The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1097: Celebrating Heritage America w/ Jon Harris

Episode Date: August 25, 2024

58 MinutesPG-13Jon Harris is an author, documentary filmmake, and host of the Conversations That Matter podcast.Jon joins Pete to talk about his new documentary, "Virginia First: The 1607 Project."1607 Project WebsiteJon's WebsitePete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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How are you doing, Pete? Doing well. Doing well. Remind everybody a little bit about what you do. And, I mean, you have... What is it that I do? A lot. You do a lot.

And a lot of it is very diverse. Because diversity is our strength. So I do it. I want to be strong. So keeping it diverse. I do some documentary film work, which is what we're going to talk about. with the 1607 project, and I produced and directed that.

But, and you can go to lastan studios.org if you want to see all the projects that I've worked on. But a lot of what I do is surrounding a podcast I have called Conversations That Matter. And it started with me just sharing thoughts and exposing evangelical, or I should say, woke incursions into evangelicalism. I guess you could say exposing evangelicalism, sure. So, but mostly like, you know, social justice. related stuff. Like, how is even jealous? So I wasn't going after like pastoral corruption in every way. Sometimes I did, but it was mostly just like, you know, how is the left coming into your church?

And I started that in 2019 and then 2020 happened. And of course, there was a big demand and my numbers started going up. And I wrote two books on the social justice movement. Social justice goes to church and Christianity and social justice where I explain and refute social justice teachings and working on a third book now that will be, somewhat related to that. But yeah, and I'm doing a music album. You probably didn't even know that this fall. So, yeah, it's a lot of different things, but writing, speaking, podcasting, all of that. Well, yeah, I guess the thing we're going to talk about is something, I think you shared something with me, shared with me like six months ago, maybe even a year ago, showing the beginnings of this, some of the Genesis of this.

I'm sure you were further along than the Genesis stage. But, yeah, the 16-07 project. And as soon as I started looking at it, I knew exactly where you were going with this. And I think, like we said before we started recording, everything's a project now. So, you really have to make yours standout from everyone else's. So just give everybody an overview of exactly

what the idea behind the 1607 project is. Well, I worked with Brian McClanahan, and he oversaw the book, which I'm holding here, called Virginia First, the 1607 project. He's the one that added the Virginia First title, which I think does differentiate us from the other projects that are out there with numbers on them. But I was the one who thought of doing this project in the first place, and I think that was either 2020 or 2021, but it was obviously after the New York Times had done their six. 1619 project.

And it was, so I had to have been at the end of 2020 if it was 2020, but it was after the Trump administration put out their 1776 commission. And I looked at both of them and I thought, these are both terrible. And the 1776 project's really not much better. Like really the difference is 1619 project says America has just always been fundamentally about slavery and racism. And we've never climbed out of that. And black Americans are really the only true Americans because.

they've had to endure this mistreatment. But we're all trying to get to that dream. We just haven't arrived. And the 16, or sorry, the 1776 Commission report was basically agreeing with that and saying, well, you know, America, you know, there are these bad things, but we have the civil rights movement. And so we've achieved. We've arrived.

And so that's the difference between that. One says we haven't arrived. One says we have arrived. But they both agree that America is essentially like the good. good side of America, right? There's this bad side in some ugly corner in the south, probably where you're sitting right now, Pete, that all the problems come from there. But there is this good America, and this good America can't be found in a people or a place. It's this proposition nation idea. And America's equality, it's freedom, it's liberty. These are all ambiguous. They're used to

justify every policy, whether it's invading a foreign country to free them or trying to force a on everyone. They always have to bring out the equality card and say that's what America is. And if you disagree, you're not American. So I sent this to a number of people, but Clyde Wilson and Brian McClanahan from the Ababaville Institute were some of them, and they liked it and wanted to do it. So Abbeville Institute did sponsor this. And then I went around filming different people. Some of them you might know, like Kevin Gootsman is in the project. Obviously, Brian McClanhan's in the project. I don't know if you know Joseph Stromberg. I thought you might because he was in Auburn for a while at the Mises Institute, but he's in it.

We have everyone from culinary chefs to musicians to historians and political theorists weighing in on what America truly is. And we started in 1607 because that is the first permanent English settlement in North America, in Jamestown. And before the pilgrims ever arrived, we have elected representatives in the House of Burgesses. We have music. We have cuisine. We have religion. We have, you know, the first Thanksgiving is in 1619. The pilgrims haven't even showed up yet. And so we wanted to trace America back to the headwaters. And we thought that's really the headwaters. And when you think of things that are quintessentially American, you think of the South more often than not, especially when it comes to cultural things that are uniquely American. So we want people to regain a sense of pride in what, America truly is and an understanding of where they fit into that. And we want people to see America for, I just think what it truly is, which is a people,

a place, not a proposition and not an abstraction. So there you go. There's so much rugby on Sports Exeter from Sky. They've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jampacked with rugby. For the first time, we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the

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And there's the argument that can a colony actually have a high culture? And, you know, my friend Thomas recently said, yeah, we had a high culture. It's a South. It was the South. And that's why I needed, that's why certain forces destroyed it. And really what it comes down to, and then Paul Fahrenheit said, yeah, it's Virginia. It was Virginia. That's the high culture of the United States.

If you're looking for a Spinglaria and a yaki-like high culture, you're looking at Virginia in the south, what it was. And I think it's very interesting that we didn't last 100 years before forces decide that it needed to be destroyed. Yeah. Well, I think that Virginia first is an app title because of what you, you just described. You're right. There's a cavalier culture there that did supply, well, most of the presidents before Abraham Lincoln, I think there was only one president who wasn't a Virginian. And so they were our elites. They were the ones to, well, the Adam, both of the

Adamses. Okay, too. Sorry. So, but you had our Supreme Court justices. You had our, you know, the first of pretty much everything was Virginia. Patrick Henry, Thomas, Jefferson, our Declaration of Independence, even the things more generally Americans think of as quintessentially American, all come from Virginia. Even the Bill of Religious Toleration, barbecue cuisine really comes from Virginia, the South and Virginia, I guess, as an extension of that. And when Europeans think of America, they're not thinking about the Northeast. They're thinking about things that were made in the South and really the seed of that is Virginia. And so, So Lyon Tyler Gardner is the essayist who wrote Virginia first in 1921.

And it's actually the first essay in the book. He was the son of President Tyler. And he ended up being somewhat of a, I guess you could say, a defender of the South and Virginia in particular. And he wrote a very short essay. I would recommend everyone read it. Obviously pick up the book. You can get it there. But he shows how Virginia was first in just about everything.

They were even foremost in the Revolutionary War, obviously George Washington being the commander who led the effort, first president of the United States. Even under the Articles of Confederation come to think of it, I just thought of this. Peyton Randolph was the first president that he's, I believe, in other Virginians. So you have Virginians just all, they're running the show. They were all over the place. And it changed. Something changed, especially after Lincoln. And so what was that?

And was it a good change? And we explore some of these questions. Virginia lost her supremacy at that point and was still a large, it still is, you know, somewhat influential states. It's bordering D.C., but it's lost a lot of its character if you go to northern Virginia. It's not the same. You have to really get into southern Virginia before you start finding real Virginia again. But we think that getting back to what Virginia was and Virginia being, of course, not just the territory,

we think of Virginia today, but a large part of the United States. I mean, it went out to the Midwest. When George Washington explored Ohio, he was exploring Virginia. That's what he thought he was doing. Our first explorers, our real explorers, Lewis and Clark, you know, went out west. They were from Virginia. Virginia was such an important place. And I think shifting from Virginia, sort of a Virginia centric approach to American history to a more Massachusetts centric approach has changed the way we think of ourselves. And that has enabled us to get to the point of thinking America is an idea. And we can explain that and talk about that if you want. But we see that as a negative. Well, this is just a classic Hamilton versus Jefferson, isn't it? It's city versus,

it's city versus rural. I mean, and that's what it's been since the beginning. And anyone who's smart, anyone who's intelligent, anyone who understands what a polity, the things a polity needs to operate, understands that Hamilton made some great points. I mean, he cannot be dismissed out of hand. But when it comes to what I think is more important than anything, and that's your culture, that was Virginia. There is no Massachusetts culture. as far as I'm concerned. Maybe now, maybe the Irish culture now you can talk about the Boston and everything like that. But when it comes to America, everything was centered around Virginia.

Everything. The most important, the most important constitutional, the conventions they had bad, the state conventions they had back when they went back to the states and they said, we're going to have to convince these people to it was it was Virginia it's always been Virginia all the generals in the civil war I mean it's yeah the military tradition of Virginia is unparalleled so Zachary Taylor you know George Washington Robert E Lee these guys were viewed I mean they're still studied today as I think Winston Churchill not not that we're promoting him in everything he's ever said but he did it's just interesting that someone of that status from a foreign country would say Robert E. Lee was the greatest general

in the English-speaking world that they've ever produced. You wouldn't hear anyone say that today. Trump wouldn't even say that probably. And it's true, though. I mean, Robert E. Lee was a brilliant, brilliant general. And so we talk about that as well, the Virginia military tradition and how that even we lived with that up until the World Wars and even into Vietnam. there was still some of that carried through. I think it's probably being stamped out, the last remaining remnants of it at this point. But that's part of the thing that made us great.

And we keep hearing the slogan, Make America Great again. And I think the Virginia first 1607 project explains and flushes out what that would mean, what that would look like. Well, when people do bring up slavery in 1619 project slavery, it has to be discussed. And it's gotten to the point where people like me,

I'm just, I'm at the point where I just dismissed the argument because I'm not, I don't want to hear it. You know, I understand that basically everyone, I mean, slave comes from Slav. I mean, even Elon Musk said that the other day and posted that the other day. And then somebody, I can't remember, retweeted it and said, you can take the, you can take the boy out of South Africa, out of apartheid South Africa. but you can't take apart side South Africa out of the boy. So how do you deal with slavery? How do we deal with the legacy of slavery in this country? Well, the way we dealt with it in the documentary,

and I think there's a chapter in the book about this as well, if I'm not mistaken, but really the way it's framed is that, you know, this was something, first of all, that we need to understand there wasn't a modern state around to stop. So I think people generally with their preference, presentist assumptions think, why didn't the government just step in and stop this? And you have to understand the decentralized nature of the colonial period. There wasn't any authority that was capable of doing that anyway. So this formed organically. And it wasn't until Anthony Johnson,

who is a funny story. The whole thing is funny just because I've known that story for decades. Oh, have you? Yeah. So the first technical, legal slave owner in the country is a black guy himself who's saying, this is my slave. Even 1619, it's more likely that the Dutch ship who brought slaves, those are actually indentured servants who came. But I digress. This was given a legal sanction and it was throughout all of the colonies. And by the time it grew and we had a few generations of slavery and then slave ships from the northeast primarily where they kept bringing slaves into the country, but by the time this became a bigger issue, it was difficult to know how to deal with it and what to do about it. And I think that the founding fathers in their prudence tried to limit it

and tried to progressively or gradually get to a point that they could do away with it. And as you see in the Constitution, 1808, they're going to stop bringing in African slave ships. I think Jefferson He had a diffusion theory where he thought if we could bring slaves out west, that would diffuse it, and they would have more opportunities for building their own lives without the pressure of living in a society very different from theirs. But none of this worked. None of this was allowed to take place. And the Republican Party eventually culminated really in the Republican Party, not wanting. There's so much rugby on sports extra from Sky, they've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use.

for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jampacked with rugby. For the first time we've fed every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place. Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra. Jampacked with rugby.

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They wanted that reserve for free white labor. And so they wanted to free slaves, the abolitionists did at least, in the North, without compensation or integration. And that was not a, that was a irresponsible, actually, move. And Sandy Mitchum says that in the documentary. And what's that, that has led to today, I think, is a poisoning of race relations. Because we freed them in the worst possible scenario, in a war-torn region, in poverty and starvation, A million of them, it's estimated, starved or died after the war.

And they were used as political pawns from that point forward. And that brings us to the present. And it's like, it's a depressing story, to be quite honest, just because every other country in the world was able to end slavery without a war. And we just did it in the most clumsy, worst way possible. But I don't think that that defines what America is intrinsically on a fundamental level. It's not like slavery is America. Certainly, though, we should acknowledge some of the.

profound things that slavery brought to the United States. For example, barbecue cuisine is thought to be. I had Lance Nidaharo, a culinary chef. He's won chopped. He's been on an iron chef. I think he won that. And I interviewed him about Southern cuisine. And that's what he sold this in the documentary is that some of these cuts of meat

weren't really being used by the landed gentry. And the slaves ended up slowly cooking it and making it tender. And that's kind of the genesis of barbecue. So there's things like that that we can point to and say, you know, there's part of the American character has been formed by some of this mingling of different cultures. But I don't think that people today have anything to feel guilty for. You know, if anything, there's a providential way to look at this that many Virginians sought this way, that there was attached to this labor relationship, a blessing of Christianization

and opportunities to better themselves. You think of like Jefferson Davis, who, I mean, he's seen as a villain, but he was the one in Congress who fought for slaves to be able to patent their own inventions and things like that. So there was a moral, I would say, capacity that the South had to eventually end the practice, but it was difficult to know how to do it, especially with the way they were being treated by the North. And this has become, I think, of political football.

that's being used to really weaponize the left against the right and try to get people who are descendants of slaves today to feel like there are a lot in life as the result of slavery. But you start going back and it seems like families were more intact. Before the civil rights movement, there was more upward mobility economically. They were doing better. So, you know, what changed? What happened? And it wasn't slavery that led to all these things.

At a certain point, I think you also have to just stop blaming that what happened hundreds of years ago for the current plight. So to lay on the plane on this, are there things that confer identity in slavery? Are there experiences and things that we need to know about? Yes, the 1607 covers those things. Is this something that should be weaponized, though, against Americans today to make them feel bad? No, I don't think so at all. And we're pretty unapologetic about that. On the many days of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee,

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There's so much rugby on Sports Extra from Sky, they've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. Thus the U.S.C and all the best European rugby all in the same place.

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You talk about the way slaves were treated after 1865, the freedmen. And we recently did a couple hours on the show talking about how a lot of the freed slaves were weaponized against white populations. There were black-owned newspapers in New Orleans calling for white genocide. And I think it's not an accident. I'm one of these people who talk about how whenever you go back, and especially starting with the American War for this war, I don't want to call it the Civil War, but that's what everyone calls it. So the Civil War.

Sure. The people who like are the regime in charge right now, you can really start seeing in the American Civil War, then you go to World War I, especially World War II, and you can see that basically the forebearers of this ideology of the way people are treated, the way people are sought to be punished after the war. They did it in the South here.

They did it in Austria and Germany after World War I, horrifically in Germany after World War II, the population needs to be punished for their part in this, for being, for their identity as the quote-unquote bad guys in the conflict, or basically the ones that lose. And I see it starting, all of this starting, like right after the war with the way the freedmen were whipped up to, to try, they're basically trying to weaponize them against the white population. And I look at like 2020, the summer of George. I see all of this connected. This is just a line that goes through since this time.

Yeah, well, you know how the left says there's simmering under the surface. There's this racism that's just always waiting to pop up. And it kind of goes away for a little while. And then all of a sudden, Donald Trump, and it's out again. And it seems more likely that there is this, I mean, it might be more extreme to call it a genocidal tendency. That might be too strong a word. But for some people, that is a description. But there is this very anti kind of heritage American and specifically anti-southern tendency that seems to come up every now and then.

And I think 2020 was certainly part of that. I mean, look at the monuments that they took down. They took down hundreds of Confederate monuments. And I know the conservative ink, whenever they even try to touch that issue of monuments, they'll focus on the few, you know, oh, look, what they did to Francis Scott Key or Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Columbus. It's like, sure, they did. But overwhelmingly, what they took down were Confederate-related monuments. And then Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, I think, would have been the second most, maybe him or Columbus.

I'm not sure. But Thomas Jefferson certainly was targeted quite a bit as well for his connection to slavery. So this tendency, I don't think we're done with this is what I'm trying to say. Like I think this is still ongoing and there's a resentment against the people who are more traditional on the Bible Belt. But before the Civil War ended, actually before the Civil War started, even as far back as like 1835, there was a postal crisis where abolitionists in the North were, they sent down at the end of all the two postal crises because there was two of them. there was millions probably of pieces of literature that they would send down south. And they would send down missionaries down south to, you know, so put your Christian missionaries,

but they were carrying this literature. And some of it was to foment slave insurrections and rebellions. And this is one of the reasons you even had some anti-literacy laws was because they didn't want their slaves reading some of these things. And, you know, kill your masters. Don't work for them anymore. And obviously, Southerners saw this as a big threat. with the high percentage of some of their populations that were slaves. They did not want to see what happened in Haiti, happened to them.

And there were smaller insurrections that did kill people. And after John Brown, I think that was kind of the final straw. That was like, okay, you guys, you don't want to work with us. You don't want to share a country with us. There's enough of you in the north that want to see us dead. And even in your elite classes, you have people like William Lloyd Garrison honoring, John Brown with a eulogy and Harriet Pieter Stowe comparing him to Christ. And it's like, how do we share a country?

And I think we're at that same point now. It's the same question of like, how do we share a country with these people? They certainly don't want us to be around. They're, even with Trump, the way they're treating him with wanting to lock him up for every little thing he does. I think that we don't cover this really, by the way, in the documentary. We've kind of taken a tangent, which is fine. but we should be proud of who we are and not apologize for it and not feel the need to have to, I think, defend our identity and the existence of our ancestors.

The Constitution was set up for ourselves and our posterity. That's what it says in the document. And I'm grateful that my ancestors were here at that point. We were part of all of that. And I'm not against assimilation and that kind of thing. but that's why the structures of this government were set up. That's who it was intended to benefit. That was an in-group preference.

And it's time to start thinking of ourselves, I think, according to the heritage that we have, because we've been handed so much. And to see it squandered, to see now the third world come in and just take advantage of mechanisms that have been set up with blood, sweat, and tears over the course of generations is, it's not right. And it's, you know, I can't, the easiest thing for me as a parent is, you know, I look at my daughter in the eye and she's a little baby right now, but I think of, what is she going to encounter?

What's her world going to look like? And are we already liquidating her future because of some of the policies today? So, so this project, getting back to the 16-07 project, this project, I think, will firm up American identity and understanding of who we actually are as a people, our culture, our culture, our food, our religion, our government, our politics, and how we approach that. And I've already had some people get back to me saying, like, I didn't learn any of this stuff in public school. This is really, I thought we were terrible. And this has made me look at things differently. And I see all the positive things that I can look at and be proud of. And that's what we're hoping

people take away from it. You mentioned the term Heritage American earlier. And I know you've had C.J. Engel. on a couple times. When asked, he always refers to, you know, Heritage American to me is like, you come from the founding stock from pre-1776 kind of thing. CJ says, he thinks we have to look at it as up to the Ellis Island generation. And he said, after that, sure, there are going to be people who are great Americans who've come here and done. done great things and are truly, you know, adopted the American culture. But that's when you really start seeing large masses of people come who just, they're not, they're not being forced to assimilate.

They're not Americans. They're here. They're here to get what they can. And that doesn't mean it has to be one generation. That can actually become multi-generational. So talk about heritage American. Yeah, well, it is where I live right now. I live in the Hudson Valley region of New York, which is a historically Dutch area.

And by the way, the Dutch were also here very, very early. And there's some settlements not far from me that are 1600s. You know, it's just, it's amazing, these stone houses. But, you know, all that to say, right now, the places where these Dutch settlers used to live, are, I mean, you might have a street name here or there that resembles that, but in 2020, they changed some of those because some of the Dutch owned slaves. But living on those streets are people that have no connection to it and no respect for it. And I think that that you think about it in a smaller terms, it makes more sense.

Like if you think about it like with a house and a family, if you just brought a bunch of people who weren't part of that house, you know, much later after the house, was built by the father and the family settled there and they colonized the area and killed all the wild animals that would threaten them. And then another group comes in and they say this is also our house. We're going to live here. They're not going to have the same attachment or respect for it. And I'm just seeing this firsthand where I live. My wife, a little story, personal story here, my wife, she goes back to the 1600s in this area. And we were taking a walk not long ago, there's this gatehouse for a big, it's like a nature preserve, but also a

resort, but they have this gatehouse from the 1800s. And her great, great grandfather lived in that gatehouse and managed that property. So it has special family attachment. And there were some Indians, immigrants, I'm assuming, from New York City who had come up and over the weekend, and they put a volleyball net right in, like no one's ever done this. This is like a historical building, but they put a volleyball net right in front of it. And they just get loud and boisterous and the noise pollution and just the way they were acting made it miserable for everyone. No one wanted to be around them. They were and I even thought of calling the park.

And what I'm trying to get at is that they have no attachment to it like my wife does or like I do being married into her family. You know, we look at that and we want to respect it. We think it's significant. We're on, you know, it's not necessarily holy ground in the religious sense, but it's close to it. You know, this is where our ancestors lived and worked and, you know, it means something. We want to preserve it for our children or at least see it preserved. And to have a foreign people come in who have no connection to any of it is that all that means is that you get enough of those people and you lose it because, you know, they're not. going to participate in any of the upkeep. They're not going to value it when it comes up to

zoning laws and whether it comes up to the town board or something, should we use this land to develop a new shopping center that will make more money for your area? They're the kinds of people that have no connection to it that would say, sure, that would be better for us financially. But it's not better for us as far as our rich heritage and history. And all of that confers identity and gives you stability. And that's what we're missing as a whole. That little story I just told you, I think, is happening all over the place, thousands and thousands of times, if not millions of times over in places across this country. And people who have invested a whole lot in this country over the course of generations are seeing it all ripped down. And it's not happening even gradually.

It's happening very, very quickly. And these are very important things because they tell us who we are. They ground us here and they make us want to be better people to manage the areas we live in, to be neighborly with the people who live there and share it with us. There's no social stability. There's no social trust. You can't even run a market if you don't have social trust when we get rid of all of these things. And I think that people who are in favor of mass immigration, whether illegal or illegal,

aren't thinking through that. Yeah, it's just sad. So that's one of the things we wanted to confer in this is the 1607 project is to remind you and everyone who watches it of who you are. And if you don't, if you didn't participate in the founding generation, you know, you should, I'm going to borrow something from the LGBT, activists if I can, but you're an ally, right? If you're listening to this and you're conservative and you want those things matter to you, you're an ally. And if you've married in, you've integrated into this too. And there's probably other ways to integrate into it as well. But you're part of that story as well if you value it.

But I think it means something very special to those who actually have those attachments. And we want to conserve those attachments. And that's the only thing that would have motivated us to do the 1607 project. Because I wouldn't have made it. It was terribly inconvenient for me to make this. But I want something to pass down to my kids to say, this is what makes America. great and this is the story that you're part of. And you don't have to go looking for your identity

on other places. You're rooted right here. There's so much rugby on Sports Extra from Sky. They've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jampacked with rugby. For the first time we've met every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more.

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new car joy. Symptoms may include spontaneous smiling, sudden increases in confidence and uncontrollable urges to take the scenic route. If you experience any of these symptoms, don't worry. The only known treatment is enjoying your new vehicle. Side effects may also include great value and exceptional customer service. Talk to a friendly professional at Frank Heen Volkswagen today and see if upgrading your car is the right prescription for you. So my family didn't get here until my mom's family didn't get here. My granddad's family didn't get here until like the early 1800s, like the 1810s.

But what happens if my wife's family was one of the founding, like has an ancestor that helped found Texas? Does that how does that help? How does that help? Oh, well, Texas is its own country. So you probably have more of a claim to Texas than I do. No, I think that, well, like I said, I mean, borrowing from the LGBTQ, maybe I shouldn't borrow from that.

I just don't know what other language to use from their vocabulary. Like, you know, you're, you're, I mean, that's an early time, to be honest with you. I was going to say you'd be an ally, but you're more than that, really, because you're, this is preceding the Civil War. This is a very early time in the country's history when your family got here. And obviously marrying in, I do think that is the main way to assimilate and integrate, to be honest. And I know the Proposition Nation advocates think that you can just step foot on our soil. And I don't even know if they think you have to take a citizenship class anymore.

It doesn't seem like it. All you have to do is love equality, whatever that is. And you're an American. Or you plant your flag in Iraq and make them Americans. and that's ridiculous. Like you have to, there has to be something rooted somewhere, right? And I'm not saying that there's a super rigid answer.

Like it's kind of like if, if I said, Pete, like, you know, pretend you've never been to United States ever, right? You're a Martian. You're as far away as you can possibly be.

And I said, and I try to describe to you, you know, like what's an American? And I was trying to like give my 10 points. Here's the 10 things. You still wouldn't really know. You have to.

see it to know what it is. Same thing with what's a southerner. You kind of have to see it and you know it when you see it. And I think Americans kind of like that. There's an organics to these relationships. These form over time with planting and fertilizing and growing and passing on to the next generation. So this is something that I'm hesitant to give you like the 10 points of like what makes

an American and whether or not you meet these criteria. I think it's more of an ethos. And you have a desire to fit into that ethos. And part of that desire is you learn the history. You learn the story. And you know, it sounds like you know exactly where you came into that story. What part of the movie, what scene you entered into it and your family entered into it and your wife's family. I think that's part of it.

If you don't care about those things, even if you have the blood, if you don't care about those things and you just want to rip them all down, then, you know, you're, at best, you're a lousy American. I don't even know where to categorize you. I mean, you're, you've betrayed your people. And we need to get back a sense of our people. This is our, this is we, this is us, those plural pronouns. It makes me sad thinking how many, um, dars are like progressive shit lib women now living in the big city, you know, Daughters the American Revolution.

Are they taking a turn left? I haven't like kept track of the. Well, no, no, I'm not talking about the, I'm not talking about the organization. I'm talking about women who could qualify, you know, qualify for that who, you know, may have taken a shit-lived turn and everything like that. Sorry for person, but, but.

I get, I understand the concept. Yeah, they're, they, they've, they pretty much wanted to just burn it all down and, and, you know, I guess have their cat and go to the Democratic Party and, have their boyfriend get a vasectomy while they get an abortion or something. I mean, that's, all the founding fathers would have been completely aghast. They would have just, they would have probably said, shut it down, guys. Like, this is, you know, let's not do this.

This isn't going to work. But if they do it. The shut it down meme, but for real. Yeah. If they knew their grandkids would be like that, they would have just been, they couldn't conceive of it to be quite honest. It just would not have even been a thought in their heads. And yeah, no, it's super, um,

unfortunate that we've gotten to that point. But that's years of 1619 project thinking that has, obviously it didn't start with the 1619 project. This has been in our schools since at least the 1960s or 70s, you know, in primitive forms. And, uh, I can, I can tell you that it was being taught in public schools, grade schools in the early 70s. Yeah, so I can tell you that. I know that for a fact. You were there. What about the people who, what about, and this is, it's great that you're talking about this because most of your, most of what you, the content you put out is you're talking about modern day Christianity, modern day Protestantism.

What do you say to the people who say, well, Christians, shouldn't even have a nation. It's foreign to call a nation Christian, that something was founded upon Christian values, that Christians are, our kingdom is not of this world. So what are you doing, John? We cover this in the documentary. There's a very strong Christian focus. And part of my contribution is that. But even if I wasn't part of it, you have to, because that's a very strong, force in the founding and the colonization and then eventually the settlement of our country. So, yeah, I mean, Barry Shane says in the documentary, and he's not, as far as I know, he's not a Christian, but he says, you know, America's Anglo-Protestant at the root.

And obviously, toleration for other groups, you have, there was a Catholic guy, Charles, I think it's Charles Carroll, who signed the Declaration of Independence. We had, you know, there was Catholic settlements in Maryland in Pennsylvania. Yeah, Maryland, yeah. Yeah, Maryland. Yeah, I mean, originally, yeah. They got outnumbered, I think, pretty quick. But there were definitely still a strong Catholic presence there.

There was, there were some small groups of mostly Sephardic Jews, not Ashkenazi Jews, but there were some Sephardic Jews, especially in South Carolina, who were part of that founding generation. And you also had Quakers who, I guess you can say they're part of Protestantism in a way, but they're very different. You had Amish, who are an Anabaptist group. And I could go on. There are a number of different groups. But the default setting was very much an English Protestantism of some kind, whether that's congregationalism or Presbyterianism or Anglicanism or Baptists.

And I don't want to leave out the Methodists. They get mad. But, you know, that really, that all stems from Anglicanism. And that contributes to not just our legal system, but also the way that we, the mores, you know, the way we treat each other in society, the figures, the expressions that we use when we greet each other. And it's so, it's like a million things that you can't even quite probably trace down because they're so ingrained and so part of who we are and our habits.

And so we lose Protestantism and we will, we lose Christianity. I think we lose our identity, which is the situation we're in right now. We are at an identity crisis. That's why the Christian nationalist thing is happening now. And it's different than the moral majority where it was all about Christian values. This is about Christian identity. Do we conceive of ourselves as Christians anymore or like culturally speaking? Or are we just going to be pagan at this point?

And sexual degeneracy, whatever you want to do, well, we're really what you're going to see at the DNC this week. you know are we okay with Satan statues being prominently displayed in public settings that kind of thing and if we completely lose Christianity we lose our identity I think and that's that's a concerning thing our founding documents don't make sense really without a Christian undercurrent or Christian background so to say should you or can you have a Christian country I don't even know if that's the right question like you know you wouldn't even have America without Christianity. They're so intrinsically related.

I was just reading some Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas debate stuff, and some speeches from Abraham Lincoln. And Lincoln was likely not a Christian. Like in the Orthodox sense of the word, he mocked Christianity, according to Herndon, his law clerk. He didn't regularly go to church. Now, of course, there's this documentary. He said he's a homosexual, which I find hysterical.

but Abraham Lincoln, not probably your orthodox. Have you ever seen a picture of Mary Todd? That was the first thing I thought. Yeah, I thought, well, you know the story probably. You know, he pretended to be sick the day he was supposed to marry her the first time. He didn't want to get out of bed and go marry her. Yeah. So, you know, I think it might be like a Bill Hillary thing.

Like he needed a wife to advance his career. I don't know. But it's an odd relationship. No, no, no, no. I know people who are, I know people who knew them back then and said they were very much in love in the beginning. Are we talking about Mary Todd and Abe or? No, we're talking about. Bill and Hillary. Yeah, I knew some people who knew Bill and Mary Todd Lincoln and Abraham. Yeah. Well, Abraham Lincoln had to saturate his speeches in Christian language. Like, it's insane how

like you would read any, like almost pick any of them today and read them. at even the Republican National Convention, let alone the Democrat National Convention. And you would think, you know, the Theocrats are trying to take it over. But it's not just Blinket. It's anyone from that era because it was so saturated in Christianity. So it's like, I don't know, to argue, I can't argue with those people really because it's kind of like what you said with the slavery, trying to guilt you for slavery. It's just so stupid and insulting.

Just like, okay, you haven't read. If you just read any primary sources from that time, you'll know it was very Christian. And if you told them we're not Christian, they would have looked at you like you had two heads, you know. Don't you think it's interesting that a lot of the, a lot of the Protestants and evangelicals who will tell you that, well, you know, we're not of this world. Yet they are some of the first ones to bring CRT and things right into the church. Yeah, it is a weird dynamic. There's a neoliberal strain in Protestantism. And I think it's in Catholicism, too.

You can correct me if you think I'm wrong on this. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when the last few times someone said to me as the Pope Catholic, I always say no. You know, I don't know. I don't think so.

Well, we hope people start, when you start acting Catholic, then, you know. Oh, when the Pope does, you mean? Yeah. Usually people have to start acting in sounding Catholic before you claim them to be Catholic. Yeah, well, with Protestants, there is an Anabaptist undercurrent. And I think this gradually crept into the church. I think a lot of which we identify today as evangelicalism is the result of 19th century revivalism, which was primarily a northern thing.

So one of the reasons in the documentary, the 1607 project, we focus a lot on Southern religion. It is different. Even to this day, if you go to a church in the south, you'll probably notice some of the differences. But there was a lot of influence after the Civil War, especially from, you know, as you had northern missionaries and northern money and the Bible schools that were still intact and waiting to train pastors were the ones that survived the war, which, you know, a lot of them were in the North. there was this influence that did eventually come in. And there is, you have two things. You have a social reform ethos. You know, this is the prohibitionism, the anti-slavery, the pro-woman's rights,

the anti-Masonry, all of that stuff in the 19th century. You can see that same thinking today with the woke stuff and evangelicalism. Like they're still on that social reform train. And then there was also, there was another strain, though, and the fundamentalists kind of adopted this, where they were just, you know, in their personal conduct, very stringent, you know, no smoking, no drinking, that kind of thing. And you saw a split, I think, in the early 1900s with the social gospel guys going more, let's reform society. And then the fundamentalists eventually developing into cultural fundamentalism, which was like, let's just secede from the world. We're going to be our church here. and we're not going to really impact the world around us.

The way we impacted is the gospel, and that's about it. We're not going to get involved in other things. And these two strains are still with us. And both of them work together to crush any serious right-wing movement. And it's very frustrating for me, because I can hardly point you to an organization in evangelicalism or Protestantism more broadly that's actually working towards the right ends and goals. in the temporal world. Either they're conflating the temporal world with the eternal world and they're

just, I know Stephen Wolfe calls this the Jesus juke, but it's like, you know, every time you show concern for your people or your family or your whatever, they're just like your families that have, you know, it is other Christians and believers and you share more in common with Ethiopians than that are Christian than you do your neighbor who's not and just stupid stuff, you know. And, and they will, they are used they to really pour cold water on right, wingers who are in Christian circles, especially, I think younger men who are getting upset about the deck being stacked against them and the kind of future their children face. And then, of course, you have the woke evangelicals who just would liquidate our future completely

and get rid of any semblance of anything traditional and traditionally, you know, American Christian. So it's a kind of a dismal state of affairs. I am somewhat encouraged. There are some younger pastors starting to rise up who are gaining some traction online. I never thought I would say thank God for the internet. But there are little things like this where I'm like, I guess without the internet, these guys wouldn't be getting traction. And they are, I think, representing more of a masculine Christianity, more biblically rooted,

and understanding the difference between the two kingdoms, being able to be involved in their communities. And the 1607 project, I think, is one of the tools that they have available to them. because they can show that to not just their family, but even people in their congregations and talk about Southern religion, what it was. I mean, there was an experiential element to it. It was very real.

They didn't just read the Bible as an academic exercise. They read the Bible and saw themselves in the stories. It was very rooted, very tangible when they would look at these stories. And I mean, this is the Christianity that, went to the frontiers that converted slaves. I mean, today we even, why are there traditionally black churches in this country for Democrats to go in

most of the time and show for their party? They wouldn't exist if hundreds of years ago you didn't have a missionary effort because they didn't, sub-Saharan African, Africa wasn't Christian. These were people in the South primarily who cared about their slaves. And they taught them the scriptures. And that's,

You know, this has been corrupted over time, obviously in the black church, but that's the genesis of why they even would think of themselves in Christian ways. So there's a rich heritage there to remember and we show the first landing. You know, the first, this kind of gets back to your previous question, but when Robert Hunt, who's the first Anglican pastor to come to the new world, sets foot in Virginia, he plants, they plant a cross there. and we don't know his exact words. There's some speculation about it, but it's because the fire destroyed the records. But he most likely would have done some kind of a prayer and dedication of the colonists to dedicating the land to Christ.

And, I mean, I think putting a cross there signifies that. So from the beginning, this was Christian. You were describing how you have different sects of, Protestantism that'll seek to take anybody who's making, I guess, let's call a right word, more rightward turn, or towards more traditional, let's call it reformed theology. And you see the same thing in right-wing politics, too. I've taken to saying that the left gets their radicals elected to office

and the right cancels theirs. I think it's, yeah, so it's like, I would assume it's the same thing. As soon as you start talking a little, you know, start preaching a little too much on Romans chapter nine, right. Someone's going to step in and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's not inclusive. Well, or, you know, I think the root issue, if we had to boil it down to one thing, is the order of Maris, you know, the order of loves that Augustine talks about. And this would be all Christian traditions would, I would assume, honor Augustine.

And this order of loves, it goes through reform theology. It's every really version of Christianity has an ordering. And it recognized that God gave us roles, responsibilities and roles. We have families as a husband. I have a wife. I'm a member of my church. You know, when I become an elder there, I'm going to be, have more responsibilities. And there's all these things.

You know, we interact in the world. We vote. Well, I think that the younger right-wing guys, I mean, I use the term right wing, but these guys want to order their lives by that. They see that there is an order in the universe that God has placed and given them a place of belonging in it so that their energy is channeled toward useful ends that actually build up their lives and make their communities, their families better and make themselves better. And so they're going to the gym, you know, this is bigger than just, that's what I want people to understand. This is bigger than just going to church. Like they're going to the gym.

They're getting muscles. They're making sure that their bodies are ready for whatever happens. And yes, they are going to church. They're trying to discipline themselves to understand what God expects of them and to fulfill those responsibilities in every arena. And this is what I think the Christians today that have institutional power, at least, are involved in attacking. And those two groups I mentioned do it differently.

One group says, your order of loves is terrible because you're people are white and they're terrible and you should, you know, let's just, let's care about the other, right? The person who's so different from you, you get the most brownie points for caring for them, not the person who's next to you, who you have proximity with. And they flipped a good Samaritan on its head to try to do this, to focus on, hey, he was a Samaritan instead of, hey, he was someone in the road that you actually came across in your daily life. So they take out the proximity and want to make it about the foreigner. And that's just, you know, it's like the maternal instincts that these women in Congress have,

who I don't have children, they like apply them to these foreign peoples. And then you have this other group that they just don't see that as much. They think that all of your energy and your identity should be channeled through the church, the ecclesia. And so when you think of your people and doing what's right by your people, that has to be the church. That has to be Christians and not just your local church, but like the church universal oftentimes. So Christians in any part of the world, like your duty to them is equal. And that trumps any duty you have to your next door neighbor if they're not a Christian or something

like that. So it takes away a rootedness in your land, identity conferred even through ancestry, these natural things that God has placed there. And it perverts it. And it only sees, and of course you're supposed to have a duty to Christians. But, there's an order of loves. Why does it say in the Bible that if you don't provide for your family, you're worse than an unbeliever? Why does it say that even evil fathers know how to give good gifts to their sons? And if they ask for a fish, they don't give them a snake. Why is it that in the story of the rich man in Lazarus, Lazarus is waiting to go to hell and he says, warn my family so that they don't have to suffer what I'm about to suffer? There's these natural instincts God put into us.

It's part of the order that he's put there. And 1607 project is trying to just kind of start that engine again and make people realize who their people are, who Americans are fundamentally. This is kind of broad, to be honest, but who Americans are, where it started, and some of the significant things that confer identity and should bring a sense of and a desire to protect, preserve, and work towards helping your people and gaining that we, that us that are. So this is definitely part of your Christian duty. This is part of the God's ordering, I think, to recognize heritage. And that's part of honoring your father. I think Roger Scruton calls it

Pietas, right? This piety you have for those who have come before you. And that's gone today in the church for the most part, which is really sad. Let's end it right there. Where can people find not only the 1607 project, but all of your work? Oh, I'll give you a few websites. So the quickest way to find the 1607 project is 1607project.com. You just go there, you'll find the documentary,

and you can order the book. It's about an hour and a half long. I would love it if you show it, show it to your group, you know, whatever that is, homeschool group, a group of friends, whatever, your family. You can also go to my personal website, John Harris Podcast.com, and you can find my books and podcast and social media links.

And I'm pretty good about getting back to people if they message me. At least I try to. I appreciate it, John. Thank you very much. Thank you for all you do. And thank you for making this. Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Pete. Appreciate it. There's so much rugby on Sports Exeter from Sky. They've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live,

plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place. Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra. Jampack with rugby. Phew, that is a lot of rugby. Get Sports Extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months. Search Sports Extra. New Sports Extra customers only.

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