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From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the.
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True and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored.
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This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.
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Gavin Newsom has been talking about homelessness for more than 20 years. That he's been in office since he was mayor of San Francisco. That was one of its top priorities in solving homelessness. And it's only gotten spiraled out of control and gotten way worse under his watch.
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This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was Susan Crabtree, co author of the recent book Fool's the Radicals, Con Artists and Traitors who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All. An in depth discussion with Susan about what's gone wrong in California is up next. Also later in the program, we'll talk with Jeremiah Regan about Hillsdale's new online course on colonial America. First, we're joined by Susan Crabtree. She's senior White House and national politics correspondent at Real Clear Politics, also the co author of a new book, Fool's the Radicals, Con Artists and Traitors who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All. Susan, thanks so much for joining us.
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Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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The book co written by Jed McPhatter, was out earlier in 2025, but the themes are still very relevant, especially as the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is becoming a more national political figure these days. How has California, you say early in the book, so goes California, so goes the nation. How has this state on the west coast so far removed from a lot of the population center of the how has it had such an outsized role in the politics and the culture of the United States?
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C
It's a really good question. You have the vice president, a former vice president, is a Californian who rose through the ranks just like Gavin Newsom did of San Francisco Politics. And I think that they don't get much vetting out here in California, especially in the San Francisco area. And that's why they are just rising without any accountability and they're exporting their policies. It's sort of like this bad sort of chemistry testing zone out here in California, a little petri dish for liberal causes. And it doesn't matter if they fail in California because it's a one party system. So you don't get any kind of, well, is this policy good for society? You don't get that big test in California because The electorate just keeps electing politicians based on the D or R beside their name and mainly the D. There's a super majority control in the state legislature, as you know, and a lot of corruption going on. And that's what we wanted to expose in the book.
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Susan, they're not just exporting policies, but they are exporting people as well. You mentioned that San Francisco was losing population faster than any major city ever. 6.3% decline from 2019 to 2021, based on what we know. Is that continuing now up until 2024, 2025. And what kind of warning sign should that statistic give to California leaders?
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C
I know just by living in San Diego that we are getting, continue to get a lot of San Francisco people coming down here because once they allowed remote work, people wanted to get out of San Francisco because of the high costs and the rates that's so prevalent there. And, and also the, the drug use downtown, it was so prevalent a few years ago that they had to close down and they told their employees no longer to go to the Nancy Pelosi federal building there in downtown San Francisco, right by the Tenderloin, because you would have to go by the open air drug markets. And there were these, you know, meth and fentanyl zombies walking around and a lot of crime and people weren' just not safe. So they actually had to shut down that building at the time. And it was sort of, it had, it was Nancy Pelosi's namesake. So it was very embarrassing for her to have that happen. But it's just a, it's just a symptom of what's going on across the entire state. They had some big news out of the U.S. attorney's office. There was, they announced the DA bill as Saleh, a Trump appointee, of course, announced that there was some, he had made some progress in investigations into $24 billion in homelessness, money that just went down a rat hole and was never accounted for. And they announced that there was two indictments of people who had embezzled tens of millions of dollars and spend it on things like their American Express credit cards, their Beverly Hills rent for their mansions, gifts, luxurious cars, gifts for their girlfriend of jewelry and Birkin bags. I mean, anywhere else that would just be the end. Everybody and their brother, in terms of investigative reporters would be scrubbing the records to see what more was there where this $24 billion went. But we're just seeing, because a Trump appointee got put in place, we're just seeing this exposed.
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Susan, correct me if I'M wrong. Grew up in California. I know you attended Southern California and I also know you returned recently to San Diego. So tell us the differences in what you saw years ago to the California you see today.
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C
Yes, I did grow up here. I was an Air Force brat. I guess I still am, but I saw a much different Californ growing up. My dad, I really was unlike some other prominent Californians. I really was from a middle class family, upper middle class. My dad was an Air Force officer career and my mom was a teacher. And we. I felt like my family was doing pretty well in, in terms of the American dream. We had a very modest house, but a pool and we could go, we could travel here and there, not extensively to Europe and things like that, but we just felt like we were, you know, we're doing. Living the American dream and it was still possible in California back then. Of course, the. What's going on? What happened since then? I was in D.C. for 23 years as a reporter covering Congress in the White House. And I didn't really see how the policy affected, you know, different states. So I wanted to come back in 2017 and also have my child grow up where I did with near close, closer to family. And what I saw was a stark difference than what I experienced growing up. The prices were just going through the roof on everything. We have the highest insurance rates, the highest energy costs, the highest gas taxes, some of the highest housing costs in the nation, and we have some of the highest poverty rates at the same time, the highest illiteracy rates, some of the lowest or middling to low education scores despite the amount of money that we're putting into it. So the other thing I saw, Scott, that was disturbing as I went down, down to San Diego to have a family day on the pier. There was a sand castle building day that. What a great family experience. And I encountered these, you know, just terrible. It just looked like they were just awful looking like they were sick, both mentally and physically. Homeless people walking and they were not in the. They were in a stupor, just like if they were on fentanyl or something. And it was frightening to me that the downhouse townhead had become that in San Diego it's just a beautiful. Used to be called America's finest city. You don't hear that, that slogan being thrown down much around lately. And then we found out that there was a hepatitis. Shortly after that visit to downtown, hepatitis had spread in the city because they weren't cleaning up the excrement on the sidewalks from the homeless people. And it had killed 17 individuals, not even homeless, just homeless, but other individuals who had caught it. This just felt like a third world country. Now, you know, it was not the down, it was not the California I knew and love so much.
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Susan, you mentioned the homelessness problem and there's an anecdote from the book in which you talk about when the Chinese, I guess Chinese president visited and the city was cleaned up overnight. Immediately. It can be done. So who benefits from California's chronic homelessness? If we ask that question.
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It'S a great question because we're just peeling the onion alpha. And the attorney, the da, the district attorney in Los Angeles and the new US Attorney are starting to peel that onion back. We call it in the book the homeless industrial Complex. There are more than, there are Hundreds of homeless NGOs, nonprofits in San Francisco alone, and they operate by state grants. And so you see these grants and you see no accountability or oversight of them. As I previously mentioned, millions are being tens of millions, even more than that are being misspent just on, on personal credit cards, luxury vehicles. We know this because the, the Attorney General Rob Bonta of California has had to sue that particular recipient of the contract to try to get the money back. And there's no and that's just a small piece of this. But the homelessness, you know, it's just a sad state of affairs. It's the, the Democrats you're asking who benefits? Certainly not the people and the businesses that reside in these areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles and across the Sacramento and across the state that have to operate in these areas where the homeless camps have taken over. And these literally the. We show a video or I had a video which I described in the book of the the Hollywood Stars. You know, the Hollywood Walk of Fame has become a walk of shame. You have these people walking around that are literal fentanyl zombies in a state of stupor. So who benefits? You know, I think that we're finding out that these non profits, some of them are benefit without it producing any results. Also Gavin Newsom and all, there's a lot of non profits and lobbyists that are involved in this homelessness industrial complex. And some of them, these lobbyists have worked in and around Gavin Newsom's housing department at very senior levels. So we're just starting to find out exactly where all this money went. And these two cases that we've seen, they were handing down the feds, were handing down indictments.
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That's Susan Crabtree, co author of the recent book Fool's the radicals, con artists and Traitors who Killed the California Dream and now threatened us all. More with Susan in just a couple of minutes. First, want to remind you you can stay in touch with us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour with our weekly email where we tell you about this week's show, give you a direct link. To listen, just go to radiohour Hillsdale. Eduardo, click the subscribe button in the upper right hand corner of the screen, then give us your email address. We'll send you one email each week telling you about the new show and again, how to get it and how to listen. Stay in touch with us at the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Join our email list at radiohour hillsdale.edu. we continue with Susan Crabtree, co author of the new book Fool's Gold, the Radicals, Con Artists and Traitors who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All. Susan, on this issue of homelessness, what is really at the core of this issue for Democrats in California? What is that approach that has utterly failed them in the state?
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It's really these failed housing first policies that the Democrats have clung to for forever in California, you know, that it was just if they just provided enough housing, then the homeless would fix the homelessness problem. We now understand that there was so much those housing, Gavin Newsom's home key program, his project, those, those housing, they turned hotels over, old hotels, motels into homelessness housing. And it was a disaster. You had it just these people have mental health issues and addiction issues, and these former hotels became dens of thieves and of just they were just a mess, excrement strewed on the walls at one point in one of these places. And they kept pouring and Karen Bass, the LA mayor, kept pouring millions and millions more. And finally they shut it down because it was just a condemned building. It went back to being unlivable in these places and some of these housing projects. So Gavin Newsom is trying now that he's running for president, to turn over a new leaf. And he's talking about addiction and mental health issues and providing care, but he can't do it quickly enough because the more and more more and more homelessness are because of the high cost of California living. And the addiction problem hasn't been solved. More homelessness are coming out on the streets. So Gavin Newsom has been talking about homelessness for more than 20 years that he's been in office since he was mayor of San Francisco. That was one of its top priorities in solving homelessness. And it's only Gotten spiraled out of control and gotten way worse under his watch.
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Susan Crabtree with us, her book Fool's Gold. The radicals, con artists and traitors who killed the California dream and now threaten us all. That's homelessness. What about crime? What is proposition 47 and how did it contribute to California's crime problem?
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Good question. That is the notorious proposition ballot initiative that came before the people and was sort of. They always do this in California. The Attorney General is, is the one that decides the name of the ballot initiative and they always name it something very, you know, benign sounding. And so the, the voters will vote it in. And in this case, Proposition 47 lowered the penalties from felonies to misdemeanors for crimes that were below $900 if you stole less than $900. And it's really responsible for these, this series of smash and grabs we've seen over the last course of the few years. And petty crime up to more serious crime. The, these gang of thieves, mass thieves come into department stores and they just raid the department stores and they have huge bags and masks on and there's just no, they do this with impunity. And so now after that of years of living with that and that was a George Gascon which was a Soros supported prosecutor in LA. That was his pet project, Proposition 40. And Gavin Newsom was the first person to sign on to that, first elected official to sign on to that and, and back it. He's very close to George Gascon because Gascon was the DA in San Francisco before he went to Los Angeles. Well, all of the liberal George Soros prosecutors in San Francisco and la, both of them Chesa Boudin in San Francisco and George Gascon have now been kicked out of office. One was recalled Chesa Bourdin in San Francisco and Gascon was just voted out in last fall. The people in California are fed up with this soft on crime approach. And you had a new proposition last fall, Proposition 36 passed which would raise those misdemeanors back up to felonies and start providing more money to police. Unfortunately, the Democrat controlled super majority controlled legislature is not funding that and Gavin Newsom is not funding that proposition. So he's not funding the police departments and the prosecutors. So it is a mess still in California with crime.
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We also learn more about the people involved, the politicians involved. There's a chapter about Gavin Newsom as mayor in this thing called China SF there's a story going back 40 years that includes Gavin Newsom and, and Kamala Harris and other California politicians. So we know a bit more about Kamala Harris as vice president and as a presidential candidate. And now we're learning more about Gavin Newsom. How would you compare or contrast the two of those California politicians?
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Well, they're very similar in how they came up in the world. So they have similar politics. Gavin Newsom was. They have the same mentor and benefactor in Willie Brown. So you know, we know very well the relationship, the very personal affair that Willie Brown, who was the mayor of San Francisco and prior to that he was the top speaker of the assembly. And he was terminally but out of that. So he became mayor of San Francisco. So he tapped Gavin Newsom to be first. He had to do some parking and transportation job. That was an appointment. And he wasn't too happy about that. But then he got onto the account the supervisor board and that was directly. Willie Brown was directly responsible for appointing him to a replacement position. Then he had to get reelected. And Willie Brown was directly responsible for Kamala Harris's rise as well as the local district attorney there in Cal, in San Francisco. So they both have the same politics because it's San Francisco. And if you can't be elected there, if you don't support to the extreme radical left, even though that's starting to change, as you just mentioned, because people are getting sick of these failures, these policy failures. So in terms of they're. They're made of the same cloth, they're cut from the same cloth. And you know, why are we even. Why is. Why are the Democrats thinking about going again to a very unvetted person in Gavin News him. And we just experienced the same thing from Kamala Harris. You know, your guess is I think it's because the Democrats bench is so weak. But yeah, I, you know, Kamala Harris got sort of tripped up by her support for trans surgeries in prison for prisoners. I know that was a big extreme. That was sort of a wake up moment. I think for the electorate that she was instrumental in doing that. But Gavin Newsom has been supportive of all of those things. Things. And he was even at a higher. He was more at a strategic level as the mayor, lieutenant governor and then the governor of California. She was attorney General. But he took a more direct path to power.
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Talking with Susan Crabtree, her book is Fool's the Radicals, Con Artists and Traitors who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All. If you have a large active government as you have in California, you might expect it to at least work in some way. You have chapters about the lack of oversight on Pacific Gas and Energy leading to the Paradise Fire, 1500 fires caused by PGE negligence between 2014 and 2017. They're supposed to be oversight by the state. And then the drought conditions in California. 80% of the water from record breaking storms in 2023 and 2024 was lost to runoff and not collected for use in California. How does all this happen under again a large and an active government in California that they can't find ways to make these things simply work.
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I honestly believe that the media has a role in this. When I was growing up in California, there was a lot more local media and it was a lot more mainstream. You don't take direct sides. Even though it was left leaning leaning, but there wasn't, it wasn't outright liberal leaning. So now you don't have as many of those local papers, you don't have the reporters providing the day in and day out shoe leather reporting on their local governments on up to the governor's office. And people are getting their news in different ways and siloed news. And so when you have a state that has become more democratic, it's cobalt blue now. It used to be purple when I grew up, especially in certain areas like Southern California because you had the defense industry there and that because of the taxes and because of the end of the Cold War, many of those aerospace and companies fled the state. And now we're seeing, you know, mass egress of companies from California because of the tax regime. But I do blame there's little accountability and a lot of information silos in California and access journalism. So people aren't finding out why the, the Public Utility Commission is raising their rates. Well, they were in bed, they were part, many of them came from the utility companies. It's a revolving door between the utility companies and the, the oversight agency that's supposed to be providing the oversight and saying wait a second, why are you raising those rates? But if they serve on the Public Utility Commission, they can sometimes climb the ladder even more and get even more lucrative jobs after they leave. And even like with Jerry Brown when he was governor, his sister sat on the board of Sempra getting hundreds of thousand dollars a year from the energy companies. So there is no accountability at that level. And these fires have just raged out of control. I really have believe they have very little to do with climate change. Despite what Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi like to say. They have all everything to do as we're seeing now with the utility in the Altadena Fire was caused by SoCal Edison and has everything to do with, well this one was arson and you do have drought like conditions and you're not saving the water and putting it to good use. You have terrible methods, mismanagement going on at the government level. The reservoirs were dry, the, the water, the pumps weren't even working, the hydrants weren't even working because of the low pressure situation. And you just had a perfect storm for one of the most luxurious areas in California to go up in flames and destroy thousands of people's lives. And it could have all been avoided if we had learned the lessons from the Paradise Fire in a more rural, less, less affluent area into the north just years ahead before that killed 84 people. You know, that one was killed way more people than the Paradise Fire. But we all of a sudden the Paradise Fire is national news because it affected such an affluent area of California. So you know, this is just government mismanagement at a obscene level. And the fact that Gavin Newsom is a viable candidate and a top polling candidate for the Democrats right now is personally mind boggling.
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Chapter on Adam Schiff current senator, his close connections to some of the most notorious fraudsters in California history. He's a player here too as a sitting U.S. senator. Is there currently a fight between or among Newsom, Harris, Schiff, maybe others about who controls the Democratic Party in California?
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C
Well, I know, I think there could have been but because Gavin Newsom has ascended right now and Kamala Harris has lost her a lot of her credibility. I think you know, Gavin Newsom is controlling things right now and he is, you know, have a, has a lock on it. He has his taxpayer funded staff fueling out influencer type, you know, contrary social media posts that are, have gotten himself in trouble with the Secret Service launched a Secret Service investigation when he was saying that you know, Secretary Noem is going to have a bad day. You know, he's getting too cute by half with these social media posts. But yeah, I do think that what's recently the most interesting thing is that since Katie Porter imploded, the former congressman from Irvine, Orange county area when she lost her Senate raised last year to Adam Shift, she's now running for governor. Well guess what, she's you know, kind of, she's still in the race and she's on an apology tour because she had, there was so many meltdowns with the, she had a meltdown, a very big meltdown with the media refusing to answer their follow up questions. And then other videos have come out since of her just, you know, being so incredibly abusive to staff. And so there's talk now in California that Alex Padilla, the senator, he could come back and run for governor and get Gavin Newsom's blessing and Gavin Newsom could become senator. So he has the post because he's term limited out into next year. That would be a really interesting shift and scramble in the California political machine that would actually bolster Gavin Newsom's chances even more. I'm not sure Alex Padilla wants to go run this troubled state. He'd rather sit in the Senate with less sort of accountability, I would think. But that's what's going on with sort of the prognosticators are thinking could happen because of Katie Porter's own demise, basically.
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Susan Crabtree is the co Author with Jed McPhatter of the New book Fool's the Radicals, Con Artists and Traitors who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All. A great explanation of what's happened in California and what we should be watching out for these next years. Susan, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
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It's my pleasure, Scott. Thanks so much for all you do at Hillsdale. It's incredibly important.
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Up next, Jeremiah Regan, executive director of online learning here at Hillsdale College, previews the brand new online course Colonial America. I'm Scott Bertram. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. You know the Robertson family from the hit TV show Duck Dynasty. Now Hillsdale College offers you the unique opportunity to learn alongside the Robertsons as they dive deep into Hillsdale's online course, the Genesis Story. Every Friday on the Utter Shot Podcast, the Robertsons will share their insights and perspectives. Learning from Hillsdale. Professor of English Justin Jackson. Take a trip down south to Louisiana for this one of a kind learning experience we call Unashamed Academy. Visit unashamedforhillsdale.com and enroll today. That's Unashamed. F O R hillsdale.com to experience the Genesis story alongside the Robertsons. Welcome back to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. I'm Scott Bertrand. Be sure to check us out on X. We're at Hillsdale Radio, the podcast network. At HC Podcasts, we're joined by Jeremiah Regan. He is executive director of online learning here at Hillsdale College. Jeremiah, thanks for joining us.
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Thanks for having me, Scott.
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Pleasure to chat, especially as we have a new online course ready to go on Colonial America. Hillsdale Edu newcourse. We'll put the information in front of you. Hillsdale Edu newcourse. Who's involved in putting this one together?
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Well, our team at online learning, this was actually an idea that came from one of our directors of content, Brett Waite. We were thinking we should have a course that has something to do with Thanksgiving. And he said, why don't we tell the true story of the pilgrims? Unfortunately, Hillsdale has great scholars who know about the colonial and the founding era of America. So this course features interviews with Dr. Arne, Thomas West, Bill McClay, Paul Moreno, John Grant and Kevin Slack. An all star list of Americanists and many.
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If you're an online course taker, you've seen them previously. That's right, online courses, they've gotten pretty.
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Good at being in front of the camera.
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Maybe too good. We'll see. So when people think about early America, they're picturing powdered wigs and pilgrims. That story, though, is much richer than that. And one that's told. And Colonial America course, what kind of world are we stepping into when we begin this course?
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B
That's a wonderful question because pilgrims and powdered wigs are certainly part of the story and it's good that we have those cultural touch points to latch onto. But what our viewers will see, what our students will see in this documentary, is what life was actually like. Imagine traveling across the ocean. It was probably about a 10 week voyage. And you land not where you intended to land, on an uncultivated wild shoreline. And you have to go through a bunch of decisions really quickly. Where are you going to clear land? Where are you going to place your shelter? Where is there sources of fresh, where are sources of fresh water? What direction does the wind blow so that you can think about where you want to position your shelters? What will you eat? Are there other men who are around? And you have to start making these decisions quickly because you landed in November. There's some food on the ship, there's some shelter on the ship, but winter is coming and you need to make sure that you have food, shelter and the ability to survive that winter.
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To that point, our forefathers helped to carve this civilization out of wilderness. So what does that actually look like? Like on the ground? What were those first communities facing on a day to day basis?
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Well, most of them were skilled in agriculture. We're thinking about the early settlers, the pilgrims, but they're coming to a different land. And it wasn't as though they were on Mars or the moon, but the soil is different, the local flora and fauna are different, and there's not much margin for error. Again, they had some stores of food on their ship, but they were dwindling and beginning to rot and they needed their crops to last. So while they were skilled in some of these trades, there was an act of translation that had to occur so that they could survive, so they had something to eat. Likewise, there were those who were skilled in building arts, but they were dealing with different types of wood, similar but not exactly the same. And they had to determine what types of trees are going to make the best material for shelter. Everything required them to be active and creative and really enterprising in order to just survive. After they did that, they could start building a civilization, but they had to do the kind of things we take for granted every day.
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A
I was going to make a joke about this being there, not being any sort of travel guide they could pick up from a library and find out what they were going towards. Did they have any idea, any information previously about what they were walking into?
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B
There were some rudimentary maps. There had been some exploration done. Of course. Columbus came to the new world in 1492, which is over 100 years before the Pilgrims. There was a settlement in Virginia and Jamestown, though that's a much different climate than Massachusetts. So if we're thinking about the Pilgrims, they're contending with different factors. Rockier terrain, colder weather and. Right. There's no, there's no Google maps, there's no YouTube to look up how to do things. They had to take take the very minimal information they had about the land and the skills and the tenacity they brought with them to cling to life those first few years.
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A
The new Hillsdale online documentary course Colonial Hillsdale.edu New Course Course explores the habits of self government that grew up in the colonies long before independence for the country. What about a moment that really captures that kind of spirit?
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B
The course has a few good examples of this. And in the interest of not spoiling them, I'll use one that's probably well known but not completely understood, and that's the Mayflower Compact. When the Pilgrims came over, they signed the Mayflower Compact and that was their first. That was their first foray into self government. The reason they needed that is because the Pilgrims traveled over with, with those who didn't share their religious beliefs. And they were called the Strangers and they were mostly artisans and builders who were intended to help create the infrastructure. Well, the Pilgrims did not land in the area they intended. They were outside of the charter from the king, meaning they were not technically formally governed by any law. So they had to write their own. And that's why? We see the Mayflower Compact as this first kind of social contract in America. And it's the first example of men saying, we are accountable to God and ourselves and our families, and we need to take matters into our own hands, so to speak, because there's no one else coming to do this for us.
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A
There were certainly plenty of struggles early on. What kinds of conflicts or tensions perhaps helped to shape the kind of people who would later lead the revolution.
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B
Yeah, we've talked a little bit about the struggles presented by nature, by the wilderness. And it. It bears repeating. These were hardy men and women. They were able to deal with wild, wild swings in temperature. They were wielding axes and shovels, chopping down massive trees, digging through soil, cultivating for the. For planting crops. But there were other men. And while English settlers sometimes had good relations with Indian tribes, they also encountered difficulties with Indian tribes tribes. And it's worth noting, and our scholars bring this out in the documentary, that there's no unification between the tribes, at least for the most part. There are a few instances in which some confederations formed, but dealing with each separate tribe was like dealing with a different nation with its own customs, its own morality, its own interest or disinterest in trading its own ideas about territory and property. And the settlers had to learn all of these things in the moment while they were trying to survive. It meant also that they had to fight what today would be called close quarter combat. That meant firing the one round in your musket and then using it as a club or grabbing a knife or a tomahawk or a sword if they had it, and defending from hostile Indians. And that could be very confusing because, again, they had good relations with some Indians and very bad relations with others. And it was a confusing time that required constant vigilance and also required these kind of. Of tough virtues.
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The new Hillsdale College online documentary course Colonial america at hillsdale.edu new course. Sometimes we forget how diverse the colonies were religiously, economically, even culturally, too. How did those different colonies somehow end up developing this shared American identity?
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B
That's a great question, and it's one of the main thrusts of the course. The colonies were certainly diverse in one sense, in some of the ways that you discussed. Most of the settlers were from Western Europe, from England, from Holland, and from Germany. Those are cultures that have some real differences in their ways of life and in their particular religious denominations. However, the colonies were not diverse in the way we think of diversity today. The differences in religion were mostly on the fringes of Protestantism. There was A general consensus about Protestant Christianity. There were differences in languages between the English and the Germans and other settlers. But there was still a kind of distant common heritage in their way of life and their views on morality. As these people lived together, though, and increasingly interacted. And there's a few events that we discuss in the documentary, which I'll leave it for the viewers to discover by watching, that led to a burgeoning sense of an American identity. Rather than a British settler or a German settler, they began to start thinking of themselves. And this took many generations as Americans, both in a religious and a political sense. And eventually you get to the point where after the Founding, after the. After the Revolutionary War has concluded. John jay, in Federalist 2, which is a proposal to ratify the Constitution, describes Americans as a people who share language, heritage, customs, beliefs about God, views about government, and importantly, shed their blood together in the revolution. And so this documentary explains how some of those pieces of unity, some of those common threads began to develop over about 150 years.
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A
This documentary also explores what's phrased as the manly spirit of republicanism. What did that kind of character or that kind of courage look like in everyday life back then?
- [40:45]
B
These people took very seriously some things that we can tend to take for granted. What, what is the government doing to promote religion? What is it doing to promote justice? How does it define justice? So there's a kind of courage in their assertion of their beliefs and their conscience. There's also the courage which we've touched on, of the physical courage, the willingness to labor, to exert oneself. And that might be cutting down trees, plowing a field, building a house. It also means engaging in close quarters combat. It means fighting, it means training for the militia and going and defending your border. And that might be from Indians, it might be from the troops of another imperial power, as we saw in the French and Indian War and several other lesser engagements which are described in the documentary. In short, though, it meant a sort of radical taking accountability for oneself, one's family and one's town. It meant knowing that the cavalry, so to speak, was not coming. And that's in matters of war and in politics. And so we needed to. They needed to think seriously about the most important things, God, their relation with man, justice, and build their own society around those ideas. They didn't work in total, in a total vacuum. All of the English colonies were granted authority by the king, but he was a distant king and quite often exercise benign or salutary neglect, meaning he didn't have much to say. To them, that was a good thing. It allowed the Americans to develop their own ideas about government and live the way they wanted to do.
- [42:26]
A
What lessons, perhaps, can we learn from the colonial period that still speak to us here in 2025?
- [42:34]
B
In a general sense, we should be very proud of our ancestors and our heritage. They are, are remarkable people. They're human beings, so they're imperfect, but their achievements are monumental. And viewers will learn that they were decent and kind, intelligent, scrappy, great people. They provide an excellent example for us. We enjoy the blessings of liberty that they helped to establish. And we have a duty to carry on the sacred fire of liberty to the next generation. And that looks a little bit different today in modern America than it did then. The circumstances have changed, but we can find ways to emulate them by doing simple things like participating in your church, by going to school board meetings or city council meetings, by voting in elections, by writing to your representatives, by, in general, taking accountability for your life, the lives of your family, and loving your neighbors in practical ways.
- [43:33]
A
One of the reasons we're talking with Jeremiah Regan about this, he's executive director of Online Learning. But also a lot of your personal research is in this field, colonial America. What do you find most inspiring about colonial America and colonial Americans? And are you satisfied that it truly comes across in this new documentary?
- [43:56]
B
Thank you for that question. I have several answers. First, yes, I'm satisfied that we did our ancestors justice in one sense, because this is a prequel. There's a second part that's about the revolution which shows what really came about as the result and the legacy of the colonists endeavors. My own study into this made me deeply appreciate our founding and I'm very grateful for my research team and our scholars to help bring a great variety of stories to life, to help ourselves and also to help our viewers understand much better what it was like for these people and who they were. So it's been a very gratifying project.
- [44:36]
A
To be a part of the new Hillsdale Online documentary course is Colonial Hillsdale. Edu newcourse Hillsdale. Edu newcourse. Jeremiah Regan is executive director of Online learning here at Hillsdale College. Jeremiah, thanks for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
- [44:58]
B
Thank you so much, Scott.
- [45:00]
A
That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to our guests Susan Crabtree, co author of Fool's Gold, and Jeremiah Regan, director of online learning here at Hillsdale College. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews or listen anytime to the podcast. Find it at Podcast, Hillsdale, Edu, or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I'm Scott Bertram, and this has been the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.