America's 250th: The Truth About the Founders w/ Eric Metaxas

It's the 4th of July weekend. The kids are out of school, the grill's going, and across the country Americans are celebrating. That's a good thing. It's a beautiful thing, but this year's different. This year is America's 250th birthday, and I've been thinking about that quite a lot lately, what that means. We're living in a moment where so much truth is coming to the surface that has been hidden from us for so long, and I keep asking myself, what the founding fathers know that we've forgotten? What was different back then? What they think of where we are right now, and what solutions would they have for us today? The truth is, most of us were taught this cleaned up, watered down version of the real story, and the real story of 1776 is so full of faith, sacrifice, and outright miracles, that if a teacher told it straight in a modern classroom today, they'd probably lose their job. America's founding was truly extraordinary. No other nation on earth has had a heritage like this one. The founding fathers knew it was going to be hard to keep tyranny out. They did everything they could to prevent it. They built safeguards into the system because they understood human nature and how corrupting power and money were, and yet over the decades, bankers, global powers, and forces working from within have spent generations trying to take America down from the inside. But here's the thing, we still have our roots, and this weekend I want us to find them together. I want us to remember America, where we came from, what we're built on, because there's so much more than what you were told. It's so important that we don't just remind each other of the basics, but that we go deep and really get to the heart of it. My guest today has gone deep into that buried history, and what he found is going to surprise you, inspire you, and maybe even give you real hope. My guest is Eric Metaxas. Eric is a best selling author. He's written more than 30 books, and he hosts the nationally syndicated Eric Metaxas Radio Show, and in his newest book, Revolution, the birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world, he tells the full story of 1776 in a way that most schools and documentaries have never even touched. While everyone else keeps repeating the same tired myths, Eric has gone deep into the original letters, the diaries, the private writings of the men who built this country, and he's pulled out the stories that have been hidden for generations, things that were never known that are so important. These stories are going to help you remember what America was meant to be, and how that truth is still just as relevant now as it was 250 years ago. Welcome to Man in America, a voice of reason in a world gone mad. I'm your host, Seth Holhouse. On this show, I talk to real Americans with real solutions to the real problems that we're all facing today. I help you connect the dots between the problems that we see in the present and the decisions made by powerful people in the past. Because once we understand how we got here, and what the real history of America actually is, we can remember where we came from. We can learn from the past, and we can make real change for a better future. Before we start, make sure you hit that like button. It helps a lot with the algorithm or platform that you're watching. It helps this information to get out to more people. Also, please subscribe and share this with someone that really needs to hear it. Let me know what your thoughts are in the comments. Also, remember that every Man in America show is done as a podcast. If you want to listen instead of watch, just go to your favorite podcast app. If you use Apple Podcasts, you want to do me a real favor, leave a review on there. Apple really prioritizes podcasts that have those reviews. If you like the show, leave a review and help me reach more people. Let's get into it now with my guest, Eric Metaxas. Mr. Eric Metaxas, it's an honor to have you on the show. Thank you so much for giving us your time today. You're very kind. Thanks for having me. So this is a very unique time in the history of this country. We're actually publishing this on July 4th on the 250th year birthday of the founding of this country. But I have to say that if the founding fathers were to look ahead and see the state of America right now, they may be a little bit disappointed in how their creation has transformed over the years. Obviously, there are some beautiful things in this country, but I think we have a long way to go to get back to our roots. And so you just recently published a book, a fantastic book called Revolution, the birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world. And I think it's important because I think as a lot of us look for how do we fix this country, I think a lot of it goes back to what was this country originally? What were the roots? What is it that allowed this to become the greatest nation, escape tyranny? And where have we gone off track from that? So I guess I'll start with asking, looking back at the revolution, looking back at the founding of this country, what do you think are some of the most significant lies being told to convince people about something that wasn't true about the founding of this nation? Well, the biggest one, really the central lie is that you can have liberty without God. None of the founders believe that, not one, not one of the founders, not one of the men who pledged their lives, who could have lost their lives, many of whom suffered and died, in fact, believed that you could have liberty without God. And so that's at the center of what they were doing. And it's not like my book is about that. My book is just, I hope, a happy gallop through the history. It's meant to be a fun read that tells everything leading up to Lexington and Concord and crazy stuff, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and lots of other stuff that maybe people wouldn't have heard of, crazy stuff, and then Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill and on and on, Valley Forge, and all those stories. I just wanted to tell those stories. I said it's time because I think that a big part of the reason we're in the mess we're in is that we have forgotten this stuff. Americans used to all know this. If you put a microphone on anybody's face in mainstream America in 1960, everybody knew all the stuff that's in my book. It just was part of the common knowledge of America. We have forgotten it. Some of it has been aggressively pushed out. We need to understand this stuff. We need to know these stories. But in the course of writing the stories, and some of them are just epic stories, I mean, Valley Forge and the crossing of the Delaware, I mean, really amazing stories, exciting stories. But in the course just of writing these stories, this stuff bubbled up over and over and over again, that this was a spiritual battle between good and evil, and that none of the founders thought they could succeed without God. They believed that, in fact, what they were fighting for was God's idea. They called it the sacred cause. They had this covenant idea that unless we covenant with God and obey in a way that honors God, God will not smile on our efforts. The British not only didn't think that way, they mocked the Christian faith of the 13 colonies. They laughed at it. They were basically cynical, debauched elites. And the Americans were really markedly Christian. The whole culture was dramatically Christian. And so you have this battle between good and evil. And I say that we are now in our third existential crisis. The Revolution was the first, the second was the Civil War. We're now in the third. And if we don't go back and learn the history of what happened, then if we don't look at the DNA of this is who we are, this is how you get liberty, we can't keep liberty. And that to me is inescapable. It's vital. And so I wrote the book, really, again, wanting just to tell these stories, because I think we need a one-volume book that tells all these great stories. But in the course of that, I realized how important it is that we know these stories. It's central, really, that we understand how this happened and how these men saw the whole thing. And at the heart of it, as I said in the beginning there, God is at the center of it. You don't get liberty without God. That's a phantasm. Well, I think that one quote that's always stuck with me, and it was, I think, James Madison, the Federalist Papers, who said, you see right here, he says that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government. He says, and nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another. Because he goes on, and you find this a lot when looking at the founding documents of Federalist Papers, et cetera, that they talk very, very clearly about a very simple principle, is that if man wants to have freedom, he has to have moral restraint. And if he doesn't have moral restraint, the only thing that will create structure and order in society is tyranny. And I think that's really kind of one of the fundamental principles, is that if we want freedom and self-governance, there's this very modern American idea of independence, discover who you are. Morality is what you want it to be, right? You can have sex with an animal if you want to. That's freedom, right? To express yourself. But what we find is that if freedom without commandments and without principles, we end up following, I think, the demon nature. We follow the evil that is tempting us in this world. They all understood this. That's what's so interesting to me, is that you can't find any of them that didn't understand it, that didn't write about it. They all were on this page. And we've drifted away from that. And my friend, Oz Guinness, puts it, he calls it the golden triangle of freedom. And I write about that in my book, If You Can Keep It, but I write about it in the epilogue of this book, is that they basically said what you just said, that you cannot have liberty without virtue. They said it over and over and over. They all said it. I mean, Washington says it. Adams says it. They all see this. They know this. So then how do you get virtue? How do you get people to behave in a way that they don't need to be constrained by government? Well, it's simple. You need faith in a higher order. If you in the God of the Bible, then to please him, you're going to behave in a virtuous way. You don't need the government to force you. And so, I see you're familiar with the golden triangle of freedom since you put up an image of it. I'm the live editor, so I just did a quick search for it. I kind of pulled it up. This is actually my first time of hearing about it. Yeah, well, it's brilliantly put. It's Oz Guinness's brilliant idea. But the interesting thing, so freedom, again, what is freedom? Freedom means I'm not going to be governed by anyone. We're going to govern ourselves. Well, how do you do that? By being virtuous, by doing the right thing without being forced to by government. Okay. Well, then, in order to do that, you need some kind of faith so that it's not the government that compels me. It's my faith in God that says I'm going to do this and this and this. But then the third piece of the triangle is that if freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith, faith in turn requires freedom. In other words, true faith cannot be compelled. It can't be just, well, we've got a state church where everybody, you know, we're going to put a gun to your head. You have to go to church or you have to go to mosque or you have to. The government has to be agnostic. The government has to say you are utterly free to figure that out yourself. We're not going to compel it. And then if you choose it, it will be vibrant and beautiful. But if you're forced by government, of course, that kills freedom to begin with, but it also breaks down. The founders understood this idea. And so it's a gamble when, you know, Benjamin Franklin is leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. I mean, he gets past the revolution. But Mrs. Powell says, you know, what have you given us a monarchy, a republic? He says, a republic, madam, if you can keep it. In other words, we cannot compel you to keep a republic. We can't compel you to be free. You know, we can't force you to be free. It doesn't work. Freedom has to be free. You have to do it yourselves. And it's a big part of why I wrote the book. It's like if we don't know this stuff, we drift away from it. So it's sort of up to us to teach this to our kids, to understand this. And I think we've done a pretty bad job in the last, let's say, 60 years. We've drifted away from this. And of course, there are many people that are openly hostile to this, that have pushed away from these ideas, that have this ridiculous utopianist idea that, you know, we're just going to evolve into something wonderful. Well, that utopianist impulse leads to, you know, the bloodbath of the French Revolution. It leads to a Pol Pot, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Gulag Archipelago. It leads to every horrible thing. The founders were not utopianists. They were realists. And they said, you know, according to these biblical ideas, if we obey God, we can govern ourselves. If we just kill the king and try to govern ourselves without reference to God, it won't go well. And that of course happens in the French Revolution just a few years later. Huge thanks to Rumble because they've never censored me. They've never, ever censored me before. It's never even been a question on the table with these guys. It doesn't matter whether I'm talking about Epstein or Today's Stuff or SRA or MKUltra. They truly have supported free speech, and I give them a lot of thanks for that. But they've also have done some things, which you might be interested, look, if you're into crypto, if that's kind of your thing, you might want to look into the Rumble wallet, right? So it's really just kind of a question of asking how much control you have over your money, right? So technology has changed, and it's changing everything about how money is working, right? 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So scan the QR code or just click on the link in the description, which is wallet.rumble.com slash MIA. So wallet.rumble.com slash MIA and download your free Rumble wallet. From there, you can set up your wallet, enter your promo code MIA10 to get your 10 bucks in U.S. stable coin. And it's a limited time offer. So act now. So take control of your money. Get started with Rumble wallet today. There are some terms and conditions. You can see that information in the show description. If you look really at the history of a lot of tyranny, whether it's communist China or the Bolsheviks or Cambodia, throughout history, what you can see is that there's a very similar pattern that happens. And a big part of that is looking at, say, the CCP and the communist revolution, the cultural revolution. There is an intentional destruction of the culture that established the moral norms and the morality. And so, you know, when you look back during the BLM riots and you see the statues falling, I mean, I saw, because I've studied China extensively and a lot of history of communism very extensively. And I had seen so many videos, the same thing happening in communist China, then pulling over the statues of Buddha, pulling over religious structures, pulling over cultural figures, destroying that, rewriting the history, telling people, hey, that's not your real history. This is the real history. And that severs those cultural roots. It severs that moral fabric that's really rooted in that history of, okay, this is what it means to be an American. Or say in 1960s, this is what it means to be a Chinese person. That was all erased. I think that's a big part of what's happened in this country. And even to the point of them saying, oh, well, the founders, they weren't really Christian. They were deists. That was a French enlightenment coming out of it. So talk about that a little bit. I don't know if I mentioned it to you or because I've done a couple of podcasts today, but this is at the heart of it all, this lie that they were deists. None of them were deists. Maybe at some point you could say Jefferson or Franklin, but let me tell you, even they got the narrative that we're going back to the Sinai Covenant. We're going to look directly to God. Every one of them understood this. And why do people keep pushing this deist idea? First of all, it is untrue. It is flatly untrue, but they push it because they just don't like the idea of reference to God in the Bible. They would like to think we can have all this wonderful stuff without God and without, you know, it's, it really is scandalous to me. John Adams famously says, facts are stubborn things. And that's true. Like, let's stick with the facts. The facts are that all of the founders understood this stuff. And if you don't like it, that's, that's really, you know, history is history. But when people have an agenda and I think this is what Marxists do. It's what, you know, you referenced China. I mean, they want the state to be God. And the biggest threat to the power of the state is people actually believing in God, because then you can't threaten them because they answered to God directly. So the Uyghur Muslims are a threat. Falun Gong is a threat. Christians are a threat, and they will do anything they can to wipe that out, to crush that. And so, you know, we're seeing that today with the, with the rise of, you know, an openness to communism, which again, leads to every kind of slavery, leads to bloodbath. So in order to combat that, we have to know this history. And so I think that even, you know, in writing the book, I just wanted to do a one volume that, you know, tells this happy story of stories. But I realized it's important because we've got a lot of semi-woke versions of this, versions that basically say, oh, you can have America without, without these God ideas, or America's really a mixed bag. You know, America's really not such a wonderful thing. Let's not celebrate too much. We should be wringing our hands with guilt. And I think, wow, that's really false. That's, it's putting out a lot of ideas there that are not, they're just not true. And so I didn't write my book to correct anything, but in retrospect, I feel like it ends up doing that. When you think of the PBS version that Ken Burns put out recently, it's, it's, it's so tortured because you can't celebrate America. You feel like we've got to talk about the sins of America. And I know Tom Hanks has something on Netflix and I, I don't think people realize how much they're being lied to. And I don't know how much of that is intentional, but when you know the facts as I now do, having done the research, you think, wow, that is just, it's just false. And again, this is how the founders saw it. So if you're interested in how they saw it, if you're honest about it, none of them thought that you could have these wonderful liberties and self-government without God. And I think we have to be honest about that. And I think if we don't know that we, we drift in these, you know, Marxist directions. Oh, I mean, certainly. I mean, you look at, we've got this alarming rise of democratic socialists and a lot of candidates holding office are openly democratic socialists. And socialism, going back to, what was it, Lenin who said this, but, or one of the, basically socialism is really just the beginning step of communism, right? Just kind of sets the stage and paves the way. It's just stage one of communism, basically. And you can see that this is happening. And you mentioned the, the rewriting of history and a lot of these modern things that reminds me of the modern church, right? Where you have, you trace things back because I've interviewed Trevor Loudon a handful of times and other people on this, this idea that the Marxists and the communists have very, very intentionally infiltrated the seminary schools, the theological schools that they've really, so, you know, you have churches the same way that you have history books now saying that, oh, the founders were deists. So this is, you know, they were these racist slave owners. You have a lot of churches now that are, you're really kind of pushing for this objective morality. It's such a lie. I mean, again, when I did the research, I was really astonished at how clearly these are lies. I mean, first of all, a third of the signers of the declaration of independence had slaves, a third, not all of them, one third. Many of them were viciously anti-slavery. I mean, they hated slavery. They hated the idea that they're being blackmailed by Georgia and South Carolina into, you know, striking out stuff from Jefferson's declaration of independence, speaking against slavery. They were, because of their Christian faith, very strongly abolitionist. And we keep hearing the same story like, oh, no, no, they were all pro-slavery. That's just not true. And it's unfair to characterize them that way. I mean, Ben Franklin, you know, he leads up the abolitionist society. I don't want to get into this too deeply, but that's just one lie that you hear over and over. President Obama repeated it the other day. And I think these people have an animus against America. They have an animus against the founder's vision, and they keep rehearsing these lies over and over. We need to fight back with the truth. And, you know, that's, again, why I wrote my book. I said, we need a, you know, a readable retelling of our history. And again, it's not about anything, but in the course of just telling the truth, it ends up being about everything we're discussing. And so, you know, looking back at history and seeing what things were like then, where they are now, how do you think we course correct? Because I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. And what I've come to basically is just, you know, as much as we can exit the system, homeschool my children, right? You know, I live out in the country, we homestead, we raise our own food. It's kind of, you look at just this corporateocracy without even getting into more of the conspiratorial, the deep state with things, which, you know, in my opinion, are very, very real. These powerful group of elites that have very nefarious agendas, even looking at just how the corporations are ruling, the collusion between the FDA and the, you know, the CDC and these big agencies with the big corporations. You know, I'm just finished watching an Enron documentary. And we watch a lot of documentaries, my wife and I, and you can see over and over again that at the very high levels that when money is involved, that there's a collusion between the government, big corporations, and that's what's created so many of these problems. It's called corruption, Seth. It's called corruption. And how do you fight corruption? You have to, I mean, this is really, this gets to the revolution itself, right? The Americans were markedly godly Christian people. The British elites were markedly cynical, corrupt, debauched. These are two views of the world. And I think that unless you have revival in faith, unless you have people taking these ideas seriously, you drift toward corruption and toward cynicism. And I do think that a lot of Americans have woken up just in the last number of years, and since 2020, really, so many Americans have thought, I had no idea how bad it was. I had no idea that I can't trust my elections. I can't trust the government. They're insisting I get an experimental jab, and if I don't, I can't do this and I can't do that. A lot of people have woken up. And so I think we're actually at a good point right now that people realize, okay, I need to get serious. I need to understand this stuff. We've let it drift. We thought everything was fine. It's not fine. Things have gotten very bad. And so I'm very hopeful because I know a lot of people have woken up. There are tons of people that kind of get this who didn't get it five or six years ago. But in terms of looking at a revolution, oftentimes we look back again at 1776 and the years leading up to it, and you did see an armed uprising, right? You had militia groups, you had people organizing. And even though it was a very small percentage of the population at that time, it was enough to tip the scales. But I feel like this is a struggle now because you look at a lot of conservatives and they're saying, oh, they're ultra pro-Second Amendment, which I agree with. I am myself. But there's this idea that, oh, we're going to just fight back. But I feel like that's exactly what these elites want. They want an armed uprising because that gives them an excuse to bring in martial law to really crack down on Second Amendment. I mean, God forbid that it comes to that. I don't think we need to do that. I think that we are already fighting back in many, many ways. But we've got to get serious and we've got to fight hard. This is not something that takes care of itself. I think that I think we are fighting back. I think President Trump actually is kind of wise to this and he's put people in place. I mean, I really think a lot of this stuff is being exposed. Finally, I mean, it's not enough for me and it's not being dealt with. You know, I want to see perp walks. I want to see arrests. There have been people that have done wicked things, really wicked things that are treasonous. I do think, however, that there are people who are aware of this and who are working on it. I don't think it's, you know, it's not 2016 anymore. I think we've seen some of this stuff. And I do think that, you know, there are a lot of people animated about it and talking about it. I'm talking about it all the time. You're talking about it. I think that, you know, you're never going to get everybody on this page, but you don't need everybody. They didn't have everybody in the revolution. You know, you had maybe a third of the people who were awake to it. So I am hopeful. And so what do you think is the core message? Again, this is, you know, 250th year anniversary. This is a very, very big deal for us to just reflect on what it means to be an American. In your view, what is the most important message people need to be hearing on a day like today where we're celebrating the birth of this nation? Where should we be focused? What should we be holding in our hearts? Well, I think we have to understand that the liberties that we have, the ability to live in a country that is ostensibly free, is an outrageous gift that you do not deserve. You should live in China or North Korea or Saudi Arabia or any corrupt government, any horrible place, but you don't. You've been given this inestimable gift of living here. You need to appreciate that gift. You need to understand that gift. And then you need to do your part in fighting for liberty. It is not free. When Franklin said, if you can keep it, it takes effort. To be enslaved takes nothing. If you live in China, you just do what they tell you to do and shut up. If you live in Nazi Germany, you know, you do what they tell you to do. If you want liberty, you have to, you know, pay into the system a little bit. You have to spend time caring about it. You have to be a responsible citizen. And so, you know, that's why I keep saying that, you know, my book is like mandatory. I want to say to people, listen, you're responsible for this information. You need to know this stuff. This is going to be on the test. This is like not for history buffs. This is for Americans. We all used to know this. And when Americans know this, we're a different America. When we don't know it, we are wide open for corruption, manipulation, deceit. That's really what has happened in the last, you know, few decades. We have drifted away from these central ideas. So that's the first thing, is not just to say, I'm going to blow off some firecrackers and have a hot dog and call it a day. I don't deserve to live here. I do not deserve the gift of liberty, of living in America. My parents, my mother, you know, who I'll see in a couple of hours, she's 92. She grew up in Nazi Germany. She remembers that. The Soviets took over East Germany where she lived. She escaped when she was 17 years old. She knows how evil communism is. My father grew up in Greece. He would tell me about how the communists tried to take over Greece. So I was raised to love America, to love liberty, and to hate communism and to know how wicked it is. And I think that we're at a point now where Americans need to understand that, that this is, this will be your lot if you don't care about it, if you don't do anything about it. And I think finally, you know, what would the founders say? The founders would say, we're supposed to trust in God. That is very real. We can't do this on our own. If we care about that, God is with us. We're not deists. We shouldn't be deists. We should know God is real and he wants to bless us and to be with us. But, you know, we have to acknowledge him. That's what Washington would have said. It's what Adams would have said. They took this very, very seriously. So I think we're seeing a resurgence of faith in America. And I really do think that's at the heart of the way forward. Without that, you simply can't have these liberties. Yeah. And that's also what gives me hope too, is it's a combination of a lot of things. It's the boom in homeschooling. It's the boom in homesteading. It's the rejection in big medicine, a lot of these kind of larger corrupted organizations. And it's a real kind of back towards sovereignty and independence. But I think at the core though, it's a belief in God and morality. And it's the fact that this conversation you and I are having, you know, say 10 years ago, people would have looked at it a little bit side-eyed. Like that's kind of a strange thing. Whereas now people would be like, yes, I can feel it. This is really, really important. And so am I correct in saying that, you know, with your book that you wrote, do you see this as being part of your mission and part of what you can play as a bestselling author, the role you can play in helping people to grasp and hold on to this history, the founding of America, remember what it meant to be in America, remember what it means to be born into this nation. Is that what you really see as one of the core goals of this book? There's no doubt about that. I mean, I believe that this is God's assignment that he gave me. I mean, most of my books, I feel that way about them, but this one in particular, that this was God's assignment to me. You know, he gave me the gift of being able to write in a way that's readable that people say, oh, reads like a novel. I couldn't put it down. You know, that's God's gift to me. And he didn't give it to me, you know, so I can make money writing silly novels. He gave it to me for his purposes. And this book is, you know, as I said in the beginning, this is the story of America. This is the story of our birth. We used to all know this. And so I did feel like this is an assignment to tell that whole story from the beginning, you know, 1761, 62, 63, all the way to 1783. We all used to know these stories and this larger story. And I did feel a deep sense. I do feel a deep sense that that's God's assignment. And it's an honor that I get to that I get to do that. And I'm thrilled to say that it has been doing very well. It was number two on the New York Times list. Amazon sold out. So it fell off the list because nobody could buy it. But it's really I think this is our time in America where I say, listen, folks, we've let it go too long. This is the time. Let's let's get serious. Let's know our history. And when you know it, you're going to be excited about it. This is you know, these are beautiful stories. These are beautiful people. When you read about Nathan Hale and Henry Knox and John Adams and Samuel, I mean, these are these are beautiful people and we owe it to them to what they've done, their sacrifices, you know, to reacquaint ourselves with them and teach our kids about them. So I am very hopeful about it. Well, me too. Honestly, I really am. And so I'll bring the link up again. So Revolution, the birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world. It's on Amazon, wherever you buy books, I'll make sure there's links to it in the description. You also have a show, which I recommend people check out your show on YouTube, podcast, etc. You know, to hear you speak regularly. And Eric, I just want to thank you not just for the time that you've given me in the audience today, but just thank you for what you've put into things like this book, because it's very, very important that we hold on to this tight. So again, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure speaking with you, Eric. My privilege. We all have a role to play. And if everyone does that, we'll be OK. And thanks for the role you play. God bless you. God bless you too. God bless America. I hope that conversation lit something up inside you today. You know, it's easy on a holiday weekend is enjoy the barbecue and the fireworks. And honestly, you should. We all should. That's what this time is for. We really need that. But I also think this is a moment to pause and to really stop and remember America, not the cartoon version we were sold in school, but the real one, the one built on real faith, real sacrifice and real men who gave up everything because they believed that freedom was worth dying for. The founders could see that tyranny would try everything in its playbook to come back. They first saw that. So they wrote it in the documents. They warned us. And a lot of what they have feared has already happened. The bankers moved in, global powers pushed in, socialism is spreading its roots. Generations of kids were taught a different story intentionally. But here's what they couldn't take from us. The true roots are still there. The declaration is still there. And it's a short document. So I'm going to read for you a few lines from it right now. And I want you to hear us like it's the first time. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That was written 250 years ago. And I want to ask you to ask yourself, does it still mean something to you? Do you still want it to still mean something? Because I do. And I think that most Americans do if they are reminded of what it actually says. The founders weren't perfect men, but they were trying to build something that had never existed before. And they knew it was going to be hard to keep. Benjamin Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention and someone asked him, he said, what have you given us? And he said, a republic, if you can keep it. And that question is still being asked today. And the answer depends on us. So this 4th of July weekend, hug your family, share a meal, light some fireworks, grill some burgers, but also share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. A friend, family member, someone who's maybe given up on America a little bit. Because the story that Eric tells in that book, in the story we talked about today, this is a reminder. This country was worth fighting for then and it's worth fighting for now. So make sure you hit that like button, whatever platform you're watching, leave a comment and tell me what surprised you most from today's discussion. If you want to go deeper, Eric's book Revolution is out right now. The link is in the description below. So God bless you and God bless America. 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