THE BEE WEEKLY: A G.K. Chesterton Special With Dale Ahlquist and Cheese
It's Chestermania 2021 at The Babylon Bee and Kyle and Ethan are joined by the President of the Society of G.K. Chesterton, Dale Ahlquist. Dale has been called the greatest living authority on the life and work of G.K. Chesterton and has authored five books on Chesterton, including Common Sense 101: Lessons from Chesterton and G.K. Chesterton: Apostle of Common Sense. Why should people start reading Chesterton and where should they begin? What are some of Chesterton's big concepts that help to unlock an understanding of his writings? What would Chesterton say about Cheetos? Be sure to check out The Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton at: https://www.chesterton.org/ Kyle, Ethan, and Dale, accompanied by Adam Yenser play a special edition of Real or Fake where the headlines are all supposedly weird news headlines from a hundred years ago. They discuss how prophetic Chesterton was and talk about his prominent books and essays that you must read to not waste your life. Then in the subscriber portion, they discuss cheese and Chesterton's big concepts that he returned to again and again throughout his life's work. Dale answers subscriber-submitted G.K. Questertons and is subjected to The Ten Questions!
Here are your illustrious hosts, Dale Alquist, Ethan LeCoe, and Kyle Mann.
Everyone, welcome to a special episode of the Bee Weekly.
It's Chestermania 2021.
We are currently in GK Chestertown.
G.K. Chesterton.
That's right.
Population, Kyle, me, Ethan, and the mayor of Chestertown himself, Dale Alquist.
Hi, Mayor.
It's an honor to have you here, Mr. Mayor.
Gentlemen, you are my loyal subjects, and I. Are you subjects of the mayor?
Is that how that works?
What are you of a mayor?
I don't know.
Citizen?
We voted you in, I think.
We will be your subjects for today, Dale.
We're down.
So Dale Alquist is the president of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, previously known as the American Chesterton Society, right?
You guys changed your name?
Yeah, we did.
We dropped the American.
Americans, you just the.
That made you more of the world.
We went to the the.
Yeah.
So we're the now.
Now, was the Chesterton Society that you're part of, did you start that or had that been around when you joined it?
It hadn't been around.
You made it?
A gentleman who was my co-founder founded it with me.
So it was two of us that started it back in 1996, before either of you were born.
Incorrect.
Did you say 96?
He may have not been born yet.
Is that satire?
Can you say satire?
We're not good at distinguishing that either.
I shouldn't try to do humor on this thing.
Okay, so anyways, that's when it started.
It's been around 25 years.
Okay.
96?
Well, before I was born.
Why don't we start out by, you have 60 seconds to tell us why G.K. Chesterton is important, why people should read him, and why you should start an entire society based on him.
So 60 seconds.
When do I start?
60 seconds?
Wait, we'll put up the timer.
Chesterton's simply the best writer of the Chester Christian.
Wait, wait, hang on, Andre.
All right, go.
G.K. Chesterton, the best writer of the 20th century, wrote about absolutely everything, more prolific than anybody else, said something about everything, said it better than anybody else.
He's funny, but he's serious.
He is more up-to-date than any writer writing now.
And if you don't start a society devoted to G.K. Chesterton, you have absolutely wasted your life.
What are some of the laws of the G.K. Chesterton Society since we have 30 more seconds?
Well, I wasted 30 seconds not talking.
Do we just have 30 seconds of silence?
Would that be okay?
I'm all right with that.
It's kind of bad radio.
Oh, that's true.
I forgot it's a reality.
We could play some music, like elevator music.
I think there's basically two laws of the Chesterton Society.
You actually have to read Chesterton and not just go...
Well, quoting him comes after reading him, yeah.
And then the other one is if you're not happy, then you probably have to be thrown out of the society.
You must be happy.
Yeah, you must be happy.
Mandatory happiness.
Mandatory happiness.
It's a choice, but you have to take the choice, though.
Once you sign up for it, then it's mandatory.
Buckle your happy belts.
It's the law.
Well, we usually start out our podcast with weird news.
Yeah, so if people aren't catching on, this is a special edition.
We're doing all Chesterton today because Mr. Dale Alquist is finally in town.
We've been wanting to get him here forever.
We've been talking about it for months.
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So we usually do weird news of, you know, last week.
But since Mr. Dale is here, we're doing the special edition version of an all-Chesterton all-day long episode.
We're going to do weird news from the early 1900s.
So we're also going to make it a real or fake with Adam Jenser.
So only Adam knows if these are real or fake headlines.
And we're going to find out if these are real or fake.
We have to guess.
Whoever gets it right wins.
Some bread or something, some cheese.
And then if it's real, we want Dale to let us know maybe what Chesterton might have had to say about the news story.
I like how we're mixing all our segments together.
Yeah, it's like an extra story.
Also, you have to eat a mystery pie and then bounce it into a beer pong.
Watch the YouTube video of a drummer collapsing on a worship stage.
All right, let's see the first headline.
In 1903, a school for parrots opened in Philadelphia that taught them to talk using phonograph recordings.
I say true.
I'm going to say true.
I'm going to say true.
That one is true.
All right.
I'll nailed it.
Someone's got to keep score here.
What would G.K. Chesterton have said about this story?
Well, he enjoyed the fact that what makes animals so amusing is when they do something that's human-like.
That's why we laugh at them because it's something human-like that amuses us.
But he also has the great comeback that animals are really not that much like humans.
It's amazing how little they are like humans.
And teaching a parrot to talk kind of points out that they're not really very much like humans.
You have to, you know, all the parrot is doing is imitating the human, and it's not really talking with its own cognitive abilities.
I've heard dolphins are smarter than humans.
Have you heard that before?
Yeah, they are.
And that's because they play the violin better than if they had arms.
And they've had a history of great composers from the dolphins.
Some of the greatest composers have been dolphins.
Yeah, like Francis.
Continue.
He set you up to use your dolphins.
Yeah, dolphins.
A three-year-old boy served four months in prison for stealing a toy worth two cents from a store.
Adam, are you being a punk on any of these?
I'm not being a punk on any of these.
He always has to say this.
Like, he's always curious if I did something like, for instance, five months in prison.
And then I'm like, no, it's fake.
So no, no, no.
I'm not a Pokemon name.
So they're either completely made up or a real story.
Yes.
I'm going to go true again.
True.
I want to say false.
This one is true.
Whoa.
All right.
What would he do it was?
I do recall Chesterton commenting on a young man that was severely punished for something in one of his essays, but I'm blanking on what it was.
He did.
He did talk about completely strange and unjust sentences to prison and, you know, based on these things, we should all be in prison.
Oh, I think it was in What's Wrong the World.
He's talking about how it's, you know, the same thing that a poor person does, they'll go to prison and a rich person can get away with it.
Right.
And, you know, that kind of crime.
Stealing a toy.
A poor person can be arrested for not having a home, for instance.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's absurd.
I knew it was right.
Louisiana congressman introduced a bill to create a hippo meat industry in the U.S., or has he called it, lake cow bacon.
I'm going to say that's false.
I want it to be true, so I'm going to say true.
So you want it to be true, so that's basically, and you're just based on common sense.
I know Adam said Adam made that up.
I like to want things to do.
Lake cow bacon is an Adam Yenser joke.
I like to assert truth.
I'm going to say it's false because I just can't see the hippo meat in the U.S. working as a hippocampus.
Hippos live in lakes?
Is that where they live?
They live in different places.
They live in the ocean.
That's the main thing.
They live in different countries.
I wish I had made up late cow bacon.
Is it real?
This is a true story.
And it was a constant.
Wait, am I winning?
Is anybody keeping track?
Let's see what's going on.
In Louisiana, they have marshes and swamps to bring in economic resources.
He wanted to raise hippos in Louisiana.
Yeah, I thought it said horse meat.
Sorry about that.
Okay.
I led you.
So by my account, I'm winning.
Hey, what would Chesterton have said about this?
So many true ones.
Well, you know, Chesterton was a big believer in bacon.
I think he would have liked this story.
Hippo bacon?
Yeah.
I really want to try hippo bacon.
Is meat from bacon from hippos called bacon?
Lake cow bacon.
Isn't there a bacon part of every animal?
No.
I thought the bacon was just pigs, right?
Yeah, I guess.
No, there's turkey bacon.
Yeah, there is turkey bacon.
He's right.
It's horrible.
In 1904, in Syracuse, New York, two men named Robert Downey and Chris Evans started a neighborhood militia group and called it the Avengers.
False.
False.
True.
That one's false.
You're not taking the game seriously.
Sorry, sorry.
Hey, what would J.K. Chesterton have said about this?
I have to mention.
Well, that would have been quite a coincidence, though.
You got to admit, if it is true, that would have been a great coincidence.
I'm going to ask you to look that one up again, see, because it might be true.
That's possible.
Have you eliminated all possibilities?
Did you really check?
Did you check?
It was probably a different...
Check to make sure there was nothing even similar.
Different year, I bet, and not in New York.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Beana punk.
The leader of the World's Health Organization launched a campaign to ban kissing because it spreads consumption.
That sounds like current news.
I'll go with true.
What is consumption?
I don't know.
Consumption is tuberculosis.
I'm going to say true.
Consumption could also be what you do with the cheese that's on this table, but that's a different use of the same word, right?
It sounds really true, so I'm going to vote true.
That one is true.
All right.
Yeah.
And Chester would have talked about Puritanism, which he was always condemning big time.
And this is a perfect example of Puritanism.
Worship of health.
Worship of health.
Even to stop consumption?
Well, he would have said that, you're right.
He would have worshipped health.
You got me, Kyle.
I wasn't trying to get you.
I was just asking.
Even to stop COVID?
I feel like this, because I remember when Fauci was talking about ending handshake.
He's like, you know, it's the thing in society we should be ending anyway.
I think it was him, right?
Yeah.
Handshakes are outdated.
They need to be a thing of the past.
Yeah, gross, old-fashioned thing.
Well, they're rituals.
Yeah, you got to do away with rituals.
And handshakes are ritual.
Get rid of rituals.
We'll create an app for handshakes.
A horse that disappeared from a ranch in Oklahoma was found two weeks later wandering the streets of Chicago wearing a bow tie and a fedora.
I'm going to say false.
Well, true.
I'm feeling false here, but I liked it.
I like this story, but I just don't like its veracity.
It's false.
An inventor died trying to demonstrate that he could use his coat as a parachute by jumping from the Eiffel Tower.
Sounds true.
I'm going to say true.
Yeah, true.
I think it's false, even though it does sound true and stupid enough that someone would try that.
But I'm going to say false.
It is stupid enough that someone tried that.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was.
It sounds more faith in humanity.
That one's true.
And see, you know, Chesterton actually did have faith in humanity, and he didn't want to just consign everyone to that garbage heap of stupidity.
Everybody's stupid, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
But you know, I could say this.
He didn't like the Eiffel Tower.
So in that sense.
Why didn't he like the Eiffel Tower?
He thought it, yeah, he thought ugliness.
Because remember, it's a monstrosity of modern art, really.
It's just a bunch of steel beams, right?
Remember, it's certainly the iconic image of Paris, but Paris has a lot more beautiful stuff to offer than steel beams.
Yeah, but he likes skeletons.
It feels like that's kind of skeletal.
He likes the skeleton with the flesh over them, though.
I mean, skeletons are important, but it's for what they hold up, not for their own sake.
Okay.
We should talk about the NSA later.
A German?
Oh, wait.
Yeah.
A German immigrant named Wilhelm Sommer was struck by lightning three times in one day, once while naked.
I'm going to go with true.
True.
Yeah, that sounds true.
That one's false.
Yeah, I put a lot of details.
You made that up.
I put a lot of details in there.
Well, the reason the reason I was convinced it was true because it was German immigrant.
Yeah, that's what convinced me it was real.
I was convinced by Wilhelm.
It was once all naked for me.
That's fine.
Congratulations, Adam.
You each focused on it.
Everyone that's not true reveals the truth about Adam and what he thinks about.
A couple in Idaho put 50 cents worth of postage stamps on their five-year-old daughter and sent her through the mail to her grandmother in another town.
I'm going true again.
False.
It sounds true, so I'm going to say false.
That one's true.
Wow.
Ethan's killing it.
Ethel is back in the lead now, you know.
What would Chesterton have said about this story?
Nailing someone else's family.
He's going to be answering this a lot today.
Chesterton spokesperson on everyone.
I'll get back to you on that one, Kyle.
You don't know.
Did he ever say anything about the Postal Service?
I said I'd get back to you.
Okay.
Where did we find this guy?
As Afghanistan transitioned out of Persian control, one British diplomat proposed dividing the country between two regional tribes in calling the countries East and West Afghanistan.
Afghanistan.
I wouldn't go thumbs down on this one, Adam.
I'll go false.
That one is false.
Surprise me with it.
He just couldn't wait to get his Afghanistan.
I was trying to find a way to get Afghanistan into it, I guess.
Did you write Afghanistan like years ago?
And you've been trying to get it.
It was an idea I had a while ago for some sort of joke that never fit that never fit anywhere.
This guy's worked on Conan and Ellen, and now he's here.
Yeah, and I couldn't, and I finally got my Afghanistan joke out there.
We get all the rejected jokes from Ellen Peak Podcast.
Exactly.
A goat ran for mayor of Greenwood, Indiana, and his opponent, the incumbent mayor, held a public debate with the animal.
I'm going true.
True.
You've got to be kidding.
Now, that was a pun, gentleman.
All right.
And I'm going to say true.
That one's false.
Yeah.
He's getting it.
Okay.
I was fooled by the Greenwood.
I just wanted to be true.
A tank holding 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst in the city of Boston, flooding streets, destroying buildings and killing 21 people.
I've been there.
I've been on the tour.
I've seen it.
I know it's true.
False.
He's trying to trick me.
No, I'm going to say true.
Well, I'm going to have to say false.
Plus, it was 22 people.
No, I knew it.
That one is true, yeah.
It's like a tidal wave of molasses.
Yeah.
It's insane.
Like the slowest flood ever.
Slowest flood.
Well, I think it's hot.
When it's hot, I think it's a little more dangerous.
Well, a doctor in Georgia determined that a 12-year-old boy was sick because he had eaten the entire family Bible.
True.
I'm going to go with true.
It sounds like an Adam joke, though.
You have to watch his face.
He gets that little impish look on his face.
Impish.
It sounds like something a Protestant would do.
I'm going to say true then.
That one is true.
I enjoy the story a lot, but it's true.
I wish I had made that up.
And finally, a man in Kansas attempted suicide to avoid talking to a door-to-door salesman.
Sounds like a scene from Airplane.
False.
Yeah, I'm going to say false.
That one's also true.
Wow.
Ethan killed us, man.
Ethan is our winner.
Yes.
Wow.
All right.
A free copy of Dale Alcas' new book, Orthodoxy, the American Translation.
American Translation.
So people have a hard time reading Orthodoxy.
You rewrote it.
You use all these American slang words like dog and yeet and bustin.
The madman.
We just put the word like between every word.
Okay.
The madman yeets himself into a busting circle.
So like the maniac, which is the first chapter, would be like what?
It's like the maniac.
It's a great trade.
Like the maniac.
I had the word like.
The maniac.
It's like the pseudoscience.
I used it like properly there, I didn't use it like...
No, you used it improperly.
That's okay.
For instance.
Yeah, there.
Is it a bomb book?
This book, The Bomb?
The Bomb.
I don't know.
Tell me what that means.
Oh, it's a good thing.
Now, what we did with the book was we took out a lot of the references to things that nobody knows what they are, like Samuel Cooper, spelled Cowper, but pronounced Cooper.
And there's only two people in the world, and they're both sitting in this room who know who that is.
And so the rest of the world doesn't have to be troubled by looking up who he was.
And so it just reads a lot more smoothly.
There were a few words that we changed to the Americanism of the word rather than the English version.
We changed things like the Bank of England to Wells Fargo, just in case people don't know what the Bank of England is.
So you took out biscuits and made it cookies.
We would have done that if the word biscuits had been in the book.
That's what we would have done.
Yeah.
Gotcha.
It's a much easier read now.
And all of the great Chesterton lines are still in there untouched.
So you have to like translate it, because there's a lot of, whenever I noticed, because so I, so my book that I just put out, the 14 essays that I recommend to people that check out Chesterton, I heavily footnoted it, like everything.
So there's over 400 footnotes because there's a lot of things he says I don't know what he's talking about and I wanted to hold everyone's hand through it.
And I started to realize as I was doing that, is when I was looking up his references, I realized, oh, he's making another joke right here.
And a lot of them are jokes.
So did you have to translate puns?
Did you have to translate jokes?
Well, we try to do away with the need to do that by simplifying the language.
There were certain things where we, within the sentence, we just expanded the sentence a little bit to make the meaning clear, the reference to what he's referring to without going to the footnotes.
Because obviously, if you take a scholarly treatment of the book, then you're going to be using the footnotes and having to rely on the footnotes to explain everything.
This is to be a popular edition that people can read right through without having to get waylaid.
Yeah, I chose to do very silly footnotes.
Well, that's good, too.
It's a weird mixture.
I've never written notes.
I'm not scholarly.
Kyle's Chesterton book's on the way.
I think Dale's written like a whole library of Chesterton books.
I've written five books on Chesterton and I've edited 15 books on Chesterton.
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All right, so let's look at some.
You have your Chesterton prophecies handy in your brain?
I've got a few of them up there.
Let's see what we can come up with.
Our old ones we did.
We do have a previous video, so we won't go through all these, but these are some that we went over in an old video of ours.
But we hear that you saw our video and you did a sequel.
I did some the other 10 best prophecies and did that at the conference this last summer where Kyle was our guest speaker there.
And I got an award that has my name taped on it with masking tape.
Yeah.
Where is that?
No one's behind you.
Oh, here it is.
Oh, yeah, there it is.
We should hold that up there.
Yeah, we'll do that.
This is so cool.
I mean, we gave him the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton Outline of Sanity Award.
And it says very nicely inscribed Seth Dillon, but we taped on there and Kyle Mann.
I mean, that's so permanent.
Yeah, that's great.
It's in permanent marker.
Permanent marker.
Absolutely.
And masking tape because masks.
Okay, sorry, let's stop.
All right.
We've got to rein this guy in.
So here was one of the Chesterton prophecies we did.
We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that the grass is green.
So only the grass is left, right?
I think they've done the right thing done in the math.
Any thoughts?
Is that accurate?
Prophecy.
Yeah, that is very interesting because the twist on that great prophecy there is that there are people who are arguing that nothing is absolute.
But Chesterton was always saying, you cannot imagine, however, two and two not making four.
Your brain is incapable of imagining two and two adding up to anything else than four.
It's just a complete defiance of logic.
And he said, even in our fantasy world, we can have great images, we can have tigers growing from trees, and we can imagine that.
But even in the fantasy world, two and two still has to equal four.
And now the fact that mathematics is the new thing that's under attack as being a cultural thing is Chesterton pointing out that we're kicking every one of our foundations out from under ourselves.
Did he see it coming that two plus two equals four would one day be racist?
Well, I don't know that he talked about racist, but I mean, there it is.
It's they were hanging a man for maddening the mob.
That's what if it's racism or sexism or anything else, whatever the ism is, he didn't necessarily predict it, at least in this one.
But he has references to that.
He's attacking racial theories back then.
So what are one of your off the top of your head, favorite Chesterton prophecies?
I think one that I quoted at the conference was the fact that we live in this age of enormous waste.
And it's epitomized, and this is him saying this 100 years ago, it's epitomized by having a loudspeaker pouring music into an empty street.
And how often do we walk into places where there's music blasting and there's no one there?
Yeah.
And, you know, sometimes hotels, for instance, they have to blast out music at the entryway when you're standing outside waiting for a ride.
They feel that you won't have a complete experience unless there's music there.
And then, of course, when you drive away, the music remains.
It's still there blasting the music.
That was an incredible little prophecy about the way we waste everything.
Modern people would hear that and think only trash and things like that.
They would never think the waste of just your ears.
Right.
Your mind, right?
Because I think about the movie theaters.
Do you remember when, like, I'm saying like now so much?
I'm noticing it.
Do you remember, for instance, how in the theaters, you go to the movies, it would be quiet before the movie started.
Or there might be like a little slideshow or something.
And now there's just this garbage.
Yeah, those previews and the preview to the previews.
The preview to the pure garbage.
It's letting you know what not to watch.
Right.
And Chesterton talks about the fact that we've lost the ability to be silent, to be quiet, and we have to be inundated constantly with some sort of stimulus and sensation.
And it's made us totally passive people because you need quiet and solitude and silence in order to really get your brain to work and to be active.
The rigor of your brain operates when you're not distracted, but we are filled with distractions.
I notice even the way that our social media is evolving, we get to these formats that are shorter and shorter, like these TikTok videos that are five seconds, and then you flip to the next one.
What's the next joke?
What's the next joke?
And you can't sit there and let even like a three-minute funny sketch develop anymore, let alone a long movie.
And I find that when I've spent a lot of time online and then I switch to reading a long book, I'm like getting bored after a half page, and it's rewired the way that you expect to be stimulated all the time by things.
The amazing thing about Chesterton is you sit down with one of his long books and you have to spend time and it takes up your energy to follow his argument, stay with him.
But yet, he somehow works for the modern audience because of those great one-liners.
That's true.
Somehow he was made for our time.
You can hook people, bring them in with those just short sentences, his pithy quotes.
So he would have been good on Twitter.
I mean, he is good.
Yeah, he is good on Tester.
His Twitter accounts are good.
He would have been so good that he is good.
I'm only imagining original Chesterton Twitter tweets.
And I'd love to see him sub-tweeting, you know, AOC or something.
Therefore, the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt.
By rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything.
Yeah, you can't, in order to doubt everything, for instance, Chesterton says, you have to be standing on some solid ground that you don't doubt.
There has to be an absolute from which you question whether everything's relative.
So everyone undoes all their own arguments by giving up the fact that it does start with a faith in something that has to be unshakable in order to even begin the rebellion.
Yeah.
Yeah, and similarly, the idea that to call something sick, you have to have some idea of what health means.
That's right.
Great line.
He says that, you know, we always say we live in a strange world when we have known no others.
You got any more off the top of your head?
I mean, he predicted things that actually happen after he died, right?
I think that things that happened in World War II, I believe he made predictions about.
Yeah, he said that there would be a new war.
It'd be the worst war in all of human history, and it would start on the Polish border.
And that was six years before a shot was fired.
So just incredible.
He also said on his Twitter account, when all are sexless, there will be equality.
There will be no women and no men.
There will be but a fraternity, free and equal.
The only consoling thought is that it will endure but for one generation.
That's wonderful.
Kind of a prophecy.
Yeah, he also said.
Probably still going to happen.
Well, I mean, it's within that great quote there is the first point he makes in the maniac in orthodoxy, which is every bad philosophy will lead to madness if you follow it to its natural conclusion.
And in the next chapter, The Suicide of Thought, not only does it lead to madness, such as the idea of sexlessness, it will lead to self-destruction.
So it will not only be a crazy idea, it will destroy itself.
And that's just a corollary of that same quote right there.
It is only by believing in God that we can ever criticize the government.
Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.
Famous Jesters.
Very famous Jester quote.
And he has several variations on that, that you don't have anything to appeal to.
Our rights come from an authority.
And that's why we can appeal to that authority.
And if the rights are only coming from the government, there's nothing to appeal to if that becomes the highest authority.
There has to be some higher authority than the government.
Yeah, you see with this pandemic, like the way that they'll even phrase some of these news stories is like, government says you now have the right to go outside or whatever.
You know, like they're granting this wonderful right to kiss.
You may now kiss.
So I'm going to pick a short one.
The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.
That goes back to what we were saying before, to state your opinion about anything, you are implying that you believe something, right?
And the skeptic can't doubt everything.
He simply cannot.
He has to at least believe that he exists and that the ground he's standing on is solid in order to begin his doubting.
And so that is a dogma.
And he says there's two kinds of people in the world.
He says there are those who are dogmatic and know it, and those who are dogmatic and don't know it.
Yeah, every time you hear about all the woke stuff, like we just interviewed Dr. Deborah Soe yesterday, sex pert, and she talking about all the stuff that is not scientific but is being pushed on to science by the woke culture.
And all I can think of the whole time is like, it's a religion.
This is their dogmatic.
They're pushing their ideas on.
They would never admit that they're being dogmatic and religious, but it's purely what's happening.
Well, just the worship of health and the worship of the earth, those are religious worships.
And if you defy any of those, you're defying their gods when you interfere with that deity.
There was one I was going to mention about the sex one that was right before that, because it really fit in.
He says, in the end, the exaggeration of sex will be sexlessness.
Well, that's what's happened.
He saw the emphasis on sex coming.
In fact, another one of his great prophecies was the next great heresy will be an attack on morality, especially sexual morality.
And he said that in 1926.
He said, the madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but much more in Manhattan.
Wow.
I don't know if we have this on here, but I love the one with the monk and the lamppost where he talks about how some people wanted to smash it just because they wanted to smash something, and then the people who wanted to smash it because they wanted to destroy municipal machinery.
And how accurate is that?
And then the last one, because they love darkness and their deeds were evil.
The reference to the Gospel of John, right?
Amazing.
All right, well, I think there are any more prophecies that we should not miss before we get out of this portion.
Let's see if there's another really good idea.
There are many.
Yeah, there are some really good ones.
He has some stuff on like abortion where he's talking about how we will soon sacrifice our children.
Oh, he said while we're debating whether or not birth control is what he would have called it then, not contraception.
But he said, while we're debating whether birth control is right or wrong, someone else will be already putting it into an immediate practical program when we were all discussing the dreadful danger of somebody else putting it into a distant utopia.
And he said the march of progress will begin with birth control and then lead to abortion and then to infanticide.
And that's what he said the march of progress will be.
And we watched that.
Yeah.
Wow.
So who's more accurate?
The Simpsons, the Babylon Bee, or G.K. Chesterton?
Well, I'm glad Adam's not here because he'd correct me.
He'd put all the instances where...
Well, so far, the Simpsons and Chesterton are the most prolific of the three.
So the Babylon Bee, you know, has the youngest.
But you obviously have a higher batting average probably because you've put out less material.
So that's a good point.
That's one way to bat a thousand.
Just do one article.
Just do one article and get it right.
All right, well, let's talk about some, let's talk about G.K. Chesterton's books and maybe where people should start.
If they don't know anything about them, you can give us kind of a rundown.
We already mentioned Dale's great place to start is Dale's American version of Orthodoxy.
I don't know where it went.
Where did it go?
Did we hear it?
Yeah, Dale's version of Orthodoxy, which is kind of an easier way to approach it.
I started Orthodoxy several times before I've managed to read it.
So that's another reason why we did the book, Kyle, because a lot of people started Orthodoxy many times and they just put this one when you start, we should get you through the whole book the first time.
But the problem, again, is even the people who've gotten through the whole book the first time and they've underlined the whole book, and they've got a book they've underlined, and they get to the end and they go, well, what the heck did I just read?
What was that book about?
Because I underlined it.
I think what people don't get, and it took me a long time to get about Orthodoxy, is we're used to books that a lot of people, when they come to faith, they came to faith in a very personal way.
But then when they write apologetics, they write reasons you could believe in God, but they're not the reasons that led them.
So they'll write, you know, arguments from existence or from the Big Bang or from science or from all the logic and reason.
Chesterton, you know, he actually in the beginning of the book calls reason a madness.
So like he says he's not starting there.
This isn't a reasoned out book.
He's really trying very hard to explain why he personally believes what he believes.
And it's a bunch of pieces of things that for him all fit together.
But he's also, I think he's saying, they might not all fit together this way for you, but this is how it all fits together for me.
And so it's all these pieces and it's his logic and it's very personal.
And I think a lot of people don't realize that.
They're going to it and thinking, oh, maybe this is like another J.P. Moreland book or something where he just kind of points out apologetically.
In my head, I thought it was like, oh, this is like mere Christianity.
Yeah.
Or like mere Christianity.
It's going to be this logical A to B to C, where he more kind of reasons around things.
Yeah, it's not a systematic approach, but it is a convergence of truth.
He does lay out the arguments.
The way you used to defend Christianity to prove it was true is you start with the fact of sin, which is the one doctrine you can prove.
But now people deny that too.
They deny sin.
And so we're going to say, well, okay, which philosophy is the most sane?
And he says, look at all these other modern philosophies.
They're all insane.
Every one of these leads to madness and even self-destruction if you take the other modern philosophies.
But Christianity is sane any way you approach it.
And that's that he lays the rest of the book is taking it from an artistic point of view, from a historical point of view, and philosophical, and how has Christianity played out.
What about Pentecostal?
What about Pentecostal?
What's the question here?
You said every version of Christianity is sane, so I'm just curious.
Just checking.
I didn't say every version of Christianity.
Play back the tape.
I didn't say that.
Didn't say that.
Where's his mouth?
Yeah, so anyways, Orthodoxy is kind of one of the pillars of Chesterton's writing.
And the other big pillar is the Everlasting Man.
So Orthodoxy is written about, sort of at the beginning of his career and how he became a Christian.
Everlasting Man is kind of one of his last great works, showing that history can't be explained except from a Christian point of view.
And you said Everlasting.
So I was thinking we can kind of give people who have not read a Chesterton book or are thinking about picking one out, rundowns of the books.
Yeah, it's going to Everlasting Man now.
You, now you've, I remember saying, that was the first Chesterton book you read, which was probably the toughest book of his to read.
Yeah, that was a tough first read.
Really screwed me up, too.
I haven't been the same since I read that book, you know, but I don't recommend other people start with that one.
You're going to get canceled on YouTube for doing that yesterday.
But I read that book.
You might accidentally become the president of the Chesterton Society.
Right.
Yeah.
So, but the reason I read Everlasting Man was because that's the book that C.S. Lewis recommended.
And I was a big C.S. Lewis fan, and that's the one he read.
So I said, okay, that's the one I'm going to pick up and read.
Is there now a big rivalry between the Chesterton Society and the C.S. Lewis Society?
There's a C.S. Lewis Society?
There's a C.S. Lewis Society?
Yeah.
Everlasting Man feels way more like a history book.
He's not as light.
The chapters are much longer.
It almost feels like a textbook in some ways.
It's beautifully written.
Yeah.
There's that part where he talks about Christmas, which brought tears to my eyes when he was talking about when Christ came into the world.
The hands that made the universe were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle.
That's beautiful.
That's a Christmas card quote right there.
Yeah.
No, he, it's history, but it's also philosophy and art and mythology and poetry and theology.
I mean, he brings every discipline together.
And that's what's so basic.
I read this book the first time, my first Chesterton book, and I said, this is a writer unlike any I've ever encountered.
And I know I'm only getting about a tenth of what I'm reading, but I want more.
I can't get enough of it.
And that's just kept it going.
When we read, so I had read it in my first Chesterton group and it went completely over my head.
And in the second group we were in, we had a couple guys that really know their history.
And that helped a lot.
If you don't know history, read with somebody who knows history.
Yeah, I'll just say as an aside, reading it with a group tends to be better.
Absolutely.
Yeah, and everyone will bring a helpful perspective to it.
Chesterton is very, very ripe for good discussion.
Man Who Was Thursday.
Chesterton's most famous novel by far.
People read it.
It's a real page turner and then people get to the end and they go, okay, what was that about?
What happened?
Strange last time.
What?
I heard it's basically our FBI sketch.
Isn't that true?
Until the end, yeah.
We didn't do the crazy party thing.
Spoiler alert.
Some said it was the inspiration for Mission Impossible with all the unmasking.
Maybe it's about the end of COVID with all the unmasking.
I don't know.
We always say the thing to remember is that it's actually called The Man Who Was Thursday, a nightmare?
A nightmare.
That's a key.
A nightmare part is a key.
Yeah.
And the other thing to maybe remember this, tuck this away.
Chesterton's favorite book of the Bible was the book of Job.
Know that when you're reading The Man Who Was Thursday, and that will help an awful lot.
Heretics.
Heretics is sort of the companion piece to orthodoxy.
It's the book he wrote before Orthodoxy, and it's sort of what people said, oh, yeah, there's Chesterton picking on everyone else's philosophy, but he hasn't explained his own philosophy, so that's why he wrote Orthodoxy.
But he does explain his own philosophy in heretics, but he just goes after all the modern thinkers and showing where they fail and where they fall in their face.
But, you know, orthodoxy is one of those great quotable books where you underline everything.
Heretics is the same sort of thing.
You'll just underline everything when you're reading.
Just one great line.
In fact, one of my most favorite Chesterton lines.
I have a lot of them, Kyle.
Yeah.
Ethan, I have a lot of them, okay?
But it comes from Heretics, where he says, he says, hope means hoping when things are hopeless or it's no virtue at all.
And charity means pardoning the unpardonable, or it's no virtue at all.
And faith means believing the incredible, or it's no virtue at all.
Yeah, his Defense of the Family is one of my all-time favorite chapters.
Great chapter, and that's in heretics.
Yep.
That's in my book.
What's wrong with the world?
I'm not asking that.
That's the next book.
Yeah.
I guess this would give me a good time to address a famous myth, a story that's told over and over about Chesterton.
That the story is told that a famous editor of a newspaper sent all points bulletin to famous writers and thinkers and said to tell them what's wrong with the world.
And he wrote back, dear sir, I am sincerely G.K. Chesterton, great story and, and you know Adam, I wish it was true.
That one's false, that one's false.
I made that one up, but but it it's um, it's still true in a way, because he, he was.
He did write a letter to the editor of the Daily NEWS and it was several paragraphs long and within the, the body of the, he said, you know, if you were to ask what's wrong with the world, of course the correct answer is, I am, you know.
So, in other words, he did say it.
It just got reduced to the, to the short one.
It got reduced to the tweet yeah, tweet version.
He would have tweeted.
So the um uh, the two of Chesterton's most famous lines come from what's wrong with the world, and that is that the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it's been found difficult and left untried.
That's from yeah, that's from him.
Like three different people.
It wasn't Winston Churchill right, it was Monsignor or something.
Like three different priests in equipment.
Oh yeah Monsignor Something yeah yeah, I thought that was a Kanye West.
One of Chesterton's most famous quotes is a Neil Gaiman paraphrase.
Yeah, but at least he paraphrased it.
Yeah, it was.
Well it was.
It was really close to the real end, but yeah it's.
But then the other, the other great line from that one that's always, always quoted and should be, is a thing worth doing, is worth doing badly right, and that's from what's wrong with the world.
And of course people will misinterpret that one.
That means well, we can do something really lousy, like the way we put on our shows at the Babylon B.
But no, that's not what it means.
It it means that the amateur has just as much right and inspiration to do something as the professional gets paid for it.
And so it's just as worthwhile for an amateur to do something, because they love doing what they're doing.
And if they don't do it as well as the professional, it's still worth doing right.
And the great example is the mother, the mother's the, the great amateur.
She doesn't get paid for what she's doing, but she does the most important thing there is.
And then just to break down of what's wrong with the world he's breaking down.
His original title wasn't what's wrong with the world.
Right he's, he's really kind of what's wrong with how we run the world.
Well, the original title, the original title was what's wrong, what's wrong and and uh, he said he was visited by someone and he says i've been doing what's wrong all morning.
Um, but he identifies the four things that are wrong with the world, big government, big business, feminism and public education.
100 years ago, prophecy fulfilled.
That's the book we're currently reading in our group.
We're almost all the thread in the later part of the education part and well, I figured i'd throw in Tremendous Trifles.
Even though he's written so many books yeah well, Tremendous Trifles is a perfect example of a book of essays, and Chesterton was by far, in a way, an essayist.
That's what he did.
Most of us writing for the, the newspapers he, he wrote thousands of essays, literally thousands of essays, and Tremendous Trifles is just one of the great collections and that has the uh, some of his best essays.
Uh for, for introducing yourself to Chesterton, the one on the jury called the, The 12 Men, the.
What I found in my pocket?
A piece of chalk.
Uh, those are just great, great essays.
Yeah, i've got a few.
I picked a few in there because it they are the easiest to digest, they're shorter and um, they tend to not be as much about things that are modern to his day, as often he's not talking about the news right, he's talking about concepts, and it's a shorter book, all right.
So there you go.
It's your breakdown of the Chesterton books of.
You know, there's more, but more of all day, and then the books that I wrote are designed to introduce people to Chesterton to uh, common sense 101 and uh, the Apostle Of Common Sense.
Yeah, read Dale's books.
I mean, I just put together a book of essays but there's probably like maybe seven times in there that it says, just go to Chesterton.org i've mentioned your books in there and i'm like i'm not writing about.
I'm not going to even attempt to like do an exhortation on why Chesterton's great, like that's been done, but I get asked all the time, where should I start?
So i've made that now and thanks for doing that book, because I think the essays are the best way to introduce people to pure Chesterton rather than a book like orthodoxy.
And you just put together a great collection of essays.
I came from like when I it's like I said when I always started reading Chesterton.
I came from, you know, reading Cs, Lewis and other authors and you you kind of feel like I have to read an entire book to get it.
Now, I didn't understand about Chesterton is that you know you can read a short essay and really get a lot of the flavor and some great quotes absolutely yeah, once you get his main concepts, it becomes way more easy to get those.
We probably should have done that in here.
Talk about some of Chesterton's big concepts.
You know, we blew it yeah, ruined.
It's a third character, square one.
That would have been good.
Actually, we could break down a few real quick, right?
Subscriber lounge, we could do it in the subscriber lounge.
Subscriber lounge, we'll do the the big ideas of Chesterton in the subscriber lounge while we eat cheese.
Okay, so let's do this.
How do you think Chesterton would react to these things right now, today in the world?
You have to speak for Gilbert, speaking on behalf, being channeled through you.
I'm sure you never get asked this stuff.
Yeah, what?
What would Chesterton have said about now?
No one's ever done that to me.
Yeah, so we can, we can take our picture.
We don't have to do everything.
But I am curious i'm sure you've been asked this one a lot, but I haven't heard the answer Trump what would Chesterton make of Trump?
Because it's kind of a mixed thing right, I mean, there's like a.
He has a, I think somebody over, I don't know if it was.
You mentioned the Napoleon nodding in relation to to Trump, but Chesterton has appreciation of the appreciation of the more blue collar, every man, not the Trump's blue collar, but uh, I don't know, I mean that's, You know, Trump, of course, is truly the great divisive character of our time, right?
So if you say, well, Chester would have liked Trump, you're going to have a whole group of people that hate you immediately and will hate Chesterton because you said that.
Indeed.
But then if you would have said, well, Chester would have absolutely condemned Trump, you'll have another giant segment that will hate Chesterton because you said that.
So if we could leave Trump the figure out of the equation and say, what is it about Trump that Chester would have liked?
What is it about Trump that Trump represents that Chesterton would have condemned or disagreed with?
Then you could have possibly a fruitful discussion.
One of Trump's great successes was what you were alluding to earlier.
He somehow connected with the working man that had been completely forgotten by both major parties for a long time.
And Chesterton, that was his goal too, was to reach that segment of the population that really had been forgotten about by the political parties of his time.
So in that sense, he would have said, yeah, he tapped into something that the other politicians had forgotten about.
And of course, that segment responded to Trump, right?
And, you know, Chesterton's against big business, against big capitalism.
He believes in small business and individual ownership.
Well, Trump, on the one hand, represents big capitalism, but in a lot of his policies, he favors the small business owner, but in trying to protect him against big government, doesn't do as well at protecting him against the voracious monopolistic things like Amazon that eat up small businesses.
But that's one of the things where he, you know, you see where he's going to be connecting well with a certain segment.
The fact that Trump really not only got the support of the pro-life political base, but also didn't disappoint them.
He actually did something.
Yeah, he actually did something for him.
Chester would have supported that.
And there are people that absolutely can't stand Trump, but these are pro-life people, and yet they don't want to admit that he did a lot for the pro-life cause.
But in general, Chesterton, for instance, saw the rise and fall, not the complete fall, but he saw the rise of Mussolini in his time and saw that Mussolini was effective because he was tapping into a lot of things that Italy was looking for to rebuild its country.
And he never praised Mussolini, but he recognized the things that he was doing that were the right things to do.
But he also predicted that he could see England someday going to war with Italy.
But then people will look back and say, oh, Chester was pro-fascist because he said some good things about Mussolini.
Well, go back and read any of the newspapers.
Everybody was saying good things about Mussolini in the 1920s.
Nobody was condemning him in the early going because he was accomplishing so many good things.
But then, you know, as things unfolded in the 30s, he makes his alliance with Hitler.
Yeah, all those people that liked Mussolini at the beginning didn't like him anymore.
Yeah.
So Chesterton would have been wearing a Make America Great Again hat is what you're saying.
What about sorry to stay on this this long?
What about the thing Trump is most criticized for his tweets or his personality, the way he told him vulgar jokes and things?
Well, Chesterton absolutely defended vulgarity.
That's true.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think the whole idea is that there was something refreshing about the fact that Trump was not a politician and didn't talk like a politician.
And that not only inspired some people, it also drove other people crazy because there's no decorum there.
But Chesterton thought all politicians were phonies to begin with.
If you don't respect that, you're going to be kind of like what Trump.
He had just such a low opinion of politicians.
He had the great line, it's distressing to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, he talks about how you want to have the town meetings under the town tree because you can hang the politicians from there.
He said you should keep your politicians close enough to kick them.
Right.
So I think he really would have hated how far away we're being governed by versus the local politicians.
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We're going to go to the subscriber portion now.
We're going to try out these fine cheeses.
We're going to talk about Chesterton's obsession with cheese.
Talk about the big ideas of Chesterton.
What else are we doing?
And we're going to do the 10 questions.
10 questions with Dale Alquist.
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Subscriber Questertons for Dale.
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Let's dive in.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
Well, do we want to start with the big concepts of Chesterton?
Can you boil down the biggest concepts of Chesterton?
Connected to wonder and humility, of course, is the idea of thanks.
Thanks is the highest form of thought, he says.
And so Chesterton is always trying to get us to be normal.
He's defending the normal.
Well, let's talk about cheese.
Now, that was the segue I was waiting for.
Chesterton saw the whole line.
He was absolutely prophetic.
We are seeing the end of the road that Chesterton saw the beginning of the road.
Wondering what they'll say next?
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