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Marshall, Mike, and Blake explore the conception and evolution of the phrase 'America First' and its surrounding ideology through American history. While at its core, the phrase seems to be innocent enough, emphasizing patriotism and community. However, if you look the context in which the phrase has reared its ugly head, you might find that it has never truly been what it has been portrayed as. Travel through time with us back to late 19th century America as we learn the context in which the phrase was born, and follow its journey through World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, numerous election campaigns, and more.

Benjamin Franklin got China wrong, and America still does today! Marshall leads the discussion in the “Tea, Drugs, and Jesus” series, dissecting the complex relationship and persistent misunderstanding between the United States and China over the last few hundred years. We discuss how the United States continues to misunderstand China today, and how it similarly misjudges the motivations, behaviors, and actions of many other countries, leading to mistakes and failure. This can be traced all the way back to America's incuriosity about the world, its resulting lack of cultural literacy, and its propensity to ignore or terminate experts who tell American leaders (and often the American public) things they do not want to hear about the world around them. This is a lesson to be more open-minded regarding other countries and cultures, and how ignoring facts because you don't like them doesn't make them change or go away; it only hinders progress.

Was America founded as a Christian nation? Some say yes, some say no, and the real answer is more complex than you might think. Blake takes the reins as the leader of this series, discussing the role (or in some cases, perhaps, the lack thereof) of Christianity in the establishment of the colonies, the founding of the nation, and the early evolution of the United States. In this series, we ask and answer these questions and more: Did the Founders "design" America as a Christian country? If the United States had an official church, which denominations would qualify as "Christian"? How would the official church function within civic life in matters of law, public policy, voting, and taxation? Would non-Christians be suppressed? This is a study on the danger Christian Nationalism poses to the US, as well as a deeper look at pieces of our country's founding that are often overlooked, rewritten, or completely ignored to serve someone's agenda.

A series examining how the United States struggled in the first half of the 19th century to give the federal government powers to develop America's infrastructure and a stable financial system in the face of pro-slavery arguments that a government with these powers also could threaten slavery -- and how Abraham Lincoln, primarily credited with leading the United States through the Civil War and emancipating African Americans from slavery, also did much more, taking measures in the early 1860s to develop America's infratsructure and reform its financial system in ways rivaled only by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s.