Churchill and World War I

HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory, America. Bonjour, hi, Canada, from the ReliefFactor.com studio inside of a blustery and windy Beltway. I am Hugh Hewitt, and that music signifies it is time for the Hillsdale Dialogue.  

The last radio hour of each week is given over to big events, big people, big ideas, and usually with Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, and, indeed, he is in the house today. Today he is joined by Professor Thomas Conner of Hillsdale College. He got his MA in history from the University of North Carolina, which we're not going to actually hold against him, or his PhD is a Tar Heel PhD as well.  

He's been at Hillsdale since 1983, so maybe the effects of bad basketball will have fallen off of him in those intervening years. Dr. Conner, welcome to the program, along with Dr. Larry Arnn. Happy week-after-Thanksgiving to you both.  

LARRY ARNN: Hey, Hugh. How are you, Tom?  

THOMAS CONNER: I'm doing well. Good morning, Larry.  

HEWITT: The introductions are always a little bit rough on you guys. You're kind of thinking it's going to be an academic thing. We don't do that on the radio.  

Professor Conner, 144 years ago, something extraordinary happened. Now, I would throw this, normally, to Dr. Arnn since he wrote his dissertation on Churchill, but that's the day of the great man's birth. And I don't think anyone knows that. It's today.  

CONNER: Indeed. Indeed. I've had the great privilege of being in the room where Churchill took his first breath at Blenheim Palace. I know Larry's been there a number of times too. So we certainly remember that around here.  

HEWITT: Now, I don't know if moving pictures have come to Hillsdale yet, but, if they have, Dr. Arnn, there is a new movie coming out called The Favourite about Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill, and a third woman that they assert is a love triangle. But there is a model of Blenheim Palace in the movie. And no one gets it, that this is what Queen Anne did for the Marlboroughs.  

ARNN: Yeah, well. I've read about that movie, and that's a fascinating story. And of course, it's from the Churchill, or Marlborough. John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, was Churchill's seven-time-removed grandfather. And he was one of the greatest—maybe alongside Wellington—English generals.  

And he won those wonderful battles, including the Battle of Blenheim. And he was an incredibly effective man. And his placement depended very much upon the friendship between his wife and Queen Anne, who got the throne by happenstance herself.  

And Churchill writes a wonderful book about all this. But there's a tremendous Conservative, conniving politician named Harley. And he gets another person, a woman, close to Queen Anne. And Sarah, who was an imperious woman, a wonderful woman—Sarah Churchill was an imperious and wonderful woman—she annoyed Anne a lot. And Sarah was expelled. And then, the next thing you know, Marlborough himself was expelled and then exiled from the country.  

HEWITT: But he made a comeback, didn't he? They basically needed someone to win the war.  

ARNN: Well, all this happened as the war was fading out. And he was welcomed back home, and he got to finish his house. His house cost a fortune, and more than anybody thought. And there was lots of parliamentary fighting about that.  

But that settled down. And then, later, Marlborough was slandered by Macaulay, who said that he was dishonest, and a traitor even, in double-dealing in the monarchical controversies that were going on then. And Churchill wrote what I regard as his best book, Marlborough: His Life and Times, in part to refute those charges.  

HEWITT: I have that book on my shelf, heavily annotated, because it was given to me by Dr. Arnn, probably 20 years ago. And it's a marvelous read even though it's about the 1600s. Outside of Blenheim Palace, Dr. Conner, there is a little church. And that little church is the final resting price of a great man that we're talking about, Winston Churchill, today.  

I am curious, because we have just celebrated the 100th anniversary of the end of the war, if you wouldn't give us the quick overview of Churchill's connection to the war. And then I'm going to come back and talk a little bit about what was lost in the conversation last week and the week before that about the war.  

CONNER: Sure. Well, Larry is the expert on Churchill's life, of course. But what I know most about Churchill's service during the war was, when the war broke out in August of 1914, Winston Churchill was the First Lord of the Admiralty, which is the equivalent of minister of the navy, which was a very important post in Britain, because Britain was the greatest naval power in the world.  

And the navy, of course, was kind of Britain's shield, you might say, from any mischief that might come at her from the continent. But, as it turned out, the navy basically did blockade duty for the bulk of the war. There was only one great set piece naval battle during the war, the Battle of Jutland, and that was in 1916. And Churchill was, by then, no longer First Lord of the Admiralty, because he was discredited, perhaps wrongly.  

But, nonetheless, he lost his job as First Lord as a result of the failure of the British to prevail against the Turks in the Gallipoli campaign over in the Near East, which was launched in the spring of 1915. Churchill was a big booster of that campaign, because, among other things, it gave the British navy something major to do. And the hope was that, if Turkey could be knocked out of the war in 1915, that there could be something decisive to come out of that.  

But it didn't happen, and Churchill lost his major cabinet post. And then he put on a uniform and went off with a unit, and served on the Western Front. I think, for the better part of a year, during 1916, he was up in Flanders. And then he gradually worked his way back into ministerial positions as the war was coming to a close.  

HEWITT: Now, Dr. Conner, can you take us back? There is presently on Twitter a savaging of, and a defense of, Barbara Tuchman and her book Guns of August. I am more a fan of Robert Massie's Dreadnought as a run-up to why World War I happened.  

But, in many respects, it's kind of eerie. The headline today is that the President of the United States is not meeting with the president of Russia because the president of Russia has seized Crimea and closed the Sea of Azov via the Kerch Strait to Ukraine. So we're back in the areas of World War I—in the geography of World War I—that not many people in America know about.  

They might know about the trenches in France. They might know about Gallipoli. But they sure as heck don't know about what went on in the Eastern Front.  

CONNER: Yes. And nor do many fully appreciate the view that the womb of the First World War was southeastern Europe—the Balkans—where great empires were contesting one another for territory and prestige. In 1914, it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.  

Today, of course, the Russians are still active there. So yeah, it's a dangerous part of the world. There's no question about that.  

HEWITT: Why did the alliances work out the way that they did? It was Russia, France and England at the beginning against Germany, Austria, and Turkey. How did we get—I thought that that Churchill got along with Turkey—I thought the Brits got along with the Turks. How did that happen?  

CONNER: Well, the Germans were very effective at cozying up to the Turks with economic development deals. The Germans sent military consultants into the Ottoman Empire to help the Turks beef up their military forces. And, indeed, some historians believe that it was the German influence that helped the Turks fend off the British when the British made their landings on Gallipoli in 1915.  

Mustafa Kemal, otherwise known as Ataturk, of course, was the great Turkish commander. But the alliances kind of developed in two stages. The Germans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Italy allied themselves during the late 1870s…early 1880s, under the influence of Bismarck, at the direction of Bismarck, really, the great German statesman.  

And then the so-called Triple Entente of England, France, and Russia formed in response to the earlier alliance. And the most unlikely combination, arguably, in the Triple Entente was the Franco-Russian Alliance, because France was a republic; Russia, an autocracy; and those two forms of government were diametrically opposed to each other.  

But it was a common fear of Germany. And this is what got the English to break away from their “splendid isolation,” as they called it, throughout most of the nineteenth century. The English were increasingly afraid of the Germans because of their naval build-up. And that's what got them into those alliance arrangements as well.  

HEWITT: Larry Arnn, we have one minute to the break. Churchill and the Turks—that relationship later becomes quite good. What happened that he allowed them, or England allowed them, to slip into the Axis, then?  

ARNN: Well, he tried to cultivate that relationship closely, including in this period before the First World War, until something happened—big—very big. And that is, British shipyards were building for the Turks two battleships, two important naval vessels to make their navy much stronger.  

Churchill got the definite sense that they were going to go with Germany. And he seized those ships. And that helped bitter relations, but he did a lot to improve them later in his life.  

HEWITT: More when we come back. The Hillsdale Dialogue today on the 144th anniversary of Winston Churchill's birth with Dr.—Professor Thomas Conner and Dr. Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College. Stay tuned. It's The Hugh Hewitt Show.  

Welcome back, America. It's the Hillsdale Dialogue on The Hugh Hewitt Show, originating from the ReliefFactor.com studio on the Beltway side of the world.  

We're talking about World War I and Winston Churchill. Before I proceed, though, I have to ask Dr. Arnn—the brand-new collection of Charles Krauthammer's greatest essays, the second collection, edited by his son Daniel. The central essay in it is a speech that Charles gave at the Kirby Center in 2011 on constitutionalism. Were you there for that speech?  

ARNN: I was. Oh, yeah.  

HEWITT: Did you know it is the key? It's the hinge of the book, and Daniel is very explicit in saying so.  

ARNN: I didn't know that. That's great. Good for him.  

HEWITT: When you get a copy of it—I read it and I said, My gosh, this is the perfect distillation of everything we believe, and everything Hillsdale believes, and everything you believe, and, I assume, Professor Conner believes about the centrality of our central document and the Declaration before it.  

ARNN: Yeah. Charles Krauthammer is a man to be missed, is he not?  

HEWITT: Very, very much, as is Churchill. It's the 144th birthday of Winston Churchill. I go back to where we left off—Churchill and the Turks. After the war, Larry, I believe he was called upon to draw up the new line to the Ottoman Empire—was not Winston Churchill?  

ARNN: With others. Yeah, very much. He was secretary of state for the colonies. And, you know, the Turks fell apart. Tom Conner probably knows all about this, but it took 150 years for the Ottoman Empire to die. But it was busy about the work during that whole time.  

And so, then it loses all of its territory. And that includes all of the things we talk about when we talk about Middle East troubles today. And so, they drew up lines. There's a really good book by David Fromkin called A Peace to End All Peace that goes into this very much about the Middle East after the First World War.  

And there were important people in the British government who wanted, and thought, this war is much more costly than we thought it would be. What we should get is a new empire in the Middle East. And Churchill was not one of those who wanted that.  

He did draw the lines that created modern-day Iraq, mostly because he was negotiating with the peoples who lived all over the Middle East. But he and T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia was his number two in the colonial office. Their policy was to cut the cost of running that place and get out there as quick as they could. And they did get out rapidly.  

HEWITT: So, Dr. Conner, when Turkey gets involved, it is a decrepit Ottoman Empire that is shaky in its control of Egypt and other territories under their nominal control. Why did they do it? Why did they allow themselves to get drawn in, because the consequences of it are as recent as yesterday?  

CONNER: Well, even though they were decrepit, Hugh, it's good to remember that they lasted pretty much until the end of the war. There were a couple decrepit empires that entered the First World War. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was viewed in much the same way. But it took them until the final weeks of the war, ultimately, to collapse.  

Larry was absolutely right. The Ottoman Empire took 150 years to die. It was sick all that time. But, finally, by 1918, it was gone.  

But the Russians and the Turks, of course, were natural enemies. And there's a new kind of school of thought about the very origins of the First World War, associated with a historian by the name of Sean McMeekin, who argues that Russia was really the principal power that caused the war, precisely because of its desire to encroach upon Turkish territory.  

So the Turks were fighting defensively in a lot of ways. They weren't really looking to gain. They were looking to hang on and protect themselves.  

HEWITT: Can you explain a little bit, though, why they felt the need to be in the Balkans? Was that primarily because of Islam? We have a minute left in the segment, Professor Conner.  

CONNER: Sure. Well, when the nineteenth century opened, Hugh, the Balkans were all Turkish territory. And, piece by piece by piece, first Serbia, then Greece, then Romania, Bulgaria—the various parts of it broke away. So it's basically just, again, trying to hang on to what had been for them, for a couple hundred years, their traditional territorial domain.  

HEWITT: OK. When we come back from break, we're going to talk about why it began, with the assassination—the womb of the war—as Professor Conner said, and Churchill's role in midwifing that war, or perhaps not midwifing a quick conclusion to it, at Gallipoli.   

Don't go anywhere America. As we continue, though the rest of the world has moved on, we know that World War I lives with us still. It is the Hillsdale Dialogue—all things Hillsdale collected at Hillsdale.edu, and this conversation will be found, as will all the others at HughforHillsdale.com. Stay with us.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. The last radio hour of the week is always given over to the Hillsdale Dialogue. All things Hillsdale can be found at Hillsdale.edu, including the application you need before you get shut out of the ever-rising number of applicants who apply to this great lantern of the north that is Hillsdale College.  

All of the opportunities to sign up for all of the online courses for free are at Hillsdale.edu. And the monthly speech digest Imprimis. If you like the conversations that we have in the Hillsdale Dialogue about big matters, big things, big history, then all of them are collected at HughforHillsdale.com.  

I'm joined not only by Dr. Larry Arnn this morning, president of Hillsdale, but by Dr. Thomas H. Conner, professor at Hillsdale College. And I'm going to have you take the floor, Professor Conner, because I have a theory about World War I—that the reason Americans don't know much about it is most of the battles are French names.  

We are intimidated by French names. We mispronounce them. At least I do. I butcher them constantly.  

We don't know the geography the way that we know World War II geography, which is kind of astonishing, since it's a smaller theater. And the awe-inspiring slaughter is so immense that we prefer not to think about it. Would you give us the nine-to-ten-minute summary of the war?  

CONNER: From start to finish, Hugh, or just the beginning of it?  

HEWITT: You bet. Start to finish. Nine minutes.  

CONNER: OK. Well, again, I agree with everything you said about why Americans tend not to know much about the First World War, or even show much interest in it. It just wasn't America's war until the very end, and Woodrow Wilson, when the war broke out in Europe, in the summer of 1914, urged Americans to be neutral toward the war in thought as well as deed.  

And, indeed, neutrality was the policy of the United States until we declared war on Germany in April of 1917. But the first three years, or two and a half years, there was a distinctive character, you might say, to each one of the years.  

1914—the opening campaigns—Germany attacked France through Belgium. That's what brought the British in, because the British had signed an agreement in 1839 guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. And when the Germans infringed upon it, the British felt honor-bound to enter the war.  

But Russia was at war with Germany on the Eastern Front. Austria was at war with Serbia in the Balkans front. The Turks, of course, were involved as well. So that was the initial sort of cast of characters, you might say.  

By the end of 1914, all of the opening campaigns had failed. They were all designed to produce quick victories on every front, but none of them did. So we went into 1915. And, quite naturally, then the war began to expand. It began to expand geographically. Bulgaria entered as a new belligerent. Italy entered as a new belligerent.  

And the fronts multiplied, and the means by which the contesting powers tried to fight the war increased. The Germans opened up unrestricted submarine warfare in February of 1915, trying to cut off Britain's access to supplies coming in across the water. And, in May of 1915, of course, we got the Lusitania sinking, which aroused a lot of concern and anger in the United States, because 128 Americans died when the Lusitania was sunk.  

But President Wilson clung to his neutral position. And, in the meanwhile, the fighting continued on the Western Front. France lost more than a million soldiers in 1915 alone. The French had lost a million soldiers in the first five months of the war in 1914 as well. And the bloodbath had pretty much declared itself fully by 1915.  

HEWITT: When the Americans arrive on the scene, Professor Conner, is the issue in doubt? Had the Germans come close to breaking the will of England and France?  

CONNER: I think very much so, Hugh. And then that's where Americans can be particularly proud, I think, of the role we played. I think we did help snatch victory out of what was looking like a pretty grim situation for the Allies by the time the war approached 1917…1918, because the killing had just gone on so long. It was a war of attrition. Somebody was going to lose because they literally shed their last drop of blood.  

And, in 1917, it looked like it was probably going to be the French. But the United States' declaration of war in April 1917 gave the French new hope. And they were able to hang on until American troops were able to get into the theater of operations in sufficient numbers to participate meaningfully in the battles. And that's what happened in the last five or six months of 1918.  

HEWITT: Now, Dr. Conner, after the break—I know you've got to go to class—I'm going to talk with Dr. Arnn about Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson, and what the former thought of the latter. I'd like for you, though, to capture for us—who was the leadership of both sides in this? Who are the principal figures that today would be the Trumps and the Theresa Mays and the Putins and the—who is running this catastrophe for the world?  

CONNER: Well, of course, the German government was largely dominated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, although, increasingly, as the war went on, the Supreme Warlord, as the Kaiser liked to view himself, kind of was eclipsed by other military leaders like Generals Ludendorff and Paul Von Hindenburg. So Germany was basically run by its military leadership.  

The French had their typical revolving-door governments—continued through the war. France was a parliamentary system. And politics as usual was suspended in France for a time, you might say, but their constitution continued to operate, and they kept turning up a succession of prime ministers. By the end of the war, Georges Clemenceau, of course, was the leader of France. And he was kind of viewed as the father of their victory.  

Wilson, of course, was running the United States. General Pershing was the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces. I happen to believe that General Pershing is a largely forgotten man, or forgotten hero, among the great American soldiers.  

HEWITT: Did he want to prosecute the war further? Was Pershing the one who said, no armistice—let's crush Germany?  

CONNER: He did, Hugh. He did indeed. And there was an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, which brought proper attention to that fact.  

Pershing was holding on. He thought that we had the Germans on the run on the battlefield in November of 1918. And he wanted to prosecute the war until the Germans actually felt the presence of combat troops on their soil.  

But it's understandable that the French and British, having bled so profusely for so many years before the Americans even got into the war—the French and the British, once the Germans showed their willingness to come to terms—the French and British were ready to sign. But yeah, Pershing was very far-sighted on that point.  

HEWITT: Now, there is a remarkable book by Joseph Loconte, who is a professor at King's College, called A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War, and it's about Tolkien and C. S. Lewis coming back from this conflict. And the whole country is in sort of post-traumatic stress. And they renew the belief in the good, the right, the true, and the beautiful through their books. But a lot of people became completely pacifist and rejected everything. So, what would you summarize the consequence of this catastrophe as being for the West?  

CONNER: Well, there was, sadly, a great deal of disillusionment, Hugh. And I think the First World War left the organism of the West in such a wounded state that it was all too vulnerable to the diseases of Fascism, and International Communism, and all kinds of aberrant forms of art, cultural decadence, and whatnot. And, of course, we all know that, arguably, one of the great tragedies connected with the First World War is the Second World War that came along a mere 20 years after the First World War had ended.  

HEWITT: Had Pershing been allowed to pursue that—this is the what if of history—would that have been avoided, do you believe?  

CONNER: Well, it's enticing to think that it might have, because, by allowing the Germans the armistice on November 11, 1918, it opened the door, because the German army was allowed to retreat from the remaining pieces of France and Belgium that it held. It was able to come home in good order. And the German people were then allowed to be seduced by some very clever and devious politicians, like Adolf Hitler, into believing that the politicians had sold out the country—that the army had not, in fact, been beaten in 1918.  

And nobody knew better than the German military leadership itself that the German army had lost the war. But they allowed this myth of the stab in the back, as it was called, to be propagated during the 1920s and the 1930s. And I think, if Pershing had prevailed, it might have opened the door for the German people to have seen Allied troops on their soil. And they would have been disabused very easily of this idea that they had, in fact, not lost the war. They really had lost the war.  

HEWITT: One of the great sidebars of the war is the naming of the United States Marine Corps as the Devil Dogs. Larry Arnn, you produced a lot of marines out of Hillsdale College over the years. And they're known as the Devil Dogs.  

That's all because of a World War I battle. I'm not sure which one it was. I can't—in the wood, Belleau Wood, right?  

CONNER: It was Belleau Wood, exactly.  

ARNN: And thank God for it. They don't act like that when they're in Hillsdale College.   

HUGH HEWITT: I'm not sure that they don't. Dr. Conner, thank you for giving us the radio guide to World War I. I'm going to talk about Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson after the break. But you've done yeoman's service here. And I just hope you learned something about basketball to replace all those years down at UNC.  

CONNER: Point taken, Hugh. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me.  

HEWITT: Thank you. I'll be right back with Dr. Larry Arnn as we talk about, on the 144th birthday of Winston Churchill, how he got along with America's first great would-be savior of the world—and boy, that's a business we shouldn't be in ever. And Woodrow Wilson proved it for all of us. We'll talk about Churchill and Wilson after the break.  

But, right now, I want to remind everyone over at HughHewitt.com, the Salvation Army has got the red kettle open and swinging, with $70,000 and rising. Wherever there is addiction, that's where the Salvation Army is. No matter how lost and the least that individual is, wherever there's disaster, whether it's fires in California, or winds, and floods, and hurricanes in Florida, and Georgia, and North Carolina, the Salvation Army is there.  

Wherever there are children with no place to go in terrible neighborhoods full of violence and drugs, the Salvation Army runs a kids' center. They're just everywhere, doing the most good. And you do the most good when you donate $10 or $50 or $500 or $5,000. We've gotten great contributions all morning long. I'll keep reminding you, it's open all weekend long.  

We are halfway to our annual goal. We do this annually to come out and remind you that the Salvation Army has been doing this since it was founded in England in the 1860s. And they do the most good with your donations. They go right to your community. So please be as generous as you can.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. As you all know, I am a modest man. But when I do have an achievement like, I'm responsible for generalissimo's upcoming wedding, or for many, many people, learning about Hillsdale College, I like to boast a little bit about those sorts of things.  

But we did not boast enough about Thomas Conner, who's now departed to teach class, and his book on the Battle Monuments Commission, Dr. Larry Arnn, of the Hillsdale Dialogue. And we ought to have done that. So I actually have to blame you for that.  

ARNN: Yeah, yeah. It was my fault. Tom is a great teacher. And he leads students. He's been going to Europe for years, taking groups of students to tour the cemeteries.  

And it's an awesome thing to go with him, because he knows everything about it. And he's very reverential of the Germans, as well as the French, and the Americans, and the British. And he got to know the people in the Battle Monuments Commission. The one who took care of Normandy, the famous Omaha Beach cemetery, was run for 25 years by a very close friend of his by the name of Gene Dellinger.  

And so, Victor Hanson helped persuade Tom. Victor Hanson was on the governing board of the Battle Monuments Commission. And Victor Hanson helped persuade Tom, because he saw those tours, to write this book. And the book has just come out. And it's tremendous.  

HEWITT: I look forward to having him back to talk about just that. I think that they're the most sacred places in the world, and that he has written about them is wonderful.  

But what a day it would be to sit by a fire and listen to Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Conner talk about World War I. I mean, to me, that would be like a party gift that someone can give me some day. You ought to raffle that off on the air, and we'll raise millions for Hillsdale.  

But I do want to get to the question—Churchill and Wilson. On the one, a real aristocrat, but a man with his view on the future and with concern for every Englishman. The other, an academic, a Presbyterian, a racist, a Progressive, and he thought he was a deliverer of Europe, but he, in fact, condemned it to another war. What did Churchill think of Wilson?  

ARNN: Well, they met. And they met especially at the peace conference, where, in 1919, Wilson was extremely influential. And Churchill writes very powerfully in the last volume of his history of the First World War, which is one of his best books, about Wilson.  

And it's just devastating. And it's in no place rude, and that makes it more powerful. And his point about Wilson was that Wilson—and this is, by the way, exactly the character of Progressivism, of which Wilson was a prime representative—Wilson was out of touch with anything except his theories. And so he came to Europe, he said, to appeal over the heads of the old world leaders, to their peoples, to shape the future.  

And come to find out, all of those old world leaders, or several of them, had just been through divisive elections, which placed them in close touch with their people. Whereas Wilson, who forced a lot of things through the peace conference, including a good thing, I think, which always failed, the League of Nations—he couldn't get that through his own Congress when he got back home. He was the one out of touch.  

And he thought that the great cry in Britain and France in their elections was, Squeeze Germany until the pips squeak. And you know, you've got to remember how this war broke out. There's a huge complexity behind the breaking out.  

But the actual fact is, Austria got permission from Germany to attack Serbia to the south. And, simultaneously, Germany attacked Belgium, and Luxembourg, and France in the north, in the opposite direction from Serbia. And those three powers didn't have anything to do with that. And so, there was a raw act of aggression. And the cost of the war was unlike anything that had ever been seen, and would be seen, except for the Second World War.  

People were angry. And so, Wilson, you know, was not that angry. We weren't in the war all that long, although we lost a lot of people and had an enormous impact on the war. And Wilson himself—he just didn't understand. And Churchill thought that he had a character that was removed from the facts around him.  

HEWITT: What's that mean?  

ARNN: Well, you know, I, Larry Arnn, have a theory. And my theory is that at the heart of the United States is the principle of equality, and the laws of nature, and nature’s God. That's a theory. And it's a principle, too.  

But let's say they don't seem to be voting that way. Well, my reaction to that would be to redouble my efforts. But I wouldn't fail to notice that when they're not voting that way, they're not voting that way.   

HEWITT: I get it now. You're actually going to take account of the facts of the reality around you, thereby not being Obama or Wilson.  

ARNN: You know, I mean, the next Imprimis is written by me. And it's about a speech by President Macron of France. And he calls for the end of the nation-state. And I go into why that's very unlikely, because it's natural.  

HEWITT: You know, I saw someone respond that, are they giving up their seat on the Security Council to the EU any time soon? That's the perfect answer to Macron. Dr. Larry Arnn, always a great pleasure. Hillsdale.edu, America, for all that you need from the lantern of the north. Hillsdale.edu.