July 4, 1619 Project, & Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings

Welcome once again to the Conversations, I'm at a podcast. I'm your host, John Harris.

Thankful to be here.

Thankful also today, as I'm recording this on July 4th, to be in the United States, to have the heritage we have, which has been very much influenced by Christianity. And it's forgotten in many ways. It's unfortunate that we can look around us and see all the signs, I think, of decay and God's judgment.

And there's still some silver linings, as we saw a week and a half ago with the Supreme Court, but we still have, and we are reaping the blessings of a wonderful heritage. And I think we can still celebrate that.

And that's what I intend to do. Now, you're probably listening to this on July 5th, because that's when I'm releasing it. And as I'm releasing it, actually, as you're hearing it, I'm going to be either on my way to or in South Carolina.

I'm wearing my South Carolina hat. I'll probably wear it the next week. And I'll be in Charleston for about five days. And I'll be at a conference down there that I went to in 2017. The Abbeville Institute puts it on.

And they have a number of great, oftentimes, really thought-provoking history scholars. And sometimes they'll have experts in literature and other areas come. And usually it's about Southern history or some facet of Southern history.

This time, though, I think it's gonna be a little broader. They're gonna be, we're gonna have some scholars talking about American history, specifically Abraham Lincoln. And I'm looking forward to this.

And one of the things, though, I wanted to mention this to you because one of the things I'm gonna be doing, I mentioned this actually for the last year, is talking to a few of the scholars there about the 1607 Project.

And I've talked about this. And there's conversations that have happened in the background I haven't really updated people on, but it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. It's in the works. In the next few months, I should have a link for you if you wanna donate to this.

It's gonna be great for homeschoolers. It's gonna be great for, hopefully, some Christian schools out there. This is gonna be an alternative to the 1619 Project and also an alternative, in some ways, to the 1776 Project.

And so one of the things that I wanted to share with you is just a brief sketch of what that might look like as we've had these conversations. 1776, 1619, I think there's some things in common here between the two that I find interesting that I think 1607 will address.

Now, some inadequacies that I think the 1607 Project is going to help just really supplement, but it's really more than supplement. I think the 1607 Project is really where it's at. And here's my argument.

Here's how I'm thinking about this. And this is the conception that I had, really, from the beginning. So historians, think about it this way. You have a river, and you wanna trace its headwater, okay?

We have this big, raging river. How did it become so influential, so big? It divides a continent, the Mississippi. Oh my goodness, it's the lifeblood of this country. Well, where did it come from? And you trace up, and eventually, you're gonna come to a small stream.

What's the headwater? How do you know which is the stream that started the Mississippi River? Well, there's a lot of converging streams, right? So how do we know which one it is? And I think it's the same way with history.

We have converging streams. We have converging influences that come in to form the present set of circumstances that we live in. But nonetheless, it is important to kinda know definitionally what America is.

And it's much broader, I think, than 1776 or 1619. 1619 essentially says that America is this horrible, racist, oppressive place. And we can see that from the beginning, because in 1619, there were African slaves.

Now, really, they were indentured servants. But I digress. A Dutch ship brought African indentured servants, quote-unquote slaves, to the coast of Virginia, and that's when it all started. That's the foundation of the United States.

It's in the DNA of the United States. It's definitional to the United States. It's always been that way, and it serves a present political purpose. To define the United States as oppressive, we can then choose to overcome what the United States is.

Now, here's 1776, and what more conservatives, really more neoconservatives, I think more Straussian, West Coast-type conservatives have given us in this project. And I think what they're doing is a noble effort, because what they're trying to do is hedge against 1619.

They're saying, no, it's not an oppressive place, but here's how they're doing it. And I want you to see kind of the weakness to this. America's not an oppressive place. Actually, the seeds of freedom, liberty, and equality were planted in 1776, when we separated from Great Britain, but we had the Declaration of Independence.

And that celebrates the equality, and the freedom, and the liberty of this new, unique, grand experiment, this new people that... And so, it almost gives the impression that out of a vacuum, or out of thin air, these ideas, these abstractions kind of took hold, and this has never been done before in human history.

And now, it's just waiting every year for the revolution to continue. So, you have a continuous revolution with 1776 project type stuff. So, essentially, and of course, I'm taking it to its logical conclusion here.

I'm not saying that all the people behind that are necessarily giving... They're not saying all these things, though I'm sure some of them are. But things like, let's say, the freedom for slaves, okay?

That's part of the seeds of liberty that were planted by the founders. Of course, yes, they had slavery. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, as he penned the Declaration of Independence, but he sowed the seeds of what eventually would overcome slavery, okay?

And what would eventually overcome the chauvinism, misogyny, all these things, and give women the right to vote. And for some, this is kind of a blank check. You could say, this also is what broke up the trusts during Theodore Roosevelt's time.

It's what brought us the freedom from want and freedom from fear during FDR's time in social security, and it gave us the great society, and we have federally subsidized public education now, and LGBT rights, and oh my goodness, it can give you so many things.

And this is all coming from the seed of liberty that was planted by the founders. And so that's something that I would push back on. I don't think the founders were thinking in their heads, yeah, and I don't think anyone is saying this, but yeah, LGBT rights.

But I don't think even the concept they were introducing was meant or intended to, or even thought to, or even logically could do what some today are saying it does. And so really you have, I think, two wings of progressivism here.

With 1619, you have America bad. Okay, it needs to be, it's fundamentally flawed. We need to fundamentally remake America, as Obama said. With 1776, America good, okay? And so we can say, hey, plus one, America's good.

But why is it good? Well, it's good because it's got all these problems that, and the true America is this idea. It's not a place, it's not a people, it doesn't have to speak English, it's an idea. So it's an abstraction.

That's what America really is. And that's why America is good. It's because it's the idea of freedom. And it can be detached from the cultures that brought it here. And it actually, that idea is what kind of tills the soil to make way for this place of equity, inclusion, diversity.

And it really does tend that direction. I mean, a progressive can really take hold of that and say, okay, we're gonna have the progressive idea of this, the progressive narrative. And it's not gonna be America fundamentally flawed, it's gonna be America good, but really the thing that we're narrow, the scope of America is these ideas.

So we're narrowing what America actually is down to this, synthesizing it into just these narrow abstractions that can then be applied to all these other problems. And so the founders can be heroes because they introduced the ideas that have led to the revolution we're in.

And the revolution though never really ends. I don't know if you've noticed that, but there's always something new. There's all, it's gonna be free healthcare, right? We haven't achieved that yet. I mean, we're on the way, but that's the next rung on the ladder.

So I think it's kind of, it's a Trojan horse, I think, to go down the 1776 Project Road. I think it sounds really good in the front end of it. There's some really good things and there's some really true things, I think, that are said by many of the scholars there.

I think though that ultimately though it can lead to and it can be wielded by progressives in such a way that it tells the positive story of the United States, but it doesn't really get what the United States is right.

It gives you a part of it, ideas are important, but it takes it two steps farther, that these ideas then lead to all these other things and these are consistent with those ideas. And it's so the ideas are, the abstractions are so narrow, but the applications are so broad.

So here's my radical idea, I guess, right? It's not radical at all. It's really, I think, the way that many Americans have thought about their history for a long time up until recently. And that's that America is really just an extension of what came before.

So if you're looking for where the stream, the headwaters of the stream, you're gonna see converging places, streams, you're gonna see the Dutch influence in New York, you're gonna see French Huguenots, you're gonna see Africans and their descendants coming in and they have had a profound influence, especially in places like the South.

You can see Spanish influence in Florida. I mean, you can see all these things, right? And you see the French, right? You see all these different European peoples, but primarily the headwater and what's influenced our country's legal system and our culture and all these other things.

If you wanna say that there is a unique kind of broad American culture, it's English. It's Albion Seat, it's David Hackett Fisher's book, Albion Seat. It's these different parts of Great Britain that have had the primarily at the beginning at this very formative period in our country's history, they've had the most amount of people coming and they've exerted the most influence and furthermore, they were the first.

Now, I know the Spanish were in Florida, but I mean, during our war for independence, that was still, they were out of it, that was Spanish. So when you think of the United States itself, it's English.

So it would have started really sequentially with the English coming here, 1607. So there's a great importance, I think, to this. And I think Virginia becomes one of the primary definitional states to this country because Virginia obviously claimed a lot more land than it does now.

I mean, but so many explorers and presidents and Supreme Court justices and just influential people, generals in the early years, the formative years came from Virginia. And so the 1607 project is really looking at this differently, I think, than the 1619 and 1776.

1619 is gonna be primarily focused on this, it's an abstraction, it's the idea of enslavement, the idea of oppression, and that's what is, that's in the DNA of America. And the 1776 is saying, no, it's the idea of freedom and liberty, that's what America is.

And 1607 would say, it's not an idea, there's ideas attached to this, but it's not an idea that makes America what it is, it's a culture and it has language, it has religion, Christianity, okay? We're gonna focus on Christianity in the 1607 project.

It's got music and food and cuisine, there's flavor to it, there's all kinds of, there's architecture, all these things, these rich things are actually what make America what America is. And so that's, and of course, other parts of the country are gonna be mentioned, but we start at the headwater, we start at 1607 with the Jamestown colony.

And really, even the Pilgrims, they were coming, why don't you talk about the Pilgrims? Well, Pilgrims came much later, I mean, not much, but 1607, 1620, okay, they came later, but where were they trying to get to?

Virginia, they were trying to get to Virginia. It was because of Jamestown that you had these other groups coming over. The Dutch, of course, they came over right after 1607, but they were aware of the English presence.

And so I think starting there, and with the assumption that it's really culture that's the really formative thing here, that even ideas like freedom and liberty and what those meant in context, which isn't egalitarianism, but what they meant in context at the time, I call it Secession Day sometimes, July 4th, breaking away from Great Britain because of its unconstitutional, tyrannical abuse of authority, that traces back to a history in Britain that goes back to the Magna Carta.

I mean, this is, their concept of these things didn't just fly out of thin air in 1776. America, or what we know of as of the United States, it existed before that. And so, and everything's on a timeline here.

So if we're gonna, but if we're gonna jump in to say, here's the date, here's when the, you really wanna talk about the seeds of America being planted, I think it's 1607. And I think it's gonna be a great resource.

So there's gonna be a really good video that is gonna go along with this. There's gonna be a number of essays and I'll have more information for you soon. But in that vein, in that historical vein, I wanna talk to you about Thomas Jefferson a little bit today and some things, I've been aware of this, but it's interesting to me to see kind of what's happened.

What's happened to Thomas Jefferson is very similar in my mind to what's happened with Confederate monuments. So Confederate monuments have become, it's the issue that no Republican with any national clout seems to wanna touch.

Even if they agree they shouldn't come down, they're not gonna fight for it. You see, Governor Youngkin of Virginia, who just recently, by the way, hosted an LGBT pride event. I mean, this guy, he's not a conservative.

I've said that forever, but people are very excited. Youngkin's this great guy. Well, Youngkin, there's no will with Youngkin to bring back any of these monuments that have been taken down. And I think many who voted for him thought that he would do that.

He doesn't have any intention of doing that. And most of the Republican governors in states where this stuff is happening, sometimes they're even behind it. But if they are against it, they're gonna whisper, whisper behind closed doors.

They're afraid of being called racist. It really is what it is. And so it's become, it's a weird situation, I think, where you have the majority of populations in these states from the beginning, and even now, I think, dead set against.

I remember when I was in Virginia, I guess this would have been two years ago. No, it was a year ago. When the election results came in, there was a number of counties that they were voting. Should we get rid of our monuments in these particular counties?

And it was coming back 70, 80%, 85 no, keep these monuments in place. Between 60 and 85 in most of these counties. And to me, this just, it shows that the population, now the population's gonna shift as they keep getting indoctrinated, now by both sides, really.

It's by both the Democrats and the Republicans are jumping on this to try to be the ones that, we're against these monuments to racism. Well, they never, what's promoting the idea that these are monuments to racism?

Well, it has to be a critical race theory type assumption that you're making to connect these. You have to, because they're gonna just jump into some kind of, here's a secession document from Mississippi, and look at the, they talk about wanting to secede because of slavery and extension into the territories, and they didn't want, they want slavery to be allowed in the common territory of the United States, that kind of thing.

Therefore, they seceded over this, and that means that these monuments are racist. And of course, you have to make logical jumps to get there. You don't see anything on the monuments that would designate that.

They weren't put up for those reasons. The soldiers who fought, really primarily in defense of their homes, weren't thinking, yeah, I really just wanna, I never have owned slaves, I would never have a hope of owning slaves, but that's what I'm fighting for.

You know, none of that stuff is there. These are monuments to soldiers who fought bravely, not to slavery, or to white supremacy, or to governments that want to enshrine that as the fundamental thing they're about.

They're not to those things, but you have to make the connection. Now, here's the thing, though. We've gone down this path with this in the United States, where the elites who represent these areas don't wanna touch it with a 10-foot pole, even though their constituents say, we don't want these things removed, the elites are like, no, and we're gonna remove them anyways or we're gonna allow that to happen.

What you've done is you've taught the population that this is, that anything that can be connected somehow, even if it's like two or three steps to connect something to oppression, slavery, racism, et cetera, that it's now, it's soured.

It's something that we shouldn't be proud of. It's something that we should be ashamed of. We should take it down. It shouldn't be in the public eye. It's a spectacle. It's a pariah. And I think Donald Trump made the great observation in 2017, I think it was, that where does this end?

You're going to, if you do this here, you can also do it with Thomas Jefferson. You can do it with George Washington. You can do it with many in the founding generation. You can basically, the 1619 Project is going to define everything in America as racist because it can connect everything by two or three steps to racism somehow.

They have some way of doing it. So that's the world we live in now. And it's like, we're watching every year. What's next to fall? What's next, you know, what's, and corporate America's enforcing it too.

So I think that was the first, that was low hanging fruit. Take out those monuments. And Thomas Jefferson though was kind of concurrent with this, was this idea that Thomas Jefferson raped Sally Hemings.

And this has become, just like I think with Confederate monuments, this has become part of the official narrative now of Thomas Jefferson's biography and of it's now brought up commonly in relationship to the Declaration of Independence and 4th of July.

This is really just, it's not even something that's debated is really my point. Just like Confederate monuments really aren't debated in elite circles in places of academic influence or political influence.

It's just assumed that all they must be racist. It's the same things with Thomas Jefferson now. Thomas Jefferson must've raped Sally Hemings. There's no really debate about it, hardly at all. I mean, it's just now locked in.

It's baked into the cake. And every year it's like something else gets baked into the cake. And so I wanna talk about this and I wanna challenge this because John really wants to be politically incorrect.

No, John just likes the truth. I just wanna give you what we know, what we can prove historically, and then give you the limitations of that, what we can't. And we cannot prove this historically. And so I'm gonna show you a video at the end of this, but I'm gonna start here.

This is a comedian just a few days ago, or well, this is, yeah, July, June 30th. America has a long history of forcing teenage girls to bear the children of the men who raped them. Just ask Sally Hemings.

Over 2 ,000 likes. And of course, this is right before July 4th. And so he posts this. And you'd think, okay, well, this is just, this is baked into the cake. It's just the way that people think out there.

But I noticed this. Thomas Kidd, and he wrote a book. I haven't read the book yet, but it's Thomas Jefferson, A Biography of Spirit and Flesh. Now, Thomas Kidd, for those who don't know, he's one of the evangelical elites, one of the evangelical scholars.

He's in academia. He, actually, I think now he's adjunct teaching, or at least part, I don't know if they call it ad, I don't think it's adjunct, but he teaches. He has some relationship with Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He is, he's written for the Gospel Coalition. So he's got, but he also has credibility from outside of evangelical circles. And so, I mean, evangelicals love that. When you have credibility outside their circles, but then you come in and you can be kind of important in their circles as well.

And so Thomas Kidd has a lot of influence. Historically, he's got tremendous amount of influence in evangelical circles. And a number of the historians in evangelicalism are the ones that are promoted.

I've been very disappointed in, to be honest with you. Thomas Kidd, here's the thing about Thomas Kidd, though. I actually like Thomas Kidd's, what I've read by Thomas Kidd, I read a few of his books.

I actually like his books. And here's one of the things I like about Thomas Kidd, is Thomas Kidd, like if you read his book about the Great Awakening, okay, he will separate, when he talks about things, social issues, he will separate his opinions.

You know that it's Thomas Kidd giving you his opinions versus here's what actually happened. He tries to not allow, as much as he can, his opinions, his moral judgments, to influence his telling the story.

And of course, we know to some extent that might influence what he emphasizes and what he doesn't. But he does his utmost to just use the objective tools of historical analysis, and then to, as much as he can, kind of like the principles of hermeneutics, if you're studying the Bible, try to use these principles of historiography, and then kind of separate, here's my opinions on this.

Here's what I think about, how do we deal with Jonathan Edwards and slavery, or George Whitefield and slavery, right? So that's what I appreciate about him, is because he doesn't really bring the preachiness into the narrative as much.

And he's not overly preaching anyway, and he's in academia. If you're in academia, 98 of historians today, just 95%, they're on the left, okay? It is really weighted towards the progressive left, like super weighted.

I could comfortably say any books written within the last 15 years by major historians, I would just be skeptical of them right away, and they're probably influenced by some kind of critical theory, because that's what historiography, or historians, that's the pool they're drinking out of.

That's what they're in, that's the world they're in, that's how they get acceptance. That's how they get, if you're innovative, and especially if you push social justice, you are accepted more in the guild.

You have accolades, and you get speaking. And these people, I'll just tell you straight up, because I've been around a number of these people, these people live for that. They live for the, just the approval of their peers, the sense of accomplishment they get.

And if you take that away from them, many of them are some of the most insecure people I've ever met in the world. Like that is who they are, that's their identity. And so it kind of is, it forces you, if you wanna survive in academia, and flourish in academia, and have respect as a good historian, because who's gonna listen to you other than other historians and sometimes nerdy people?

I'll just be honest with you. I can say that because I'm one of them, right? You're going to kind of push the envelope. You're going to push towards that social justice direction. You're going to emphasize things.

You're going to fudge things even sometimes to get these ridiculous narratives sometimes. Well, this is one of the narratives that frankly should never have taken root as deeply as it has. And it's become now the official narrative, and Thomas Kidd buys into it.

I know Thomas Kidd because he's in academia. And because I've seen other tweets from him and things he said in the Gospel Coalition, yeah, he's more progressive in my mind. But he's a historian. So probably in the historical world, he's way on the right in their minds.

But he's a Christian, so they have to look at him probably with a suspicious eye a little bit. But then when he does good research, and then he comes to them, and he's got semi-progressive ideas on some things, he'd be more accepted.

And this is just kind of how it works. But in most of, probably many of you who are listening who are Christians, who are conservative, he would be to the left of you, definitely. And so anyway, but I'm just saying, even though he's to the left, I think his historical research a lot of times is really good.

I don't, I would say, yeah, read a Thomas Kidd book. Just make sure you realize that he might give you some of his opinions on things. But if you separate those two, which he allows you to do, then you're fine.

Here's his article recently, June 7th. Should we judge Thomas Jefferson by his ideas or his actions? His ideas or his actions? A new biography maps out the moral tensions that tormented his mind and tainted his legacy.

Now, this is in the context, is coming out in 2022. You know, Thomas Jefferson is, it's just assumed that he had this, not only affair, but a rape, really, with Sally Hemings. It's assumed that he was, he had all these contradictions.

In some extent, he did, I guess. But the thing, that's what's emphasized now, that Thomas Jefferson was, despite the fact that he was a genius, that he was such a seminal figure in the founding of our country, in so many areas.

He was a Renaissance man. Those things aren't focused on. It's more social history and what Thomas Jefferson's social views were and the things that he notes that he took, private letters, those kinds of things, now are being emphasized.

And really, Thomas Kidd is even saying this. Is it his ideas that he wrote down or is it what he actually did that we should use to define him? And I say actions are more important than words, but there's social historians all over Thomas Jefferson trying to find all these politically incorrect views he held and really to present him as just this mired, confused figure.

I mean, there's a lot of psychological. I mean, that's what you have today. You have social history and psychological analysis of history. You don't really have much in the way of diplomatic history or the other fields that you used to have in history.

They're just not as important anymore. So that's kind of what's happening. And it's in this environment Thomas Kidd writes this. Here's the disappointing thing. Thomas Kidd says, or here's the article opens.

It says that much of, okay, I'll start here. Thomas Jefferson continues to inspire and divide Americans. He still ranks in the top 10 in C-SPAN's Presidential Historian Survey. Recent years have witnessed Thomas Jefferson's name and image removed from schools, libraries, and halls of government.

And that's true.

I mean, when I was in Virginia, they were trying to rename Thomas Jefferson High School. I remember this. Jefferson's statue at his own University of Virginia served as a rallying point for white supremacists during the summer of 2017.

All the while, David Diggs, flamboyant portrayal of him in the musical Hamilton was winning acclaim on Broadway. So there's two different Jeffersons and there's some truth to this. You have, but they're two different.

They're two different Jeffersons of mostly a progressive minded imagination. The Thomas Jefferson who implanted the ideas of liberty that gave us now LGBT. And then the Thomas Jefferson that is super racist and misogynistic and a horrible person.

And so these are two Jeffersons that are really the creations of the minds of progressive leftists. Well, this article is in Christianity Today if I haven't mentioned that, but it goes on. It says much of this controversy stems from Jefferson's dual identity as the author of the Declaration of Independence and his status as one of the nation's most prominent slaveholders.

Add to this, the unsettling reality, the unsettling reality that Jefferson fathered at least six children with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings. And it's little wonder that many Americans find themselves wondering how such a man could have penned the words, all men are created equal.

Now, if you just understand that the times and what Jefferson was trying to say, it's not really that much of a mystery how he could have penned this and what he meant by it. But the notice, notice what they say here about what the author says about Sally Hemings.

That in this review of Thomas Kidd's book, that it's a reality, an unsettling reality. Now, what it should say is add to this, if they're gonna say anything, the unsettling possibility. They said unsettling possibility, okay, but it's reality.

That means this is not to be questioned. This is part of the narrative. Now, if you look at the book here by Thomas Kidd, in the first, on the first page, in the introduction, it says this, it says, it makes the same assumption.

It says, Thomas Jefferson, his relationship with Sally Hemings produced at least one and perhaps as many as six children. So it's just an assumption. And I noticed in the bibliography at the end, there's a lot of quoting Gordon Reed and Gordon Reed is the one that spearheaded this narrative.

And so I haven't read the whole book, but first page you're seeing already, this assumption is being made here. So is it any wonder that you have in Christianity today, this is now being just, this is just assumed.

And so it's not so much that I'm just wanting to defend everything Thomas Jefferson's ever done. And I think he's a perfect man. I don't think that at all. It's not even that I'm, that I know for a hundred percent fact that he didn't have this relationship with Sally Hemings.

I don't know that for a hundred percent fact, but it's given the tools of historical analysis, it is very unlikely given what we know. And we only have a part of the evidence. We don't have everything, only God knows.

But what we do have points to the idea that it's not Thomas Jefferson. It's someone else in his family that had this affair with Sally Hemings. And we don't know that it was a rape. And so that's of course this possibility, possibility of a possibility has now streamed into the mainstream of American culture to the point that you just can't even question this.

This is just part of the narrative. And so it makes things on July 4th, there's even a little bit of tension there. Like, well, this is a guy who authored the Declaration of Independence and this is what he did.

There's kind of this, there's an undercurrent here and it doesn't need to be there. That's my point is it just doesn't need to be there. There's no reason for us to just make these assumptions. But this is the wedding of the BLM stuff with the Me Too stuff in a way, because what this does is without the sufficient evidence with just the mere accusation, we just assume that that's what happened and that it was in fact a rape, that that's what Thomas Jefferson did.

And so you have almost like a Me Too element there. It's guilty until proven innocent. And then you have the BLM thing with, well, this is just how black women were just treated. This is, in fact, here's a clip.

This is from, this is a few years ago, but this is Curtis Woods. He was the chairman of the Resolutions Committee that gave you us Resolution 9 that viewed critical race theory as an analytical tool in the Southern Baptist Convention.

And he for many years taught at Southern Seminary. This is what he said.

And I think what happens is we forget that race is a victim. It is an imaginary idea. It is imaginary. Though it's real and it has real implications, nonetheless, it was created, socially constructed, in the same way ethnicity was, but worse, because it was a prohibition.

It circumscribed a person's destiny on earth. So when we say black lives matter, here's what's happening. For so many centuries in American history, in the American political economy, black lives did matter.

You could kill a black man and not even worry about it. You could rape that black man and consider it a crime. You could have a president by the name of Thomas Jefferson who rapes a 16-year-old child in France by the name of Sally Hemings, who was the half-sister of his wife.

This is history, y 'all.

And have 10 children with that woman and then historians call her his concubine. I'm trying not to bridge, right? She can't be a concubine if she's an enslaved African woman. If you're a concubine, that connotes the idea of consent.

Right?

No, she was raped by a sitting president of the United States of America. So here's why, when you think black lives matter, we hear things like, let's make America great again.

About what you mean when you say,.

Because it wasn't great for everyone who existed in it. So why do black lives matter? Because legally in this country for centuries, it didn't.

So that was Curtis Woods, who was the chairman for the Resolutions Committee in 2019 for the Southern Baptist Convention, well-respected, or was at least up until recently in the SBC. And this is what he says on panels.

And he says it like on other panels too. This isn't unique to him. I mean, I've watched a number of them. And so this kind of thing though, is not uncommon. And he uses as an example here, Thomas Jefferson.

Why do black lives matter? Because they didn't matter. And guess what? They didn't matter to Thomas Jefferson. Because while he was a sitting president, this is what he did. And of course, he gets some things wrong.

It wasn't that Thomas Jefferson was doing this as a sitting president. It was rumors to prevent him from becoming elected. I mean, politics has always been dirty. There were people saying he's gonna make everything atheist if he's elected.

I mean, there was all kinds of things going on, but rumors and just mud being slung. But it wasn't 10 children. It was at most six and as little, possibly one, Esten. But he's saying all this to just make a point that this is how black lives have been treated.

This is the 1619 Project, basically. And this isn't accurate. This isn't across the board accurate. It's much more complicated than what he's simplifying it into that's just how it was. That's not just how it was.

And the example, the primary one he's using is at best dubious. It's not, it should not be taught as a fact. And he presents it as a fact.

It's just history.

Well, I wanna present to you right now. I wanna show you, as promised, I did an interview with Mark Halachak a few weeks ago, I think, or maybe it's more than that. Maybe it's over a month ago, I think I released that.

And we talked a little bit about Thomas Jefferson. And in the comments, I remember some people were, how can you say that Thomas, or how can Mark Halachak say that Thomas Jefferson, it's unlikely that he fathered children with Sally Hemings?

I mean, this is just erasing American history because that's how accepted this is now. And this, again, this is kind of, this is the same assumptions that critical race theorists make are being made here by historians to get to the point of, it's a fact that Thomas Jefferson did this.