their middle fingers at Mount Rushmore. Now, many questions potentially arise. Questions like, what sort of person drives all the way out to Mount Rushmore just to flip off a bunch of rocks? I guess it kind of reminds me of the time when I drove four hours to the beach in order to scream at a mound of sand. It is really annoying when sand gets in your shoes. And I just thought it was time that someone finally sent a message. But in any case, more to the point, let's consider the same. specific complaint that Lakota man, B.A. has here. He says that America has desecrated his sacred

mountain, the Black Hills, by carving the Mount Rushmore sculpture into it. He also says in subsequent tweets that this was land theft and colonization, et cetera. Now, this claim of land theft made by modern Native Americans is almost always specious and hypocritical, but when it's made by someone descended from the Lakota tribe about the Black Hills, the irony is even more pronounced. Lakota man, B.A. says that his people owned the Black Hills. It was sacred to them. The white man ruthlessly stole and desecrated the land that belonged to them. But does that mean that the Lakota were the first to inhabit this region of the country? No, far from it. Before the Lakota, the black holes were occupied by the Arapaho. In fact, the chain of possession during recorded history goes back to

the 16th century. And during that time, the land was claimed by the Arapaho, Kiowa, Crow, Cheyenne and Arikara tribes before we got to the to the Lakota. And that's only recorded history. Archaeologists tell us that the very, very first occupants of this region were called the Clovis people about 13,000 years ago. Well, archaeologists did tell us that now we're told that the Clovis people came somewhat more recently and they're predated by another group of people who we know very little about. The point is that the Black Hills,

his sacred mountains are not his at all. His people were not the first to occupy it, not the second, not the third, not the fourth, not the fifth, not the sixth. Indeed, the Lakota came in the 19th century, moved everyone else out, took over, and immediately declared the mountains sacred to them. Like they just got there, killed a bunch of people, and said, these mountains are sacred. Keep something in mind here. When we say that one tribe moved other tribes out of the region, we don't mean that they asked them politely to leave. Okay, they didn't show up with a note and say, well, would you, hey guys, would you mind skedaddling here?

Would you mind moving over and giving up some space? Would you mind? That's not how it worked. In Indian culture, war over land was very common, and it was very, very brutal. Slaughter, decapitation, dismemberment, rape, enslavement, scalping were all common features of these conflicts. Speaking of scalping, the earliest evidence that we have of this practice, to my knowledge,

dates to the 14th century in South Dakota. A mass grave from that period has been uncovered, and we don't know exactly what happened, but whatever happened, it's been dubbed the Crow Creek Massacre, because the human remains show that hundreds of people were cut to pieces, is scalped, torture, mutilated. And this is before any white man had set foot on that part of the globe, way before. Which means that one Native American tribe did that to another. And there's nothing especially surprising about that. That's how they treated each other. And that's what they did when they wanted to take the land occupied by some other group. Now bringing this back to the

Black Hills. One Indian tribe conquered and massacred another tribe for access to that land, and then that tribe was conquered and massacred by another and so on and so. Until finally, not but a century or soar before the white man showed up, the Lakota came and did the same, stealing the land from the thieves that had most recently stolen it before them. Then a short time later, in the grand scheme of things, the U.S. government rolls in and a series of battles are fought over those mountains called the Black Hills War, and the U.S. won the battle. That is, the U.S. conquered the people who had most recently conquered the land. We're left then with the original question.

Who owns that land? If you say that conquest is illegitimate, and it's always wrong to conquer land and overthrow the people occupying it, then you can't say that the Lakota owned it because they did the same. And you can't say that the Cheyenne own it or the Akira or the Kiowa. So who owns it? it? Who's the victim of this theft? The Clovis people with their stone tools 13,000 years ago? Maybe we should find some of them and apologize. But they weren't there first either.

They somehow came to supplant some other Stone Age people before them, and I can pretty much guarantee you that that supplanting was not peaceful. Very few things were at that point in our history. This is the absurd rabbit hole that you fall down whenever you try to claim that the U.S. stole the land it currently occupies. In order for a thing to be stolen, it must first be owned. But if you say that the most recent Indian tribe who lived on it owned it, then you're legitimizing conquest. And if you legitimize conquest, then there's no reason why the United States' conquest should not be considered legitimate. As I've argued many times, conquest was the way of the world, all over the world, everywhere, among all people for thousands of years. If you wanted it, you took it.

If you wanted to keep it, you defended it. If you couldn't defend it, you lost it. If you couldn't take it, you didn't get it. As simple as that. America didn't invent this concept. We didn't even practice the most brutal form of it, not even close. Today, we're simply blamed because we were better at it. Americans played the exact same game that the Indians played.

They observed the exact same rule of conquest, a brutal rule, but a universal one. and they were just better at it. They won. And now we're supposed to be ashamed of that victory and weep over it and apologize centuries later. But apologize to who? The conquerors who were conquered? The thieves who had their stolen goods stolen? That's absurd.

I for one apologize for nothing. And I'm ashamed of nothing. And I'm happy that America is here. And I'm happy that it won that conflict and that war. I'm happy that this civilization is here. I would rather live in this civilization, and I think everyone would, including the Lakota man, B.A. But anyone who is ashamed of America is free to leave.

You know, one of the difficulties of living in a country where half of the people have gone entirely insane is that it's hard to tell what's real and what isn't. It's easy to get suckered by trolls and satirists because the troll and the satirist can't present a version of reality any more absurd than the one we actually live in. It's kind of, it's anyone's guess what's real and what is. And that's why I present the following

story with some trepidation, relatively sure that it's real, but I can never be completely sure. So on Twitter over the weekend, conservative commentator Kathleen McKinley posted a screenshot of a letter that was apparently distributed by two white families in a wealthy suburb of Dallas by some kind of racial activist group. They went around giving this letter to white families. in this wealthy liberal neighborhood. The post-millennial has some of the details here. Dallas Justice Now, a racial equity advocacy group, has been actively campaigning to convince wealthy white liberal families

to not send their white children to Ivy League schools or other top 50 collegiate institutions so that admission spots are available for people of color to quote, correct historical wrongs. An organization purporting to be a racial justice group has been sending letters informing white affluent Democrats about the college pledge around Dallas's richest neighborhoods such as storied Highland Park. And then here's someone what the letter actually says.

And this, again, was in a screenshot. This was left, I don't know, put under people's doors or in their mailbox, I'm not sure. And the letter says, quote, we are writing to you because we understand you are white and live within the Highland Park Independent School District and thus benefit from enormous privilege taken at the expense of communities of color. You live in the whitest and wealthiest neighborhood in Dallas, whether you know it or not. You earned or inherited your money through oppressing people of color. However, it's also our understanding that you're a Democrat and supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement,

which makes you one of our white allies and puts you in a position to help correct these cruel injustices. We need you to step up and back up your words with action and truly sacrifice to make our segregated city more just. The letter then asks, rather demands, I should say, that they pledge not to send their children to an Ivy League school or any school listed in the top 50 by U.S. News and World Report. Generously, the group does admit that this is a, quote, tough commitment to make. But they point out that if you're going to have a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard,

you ought to be ready to make these kinds of sacrifices. The Post-Millennial has a little bit more. They say on the group's website, white parents can take the pledge online. The pledge form asks users, reading it says, will you take the college pledge? There are two options available for users to choose.

Here are the two options. You can take the college pledge. That's the question. Two options, I am a racist hypocrite or I agree. It says talk is not enough. Commit yourself towards taking action and making sacrifices to correct centuries of injustice. The pledge's description instructs.

Open up spaces for black and latinx communities by refusing to send your kids to Ivy League and U.S. News World Report Top 50 schools and encourage friends, neighbors, and family members to do the same. Imagine if those hundreds of thousands of spots at these institutions were occupied only by marginalized communities. Imagine the opportunities. We can achieve true equity within our lifetimes, but only if white folks are willing to sacrifice their privileges.

And then a little bit of the pledge is, as a white person with privilege, both from my whiteness and my neighborhood, I recognize the need to. to make sacrifices for the purpose of correcting hundreds of years of murder, slavery, discrimination, and lack of educational and economic opportunities perpetrated upon people of color. Okay, if this is a, I should say, if this is a troll job, it's a pretty committed one, because I looked at the website myself and it certainly appears legitimate. The group also has a very active Twitter presence, which includes this video, which I'll play for you, from a member of the group named Jamil, recorded this video.

Here she is explaining why they're asking white families to clear the deck and keep their kids out of our nation's top schools. Here it is. We are fighting for change. We are fighting for equality. We are wanting to bridge gaps and we just want to catch up. I'm a parent myself and I would love to be able to send my children to college. I feel that not only sending my children to college would not just be a good thing for them, a good thing for us, but also in the future to come. Their kids will say, hey, mom, dad went to college. I'm going to do that too. Therefore, I will be creating generational wealth in my family, and I believe it's a trickle-down effect.

The kids in the community, the kids that come over and play, the kids that will come over and play with my kids' kids, they'll all be affected by that because they'll see it. They'll see it. They'll feel it. I believe that it is my burden. It is our burden to use our voices, our platforms, to spread awareness, to offer options and choices on how others can support the cause, on how others can make the dream become a reality. So again, we're just a nonprofit advocacy group seeking change, seeking equality, seeking justice.

That's it. That's all they're seeking. change, equality, justice, and for you to totally debase and submit yourselves to them and their authority and their power. That's it. That's all. Is that too much to ask, really? President Trump announced that he was forming the 1776 commission to counter the anti-American anti-truth indoctrination in our schools and other institutions.

The focus was especially on debunking the noxious lies told to the public and in particular our children by proponents of critical race theory and the 1619 project and similar things. Ultimately, the commission's goal was to offer a corrective to leftist historical revisionism and to promote, as Trump calls it, patriotic education. Now, to my mind, this is not only a noble endeavor, but perhaps one of the most important things Trump has done with his presidency. Any attempt to reverse the cultural tide must begin by addressing the fundamental sickness in our education system. Entire generations are being trained from the youngest ages to hate their country. And if they're white, despise their ancestors and themselves. So this is not simply a matter of kids

being brainwashed into a lack of patriotism. At a much deeper level, they're being conditioned to believe and build their worldview around what is not true. So I would much rather we call the corrective truthful education rather than patriotic education. I'm not going to quibble much over over those sorts of details, but that's really what we're talking about here. Yesterday, the 1776 Commission released its report, reaffirming the basic truths of America's founding and offering its critiques of the radical leftist version of history. The final product is about 45 pages long. It's well worth the read.

And if you take the time to read it, you will already be one step ahead of most of the report's critics who do not appear to have even skimmed the document before, issuing their many denunciations. For example, CNN's headline declares, Trump administration issues racist school curriculum report on MLK Day. By the way, that's it. That's not an op-ed. That's their news article, calling it racist.

The Washington Post quotes, outraged historians who are incensed by the reports, quote, outright lies. The New York Times also claims that, quote, historians are, quote, deriding it for its false narratives. Now, a brief sampling of the post article gives you an idea as to the general flavor of the criticisms. It says, quoting now, I don't know where to begin, said public historian Alexis Coe. This report lacks citations or any indication books were consulted, which explains why it's riddled in errors, distortions, and outright lies. Callie Nicole Gross, a history professor at Rutgers and Emory Universities, and the co-author of a black women's history of the United States, said it was dusty and dated. and the usual dodge on the long-lasting, harmful impacts of settler colonialism,

enslavement, Jim Crow, the oppression of women, the plight of queer people, as the true threat to democracy. This report makes it seem as if slaveholding founding fathers were abolitionists, that Americans were the early beacons of the global abolitionist movement, that the demise of slavery in the United States was inevitable. Boston University historian Ibram X. Kendi tweeted, it's very hard to find anything in here that stands as a historical claim or as the work of a historian. Almost everything in it is wrong, just as a matter of fact.

Said Eric Rochway. I may sound a little incoherent when trying to speak of this because the report itself is not coherent. It's like historical whack-a-mole. Okay. You'll notice here, as you'll notice in nearly all the denunciations of the 1776 report, that little attempt is made to engage with the specific and most essential historical claims that it makes. We're simply assured that the report is completely, false and misguided and silly and racist. But nobody issuing these assurances will bother to explain

why. That CNN article that called it racist, at no point in the article, did it defend or justify or explain that characterization? It just said, well, it's racist. You know, of course it is. In fact, the critics say, you know, the report isn't just wrong, but incoherent. And this causes me to suspect that perhaps these professional historians are having trouble with the document because they're illiterate, which would explain quite a lot about how history is taught these days, and would explain why they, by their own omission, cannot seem to understand a report that lays out its case very clearly and cogently. You can agree or disagree with what the report says, but any literate person should at least be able to comprehend what is being said.

These historians can't even do that, they say. They just don't understand it. They're completely confused. Mostly it seems that the scholarly community takes great umbrage with the report section on slavery. That's the part that's gotten the most attention, which they say dismisses, or as Huffington Post headline claims, justifies the practice of slavery. That's what they're saying. They're saying that the report justifies slavery, defends it. So let's read what it actually says on the subject. Hopefully you'll find this at least coherent. I mean, you tell me if you can, at a minimum, understand what's being said. Okay. This is a quote now from the 1776 Commission report. The most common charge leveled against the founders, and hence against our country itself,

is that they were hypocrites who didn't believe in their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is untrue and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric. Many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow uniquely American evil. It is essential to insist at the outset that the institution should be seen in a much broader perspective. It is very hard for people brought up in the comforts of modern America.

and a time in which the idea that all human beings have inviolable rights, an inherent dignity is almost taken for granted, to imagine the cruelties and enormities that were endemic in earlier times. But the unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout history. It was the Western world's repudiation of slavery, only just beginning to build at the time of the American Revolution, which marked a dramatic sea change in moral sensibilities. The American founders were living on the cusp of this change in a manner that straddled to

worlds. Okay. Did you understand that? It seems coherent, isn't it? I had no trouble understanding the point. It goes on to discuss the attitudes that the founders had towards slavery. Some were against it, some were for it. Some wrestled with the issue throughout their lives. Ultimately, of course, slavery was abolished in this country, and it only took America 90 years to do it. America was only a country for 90 years, give or take before slavery was abolished. Compare that to the track record of other nations, some of which have been around for millennia, and still, to this day, have not completely abolished it right now. And when you do that, you see that our country is not guiltless, but its guilt is no greater than most any other nation on earth, and in many cases,

it's quite a bit lesser. Now, it may be hard for media people and scholars to understand the simple but crucial point being made here. That's either because they don't want to understand or they're too stupid to understand or both. The goal of critical race theory and of the modern left generally is to saddle white Americans with a special and lasting guilt stemming from these historical injustices and to paint America itself as uniquely evil and almost singularly responsible for atrocities like slavery. This is wrong and it matters that it's wrong. We cannot assess our own history or the people who comprise it if we do not have an accurate and a complete understanding of the context in which these people lived and acted.

So we can quite easily and self-assuredly sit here right now from our comfortable position and condemn men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, for not being racially enlightened enough. But to thoughtful people, it should make a difference that Washington and Jefferson lived at a time when almost nobody on the entire planet was racially enlightened by our standards day. Slavery was indeed a foregone conclusion, a normal part of life for nearly everyone, everywhere, through all of human history until the last couple of centuries. We could have an interesting discussion about why this was the case. How was this the case?

How is it that the whole world could have been so blind to a moral truth that we all now see so clearly? And when I say we all, I mean we in the West, because in other parts of the world, they still don't see it. But we cannot have that discussion if we insist on absolving everyone everywhere of guilt except for white men in North America. The discussion becomes absurd at that point and pointless. And whatever conclusions you draw will be false and harmful. There'll be the conclusions of the 1619 project and critical race theory, which the 1776 report rightly condemns. Now the report ends with this passage, which I like.

It says to being American means something noble and good. It means treasuring freedom and embracing the vitality of self-government. We are shaped by the beauty, bounty, and wildness of our continent. We are united by the glory of our history. We are distinguished by the American virtues of openness, honesty, optimism, determination, generosity, confidence, kindness, hard work, courage, and hope. Our principles did not create these virtues, but they laid the groundwork for them to grow and spread and forge America into the most just and glorious country in all of human history. Admittedly, okay. Some of that is a matter of opinion.

I'm not sure there is any objective, factual measure for the gloriousness of a country. But it's good for a person to feel this way about his country. And there is good reason to feel this way about our country. It's how many other people and many other countries feel about their countries. And all of those countries have their own troubled histories, their own sins, their own guilt. Many cases much worse than our own. Yet nobody would mock or scold them the people in those countries for their patriotism. it's only us

we are the only ones the only ones who are supposed to be ashamed of our country and its history and its heroes we're the only ones who are not supposed to be too enthusiastic in our patriotism we're supposed to issue a thousand apologies as a preamble for

every good thing we say about our country at least that's what they tell us at least that's the rules they want to impose and we should not listen We should reject that.