The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report, great to be with you. We’ve got another great show and please visit ProAmericaReport.com, ProAmericaReport.com and you can sign up for the Daily WYNK there. Just put your email address in. I promise, I send you an email, only an email every morning, Monday through Friday at 08:00 A.m. East coast 05:00 a.m. Pacific. Nothing else – I don’t sell your email address. I don’t rent it. I don’t lease it. I don’t do anything with it.
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So let’s get to it. What do you need to know today? Well, this one is going to be important and I’m going to walk you through this. I’ve told you about my interest in what it means to be a nation. What is it about a nation? The American nation. And it’s only the last 400 years or so that there is something called the nation state.
There used to be other ways to think about… You had Holy Roman empires. You had different kinds of ways of living together. And only in the last few hundred years, the nation state developed. And what is the nation? We’ve talked about this a lot. And I tell you, my good friend Joe Johnston, who wrote the book The Decline of Nations, is a great sounding board. But I’m really interested in this.
And one of the things is that there is national sovereignty, and the national sovereignty may be different in other nations. Right? There could be a different nation. So if you go to Great Britain, if you go to England, well, they have a kind of monarchy, and their sovereignty kind of comes through the King and Queen, the Queen right now. America, we have a very distinct form of sovereignty. And the sovereignty comes from We the People, through our States, to the federal government. The operating manual is the Constitution and, to some extent, the inspiration, the founding document, is the Declaration of Independence.
Well, over in Europe, there is this strange relationship that sort of struggle as the European Union has grown over the last 25 to 30 years and has attempted to say, well, we we get to have some sovereign role over all the nations. And so this is the tension you see, whether it’s a regulatory tension… A lot of people attribute Brexit, the leaving of, the leaving of the European Union by Britain to some of the regulations that had to do with all different kinds of economies and things. So there’s lots of ways to think of this, but here’s the what I want to talk about.
The tension is coming in nations like Poland, nations like Hungary, and other nations where they have a decidedly different view of the nature of their nation and therefore the impact of sovereignty. So what got me thinking about this was this morning, I guess, Friday morning, let me make sure I’m getting it right. Late Thursday night, I’m sorry. I’m looking at the date on it. The Polish Constitutional Court gave a ruling, put down a ruling.
So this is like the Supreme Court of Poland. And they said, look, the European Union only gets to have a certain competency over our, over laws in areas that we signed up to, in the areas we signed up for. In other words, if we sign up with the European Union to share a currency, if we sign up with the European Union to agree to regulate travel, if we sign up with the European Union in certain competencies, including regulatory ones… Whether it’s good or bad, if we’ve signed up for that, well, then the EU courts and the sort of EU sovereignty can go ahead and have an impact on us.
But it doesn’t get to be extended to everything just because we’re in the EU. And here’s where the rubber meets the road. Nations like Poland and Hungary and there are a few others that have a decidedly different view of the world and of their lives and of their families and of their nation. Mostly, I would say, informed by Judeo Christian values, that would be the way to say it. In other words, Hungary’s got some laws they pass that say we’re not going to let LGBTQ be presented to kids under 18 and Poland’s got some rules on the same similar topics.
Well, European Union says we’ve got the right to crack down on you, and they’re doing it in the classic fashion that the American system, which is what we’re going to switch to, is doing here? What is it? Show me the money. So the European Union, one of the big values that they have if you’re a member, is that you get access to the funding and they pool their resources and they tax each other and they borrow against the strength of all these nations, et cetera, et cetera.
And so there’s a bunch of, for example, COVID relief. Well, the European Union has said we object to the laws of Hungary, and maybe I think the laws of Poland also, as to X or Y. Therefore, we’re holding back the COVID. And the Polish Constitutional Court said, no, we’re not doing that. Our sovereignty, the Polish sovereignty is here.
And I won’t even get in for a moment in the past that. I would say that the Polish example, by the way, is one of the more interesting ones, because when I was visiting Poland about three years ago, one of the people I was talking to there said to me about, apropos Poland, and he said, we were a nation for a long time, when we had no state, we had no boundaries. We were underground. And what held us together was the Church, the Catholic Church. That’s what he said. And that’s what went on.
So that’s a very different example. But let’s talk about America. Let’s talk about America. And let’s talk about what’s happening in America. And here’s the thing I have to tell you. You watch what’s happening in America and you say to yourself, okay, we see incredible overreaches by the federal government, whether it’s the role of the Department of Justice in our school board meetings, whether it’s the role of the Department of Education in curriculum, especially now you’re seeing on the health freedom front, the question of who should be allowed to tell a parent that they must act in this way?
Or let’s say it differently, who’s allowed to tell an adult that they’re allowed to, that they must act this way. And then, even more telling is who should be allowed to tell… More important, who should be allowed to tell a parent what they must do for their child?
Now we’ve headed down a path where we’re misunderstanding our sovereignty. We used to have a problem, and we still do in some ways in America. And probably, let’s say, between the 50s, 60s, and 70s and into the 80s, we had a problem where the European, excuse me, the United Nations and other international organizations, were getting their hooks into America. And we were seeing even our courts citing foreign law, international law and all that.
But now the question is, who’s sovereign? I’m sovereign. Right? Who’s sovereign? We’re the sovereigns. We the People are the sovereigns. We’re the ones that have control over this. We’re the ones that should be in charge. And this is very important. Again, this is another great moment in terms of learning, if we can get it right. If we don’t get it right, we’re losing something special about our nation.
But if we get it right, our nation and the Republic, the way our founders set it up, created space where if you do want to live in a state where you want your sovereignty to be given over in a greater way to the state or federal government, you can do that. But generally and more importantly, as a threshold matter, our sovereignty comes from We the People. And the intrusions of that by the federal government or by foreign, the UN or anybody else, are significant.
And, well, the intrusions must be… We must be vigilant. Let’s say it that way. We must be incredibly vigilant for those challenges to it. So we’re watching Poland fight back against the European Union trying to usurp Poland’s sovereignty. We’re watching Hungary fight back against the European Union and there in the intrusions of their sovereignty.
And we’re watching in America, the federal government and the big government, even in States, intruding on our sovereignty. And we’ve talked about this, we don’t need to be the nation builders of the world. But we can be the inspiration for nations of the world because they look at us and they see what we did was so spectacular, so special, so significant. So that’s interesting to watch in the rest of the world.
This is the fight right now. This is the fight for the survival of the nation. And remember, the nation is all the things, all the aspects of the nation, we could talk about it for hours and hours and hours, but includes our faith and religious tradition. Not which religious tradition, but that there’s a religious tradition, the rule of law, the Constitution, the founding documents, the shared… We’ll lose it if we let the sovereignty be overtaken by the power. By the powerful.
All right, we’ve got to take a break, everybody. We’ll be right back. Don’t forget, visit ProAmericaReport.com, ProAmericaReport.com and sign up for the daily emails there. And that’s what you need to know. Be right back.