The Problem With Jon Stewart - American “Heritage” vs. American History

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

As debates over what it means to be a "heritage American" enter mainstream political discourse, Jon is joined by University of Florida Professor Allen C. Guelzo and Yale historian Joanne Freeman, host of "History Matters" podcast. Together, they examine what this loaded term actually means, explore how American identity has been defined and contested throughout the nation's history, and discuss the central role immigrants have always played in shaping who we are. Plus, Jon talks about the “enemy of the people” and presidential pardons! This podcast episode is brought to you by: GROUND NEWS - http://groundnews.com/stewart. Subscribe for 40% off the unlimited access Vantage subscription for yourself or if you send it as a gift. AURA FRAMES - Exclusive $35 off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/TWS. Promo Code TWS. INCOGNI - Use code stewart at https://incogni.com/stewart to get an exclusive 60% off. HELLO FRESH - http://hellofresh.com/TWS10FM Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast> TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Producer – Gillian Spear Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. We have been gone a week. It was obviously a holiday week, the Thanksgiving holiday, where we all sat down and ate delicious food and watched football games and tried not to think about what it's actually about. But it's so apropos to a new national conversation that is brewing in this country about who is America?

What is America? Who belongs here? doesn't belong here. Clearly the president has ideas and states them with such grace from the Oval Office. But I thought, boy, wouldn't it be nice to get a little bit of nuance and into this conversation with people who understand what we were at our founding, who we were at our founding, what we were meant to be, and how it grew from there. And the different times within our history where the arguments over who we are and where we should come from and what America actually means and who it belongs to really bubbled out into the public sphere.

So we are going to jump right in with that. Both guests are just so erudite and knowledgeable within this sphere. So we're just going to jump in with them. Here they are. Okay, folks, so we are delighted today to be joined by Dr. Alan Gelsho, Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida. and Joanne Freeman, professor of history in American Studies at Yale University and host of History Matters. Guys, thank you both very much for joining us. The discussion today is who is America?

What are we actually? There seems to be as we enter this sort of draconian immigration enforcement period and a kind of a much more of a sense of this new terminology of heritage Americans having kind of being slightly above the rabble of other Americans. I guess the discussion today should probably start in kind of defining this idea. Is heritage American, is that defined through a religious lens? Is it through an ethnic lens? Is it through just purely a time lens? Joanne, what's your understanding of what heritage American even means? Well, my understanding, based on what I've seen, the people who are using it, is fundamentally, it says you are a heritage American if you trace yourself and your roots back in American hits history to a certain degree.

I think your question about lenses, there are different lenses. I think some people would argue it goes back to a sort of Anglo-Protestant idea of what American is. is that goes all the way back. Some would argue that it, although it's not put this explicitly, that there's a white component, right? So if you look at the long history of America, as far as nativism goes and as far as white nationalism go, that term certainly plugs into a lot of that. But those are certainly two very different things.

So I guess the more benign definition of it is, well, we're seeing it through a lens of those that have been here longer, whereas the more maybe loaded one is, yeah, it's for white people. It's a nationalist. Like, we're looking for white people. Alan, what's your understanding of how that's being used now? And is it being used cynically? I'm tempted to say cynically. Because I don't think, I don't have a sense that the people who are using this kind of

terminology or trying to formulate these kinds of ideas really have a particularly serious grasp of this heritage thing they're talking about. if we want to talk about an American heritage, it seems to me the two most obvious things are at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And neither one nor the other tell us anything about where people are supposed to have come from or what their lineage is or how long they're supposed to have been here to qualify. Sometimes it said that it takes 1,200 years to make somebody French. What? They have to age it like Roqueford? Exactly.

Why would they do that? Depending on where in France. You've got to get through an entire wine cellar. But in America, you can become an American in 20 minutes. You read the declaration. You read the Constitution. You sign it. You're in.

That's it. My favorite example of this is my great-grandfather from Sweden. He emigrated in the 1880s. He could not wait to abjure the King of Sweden. He wanted to be an American even before he left the shores of Scandinavia. He wrote out longhand in pencil, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg address. He had no use for monarchs and aristocrats. I have another great-grandfather who departed from Bavaria in the 1890s, came to Chicago.

a little classic Jewish tailor. He had come from a small town just west of Munich called Dachau. Oh, Lord. And he came in the 1890s from there. And I am so glad he did. Boy, you're not kidding. These are people who wanted to be Americans. And their desire was focused on those great documents,

those great ideas of what it is that we saw. sign on to, which is a proposition. This is what Lincoln says at Gettysburg. How did we come to do existence for a score and seven years ago? We came conceived in this idea of liberty and dedicated to a proposition. This is not about heritage. Anybody, anybody can lay hands on this. And Lincoln himself, I'm going to quote Lincoln a lot, no surprise. That's right. I could, I can come back with Hamilton. Lincoln is your bailiwick. Joanne Freeman's going to come in with Hamilton. And I'm probably in a quote, Spiro Agnew. So we're going to run the gamut. But seriously, Hamilton is another example. Where is Hamilton born? He was not born on the Upper West Side. Sure. On the islands.

You know, maybe he's born on the Upper West Side of St. Kitts, but, you know, he's in the islands. He's a bastard. I'm not using that as a pejorative term. I'm literally describing the man. But this is, it's attention. And my ancestors, this is the same thing. You come and you find in America, this openness, it is a regime of reason. It's a regime of creed. It's a regime of belief. And enlightenment. Exactly. And people, there was a great poem written in 1916. And it was a poem simply entitled, I'm an American. And the first verse of it was all about someone who was descended from, you know, the sons of the Mayflower and all that kind of thing. The second was about someone whose father had been imprisoned in Siberia,

whose mother was a cast-off from the great white czar. They were nothing more than a wisp of straw. But when they came to America, the wisp of straw became a man and a woman. And that is the great, if there is a heritage, that is the heritage that we lay claim to. It's that ideal.

Yeah, exactly. But that, you know, it's, And it's fascinating because the tension between, as you beautifully put, Alan, the proposition that drew people versus the idea of a kind of native definition or ethnic definition is there from the start because Joanne, look, we are a proposition. You can read the declaration. But the Constitution does define white Americans as being above. other Americans. It's, this is not something that is born of thin air. And it seems to be,

uh, the, the difficult question that we have had to answer over these 250 years. And, and later in the discussion, we'll walk through the way we try to answer it with 1924 immigration and 1965 immigration and all those different ways. But this idea of America as a proposition is obviously laid out in those documents. But so is the other idea. And how do we square that? Right. And part of the way that we square that is by acknowledging that the ideas that the founders put out there into the world. You have to say it that way when you say the family.

The ideas that they put out into the world were ideas that they had an understanding of, meaning they were in a world in which they were thinking of white men with a certain amount of property as being the people that they were largely talking. to, but that the ideas that they gave birth to in the Declaration of Independence, in the Constitution, were ideas that were broad enough, you know, the human condition, right? They're broad ideas that later generations, all kinds of marginalized peoples could point to those documents and talk about those ideals and own those ideals. and as Alan was just suggesting, use them to say, well, you know, I'm an American too. I understand these documents. So it isn't as though whatever the founding generation of people thought about the boundaries of who has certain kinds of rights and who doesn't, the ideas that they put forth. So the proposition that they put forth was broad enough that it was open.

I mean, so there is kind of an openness to that period as to what an American is. One of the things I love about the founding period is that they don't fully know what an American is at that point. Right. Did they feel homogenous? Did they think of whiteness as a homogenous? Or did they view it as whiteness is Scotch Irish and German is actually not? Like, how did they view that lens? Or did they literally think of it as white and black in the way that they framed it in the three-fifth school?

clauses and things like that. Well, so it depends. I mean, and this is, I'm sure, a point we're going to get into as we talk today. Different moments in time, different people have been considered white or black. Right. It expands and contracts. Exactly. So in this period, sometimes people are upset at the Germans.

You know, they're coming in here and they shouldn't be here and they aren't us. You know, the Irish. Yes, that has happened in history. People have been upset with the Germans. Talking about early. Early, early, early. Fair enough. The Irish, right?

The Irish for a period, we're not considered. to be white. So the founders certainly are assuming that in the realm of political power, they are in a white universe, but they're also assuming that they're making things up as they go along, right? They use the phrase all the time, experiment. We're engaged in an experiment in government. And they thought about things. It was improv, which they say later, those who managed to live to an old age, say, people write to them all the time saying, tell us about the founding. And what they say, actually, John Adams is great on this. Over and over and over again, John Adams says, we didn't know what we were doing. Wait, he had no idea. Yeah. Yeah, it's true.

It's true. Right. Madison, Madison makes this comment. He's writing a letter. He says, we are in a wilderness without a path. Now, he didn't mean that in a pejorative sense. He said, we really are on the doorstep of something entirely new. They all say that in 1789.

But you didn't think at some level they knew that they would be deified? Well, they understood that they were founders. Okay. Right. And so past a certain point, they also understood that their reputation would be bound up in what was happening. You know, I mean, Thomas Jefferson really wanted to die on July 4th, right? He was sort of sort of, he did it. He did.

And he kept, he was sort of semi-conscious and he kept regaining consciousness and asking people, is it the 4th yet? And they said, no, he kept going. And the fourth, he came along. So they understood to a certain degree they were founders. They were educated to believe, you know, they were reading Plutarch's lives of the great Greeks and Romans. The greatest thing you could do for your country was to be a statesman, to be a founder of a nation. And they wrote all the time to each other saying, can you believe our luck? Can you believe that we're here at a moment when we can do this?

But along with that goes a huge sense of rule. risk, contingency, responsibility. They're thinking about posterity. And they were thinking about national identity and national character in such a concrete way. There's a whole discussion in the first year or two of the government in which they're worried about how should elite politicians, how should the people in national government actually dress, meaning how much lace seems to aristocratic and monarchical? And the reason that matters is they thought, well, people are going to look at us, and if we look like aristocrats, if we look like monarchists, they will think that that is what we are as a country. So they're really, in a really interesting sort of self-conscious

way, crafting an idea of what national character and national identity is. So as we look now as to, like, what is actually the American character? They were down to like, should we wear wigs? Maybe we shouldn't wear wigs. Wait, wait, John, I'm in favor of people wearing wigs. Settle down, Alan. Now, this is a podcast. People can't see. We have a follically challenged American. Actually, two of them on the program today.

Alan and myself. That's right. Folks, you know, well, I've gone on about this before. And I'm going to continue to go on. Wait, you tell me what I can talk about? What I can't. No, I'm going to keep talking about this until you get this damn thing. Ground News.

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Ground News doesn't dictate how the readers should think or feel. They just aggregate and they organize the information so you can be better informed. Go to groundnews.com slash steward. Subscribe for 40% off the unlimited access

vantage subscription for yourself or if you send it as a gift. Brings the price down to like $5 a month. That's groundnews.com slash steward or scan the QR code on screen. You know, when we, We talk about that. So they were specific in their conversations about, but they were separating,

it seems, Alan, who would be a statesman, sort of this, the different levels. It's not that they didn't think in terms of a caste society. They really thought, no monarchs, but there were going to be elites. They were going to be elites because they expected, they hoped, that the leadership of this new experiment was going to come from people who had education, they had talent, they had demonstrated service. What's interesting is that it's never connected to birth. I think one of the most unusual provisions in the Constitution is the one, it's a very brief phrase, which says there shall be no titles of nobility, which means there's no

aristocracy. Right. It's not, it's not going to happen. So for them, all right, it's not going to be what we might call the level playing field where anybody can walk in. But there is an expectation that it is going to be open to a remarkable degree of people who have made themselves. And no one's a better example of that than Alexander Hamilton. Of course, that meant he was also sometimes resented for that. Right.

Well, didn't he view himself as a kind of renegade and, as you said earlier, a bastard that he felt he had to fight to be. viewed. Yes, he actually, he actually, a lot, ponders, towards the end of his life, he will say things like, this is really upsetting me. And am I not an American? Why is this upsetting me more than some other Americans are? Towards the end of his life, he says, this American world was not meant for me. He always understands to a certain degree that he isn't quite in the same place as others. He would have been called in the time period. a mushroom gentleman. And what that meant is... A mushroom gentleman? A mushroom gentleman. What? I don't want to talk about what that means now.

Right, right. Talk about what it means then. That's a good... Yeah. At the time, what it meant was a person without roots. A person who sort of has arrived and sprung up in the dark and we don't know who this person is, you know, people who are not necessarily of known background, not necessarily elite, but who are these people.

You know, we don't know who they are. He came up out of no way. So he certainly would have represented one of those people. But I want to add to what Alan said because absolutely they assumed that people in power would be a kind of an elite, not aristocrats, would be educated. But the fundamental thing that was most experimental about the new government was that it would be grounded on public opinion. Consent of the government. Well, even more than that, what the public believes is what matters. Let the public, so to a greater degree than a monarchy, this is why they feared demagogues.

Because anyone can get the public to think something one way or another and can then grab the government and warp it into being something that's not supposed to be. It's why they valued education, I guess, to the extent that they did. Absolutely. Jefferson thought that all white men should have three years of education because only if you're educated will you, and particularly, I should say, in history, will you recognize the threats to. the republic and be able to see them when they're coming and not get taken in by them. But how do you square out? So it just said all white men should have three years of education. Did they conceive of immigration? Did they see themselves as homogenous? Did they view the fissures between, let's say, you know, Baptist and Lutheran and Calvinist and, you know, Quaker?

did they view those fissures as anything other than just disagreement civically, or did they see some of those things as more uniquely American? Did they think Protestant was American? Catholic was, well, maybe we can teach them. Right. Let's take Washington as an example, because Washington himself speaks to a lot of this. Washington starts off the revolution by saying, we don't want black. recruits for the Continental Army. And people come to him and say, no, no, no, that's not going to work. We're not going to be able to have a Continental Army if that's going to be a rule, if it's

going to be an all-white organization. So that the Continental Army, from very early on, starts to develop black recruits, small black units. By the time we get to 1777 and Bergoin surrender in New York, one Hessian officer is saying, you can't, you can't go anywhere in the American. encampments and not find black soldiers. So right away, you might say that any gesture towards exclusion gets defeated by an American reality, and Washington yields to that. When Washington is president, the leaders of the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, write to him,

they're very anxious. What's going to be our few? Are we going to be part of this American experiment? And his response, which I strongly suspect was written by Hamilton, But his response is, this government gives to bigotry, no sanction, gives to persecution, no assistance, and asks only that the members of it behave themselves as good citizens. It's the only standard Washington lays out. See, this is where I think I have, I come up against the most difficulty that I have. So that is an absolute statement of moral integrity squared with a gentleman who has slaves. That's right. And this is where, I think where we get hung up is the distance between the ideals of these statements for posterity that ring so beautifully on the long moral universe in the arc of history versus the reality of how they establish the country.

They could have obviously established a religion like the Church of England, but they did absolutely undercut whatever moral imperative is in the Constitution with the realities of forming a union. So Joanne, explain how we're supposed to discern that now. Is it the idea that we were supposed to do better than them? Well, they certainly did not assume that they were the best and that everyone coming after of them was going to be downhill. And this is part of what Adam says in his old age when people keep saying, tell us about the founding. He essentially says, look, there was no golden founding

period. And if you think there was, you're going to think it's all downhill from us, which is not the case. You have to judge the government as you go forward in the way that you're going to judge the government. But look, for example, as to how they sort of are squaring things and not really. Look, as one would, at Jefferson. Right. So Jefferson, in his old age, is asked by many to do something, say something against slavery, come forward, endorse a project of someone who's going to take his enslaved population out west and then free them. And Jefferson's response is basically on the one hand admirable. And on the other hand, that's for future generations to take care of.

So he's sort of bowing to the idea and then stepping back and saying that's, you know, future generations will be dealing with this, but I myself in this moment will not. So, and I should say that the founders aren't one big lump of a blob of people to agree. Right. And some of them are, you know, slaveholders and some are not. But that was not something that a lot of people actually did square. They understood that the ideas and ideals that they were using to found the nation were distinctive and were different from where they had come before and meant something different and that a republic was a really different kind of government. They also were new. I mean, they used throughout the revolution, you know, we don't want to be enslaved to England.

They understood that language because they were enslaving people. I mean, I think it's Samuel Johnson who says, you know, the people who are yelping loudest about being enslaved over there in America are the people who own slaves. So the, the, the, the contradiction was really apparent, but it was kind of, as with so many other things, to some degree, pushed off. Right. But the next generation will deal with that. Based on the idea that the important thing was the union.

But Alan, did they then conceive? And this moves the conversation then from sort of this idea of where they were when they were founded into that next step, which is, and how did they believe that they would prosper in the sense of did they conceive of immigration? traditionally in the way that we think. You know, they came from England and, you know, obviously there were Spanish colonies and obviously the French were here and then there were Native Americans that were here

and there were slaves that were here and various different groups. How did they perceive of the nation growing into its clothes? For the earliest generations from the constitutional convention onwards, the rules, so to speak, are laid down. There are two minds, just as there are today. There are some people who would say, we don't want to be swamped by all these foreigners, but they are by no means the dominant voices.

Overwhelming the voices are, we want people to come here because, look, we've got a lot of space and we don't have much labor. We have openings. We need more hands to help. So we're going to open this up. You might say, what was the vetting process for immigrants in, let's say, 1790?

Answer, there was no vetting process. The boat would tie up at the wharf in New York or Philadelphia. People would get off the boat and they're gone. They're out into the landscape. When Alexis de Tocqueville

got off the ship in New York in the 1830s, the first thing that impressed him was there was no official there to greet him. To, to, right, there was. No passport stamp, no line, no nothing.

No real passports. No, no. No, no. No. No. So you have people, yes, who are irked at the behavior of some people who will lose. They will say, these are foreigners. Classic example is citizen Edmund Jeunet, representing the new French Republic and making

himself obnoxious, especially obnoxious to Washington. As they do. And yet at the same time, after the French Republic decides that it's going to, yank the credentials on Jeunay. It's very clear that they're not only going to yank the credentials, but they're going to guillotine him when he goes back to Paris. Wow. And Washington says, no, no, no, we can't let that happen. And Jeunay settles in the United States, moves upstate New York, marries the daughter of the governor of New York, and becomes an American citizen. And in fact, he's still sitting on his property in the Hudson River Valley when Alexis de Tocqueville shows up to pay him a

visit and ask him, what's it like being French in America? The capacity of Americans to absorb this is simply phenomenal. Absorb. That's it. Boy, do I like that word, absorb. And when you turn, to Abraham Lincoln in the 1830s and the 1840s, yes, you have nativists. You have people who are saying, we should be exclusionary, not Lincoln. Lincoln is saying the strength of this country is coming from people who are coming from all over, but who are drawn. They're attracted by what he called this electric cord, the electric cord of liberty. An electric cord, he said, that runs through the hearts of lovers of liberty, wherever. And for him, there was simply no question. Germans in Illinois, yes. Other constituencies, yes. He's willing to speak to and bind them all together.

And this higher purpose is always a part of the lure, this idea. that we are different, that not only do we have a frontier and manifest destiny within this country, but the country itself is a different beast than all of the other nation states that these fellow travelers are coming from. What they're saying is release those bonds and join us in this pursuit of independence and liberty. But Joanne, then Alan used a term that I think we hear today, nativism or nationalism or those kinds of things. But what is a nativist then? in 1810, is a nativist somebody who thinks only Protestants, only whites? Is a nativist somebody that groups all Christianity together?

Is a nativist somebody who says, no, it's all European? How do they define, is it defined narrowly at that time? Well, it is defined narrowly different times in different ways. So, for example, for a time, nativists would say, Catholics don't count. It's not even all Christians. It's like Catholics are not properly. Well, Catholics have this scary guy, the Pope, and people are going to be loyal to him and not loyal to this government. So Catholics, they can't be properly American. Which, by the way, for people that don't understand, like was all the way up to John F. Kennedy, like when John F. Kennedy was going to

become president, there hadn't been a Catholic yet. And people still thought, this is the 1960s. Well, he's not going to be loyal to the United States. He's just, what the Pope's going to tell him something, do and he'll just go do it. Exactly. So that that term shifts and changes over time as to who counts as a native with nativist understanding. But is the nativist movement, is it, is the strength of the nativist movement in sort of British Anglo culture? Or are there German American nativists? Like what's the, what was the larger preponderance of it? Well, I mean, I think in the early period. Everyone, well, not everyone, many people are from somewhere else. As a historian, you never say everyone only unique first. You're in trouble if you do. But so many people are from

somewhere else, right? That nativism, like let's look for, let's go back to Hamilton again. Let's look for a moment at Hamilton. Hamilton. Hamilton writes in 1802, 1803, something that sounds exceedingly anti-immigrant. And he says things along the lines of, you know, these people from other countries. They're going to come here. They'll be living according to things, ideas they've imbibed in the countries they come from. They're going to have different views of us. He goes on and on and on and on about how, you know, that's a horrible thing. But then he goes beyond that to say, kind of along the line of what you're saying, John. So for that reason, they shouldn't vote, but we welcome them here. They should come. We want everybody. Right. And Halton, of all people.

We need labor. We don't need citizens. Well, and there's so much land here. Right. Look at that. And people came in part to the United States because unlike landlocked Europe, there was land here. And people felt that, well, you know, you can begin a new year. You can come. You can get land. People in the early period called Pennsylvania, the best poor man's country because there were so much land there that people could claim and then become farmers and gain independence. Right.

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Let me ask you, when did the idea more traditionally then of immigration come to the forefront in the American experiment? Is it a post-Civil War or is it a pre-Civil War idea? Because you said there's nobody there. Right. You come to this country. You just find a dock. You line up. There's only people there if it's slave trade or ships.

Right. Or if you want citizenship. Or if you're okay. Now that's a different issue. And there's a process for that. Well, but there isn't a uniform process. I just had a wonderful grad student who wrote her dissertation on... Historian, fight!

History and fight! One of my... I've never had that said before, and it sounds so fun. A student of mine just wrote a dissertation on the very fact that there was no set way to become a citizen, that it depended, you know, like, for example, how do you get back into being a citizen if you were a loyalist and you fought against the... United States. People said, well, you know, in New York, maybe it's easier than in New Jersey. There was no federalized process. It was state to state. There was not a federalized process. There were not passports. It was very much a negotiated thing with different terms in different places. That's interesting. A lot of it varied from state to state, certainly in terms of how it was

enforced. There were no ID cards. And particularly, I mean, the most important moment in terms of the life of a citizen participating in this experiment is voting. Well, what happened when you went to vote? Well, you didn't walk into a voting booth and you didn't have a list of candidates that you'd check off and you didn't have to have your name in a judge of elections book. No, you walked up to what was really just a window in a store or a post office. You had a ballot yourself and you handed it over. And then they would give you, I guess, an impression.

embroidered, I voted. Not a sticker, but like a patch. No, not even that. Betsy Ross had painstaking. None of this I voted business. Sorry. Really? That doesn't happen.

Well, depending on the period, too, you didn't even have a uniform ballot. No. There's one election in which, in Pennsylvania, in like 1792, 1793, people who wanted Jeffersonian Republicans to win wrote out. You would have to write the names of the candidates he wanted to vote for. Wrote out thousands and thousands of ballots. us with the names that they handed to people like, oh, go hand this in. Wow.

And if you misspelled a name in writing it out, that could be argued that you weren't really voting for that kind of person. Wow. And if there was some kind of question, as someone standing around at the voting place said, look, this fellow who just handed that vote in, I saw him get off the boat in Chicago three weeks ago. What would you do? you could make a protest to the judge of elections.

The judge of elections would turn around then and have this person swear an oath. Yes, I'm a citizen. It would be it. We are a chaotic mess at this point. Isn't it marvelous? I have to say, it's incredible because it shakes the narratives.

The narratives we learn are generally so, they lack nuance. They're sort of black and white. There is this idea of this is the process. You have no idea of, And I think we would all benefit to understand the improvisational and chaotic nature of perhaps mostly well-intentioned people trying to create a union of high moral integrity, but also some functional backing. When did they start to bring order to the idea of who was going to be an American and how they would achieve that? I mean, it's a process, right?

It's a long process. So in the early period, they are experimenting and making things up. And improvisation is the best term because that is indeed what they're doing. As you work your way through the 19th century, bit by bit, you do have federal ways of doing things, national ways of doing things. Passports become something that people can actually have, although that's into the 19th century. Often, some of these things happen because there's so much, I don't want to say chaos, but disagreement about certain things. It's something. someone finally comes forward and says, we need to actually iron out how this works. We need to actually come up with some kind of set ways to do it. So the first hundred years, it's kind of the Wild West. So, Alan, let me ask you, when I hear discussion today of Heritage Americans, they almost always, and it seems kind of anachronistic, they point to the civil war. They say you're a Heritage American. For instance, J.D. Vance, when he talks about Heritage American.

He said, my ancestors who fought in the Civil War sure as hell have more of a standing in this country than people who just got here. But it's almost always tied to the Civil War, not to the period before that. And I'm curious if either of you has an idea of why that is. I think it's because the Civil War is a big box event. And people can refer to that. Right. But why wouldn't they refer to it as the revolution? Why wouldn't they say, my people came here in the revolution?

Or does that exclude so many of these nativists? Probably. That they don't want to start history there. They want to start history where they actually enter the picture. It's also because in the revolution, you're dealing with people in tricorn hats and small clothes. It's not, and stockings and buckles. Yeah. And it's not as clean cut as the Civil War, right?

So it is British versus Americans. but, you know, that division isn't going to help us a lot if you're trying to divide people into boxes. But looking at the Civil War, clear sides. Yes. You can say a lot more generally. Right. That's true. Not really, but still the idea being that, as you just put it, it's a big box event and it's handy for pointing fingers at and claiming belongingness in a way that the revolution, even at the time wasn't that.

But look at the Civil War itself. Look at the percentage. Look at the numbers of immigrants who fight in the ranks of these Civil War armies. You're talking about something like 180,000 Irish, just in the Union Army. You're talking about 200,000 Germans. You're talking about 80,000 suite. You have got whole units of the Union Army at Gettysburg whose officers are still giving them orders in German. Because that's how many Germans there are.

Literally speaking, these are units in the 11th Corps of the Army of the Potomac. So we are talking about armies which are chock full of immigrants themselves. And when Lincoln comes in November of 1863 to dedicate the soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg, you have some, what, 3,500 union burials there. The percentage of immigrants who are burials. Right there. I can take you right on the outer rim of that semicircle of graves, that huge semicircle. I can take you right to the very first one you would walk through in the central. This is a kid who was born in Austria under the Austrian Empire. And he was, and he died at Gettysburg. He was an officer in a New York artillery battery. Is someone going to take away his title? Be an American? Well, because it's so interesting, you bring it up because if you think about this nativist movement, and it's hard to separate it from the MAGA movement, except for maybe the more extreme versions of it that are more in the like, you know, real true white nationalist world. But they generally fetishize the iconography of the American Revolution and the documents of it. It's a lot of we the people on the buses. It's a lot of all that. But when they want to start history, they generally start. it at the Civil War. And I wonder if it's because they view it as these are the people that we want

to credit with ending slavery, and therefore they are the beginning of this new generation of America. I'm not sure. Let me give you some iconography in response to that. I'm going to give you the iconography of a photograph. The photograph of a black union sergeant with a cane, resting on a cane in one hand, and in the other hand, the regimental colors of the 54th Massachusetts volunteers. Joanne, I'm sure you've seen this photograph. This is Sergeant William Kearney. Carney was one of the, he was born in slavery.

He's one of the recruits to this new black regiment, the 54th. They go into action in July of 1863 at Battery Wagner. He rescues the regimental flag. He's hit three times, once on the chest, one in the leg, once in the arm. drags himself back to the the first aid station he comes to, hands over the flag before he collapses, and says,

the old flag never touched the ground, boys. Wow. Six months before, that man did not have a flag. He couldn't have because of Roger Tawny on the Dred Scott decision. But in the Civil War, he has it. He has that flag.

That flag is his. He is an American. Right. He is a heritage American and they don't normally count. Oh, that's the thing. Right. That's what I'm trying to get to. That's the thing is that when you look at the revolution or you look at the civil war and you look at it with a glossy, simplified view and you talk about flag waving and you talk about, you know, us versus them, you erase the complexity and you erase the subtlety and you erase the very things that make this a country that's. It's always evolving and always developing, you know, our sense of history and our willingness to get beyond the glossy cover, you know, the people who are looking at the Civil War and saying heritage American, they're erasing, in a sense, some of the people that Alan here is talking about, right?

But isn't that what's necessary to the nativist experiment, if we put that in? Nativism only works. And Alan said it, I thought perfectly before. which is that it's a bit of a cynical. It's a phrase that's used to be more palatable to those that use it as a cover for a certain prejudice. Well, precisely. And that's that now that's the point. It's a cover.

Yes. And that's also, you know, obviously linked to people who are interested in us not studying certain parts of our history and not thinking about certain things that happened in the past and only thinking about the sort of grand, glorious. moments, right? I mean, we're coming up on 2026, and it's a moment, you know, those kinds of anniversaries. I mean, I was, the bicentennial basically made me a historian because it was everywhere, and it got me really thinking about big ideas. But those kinds of anniversaries are reckoning moments. And if you head into those moments unwilling to wrestle with anything other than the flag waving glorious things, you're basically declaring that you're unwilling to embrace your country in its entirety and really think about what it is. And complexity. Yeah.

and where it might be able to go. There is a trajectory in this American experiment. And it's one we can respond to or see people respond to in two different ways. One is to say, oh, look how dramatically they failed to live up to these expectations or these promises. That means the expectations and the promises are a null set. And that's a very pessimistic view. ironically, it is also the view adopted by every monarch,

every aristocrat, every tin pot dictator who's ever come along. Right. He was happy to say, see, the Americans make a great deal out of all these wonderful things. But look, they don't live up to it so we can't take that seriously.

All right, that's one way of doing it. And if we yield to that, then we find ourselves thoroughly in agreement with the dictators and the tyrants. Is that where we want to be? All right, that's one thing. Second thing is to say, the trajectory of this American idea is always in motion.

We are always discovering new ways of opening this up. I remember two or three years ago, I was watching a video of some Chinese dissidents. These were students. They were protesting policies of the Chinese government. One of them stood up at a barricade, a police barricade, and he's shouting at the top of his voice in Mandarin, but he's shouting. give me liberty or give me death. Wow. And I thought, at that moment, John, at that moment I thought,

the American Revolution is not over. And it is not. And the alternate to the pessimistic concession is to say, we are still in process. We are still discovering what is in the marrow of these ideas, of that proposition. And it's to acknowledge that ideas matter. Yeah.

Right? So the ideas and the ideals that came out of that founding moment, they didn't live up to them. And many of them didn't want to live up to them. But the ideas mattered. Right. They mattered to future generations. And we're enduring.

They were enduring ideas. Exactly. And all kinds of people could look to them, could point to them, and use those ideas in a way that opened the world. world to them as well. You know, there's all kinds of scholarship on how the Declaration of Independence has been used and reused and reused in places around the world. The ideas matter even if the people who created them didn't live up to them. So I agree with what Alan is saying. We can point to the founding and say, well, to that because they didn't live up to what they were saying.

Well, no, they really didn't. And they did a lot of things wrong. And they were unjust in a lot of ways. And slavery was there. It's written into the Constitution. But the ideas that they put forward mattered. I just, in the class, I just was teaching about Hamilton and Jefferson, we looked at Jefferson's last letter. He was invited to go to Washington, D.C. to give a speech on the Fourth of July. And he couldn't. He actually died the Fourth of July that year. Right.

But what he says in the letter... It's a good excuse, not to go. I know. It is. A pretty good excuse. Yeah. He pushed to make it that far, as I said earlier. But he says in the letter that essentially it's going to be a horrible paraphrase.

We now are in a time where people understand that they don't exist for the wealthy and the powerful to tread on their backs and keep them bowed down. We live in a time when people around the world understand that we have a different understanding of the rights of humankind. Right. Bernie. Burn. Oh, I'm sorry. Folks, today's episode is sponsored by Incogni. Now, I don't know what you're doing at home. I don't know what you're doing on the computer. I don't know what you're doing on the websites. And no one else should know it either.

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incognite.com slash steward. Now we're going to make a little time jump. So we've got this idea of a country that's not really formulated like a normal country. It's got this ideal. And it's also got a frontier. So it's got this expansionist kind of mentality and the borders are not drawn hard and fast, but at a certain point, the country sets

like Fontanelle. It just sort of sets. And now we've got real borders and now we've got to look at. So I want to draw attention to immigration reforms when it starts to happen because there's sort of two tent posts here that I want to talk about, the one in 1924 and then the one in 1969, because I think they are in many ways diametrically opposed, yet continue to reflect the kind of battle that we're all facing internally about what it is to be Americans. So 1924, the Immigration Reform Act is a is a nativist act where they're basically saying, actually, we are white Europeans. but even within that, I think they say basically Germans, Irish, Greeks are not white European. They are not allowed to immigrate here.

Is that correct? Well, there are quotas that are established. I see. I see. And how do they establish who is properly white? Why is it that Irish and Italian and Greek, and maybe it wasn't Irish, maybe it was Italian, maybe it was Italian and Greek, were not considered in 24. Because it was an explicitly nativist bill, was it not?

It is also true, though, that Irish and Italian, you know, there's a long history going all the way back to the 18th century of people declaring that they're not white, right? All the way back to the late 1970s. Right, right. In early 19th century. So southern and eastern Europe is declaring we're not white like them. They're declared.

At times. At times. I see. Yeah. I mean, that's part of what's fascinating about this whole thing is the way that this evolves. Okay. That there isn't, you know, a set standard that has persisted throughout the entirety of American history and that in a given moment, those kinds of boundaries, the lines that people try to draw,

say more about that moment in time and the biases and goals that people in that moment have than about the American nation as a whole. So what is the bias that have? exclude Asian people almost entirely. They severely restrict Slavs and Poles and Jews and Italians and Greeks. What is it then they're trying to say about who the heritage Americans are? Because certainly in this country at that time, there are Poles and Italians and Jews and Asians.

So why are they saying, actually, is it because of their religion? Is it because of where they're from? Is it their complexion? What is the dividing line? I'm not going to try to be too much of an expert about 1924. I'm a 19th century person. But I feel you.

I'm an 18th century person. All right. You know what? I'll take this part of the conversation. Okay. I'll be the expert. Having issue that disclaimer. Yes.

I think one of the key factors that goes into this is World War I. Okay. We're dealing in 1924 with an era of tremendous disenchantment on the part of Americans. Here, this marvelous European civilization has spent four years in the trenches blowing its brain zone. And what do we have as a result of it? Well, what we have is a deranged Europe, which is going to get more deranged very quickly. We have a Bolshevik regime in Russia, which scares us silly. So what are we trying to do?

It's almost like we are trying to do a kind of disinfectant. We're trying to say we don't want to go in the direction that the Europeans have shown that they have gone. And there are going to be some Europeans who are, in our minds, more dangerous than that. But it is a moment of real angst and disenchantment, which is not to say that that's an excuse. But it is to say, this is the, environment in which the 1924 legislation emerges. So you're saying it's a prophylactic. It's basically saying here are the elements we think are involved in this world conflagration

that led to this terrible, you know, four-year slaughter. We are not going to allow that element. Yeah. This is what's called isolationism. Because we go into that, we go into World War I with Woodrow Wilson banging the drum for how we're going to make the world's safer democracy. What did we make it safe for? We made it safe for the Weimar Republic.

Oh, yeah, that was a real accomplishment. Right, right. So Americans look at this, and in the 1920s, it's its gigantic pullback. Like, World War I, this was not a good idea. Woodrow Wilson did not have good ideas. Woodrow Wilson through Eugene Debs into jail and destroyed his health. We had the persecution of all kinds of dissidents. We're not going to do that again.

so we're going to put up this barrier because we don't want any influence that might push us in that direction. Is it a panic? Yeah, it is a panic. It is panic. Yeah, Joanne. I would add to that by saying

that if you're fighting a world war that's characterized by all the things that Alan just said, you're going to emerge from that moment really thinking about who we are. Right. And who they are. Yeah, that's true.

That's kind of a defining moment. You know, and I would say, generally speaking in American history, the question of who is the we? And is there a we? Is there something that unites all Americans? You know, we live in a moment where we're kind of having a we crisis in which, you know, who is the we? I don't think right now, most people agree that there is one. And we're seeing the rise of isms. We're seeing fascism rise. We're seeing Bolshevism rise, you know, communism, Marxism, you know, all those things. And we're defining ourselves. as these people are the cause of that.

And we don't want that strain to infect here. We're defining us as not that. Not that. Right? We're not that and we're not that and we're not that. And okay, fine, but what are we? And that is not where we're going right now. That is not a conversation we're having.

We're not talking about democracy. Part of what we are. We're a small D, Democratic country. What does that mean? We're a representative country in which representation matters. We're a country grounded on public opinion. Those conversations aren't happening. And public opinion changes on who we are as we see now.

Because certainly, if you look at us post-World War I and we're saying we don't want Germans and Italians and anarchic, you know, because that's anarchists and we don't want Jews and Poles because that's, you know, Bolsheviks. you know, we're defining ourselves by what we don't want. Whereas, you know, you jump ahead to 1965, and we're defining ourselves as a much more egalitarian society, that what we're defining ourselves as actually, we are that idea, and we're going to live that idea. Is that fair to say? Or not? And then there is a long silence. It's the long silence of the absence of the absence of the 20th century history person. Let me tell you something.

You guys killed it with the 1924 stuff. You told me you didn't know anything. And I was like, holy shit. I wish I didn't know that. You two have forgotten more than I will ever know about this stuff. I'm only, the reason why I'm sort of trying to frame it that way is I'm trying to understand how we do have that discussion. Because the way we're having it now is with a cudgel.

The way we're having it now is guys in face masks come in with flashbang grenades and arrest an 18-year-old valedictorian who came to this country at seven years old. And maybe that's because it's the absence of clarity in who we think we are and who we think we might want to be. It's not even just the absence of clarity. It's the masking, literally. of clarity. These are people who are masking themselves so we don't know

who they are. Right. So not only is there not a discussion, there's a deliberate effort to not have that discussion and to create an environment in which anyone can point to anyone, well, not anyone,

but the folks who are in power and are being given a certain kind of power can point to anyone and say not us. But I understand it in the framework of 1924, you're coming off of World War I. What is the framework

for me to understand the President of the United States sitting in the Oval Office saying, Somalis are terrible people. I don't understand the framing of it. It's in the context of an American experiment that is an ideal, not always one that we lived up to, how is it that 250 years into the experiment, our elected leader is pointing at faceless people,

and absolutely denying their individuality, which is the inalienable rights that we all have, according to the document of our founding, how are I supposed to understand that when there is no world conflagration? Like what, do you guys have an opinion on that or a sense of it? Well, I do want to add to that. So on the one hand,

saying Somalians are a horrible people is a horrible thing to do, to go the next step and say, so we should throw them out? Right. So they shouldn't be here. That's the part that suddenly not only moves into hatred and ugliness, because certainly there have been other presidents that have said sort of hateful, ugly, prejudiced things, to go the next step and basically say,

we have to throw them out of here. They don't belong here. And I've got my guys in masks. And who knows if I'm going to set them out to, you know, We're in a moment where there's a particular president who not only says the ugly words, but then is willing to enforce them in a way that isn't constitutional. But he is reflecting a deep sentiment amongst, I'm not going to say the majority certainly, but certainly amongst a portion of people. Alan, you've been you've been pondering. I'm pondering where the common threads are in these, let's call them, of.

upsurges, waves of nativism, of suspicion, of hostility. I think the common threat is anxiety. Anxiety that when you create a nation based around an idea, based around a proposition, based around a creed, connected with that, there's an anxiety that this might not be enough because we're told over and over again by so many others that if you're, you're going to have a nation, it's got to be built out of these very solid materials like race or religion or language or culture. If you're going to be a German, you've got to talk about the Tutaberg Wald or the German Volk or something like that. There's a comfort in this similarity.

Because it feels like it has substance. It feels like it's material. It feels like it has something that you can actually sit down on. Whereas when you talk about living. the life of an idea, that sounds so much more nervous. How do we ensure the safety of an idea? And I think when you encounter nativism in the 18th century, when you encounter it in the 90, the waves of it in the 19th century, into the 20th century, into our own time, common thread here is anxiety.

It's not that we're unsure of who other people are. We're not entirely sure of who we are ourselves. And if we're going to hold. And I think that that is manifest, not only in the kind of anxiety, the kind of hostility that we show in terms of immigrant groups and have shown in the past, it's also the way we treat each other. Look at how we talk about each other today. We talk about, we bandy around these toxic terms, fascist, socialist, Bolshevik, you name it. Enemy of the people. We, yeah, we do that.

We do that and we do it. It is an act. We commit on each other over and over and over again. This is happening everywhere. But is that different, Alan, certainly in the revolution and in the Civil War, you know, the verbiage around, you know, certainly the founding fathers and people that were running were, I mean, they were vicious. Absolutely. There is a common word we have to come back to. and I almost want to say,

Joanne was saying about the importance of we, I don't think, the most important we that we encounter is we the people. And that's something we always have to bear in mind. But there is a particular word that I want to draw people back to. I draw my students back to.

And that is citizen because there is only one title that Americans enjoy. That's the title of citizen. Everything else is temporary. Everything else is, is improvisatory. The fundamental fact is citizen. What is a citizen? And if we could for a moment learn to look at each other as citizens, instead of the way we treat ourselves.

Right. And trust each other. The beastly way that we treat each other today. The names that we call each other. One faction calls this. One faction calls that. John, I've been called, believe it or I've been called everything from a Trotskyist to a Christian nationalist. And who calls historians names? Wait a minute. Oh, don't even ask me what I'm going to call. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, get two or three historians together. Why are people who attacks you guys? Because I would think that that's generally, is that because you're at conferences where you might give speeches about certain things? that's where it comes from. I'm a little blown, like, I'm used to me getting yelled at, but that's, I'm, it's cable television and people. It's the public and it's, it's, because I do a lot of

public facing work. And so on social media, people will weaponize your work and politicize it and attack you. Yes. Oh, absolutely. And this happens, this happens all the time. It happens across the board. I have just about completely decoupled from social media. largely because I just can't stand listening to the way people carry on. Certainly in that negative in most people's lives, I would say. Yeah, and it's poisonous. And it is a contradiction. I'm on there, though. I'm on there.

I am up there. I'm up there. I'm up there for the Constitution. Joanne's out there with a tweet storm. She's going nuts. Not on Twitter. I am not on Twitter. Joanne's a braver soul than I am. All right.

I'll be happy to concede that. Let me ask you this then, because is it maybe? Because Alan, I thought, the word. that you framed as its anxiety, that there is an anxiety and through citizenship is ultimately maybe what makes this feel so tenuous is our anxiety of what it means to be a responsible citizen, to not really have the tent posts in place,

to know what that is, and then to not trust that others are also living up to, so that like when they say, we need screening, screening for what and what is the metric we need people that love this country love it this much to the moon and back or just to the moon what are we if there are no metrics for citizenship is that anxiety based on now i'm living next to somebody who celebrates a different holiday than i do who wears different colored clothing now if you're from new york city you're used to this it's the beauty of it.

It's the beauty of being able to go to these different neighborhoods and experience culture, but also assimilate into this. It's the melting pot. But John, that's a risk, you see. Yes. And in the long run of human history, it's a risk that many times over and over again, people and nations do not want to take the American experiment. Washington uses the word experiment.

Lincoln uses the word experiment. It is a risk that we take, but it's a risk because we believe that there is something higher and nobler that we can appeal to in our common lives together. That's the we. That should be the we. That should be what brings us together. Is that understanding that, and we don't, we're not going to all agree on where we should be going. I'm getting chills, guys. Keep going. I know. We're not going to agree on where we're going.

But no more... Can I just have you do that generally when I speak? Sure. Because I would find that so inspiring. Look, there is a great moment in the movie Glory, which is about the 54th, Massachusetts. It's a great moment in which the Denzel Washington... Back in Civil War. You're back in your conference.

Right. I'm back on my own turf. Hit me. The Denzel Washington character, they're about to go into action the night before they have a prayer meeting. And in that prayer meeting, Denzel Washington is not long and short. His character is not long and short on prayer. He gives us marvelously eloquent little speech. He says, whatever happens tomorrow, we know, we men. And in saying that there's the we, we are in this together. Right. Defending an ideal. Exactly. Exactly. But here's the thing. And I love what you both said a little while ago about the anxiety.

A country that's created based on, you know, race or, you know, a certain battle being fought in the distant past or whatever. There are ways in which you can found a country that feel stamped in a sort of concrete, rooted reality. And that's not what the United States is. And by definition, as you've both been saying, that's going to create anxiety. And that goes, you know, again, all the way back to, quote unquote, my time period. constantly they're trying to figure out what brings us together. But that is the challenge. In almost all of my classes, I quote part of the first paragraph.

I'm going back to Hamilton. Do it. Go back to Hamilton. Come on. The first paragraph of the first Federalist essay. Yes. Yes. And Hamilton says basically.

Oh, oh. Alan's office chair. Here we go. Come on. Bring it home, Joanne. I will try and bring it home. Hamilton says, you know, we're essentially deciding for all time, whether it's possible to create a country based on deliberation and choice or whether countries forever

will be created by warfare and fate. And the decision which we make now, the actions which we take now will decide that for all mankind, meaning we are coming together to deliberate, to create something by choice, that is is a risk. That does mean we're going to eternally be trying to figure out who we are. We're creating it through choice and deliberation. And in our defense, and I would say this, you know, when as a rebuke to, I think, the more nativist elements, there's this idea that a diverse society formed around a creed is a risk, as though a traditional nation state, man, they just live in peace and there's no problem. Like, if you were,

want to, if you want to go back to what makes this a dangerous world, it's nation states or religious states fighting for the supremacy because they believe themselves superior. So the idea that somehow we in America are embarking on a much riskier journey seems utterly foolish. What it seems to be is a reaction to the much more, as you would say, say clear-cut, I know who belongs here formulation that has been the cause of strife and death and war throughout history. So to formulate it, you know, as Trump would say to the inner cities, what have you got to lose? You know, it's not like those other formulations have been so stable and peaceful. Tis true. Tis true. No, it's true. I got a Tis true. There's not. There's not.

There's a, John, there was a wonderful letter written by a 19th century Swede and emigrants of the United States. He's writing back to family in Sweden. He talks about what it is like to live in America. And the thing that he homed in on was this. My cap is not worn out from having to take it off when a rich man rides by in his carriage. And I thought, bingo. Boom. That's what it's about.

Yeah. Yeah. There's someone who says that right after the revolution, actually. Yeah. When he's asked at the time, or he says at the time, what's different now? And he says when I'm on the street, I don't need to bow down to someone who's coming by me. I can actually stand up. I so appreciate you guys spending the time with us.

I wish my brain had... a tenth of what you guys have going on in your brains and your ability to recall it all with such specificity and such purpose is really wonderful to listen to. I think your students are supremely lucky to have both you guys. And I really appreciate you spending the time with us. Dr. Alan Gelsso, Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida and Joanne Freeman Professor of History in American Studies at Yale University and host of History Matters. And thank you guys, so much. Thank you for having us. Kids, I didn't want to make this announcement. Now, I thought it might be premature, but I'm just going to say it. I'm just going to say it right now. We made it.

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I can't figure out if I was just a fucking idiot when I was in college and did not take advantage of the brilliance and insight of my professors. or if they're just incredibly brilliant and insightful and bring this to life in a beautiful way for me? I think I don't know. Maybe both. Both. It's definitely both. College is definitely wasted on like 18 to 22 year olds. Like I definitely didn't take advantage of my time there.

I'm mad at my, I think somehow whatever marijuana haze blocked my ability to see. You heard, though, Joanne would definitely have you in class if you played behind her. I would do it. I would get the fife. Certainly, that would help me in my classroom participation grade, which I did not do well in. What was your favorite? Do you have a favorite professor or class that you had? Oh, my goodness.

I had so many great classes. I really, I was an international relations major, and so I focused, you know, on international relations. But I loved, I had a two German histories class just talking about, you know, different ways of German history through culture. And so it's a lot of film and reading from the time. A lot of schnitzel, big schnitzel class, field trips to beer gardens. See, I did a very similar course of study at a beer garden where we would sample. I fucked up my youth so badly. I don't know about that. You're here. I think it turned out just fine. Yeah, but it took a while. And I don't know if you can

tell running out of steam. But now that like as you guys think about where your families are from, do you think about the various times when they came and when like they landed here in those changes? Like I think my family came after the 1924 act. Oh wow. Yeah, yeah. I think at least I know my, yeah, I think my grandfather did because he came from China. Oh no, I guess it was right around that. It was probably the 1920s. That's when they all came. One drove a cab in Brooklyn and the other ran like a dry cleaner. But I think they came around that time.

Oh, my God, guys, I just thought of something terrible. Uh-oh. Do you think they passed that act because of my grandparents? They were like, there's two, too many. They got here. And the government was like, that's it. The vibes are off. We have had it.

Brittany, what do we got from the people this week? All righty. John, do you think there's any truth to when Trump calls the press the enemy of the people? I'm going to go with no. What? I mean, the press may not be at all times helpful, but the idea that they are, I consider an enemy, somebody who is purposefully weaponizing, whatever it is that they do, to undercut the strength and stability of the country.

And if that's what he thinks that they're doing, I think he is fucking way off on the other thing. And in fact, I would say that the subversion of the so-called press outlets that he favors have more along lines with subversion than the majority of the media, even if you don't think it's helpful, tends to be following the incentives of sensationalism and ratings and profit and not of a direct cultural and, you know, political aim, I think. I think they're just generally trying to produce television.

Yeah, because like when he says that, do you think Matt Gates and Laura Lumer are included in that? No, he doesn't. They're friends of the court on the thing. Lauren, you worked in the media? Are they the enemies? Do they sit in the back and go, here's how we do. take down the infrastructure?

No. And honestly, I would say that they're really helping him. I mean, I was looking at the news this morning and I saw so many summaries of his tweet storm. Like, I know every crazy thought he had on Monday evening and tweeted just because so many outlets summarized it as if it was newsworthy as much as anything else. So I think they're actually helping him. I think they're sanitizing and laundering it and removing the disturbance and the kind of the bizarreness of it by treating it through aggregation. Yeah. Rather than just going, can you fucking believe this one?

Like by aggregating it, it makes it seem like a weather report. I will say there was one little tidbit that I took away from these summaries that I thought was a little bit interesting, which is that, okay, backing up. he had 158 truths or whatever you call them in a series of like two hours. The last time he had so many was 200 during Black Lives Matter protests and 142 during his Senate impeachment. So it's nice to put it into context like that, I guess. Like he's losing out in some way. I thought you were going to say the last time he did that.

He had bought Nate Ball. That too. And he was up and he was all up all night. These things are not mutually exclusive. Right. Jillian, you don't think they're the enemy of the people, Jillian. Oh, I think they're the enemy of the people. I fucking knew it, Gillian. She's always, Jillian's Maga. She's always been Maga. That's just how it goes. Famously, yeah. Famously, Maga. What else we got?

Isn't it about time, Congress takes the pardon power away from Trump, the convicted criminals' best friend? I kind of dig what he's doing. I, you know, I used to think crime doesn't pay. but now I'm getting a whole other head on this. He is decriminalizing. You know, like, there was that big movement. Like, for years, people had to fight for, like, legalized pot. Like, there was this drug that was, like, sort of like alcohol, and alcohol is legal, and there's restriction on it, and you couldn't figure out.

He's just out there with pens, like, legalize international drug trafficking. Like, with the stroke of a pen, he's like, this guy was convicted for moving. They literally said, Mountains of cocaine. Yeah. And he's like, but a mountain, it's not too much to have a mountain. He's like dream bigger. Yeah.

Right. And Congress does nothing. Nothing. They're scared shitless. But do you remember when the step between getting dispensaries and like, you know, getting arrested for smoking on the street was, well, if you had like two joints, you'd be cool as long as it didn't, you know, seem like distribution. Like an ounce or something, yeah.

Trump, while obviously droning boats to fight the drug war, he decriminalized a mountain of cocaine. You can't do more than a mountain. There is no geographical even apparatus. This mountain is for my personal use. Right. Like now, now the next guy is going to be like, well, you're in trouble because you're doing a mountain range of cocaine. Like, what the fuck? He even, like, bribery is legal.

State sponsor drug trafficking is legal. Like, I don't even know what to make of this, as he said many times, law and order presidency. Yeah. Well, he doesn't either. He doesn't even know who he pardoned. So. That's, by the way, what a six-year-old he is. Whenever he gets confronted, his responses are.

I don't know or you're stupid. I have children. I'm very familiar with these dodgers. He always says, I don't know, and then has a specific next line that shows he specifically does know. It's like without fail. What about even the droning of the, the so-called double tap where they ended up to there were survivors and then they killed them. They asked him, and he goes, I don't know. You know, I got nothing to do with it.

And you're like, you're the commander in chief. But pointedly says he didn't have anything to do with it. I got nothing to do with it. That's Pete. And then Pete's like, hey, man, I left. It's a tag-you-it situation. I left the room. I'm busy.

I got shit to do. I've got, you know, hair cream to buy. To throw under the bus. The buck stops down there. The buck stops. Oh, another boat blew up. What are you going to do? Oh, gosh.

I'm John. Yes. Another quick one for you. One quick one. Brig it. So I thought was kind of funny. If you ran CNN and had to keep just one, are you going with Scott Jennings or Jake Tapper? Collins.

And we're out. And we're out. Guys, thank you so much. Excellent work. Boy, I got to tell you, I loved that conversation. I just found it so invigorating. And boy, my respect for those two is through the roof. really fuck wish I had paid attention more when I was younger.

But thank you guys for it. Lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mehmedevick, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer and engineer Nicole Boyce executive producers, Chris McShane, and Katie Gray, we shall see you next week. Bye-bye. The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions. Look, you know, the holidays.

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