The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome! Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. And it is time to catch up. We’ve got a lot to cover today, but I want to start today, well, we’ll talk in a few moments with our old friend Ted Malloch. I like to always talk about who’s coming. Ted Malloch will be with us, and we’ll talk with a new author who I have not spoken to before.
He’s written a piece at The New American, theNewAmerican.com. You know who wrote over there. Alex Newman has written there. I like that website. And this gentleman, Selwyn is his first name. Selwyn? I’ve been practicing because I’ve got to talk to him, and I don’t want to mispronounce his name. I’ve never heard of that name before. We’ll talk with him. He’s written a piece in The New American about how there are places where the counterculture young people are embracing conservatism, in this case, traditional Catholicism. In New York City, there’s a neighborhood, I guess, where people have gone. His name is Selwyn Duke. We’ll talk with him in a few moments, but before we do, let’s get to what you need to know today.
And what you need to know today is if there is an epidemic of fake news, and there is. What do you think about history when you realize that the people who are doing news so definitively are lying?
The question you have to take in your head, you say, well, were they lying just starting with Trump, or were they deceiving us before? It looks like they were deceiving us before, right? It seems like that’s the right assumption.
So fake news isn’t just new.
It may be exacerbated by Trump, it may be worse under Trump, whatever, but I don’t think it’s new.
So now you say to yourself, what about history? What do we know about history then, and what do we say about history? Well, one of the ways that I love to maybe now that I have thought about this more, have more experience, maybe have more clarity, I like to watch who are trotted out as historians. So Michael Beschloss, over the last three or four weeks has been out on MSNBC. He likes the attention until he became a stalwart on Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzenski. The MSNBC show that is as shrill as anything to the left. It just preaches to a far left choir all the time. And Michael Beschloss has become a regular over there, and he’s become hysterical.
Until then, I would have said, he’s always called a presidential historian. And I would have said, well, he’s a presidential historian. He’s written books on the presidents.
Now I watch him, and I think he’s a propagandist. And so he has brought into question my willingness to call him a presidential historian. I can’t say I’ve written, excuse me, I’ve read his stuff. So comes now Politico with a piece on Reagan, and they want to say, that Trump. The headline is Trump didn’t kill Reaganism, these guys did. And it goes into this piece, and it’s in the magazine. So it’s a long piece. By the way, the new thing in journalism is not to do a long piece, but to do a three or four or five paragraph summary of what you want to be said and then to do a transcript of a lengthy interview with someone. That’s a new concept, as far as I can tell. There used to be interviews with people, but it was relatively less common. And usually you get these lengthy pieces where people had to write an article, an essay on someone with some context and some descriptions, because if you just do an interview transcript, what you get is what the person says, how they want to present things, how they want to persuade you. It’s got its own value. But it used to be, especially in these magazines, a political magazine and New York Times Magazine, lengthy pieces that gave you context about where someone lived and what they did and all, and whether it was dishonest or not.
Maybe it was dishonest that was different than this idea of just writing a piece and including a transcript.
So it comes, now, Politico now wants to say the book is by Nicole Hemmer. She’s an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, and she’s written a book called Partisans the Conservative Revolutionaries who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. And she’s an expert on the right wing media.
Well, what she goes on to talk about, I don’t even need to tell you, it won’t surprise you, is that Reagan was amazing. He was wonderful. He was kind. He was not a harsh guy. He wasn’t a bitter guy. He was a sweet guy. Everybody loved him. And it was only after Reagan that everybody got tough and played hardball.
It’s incredible. It’s like they blacked out. Reagan, he was a sweet guy. He was a sunny personality, but his campaigns were hardball campaigns.
He almost unseated the sitting president of the United States, Gerald Ford in ’76, in a really tough campaign. He lost briefly in ’72, I think he ran, but in ’68 he wanted to run and couldn’t because Nixon played hardball. Lyndon Johnson played hardball, Kennedy played hardball. I mean, the idea, but back to this, somehow Reagan was this halcyon days and that everyone was supposed to blame.
And here’s the blame, here’s the kicker. We’re supposed to say that the line is that Reagan was a sweet guy. And then afterwards, things got extreme, except if you look at the politics, Reagan was along a continuum.
He was taking on the globalists. In that case, Communist Soviet Union, taking them on all the time, knowing the threat. Then the Communist wall falls, and there’s an interregnum of about 20 years dominated by the Bushes in the Republican Party. I’m talking about where the embrace was towards globalism, towards the New World Order. George H. W. Bush used that term. Towards the idea that we could bring democracy to the world. George W. Bush did that. Clinton and Obama came along for the ride.
It wasn’t until Trump dramatically shifted the party back to Reaganism, back to the recognition that there was a threat in the world that was world communism. It’s in this case China. Back to the notion that we wanted a strong military, but not a military that was fighting all over the world. After the bombing in Beirut, in Lebanon, where a couple of, more than 200 Marines were killed, Reagan’s policies became decidedly more isolationist, except as to focusing on building up, to keep the strain, keep the pressure on the Soviet Union.
So this historian that is writing that somehow it was Rush Limbaugh and the extreme Newt Gingrich that somehow changed the Republican Party in the ’90s, it’s just patently false. If you look at the ascension of the ’90s, you saw H.W. Bush, New World Order. Jack Kemp. Bob Dole. The establishment in the Republican Party was about multilateral trade deals, about immigration on demand, about opening up the borders even more about this internationalist mindset. It was under Clinton, but it wasn’t fought by the Republicans too hard was the idea that we would have our patent system be, what was the phrase that they used? It would be harmonized with the rest of the world, which means we would take on the characteristics of the rest of the world’s patent system, which is not as good as ours. Anyway, you get the point. Somehow.
But the history, they want to rewrite this because the pivot in history, the thing that changed American politics and American policy, and certainly the Republican Party was Donald Trump in 2015 and 16. You couldn’t be a candidate nationally without having the positions that the Trump campaign were articulating in ’15-’16. You can’t have them today against the multilateral trade deals, against the internationalist movement, against the Communist Chinese, willing to take tariffs, which is a trade shift, right? A big trade shift. And it’s amazing.
But my point here is two points.
One, if you think that history is honest, then I’ve got fake news to show you.
And if you think then that with clear eyes that history is not honest, it brings into question a lot of stuff, doesn’t it?
It brings into question a lot of what we’re told about things, about policies, about how they happened. You don’t have to look far to see other places where they quote, the Civil Rights Act and they say modern day Republicans. In fact, this professor says that modern day Republicans who oppose the Civil Rights Act in long standing. It was the Democrats that opposed the Civil Rights Act. It wasn’t the Republicans. There were a few. It was mostly the Democrats in the south that opposed it. And I don’t know anybody now that’s not. There are aspects of the Civil Rights act that people say got out of hand that are used oddly and not the way it was intended. But the idea that a professor of history is selling this, Buchanan – they drag in Buchanan and said Buchanan was extreme in all this. Buchanan wasn’t extreme. Buchanan. He’s not extreme now. Buchanan has the marks of the modern Republican Party in terms of the internationalists more than almost anything, and also in terms of, I guess, in terms of the family and the idea of a nation.
But again, it’s fake history. It’s fake history and it’s amazing.
It’s eye opening is the word. I’d say it’s eye opening. It makes you realize how, in the name of all that’s good and righteous, do you look back now and understand exactly what happened?
Let’s say another one. I tell someone. When Donald Trump stood up on the debate stage in St. Louis, Missouri, in October of 2016, and the discussion was about prolife, and he said, I’m prolife. I think it’s a baby.
And he said, Hillary, you don’t think it’s a baby. Are you willing to kill the baby? I’m not. Or something like that.
And then he went on to appoint three Supreme Court justices, and they rolled back Roe v. Wade. What more do you want?
If I just take the names out, if I said to someone right now, a conservative, I said, there’s a guy named
Joe Smith or Tom Jones, tim Smith, Tom Jones, whatever. Make a name up, Joe Six Pack. He says he’s pro-life. We don’t know for sure, but he says he’s pro-life because it’s a baby. He’s running for president. Now, he appointed three judges, they rolled back Roe v. Wade.
Wouldn’t there be statues and parades? That’s what would happen, right? As well it should. It’s amazing. All right.
That’s what you need to know is fake history is as bad as fake news, and I think it’s even more common. Visit your schools. Find out. Go to your schools and your school textbooks.
We’ve always wondered about the left lean, but forget about the left lean, the obvious liberal biases. You just have to wonder, what’s the truth? Well, you don’t have to wonder. I think you have to wonder, as Ted Malloch, I was talking with him to prepare for his interview in a few minutes, and he said I forget how he phrased it, but he said, if the mainstream media is for it, I’d say go the other way. 180 immediately, and you’ll know you’re on the right track.
All right, everybody, we’ll take a break. That’s what you need to know. We’ll be right back. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
