Why The Right Is So Dishonest About American History - Some News (Thanksgiving, Football)

- Here's some news,
America's having a reasoned, healthy debate
about the cause of the Civil War.
The year now is 1866 and the losing enemy,
the Confederacy, was, what, what's?
No, couldn't be 2017, that's this year.
Oh, yes, I see.
Here's some old news, the Civil War was caused by slavery.
And here's some news: the president, the chief of staff,
press secretary, and a large portion of the population
seems to think it wasn't.
We as a nation are having a crisis
of both fake news and fake history
relitigating the Civil War, defending Christopher Columbus,
downplaying the genocide of Native Americans
and taking of their lands
and it's bizarre.
And Thanksgiving is coming up
so we thought it would be a good opportunity
to get into our country's history of war,
racism, genocide, and (bleep) football.
But first we have to back up, because
in 2017 we need to relitigate all of documented history
in order to discuss simple topics.
For example, whenever Columbus Day rolls around
many point out that Christopher Columbus was actually
an idiot and dumb dumb who didn't actually discover America
or prove the Earth was round,
thought the planet was smaller
than everyone else said it was,
turned out to be wrong,
then abused and enslaved the natives
for the purposes of acquiring gold from their land
and those are just the facts.
And that should be the end of it, you'd think.
Okay, Christopher Columbus was a savage man
who didn't discover North America,
didn't prove the earth was round,
did enslave and brutalize the nice people he found.
There are journal entries literally from him
describing the natives being kind and bringing them things,
having no knowledge of guns so they'd be easy to enslave,
and then he went back to Spain
to get more ships to load up with slaves
and then brutally forced others to mine for gold.
On his face and in his skull,
Christopher Columbus isn't worth
taking a whole day to celebrate
and that's it.
We're done?
Apparently not, because every Columbus Day
the right tends to point out
other general sort-of half truths about,
generally Native Americans or history, in general,
to dismiss the idea that (bleep) Christopher Columbus
in videos called Thanksgiving: A Politically Incorrect Guide
which is a weird way to spell Historically.
Instead of talking about Christopher Columbus
of Columbus Day fame, his actions in the 1490s,
he hear things like so, you think Native Americans
were peaceful until Columbus showed up?
Tell me again about scalping and cannibalism.
Okay, come with me on a world of the imagination,
use your imaginer,
'cause, sorry, I thought we were talking about
Christopher Columbus, of Columbus Day fame,
and his actions around 1492,
but, okay, okay, okay, fine,
various Native Americans scalped their enemies
from before 1492 to after 1492
and colonials offered bounties for scalps in the 1600s,
but to be fair, at first the bounties were for heads.
In 1756 Pennsylvania passed the Scalp Act for scalps,
Confederate guerrillas scalped
Union soldiers in the Civil War.
Oh, right, the Civil War, we'll talk about that,
but anyway, some tribes participated in
cannibalism of their fallen enemies
and other tribes thought it was a real gross no-no.
But again, what does that have to do with Columbus Day?
Don't know, but hey,
aside from Native Americans being brutally violent,
the most brutally violent of everybody, from anywhere,
they were also technologically regressive
and didn't even use the wheel.
Happy hashtag Columbus Day.
Well, first of all,
regressive means they were becoming less advanced,
not that they weren't as advanced as others,
so nice try, wordwise.
But some of them did invent a wheel.
They just didn't use them for hauling
because they hadn't domesticated draft animals yet
and also Europeans didn't invent the wheel,
Sumerians did
and then the concept spread across the continents
over the next thousands of years.
There's this idea of Native American savagery
and settler superiority that perhaps can be best summed up
by a video from Ben Shapiro's website the Daily Wire,
the video has since been removed,
but it depicted the Native Americans
as all violent savages and cannibals
until Christopher Columbus arrived
and kindly introduced them to eating utensils,
which they already had,
taught them how to build things,
taught them how to cultivate corn,
which is the opposite of what happened,
so we should celebrate Columbus Day
because Native Americans contributed nothing,
like, for example, the cultivation of corn,
the industry of which made $63 billion dollars in 2014.
Shapiro claimed the video was satire,
which, no, unless you were making fun
of what you actually think about Columbus Day
because it's just a slight exaggeration
of what these arguments always are.
After removing the satire video
Ben clarified that Columbus Day is worth celebrating.
Despite some awful wrongs,
Western Civilization's cultivation of the Americas
is a historical good.
Which is literally unknowable.
It's the civil, facts don't care about your feelings,
of Ayn Rand's,
any white person who brought the element of civilization
had the right to take over this continent.
It's the not explicitly erasist version
of Richard Spencer's:
- The video lists off all of the things white people did
after Christopher Columbus discovered America
like written language, mathematics, and philosophy
and, broadly, books,
despite the Native American's written languages,
and their almanacs,
which were invented thousands of years
before Europeans invented almanacs.
Other post-Columbus contributions are medicine,
even though Native Americans invented the syringe
and had medicine, and had anesthetics,
which the West didn't have until the mid 18th century.
They contributed not-scalping,
which we've already covered,
and football, which we'll cover.
But, also, Native Americans invented lacrosse.
And they say horses as if
there were horses in North America,
there weren't.
So when all is said and done,
a little in column A, a little in column racist.
Also, if we're really talking influence and innovation
that contributed to the historical good,
the American government was heavily based
off of the Iroquois Confederacy.
In 1988 the US Senate acknowledged the confederation
of the original thirteen colonies into one republic
was influenced by the Iroquois Confederacy,
as were many of the democratic principles
which were incorporated into the Constitution itself.
So, instead of debunking the myth
that settlers from the Mayflower
gave the natives diseased blankets,
while ignoring the fact that colonial officers in the 1700s
literally wrote about giving diseased blankets
to natives for the desired effect of killing them,
it would be so much easier to admit
that Christopher Columbus (bleep) sucked.
And that celebrating him is like
the aliens in Independence Day arriving in a planet
with lesser technology and some better technology,
and various factions with
some uncivilized and brutal behavior,
giving 90% of us a deadly cold,
partly by accident, and then mostly on purpose,
slaughtering most of the rest of us
and then celebrating Goo-Tentacled Mothership Day
instead of Human Day
to remember and pay respect to the victims
and cultures and civilizations lost
to their terrible atrocities.
Maybe it's just more respectful
and historically and intellectually honest
to just call Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples' Day,
to actually educate about our history.
- How.
Trigger warning.
- And be honest about the gray areas.
Then maybe alt-right journalists
with White House press passes
like Gateway Pundit's Lucian Wintrich,
or, Petty Joke Junction,
Toby Maguire's cameo as Harry Potter in Twilight,
maybe he'll pause
and think before tweeting picture of a family
giving the finger to Mt. Rushmore while complaining about
all these immigrants coming into our country,
taking our stuff, and then insulting our history
only to hopefully, at some point, realize that, oh,
those are Native Americans flipping off Mt. Rushmore,
a Lakota mountain called Six Grandfathers,
renamed after a lawyer from New York
and then carved with figures representing,
among other things,
the taking of native lands
the depletion of the native people.
I'm not gonna say this was racist,
but it did have to do with the
something of their skin.
Can we get the president to weigh in on this?
- They don't look like Indians to me.
- Good quote from the president.
And it took us way too long to arrive at
Columbus sucks and all your arguments against that
have nothing to do with him
and are also pretty inaccurate and disingenuous,
so hey, happy Disingenuous People's Day.
It's 2017 and the Civil War started
because of lack of compromise,
despite there literally being compromises
with compromise in the name.
And also those compromises were about slavery,
which people say the Civil War wasn't about,
but of course it (bleep) was.
The vice president of the confederacy
literally said in a speech,
our new government is founded upon exactly this idea,
its foundations are laid,
its cornerstone rests upon the great truth
that the negro is not equal to the white man;
that slavery, subordination to the superior race,
is his natural and normal condition,
This, our new government, is the first,
in the history of the world,
based upon this great physical,
philosophical, and moral truth.
The truth being, Civil War was about slavery.
Robert E. Lee was a traitor to America,
so statues of him are dumb.
Sure, some that-guy-from-earlier might say
anyone with even a remote sense of military history
knows what a brilliant general Lee was,
except no, he lost.
And that has nothing to do with him being a traitor
who fought for slavery.
Ah, that Hitler sure could give a speech.
Let's give him statues.
It's all just, it's disingenuous trash
spouted by liars and, yeah,
racists.
How is this a conversation we're still having?
This is old news.
We're taking the cue on the Civil War
from Donald (bleep) Trump?
At his golf course in Virginia
there's a plaque commemorating the river of blood,
which is a thing he made up
about battles that never happened
and when confronted about it by historians
he said, quote, how would they know that?
Where were they?
God, what a disaster.
Thanksgiving's coming up.
I wanted to talk about football.
So, okay, here's a segment we like to call Some Sports
About Which I Know Quite a Bit
and in Which I Participate Quite Well.
Football is so in the news, you guys.
The president's mad that players
are protesting for racial justice,
people are arguing if there even is racial injustice,
Papa John's blamed the NFL protests
for dwindling pizza sales,
neo-Nazis claimed Papa John's to be
the official pizza of neo-Nazis
and then Papa John asked neo-Nazis
to please not buy their pizza.
It's (bleep) wild.
It's a wild year.
But this isn't an episode of Some News,
it's Some Old News.
So here's some old news, football was invented
because the Civil War ended
and we were done exploring the frontier
so we needed new ways for young men to be violent.
The similarities between war and football
are pretty obvious,
but it was a deliberate decision
to keep alive the martial spirit.
We needed a new way to be tough, to be men,
so football.
First season of football ever
Rutgers and Princeton played each other 10 times.
The second season they added a third team,
Columbia University, which, fun story,
currently named after another word for America,
Columbia, which is based off of Christopher Columbus.
Though the school was originally founded
as King's College for King George II,
but it was changed after the American Revolution
against King George II's son George,
to reflect history and context.
Anyway, football,
born from American anxieties about men becoming too soft,
was also born from anxiety about race
and how best to Americanize foreigners
now that war and frontier times were over.
One attempt was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
started by Richard Henry Pratt,
in order to take Native Americans from their homes,
strip them of their culture,
and teach them how to be American.
He often used the phrase
kill the Indian, save the man.
Though, to be fair, he did genuinely want
to help them be accepted by the rest of America.
But, to be balanced, he also had them beaten
if they used their native language.
Anyway again, Pratt formed a football team at the school,
the Carlisle Indians.
And they were so incredible and innovative
they made the game more popular,
have the best winning percentage
of any defunct college team,
invented trick plays that eventually had to be prohibited,
invented the play-action pass,
and invented the overhand spiral throw,
also known as throwing the football.
So maybe Native Americans
actually did kind of invent football.
Speaking of football, head and body injuries,
so many, in fact, and deaths, in the early 20th century
that the president at the time stepped in
to institute safety regulations and rule changes
to try to save lives.
Though he did write that he would not emasculate football.
Teddy Roosevelt was very concerned about American manhood,
which is why he so strongly supported
the start of the Boy Scouts of America.
Do we have a clip of a president being a man
in front of the Boy Scouts of America?
- Do you remember that incredible night
with the maps?
And the Republicans are red
and the Democrats are blue
and that map was so red it was unbelievable
and they didn't know what to say.
- Didn't think so.
But football is about preserving masculinity,
with non of that femme prancing around.
Do we have a clip of the president
wishing football was more violent and dangerous?
- Today if you hit too hard, right,
they hit too hard, 15 yards, throw him out of the game.
They're ruining the game.
- Thought so.
That's right, the president is very obsessed with football.
Tweets about it a lot.
Twitter, by the way, not invented by Native Americans,
so we should celebrate Columbus Day.
But, yeah, the president is pretty obsessed
with yelling at football players
for kneeling during the National Anthem.
After former NFL quarterback,
and current blackballed former NFL quarterback,
Colin Kaepernick began protesting
to bring attention to racial injustice
and to think, an athlete, protesting.
Imagine.
And whether or not you agree with Kaepernick,
he certainly has the right to protest.
As do the other players.
But it's being framed as disrespecting the flag,
even though this country was built on protest
and the freedom to protest.
And the Flag Code says that
you shouldn't put the flag horizontally
or use it in advertisements
or put it on disposable things like napkins
or wear it as a costume.
And sure, the American Legion says
you can wear articles of clothing
that are red, white, and blue with stars and stripes,
but it doesn't say a costume.
And in 1989 congress revised the definition of the US flag
to include a US flag, or any part thereof,
made of any substance, of any size,
in a form that is commonly displayed.
The flag should never be used as a receptacle
for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.
And the president needs to be reminded
to put his hand on his heart during the National Anthem
and hugs the flag,
because when you're famous they let you do it.
He's not a bastion of flag respecting.
And also the Flag Code is merely a set of guidelines
and also, and I don't think the president knows this,
because it's on the last page of the Flag Code,
and, you know, pages,
but the president can alter the rules
for presenting the flag to whatever the (bleep) he wants
whenever the (bleep) he wants.
And that's true.
Don't tell 'im.
You know what's disrespecting the American flag
at a sporting event?
Confederate flags everywhere, for (bleep) sake.
In Germany they outlawed Nazi symbols and gestures
so sometimes Nazis in Germany
fly the Confederate flag instead.
I wonder why, for (bleep) sake.
And actually, a year before the Carlisle Indians formed,
our precious Pledge of Allegiance
was written by a socialist, Francis Bellamy,
who's also severely racist, anti-immigration
and worried that mingling with certain races
would lower America's racial standards,
but anyhoo, before World War II
we didn't put our hands over our hearts,
we did what looks like a Nazi salute.
So we stopped doing it.
Well, a lot of us did.
And instead we put our hand over our heart.
Well, most of the time.
So maybe kneeling in protest isn't disrespecting the flag,
but is it disrespecting the military?
Well opinions among veterans are pretty mixed on that.
Some say yes, others say the right to protest
is one of the reasons they fight.
When Kaepernick first started his protest
he merely sat down during the anthem,
but after talking about it
with former Seahawk and Green Beret Nate Boyer,
they decided a better way to protest,
while maintaining respect for the troops,
was to kneel.
But who knows, you know, maybe five time draft dodger
and proponent of using the military
to go into Libya and take their oil,
and also president, Donald Trump, might know better.
- There's nobody bigger or better at the military than I am.
I am the most military based,
and the most militaristic person on your show.
More about Isis than the generals do, believe me.
- You may not agree with Black Lives Matter protests
or Kaepernick, but he can do it.
And just consider that for hundreds of year
black people were seen as subhuman
and were slaves in America.
And then they were begrudgingly, via war, freed.
And then laws were enacted to segregate and opress them
and then 100 years of that institutional racism went by
and then we passed the Civil Rights Act
and Voting Rights Act
and then, 52 years passed and it's now
and there's no racism?
Kaepernick's protest makes people uncomfortable
'cause race makes people uncomfortable.
And Black Lives Matter protests
make people uncomfortable.
And the same was true during the Civil Rights Movement,
it's why a lot of Confederate monuments
went up during that period, out of spite.
Here's a political cartoon from those days
depicting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
conveniently labeled, saying
I look forward to another non-violent march tomorrow,
but there's broken stuff around him,
which sounds familiar.
Because 2017 doesn't discriminate
in terms of different periods of American history,
we have to keep reliving.
People tell the NFL players to just shut up about politics
and play football.
But they didn't tell the president to shut up about politics
and build hotels
and fire people on TV for your entertainment.
And athletics were meant to create leaders
and train young men to manage
the burden of carrying on this country in the best way.
So maybe it's okay to look to them.
People call the players cowards for kneeling,
but they're lending their voice to those who don't have one
about something they're passionate about,
to make things better
in the face of threats from their boss
and, literally, the president of a country.
And then they stand up and go play a game
that causes brain damage to 99% of its participants.
At this point you might mention
many of the greedy players' high salaries
which, fun story, got significantly higher in the NFL
after Donald Trump bought a USFL team in the '80s
and offered NFL players
more money to play for him at the USFL,
but instead they Art of the Deal-ed him
and took offers of even more money in the NFL,
then Trump tried to destroy the NFL
by convincing the USFL to move from the spring to the fall,
defeating the entire purpose of having a second league,
and the USFL collapsed, sued the NFL,
Trump brought in his own lawyer, Harvey, quote,
"He's the greatest," end quote, Myerson,
who was later jailed for a phony billing scheme.
The USFL won $3, but only because
anti-trust settlements are tripled.
And then Trump was like, oh well,
and moved on to focus on casinos in Atlantic City,
which also failed.
Then a year or two went by and let's see,
called to bring back the death penalty
for five young black men who were proven to be not guilty,
that's probably relevant to this conversation somehow,
what's the topic of this conversation?
Football, Native Americans, Thanksgiving?
Yeah, Happy Thanksgiving everybody!
It's almost time for the turkey pardon,
a dumb tradition that started in 1989,
the year Donald Trump called to bring back the death penalty
for five young black men who were proven to be not guilty.
The first official turkey pardon
was by George H. W. Bush in '89,
but it was informally begun by American hero,
Ronald Reagan, who made a joke about pardoning a turkey
after being asked too much about
whether or not he would pardon Oliver North for crimes.
Oh, if only we could live in the days
when our president avoided questions about crimes,
and also probably has to pardon
a lot of people he knows for crimes.
So the turkey's coming up,
and maybe he'll pardon it.
Or maybe he'll get rid of it, you know,
that seems appropriate.
He has a habit of showing up,
(bleep) things up, then leaving.
And who cares?
Pardoning turkeys is dumb
and based off of the president avoiding important questions
and maybe he'll also destroy the NFL, ultimately.
And, honestly, that's probably okay,
there are a lot of reasons the NFL is bad,
it's just unfortunate that the 2017 version of history
says that the bad thing is this.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Gobble, gobble,
which is, that's what the turkey says.
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Why The Right Is So Dishonest About American History - Some News (Thanksgiving, Football)

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