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Them Before Us Podcast
Them Before Us Podcast #098 | Patriotism isn't Political with Katie Broussard
00:24:35
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- [00:01]
A
Foreign. Welcome to the Them Before Us podcast. I'm your host, Jen Friesen, training director, Podcast, substack communication, social media. Basically, if you see the things that them for us does, you are seeing some of what I get to do. And our team, the creative team, and we're really excited for our conversation today.
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B
We.
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A
We are joined by Katie Broussard. She's a wife and mother of three young children. She's the founder of the Littlest Statesman, a heritage family brand dedicated to raising the next generation of proud Americans through craft, ship storytelling and small intentional acts of daily life. She's the author of the children's book the Great George Washington, which I have here. And it's going to be the first of seven stories sharing the life and contributions of our nation's founders. Through her work, Katie endeavors to cultivate a profound love and appreciation for. For her country in her home and help other families to do the same. So, Katie, thanks so much for joining us.
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B
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited.
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A
Okay, well, start us out with, you know, Katie's life before you decided to write a book. Maybe. I mean, were you a kid that liked writing or drawing or anything?
- [01:17]
B
I was. I'm not the artist. My dear friend Grace Vitale is the artist. I cannot draw. I can write. But no, I grew up in California. My dad worked in California state politics. He was the director of policy for the Republican caucus. So I grew up in the political movement. I grew up sitting during session, things like that. So I really had a really unique experience of being exposed to these things and how our government works and things like that. Both my parents both, you know, are really strong patriots. And I'm so grateful that, for that upbringing. And I feel like also during that era, you know, the early 2000s and whatnot, it was just a really. It was a great time of just great patriotism in our country. It was very normal. And so it was just something I was raised with. I ended up going to Hillsdale College, which is a small liberal arts college in Southern Michigan. And it's a. It's a classical school that just starts asking questions. And I was exposed to some of the most incredible works, just all the classics that I hadn't read as a child. And so it just increased my understanding and my appreciation for the foundation of this country, the uniqueness of this country. And I was also a politics major. So, you know, my favorite course was, like, the Statesmanship of Lankman. So I'm a real politics nerd in that kind of in that realm. But I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. I've got three kids. Five, three and one and a half. My husband's an entrepreneur. He works in the home improvement business. But this kind of came about just as I was kind of with my young daughter, and she's three at the time. And we're, you know, going off to the fourth of July parades and things like that, just going, mommy, what is this? Like, why are we celebrating this? And, you know, I never really thought about it as an adult of. I just grew up knowing it. Right. Like, I never really had thought about, okay, how do you cultivate that love and understanding for our country, especially at such a young age? And so I started looking online, went on Amazon, you know how it goes as a mom, and Googling all these books, and they don't really exist. There's beautiful books out there that have, like God Bless America and America the Beautiful and, you know, teaching the basic songs of our country, but nothing that's actually teaching our youngest children. So I'm talking about toddlers, kindergarteners, first, second grade, about actually our founding. Our founding fathers, what our country is and why it is the way it is. And so I figured, you know what? I'm gonna do it. So that's kind of how I got into it. It really was a spur of the moment thing that has really blossomed into something more. And honestly, it was just the inspiration of being a mom and having a daughter asking these questions.
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A
Awesome. So you're the author and it's kind of poet poem style. And then you said your friend Grace is the artist, right? Yeah, I love it too, because it kind of. I mean, if you're doing watercolor.
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B
Yeah, they're a gouache. Watercolor. Yeah.
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A
Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yes.
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B
It's a beautiful book. Thank you so much.
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A
We just posted a sub stack on our publication, M4S substack.com if people haven't found it yet. About one of our colleagues, Sam, found a book called Embry the Embryo. So it's a children's book, really. Young children's book. Yeah. So it is interesting how, I mean, both sides of the political spectrum are using children's book to communicate values. Let's. Let's say absolutely both sides are doing it, you know, for sure. Propaganda, indoctrination, whatever. But I mean, both sides are saying, how can we make a book that's communicating values? And now we wrote about a number of books that we would not recommend, which are ones that are focused on sexuality and gender identity. And things. And these are marketed toward quite young kids.
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B
Oh, absolutely.
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A
And explicit. Right. And so when you go to the children's library these days, it is kind of hard to know which books do I trust. You know, you might pick up a book about George Washington these days, and the book might be focused on he was a slave owner and would. There are true things about that.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
Yeah. But it only focuses on the bad in a way to cut down the country instead of giving kids an inspirational picture of flawed men and women that were a part of the founding. This is a very unique country and a unique founding. And you said this is the first of seven. I'm. Not that you remember all of them off the top of your head, but do you have those already or which ones are coming?
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B
The manuscripts are all written. So we wanted to start with a founder's collection. Obviously with the 250th anniversary. You know, you can't start with anyone but George Washington, but Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Paul Revere. I'm missing James Madison, Alexander Hamilton. There we go. That's when I was missing. So we really just want to. And as you said, our books are not political. And I am of the belief that it is not political to be patriotic. And I think that that's something that might just be a very controversial thing to say today, honestly. But yeah, as you said, I mean, we've gone out to markets and things like that, and I've gotten the question, hey, where do you mention slavery in your toddler book? And these. This is written for ages three to eight. Right. So it's all read in rhyme. But. And I told them, you know what? Absolutely. Am I going to have those conversations with my kid one day? 100%. We need to. These are broken, flawed individuals. And that was one of, you know, obviously the greatest sins of this nation. But at the same time, we also need to teach them, why is this country so different? And it was these flawed individuals that looked and wrote the Declaration saying, all men are created equal. They weren't even living up to that. They were writing things that were so beyond their time and knowing, hey, I don't even know how we're going to get here. But we know that from a biblical standpoint, this is the truth. And somehow we need to get to that place. And so we don't, you know, characterize ourselves on one or one other side of the aisle here. These are books just trying to teach our children about the founding of our country and that America is great, not because we are perfect. We're not. We are in a broken world with sinful individuals running a country. You know, Federalist55 says, if men were angry angels, no government would be necessary. But they do. But they. He followed off after that, publish, followed after that saying, but men have enough virtue in order to self govern. And so there is that balance of knowing that we're not perfect, we are going to be flawed, our laws are going to be wrong, you know, at both sides of the aisle, there's so much corruption. Right. But at the same time, there is a beauty in the ideas that this nation was founded upon. The ideas of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. All these Enlightenment ideas that were so radical for their time. And it's the reason that these documents. Documents still hold true in a world that's so different than when the founders actually started this country.
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A
That's a great point that they are writing, you know, the founders are writing so much of it was so specifically against how they had been treated from 100 and then the king. Right. So things that we have not even had to conceive of, of. You're not allowed to just house your soldiers in my house and take all my stuff because that was very specifically things that were happening to them.
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B
Yes.
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A
And the notion of you can't force us into a particular denomination where you can't tell us, we can't practice the denomination or the faith that we want to, or we should have the right to write the things, our disagreements and publish them and go back and forth with our ideas. But we read these things, you know, the. When politics in America Right now, 2026, we fight back and forth and we're arguing about what does it. What. What are the nuances of freedom of worship? What are the nuances of freedom of speech? Am I allowed to do hate speech or whatever? And these are conversations other people around the world don't even get to have. That's the higher percent of the country, right?
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B
It is.
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A
So picture being in China, a very developed, successful, technologically advanced country, but you think you get to storm, you know, some kind of law enforcement situation there? No, you disappear. Like they disappear, you and your family. So it's just interesting. Like we see so many flaws in our country and we go back and forth and fight. And a lot of people don't recognize that it's. We're in such a unique situation because men conceived something that didn't even exist. They didn't have anything to go off of.
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B
Right. And we also, I mean we're, we're living a First world country. The issues that we have today are so. They're so crazy. You know, like, we have time to question. We have time to question our gender, you know, in, you know, and I, I love Matt Walsh. You know, in his video, like in his film that he did, you know, he. Yeah, it was a woman. He goes to, you know, Africa, and they look at him like he's crazy. They don't have the terminology for it. Not because, you know, obviously I, I don't agree with it. Like, I. It's not biblically true, but at the same time, we. They don't even have the opportunity to do that. They have to go, literally go hunt and gather in order to keep their family and their tribe alive. So a lot of these issues, not that technology is bad, not that all these advances in the United States are bad. No, they're wonderful. And they've brought us to where we are and the things that we can do. But at the same time, we also need to recognize, like, we are in a very unique situation. And so we are incredibly blessed as a nation. We are very fortunate. We are very rich. And so all these issues that we're arguing about are very unique to our country and something that honestly, we shouldn't even have the time to be able to do, but we do.
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A
Yeah. I mean, a technologically advanced country that basically is bored. So we're like going back in time to argue things that are plainly obvious. Yeah. Biological. The reality of that, or, I mean, even some of the realities of obesity or eating disorders. Like, eating disorders only happen in a nation where there's food abundance. Isn't that. That's an, that's an irony.
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B
Right.
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A
And I guess, you know, from the Christian perspective, it takes. We can take any good thing, any success, any peace that we have, any whatever, and we'll find a way to make it bad or a way take it too far, take it to an extreme, find a way to argue about it, et cetera.
- [11:41]
B
I mean, look at the garden. I mean, that's Genesis. That's Genesis 2, right. I mean, it's. It was destroyed before it even started. So going in to that, with that perspective, though, knowing like, hey, we do live in a broken world. I am sinful, then my neighbor is sinful. You know, we need grace, we need mercy. And I think that that's why this country is so successful is because it was founded on those ideals. You know, every single colony that was founded, was founded on religious freedom, but the majority of them, other than Roger Williams, who wanted more religious freedom than the others. I mean, they all had biblical doctrines that they were signing, like every single one of their compacts specifically were tying them to do this, all for the glory of the God and the spread of the Christian faith. I mean, it was very, very specific what their purpose was. And so the idea now that, you know, we're founded on Judeo Christian values, but nowadays that's not something that everyone shares in this country, and that is the blessing of a country found on religious freedom. You do have the right to pursue truth in your own way and come to the conclusion that you do. But at the same time, a country that was founded on specific values but is no longer held by the people that live in this country. This is why we are at the place that we are today and why so much in with the little estatesman attached back here is why I am pursuing a company that is trying to teach our youngest children why America is so great and pursuing those values as a family and helping families do that, just as I'm trying to do with my own.
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A
Yeah, that's so good. I was, I was just going to go look up your website really quick, but I was wondering too if you could unpack a little bit because you were. We love Hillsdale. One of Katie's children just graduated from Hillsdale.
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B
Oh, very cool.
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A
Yeah, super awesome school.
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B
And.
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A
But the notion that our founders had that this whole experiment was only going to work with a moral people, and now they didn't say. Well, you tell me. I, I don't remember if it was like explicitly they said Christian people or if they were trying to a little bit. They, they, they were meant to in a Judeo Christian way, of course. And then as Christians, I'm like, that is the standard for morality. Not that I'm a Christian, but that there's an objective law giver who gave a law. He's the Christian. He's the God who revealed himself in scripture, the Bible and through Jesus. That's the Christian worldview. That's what being moral is, would be lining up with the God who created us. So maybe that was their understanding when they said the word moral. But do you think the problems we're in now is the notion that we're, I guess, not a moral people anymore? Have we completely separated from that? Or is it that we have these competing ideas of what it means to be moral? Like, I don't know if you talked about that at school or.
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B
I mean, I'm 10 years out of school now. It's kind of scary. Almost 10. God bless. I think the issue is nowadays that everyone has their own truth. There is no universal, a single truth. And so when everyone has their own truth, the whole My Truth movement, you know, I think that that's where we come into this bind that we cannot come back to square one. There's no, there's, there's no footing that we have that we can return to when everyone has their own truth. And so, you know, my truth is I'm, I'm a boy trapped in a girl's body. Well then unfortunately, it doesn't matter what I say or what I believe. It's your truth versus mine. And so we're never going to come back to a consensus here. And so, you know, America was founded after the Enlightenment. It was founded, you know, after the whole, the British Revolution, the Glorious Revolution. And so they were all coming back from this, you know, destroyed Church of England and everything's messed up. And so everyone is trying to come back and figure out like how. And it's very similar here, honestly. But you know, how can we figure out how to be a moral country when everyone, we have all these different denominations now and you've got your separatists, you're like, we can't come back together anymore. We need to create our own individual denominations. And we've got the purists saying we can restore the church, it'll be okay. And it's honestly very reminiscent to what we're experiencing today. But they realize, you know, these new ideas through the Enlightenment that, you know, there is natural law, there are rights that come simply from God and no government can take them away. They come from the people. And you know, all these, those two things together put together, you've got these people pursuing good, pursuing truth. And honestly, at that time, you know, pretty much everyone was a Christian or of the Judeo Christian tradition. It wasn't. At least the Americans that came Here, you know, 102 people came here from the pilgrims on the Mayflower. Like every single one of those people were Judeo Christian, God fearing believers. And so for them it was simply, you know, John Winthrop's giving his, his speech right before they get off the boat. And all these things are, it was literally a sermon that he gave, you know, the model of Christian charity. And so I think the issue nowadays is there's not a, there's not a pursuit of truth, it's a pursuit of my truth. And so it's really hard to conflate the two when you've got people who can't even come to a Consensus on the most basic ideal in which we believe all our rights are wrapped up in, you know.
- [17:12]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's good. I have thought the notions of propaganda or indoctrination are interesting to me because that's, those are very critical words. Of course. Like those are bad words for the notion of communicating values. I would say. So obviously there's. But, but maybe it's better to say, I'm just thinking out loud, there's a proper way to give values, teach values and improper ways to teach values. And so I would say to propaganda and indoctrination is more like without question. I'm just going to tell you what it is. No dissent allowed, no conversation allowed, no discussion. That's what it is. So that would probably be. And just, you know, it's like over and over and over when you're too little to process and you.
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B
That's what it is.
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A
Okay, But I do think there is, there needs to be a resurgence of communicating values in a proper way. Age appropriately, topic appropriately for age. Talk about slavery when they are 5, 6, 7, whatever. When they see something, they ask you
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B
a question about it.
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A
But in an age appropriate way, of course.
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B
Right.
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A
An understandable way and in a contextual way. You know, this was the norm for the entire world until people became Christians in Britain and decided to stop the, you know, the transatlantic slave trade. But it does feel like, especially in our government schools, they've just completely abandoned the notion of teaching you about America and what it means to be American. That would be where you would be able to, to communicate and transmit shared values the easiest. 100% majority of kids are in these schools. Yeah, but, but like we're talking about propaganda, indoctrination. They've reversed it. So they are doing propaganda and indoctrination. But it's how horrible the country is. And so why we shouldn't be surprised that we have college students on the most beautiful, prestigious, highest level of privilege. You could have college campuses that are like destroying buildings, camping out, screaming, you know, death to Israel, we hate the police. And so it's like that. So it's cool that you're writing a book for the youngest people to help reinstate that. But man, when I look at kind of the state of our country, it feels a little bit like, how are we going to return to that kind of shared value? I don't know. That's not a question maybe you could answer right in this moment. But it is a thought that comes.
- [19:54]
B
No, I, I agree. 100. And it's something as A mom. I fear, like, what are, you know, everyone, you know, what. What are my kids going to grow up? What are they going to inherit? And I do believe it's grassroots. I really do it. But it. It starts in the home. It really does. And I'm very blessed. We are homeschooling. My daughter. I was. I was California public school school from start to finish until I went to Hillsdale. And to be honest, I loved it when I was younger. And as I got older, though, in high school specifically, it became, you know, we're pushing the mid 2000s at that point. You know, 2010, 14. Ish. We're pushing more of a political realm. Right. And so my. My teachers were. They made it very known. And today, I can't even imagine. But, you know, not every family has the opportunity to homeschool, and I absolutely understand that. But it does begin in the home. You know, obvious. Obviously, we do want. I mean, our school system has turned into a big propaganda place. And so. And I think it comes from the teachers. It comes from their jadedness. It comes from, you know, not just. Just not a proper understanding of the foundation of our country. And so, you know, you go on college campuses, you know, I've watched a million Charlie Kirk videos, and unfortunately, the thing that strikes me more than anything is their lack of knowledge and understanding. There's. They're asking these questions, and it's like you are at these prestigious schools. I don't pretend to have every answer. I don't. But at the same time, there's no pursuit. It seems like that there's a severe lack of pursuit of truth these days, and wherever that lands you. Right. Like, if we're pursuing truth, that's what we should want to land at, where, you know, whatever happens to us, whatever the result is, we should all be pursuing truth. And it seems, unfortunately, that that is not what is happening anymore. But I do very much believe it starts in the home. It starts in the churches. It starts in those places where our families need to be teaching our kids and cultivating that and cultivating the pursuit of the good and the true and the beautiful and all the things we do, whether that's baking cookies in the afternoon with your kids or reading a book about George Washington and talking about our country. Those are. Those little acts add up a lot.
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A
All right, well, in our final few moments, tell us where people can find you. And then I noticed there's a bunch of other cool things either for sale on your website or just other resources that you offer. So can you tell us more about those.
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B
Yes, absolutely. You can find us on all social media at the Littlest Statesman and then our website, the littlest statesman.com. we have our books. The books are always going to be the heart of our company is I believe that through education we can rise to self government. That's a, that's in the Hillsville honor code and I truly believe that. But we also have a entire slew of other items that we're just trying to pursue the beautiful things in life. And as a stay at home mom, you know, there's a lot of beauty in the mundane and I feel like that that's lost a lot. And so we've got home goods, we've got mugs, and we've got a lot of things coming actually. But we've got apparel and prints and books and home goods, mugs and puzzles and towels and all the, all these fun things that just, really just make you thank the Lord and find joy in the little things. And then we also have an entire section of free supplements on our website, so activities to do with your kids, crafts, recipes and history lessons. So a lot of the crafts come with a lesson to go with it. So like cotton ball, American flags that you can make with your kids. But then we talk about, okay, why there are 13 stars and 13 stripes. Where did that start? How many do we have now? Where do you live? Why do we, you know, all those things? But it's a written out lesson, all downloadable, everything's for free. But to kind of help moms and dads kind of figure out, okay, how do we make this big concept come alive for these little kids. But everything that we're doing, we're trying to pursue beauty in order to expose our kids to the ultimate source of it.
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A
I love it. I'm looking at this America 250 Year 250 sweatshirt.
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B
I think I'm gonna recommend.
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A
You know, I always, we grew up, my grandma always got us the old Navy flagship for 4th of July.
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B
I still want to go do that every year.
- [24:00]
A
I gotta go get my flagshirt for the 4th of July. So if you're looking for some 4th of July swag for the 250 year anniversary, you can come to the littlestatestatesman.com Katie, thanks so much. This is awesome. Can't wait to read this book with my nieces and nephew. And I love what you're saying and doing and just passionate about getting people to love the country we're in. I think we need to know it and love it. If we want to change it and make it better and better. So that's great. Thanks so much for joining us.
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B
Thank you so much.