Clay's Thanksgiving Food for Thought

The importance of our history as we gather this holiday and talk with friends and family about the current issues of today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome in now number two Thanksgiving Eve edition Clay Travis
Buck Sexton show Buck is already with his family. He'll
be back with me on Monday on this program. I
hope that all of you who are out and about
traveling are managing to do so safely. I flag this
in the morning. TSA estimates it'll screen around thirty million

(00:23):
passengers over the Thanksgiving holiday, a record fifty five point
four million people expected to travel fifty miles or more
between tomorrow and Sunday. And let's see, the busiest day
of all expected to be today and then Sunday, and

(00:45):
so many of you, like me, are going to be
on the road, like Buck, and we hope that all
of you will stay safe and manage to reach your
family and have a fabulous time tomorrow and throughout the
holiday weekend. And we also know that many of you
are going to be out there work because you work
on the holiday. Certainly I have done that in the past,
and I know many of you will be doing so
as well. We thank you for working, particularly truck drivers

(01:09):
who are out there every day making sure that our
country functions military first responders. Everybody in those communities, many
of whom are listening to us right now. There will
be a best of show tomorrow, I promise. We have
had a few decent segments so far this year. And
then on Friday, our friend Tutor Dixon, who is a
part of the Clay Travis Buck Sexton podcast network, will

(01:30):
be in also mentioned this. One of the great benefits
of both Buck and I being able to do the
show is I believe there's only one week all year
where you're not gonna hear from one or the other
of us. That's unprecedented to my knowledge, on any national
radio show anywhere. The only week we're out is Christmas Week.

(01:51):
We haven't between the two of us missed a day
since July fourth. Now, I'm not claiming this is a
super difficult job, but we do take it very seriously
and we want to be with you every single day
because we think the things that we are talking about
are very important. And I want to take a moment
here to talk about Thanksgiving, because I know Rush did
this often on his show, and I also think a

(02:15):
lot of times Thanksgiving gets lost now in the shuffle
between Halloween, which every year seems to get bigger and bigger,
and certainly the Christmas and New Year's Holiday, and as
a result, Thanksgiving sometimes gets lost. So I just want
to kind of talk about this for a moment wherever
you live, If you are fortunate enough to be an American,

(02:39):
I hope that on Thanksgiving you will take a moment
and just contemplate what had to happen for you to
have the good fortune to have either been born in
America or to have become an American. But in particular
for those of us who were born here. You ever
read history surrounding Thanksgiving, how many of you have really

(03:05):
thought about this. I heard this and I couldn't get
it out of my mind, and it's still extraordinary to me.
When the pilgrims arrived here, a squirrel on a tree
could have walked from the East Coast all the way

(03:26):
to the West coast, from one tree to another. You
want to talk about how wild this land was, just
think about that for a moment. There were so many
trees that a squirrel. I've read this, and I believe
it to be true. A squirrel could have been on

(03:48):
the East Coast and could have walked across the entire
United States from tree to tree. And I don't think
we talk enough about the ships that these people got
on to come here. I want you to think about
it for a minute. I just finished reading a great

(04:08):
book about Magellan. These ships were tiny, and whatever risks
you are taking in your life, I want you to
think about what it would have been like to get
on a ship in Europe and make the decision that

(04:32):
you were going to leave behind everyone that you had
ever known and every land that you had ever known,
and probably that you would never see those people for
the rest of your life, and that there was a
tremendous risk that something awful might happen to you on
that trip to the United States. And by the way,

(04:56):
this is true no matter what your ethnicity is. As
Thomas Saul has pointed out in many of his books,
while This Country focuses on the legacy of slavery almost
to the exclusion of everything else that happens historically, every
single person who is of African descent that lives in

(05:16):
the United States today is far better off than they
would have been if they had never come to the
United States at all. It's a stat that doesn't get
a lot of attention. You know, the poorest Americans, the
absolute poorest people in the United States of America today

(05:36):
would be in the twenty percent wealthiest if they lived
in India right now. Our poor people, even if you
feel like you don't have a lot to be thankful for,
our poor people would be the wealthiest people in some
of the biggest countries in the world. Our poorest person

(05:59):
would be in the top twenty percent wealthiest in all
of India. Think about the risk that was involved in
making the decision to come to this new land, a
place that was truly wild, sparsely inhabited, and where you

(06:20):
were likely to never see any of your friends and
family ever again, if you were fortunate enough to make
it on the perilous journey to these shores. One of
the things that I worry about the most as I
think now, as I've moved into middle age and I've
now got three kids of my own, I'm thinking about

(06:41):
the world as it may exist after I'm gone, presuming
I've got a couple of generations left. I'd like to think,
what are we teaching our kids and how much safety
ism and lack of risk taking are we trying to

(07:03):
embed in their lives. One of the things that troubles
me the most about young people today is very much
they're coddled and they lack the ability to take risk.
This is a country of boundless opportunity because of the

(07:25):
risk takers, because of the people who've been willing to
put their lives on the line. Study American history as
we have this Thanksgiving holiday and look at all the
things that the people who came before you were willing
to risk, and ask yourself what you're risking. It seems

(07:51):
to me that America today has a national epidemic of cawariss.
Your ancestors were willing to risk their lives to come
to this country, and a lot of you and a
lot of your grandkids aren't even willing to post what

(08:12):
they actually think on social media. Worse than that, they
call people they disagree with Nazis. We have moved, in
the space of a few generations, from a country that
fought actual Nazis to a place where the great grandchildren

(08:35):
of the people who killed and beat and preserve freedom
for the world by defeating the Nazis now think that
they are heroic and courageous because they call people they
disagree with Nazis. Just played it for you. You're questioning it.
Claire mccaskell on MSNBC. You see it every day happen.
Even in the wake of October seventh, when we had
the most deadly day in the history of the Jewish

(08:59):
peace people since the Holocaust, people are still running around
calling Trump a Nazi. And I tie all this together
on Thanksgiving. Yes, we have a tremendous amount to be
thankful for. But what are you conserving by taking real
risks for your country? What are you putting on the

(09:25):
line on a daily basis, What are you actually risking
compared to the people who made this country great. It's
something that I think we need to have a real
national discussion about, and I hope it's something that you
will think about when you sit down to celebrate Thanksgiving

(09:49):
with your friends and family and recognize the immense and
bountiful gratitude that we all should share for being Americans.
How much of that is part of our national discourse
right now. I'm not super old. I like to think
I'm not super old. I'm middle aged now, I'm forty four.

(10:11):
I don't remember in the nineteen seventies and the nineteen
eighties and the nineteen nineties and the two thousands. I
don't remember people hating America. I don't think it existed
in my life. And a lot of people now are
focused on what's going on on college campuses. But I
think that's a failure of the adults. We've allowed kids

(10:35):
to be so coddled that they don't even understand what
evil is. Been thinking about this a lot, and I
think this is important conversation to have with so many
of your families for Thanksgiving. Kids only know what they
are taught. If you have convinced the generation of kids

(10:57):
that people who have different opinions than them are evil,
what scares me is not only are they coddled in
a verse to risk, they aren't able to see actual
evil when it truly exists. I can't think of anything
that has occurred that is more evil than October seventh

(11:22):
in recent history. Jewish people, just like in the nineteen thirties,
were murdered explicitly for being Jewish, and many people cheered it,
and a lot of people on college campuses did. What

(11:42):
does it say about us that our most highly educated
in terms of schooling are the least able to recognize
true evil. I think it's ominous because remember, without people
willing to speak the truth and without an absence of cowardice,

(12:09):
many people are sheep. If you look at what happened
with COVID, how many people just went along rather than
get acknowledged for not being willing to go along. This
is the country, more so than any other, filled with

(12:29):
the DNA of people who said, I'm not just going
to go along. I'm going to take a risk. I'm
going to get on that ship, I'm going to get
on that horse, I'm going to get in that covered wagon.
I'm going to travel across the horizon to something better,
something that I can't even see. This entire country was

(12:52):
founded on the leap of faith, on the idea that
tomorrow could be better, on the willingness to take that risk,
on the incredible hopes, dreams, and aspirations upon which this
country was founded. What does it say on this Thanksgiving

(13:14):
when we all have an immense amount to be thankful
for that some of the youngest and best educated in
this country are unable to recognize both the history of
this country, which is proud and upstanding and greater than
I believe truly the history of any country in the
history of the world. They believe, actually the legacy of

(13:35):
America is one that is awful and reprehensible and evil,
and as a result, they're willing to support actual evil.
It's our fault. We have coddled their minds to such
an extent that we have convinced them that words are

(13:56):
violence and microaggressions are unacceptable, and as a result, their
brains are stilted, unchallenged, and unable to confront the reality
of evil. So I hope that all of you out
there will be willing to have this conversation with your
kids and grandkids. And it may get a little uncomfortable. I

(14:18):
don't care. It's past time for being nice. At some point,
you have to confront evil and be willing to have
conversations with people who can't see it. Maybe they get
a little bit upset with you. Maybe they say, mom, dad, grandma,
and grandpa, you don't know what you're talking about. I
would submit that if you have lived in this country

(14:38):
very long at all, you know a lot more about
what you're talking about than anybody who's a college age
kid or a high school kid that's trying to defend
Hamas's murder of over a thousand innocent Jewish people based
entirely on their faith. So I hope those are conversations
that you'll have, but I hope you'll contextualize them in
the larger historical resonance of what is I think the

(15:03):
fabric of the greatest country that's ever existed in the
history of the world, and one that must continue to
embrace risk taking, to embrace actual courage and physical valor,
because I don't know that we've ever valued it less
than I'm seeing valued right now.