John Gerardi Fills In - The Mayflower Compact

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
A happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. We're gonna talk
about a little American history. You're gonna learn a little
something today on your drive home here the last day
before your Thanksgiving holiday.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
I want to.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Talk with you guys about the Mayflower Compact. That's what
the heck we're celebrating here this Thanksgiving. We're celebrating it's
not just about the Pilgrims and the Native Americans all
sitting down and having dinner. The Pilgrims who came to
Plymouth Colony brought with them a couple of pretty dang
important ideas about government that have had a pretty darn

(00:34):
big effect on the history of this land which we
now call our home, the United States of America. The
Mayflower Compact. Maybe it's not quite as important as the
Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, but it's in some

(00:57):
ways a kind of spiritual forerunner to those things. And
so we're going to talk about it today, and I
think you're gonna learn the dang thing here on your
drive home. This is John Girardi. I am filling in
for our buddy Trevor Carey. I'm the my day job,
I'm the director at Right to Life of Central California
RTLCC dot org is where you can go to learn

(01:18):
more about what we do and to help support what
we do. And I'm also the co founder of the
Obria Medical Clinics of Central California is a wonderful nonprofit
organization that provides great obgyn clinic and medical care to
lower income women throughout the city of Fresno from a
pro life perspective. You can go to Obria ob r

(01:39):
i A three sixty five dot org to give to it,
or you can go to Obriafresno dot org, Obria Fresno
dot org uh to see what the clinics about, what
kinds of services we have, et cetera. All right, let's
talk about the Mayflower Compact. Now, the Pilgrims come to

(02:01):
Massachusetts in sixteen twenty and on the boat as they're
in Cape kind of in the hook of Cape Cod there,
the guys on board the ship, about forty one of them,
get together and say, all right, well, we got to
like kind of set up sort of the rules for

(02:23):
how we're going to be running this thing together here.
So let's put together this compact for ordering this township
that we're going to establish and I'm gonna read it
to you guys verbatim. It's not very long. It starts
in the name of God, Amen, we whose names are underwritten,
the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord, King James,

(02:45):
by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland,
King Defender of the Faith, et cetera, having undertaken, for
the glory of God an advancement of the Christian Faith,
in the honor of our King and country, a voyage
to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia.
They were calling this Virginia, even though it's up in Massachusetts.
So expansive notion of what Virginia was. Do by these presents,

(03:07):
solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another,
covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic
for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the
ends aforesaid, and by virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and
frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices,

(03:29):
from time to time as shall be thought most meet
and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto
which we promise all due submission and obedience in witness,
whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod
the eleventh of November, in the reign of our Sovereign Lord,

(03:50):
King James of France, James of England, France and Ireland
the eighteenth and of Scotland the fifty fourth, in the
year of Our Anno Domini in the year of our
Lord sixteen twenty. All right, So a couple of things
to think about with that. First, the uniquely American thing

(04:13):
that this was written. That's actually kind of a big deal.
England had a historic constitution, a historic sort of set
of principles according to which the country was run, the
prerogatives of the crown, the prerogatives of Parliament, et cetera.

(04:35):
Some of those things changed over time, but they were
often subject to change just sort of by acts of parliament.
And the thing is, the historic Constitution of Great Britain
was often written about by legal scholars and commentators and
thought about and cited by judicial decisions, but it was

(04:56):
not an actual written legal document that was written down.
The American Constitution was kind of a significant thing in
world government history for being a written document laying out
in clear terms, the baseline fundamentals of how the government

(05:19):
would be run. It wasn't governed as much by as
the Romans used to say the most majoram that that
was the Latin phrase for the Roman Republics constitution. That
we did think it was the way of the ancestors
is what the most mayoram was most the custom majoram

(05:41):
of the ancestors. They wrote it down, and that was
a big deal. That was a significant thing that would
have ripple effects and would be reflected in the Declaration
of Independence, where they say, in a written instrument, we're
going to declare that we're our own country, that we're
not part of Great Britain anymore. And these are some

(06:04):
of the terms according to which this country will be established.
This was further developed in the Constitution. These are the
rules by which this country is going to be ordered.
So that was a big deal. Secondly, was the democratic
aspect of it. One of the things people note about

(06:28):
the Mayflower Compact is it's not just kind of a
in its own way, kind of a forerunner of the
Declaration of Independence in the Constitution. It's the foundational text
of the New England Township. The New England town a
division of government that still exists to this day. You

(06:48):
still have New England townships to this day which are democratic,
i e. Genuine pure democracy. They don't really have magistrates
who run the show. Necessarily, stuff gets decided by a
of the people. So you had all forty one free
men who are on this boat, including a couple of

(07:10):
servants who signed this document. So it is kind of
democratic in nature. So you can see echoes of the idea,
sort of the American ideas of popular sovereignty. But there's
also this critical element. The whole thing is in the
context of English tradition, British legal tradition, that we're here

(07:40):
by the grace of the King, in loyalty to the
King as British subjects, and we're here to maintain our
society here on a local level, but as British subjects.
It provides this sort of context of tradition wanting to
uphold the traditional rights of Englishmen. Now it's true that

(08:03):
the Pilgrims were in some ways escaping English domination in
various ways. These guys were sort of heretics from the
Church of England. They were sort of had different religious
beliefs from the Church of England. They had suffered various
levels of persecution for it, and this kind of tended

(08:25):
to be what happened with a lot of the American colonies.
Was yet a lot of people who came over here,
and the British government was basically took this sort of
attitude of, well, we don't like the fact that you're
not following the Church of England, but you're far away,
so we're not going to care as much, and as
long as you send taxes back, we're going to kind
of turn a blind eye to the fact that you
guys are practicing some weirdo wacko form of religion like

(08:48):
Catholicism with the Maryland Colony, or you know, Puritanism with
the Massachusetts colony, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So
we'll sort of turn a blind eye to that. In
spite of that, these guys are still saying we are
British subjects. We want to maintain various kinds of traditional
British rights as British subjects. And in this way, this

(09:12):
kind of highlights the thing about the American Revolution that
was so different from the French Revolution. The French Revolution
was way different from the American Revolution, so much so
that it's almost silly to call them both revolutions. So
the French Revolution, which happened in the seventeen nineties, in
which Louis the sixteenth was overthrown, that was a massive,

(09:39):
a whole cultural overturning, completely eradicating any sense of tradition,
any sense of the traditional legal culture of France. No,
it's all gone, all of it is completely eradicated and

(10:01):
replaced by a whole new thing. With the Plymouth Colony,
you know, with with the Mayflower Compact, as with the
Declaration of Independence. What these colonists were saying, they were
trying to ground themselves as what we want are the

(10:21):
rights traditionally held by British subjects. We're not trying to
do something to reinvent the wheel. We're saying we want
to be as British subjects are treated in the Declaration
of Independence. They were saying, we're not being afforded the
same rights we were supposed to be afforded as British subjects.
Our rights are being infringed here as British subjects. And

(10:43):
because they keep being infringed upon in order to preserve
these traditional things that we want to hold onto. We
have no choice but to separate from the crown. That
wasn't the case with the French Revolution. They didn't want
to preserve anything for and so much so that at
the height of the French Revolution they were outlawing Catholicism.

(11:06):
They were replacing the calendar to have a week that
didn't include Sunday, a week that wasn't seven days long,
get rid of all the traditional months and weeks and stuff.
Basically to abolish Sunday. It was a total cultural overturning,

(11:27):
eradicating the faith that n nine percent of frenchmen believed
in Catholicism, sending nuns to the guillotine. So in short, yes,
Thanksgiving is about food and family and thankfulness and thanking God.

(11:53):
And that's what why Abraham Lincoln sort of wanted it
to become a holiday, was thanking God for his blessings.
And it is about thanking God for his blessings. It
is about thanking Him for his blessings in the context
of family and enjoying some yummy food is a kind
of a byproduct of all of that. But it was

(12:14):
a really kind of significant little moment in the history
of America, where this group of religious odd balls who
came all the way across the ocean to try to win,
almost as crazy as if you were going on the
Moon or Mars to set up a colony. These people

(12:37):
left everything behind, put it an ocean behind them to
live out a new kind of thing, a new kind
of government, a new kind of existence, grounded in the
British tradition, wanting to preserve it, but still very much

(12:57):
doing something new. And that is really characteristic of the
American experience as a whole.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
This is the Tremor Charry shown on the Valley's Power.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Talk Mayflower Compact, which was the founding document for the
settlers who came to Plymouth Rock and how that's really
I think one of the most significant things about that
we're sort of thinking about within the context of Thanksgiving.
It wasn't just because the settlers in the Plymouth Colony

(13:34):
had a nice meal in sixteen twenty one with the Indians.
That's a very nice thing. That's a very good thing
that that happened. Great. Being thankful to God is good.
The Thanksgiving holiday also came about due to Abraham Lincoln
asking that we thank God for his blessings. But it

(13:58):
was also sort of the start of something interesting with America,
the start of a kind of new sort of way
of government that was rooted in certain kinds of democratic principles,
that was still grounded in tradition, and also in various
ways under the guidance of God. Now, I certainly I

(14:20):
think the Mayflower Compact authors were a good bit more
religious than Thomas Jefferson was. But the idea of the
American experience experiment being totally divorced from God is a
bit unhistorical. And as we get to Thanksgiving, I want
to reread Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation from eighteen sixty three.

(14:47):
It's good to read, and it's good to sort of
remember in our era of you know, sort of separation
of church and state, the kinds of things that Americans
in the nineteenth century didn't bat an eye at when
it came to government officials proclaiming a day of thanking
God in ways that we're pretty darn theistic that today

(15:11):
liberals would scream about as theocratic. So here we go
October third, eighteen sixty three, in the midst of the
Civil War, by the President of the United States of
America a proclamation. The year that is drawing towards its
close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields
and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly

(15:31):
enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from
which they come. Others have been added, which are of
so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate
and soften even the heart, which is habitually insensible to
the ever ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the
midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity,
which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and

(15:53):
to provoke their aggression, peach peace has been preserved with
all nations. Order has been maintained, the laws have been
respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in
the theatre of military conflict. While that theater has been
greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union,
needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields

(16:14):
of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested
the plow, the shuttle, or the ship. The axe has
enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines as
well of iron and coals of precious metals have yielded
even more abundant, abundantly than Heretofore, population has steadily increased,
notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp,
the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in

(16:36):
the consciousness of augmented strength and vigors, permitted to expect
continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human
council hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out
these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the
Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger
for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed

(16:57):
to me fit and proper that they should be so
reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice,
by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my
fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and
also those who are at sea, and those who are
sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the
last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving

(17:18):
and praise to our beneficent Father, who Dwelleth in the heavens,
And I recommend to them that, while offering up the
inscriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings,
they do, also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness
and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who
have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable

(17:40):
civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently
employ the interposition of the almighty hand to heal the
wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon
as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the
full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union. In testimony
whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the
seal of the United States to be a fixed done

(18:01):
at the City of Washington, the third day of October,
in the year of our Lord Oney eight hundred and
sixty three and of the Independence of the United States
the eighty eighth by the President Abraham Lincoln William H. Seward,
Secretary of State. And that's actually what it's all about.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
This is the Trevor Cherry Show. On the Valley's Power Talk.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
As you all know, I'm the director at Right to
Life of Central California. I want to talk about a
couple of election things as we wind into the last
half hour of the Trevor carry Show, but don't leave
after the bottom of the hour. The John Girardi Show
starts right up again at six oh five, so stay
tuned for that. A couple of things I want to

(18:46):
talk about with the election, how liberals don't really understand
the Latino vote and the way that the Latino vote
has shifted. Any Latino conservatives listening to this, by the way,
who may want to chip in five five, nine two
through zero forty two forty two, let me get into it.
And if you've got something you want to add that

(19:08):
you think is relevant, I'd be happy to have you
on the air.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
All right.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
I think there were three things about the Democrat establishment.
The liberals sort of controlled the Democratic Party that is
leading to them being totally bewildered about the fact that
Donald Trump warn more of the Latino vote than any
Republicans ever won. That Latinos are now you know, it's
about forty five percent of them went for Trump. It's
a huge shift, and even a lot of parts of Texas.

(19:39):
By the way, the whole idea of Texas turning blue
not going to happen. It's not even close. Some of
the most Democrat Latino heavy parts of Texas shifted way right,
so not going to happen. Places like Brownsville, Texas, which
is a very very southern part of Tech right near

(20:00):
the border. Huge his Latino population, huge shift towards Trump.
And why because of the border. Because Biden screwed up
the border, and people in these border communities can see
how his policies have not been helpful for the whole situation. Now,
a couple of things that I think Democrats don't understand.

(20:20):
And some of this is the fruit of my having
lived in the Northeast and having lived in the Midwest
and Northeast and Midwest liberals there is just more of
them than there are California Liberals. And because they're in
the Northeast and they're in d C. And they're in
New York, they have an outsized influence on national media

(20:43):
and on politics because they live in New York and
DC respectively. Here's the thing about the Northeast. Not a
lot of Mexicans out there.

Speaker 3 (20:58):
I say this with love.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
Okay, I grew up in Clovis, California. And for you people,
by the way, you South Fresno liberals or U Tower
District liberals who think that Clovis is the most lily
white place on God's green Earth, understand that if you
picked Clovis, California up and dropped it almost anywhere else
in the United States. If you picked Clovis, California up

(21:20):
and dropped it in say, northern Indiana, where I went
to school, it would immediately be the most diverse city
in all of Indiana you picked. You pick Clovis, California
up and drop it in Massachusetts, where I lived for
two years, it immediately becomes the most diverse city in Massachusetts.
Clovis is way more racially ethnically diverse than most cities

(21:45):
in the Northeast, than many, many, many cities in the Midwest,
not like by a mile. When I went to Notre Dame,
I looked around at campus and was like, wow, there
are like no this is so weird. There are no
Latinos here. Most of the Latinos in Notre Dame, We're
rich kids are from South America. Not kids from La

(22:09):
or something. So here's the point that liberals in the
Northeast who run the Democrat Party, they don't actually hang
out with very many Latinos. They don't They live in
elite rich enclaves where there are very few Latinos. So

(22:37):
they don't actually, I think, really have their finger on
the pulse of how Latinos think, what Latino opinions are
about things. And certainly they're disconnected from Mexican Americans who
live in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and Colorado
and Nevada. They're very disconnected from them. There are there

(23:04):
are very few because and this comes to point number two,
Latin liberals in the Northeast don't appreciate enough the vast
differences between different kinds of Hispanic peoples, different kinds of Latinos,

(23:24):
different nationalities that happened to be Spanish speaking and from
Central or South America or the Caribbean. They view Spanish
speakers as Spanish speakers. And that's it. The whole ridiculous
argument that was being made that you know, Trump had
that rally in Madisine Square Garden and that comedian made

(23:46):
that joke about Puerto Rico liberals were trying to say
that that was going to turn the whole Latino vote
against Trump. Let me tell you something, I don't know
that I've ever met a Mexican or a Mexican American
person who would have given a rat's rear end that

(24:10):
Donald Trump said something mean about Puerto Ricans. This would
be like me as an Italian getting mad that Donald
Trump said something mean about the Polish, like they don't care,
or maybe more accurately, an Italian getting mad that someone
said something mean about the French. They don't care. It's
not like there's some Pan Hispanic speaking sense of deep

(24:33):
brotherhood that Mexicans would rise to the defense of their
belieguered Dominican brothers, or their beleaguered Puerto Rican brothers, or
their beleaguered Cuban or Venezuelan brother No, it was a
big controversy among Latinos actually when Jennifer Lopez played Selena

(24:58):
in that biopic, because Selina was Mexican and Jennifer Lopez
is from Puerto Rico. She is not Mexican. Like like,
they understand there are differences. They understand the differences there.
So the idea that like the comedian making a mean
joke about Puerto Rico is going to cause the Latino
vote in Brownsville, Texas, which is all, you know, ninety
nine whatever percent Mexican. And if it wasn't Mexican, it

(25:22):
was Salvadoran or you know, someone from Central America coming through. No,
that was never going to impact that. And I think
maybe the most fundamental thing that liberals didn't understand about
the Latino vote, they didn't appreciate enough the fact that

(25:48):
an American citizen who happens to be of Mexican descent
may not think of Trump's deportation plans as negatively as
a recently arrived non citizen would. I grew up again

(26:15):
in the San Joaquin Valley. When you grow up in
the San Joaquin Valley, tons of your friends and acquaintances
and family are Mexican. And it's not a big deal.
It's it's not even a thing. I feel awkward even
talking about it, as like I feel like I'm making
more of a deal of it than it is just
by virtue of talking about it. I have friends at

(26:37):
church who are of Mexican descent. I have friends that
right to life who are of Mexican descent. I have
a family, and I know multiple multiple families where maybe
the husband's Mexican, but the wife is white. And most
of the people I'm interacting with, many of the people
I'm interacting with are not necessarily just new arrivals. Certainly

(27:04):
I interact with plenty of people who are new arrivals,
but a huge percentage of the quote Mexican population, the
Latino population of the San Joaquin Valley are not recent arrivals.
They might be second or third generation by this point.
If it was all the people that got amnesty under Reagan,

(27:25):
that their grandkids at this point could be voting, Well,
maybe I'm getting my maybe I'm getting my dates wrong,
but maybe they're grandkids by this point could be voting.
And that's also the thing we're not talking about, you know,
the idea that all Trump is going to turn off
Latinos by his promises to deport people. The only people

(27:45):
Trump's got to be concerned about are voters here for
the purposes of winning or losing this election. We're talking
about voters who are citizens. A third generation American citizen
who was born here probably has a lot of the

(28:06):
same concerns about politics that you and I have. They're
concerned about the economy, they're concerned about their job, they're
concerned about inflation, they're concerned about maybe they have concerns
about the moral issues or esoteric things that are beyond
what you know. The left seems to think that basically
the only thing that Mexicans or people of Mexican descent

(28:29):
should be able ever to think about is the border,
and meani Trump wanting to deport people, as if Mexicans
can't have grander or can't have thoughts about other issues
like abortion, like foreign policy, like the economy, like et cetera.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Et cetera.

Speaker 4 (28:45):
They care about the same things that I care about,
including the border, But their way of thinking of the
way that many of my friends who are just American
citizens who happened to be of Mexican descent, they're not
thinking about the border the way that again, someone who's
a non citizen who just crosses thinking about it. A

(29:05):
lot of people I know who are of Mexican descent
who voted their parents are also born in America and
voters and are not going to get deported. They're not
as concerned about deportation of family members. The way that's
being painted by Northeast liberals who just think of Mexicans
as Mexicans and that's it. Spanish speakers as Spanish speakers.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
And that's it. Probably a lot of them also think, hey,
completely unregulated immigration of millions and millions of people coming
into this country unlawfully is not good, and probably some
of those people need to be sent back, especially anyone

(29:45):
who did a crime. And you know, I'm thinking about
some of my friends and friends at church and other
places who like, yeah, they don't care, they want deportations
to happen for many people who came to this country illegally.
Some of the people I know we are the most

(30:07):
vigor hardest core on the border are themselves of Mexican descent.
And I don't think there's anything hypocritical about that or
twisted or wrong about that, that they're Americans. And that's
the sort of condescending thing about the way that the
left sort of thought about the Latino vote.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
This is the Trevor carry Show on the Valleys.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
Our Talk John Girardi. I've been filling in today for
yesterday and yesterday for Trevor Carrie. It's always fun to
sit in the big chair and fill in for my
buddy Trevor. If you liked the show today, you can
keep listening. John Girardi Show is coming up at six
oh five, and if you like me, you want to say, hey,
this guy did such a great hour of radio. I'd
like to help support the non profit organizations he runs.

(30:56):
You can go to RTLCC dot org and you can
give to Right to Life Central California are big Christmas
events coming up on Friday, December sixth. Might be a
little late to get a table or seats, but you
can certainly donate in support of us and learn about
all we do. You can donate to the Obria Medical
Clinics of Central California are awesome pro life nonprofit Obgyn
clinic that's helping serve lower income women throughout the city

(31:17):
of Reresno. Go to Obria Obria three six five dot
org to support. And you know I want I was thinking,
how am I closing out the show. I want to have,
you know, something Thanksgiving themed, something a warm, comforting, inspiring
Thanksgiving message, And I thought I'd just give you guys

(31:39):
a couple of Thanksgiving tips. So a couple of the
John Girardi Warm inspiring Thanksgiving things. Be nice to your relatives,
Be nice to your most liberal relative. You only get
so many of these Thanksgiving dinners with family and friends.
You only get so many of them. And there are
some people who don't get very many of them at all,
who are not feeling so this time. So appreciate it.

(32:01):
If you got it, your assignment is to give a
big hug to the most liberal member of your family
at Thanksgiving. And if you're a liberal listening to this,
your assignment is to give a big hug to the
most conservative member of your family and just say, listen,
the election's done. Let's talk about football, Let's talk about

(32:22):
your baby cousin, your baby nephews, whatever, Let's just have
a good time. Family's too important to be soured by
disagreements like this. Let's have a great time this Thanksgiving.
Let's love each other and do what we can. And
to close it out, I think the most inspiring message
I could possibly give to all of you is from

(32:44):
our Vice President Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
I just have to remind you, don't you ever let
anybody take your power from you.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Don't you do it.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
You have the same power that you did before November.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Fifth, the very same.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
And you have the same purpose that you did, and
you have the same ability to engage and inspire. So
don't ever let anybody or any circumstance take your power
from you.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Just I just just just don't. It's hilarious that she
kept going on after that, but any