Coming up, Trump has a new election report, a tabulation of fraud and abuse.
Wait till you find out what's in it.
I'll celebrate a big win for True the Vote and spell out the implications of that.
Historian Phil Magnus joins me.
We're going to talk about Harvard plagiarism and the departure of Claudine Gay.
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The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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Donald Trump and the Trump team have issued a remarkable report.
It's about 32 pages long.
And it is a summary of tabulated or documented election fraud in the swing states in the 2020 election.
The report is important because of the density of the information it provides.
Essentially, it takes each state and it has a set of bullet points.
And the bullet points are quite overwhelming in the sense that they have startling pieces of information and then each piece of information is footnoted.
And then the cumulative effect of reading through these items is like, wow, if this is true, this election was a major scandal.
So not only was it not the most secure election in history, by the way, no one really believes that.
No one today even really says it anymore.
Remember this mantra we used to hear deafeningly every single day?
Rasmussen has a survey that not only shows that people believe that the election was rigged and stolen, but one in five million voters admit they cheated in the 2020 election.
What a stinging discovery or statistic from the Rasmussen people.
And this Trump document, as I say, is full of listings of just failures and breakdowns of the election system.
And Trump says it's outcome determinative.
I think he believes that it conclusively proves that he won the 2020 election.
And we can all make our own judgment about that.
But let me say this. I think what it clearly does show, at the very least, is that if even half of this is true...
who won the 2020 election.
Now, I mentioned this kind of agnosticism, not because I don't believe Trump won, I actually do believe it, I said it in 2000 mules, that as far as we could see, Trump won the election.
But the reason I use the sort of agnostic standard is that it is the legal standard.
By and large, a court can and should, in fact must, invalidate an election if evidence comes out later that you really don't know who won it.
You don't have to prove that the guy making the allegation would have won it.
You just have to prove it genuinely casts the election into doubt.
Now, I'm not sure how much of this document I can cover.
I think today I'm just going to start looking at it, and I'm going to just use the representative case of Georgia, because it's good for you to have a sense of what is in this document.
Georgia was called by 11,779 votes.
So a close election.
Fulton County, Georgia, the most populous county, has no digital record of all the in-person votes cast in its original results.
It says that ballot images of votes on election day were destroyed.
The vote in Georgia was counted three times, but they weren't counting the same ballots three times.
In other words, they're counting different sets of ballots.
There were thousands of fraudulent presidential-only ballots injected into the second machine count with huge margins favoring Joe Biden.
What this refers to is the fact that there were apparently ballots in which people only voted for the presidency.
Now, that's theoretically possible.
Someone can decide, I'm just going to vote in that.
But it's not normal for people to only vote.
I mean, you voted. I voted.
You have a whole slate.
And by and large, you go down the slate.
You cast your votes. You might leave one or two items blank if you don't know what those are.
But you're not going to just vote in one election and no other.
But oddly enough, thousands of people did that.
And all those votes kind of came into the second count.
Then we go on.
There were...
Thousands of ballot image files from the original count contained identical modified timestamps suggesting electronic manipulation.
It says that there were bogus votes added into the election results, and these included 20,977 unsubstantiated votes of unknown origin.
It goes on to talk about the fact that Fulton County, when asked how many voters voted in the 2020 election, their answer is, we don't know.
We can't tell you.
Then it talks about the fact that tabulators used in Fulton County during early voting had their seals broken, had the memory cards reprogrammed and inserted into different scanners to count absentee ballots in violation of election rules, and this makes it impossible to reconcile the number of ballots that were cast.
It talks about the fact that there were 4,081 false votes for Joe Biden included in the hand count results.
These were the result of accounting errors confirmed by the governor's office working with the Secretary of State, Raffensperger, yet they've never been removed from the official hand count result.
Then it talks about the fact thousands of pristine, unfolded absentee ballots were counted during the hand count in Fulton County, according to at least six witnesses.
Now, let's think about this for a minute.
You request an absentee ballot, which is then sent to you.
The absentee ballot is filled out Folded, put into an envelope, and then mailed or dropped off, let's say into a mail-in dropbox.
How is it possible to get an absentee ballot that is pristine and unfolded?
There is really no easy way for that to happen.
And there's no possible way for thousands of these ballots to show up.
You could have a rare case where maybe someone filled out an absentee ballot.
But again, you can't just walk up to the city clerk and hand in your absentee ballot.
I don't need to fold it.
Why? Because the signature is on the envelope.
So, in other words, the envelope contains information.
It's not just the ballot that goes in.
The ballot needs to be in an envelope.
And so, right away, we see something is very wrong here.
And again, I'm only scratching the surface.
I'm just flipping through pages here.
An estimated 30,000 to 92,670 illicit votes were trafficked in Georgia as part of a massive ballot trafficking operation discovered by True the Vote.
You know all about that, and I do too.
The group identified 242 trackers in Georgia who engaged in 5,662 ballot drops into drop boxes, making an average of 23 runs per trafficker.
And then it talks about over 40% of the illicit drops captured on camera were recorded between the non-voting hours of midnight and 5 a.m.
This evidence is all in 2,000 mules.
Many, if not most of you, have seen it.
And you know how inherently suspicious this is.
People showing up in a typical scene on the video.
A guy pulls up in a car.
It's like 1.45 a.m.
in the morning. He jumps out, looks to the left and right, makes sure he's not being observed.
He's wearing latex gloves so as not to leave fingerprints.
He drops ballots 1, 2, 3, 4 into the box, then takes a photo, not of himself voting, but of the box, of the ballots going in the box, presumably in order to say, hey, I was there, I now need to get paid.
So, the evidence that is put forward by Trump includes the 2000 mules evidence, but goes way beyond this.
Much of the stuff I'm reading about now, some of it I've never heard of, and I'm, well, if not an authority on the issue, someone who's reasonably well informed about it.
And it goes on. In 2020, there were absentee ballots issued to Bangkok, Thailand, Georgia, Denver, Georgia, Detroit, Georgia, Los Angeles, Georgia, and other fraudulent addresses that do not exist.
Ballots were fraudulently cast in 2020 from addresses listed as Bronx, Georgia, Hilton Head, Georgia, Louisville, Georgia, San Diego, Georgia, French Creek, Georgia, New York, Georgia, Sarasota, Georgia, all with zip codes out of state.
Now, you know, this is laughable, but it's laughable in a tragic and really frightening sense because we find...
And then it goes on. 43,000 Dropbox ballots violated chain of custody requirements in DeKalb County.
And an estimated 355,000 ballot transfer forms for Dropbox ballots are missing statewide.
And so...
And this is all only Georgia.
So you get an idea here because the Trump report covers all the swing states.
It covers Michigan, it covers Wisconsin, it covers Arizona, it covers Pennsylvania.
And the effect of it is kind of overwhelming and perhaps even numbing.
I know that, you know, it's hard to know if all of this is true as stated, but as I say, if even half of it or most of it, even some of it is true, we had a very defective and indeed a deeply corrupt election in 2020.
It might have been, quite honestly, the least secure election in U.S. history.
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Here's some really good news.
A big win in a federal court in Georgia by True the Vote.
By way of background, True the Vote...
had amounted an election challenge to the voter rolls in Georgia.
Voter rolls are the beginning of voter fraud.
I say that because when you have bad voter rolls, voter fraud becomes very easy.
And I don't just mean voter fraud, fraud by a particular voter.
I mean election fraud, coordinated fraud.
Why? Because you can look at the voter rolls, which by the way are publicly available, you can scroll down and there could be people on those rolls who have died, who are ineligible to vote, who have moved and now living in a different state.
And yet there they are in the voter rolls, which means that Georgia does not raise an eyebrow when a ballot comes in from one of those guys because they're on the rolls.
So, True the Vote assisted voters in Georgia to file challenges to some 360,000 of these names on the Georgia voter rolls.
Now, by the way, these aren't just sort of abstract names on the rolls.
Truth of Vote has computed that some 60,000 of these 360,000 people voted, voted in the 2020 or 2022 election.
In other words, they have been exercising their right to vote even though it is questionable whether they have that right to vote in the first place.
And let's remember again, Georgia was decided by 12,000 votes.
So having 60,000 eligible or maybe even 50,000 eligible, ineligible voters cast votes, that That is enough to throw fundamental doubt into the outcome of the Georgia presidential vote in 2020, not to mention other elections as well.
Now, the moment that True the Vote challenged these voters, these names on the voter rolls, Fair Fight Action, which is a part of a Stacey Abrams group, In Georgia sued True the Vote.
This lawsuit has been going on now for almost three years.
These lawsuits are kind of lawfare because they're expensive.
They take time.
They are a real drain on our side.
And we are familiar with this now.
This is standard strategy that the left uses against individuals.
They use it against groups like True the Vote.
They're using it against Trump.
And fortunately, this one came out the right way.
The federal judge, his name is Judge Steve Jones, he ruled that there is insufficient evidence that True the Vote tried to coerce voters by engaging in these election challenges.
So it's a very familiar thing here.
You're challenging these names.
Fair Fight says you're intimidating voters.
You're trying to scare people out of voting.
And there's a 105-page opinion or order.
Judge Jones says, not only have plaintiffs failed to overcome the fact that their actions did not result in any direct voter contact or alone include or direct county boards of elections to pursue an eligibility inquiry, but there is no evidence that defendants' actions caused or attempted to cause any voter to be intimidated, coerced, or threatened in voting.
In other words, the judge is saying, listen, there is a legal right to challenge names on these rolls.
By doing that, you're not preventing people from voting.
You're not scaring them.
None of that. It's not that True the Vote went door to door and told people, you're on the rolls, but you're not allowed to vote.
That would be a whole different matter.
True the Vote mounted a legitimate legal challenge.
This has now been battled out in court.
By the way, this is the second legal victory by True the Vote.
You might remember that they were sued by an election software company named Conic.
That case was dropped by Conic, presumably because there was no there there.
And so although this stuff is hard on Catherine Engelbrecht and Greg Phillips, why?
Because as I mentioned, litigation is protracted.
It is extremely expensive.
Through the vote is a Texas-based organization, relies on donors.
It's very impressive that they were able to take on a powerful group from the left that is accustomed to prevailing.
These are guys who say, oh, it's...
They bring up the sort of legacy of the past.
Let's remember the days when the Ku Klux Klan marched in Georgia.
They do not hesitate to inflame racial sensibilities.
They make these cases in court.
They rely on sympathetic judges to go along.
But kudos to Judge Steve Jones for not buying any of it.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast.
Well, welcome back to the podcast.
A scholar, his name is Philip Magnus, Phil Magnus.
He's an economic historian, currently serves as the David Thoreau Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute.
He's written a bunch of scholarly works, including a detailed critique of the 1619 Project.
His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Politico, Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times.
uh... and here's the website for the independent institute is just independent dot or a gun fill up glad to have you joining me again and uh... we want to talk about a topic that you have uh... been sort of watching very carefully and also examining and that is the issue of academic plagiarism now so or for guys who are not in academia See ya.
It may seem a little bit strange why this is considered a kind of a cardinal sin, if you will, a fundamental offense.
Why is plagiarism, which is lifting another guy's ideas, their words, their thoughts, and not attributing it properly to them?
No quote marks, no citations.
Why is that such a big deal?
Well, the premise of scholarship itself is being transparent with your reader, especially telling the person who is examining your work how they can reconstruct the steps that got you to your argument, to your position that you're taking in the paper.
And if you start lifting passages from other people's work, you're borrowing their work without attribution.
It's basically stealing from them, and you're not only deceiving your reader, but you're deceiving the general public by claiming something that isn't yours as your own.
So in other words, the offense of plagiarism is the offense of dishonesty and the offense of theft, right?
Absolutely. It seems to be the two put together.
Now, you sort of...
You came into public focus when you busted somebody well known to me, Kevin Cruz, a historian at Princeton, for engaging in pretty systematic plagiarism.
Absolutely. And you exposed them in a very kind of effective way because what you did is the side-by-side presentation.
This is what Kevin Cruz did, and you look on the right-hand side, and this is the original source.
And so you can easily...
Yeah, this is not an accidental lifting.
This is not a phrase or a word or even a sentence.
You have essentially a whole paragraph with maybe one or two words changed.
And so let's talk about the Kevin Cruz case first because we're going to talk about Claudine Gay.
But before we get to Claudine Gay, talk about what you found about Kevin Cruz and also what happened to him.
Yeah. So I started, the Kevin Kruse case started, I was reviewing one of his books for an academic journal and something caught my eye about a phrase that just looked a little bit too familiar and it stuck with me.
So I started digging around and then it just occurred, I had read this before.
And piece two and two together.
And sure enough, you know, normally in cases of plagiarism, it's not just a one-off instance.
It's usually a pattern that goes across several works.
So after discovering that initial phrase that just caught the corner of my eye, I started digging a little bit deeper in some of his other works and found more pervasive and more substantive issues of plagiarism.
Now, like the example you said, I found an entire paragraph that turned out to be, it was the thesis paragraph of his doctoral dissertation.
The paraphrase says, this is why I am writing this dissertation, and it had been lifted almost word for word from another source, except he wrote his dissertation about race relations in Atlanta, and the source he plagiarized from was a book about race relations in Detroit, and the one major change he made is he swapped out the city of Detroit for Atlanta in his dissertation, and then basically passed it off as his own.
And that was one of multiple successive examples over a good 20-year period in his academic career.
So again, it's like you start digging deeper and you find one thing leads to another, leads to another, leads to another.
This is not just an accidental thing.
This is a very intentional bad habit that he picked up over the years and continued doing.
Now, interestingly, Phil, when you exposed this, there was initially some sort of natural reluctance because Kevin Kruse was a kind of star on the left.
He had a whole following of historians who would essentially applaud and echo what he had to say, kind of a cheering section.
And once they realized that your documentation was thorough, was unquestionable, they then began to pivot To a, well, we don't know if this was intentional.
And moreover, how serious is it?
Does it really matter?
And some of this happened a long time ago.
And so all kinds of excuses and rationalizations.
And then Princeton and Cornell supposedly conduct an inquiry and exonerate Cruz.
How is that possible? Exactly.
Well, it's crazy because in both Princeton and Cornell's cases, so Princeton actually contacted me after I broke the story, and they asked for evidence, and I was, you know, very quiet with them.
I offered them everything that I had, and then as I continued to make more discoveries, I would forward it to the supposed academic integrity office.
That was investigating it.
But then they went completely silent and I didn't hear anything more from them for months.
They never bothered to follow up and ask me questions, which I think is very strange for an investigation.
Usually you at least talk to the different witnesses who found these things.
And, you know, they went completely silent.
And then suddenly, a few months later, Cruz announces on Twitter that he's basically been cleared.
And what Princeton did is they played word games.
They redefined the term plagiarism.
They said, well, this isn't plagiarism.
It was something to the effect of accidental cutting and pasting.
And you're scratching your head, accidental cutting and pasting his, by definition, plagiarism according to Princeton's own policies.
And then they invented another line, and Cornell did the same thing after their investigation.
They both say, well, our academic misconduct policy requires intent in order to...
penalty against someone. Both of their published plagiarism statements that they apply in the classroom to hundreds of students every year state that whether you intend to or not is immaterial to whether plagiarism occurred. So they invented this claim of intent. Now, I'd also ask the question, how do you unintentionally swap out the city of Detroit with the city of Atlanta when you're plagiarizing a barograph?
So it's almost like the offense itself illustrated its own intentionality, but they come up with all these just excuses to basically give him a chance to get off the hook. And then they don't publish the full results of the investigation.
They're not transparent about anything, but they're basically like, we aren't even going to give you a slap on the wrist.
They're going to say... Spruce up your citation practices in the future, but this is a non-issue.
And then he just resumes tweeting.
He resumes his political activism as if nothing happened.
Remarkable. Now, do you agree?
I mean, would it be fair to say that this is ideological protection?
And I say that because, Phil, I mean, if Harvey Mansfield had done that at Harvard, let's say, isn't it a fact that he would have been booted faster than you and I could count?
Absolutely. If you've got someone like Kevin Cruz, prior to his own plagiarism scandal, he used to tweet all the time.
Anytime somebody on the political right was even under scrutiny for plagiarism, he would come down like a hammer on them.
There was a... A case of a figure from Minnesota that was being considered for appointment in the Trump administration, and they found that even though he had cited passages in his own master's thesis, they didn't all have the proper quotation marks, which is a lesser offense than what Kevin Kruse did.
It's still plagiarism, but it's a lesser offense.
And Kruse was like, well, if this was a student in my classroom, I would fail them.
And yet here we are, a few years later, Cruz is doing worse things, but he gets off the hook because his political views align with the academic elites.
They're a tolerated opinion.
And then it even goes further than that.
Anyone that criticizes them or points out the plagiarism becomes a target of vilification.
And I was attacked because I'm not of Kevin Cruz's political persuasion.
Let's pivot to the case of Claudine Gay.
And I said on the podcast yesterday that egregious though the plagiarism was, and by egregious I mean the accumulation of cases, I believe the total number of cases approaching or maybe even passing 50, egregious though it was, I don't think that the plagiarism by itself would have sunk her ship.
Ultimately, she was caught in the vortex of two separate storms.
There was an anti-Semitism storm and there was a plagiarism storm.
Had it been only one of those storms, she would have survived either one.
But because they hit together, it created a kind of perfect storm and took her down.
Do you agree with that assessment?
I think absolutely. So the plagiarism was the tipping point.
Claudine Gay embarrassed herself very publicly in her congressional testimony.
I think even across the entire aisle, everyone agreed it was a disastrous testimony.
She became a target of public outrage almost at Harvard, her and the other two university presidents that testified because they misstepped in the way that they handled that issue.
That caused other people to revisit.
You know, there had been rumors about Quadinga's academic work for years, including hints that she may have plagiarized something.
So that had been floating out there.
And what the controversy over the testimony did is it caused people to go revisit those and start digging back into them.
And sure enough, when they found her dissertation, there were multiple clear examples.
And you know, it's always the pattern.
It's always one thing leads to another.
Where there's smoke, there's usually fire.
Once they found evidence in their dissertation, people start scouring for other works.
I did so myself. I started looking at some of her other academic articles.
And sure enough, In the course of a couple of weeks, it had amassed about 50 different examples spread across another 20 years of her work, so very similar to Kevin Kruse.
Do you think that because of the pervasiveness of affirmative action that this is a kind of tip of the iceberg?
And I say this because for two reasons.
One is that when academia moves away from merit to non-merit considerations, then you're going to get, by definition, some substandard people who are going to be very tempted to use shortcuts because they don't have the academic rigor.
They weren't even hired for their academic rigor.
But the second point is that people like Claudine Gay rise very rapidly through the establishment.
Phillips, Exeter, Princeton, Stanford, Harvard.
And so they have a sense that they are the anointed.
And since they are the anointed, they feel, I have a certain level of protection.
And they're not wrong. They actually do.
I mean, Claudine Gay, in my view, is as protected in academia as Barack Obama is protected in politics.
And so, as a result, they do all this stuff in the firm belief, I will never be held accountable.
I will never be caught.
So do you think that there's a lot of this going on?
There's a political privilege that exists in academia.
If you have the right set of views, it doesn't matter how shoddy your scholarship is, you will get away with it.
Kevin Kruse is a white male.
He's the quintessential example of a white male professor that comes from a privileged background.
Claudine Gay is African American, but also comes from a very privileged background.
They both went to elite private schools from K through 12 on up, both graduated out of Ivy League institutions, and they have the same political views, political views that are privileged by academia.
And what it means is even when academia does a gesture toward investigating, like Princeton did with Cruz, like Harvard claims it did with Claudine Gay, The conclusion is foregone.
It's going to exonerate them.
The Harvard example was, you know, they claimed that the corporation commissioned three unnamed political scientists to investigate her work, and they rubber-stamped it.
And, you know, people have gone back and reconstructed the timeline of what Harvard claims it did, and it's achronological.
It doesn't work. They had already started sending out lawyers letters Insisting there was no plagiarism that anyone that claimed plagiarism could be potentially sued That's what they did to the New York Post and they did that before the timeline said that they began their own investigation so it was a foregone conclusion conducted in a smoky room behind closed doors and There's absolutely no transparency toward it. So this is why you need figures out in the public Investigating it separately and bringing it to light with
the side-by-side comparisons. Here's a final question There are people who made the observation on X, on Twitter, the old Twitter, that basically Twitter was the ruin of Claudine Gay, and that had it not been for a free speech platform like Twitter, Gay would still be the president of Harvard.
Do you agree or disagree? Well, I think there's some truth to that.
You know, the example is, because media stories, they start to emerge around plagiarism, but they usually follow from a public revelation.
Now, in the case of Claudine Gay, I know the New York Post was investigating the story early on, but Harvard was throwing up roadblocks.
They were refusing to answer their questions, threatening them with lawyers.
But once it spills out into the open on platforms like Twitter, where people can put the images side by side, And, you know, any reasonable person can compare them and say, there's something that's not right here.
This is clearly a lifted passage.
That forced the story out to the public.
And then in the matter of a couple days, it jumped from these online platforms, this online discussion, to the front pages of national newspapers, to being an evening broadcast of CNN. Yeah, I gotta say, when I read about Claudine Gay resigning, I felt a little bit embarrassed because a momentary, just incredible thrill went through me because it's sort of like, finally, one of theirs is held accountable.
You know, it's so long in coming, and it doesn't happen very often.
So when it does happen, we're entitled to stand up and cheer.
You know, I feel for the students in the classroom at Harvard who have had plagiarism rules applied against them for much lesser offenses than Claudine Gay.
And in fact, Claudine Gay is the leader of the institution that applied those rules.
Every student at Harvard who has been brought before the Honor Council And given a severe penalty over the past several years, needs to be looking at that and asking, you know, what's going on here with our president is held to a different standard and gets off on an easier set of rules than is applied in the classrooms of the university.
So there's some justice on that.
Absolutely. Hey, Phil Magnus, thank you very much for joining me, guys.
We've been talking to scholar Phil Magnus at the Independent Institute.
The website is independent.org.
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I'm going to begin over the next few days a discussion of a slim but interesting and important book.
It's written by C.S. Lewis and it's called The Four Loves.
I have it right here. The Four Loves, as you can see, not a whole lot to it.
In fact, it's sort of in size and volume.
It's the opposite of the Gulag Archipelago.
The Gulag was like 1800 pages condensed to about 900.
This book is, gosh, let's see, in fairly large print, 180 pages.
And it's really... There are six or seven chapters, but four central chapters, and each one of them is on the four loves.
Now, let's talk a little bit about C.S. Lewis.
Who was this guy?
Well, he was an Englishman.
He was a scholar.
He's probably best known as a Christian apologist, but that really wasn't his professional title.
That's something he, well, did on the side.
His professional title was he was a medieval literature professor at Oxford.
And so he was in the very elite precincts of English life.
He was a Don, as they say, a scholar, and he produced important work on Milton, on medieval literature, and this is how he built his reputation.
His early work is essays, literary essays, and then he turned his attention to Christianity.
And Lewis was someone who rediscovered Christianity in later life.
So he was, I won't call him a convert.
He was, for most of his life, an Anglican.
Later, interestingly enough, he called himself an Anglo-Catholic.
He apparently considered converting to Catholicism, but he never did.
He remained an Anglican.
I think what he meant by Anglo-Catholic is two things.
One is that he found that there was considerable value in the Catholic intellectual tradition.
And remember the Protestant intellectual tradition, because of sola scriptura, because of Christianity, and by faith alone, has tended to emphasize the faith component of Christianity and downplay the intellectual component.
Now, this is not because the Protestant reformers weren't smart or they didn't believe in the intellect.
They deployed the intellect to expound the Bible.
And so one finds in Luther and Calvin...
Detailed expositions of scripture, analyses of particular sentences, sometimes even a single word.
And so there's a great deal of thought and intelligence that goes into that.
But the notion of trying to defend Christianity by reason alone...
Without recourse, at least not immediate recourse, to the Bible.
Now it's not that the Christian apologists don't consult the Bible, but it's that the Bible is the end point of their discussion.
They're vindicating the Bible.
They make a point, they show something out of the world, out of morality, out of philosophy, and then they go, hey listen, this is exactly what the Bible says.
So the Bible comes in at the end as a way of corroborating or showing that the Bible knew, in a sense, what modern science has taken, in some cases, you know, a thousand, two thousand years to figure out.
Now, Lewis produced a pretty wide and massive corpus of work in his life.
He wrote fiction.
He wrote nonfiction.
He wrote books for adults.
He wrote books for children.
Some of you are familiar with the works of Narnia.
You might have seen the Chronicles of Narnia film.
I think I did many years ago.
His books include The Mere Christianity, Miracles, The Abolition of Man, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain.
So a lot of major issues are tackled one way or another by Lewis.
And it turns out, if you read The Great Divorce, very prescient about some of the cultural and moral breakdown that we see throughout the West.
If you look at The Problem of Pain, you see that Lewis is wrestling with the issue of why, well, why bad things happen to good people and sometimes why good things happen to really bad people.
There are two sides to that coin.
Mere Christianity, which is Lewis's best known work, is I think if you're...
If you're approached by someone who is a decent guy and they are skeptical about Christianity, I don't know, it seems like a bunch of fairy tales, what's this all really about?
If you want to give them a single work that would be a good starting point for them to sort of reconsider, take another look, You could do much worse than me or Christianity.
In fact, I think this is one of the best ways to introduce someone.
Why? Because it begins in the most simple way to draw you in with premises that everybody agrees with.
Lewis just begins with the simple existence of morality in the world.
The fact that we cannot live as human beings Without saying things like, you should do that.
You ought to do that.
This is right. That is wrong.
And then Lewis, by careful examination, looks at that moral faculty, what it is, how it operates, where it comes from.
And he's often running with the argument of mere Christianity.
Maybe sometime I'll do an exposition of mere Christianity on the podcast.
But no, we're going to focus on a different book, and a not so well-known book, And a book that was initially delivered as a lecture or maybe a series of lectures.
Four lectures, I believe.
One, a piece on The Four Loves.
And by the way, if you get Audible or if you look for it, you can find the audio recording of C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves.
It's a pretty remarkable book.
I say document because, as far as I know, there are no other recordings of C.S. Lewis in his own voice in existence.
I find this a little odd because here was a guy who was a prominent lecturer.
You would think that, well, I guess in the old days people didn't really bother to record someone's lectures.
This has now become so standard in academia that it would be unthinkable for a professor today to have no recordings of their lectures because, you know, most of the students in class are recording it or some of them aren't there and they record it and listen to it later.
But for Lewis, apparently this was very uncommon.
And even though Lewis went to public events, he gave public lectures, evidently those lectures, were not recorded.
In some cases, transcripts were made and you can read them and sometimes C.S. Lewis would take his speeches or his recordings and convert them into a book.
This by the way was also the case with Ameer Christianity.
C.S.
Lewis delivered that book not as a book.
He delivered it as a series of radio lectures on the BBC to the British audience and it was, it struck a chord and then Lewis decided, all right, well, I'll pull these ideas together and write a book.
And what we find is that the book is a little different than the recordings.
So even with The Four Loves, I've listened to the recordings on Audible.
They're more concise than the book.
The book has a sort of We're good to go.
And the book has, as I say, a little bit more, but not a lot more.
And in fact, when I cover the book, I'm not really going to be going through the opening chapter very much, but diving right into the four loves.
Now, what is the point of this book?
What is Lewis sort of trying to do with it?
Well, He's trying to do something that is very important to do, and that is to take something that is right in front of us, right part of our ordinary life, and examine it carefully and think about it.
We're not used to doing this.
In fact, we live in the world, by and large, half and And what I mean by that is just that everything in the world, by habit, becomes familiar to us.
So we look out and we see skies blue.
And, you know, when we're a kid, we might think of asking, hey dad, why is the sky blue?
But when you're an adult, you never think of asking that.
Why? Not because you know the answer.
Most people don't know the answer.
But because you've seen the sky blue so many times that it has now become accepted that the sky should be blue, you'd only be surprised if the sky were green.
Then you'd be like, why is the sky green?
It's supposed to be blue.
But you don't know why the sky is blue in the first place.
And this is not just true of the physical landscape of our life, it's also true about our moral landscape.
And this is what C.S. Lewis is doing.
He's taking the idea of love and he's saying that love can be divided into four types of love.
Now right there that's kind of interesting because we think of love as one thing and that is love is basically our kind of feeling of affection or romantic interest or devotion to someone else and why should love be in four different categories?
But Lewis says no. The reason we have to talk about love in four different ways is because there are four different types of love.
Some of them are similar to each other, but there are also important differences between the four.
And in fact, this is not something original with Lewis.
The ancient Greeks knew this.
How do we know? Because they came up with four Greek terms for love.
So when I pick this up tomorrow, I'll be going into doing a kind of overview.
What are these four types of love that C.S. Lewis is going to be examining?
And why is it important for us to learn about them?
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