From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

We are a very distinct sort of people. We're self-selected risk takers, and the atheism is not something that we usually subscribe to.

But I have to say after this COVID thing, I'm a little bit more worried as I was writing this book about where we're headed. This is your host, Scott Bertram. And that's David Harsani, author of the new book

Euro Trash, Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. We'll talk at length with

David in just a bit about his new book. But first, we're joined by Dr. Paul Marino, William and

British screwcock chair in constitutional history, Professor of History, Dean of Social Sciences, and for our purposes today, big baseball fan and historian. Paul, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on the show. My son and I, he's eight, and we just finished up a book on Jackie Robinson. We read it together, and I thought that would be a, you know, we're in the midst of baseball season now.

Let's talk a bit about Jackie Robinson.

His life, his career, breaking the color barrier.

Go back a little bit.

Jackie Robinson before baseball, before Major League Baseball, great athlete, multi-sport athlete.

What, four at UCLA?

And again, he's one of the reasons that Branch Rickey chose him was that he was sort of a

model character. He had just the perfect temperament to sort of run the gauntlet of

crossing the color line and met with a great deal of white resistance. There was an

insipient rebellion among the Dodger players because of this. And so

Robinson had the, you know, the steel that, because Ricky told him, you're going to be in for a lot

of harassment. Yeah. And you've got to be willing to take it. You know, we can't have somebody who's

going to explode. Well, let's talk about that dynamic of it. Branch, Ricky, the general manager in the Los Angeles Dodgers, he's the one who decides that the Dodgers are going to explode. Let's talk about that dynamic about. Branch Ricky, the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, he's the one who decides that the Dodgers are going to integrate. The Dodgers are going to have a black baseball player. What was his reason? Why did he want to do that? Yeah, that's one of the great sort of disputed questions among historians of the subject. Ricky was such a complicated character.

He was a very devout Methodist.

He had a sense of Christian Brotherhood, which is probably very genuine.

He probably saw this as, you know, that segregation was a stain on the American

escutcheon wanted to do something about.

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