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May 6, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:42
AMERICA UNPREPARED Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep826
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Coming up, do you know who Eric Prince is?
He is a former Navy SEAL. He is the founder of the military company called Blackwater.
And he has an in-depth analysis of the U.S. military that I'm going to focus on today.
Also, Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to talk about an idea for making things a little better in the culture of Hollywood.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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Eric Prince is a Navy SEAL, former Navy SEAL, and the founder of the military supply company called Blackwater.
I actually invited Eric to come on the podcast and he agreed, but we had some horrible weather problems that knocked out our Wi-Fi.
So Eric isn't going to be joining me today, but I'll have him on the podcast later this week or next week to speak directly about the article I want to discuss today.
This is Eric Prince's article.
It is kind of an in-depth overview of what has happened to our military, to U.S. defense forces.
Weren't we the country that won World War II? Wasn't the United States the country that won the Cold War?
It seemed at one time that we were riding on top of the world.
Why is it the case that we are now mired in all these conflicts?
It seems that the recent conflicts that we've gotten involved with, even though we're fighting against tin pot countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, we end up in disgrace, leaving with our tail between our legs.
The United States is involved in a kind of indirect proxy war in Ukraine, which is not going well, contrary to some of the things you might have heard.
U.S. intelligence is a mess.
It's one thing for Israel to miss the intelligence leading up to the Hamas attacks.
But the U.S. is supposed to have the best intelligence in the world, and evidently the United States had no idea either.
What has happened to our defense infrastructure?
This is the question. That is considered in-depth in this article.
And I'm just going to touch upon a few of the details, but I want to give you what I take to be the big picture.
And this conclusion that I'm drawing is not present in the article, but it is my inference from the article.
Basically, I think what Eric Prince is saying...
Is that the military policy of the United States in the past 30 years has been alternatively set by two opposite groups of people that are both bad.
On the one hand, you have, let's call it loosely, the incompetent, idiotic, have no idea how the world works Democrats.
These are people who are weak, they're feckless, they're stupid.
And they don't have a clue about what they're doing.
And that's one thing that breeds chaos.
It's also one thing that shows unpreparedness.
It leads to horrible things like 9-11 because you didn't see the signs that were right there for you to see.
So this is the Democrats.
And you would think that there would be a remedy to this because, after all, if you look at American politics, leadership has swung between the Democrats and the Republicans almost back and forth over the last 30 years.
You had two terms of Reagan, then you had George H.W. Bush, two terms of Democrats, which is Clinton, then George W. Bush, two terms, Obama and Trump and Biden.
So back and forth it goes.
So you'd think that the Republicans would have a better approach to foreign policy, but, says Eric Prince, the Republicans have sort of delegated their foreign policy to the neocons.
And who are the neocons?
These are the people who can't wait to get into a war, and if they get into a war, they can't wait to stay in the war.
So in other words, they have no interest in finishing it, no interest in defeating the other side, no interest in getting out, because that's a disappointment.
The war is now over. It's almost like Patton at the end of the movie, Patton, where you see Patton and he looks forlorn and he looks like, I'm a fish out of water.
Can't we get World War II back?
I mean, can't we keep going?
Because Patton without the war is not Patton.
Well, the neocons without a war are sort of completely fish out of water, if you will, in their own way.
And so, now we look at the different conflicts that America has faced over the years.
Basically, Erik Prince says that the United States was very effective in defeating the Soviet Union, but it did take on a bad habit under Reagan, and that is the habit of fighting wars by borrowing money, by debt.
And he argues that one reason, now this is not the only reason, but he says our defense expenditures are part of the reason That we now have a $34 trillion debt.
Of course, a lot of it is also primarily domestic spending, which outpaces defense spending, but defense spending is also part of it.
Number two, Eric Prince says after the Cold War was over, instead of shrinking NATO, or basically ending NATO, NATO was created for the Cold War.
It was an alliance, if you will, against the Soviet Union.
You have no Soviet Union.
But instead, the United States starts expanding NATO and looking ultimately to find a foe, initially Russia, now to some degree still Russia, and then China, and misses the real foe that is, by the way, gathering strength in the 80s and 90s, jihadist Islam.
Then what happens is in the 90s you have these strikes on the USS Cole, on the U.S. embassies, And even so, the Clinton administration is clueless.
No idea what's coming and then what comes is in fact 9-11.
But, says Eric Prince, even though the Democrats in a way created the environment in which the radical Muslims were like, yeah, we can go ahead and do this.
The attack of course came in the very beginning of the Bush administration, but nevertheless, the signs were there for Clinton to see and were ignored.
But after 9-11, the United States says, okay, let's go start rebuilding some countries.
In other words, the United States did the right thing in clobbering the Taliban and getting rid of them.
But, says Eric Prince, I'm now quoting him, the U.S. response should have resembled a Scipio-Africanus-style Roman punitive raid.
So, Scipio Africanus was the Roman general who led the Romans in the Punic Wars against the Carthaginians.
Basically, Scipio's approach was, we're not going to go rule Carthage.
We don't care. We're just going to go pulverize them and come home.
And that's the point he's trying to make.
Pulverize the Taliban and come home.
Instead of this nonsense about nation building and trying to figure out how to run Afghanistan, I mean, we can't even run our own cities.
Forget about running Kabul.
And so needless to say, massive corruption over there.
And so the project to rebuild these societies becomes a total failure.
Let's fast forward to the present.
Right now, when Hamas attacks Israel, says Eric Prince, he says, Hamas has a strategy.
The Muslims may not have the technological sophistication of the United States or even Israel, but they do think it through.
And what they think is, we'll go in there, we'll grab a bunch of hostages, we'll pull them into the tunnels, Israel will be forced to come and start blowing up things in...
In Gaza, that will bring the sympathy of the world over to the side of the Palestinians.
So we know what we're doing.
We have a limited hand, but we know how to play it.
And then Eric Prince goes, there are ways to flush out Hamas.
And he mentions one specifically.
He says, why not flood the tunnels with seawater?
Using Texas precision drilling technology.
So he's saying that there's a technology available to flood the tunnels.
And that would mean that the Hamas guys would either get out of there or they're going to basically be drowned.
And now, an objection occurs to me, which is, of course, Hamas has probably dragged some of the hostages into the tunnels.
But we come back here to the Scipio-Africanus approach.
The Romans don't care about stuff like this.
Their approach is, listen, if you take the hostages into tunnels, the hostages are basically in your hands and...
We are not going to compromise our military operation because we got to get the hostages back.
That cannot be our priority.
Why? Because if it is our priority, we're going to endanger far more hostages, far more Israelis in the process.
And so he says the IDF, under pressure from the Pentagon, adopts this clumsy approach of Of an Israeli strategy that is awakening, if you will, global resistance.
Resistance that then makes it more difficult for the Israelis to carry out the strategy because the strategy in the beginning was not very well thought out.
There are discussions in this article about Taiwan and the difficulties that the United States would face over there.
Basically, Eric Prince is saying we can't risk a full-scale war with China because we can't risk the destruction of our own cities, and yet it's not going to be easy to go fight over there thousands of miles away.
We didn't do very well in the other places.
We've tried this. So I take this article as a call for a radical rethinking of American military strategy.
I'm confident that it's going to happen, not in today's Pentagon, not under the Biden administration.
And there's a final suggestion here that I think is very interesting, which is that Eric Prince makes the argument that we need to draw on the resources of the private sector a lot more.
He gives the example of SpaceX.
He says, listen, when 1969, when we put Apollo 11 on the moon, if you had told someone that the only way to get rockets into space...
30 years later or 40 years later would be to use SpaceX, to use an independent space station run by Elon Musk.
He goes, the people in the Johnson Space Center would have just started laughing and they'd be like, this is ridiculous.
But he goes, but there it is.
He also gives the example of FedEx having largely displaced the post office.
Today, if you want to get a package to somebody overnight, I'm going to FedEx it to you, okay?
Which means that we trust the private sector to deliver things efficiently in a way that we can't trust the public sector.
So I look forward to having Eric on the podcast to discuss all of this further.
But I think the big message here is that the United States had a very strong military, had a very good military strategy, but now we don't.
And while Biden is partly responsible for it, he's not the only one responsible.
The Democrats are not the only ones responsible.
So are the neocons who have gotten us into at least two wars and shown that they have no idea how to fight them.
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on the podcast now about how the right needs to do to the left what they are doing to us.
In some ways you can interpret what I've been saying as a call for the right to fight more like the left does.
And yet, whenever we make these arguments, or I make these arguments, I always like to think about counter-arguments.
What would be a case against my position?
And voila, I find one.
An article written by a fellow named Dan McLaughlin.
It's called, Why the Right Can Never Fight Like the Left.
And so I want to go through some of his key points and comment on them.
First of all, he makes the point that there's kind of a difference between a criminal and a policeman.
And he's using the analogy, the criminal is the guy on the left, the policeman is the guy on the right.
And I think he wants to make the point that the policeman cannot be like the criminal.
But this point kind of backfires, I think, on Dan for the simple reason that the policeman, yes, has to follow the law.
But it's also the case that the policeman, like the criminal, uses force.
In fact, the policeman needs to have superior force to the criminal and the policeman has to be more adept and I would argue in some ways more ruthless in the use of force than the criminal.
But I agree with Dan when he says we're fighting for different things.
And so he says, of course our methods must be different.
The reasons are not only moral, they are also practical.
Now, the moral reasons that he gives are the conventional ones, which is stuff that you hear very often from Republicans with things like, we are people of principle, and therefore we have to stand on principle, we're better than that, and so we can't bring ourselves to do the stuff that the left is doing.
I think that a lot of these claims don't really make any sense.
Because, quite frankly, if you have high principles and those high principles are at stake, and you are experiencing an attack on those principles that's trying to decimate those principles...
By and large, if you really believe in your principles, you're going to adopt pretty much any means necessary to defeat the attack.
A really good example of this is the Civil War.
Again, something that Dan mentions.
He quotes more than once some statements from Lincoln about the need to follow laws and the need not to use force and the need to conform to the law.
But all of this was delivered at least a decade before the Civil War.
I think it's probably not an exaggeration to say that once the Civil War broke out, Lincoln pretty much went to the Dinesh strategy, which is to say, to use whatever means are necessary to defeat the opposition.
No holds barred.
And even...
And this would include some tactics that are pretty barbaric, not only by today's standards, but even by the standards of the 19th century.
I mean, the burning of Atlanta by Sherman, for example, was conducted in an absolutely ruthless manner, with a lot of the suffering falling very heavily on civilians.
Now, civilians weren't targeted by the Union armies, but the collateral damage on civilians was extensive, and the South was completely leveled at the end of the Civil War.
Again, I use this only by analogy because we're not talking about an actual civil war in America now, but what I'm saying is Lincoln was not bound by strictures once things got into a sort of a free fight.
Now, We hear that the right needs to preserve tradition and protect the patrimony we were given by our forefathers.
In America, this means the Declaration, the Constitution, blah, blah, blah.
Now again, yes, we are the party of the Constitution.
We are the party of the Declaration.
We are conserving that.
But what is that?
Now for Dan McLaughlin, it is sort of like it is all the inherited parchments from 200 years ago.
This is the stuff that we're conserving like it's all preserved in a drawer.
Well, to me, the Declaration of Independence is a revolutionary document.
It represents a complete break with tradition.
The American founders were saying, even though we are of English descent, even though we've been under the English laws, we are going to declare enough.
Stop. No more.
Get out of our country.
So while a revolution can sometimes be peaceful, the American Revolution by the way was not peaceful, a revolution by definition can never be legal.
A revolution by definition can never be traditional.
And so it makes no sense to To say, hey, we're conservatives.
We're conserving a tradition.
But guess what? It happens to be a revolutionary tradition.
But no, we don't really want to act like revolutionaries.
No, no. We've got to be very pacific and very principled and very holier than thou.
And we should not stoop to the tactics of the left.
I mean, if George Washington had said, I'm not going to stoop to the tactics of the British, they draw their muskets, I'm not going to do the same thing as them, that's going to make my team more like theirs.
No! Washington basically said, look, I've got to figure out a way to defeat a superior fighting force, the British.
They're not going to fight me the way they're going to fight Napoleon, because the existence of Britain is not at stake, so I've got to use guerrilla tactics.
Essentially, attack them when they least expected, harass them, make it not worthwhile for them to stay, and that's why America became a free country.
Now, of course, I agree that It's not a case of anything goes.
I'm not saying that because they knock down our statues, we should go knock down their statues.
Or if they break the law, we should break the law also.
No, they break the law, but we've got to be pretty emphatic about enforcing the law.
We've also got to make sure that when we take power, we hold their criminals accountable.
They've been going after our guys under false pretexts.
We need to go after their guys under legitimate pretexts.
I was just watching a video, Debbie and I were laughing about it, about some students at Ole Miss, and they confronted these sort of Hamas, pro-Hamas protesters.
And they defended the flag, and they sang the national anthem, and they ridiculed the activists.
And part of what, the reason I found this so mesmerizing is, we never see it.
By and large, the conservatives are very sheepish.
They're like, oh, the activists are out there.
Well, maybe we should just quietly hasten to class.
But these students were like, no, we're going to show up.
We're going to be in your face.
We're going to defend the flag.
So we need a little bit more of that on our side if we're going to match and defeat the tactics of the left.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
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I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
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It's, for me, a pleasant surprise to have Debbie join me on a Monday for the podcast.
As I mentioned earlier, I was going to have Eric Prince from Blackwater, but we're going to have that come later.
You have Debbie Princess. There you go.
Exactly. Well, we just thought it'd be fun to do a segment together and talk about some of the stuff that's been happening.
What do you make of this notion that conservatives cannot be like liberals because we are morally different and because as a practical matter, we're psychologically different?
Well, I mean, that's basically why it's this way everywhere you look.
In every country where the left invades the country and basically takes over the country, takes over all the basic liberties, it's because the right doesn't stop them.
Because think about it, if the right were as powerful as the left, And as energetic and as diabolical as the left, I don't think half of these countries would have been taken over the way they have.
I mean, people have long understood that you can be on the side of the good guys, and yet that in many respects you have to resemble the bad guys.
So, for example, in the Cold War, we understood that you have a Soviet Union and you have Soviet spies, for example.
Okay, they're spying on behalf of an evil regime.
But the United States had a CIA and we had spies.
And our spies were just as ruthless as their spies.
And we were just as determined to get information on them as they were to get information on us.
We didn't say, well, we can't really have a CIA because we're an open society.
We can't do spying like they're doing.
We're better than that.
We didn't even entertain this kind of nonsense because we understood that spying on behalf of the good guys is not the same as spying on behalf of the bad guys.
Every cop understands that using force on behalf of the good guys is not the same as using force on behalf of the bad guys.
So what is the genesis of this?
I think it's really just a cover for laziness and stupidity.
It's for people who themselves don't want to be creative.
Look at the left.
You have to say, look at these encampments on campus.
Even if they're getting money from Soros, think about the organizational structure you have to put together to mobilize these takeovers on dozens of campuses, to organize these students to come out, to have, you know, you have all the different elements are put together by the left.
Now, I'm not saying we need to go do our own encampments, but I'm saying at some level you have to admire that these people know how to bring in the money, They've got the activists, they've got the media, they've got the whole thing thought through and worked out.
And bingo, that is the reason we can't do it.
Do you remember what happened on January 6th when we did it?
What happened? Well, let's put it differently.
But even that doesn't really work, I don't think, honey.
Because for this reason, you're like, when we did it, what did they do?
They used the full force of their prosecutory power to go after us.
Exactly. Right. Have we not had that same prosecutory power under Bush, under Trump?
We didn't dream, it didn't occur to us that we can use that power against their guys.
Right. So this is how we know...
Under the Trump administration, all that George Floyd stuff happened under Trump, right?
And yet, it never occurred, not to Trump personally, but to the Trump Justice Department, that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of leftists who can be hauled up on charges, prosecuted, jailed.
We'd have every reason to do it.
They're all breaking laws. They're breaking laws now.
So, my point is it's not as if we don't have the opportunity.
It's more like when they have the opportunity, they exercise it.
When we do, we defer.
Exactly. So that's the truth.
And then, of course, they have the media to back them.
So the media creates the narrative of, we the right-wingers are the terrorists, when in fact, they are the terrorists.
But the media is losing a lot of power, and I don't think that the media narrative carries much weight.
I mean, for example, if I'm running the DOJ, and I arrest 100 people, Who cares what the headline is in the Washington Post?
It's of no interest to me.
What I'm concerned about is I'm going to bring the case in a jurisdiction where I'm going to get a jury that's going to go, we have no tolerance for this kind of behavior.
So I'm not worried about the media.
The media is talking to its own constituency, its own audience, which is rapidly shrinking.
Just like they plant their cases in favorable jurisdictions, There should be nothing to stop us from doing the same.
I mean, really, they should take a page off of the Attorney General here from Texas, Ken Paxton, because he does that.
He's very much like that.
So I think if more Attorney Generals start acting like that, we might get somewhere, actually.
Yeah, although I think that even Paxton needs to be escalated times 10.
A little more, yeah. A lot more.
Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, for example, there's no reason Paxton can't indict Mayorkas.
Yeah, that's true. For sex trafficking, child trafficking, human trafficking, all the stuff that's going on in the border that's going on with Mayorkas' knowledge, they know all about it.
In fact, they're part of it.
They're enabling it to happen.
Yeah. So why shouldn't they be held responsible for it?
Well, look at my, I mean, Mallorcas in the Congress.
What happened there? No, but that's because in the Senate, there's a Democratic majority.
So, you know, you don't want to unleash something that they have the power to stop.
And again, you don't want to be stupid enough to indict Mallorcas in Austin, Texas, where he'll get a jury of UT, Austin, Texas.
He'll get a jury of his peers.
Of his peers.
We want a jury of our peers.
You and I need to be on the jury.
That would be a very quick verdict.
We don't seem to land in juries very often.
Every time they see our name, they're like, check off.
You get thrown off because of me.
Yeah, I do. Every time I go for jury duty, they're like, Dinesh D'Souza's wife.
No. Ex.
Ex. Goodbye.
Come next time.
I don't mind, actually, but yeah.
One other topic we want to cover.
I saw this headline and I showed it to you.
It turns out that the headline is bogus.
But you're like, hey, that's actually a very interesting idea.
According to the headline, which apparently comes from a satirical site, Sylvester Stallone and Mark Wahlberg and who was the third guy?
Oh, Denzel Washington had teamed up and were creating a kind of new Screen Actors Guild.
So not the SAG, the Screen Actors Guild, because it's so woke.
I mean, it's not just that the union is woke in the sense of they're leftist.
They have created these preposterous guidelines where you cannot write a script, you cannot have a comedy routine, if it's not like 30% of it has to be this and gays have to be included and you gotta make a positive reference to the trans and even if you're doing historical scripts, you gotta like make sure black people are in the, even if they're, you know, it's about ancient Norway, you know, it's insane.
So the idea was and I think the point you were making is that evidently this is not true, but it should be true.
It should be. It should be because I think there are enough of them to do something like this.
As you know, we've had so much trouble making movies via the normal route because of who we are.
And even when we were making Infidel, remember at the beginning, we were very incognito.
Nobody knew that we were even behind the movie because we were afraid that once they found out that it would just destroy the whole project.
So it is really sad that we have to do that because as you know, every time we watch a movie...
We are like, why did we waste two and a half hours of our life watching this piece of garbage?
And that's all that keeps coming out of Hollywood these days.
So the fact that they don't allow this kind of just, you know, writers and actors that are right, who cares what their affiliation is?
If they're good, and if they have a good storyline...
And your point is that guys like a Denzel Washington or a Wahlberg or a Stallone, they've already established themselves.
Exactly. In other words, they can't be easily canceled and they don't even care.
They're way past all that.
So they have the cachet and the credibility to create a rival institution.
So just as we have rival institutions in the media, there's conservative media, rival institutions on TV. We're obviously talking now about the idea of creating rival university structures.
There's one, the University of Austin, I believe it's called, that's starting up.
We need something in Hollywood, I think is what we're saying here.
And there is the chance to create that.
Evidently, this story we saw, which kind of got us excited.
Wait a minute. But then I looked it up and looked into it, and I'm like, no, this is evidently...
There are too many satirical sites, but it kind of gives you room for pause because sometimes we don't know if it's satirical or not.
This is so true.
I saw a ridiculous headline in the Atlantic, right?
At least I saw it on X and I'm like, wow, this is really stupid.
So I retweeted it.
But then I got an angry note from the publisher of the Atlantic.
He goes, that was, you know, we didn't publish that story.
And what I replied to them, I said, I'll be happy to take it down.
It is. In other words, right?
And you see parodies of Biden and then real Biden?
Not so easy always to tell the difference.
He's one big parody. He's one big parody indeed.
I want to talk today about some of the distinctive characteristics of the Puritans.
These are the people who came from a certain part of England.
They were radical Protestants in opposition to the Anglican establishment of England and they came to create a new society, well, a city on a hill in America.
They settled in the area of Massachusetts or New England.
They've decisively shaped the culture of New England.
And as I mentioned, they brought with them a new idea of liberty that's quite different from the modern understanding of liberty as freedom, the right to do what you want, to live your life as you please.
The Puritans didn't believe in this.
Their idea of liberty was liberty for Puritans as a community.
They wanted the liberty to be left alone so that they could create their own community according to God's laws, strict rules, and complete conformity within the community.
So, it would be no point to accuse them of religious persecution.
They would say, well, we're fleeing religious persecution, persecution of us, but we have no objection to us persecuting others.
So, to put it differently, we have no objection to us setting up a community according to rigid standards.
You've got to follow those standards, and if you don't, we either punish you or throw you out.
Now, the Puritans had a very distinctive idea of marriage, of the family, and also they had unique types of religious services that were completely different from, for example, Anglican religious services, which are very close, by and large, to a Catholic mass.
So, Anglican services are liturgical, There is a kind of patterned formula for them.
They follow The Book of Common Prayer.
They typically use the King James Version of the Bible.
The Puritans went in a completely different direction.
And now, in a way, Puritan services resemble what you might today see in an Assemblies of God or a Baptist church.
I don't actually mean the content.
I just mean, at this point, the structure of it.
In other words... If you imagine a Puritan service, first of all, you have a church, and the church is almost completely bare.
So, unlike, again, the Anglican Church, which has all kinds of statues, and, you know, Jesus is prominently present, visibly present in terms of, is being depicted in the church itself.
It's very ornate.
Think, for example, about some of the Anglican cathedrals in London even today.
That was the Anglican Church.
The Puritan as service?
You have people in very simple, modest outfits, sitting with bowed heads in a very plain building.
By and large, they would be sitting in pews, originally just on benches.
And the essence of the service is...
Hymns or worship at the beginning, and then generally a lengthy sermon.
And I mean lengthy.
When you think about, from the records we have, we think about people like Cotton Mather, Increased Mather, some of the original Puritans, they would think nothing of speaking for 90 minutes straight.
And these were classic...
I guess today we would call them hellfire sermons.
And they were also very learned.
In other words, the Puritan preachers were educated people.
Some of them had been schooled in places like Oxford or Cambridge in England.
And so... When you look at their sermons, and we have records of some of these sermons because they were written down, we find the sermons full of words like rambunctious, absquatulate, splendiferous.
In other words, this is not, you would call it, bare-bones talk.
In fact, today when you listen to sermons, very often, whether it's Catholic sermons or Protestant sermons, it's kind of the same.
The sermons have no literary quality at all.
They don't even aspire to that.
They certainly don't, they aren't learned in any sense.
Very often the preacher talks about some anecdote about when he broke his leg and then relates that to an experience of meeting Jesus.
So the sermons today are very much catered to a kind of whimsical, almost delivered at the sixth grade level, just in terms of of their literary quality and the level of knowledge that's presumed.
The Puritans presumed that people were familiar with the Bible, knew a lot about it, read it frequently, and that they could go into not only the details of Scripture itself, but also go into the details of the underlying Puritan theology.
As I mentioned, the Puritan churches were very simple I want to talk about Puritan families because Puritan families, again, were little miniatures of Puritan society.
Puritan society was built around the concept of the elder.
the elders like the wise man of the society.
By and large Puritan elders ran the community.
And similarly the husband in the house was the equivalent of that inside of a household.
So Puritan families had a kind of a patriarchal structure.
Not to say that they did not believe that men and women are spiritual equals, they believed that they were.
Not to say that they believed that let's say men can kind of do certain things and are not going to be held to the same standards as women, the so-called double standard.
They didn't believe in that.
So they were very strict for example about things like fornication, adultery.
But the Puritans blamed men and women equally for those offenses.
Interestingly for Puritans the Um, uh, We think of Puritans today as, you know, when we say something like, he's very Puritanical.
What we really mean is the person is very straight-laced, or maybe that they have a kind of fear of sexuality, or that they are very repressed, or that they somehow think that sex is a bad thing, they don't like, they think the body is evil.
Now, the Puritans did not believe any of this.
They were not puritanical, at least in the modern misuse of the term.
They had strong views about sexuality, but they firmly believed in an intimate sexual bond between husbands and wives.
They did not believe in modesty within the family.
They, of course, were strongly against adultery, not only as an offense against husband or wife, but also as an offense against the community.
And they had strict punishments.
But like I mentioned, the punishments were even-handed.
Rates of children out of wedlock, virtually unheard of in Puritan society.
But the point I'm trying to make is that the Puritans were not Christian ascetics.
They weren't monks who took vows of celibacy.
Puritan pastors, of course, were married.
They were family men. And Puritans understood the power of sexuality.
In fact, this is really why they sought to regulate it, because they recognized that if you leave unmarried boys and girls to themselves, they were like, no, these are sinners.
These are naturally depraved individuals, and so we should expect the worst.
And that's why, for this reason, we need moral education.
We need people to be brought up in the church.
We need schools that teach moral principles, and so on.
I mentioned yesterday that Puritans had very interesting ideas of child-rearing for children.
Their view was that children are basically naturally depraved.
Children are born, well, I guess today we'd use the phrase original sin.
I'm not quite sure if the Puritans believed in original sin in the sense of a sin sort of genetically transmitted from Adam.
But what the Puritans did believe is Is that from a very young age, children have an obstinate will.
And this will is of the devil.
In other words, it's a will to rebel.
It's a will not to follow authority.
It is a will that rejects, almost by temperament, God's sovereignty.
And so the will has to be, quote, The Puritans often spoke about kind of breaking the will.
And their way of doing that, by the way, was not like corporal punishment or something like that.
It was you break the will through habits.
And so for example, if the minister comes to your house You have to stand up.
You have to be respectful.
You have to bow your head.
You have to treat family members, especially older family members, with respect.
So by cultivating these virtues, the Puritans were hoping to create, well, better citizens and, quite frankly, also better Christians.
The The other point I want to make about Puritans is this idea about a final thought about the Puritans.
They had a very interesting idea of death.
And their idea of death was that death comes to you a little bit every day.
In other words, and this is Cotton Mather's phrase, he calls it daily dying.
And what he means by this is not that death is some final catastrophe.
No, the Puritans obviously believed in death as a gateway to another life.
But they were also a little tormented by the fact that did God choose them for this other life?
In other words, are they part of the elect or not?
So there was a little anxiety or uncertainty in the mind of the Puritan about whether he or she is...
It has been chosen by God.
Not as good enough because the Puritans didn't believe that you could earn your way to salvation.
So it's not simply a question of doing the right thing.
It's a question about whether God chose you for his own reasons at the beginning of the world.
And the point is, obviously, you cannot alter that choice.
Either God chose you or he didn't.
But It would be good to know if he did, because you'd have a certain confidence as you approach death that a better life awaits you as opposed to damnation.
But at some level, the Puritan realized, I cannot be sure.
God isn't going to, in some ways, reveal to me beforehand who his elect are.
In a sense, we have to act as if we are the elect.
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