The following is a transcript of the first segment of the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be together.
I hope that you had a great weekend, everybody. Well, it was an eventful weekend, obviously. There’s now a fomenting revolution maybe in Cuba. Hard to tell.
Of course, it’s on the heels of Haiti having had a something like a political assassination. I don’t know, it was an assassination of the President, for sure. So there’s a lot happening in that part of the world.
And, of course, in America, the big news down towards the South in Texas was Donald Trump giving a speech at CPAC. We’ll talk a little bit about that later, but I want to tell you, I’ve been reading a book.
The listeners know I read a lot of books, and I read a lot of parts and lots of books. I don’t read all of every book, but I’m reading a book by a man whose name is Sandor Marai. M-A-R-A-I. And actually, interestingly his history, he was born in Hungary.
By the time he was about 48 years old, he had been a well regarded published poet and essayist and a novelist, and then left Hungary because the Communists got in there and never went back.
Literally left in the late 1940s or early 50s and never went back and bounced around the world, but spent the last decade life, I think maybe a little bit more in San Diego, California. And that’s where he passed away in 1989.
And he was an extraordinary observer of what he was seeing happening in Europe. Of course, imagine, I think he was born in about 1900.
And so he was watching the the rise of the First World War. Than the rise of Nazism and Mussolini. And then in Hungary, of course, the what was so I made him so despondent was a lot of Hungarians who had fled during the war, World War Two now we’re talking about, came back to lead the Soviet imposition of communism in Hungary. Anyway…
But he talks a lot about a failure of the society and the people in Hungary, particularly to recognize that there is something that amounts to culture and mounts to kind of a unifying culture of a nation.
And in this case, he’s writing about Europe. And I was struck by this over the weekend as I read that the Charlottesville, Virginia what is it? City Council, I guess it’s called decided to take down the statue of Lewis and Clark.
Now, I don’t agree with taking down almost any statues to be honest. I think that I’m for qualifying statues… Well, let me say it differently. So someone’s got private property, they can put up something they want. And if it’s mean or rude to someone else, that’s not very nice. Right?
So if you’re a jerk, it’s not nice. But if it’s city property and it’s been donated by someone and it’s been around, I’m generally for more of a qualifying rather than removal… Meaning, put the context.
Put the context, for example, of Robert E. Lee and describe that. I just think that there’s something in between this hysteria of taking down statues and frankly, I believe it is…
And I know it’s part of what Marx described and what Communism desires, to get rid of history, unmoor people from history. And then you can tell them what they need to do. And unmoor people from Salvation history, if you happen to be a Christian, and you can tell them that, just focus on yourself.
And if you just figured out yourself and you have a materials viewpoint, meaning not materialism, but materialist, you’ll figure out yourself and you’ll go from there.
Well, at a certain point, like Charlottesville, Virginia, and other places, they get beyond comical. Lewis and Clark? Coming down?
I mean, I happen to… I’m sitting in my office as I record this actually ahead of time, and I am looking at a bust of Louis and a bust of Clark. It was actually they’re book ends, and they were actually a gift for the late Antonin Scalia when he came to St Louis.
Of course, St Louis has a huge connection to Louis and Clark. It’s where they started the Corps of Discovery, adventure and this incredible, in 1804, this incredible journey that they took, they left from St Louis.
Anyway, when Justice Scalia came to town, gave a couple of speeches, I gave him these book ends, and he didn’t want to take them back on the plane, and he gave them back to me, and I never had a chance to give them to him again anyway.
But my point here is, what happens when your culture, your nation has no confidence in its culture? What happens then?
And you have to start to marvel at, you know, it’s not just the critical race theory problem, because that stuff is terrible. As someone said earlier about that, and it was well, it was better. It was said more succinctly than I’ve been saying it.
They said critical race theory teaches all black and brown kids that they’re victims and all white kids that their bullies. Or if that wasn’t even the phrase, it was better than that.
But my point is I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking about what happens when your nation doesn’t have enough confidence in its culture, and it keeps jerking, hither and thither removing the things that are part of its culture.
And again, you know, our founding in the preamble was in order to make a more perfect Union, meaning we haven’t had a perfect Union.
And I think that’s… everybody concedes that all human beings are aspirational, meaning getting better and better. But the idea that we’re living in a culture, in a nation where we’ve just gone away from the idea that there is a common culture… And there should be a common culture, and it’s not white supremacy, and it’s not racist to say that none of those things are true.
And we’re watching it. And I watched CPAC, which is where Donald Trump gave his speech. One of the issues at CPAC, this big conference, and there’s a lot of really cool things that happen there. One of the issues that they’ve never, ever taken on is the immigration question.
And in my opinion, it’s because most of the Conservatives, the quote, unquote conservative movement, decides that they’re not going to take on the issues that will be detrimental to them raising money and having corporate donors. And the corporate donors and all, they hate the idea of having a border.
They hate the idea of saying out loud that if you’re having people by the millions come to America who are not assimilating, and by the way, I’m not blaming the people that are coming here illegally or otherwise and not assimilating, that’s not their fault.
I mean, the reality is their fault is coming here illegally. But, you know, the assimilation that took place in America was because our nation always had value and valued culture.
And so when you had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Irish or German or Italians coming 100 years ago to America, they were assimilated into America.
And we’re not assimilating people in the same way because we don’t believe in a culture in the same way.
And so what is the culture? The culture is the rule of law, the Judeo Christian values, and binding us together in this system that works so well for what?
Personal property, for pursuit of excellence, creativity, all these kinds of things that are at the core of America. And we don’t even have the confidence to understand that there is a culture.
And so as I’m reading this Sandor Marai, I think I’m pronouncing his name, right, this Hungarian who lived the last years of his life in San Diego. And I’m reading him, and I’m saying, you know, the fact is that it is such a lack of confidence and it will destroy nations left to its own devices.
That’s what he says. That’s his warning. And you see it all around you and you see it all around you, and you wonder what is going to stop that, right?
Because what we have now and I’ve done this a hundred times to you listeners, and I hope you’re not tired of it. We have a narrative machine, a narrative machine, big tech, big media and big government that is using all of its power to push narratives on us that are just untrue, completely false.
You could say it’s the Russia Russia Russia hoax. You could even say, by the way, Here’s one for you. Do you know that there’s an essay that’s describing how one of the reasons that California has had rolling blackouts is because they have gone away from nuclear power? I think this is right.
And because they say they say it’s not fashionable or it’s not good. Well, everybody agrees that has any sanity that if you want to solve the problem of energy, it’s abundance as well as the carbon… go to Generation IV nuclear. And it’s safer. It’s better. All that kind of stuff.
And my point here is we have so many hoaxes being perpetrated on us by big tech, big media, and big government. January 6th, the Russia Russia hoax. Even the climate change hoax. I mean, the climate changing is real. The answers are lies.
And we’re watching all around the Wuhan breakdown, the COVID Wuhan breakdown, we’re watching all kinds of hoaxes being perpetrated on us, but the power is unbelievable.
But the thing, the aspect of our life, it works so well, is being knitted together as Americans in one nation under God and having that common culture. It’s not one culture of one ethnic group. It’s not one culture of one race. It’s the American culture.
And what I fear is what you hear Sandor Marai write about when you read what he says. It’s that the lack of confidence by normal Americans in their culture, in his case, the normal Hungarians, is what’s allowing it to slip away.
That’s what’s allowing you to slip away. And so we got to fight for that. So anyway, that’s what I’ve been reading about this weekend. And watching Lewis and Clark torn down. I couldn’t find an explanation of what they did. I think it had something to do with Sacagawea that they didn’t treat her as well as they could or something.
I don’t even know. But they’re just taking down statues. One statute of time we’re losing our culture.
Alright, we’ve got to take a break. When we come back, we’ve got great interviews. Be right back, it’s Ed Martin here in the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.