Ben Shapiro’s Spies R Them episode dissects Twitter’s alleged FBI collusion to suppress conservative voices—leaked emails show Yoel Roth and James Baker censoring accounts like Jordan Peterson while pre-bunking Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation, mirroring past Trump-Russia psyops. The host frames this as a leftist power grab, using polarization to radicalize both sides, with Trump’s "terminate the Constitution" remark exposing Democratic hypocrisy while Republicans fail to act. Meanwhile, Stephen Wolfe defends Christian nationalism as a bulwark against progressive moral decay, arguing for faith-based governance despite free-speech concerns, while a listener’s trauma reveals how distorted religion fuels abuse—contrasting with Shapiro’s call to reclaim God’s true nature through Scripture. The episode ends by warning of institutional collapse, blending conspiracy, theology, and political warfare into a call for conservative unity. [Automatically generated summary]
The time has come for each and every American to make a choice.
Are we going to allow the Democrats to destroy democracy in the name of saving democracy?
Or will we insist that Republicans save the Constitution by destroying the Constitution?
It's kind of like watching Gorgo fight Godzilla and deciding who to root for while they're both reducing Tokyo to rubble.
To help you make the decision between the Democrats and Republicans, not Gorgo and Godzilla.
But really, what's the difference?
Anyway, to help you make the decision, let's review the news of the week.
Twitter chief Elon Musk had journalist Matt Taibbi release internal emails which would have shown FBI plants tampering with the last election by censoring information if the emails hadn't been tampered with by an FBI plant censoring the information.
Reporters reacted to the news by condemning Taibbi for reporting the news, which they said deeply hurt journalism by doing journalism.
At this point, Democrats chimed in to say yes, they had colluded with sinister intelligent officials and a corrupt media to destroy democracy by spreading disinformation, but only so they could stop disinformation from destroying democracy.
Donald Trump reacted by saying we now have to terminate the Constitution in order to save the Constitution, and then said he hadn't said we should terminate the Constitution, only that we should cancel the last election and install him as president, which would terminate the Constitution, thereby saving the Constitution.
Republicans reacted to Trump's comments with shock and said we need to leave Trump behind and move forward with new leadership by moving backward to old leadership.
Then at last, Republicans can stop all this chaos and restore calm by doing absolutely nothing.
Meanwhile, Democrats took time off from calling for the destruction of Israel and its 6 million Jews in order to strongly condemn Kanye West for calling for the destruction of Israel and its 6 million Jews.
West, a Nazi black man, has teamed up with Milo Yiannopoulos, a Nazi homosexual, in order to finally realize Adolf Hitler's dream of a truly diverse Aryan race, full of blonde-haired and blue-eyed, manly men who are black and gay.
To prove that he's not mentally ill, Kanye gave yet another interview wearing a full face mask like a mentally ill person.
In this interview, Ye said that the Jews were going to have to forgive Hitler.
And let me just pause here to say, as a Jew who is also a Christian, forgiving Hitler is on my to-do list.
It's just very, very far down.
It's on the list just below reading the big book of feminist theory and just above rereading the big book of feminist theory because I couldn't believe what a load of garbage it was the first time.
But somewhere between those two readings, I'm going to forgive Hitler.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, in other news, batcrap, crazy black man Raphael Warnock defeated batcrap crazy black man Herschel Walker for a Senate seat in Georgia.
Warnock, who says that Jesus would support abortions, condemned Walker for funding an abortion because that was wrong.
Now Warnock actually is an ordained minister in the Holy Church of whoop-de-doodleism, and he found evidence for his theology in the Bible verse Mark 10.14, in which Jesus says, suffer the little children to come unto me, and I will rip them limb from limb and then suck out their brains.
Which does in fact prove that if Warnock is going to write down his fantasies, he probably shouldn't write them in his Bible.
It's just confusing.
In any case, with Warnock supporting Christ-like abortions and Walker paying for abortions with Christ-like charity, the entire election was like a beautiful reenactment of the Christmas story, or at least that one part of the story where all the children get slaughtered.
So, now that we've covered the news of the week, let me return to what I said at first.
It's time for Americans to come to a decision.
Are we just going to cower under our desks, whimpering in despair, while a bunch of venal, brainless weasels destroy our great country?
Or will we be men and crawl out from under our desks whimpering in despair?
Then run very fast, still whimpering in despair, until we reach the Mexican border, where we'll be stopped by border guards because they aren't doing anything else anyway.
Personally, I'm just going to stay under the desk because at my age, it's hard to run fast and whimper at the same time.
But if anyone can hear my voice in Mexico, please send help.
Trigger warning, Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we have returned laughing our way through the dark ages that come after the fall of the Republic.
Today we're going to talk about the assault on our democracy by federal law enforcement and intelligence and the corrupt participation of the corrupt media who are corrupt.
Also, Stephen Wolf will be here to talk about why he loves Christian nationalism, and then he'll be carted away by the FBI.
This is a great time to subscribe to my personal Andrew Clavin YouTube channel where you will get exclusive content just for you and leave a comment.
If the comment is ugly and racist and sexist and just utterly, utterly morally reprehensible, we'll include it on the show because it'll fit right in.
Last week's comment, by the way, was about my wife that somebody asked, how does Mrs. Clavin get any work done with such a hilarious husband?
So I went home after the show and I asked her, I said, how do you get any work done when you have such a hilarious husband?
And she said, I don't get that much work done.
So Kevin O this week says, Kevin O says, I just finished A Strange Habit of Mind, my new novel, and reading that and the Twitter files at the same time has some eerie similarities.
Is Cam going to be matching wits with a former senator secretary of state first wife whose opponents seem to suicide themselves next?
That was my last book.
The book before the winter series began was Another Kingdom, which featured a plot by child abusing, child abusing cabal, a plot to hang somebody in prison to give them the blame so everybody else could escape.
This one predicts what Elon Musk is facing on Twitter.
I often say that good art has a kind of prophecy about it.
In any case, Christmas is coming.
So get this book and when Christmas comes and give them to somebody you dislike intensely who's on the left or somebody you love who's on the right because you will love them.
They are good books.
Only have to look at the Amazon reviews and you'll see how much people like them.
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In ancient Rome, there was a famous satirist, a great satirist, actually.
He's still quite good when you read him.
His name was Juvenal.
I sometimes feel that my satire kind of models itself on juvenile.
I'm an outlaw juvenile, you might say a juvenile delinquent.
But there was a funny passage in juvenile, a famous passage, in which a husband is asking how he can keep his wife from cheating on him.
And somebody says to him, you know, just lock her up and surround her with guards.
CIA's Guardians Gone Rogue00:15:24
And the husband says, yes, but who will guard the guardians?
We'll keep the guards from sleeping with his wife while they're guarding her.
And that phrase, who will guard the guardians, is often used to refer to Plato's Republic, where Socrates wondered how the people who were given power can be kept from abusing their power.
Who will guard the guardians of the city?
Who will guard the people who run the city?
And this is a problem, of course, that returns in the Federalist Paper, where it's Madison, I think, who says, you know, if men were angels, we wouldn't need a government.
So what we have is a problem where we have to have a government to control the people, but we have to somehow convince the government to control itself.
Who will guard the Guardians?
In our country today, and this week has really brought it home in a really frightening and ugly way, the Guardians of Freedom have lost their dedication to freedom.
The people who are supposed to be protecting our freedom, the press, the FBI, the CIA, are instead utilizing this information crisis we're in to flood the zone with misinformation and disinformation.
And they're doing it on purpose.
We now see it because of these Twitter releases, spies and federal cops who are supposed to guard our freedoms.
What they're doing is they're using the information crisis that I talk about all the time is not about too little information.
It's about so much information that we can't tell which is right and which isn't.
And the fact that at the same time that's happening, it threatens the powers that be.
So that what they're doing is they're using their power, the press and the federal police department, the FBI, in other words, and the CIA, they're using it to sort of flood more information so it becomes impossible to tell what is right and what is wrong.
And that is what the story about the Twitter release is about.
I'm hearing a little bit of this.
I'm just hearing the beginning of people talking about it, but mostly people are talking about the news that's coming out because Elon Musk is having Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi release, independent journalists, release these Twitter emails that show what was going on during the election and other times to suppress mostly right-wing talk.
Yesterday, I think it was last night, Barry Weiss released a new batch of internal Twitter emails and they show that Twitter higher-ups indeed were doing what they kept saying they weren't doing, which was suppressing and shadow banning sites for no other reason than that they didn't like them.
And they would say, oh, they're violating this rule or they wouldn't tell what rule they were violating or they would just make something up and they would make sure that people they didn't like get stopped.
And the guy in charge of the security at Twitter is no longer there is the guy, Yoel Roth, utter woke jerk who is so sensitive that he just couldn't stand any disagreement.
Here's cut seven, just so you get a glimpse of him and what he was like.
It's terrifying.
I thought I was going to be a college professor for a living.
I got a PhD and was doing research that nobody cared about.
And then I was like, oh, you know, like this platform thing is cool.
Like I can go and do research there.
And then, you know, one thing led to another.
And all of a sudden we apply a misinformation label to Donald Trump's account and I'm on the cover of the New York Post.
And that is a deeply terrifying experience.
And I say this from a position of unquestioned privilege as a cis white male.
Like the internet is much scarier and much worse for lots of other people who aren't me, but it was pretty f ⁇ ing scary for a long time.
What was a result of it?
So first of all, you're not that cis.
And cis.
And second of all, he's so terrified.
He's so terrified of all those Trump people who actually never killed anybody.
But he's so terrified that he has to shut them down and label them misinformation.
But let's reiterate the people he's terrified about.
The people who are knocked down on Twitter, the people who are suppressed were guys like Jordan Peterson.
I mean, you know, violent, that horrible Jordan Peterson.
I mean, all he does is express ideas.
The Babylon B, all they ever do is make fun of the left.
They make fun of everybody.
To be perfectly fair, they're the second funniest satirists on the internet.
Libs of TikTok, who never do anything but actually let libs speak for themselves, and they were banned like seven, eight, nine times without ever getting an explanation why.
Juanita Broderick, who's plausibly accused Clinton of raping her.
These are people who just basically did what is their duty in a free society where people are supposed to be able to speak without fear or favor.
But the big story goes on beyond that.
It goes on to show how much the media and the federal black shirts, by whom I mean the FBI and the CIA, participated, colluded in suppressing speech.
This is exactly what the Guardians are supposed to be guarding against.
This is exactly what the press is supposed to be opposing and does oppose it whenever it gets in the way of what they want to say, but doesn't oppose it at all when it gets in the way of those people who they now feel are the enemies of the country because they support the Constitution.
And you can make an argument that there are some people who are so crazy, you know, that they shouldn't be allowed to speak.
I don't agree with that argument.
I've been very clear about this.
I think it's wrong, but that's not who we're talking about.
If we're talking about Jordan, if we're talking about the Babylon B, if we're talking about Dan Bongino, who was suppressed, listen, I was suppressed since Elon came on.
I gained like 40,000 followers on Twitter, and I'm not even on Twitter that much, but I gained like 40,000 in a couple of weeks.
So obviously these guys were suppressing everybody's reach that they didn't like.
But somewhere, you know, this was supposed to be basically fair.
It was supposed to suppress anybody who violated these things, but somewhere between 90 and 100% of Twitter's staff were leftists, and the bias was powerfully toward helping the left and suppressing the right.
And when Hunter Biden's story, the Hunter Biden laptop story, went nuts, came out, they went nuts.
And they came out, I just want to remind you, because it's a complicated thing.
I want to remind you that the Hunter Biden laptop and some ancillary information that came in on because of the Hunter Biden laptop gave very strong evidence that Joe Biden was directly involved with the family influence peddling business, which everyone knew had been going on for decades, right?
They were peddling influence and they were using not just Joe Biden's name, but apparently appearances by Joe Biden.
And he may have been getting 10%, remember, 10% for the big guy of the profits from places like China and Ukraine, which now, of course, as president, he has big dealings with.
So we know from sworn testimony by several people that the FBI pre-bunked the Hunter laptop release before it came out.
They went to Facebook, they went to Twitter, and they said, and doubtless other social media sites, and they said, watch out.
The Russians are planning to hack a, to release some Hunter Biden misinformation in order to poison the election against Biden.
And these are the same people who had been claiming that the Russians had colluded to help Donald Trump.
They'd colluded with Donald Trump to help him, which turned out to be entirely a hoax.
And not only was it entirely a hoax, they knew it was.
The FBI knew it was, even as they were investigating it, even as they were getting warrants to spy on Americans.
They knew that this information was false or at least not reliable.
So now they go out and say, oh, by the way, there's bad Russian information coming out, Russian misinformation coming out to skew the election that attacks Hunter Biden.
And it's going to seem like it shows Hunter Biden is doing bad things, but don't believe it.
So the minute the post story broke, what turned out to be, and the New York Post broke this story, which turned out to be a totally true story.
The minute the story broke, they banned it.
They shut it down.
They threw the New York Post off.
They shut down Kaylee McInenney, Trump's spokeswoman.
And when it turned out that there was no proof that the stuff was hacked, they didn't do anything.
They didn't change it.
Over 50 former top wrong intelligence officers, including lying dirtbag John Brennan, former Obama's former CIA chief, right?
They came out and said, oh yeah, this, oh yeah, this is Russian as our expertise.
We are top CIA operatives.
We are top intelligence operatives.
And our expertise tells us that this is Russian disinformation.
All the while they knew.
Now, this gets even better because Matt Taibbi said in his release, he said he saw no evidence that there was government involvement in banning people from Twitter, right?
These are campaigns.
Both the Trump campaign and the Biden campaign reached out with complaints about information on Twitter, but more of what the Biden campaign wanted silenced was silenced.
And there are notes saying, oh, the Biden wants this done.
And the guy will answer, I'm on it.
It's handled.
I've done it.
It's all done.
So because of their bias, they were handling more of the Biden complaints than the Trump complaints, but both sides were complaining.
And of course, Biden wasn't in office.
So it wasn't necessarily a violation of the First Amendment because it wasn't government colluding to censor people by private means, which is against the Constitution, according to the Supreme Court.
However, however, the information in these emails, in these emails that Taibbi was releasing, was looked over by James Baker, Twitter's deputy general counsel.
He's no longer Twitter's deputy general counsel because after this incident, Elon fired him.
But James Baker was the guy who was vetting the emails before Matt Taibbi.
Who's James Baker?
Baker was the FBI's general counsel when Clinton lawyer Michael Sussman wanted to plant absurd stories about secret contacts between the Kremlin's Alpha Bank and Donald Trump.
They went to James Baker and Baker took it to the FBI because he was the FBI's general counsel and he was friends with Clinton's lawyer.
He was a perfect conduit.
He called this in to Baker.
He rushed to the FBI director and told it about him.
And we also know he's testified, Baker has testified himself to this behind closed doors that he was involved in telling lies to the Pfizer court so the FBI could use the steel dossier, which they knew was false, to get permission to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page, right?
So I know it's complicated, but all I'm saying is the same guy who was cheating behind the scenes to make it look like Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians is now vetting the very emails that Elon Musk is having released.
And Musk says he may have deleted some of them.
He thinks he did delete them.
He called him in, Elon Musk, called Baker in and questioned him about this.
And he said his response was not believable, basically.
So this whole story, I remember this whole story, the whole Russian collusion story was pushed by Obama's CIA director, John Brennan, who's still pushing disinformation on TV.
And Obama knew about it the whole time.
Baker was finally forced out of the FBI because of his actions.
And as I say, Elon said his unconvincing was the word he used.
He said that Baker's excuse was unconvincing.
A bunch of criminals.
These are a bunch of criminals.
And who will guard us against the Guardians?
Who will guard us when the people in the CIA, who are not supposed to be in domestic policy at all, and the FBI, who are supposed to protect us from wrongdoers, and the press who are supposed to vet the FBI and the CIA are all working together to silence 50% of the country.
Perfectly valid opinions that they just don't happen to like because they restrict their power by calling on the government to act according to the Constitution.
That is what they like.
Now, the thing is, your liberal friends, if you still have any liberal friends, don't know any of this because nobody is reporting it.
They're not doing the report.
So, this is from Mediaite.
Mediaite is a total left-wing website that covers the media from an anti-Trump point of view, a very left-wing website.
And they said the reactions of the press to Matt Taibbi releasing these emails were humiliating, embarrassing.
Let me read you some of them.
Ben Collins of NBC News.
Now, this is NBC News, where they suppressed the Harvey Weinstein story because they were busy suppressing stories about their anchor, Matt Lauer, who was busy sodomizing, well, allegedly sodomizing girls against their will and jumping on one staffer and screwing her so hard, really without her permission, that she collapsed and had to be taken to a nurse, allegedly, allegedly.
So, NBC's Ben Collins, working for this sleazy organization, says of Matt Taibbi, imagine throwing your reputation away to do PR work for the richest person in the world.
Interesting take.
Here's Mehdi Hassan, who works for MSNBC, part of NBC, where they were doing all these things to suppress the Hunter, the Harvey Weinstein story.
Mehdi says, imagine volunteering to do online PR work for the world's richest man, he says of Matt Taibbi.
What about Simon Owens, who calls himself a tech and media journalist?
He says, Taibbi has gone from calling Goldman Sachs a vampire squid to giving free PR to the world's richest billionaire.
Jason Schreier of Bloomberg News says Taibi needs an editor because he would have told him not to do PR work for the richest man on the planet.
Wajah Halat Ali, who writes for the New York Times, a former newspaper, accuses Matt Taibbi of selling your soul for the richest white nationalist on the earth.
They're using the same words.
They've got talking points from somewhere, right?
And these are the same guys, the same guys who publish story after story after story by anonymous sources within the intelligence community and the FBI to show that Trump was colluding with the Russians.
They're all working on this together.
The Guardians are gone.
This goes on and on.
All of these toadies, they're all of them using the same language.
They're all of them the same people who worked with the intelligence community and with the FBI to accuse Trump.
And all of them also work together to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and to try and debunk it as Russian misinformation.
So basically, what Matt Lauer did to that poor staffer in his office when he bent her over her chair and screwed her till she lost consciousness is what the journalists, the FBI, and the intelligence complex is now doing to the rest of us.
They're a bunch of criminals.
Our guardians have gone rogue.
And wait, I'm just about to get to the funniest part.
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So now Donald Trump enters the fray because, of course, nothing can happen without Donald Trump making a comment on it.
I'm going to talk about Donald Trump more in the mailbag section.
I've got some great mailbag questions, so hang around for that.
Do not miss the mailbag this week.
But Donald Trump comes out and he reacts to the first Twitter dump, the Matt Taibbi Twitter dump, with a message on his Truth Social.
He says, so, with the revelation of massive and widespread fraud and deception in working closely with big tech companies, the DNC and the Democrat Party, do you throw the presidential election results of 2020 out and declare the rightful winner?
Or do you have a new election?
A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.
Our great founders did not want and would not condone false and fraudulent elections.
Now, Trump says he didn't call for the termination of the Constitution.
And if you hold his tweet up to the light and sort of turn it this way and that, you could possibly say, well, he says it allows for the termination.
And maybe what he's saying is that the, you know, the fraud from Twitter, the Twitter people, basically terminated the Constitution.
Maybe that's what he's saying.
It doesn't sound like that's what he's saying to me.
It actually sounds like he was saying we should turn over the rules.
But either way, either way, he wants to throw out questions whether we should throw out the election result and declare him the rightful winner, just install him, which would, in fact, terminate the Constitution because the Constitution makes no allowance for that to happen.
And again, nothing he's saying has been proven to be to delegitimize the election in a court of law where things happen legally in a free and operating country.
But let's remember too, the Democrats claim that Trump's election was a cheat and they asked Vice President, then Vice President Joe Biden not to certify it, just like Trump asked his vice president, Mike Pence, not to certify it.
And Joe Biden, as corrupt as he is, as venal as he is, would not do it and neither was Mike Pence.
But here's the thing.
Here's the part of this that struck me as funny.
Because now the press is so openly corrupt that they don't care anymore.
I think I explained this before.
What they're betting on, and it's a good bet, it's a good political bet, what they're betting on is that their lies and their malfeasance and their bias against conservatives, it's not a bias, it's corruption in trying to shut down the voices of people who believe in the Constitution.
They believe that that will make a certain sector of the right so furious that they will cling to Trump no matter what and excuse Trump no matter what he says.
That's about 30% of the population, maybe 35%.
But on the other side, the liberals who read the New York Times or watch NBC News, they have no idea what's happening.
It's not being reported at all, right?
They have no idea what's happening.
So 60% of people either don't know what's happening and wouldn't vote for a Republican anyway or hate Donald Trump because he's annoying and loudmouth.
And so that's their bet.
They're betting that they can just be, you know, Joe Biden is walking around town with Hunter Biden in his wake.
He's showing him off.
That's how arrogant he's being because he knows it makes the right furious.
And the more furious the right gets and the more Trump mouths off and the more the furious right supports Trump and things that he shouldn't say, that is going to alienate more people in the middle.
You know, it's a very clever political play.
So the media, Donald Trump makes a statement about terminating the Constitution, whatever he meant, that's what it sounded like.
So the media now, because on the right, anything an untoward person says it's untoward on the right, we all have to answer for.
It doesn't matter what a leftist says.
If a leftist comes out and says, oh yeah, you know, Rashida Tlaib comes out and says, oh yeah, I hate Israel, hate the Jews, I hate those people.
They don't ask every Democrat about her comments.
But if anybody on the right says anybody anything, especially Trump, that's untoward, every Democrat now has to answer for him.
So this is the Sunday shows after Trump makes his statement about, remember, what Trump is commenting on is the Twitter fiasco.
It's cut five.
All elected leaders swear to uphold the Constitution.
Does calling for its suspension, is that disqualifying for a presidential candidate?
It's certainly not consistent with the United States.
You know, I'm not sure.
I do.
It's certainly not consistent with the oath that we all take.
Should the standard bearer for the Republican Party, the frontrunner for the nomination for the presidency, for your party in 2024, say this?
I do want to ask you about something that the frontrunner for your party's presidential nomination, former President Donald Trump, wrote on his social media platform.
What is your reaction to Donald Trump calling for the termination of the U.S. Constitution?
Well, obviously, I don't support that.
I have to ask you a question about Donald Trump's statement yesterday talking about suspending the Constitution.
Can you support a candidate in 2024 who's for suspending the Constitution?
I will support whoever the Republican nominee is.
That's an extraordinary statement.
You can't come out against someone who's for suspending the Constitution.
All right, so that's how they covered, that is how they covered Donald Trump commenting on Matt Taibbi's release of the Twitter emails.
Here is how they covered the Twitter emails.
All right, move on.
Nothing to see here.
Please disperse.
Nothing to see here, please.
They barely covered it at all.
So they covered Trump's comment because, of course, it's incendiary, but they didn't cover the news story that Trump was commenting on.
In the New York Times, a former newspaper, they simply say, oh, well, he made these, he's misrepresenting some Twitter thing that was going on somewhere about something, but he was misrepresenting it.
And listen, I know people who read the New York Times.
If the New York Times says Trump was misrepresenting it, they just move on.
They just move on.
They didn't cover it.
This whole thing in so many ways is a duplicitous psyop by our intelligence community, especially those intelligence people who came in and FBI people who came in during Barack Obama's administration.
Barack Obama was a genuinely destructive president.
And one of the things he did was plant these people like John Brennan, this lying dirtbag.
I mean, he's just an awful, awful human being.
He's just a complete dispenser of misinformation and disinformation.
Anything to just muddy the waters.
Listen to the way he talks.
He can barely get out a sentence that makes sense because he doesn't have to make sense.
He just has to suggest, like he did with the UFOs.
Remember the UFOs?
Well, there could be possibly something about this, which is now completely about to be debunked.
The UFO thing that was such a big story a couple months ago is going to be debunked.
But it doesn't matter.
They flood the zone with misinformation to confuse everybody so nobody knows what's true.
And everything, everything becomes emotional.
Everything becomes a question of emotion.
So they make people on the right emotional, as they have a right to be.
They get furious about their mistreatment.
They get so furious that they say stupid stuff and support stupid stuff that Donald Trump says.
Their furiousness and their supporting Donald Trump makes the center go like, I don't want to associate with those people.
And it also solidifies the people on the left.
You know, people who say that Donald Trump, for instance, wasn't part of the disappointing midterm returns, who say he wasn't part of the disappointing presidential election.
It wasn't his fault.
They're not thinking clearly because if you look at the Biden administration, if you look at how bad this administration has been, if you look at how much they've screwed up inflation and crime and the border, the lawlessness of the border, there's only one man powerful enough to counteract that.
Donald Trump is the only character big enough to counteract that.
He's the only person that people could look at and say, yeah, well, this Biden administration is bad, but I don't want anybody who comes from Donald Trump or anybody who's supporting Donald Trump because that's how big Donald Trump is.
Nobody else could make people, could convince people to vote for the Biden administration, but he could because he's that powerful a figure.
This is really, really dangerous and really scary.
Relief Band Training00:02:32
Who will guard the Guardians?
You know, in the Republic, Plato's Republic, when he asks, when Socrates asked this question, who will guard the Guardians?
The answer is you have to train them.
You have to train them so that their souls are full of virtue.
And then you won't need to guard the Guardians.
The Guardians essentially will guard themselves.
And how do you train the soul?
Well, Plato knows.
You train the soul through the arts.
You train the soul through culture.
And of course, you train the soul through education.
Well, who owns the culture?
Who owns the arts?
Who owns the education system?
Of course, it's the left.
And they have trained these guardians and they no longer know.
They no longer know what it is that they're supposed to guard.
It's a really dangerous situation, but the fight's not over.
In fact, I think really now that we have a full picture of just how bad this is, the fight has just begun.
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Now, I want to show what I mean when I say the Guardians have been mistrained in virtue.
Why Free Association Matters00:09:31
They're not.
They haven't been trained in the virtues that we need to protect, the virtues of virtuous action, which defends freedom, right?
We want to defend freedom.
And the reason we want to defend freedom is because freedom is the path to happiness.
This is what the founders understood was that freedom was made happiness possible by allowing for personal virtue, right?
That's the idea.
It's not supposed to be licentiousness.
It's not supposed to be, oh, you're free to screw anybody you want.
It's supposed to be you are free to find the way that you personally relate to God and that you personally understand virtue so that you can live a virtuous and godly life and therefore become happy because they knew that virtue was the path to happiness as virtually every philosopher has known since the Greeks.
There's a story out of Colorado.
I'm calling it Rocky Mountain Lowe because it really, Colorado is just an awful, awful state in this regard.
A lady named Lori Smith who designs websites and wants to offer custom wedding websites, right?
This is a big thing now.
And she wants to say upfront that she will decline to work on same-sex weddings because doing so would compromise her Christian values, right?
And this 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, I'm reading this from the Wall Street Journal, decided that the design of wedding websites is pure speech.
It's just, you know, that's what it is.
It's free.
It's protected speech.
But in Colorado, the panel has ruled that California law says companies that are open to the public can't refuse customers based on sexual orientation.
Now, Lori Smith is not refusing gay customers.
She is not saying gay customers can't come to her shop and have a website.
She is only saying that she is not going to make a website advertising gay marriage because it's against her religion.
So this has ended up this week in the Supreme Court.
And now, I want to remind you again, because Obama is so much a presence behind so much of this corruption and so much of this deterioration of our commitment to liberty, so much of the deterioration of the press and the police and the spy organizations' commitment to liberty by his appointments and by the way he operated.
I just want to remind you that in 1996, Obama was running for Illinois State Senate and he filled out a form and said that, yes, he approved of gay marriage.
Then when he became a national figure, he started to say, well, he didn't approve of gay marriage, but he did approve of civil unions.
Then he said he evolved and now he believed in gay marriage.
David Axelrod, his campaign manager, wrote a book saying he was lying the whole time.
And this is David Axelrod, who was his pal.
He said he was lying the whole time.
He always believed in gay marriage.
Then the Obergfeld decision comes down in 2015, in which the Supreme Court says that the founding fathers have come back to life, rewritten the Constitution, and now there is an absolute right to gay marriage in the Constitution.
And suddenly Obama comes out and he lights up the White House, the people's house, with rainbow colors.
Instantaneously, it becomes a sin to say you disagree with gay marriage.
Instantaneously.
Suddenly, your bank is hanging out rainbow flags.
Suddenly, every corporation, all of a sudden, it was like, no, no, no, we just want this.
We just want this.
No, no, no.
We lied.
We lied.
And now it's a sin.
And now, if you say what we were saying 20 minutes ago, you're a bad person.
You're going to be canceled.
Your life is going to be made miserable.
Now, the opposition to gay marriage, the religious opposition to gay marriage is pretty simple.
It's that obviously God made our bodies for male and female to fit together.
God made sex, obviously, for procreation.
To use it otherwise, according, now I'm basically putting forward Catholic theology, but to use the body otherwise with no possibility, even in principle, of conceiving is to use people as objects.
That's basically what the Catholic Church says.
And that means that, you know, obviously, you know, my wife is past childbearing age, but in principle, we're still male and female.
And so in principle, our sex life does serve procreation, but gay people don't.
I'm not saying I agree with that.
In fact, I think I've talked about why I find flaws in that reasoning, but still, it's not a question of whether I agree.
It's a question of whether you have a right to think it and whether you have a right to live out the meaning of your faith, right?
Now, you know, Alito, the Supreme Court Justice, because they made this argument, and the Solicitor General, the lawyers for Colorado, Eric Olson, Alito says, well, is this the same as interracial marriage?
Here's that exchange.
Do you think it's fair to equate opposition to same-sex marriage with opposition to interracial marriage?
Yes, because in how the law applies, not in the discussion with folks, because of course honorable people have different views on this issue.
And I think when you look at what Justice Kennedy said, the way to honor that requirement is, as this court has set forth in Fulton in Masterpiece, of having a rigorous interrogation to make sure that there are neutral and generally applicable laws applied in fact that way that don't single out religion.
And then the very next sentence of what Justice Kennedy said in Obergefell talked about when it transformed that honest and decent disagreement transformed into enacted law and policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimeter of the state on that exclusion.
But that's ridiculous, obviously.
It's not putting, for a private business, a small business to say, look, I can't put out this message because it violates my religious beliefs is obviously not giving it the imprimatur of the state.
That is absolutely absurd.
In the New York Times, on Knucklehead Row, their op-ed section, the head of the, David Cole of the American Civil Liberties Union, which used to be a guardian of free speech, argues, no, no, no.
He says, can an artist be compelled to create a website for an event she does not condone?
That's the question the Supreme Court has said it will take up on Monday, but it's the wrong question.
The right question is whether someone who chooses to open a business to the public should have the right to turn away gay customers simply because the service would provide them is expressive or artistic.
That's nonsense.
It's utter nonsense.
And to prove it's nonsense, all you have to do is walk into a Colorado cake shop that is not Christian and say, hey, you know what?
I would like a cake that says Donald Trump forever.
That's what I want.
I want a cake that says no abortion.
Abortion is murder.
And see how fast, see how fast they say no and throw you out.
They will not say what they don't want to say.
I don't want them to say what they don't want to say.
But religious people are excluded because they now have these protected classes, black people and gay people.
These are protected classes.
This is civil rights law and the way the civil rights law has eaten into, it has eaten into our right of free association.
They are committed.
They are committed to destroying free speech because it goes against their idea of civil rights.
Their idea of civil rights is everyone must believe the same thing.
Everyone must treat everybody the same way.
Everybody must associate with people, even if you don't like them.
I, by the way, believe you have the right to be a bigot, but that's not what this is about.
I think you have the right to be a bigot.
You have a right to say, I run a small business.
I don't want Jews in my store.
I would never go to a store that did that.
I would think it was disgusting.
But I think civil rights law has violated the essential right to association.
But because all this time has passed, they promised us, by the way, this is in that wonderful Christopher Caldwell book called The Age of Entitlement.
They promised when they passed the Civil Rights Act that it would not do this, that it would not mean that people couldn't associate with who they wanted to, with anyone they wanted to associate with and not associate with people they didn't want to.
But of course, the law since then, the case law, has stripped us of our right to free association.
You know, I despise bigotry.
I despise bigotry in all its forms.
And yet, and yet, I believe you have the right, the right to be bigoted.
A friend of mine once said, I'm thinking of joining a club where they don't allow Jews.
And I said, go ahead, but I'll never speak to you again.
And he said, but you believe in free association.
I said, that's right.
And you have the right to freely associate with those people.
And I have the right freely to not associate with you.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
It's supposed to be between people, you know, not mandated by the government.
You know, they believe that inclusion and tolerance are the central goods, but they're not.
They're not.
Virtuous action is the central good.
Freedom to choose virtuous action is the central good.
That's the central path to virtue, is freedom.
You cannot be virtuous without being free, because if somebody sticks a gun to your head and says do the right thing, that's not your virtue, right?
You have to be free to choose the right thing.
But the government can help you learn to do the right thing, and it can help guide you to do the right thing, and it can run its education, so it teaches you the right thing, but they do not do that anymore.
All they teach you is inclusion.
Every time I see a church that says, everyone is welcome here, I want to just write in, if you believe you're a sinner who has to be saved by Jesus Christ, because that's what constitutes a church, is people coming together who believe that thing.
They have been mistaught.
The Guardians have been mistaught to put inclusion and tolerance above every other virtue.
They are not the top virtues.
They're not even in the running for the top virtues.
So many other things are.
This lady who wants to do websites believes that supporting marriage, which is a central institution of a free country, of any country, she believes that her relationship with God depends on this.
Spiritual Search Through Sensuality00:16:54
She has every absolute right not to be tampered with or tormented by the government of Colorado.
And I hope the Supreme Court figures this out rightly, that Guardians have been misinformed.
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All right, for today's culture section, I want to talk more about the Advent season, which is the season of running up the run-up to Christmas, waiting for Christmas.
And Advent obviously is the season of Mary.
Mary is now bringing Jesus to fruition in her body, and I think she's an important person to talk to about.
And I believe that Mary, in doing this, in bringing Jesus into the world, is performing the ultimate human act.
I believe that she becomes the ultimate human, and that's why she's a very important person to talk about.
Joseph Ratzinger, the former Pope Benedict XVI, speaks of her and speaks just so beautifully of Mary.
And when you hear this, you'll be able to see why I respect at-home mothers so much.
He says, let us be aware that this stellar moment in world history, he's talking about the annunciation by the angel to Mary that she is going to bear the Son of God.
And he says, let us be aware that this stellar moment in world history was at the same time one of its quietest moments, a moment overlooked, not reported in any newspaper nor mentioned in any magazine, nor would it have been reported if such means had then been known.
What we are told there is therefore first and foremost a mystery of stillness.
What is truly great grows outside the limelight and stillness at the right time is more fruitful than constant busyness, which degenerates all too easily into mindless busy work.
Pope Benedict XVI goes on to say, all of us in this era when public life is being more and more Americanized are in the grip of a peculiar restlessness which suspects any quietness of being a waste of time, any stillness of being a sign of missing out on something.
Isn't that what we tell at-home mothers, you're missing out on the world.
It's a waste of time.
Every ounce of time is being measured and weighed, and thus we become oblivious to the true mystery of time, the true mystery of growing and becoming stillness.
It is the same in the area of religion where all our hopes and expectations rest on what we do, where we, through all kinds of exercises and activities, painstakingly avoid facing the true mystery of inner growth toward God.
And yet in the area of religion, what we receive is at least as important as what we do, what we receive.
He's talking about Mary receiving God and then producing the fruit, what's called the fruit of her womb, but is the fruit of God's interaction with her, which I will argue is exactly what all of us do in our lives.
All of us essentially perform, this is why I think God is always male, is that all of us perform the female role of receiving God and then producing what we produce by what we have received.
The fruit, you know, Jesus said, you have to be a part of my vine, a branch of my vine, to bear fruit.
And this is what we're doing.
Our inner lives, our inner lives, our love, our creativity, our experience of life is part of creation.
It's the next stage of creation.
God did the first part, and we in our consciousness in the image of God do that part again.
And it is all of it represented by pregnancy and delivering.
And all of that pregnancy and delivering is ultimately represented by Mary's receiving God and producing the baby Jesus.
Now, last year I got a lot of people angry because I was discussing Mary's perpetual virginity.
And it's really, obviously Catholics believe that Mary was perpetually a virgin and some Protestants do not believe that.
But what's interesting to me about that is it doesn't make me angry no matter what people believe, but people get very angry at me.
I told you that Sora Bamari refused to give my book, The Truth and Beauty, a blurb, very sweetly.
He was very nice about it.
But he said, look, for me, this is heresy.
I can't do it.
And I told them, you must not do it if you believe it's heresy.
But still, people take this, this is very important to people.
And my feeling is different.
My feeling is that God will one day bring the churches together and he means for us to explore this and to listen to one another and sort of feel around it.
Now, why do people get upset?
I think people get upset because of what I said before, that Mary's nature is all of our jobs.
It represents all of what we all do.
When we say to women, wives, that they should submit to their husbands, we say because the husband is representing God and you are representing the church.
And when we say to when we call Jesus the bridegroom, we basically say that all of us are the bride.
And when we say that men should be a branch of the vine to bear their fruit, we're basically putting them in a kind of feminine position.
I think that's very upsetting for people, especially for men.
Men don't like that.
And I think that it means they want to eliminate the sexual imagery from it.
And I think that that's one of the reasons people get very upset.
Now, remember, none of us was there.
None of us knows what Mary was.
I take my belief that Mary was not a perpetual virgin from the scripture where it says that Jesus had brothers and sisters.
And obviously, Mary and Joseph were married for 12 years, at least.
We know they were married at least for 12 years.
But the Catholics reason that, no, she must have been a perpetual virgin.
And therefore, for instance, Joseph would have been an old man.
Whenever in Catholic paintings, like this one here, an absolutely beautiful, one of my favorite paintings, it's in a museum in Pasadena, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
I can't remember, I think it's an 18th century or late 17th century painting of Joseph holding the little baby.
It's a beautiful painting because he just looks so happy and the baby is playing with his beard.
But look how old he is.
I once took a friend of mine who's an evangelical to see this painting because I loved it so much.
I didn't think about it in terms of theology.
I just loved the painting so much.
And the minute he saw it, he said, why is he so old?
Why is he so old?
And I have to explain that the Catholics feel that he must have been old and past his sexual activity.
And that's how Mary remained a virgin.
And also, Jesus' brothers and sisters were from Mary's, Joseph's previous marriage.
And that's how they work all that out, although they admit there's no proof of that in scriptures.
Now, the reason I think this is important is because it has to do with how we look at sexuality and human life.
Now, a lot of people say to me, you talk about sex too much, and I don't think I talk about sex half enough.
I think sex and procreation is the whole purpose of the human body.
It is what the human body is formed to do.
It's just not the purpose of the human person, right?
The human person is formed for love, and that's a very different purpose, but sometimes intermingled, obviously, with Eros and with sex and with producing babies.
But if you only look around at what's going on in our world today, as our religion falls apart, as people say, oh, we're entering a post-Christian world, which is really a pre-Christian world, we're becoming pagans again.
Where is the dysfunction most obvious?
It's most obvious in our sexual lives.
So I think it's important to ask what is Mary's relationship with sex.
Now, the Catholics, beginning fairly early on, began to develop a doctrine where they really prioritize virginity.
They said basically there were different states.
Marriage was one state, but it wasn't as good as virginity.
Virginity was a better state than marriage.
And that comes directly from St. Paul, who talked about, you know, what did he say?
He said, it's better to marry than to burn, right?
He said that if you're not married, he says it's good for a man, it is good for a man not to marry.
But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.
The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife and likewise the wife to her husband.
He goes on to say, I say this as a concession, though.
He's conceding that they should have sex, that married couples should have sex, not as a command.
I wish that all men, says Paul, were as I am, meaning celibate, but each man has his own gift from God.
One has this gift, another has that.
Now to the unmarried and the widows, I say it is good for them to stay unmarried as I am, but if they cannot control themselves, they should marry.
It's better to marry than to burn with passion.
So that's not exactly, you know, a sex positive message, right?
It's saying, you know, having sex is secondary.
Now, Jewish people, and I'm a Jew as well as a Christian, I was born a Jew, basically don't feel that way.
I mean, and Islam doesn't feel that way either.
They honor women as wives and mothers.
They think that that is where women shine, basically, and that the creation in Judaism, at least, I don't know about it in Islam, but in Judaism, having children is a duty toward God.
You're supposed to keep the race alive and reproduce.
So this idea that virginity is holier than marriage begins at a time when they thought Jesus might be coming back right away, so it didn't matter whether the race procreated.
But it goes on into the Middle Ages and it becomes this elevation of virginity so that Mary's virginity becomes very important because she's so holy, she's such an important figure that she must have been perpetually virgin.
Obviously, I'm not giving you the whole theology, but I'm just saying that the attitude toward that.
Whereas for me, you know, obviously a virgin mother is a miracle, but a virgin wife is a pain in the neck, right?
I don't think a wife should be a virgin.
I don't think that would be a very good marriage.
And I like to think of, because I elevate Mary so much, I like to think of her as being as great a wife as she was a mother.
And this struggle in the early church resulted in a lot of literature in the Middle Ages, some of which elevated virginity.
Recently, I went back to the Arthurian legends because I'm looking for ways as I write these winter stories, I'm looking for ways that an anti-hero might be transformed into a hero, because I feel that that's what the culture is looking for.
And so I'm speaking into the culture, and that's one of the things, one of the themes of the winter novels.
And I was going back to these books of the King Arthur legends and the Knights of the Round Table, because they were my first introduction to Christianity in a lot of ways.
I was reading tough guy novels.
I love the Tough Guy writers, Raymond Chandler's mystery novels and Dashel Hammett's mystery novels.
And Raymond Chandler's mystery novels are full of knightly imagery.
And so, and the Maltese Falcon by Dash Lahamet is full of quest imagery.
Ernest Hemingway, one of my favorite tough guy writers when I was a kid, wrote the book The Sun Also Rises, which is filled with imagery from the Holy Grail legend.
So I thought, well, I better read the Holy Grail legend and these King Arthur stories.
And I just absolutely adored them.
I loved the King Arthur stories.
And they were filled with Christian imagery.
So that's why I started to read the New Testament, which I didn't know anything about being Jewish.
I had to go out and buy one.
There wasn't one in my home.
Recently, in the providential way of these things, I found out that our friend and who comes on the show, and I hope she'll be on next week, Megan Basham, was also deeply influenced by the King Arthur stories.
And then I found out that Jeremy and other people here at the Daily Water were influenced by these Stephen Lawhead Arthurian novels that we just bought, hopefully, to turn into screenwork.
And so King Arthur and the stories of the round table have had a big effect on a lot of people bringing them to Christianity.
And one of the things I found about them when I went back to them was that in the hunt for the Holy Grail, there's a real elevation of virginity.
Only the Holy Grail is the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper in most of these legends.
And the only knights who can find them are the virgin knights like Galahad.
Lancelot, who's had an affair with Elaine and also with Queen Guinevere, cannot find the Holy Grail.
He's going to fail at that and his infidelity is going to bring down the kingdom.
But Galahad, who's a virgin, can find them.
This very intense respect for virginity.
But at the same time, well, not at the same time, but later on in the 13th century out of France, there come these other stories about knights that developed the idea of courtly love, in which courtly love was a yearning, a lust, a desire for a woman who was married and therefore you couldn't have.
And so you would go out and perform feats of daring do for her, but you couldn't have her.
You could only yearn for her from a distance.
And now there's a very famous theory that these stories that became very popular, stories of courtly love, were meant to be stories of spirituality.
They were actually metaphors for the spiritual search.
And of course, the greatest story of that metaphor, the way Eros becomes a spiritual search is the Divine Comedy by Dante, in which Dante rises up through the spheres from the inferno to the paradise by following Beatrice, who he lusts after, but that lust becomes purified as he gets closer and closer to heaven.
And so the erotic desire becomes a spiritual desire.
And this is what John Paul II, the Pope, talks about in his theology of the body when he says that priests are celibate not because celibacy is better than sex, than marriage.
He says that's not the reason.
It's that some people are given the gift of turning all their erotic attention toward God.
That's what he says.
And that's a really interesting idea that because the way I see it is, yes, I do believe that sex represents something even higher than itself.
Eros represents agape.
It represents this search for spirituality.
But I also believe that we can't, we're stuck in this material world, that everything we experience is material.
And that's why we eat the bread and wine to get at the body and blood of Christ.
We don't just sit there and think really hard to, you know, blend in to commune with Christ.
We actually take this bread and wine because we know him through the breaking of the bread.
We know the spiritual world through the material world.
And so the reason that Theologically, the reason that I like to think of Mary as a complete, as a virgin mother, but a complete wife and a mother, a natural mother of other children, is because I think that you know the spiritual world through the material world.
It's the only way we know it.
We are creatures of the senses.
We are creatures of material and that material is given to us to see something beyond.
Now, I understand what the Catholics are saying, and I do not denigrate it in the least.
I understand why they are elevating her in a different way.
But for me, this is the way I see the world.
I see the world as a sensual experience that leads to a spiritual experience.
When you see sex as a sensual experience that leads to a spiritual experience, you treat it a lot differently.
You don't just do anything that feels good.
You don't just leave it for consent.
You do it hopefully in a way that expresses the love that will take you beyond sensuality into spirituality.
And of course, we only get to know God in Christianity through that moment, through that moment that comes at the end of Advent when Mary gives birth and we actually meet him in the flesh.
It is in the flesh that we know what we know.
It's through the senses that we know what we know.
But the things that we meet in the material world actually represent something much higher.
And that is what comes to us on Christmas Day.
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Essential Gifts for Christmas00:02:31
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So I'm really excited about my guest today because there's this big debate on the right about how we move forward when things seem to be falling apart.
A Christian Nation's Diverse Faith Tradition00:15:02
And as I spoke about before, it seems like we are entering what they call a post-Christian world, but was really a pre-Christian pagan world.
And a lot of people are wondering how we can get back the ideas of virtue and the practice of virtue that the founders knew was so essential to our freedom.
Stephen Wolfe has written a really provocative book called The Case for Christian Nationalism.
You'll remember that we were being condemned.
Everybody on the right was being condemned for being Christian nationalists.
Stephen Wolf says, yeah.
He is a country scholar at Wolfshire in central North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and four children.
And he recently finished a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, Princeton University's James Madison program.
He co-hosts the podcast, Ours Politica.
Stephen, thank you so much for coming on.
Yeah, thank you for having me on.
So since Christian nationalism has become virtually a slur on the left, maybe you could start by just giving us something of your definition of what Christian nationalism even means.
Yeah, I mean, the simplest definition is that it's simply a nation or a Christian nation that has chosen to arrange itself and act for its good.
And that good is both earthly and heavenly good.
So that's the simplest kind of definition.
And I think that's something Christians should desire and seek after.
So it's just our earthly and temporal good, which would be just earthly comforts, that sort of thing.
But at the same time, have the nation think, well, there's something higher and greater than just the mash we eat all day.
There's something higher, and we should order ourselves to that.
Would that affect the way, for instance, lawmakers debate laws and the way laws are made?
I think that it would.
I think it would.
But I think the main point is that there would be this sense in which we as a people, as a Christian people, ought to think of things higher than not only, I mean, not only the intergenerational way, thinking in terms of future generations, but also the present generation as well and their ultimate end.
So what is the chief in demand is to glorify God.
And to glorify God is to worship God, and that's what we'll do in heaven.
So I think the nation, the lawmakers, if they had that in mind, I think we would have laws that would point people to that.
Okay, so now the obvious question, does this in any way get in the is it obstructed by the founders' commitment to not having a government establishment of religion and to having free expression of religion, which in the Constitution at least doesn't exclude Judaism and Islam and other religions?
Yeah, I think certainly at the founding era at the federal level, the First Amendment, of course, only at first and I think still only applies to the federal government.
So yeah, there was you could not establish religion at the federal system, the federal level.
That would impose some kind of denominational church across the entire nation.
But at the time of the founding, there were still several establishments in different states.
You had establishments in Connecticut and Massachusetts and other states.
And these lasted for decades after the founding.
I believe the last one, the last disestablishment was, I think, in early 1830s.
I forget the day exactly.
But for decades, there were actually church establishments.
But at the same time, there was wide religious liberty.
So there's the famous letters that George Washington sent to Jewish synagogue and Roman Catholics and Baptists and said that we as a country are not a persecuting country despite whatever happened in the 17th century.
So there's wide toleration, but there still was a, and this is expressed in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, that there was a widespread self-understanding of American self-conception as a Christian nation that was at the same time highly tolerant of other of non-Christian religions.
So I think it is compatible.
So when we're thinking Christian nationalism, we shouldn't necessarily think of Europe in the 16th century, but there is a form we can think of that's very American that I think we can pull from our own tradition to seek to restore it.
There's no question that at the time of the founding, this was a Christian nation in the cultural sense of those words.
Now, it seems to me we're almost the opposite of that.
What does a realistic path to this Christian nation look like?
Yeah.
I mean, that is kind of the big question.
And some of the criticisms I've received about the book has been that I don't give enough discussion of that.
My excuse is that I'm a political theorist trying to do political theory and I'm not a politician or whatever practitioner.
But I think that the way forward is going to be at the local and state level because there are Christian majorities in many states.
And I think if we as Christians were to see ourselves as kind of a Christian voting bloc, I think we could be very effective at the state and local levels.
And this would potentially clash with the federal level as well.
But I think at this time with the kind of moral insanity we're seeing in this country, it's time for Christians to not just think about kind of pushing back against critical race theory or push back against critical theory or a lot of the anti-Christian sentiment you see among elites, but actually try to replace those as well.
So to have a Christian society and a self-confident and explicit Christian society.
So not just go back to the old secularism of the 90s or the 80s, but have a kind of a broader, kind of more robust vision of kind of a restoring this Christian self-conception that's reflected in laws and the way we relate to each other as Christians.
But yeah, I think that's going to have to be at the local and state level.
And I think civil leaders are going to have to be very assertive in that regard and face a lot of heat to bring it about.
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There are no easing penny bad ways.
Do you think, I mean, one of the, we didn't just kind of tumble to this place.
We got here through a process of history.
And part of that history were the bloody years of the Reformation, where all of Europe was at each other's throats and people were burning each other over their, you know, translations of the Bible and over theological points that today, you know, two people can sit down and have a beer and argue about, you know, the perpetual virginity of Mary, but then, you know, you were being basically put to death if you didn't get the answer right.
And I think, I don't think anybody wants to go back to that.
And yet it does seem to be part of monotheism.
There does seem to be this strain in monotheism that makes it very difficult to disagree.
Is that antithetical to the American mindset, even the true American mindset, let alone the one we're steeped in today?
I think among, I don't think it is.
It's antithetical because I think it was, if you look at like the 19th century America, there was very extremely religious, but at the same time, you had disestablishment and you had a lot of conversations and people weren't killing each other, at least very regularly, at least certainly not like in the 16th and 17th centuries.
So I think there is a very kind of deep American tradition of having a diversity of faiths that at the same time could recognize their country as being a Christian country.
And I actually think this is kind of principled Protestantism because in Protestantism, your faith is not necessarily, is not aligned to one to sort of institution.
It's not like in the Roman Catholic Church where you're the kind of inner out.
I know this is kind of complicated and Roman Catholics might disagree and all that, but at least it used to be that kind of if you're either under the Pope or not, and that's kind of your inner out of the church.
The one true church is this.
Whereas Presbyterians can look at Baptists and say, okay, we differ on the issue of baptism, but we can still recognize each other's mutual faith because it's not a matter of institutional alignment.
And so I think what happened in American history up into the 1800s was this recognition of mutual Protestantism and this ability to affirm each other's faith.
And so there's a very principled Protestant way of extending religious liberty.
And this is true for even people who may not recognize the principle.
So Roman Catholics, whatever their view is today or then, whether they think it's in and out based upon the papacy, Protestants can still extend the religious liberty because of a mutual recognition of Christianity or Trinitarian baptism or something like that.
And so I think that the point being that you can have this sort of pan, what I call a pan-Protestant order, where Protestants recognize following a Protestant principle, that faith is an inward thing and faith is something that's not an institutional alignment.
And so you can affirm each other's mutual faith and extend liberty in charity, Christian charity along those lines.
And I think that, again, I think that's what happened in the 19th century.
And it's kind of a culmination of a lot of religious history.
Like you mentioned, some of the, you know, the religious wars and conflicts.
I think that was Protestantism working itself out and being able to recognize the mutual faiths of fellow Christians.
You know, I totally respect what you said about not being, you're not a policy guy.
I'm not a policy guy.
It's very hard to sometimes get to places, but I am having a somewhat difficult time imagining this world.
Maybe it's because we're so far from it that my imagination doesn't reach that far.
I mean, part of the reason I think we came to the secular the idea of secular government is Jesus himself says, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar and unto God the things that are God.
And it seems to indicate that, you know, the government has certain rights that actually are outside of the religious sphere, the right to tax and things like that, whether or not there's Caesar on the coin.
Jesus doesn't seem to care because he's not dealing with those things.
And so I'm having a hard time seeing, well, how does a Jew feel in this world, in this Christian nation?
How does an Islamic guy feel or an atheist feel?
Does he feel that he is being compressed in some way, that his actual, his actual liberty, not his liberty to sleep around, but his liberty to express and live by his conscience, is not being hemmed in by your particular religiosity?
Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, if it was a Christian nation, this would mean that public institutions are Christian.
This would mean that Christian, that public schools are Christian.
And so there'd be Bible learning and you'd learn English from the Bible.
And so there'd be a general expectation that you'd learn religious instruction that would be biblical.
But at the same time, given what I just said, there would be the possibilities for exceptions, exemptions based upon if someone doesn't believe, or maybe they're Jehovah's Witness, or maybe they're Jewish.
And so they can be kind of, you know, they can be an exception to the rule.
Kind of like, I mean, today, this is kind of what Christians are actually face this all the time.
And that would be that they are seeking exemptions from normal.
And so what's happening?
So, I mean, it's essentially what I'm saying is instead of secularism, it should be Christianity.
And then anything that's not Christian can be subject to an exemption.
I have to, I've only got two minutes left.
I have to ask you this question.
Toward the end of the book, you talk about the gynocracy.
And this is something, the rule of women, the rule by women.
And this is something that religious people are talking about a lot, that it seems to be A, making women miserable, but B, going against certain ideas.
What is it?
How do you stop it?
And as I say, I only have two minutes here.
Yeah, so gynecracy is just, it's trying to understand how kind of the feminine, certain feminine traits operate within institutions.
And this could be everything from government to non-government institutions.
And it's the it's, I think a lot of guys experience this when they're kind of kind of like walking on eggshells within the corporate room.
They're not sure if what they say is going to get them in trouble or what.
And they're at the same, so there's like this sort of like HR mindset that women can easily appeal to the third party that is the HR to kind of get at people and use retribution.
You use the system to gear it around their interests.
At the same time, there is a sense in which the voting bloc of women, particularly liberal women, well, liberal women, is so skewed towards this empathetic attitude that can actually be very destructive.
Mom's Influence on Faith00:06:50
And I don't know the exact solution to it.
Obviously, unless we're going to take out kind of these, the ability for civil rights cases to be adjudicated to at the expense of the institutions.
But that's the general idea, yeah, like I said, is that there's certain feminine traits are exhibiting within these institutions that are destructive upon the institutions themselves and those need to be resisted as best they can.
But it seems that the whole system is designed to actually amplify them.
I have to stop there, unfortunately.
Really provocative ideas.
No, a real genuine contribution to the debate that's going on.
Stephen Wolf is the author's name, S-T-E-P-H-E-N.
The book is called The Case for Christian Nationalism.
Stephen, thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you.
All right.
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Right after this, I'm going to send you crazy.
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He's all right, folks.
All right, from faith.
Hi, Andrew.
I want to have a relationship with God.
This is an important letter, I think.
I want to have a relationship with God.
My parents used religion as an excuse to violently abuse my seven siblings and me growing up.
The abuse eventually led my youngest brother to his death at two years old.
How can I separate religion and the abuse we endured, especially when many religious people support spare the rod and spoil the child?
Now, the reason this is such an important letter is because I think almost everybody has some element of this problem.
But what faith has here is the worst element.
Faith, my heart aches for you.
I'm so sorry about that you went through this, and I'm certainly sorry for the death of your brother.
It's just a terrible, it's a terrible, terrible story.
But all of our parents fail in some ways, and yours is an extreme example of that.
I think the psychology of human beings has been misrepresented in this materialist age, having to do with sex and having to do with this and your mother and father and all this stuff, because they've left out the fact that your parents are assigned to represent God, male and female.
They're supposed to act in the perfect world.
They're supposed to act in the image of God.
And your mom, you know, let's say that your mom, let's say they do it well, instead of what happened to you, this nightmare that happened to you, your mom is tender and loving.
Your father is firm but fair.
And as you grow older and become an adult, you notice that they have flaws and they're human beings and they're not perfect and all this.
But you forgive them because they demonstrated enough of the godly qualities that you understand that the ways in which you wouldn't even know that they failed if there weren't something beyond them that they represented.
In other words, because you know, because you're born with the knowledge of God, you're born with God inside you, he's written on your heart, you knew that your father was failing when he did something when he wasn't quite fair, when he should have been fair, or when your mother lost her temper and was unkind, that you knew she was failing.
But most of the time, she was pretty good and he was pretty good.
And so you forgive them for being human, because we're all human, right?
And you forgive them and you move beyond them through them, through what you learn from them, you move beyond them to the image of the true God.
And it's easy to develop a relationship.
It's easier to develop a relationship with God.
In your situation where they have failed so utterly to represent God truly, they represented him falsely.
They lied about who God was.
They showed you cruelty.
They showed you smallness.
They showed you bitterness and ugliness and unforgiving, brutal nature.
And all these things have deformed the image of God.
So you can't reach him through them.
You can't look at them and say, somehow I'm going to take that to God.
So really what you have to do is you have to do the opposite.
Instead of going through them to God, you have to go through him back through them.
To put it a little bit foggily, let me see if I can explain it.
You know, God is available to you.
The nature of God is available to you.
If you read the Gospels, you will see him.
You will see how he behaves, how he acts.
You will see the love, the forgiveness, the impatience with hypocrisy, the impatience with dishonesty, but also this incredibly forgiving nature that welcomes people in, even as they're doing wrong, even as they're making mistakes.
He just welcomes people in.
He sits and has dinner with them.
He doesn't do the thing that a lot of preachers, a lot of Christians are doing, where they're judging how good their Christianity by who they condemn.
He doesn't do that at all.
He basically is saying, here I am.
Take a look at me, even in your sin, even in your sin.
I'm here to live for you and to die for you.
And then talk to him, talk to God, and start to understand who he is.
And the reason I say this is a backwards operation is because as you talk to God, you will notice that you are imposing certain images of him that come from your brutal and abusive parents.
And as you do that, and as you realize that that's not his nature, that's your parents, you can start to strip that ugly facade away and start to get at the real God in his love for you.
And as that happens, your relationship with your parents will become smaller and smaller and your relationship with your God will become bigger and bigger.
And also if you do certain kind of traditional rituals like taking communion, you can relate to God directly through ritual, through the bread and the wine, instead of thinking about your parents.
And so if you pray to God and if you try to understand God and read about God, the true God, not the God that your parents represent him, because that's a falsehood, you'll find he's really, you know, he's really there.
And that's the thing, the other thing, because he's really there, because he's not a phantom, he'll help you.
He will actually help you.
You know, when Noah, think of it this way, when Noah, after the flood, wanted to find out if the floodwater was going down, he sent out a bird, a dove, and the bird came back with a branch.
And he started to realize, ah, the floodwater is going down.
And when he sent it out finally, it just disappeared because it didn't have to come back because the earth wasn't covered with water.
As you get to know God better, you will start to have the dove of prayer will come back to you with a little sprig of joy.
And when you start to feel that joy, you'll realize that this flood of abuse that drowned your relationship with God is going down.
And as it goes down, finally, you'll go out there.
You'll send that dove out and it won't come back.
And the joy will be what remains.
Screwing the Pooch Politically00:04:19
It's doable.
It's utterly doable.
It's very difficult, but you have to put aside this thing that has happened to you.
Things happen to all of us.
All of us have bad things.
Yours are particularly bad.
And so it will be particularly difficult, but it's nowhere near impossible.
And with God, it's utterly possible and it will happen.
And I wish you luck and I hope you write back and tell us how things are going.
Let me do one more if I can from Scott.
I love the show.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but when you talk about Trump's classlessness and personality faults, I feel you're missing the reason we support him.
As president, Trump got great results in Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, our economy, more, period.
It would be great if we had a president that could be a role model, but who was the last such president?
He says, I could go on and on with all the bad things Obama did and the good things that Trump did, but we have accepted that we're not getting a role model for president and we just want results.
And the reason I want to answer this question, because I feel I keep saying the same thing and people keep hearing the same thing, but it's not the same thing that I'm actually saying.
I don't admire the classlessness and unkindness of Trump's personality, but there is lots of stuff about Trump I admire.
And certainly his policies and some of his achievements in the first three years of his presidency, I think are unbelievably great.
Some of the best achievements since Reagan.
And I've said again and again that he is a godsend.
Unfortunately, so was King Saul.
And after a while, King Saul just timed out.
You know, things happen.
The thing about his classlessness and his rudeness that I keep putting forward is not the fact that I personally disapprove of it, although I think all of us do.
I mean, Trump does things that we would punish our children for if they did them.
And then we say it's all right because Trump did it because he did this and he did that.
That's not my problem, though.
That's a personal problem that has nothing to do with politics.
My problem is, is that his flaws, the flaws that got him elected, the flaws that made him effective, have now made him a loser politically.
I can't be sure of this.
And I know he surprised everybody by winning the first time, but just barely, just barely.
And the second time it didn't happen.
And I think by telling ourselves that the election was stolen, and I do believe it was an unfair election, but by telling ourselves the election is stolen, we're missing the point.
He's a giant figure, and he's an important figure.
And I think he is screwing the pooch politically.
And I think his attitude and his mouth and the things he says are screwing the pooch politically.
I think they're ineffective.
I think the fact, I've said, I've used the McCain example all the time, the John McCain example, because I disagreed with almost everything McCain believed in.
But by treating him with disrespect, McCain got him back by not voting against Obamacare.
And people say, well, that's not the reason he did it.
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
He made enemies of people who should have been his allies.
And he made enemies of people who might have been voters for him.
He estranged independent voters by his behavior.
And he loses his election because he's losing us elections.
He's now lost his election, the presidential election, and this midterm election and his midterm election.
While he was president, he lost.
So that's three in a row.
He has lost.
And part of that reason is because of the way he behaves.
I'm making a political point, not a moral point.
There is a moral point to be made.
I don't like the fact that he acts that way, but it's, you know, who cares?
If he's getting, if he's making us more free, if he's defeating Democrats, I'm for him.
But he's not.
And I'm sorry.
You cannot just keep telling yourself, oh, it's this one doing that and it's that one and they're cheating and it's this and that.
No.
I mean, he's a powerful guy, a big personality, and he's losing because of the way he behaves.
And he lost while he was office because of the way he behaves, as in the example of Obamacare.
You know, I loved some of the Trump years.
It's not fair to say to me, oh, you're just anti-Trump.
It's just not fair.
I supported him.
I voted for him twice.
I'd vote for him again if I had to.
But I think he is a liability politically because of the way he behaves and because of his egotism.
It's a political point.
That's it.
There are many, many great questions this week.
And I may just use this mailbag list again next week because of many things I want to talk about, but I'm out of time now.
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