NXR Podcast - THE LIVESTREAM - We’ve Been Lied To About History
Aired: 2025-01-27
Duration: 02:11:26


=== Why We Need History (02:07) ===

[00:00:00]  Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
[00:00:04]  I get it.
[00:00:04]  It's annoying.
[00:00:05]  Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
[00:00:07]  When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
[00:00:16]  You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
[00:00:21]  We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
[00:00:28]  The last decade has seen an explosion in history related podcasts.
[00:00:32]  Shows like The Rest is History receive approximately 12.5 million downloads per month, proving that people are hungry to know what really happened in the past.
[00:00:43]  Our history shapes our understanding of who we are as a nation, as communities, and even as Christians.
[00:00:51]  But with so much information at our fingertips, conflicting narratives, revisionist accounts, and even long buried truths finally coming to light, how do we sort through all of this to find out what's true?
[00:01:06]  This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members and our faithful donors.
[00:01:16]  You can join our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, or you can donate by going to right response ministries.com forward slash donate.
[00:01:28]  Today we'll explore the erosion of trust in our institutions, the value of tradition that so many have dismissed.
[00:01:37]  And why it matters that we do the hard work of uncovering our history.
[00:01:42]  Stay tuned with this episode, especially as we welcome paleoconservative Christian perspective from John Harris to the show.
[00:01:52]  Tune in now.

=== The Danger of Contrarianism (05:13) ===

[00:02:07]  All right, welcome back.
[00:02:07]  Here we are.
[00:02:08]  It is Monday afternoon, a little after 3 p.m.
[00:02:11]  I'm joined by Michael Belch.
[00:02:12]  Our very own Wesley Todd is not with us today.
[00:02:15]  He's traveling, but we'll see him on Wednesday, Lord willing.
[00:02:18]  And as I just said in that introduction, we're going to be joined today by special guest John Harris from Conversations That Matter.
[00:02:26]  And Michael has outlined today's episode.
[00:02:28]  So I'm going to hand it to him to kind of flesh things out and lay a little bit of the framework.
[00:02:32]  But basically, what we're going to be delving into is how do we know what's true?
[00:02:38]  We cannot progress.
[00:02:41]  Unless we can stand on the shoulders of giants that came before us, unless we can learn certain lessons from the past.
[00:02:47]  And whenever we do learn a lesson, whenever there are positive developments within the providence of God, we want to be able to seal those into our conscience as we move forward as a society so that we keep those lessons and that we don't have to constantly be reinventing the wheel with every generation that passes by.
[00:03:07]  You've seen this even theologically outside of politics and culture, but.
[00:03:11]  I'm reminded of the 20th century.
[00:03:14]  There's been a lot of higher criticism that's seeped into seminaries and the white ivory towers.
[00:03:22]  And basically, people questioning well, do we really know that there was a literal virgin birth or that there was actually a bodily resurrection?
[00:03:32]  Or one of the big ones, those are obviously massive, but one of the constant ones, just constant scrutiny, scrutinizing again and again and again and again, decade upon decade upon decade.
[00:03:45]  Over the 20th century, was in regards to scripture, the inerrancy of scripture, and how do we know that this is really the word of God and that we got the manuscripts right and that we got this and we got that.
[00:03:58]  And what I've noticed is that if you're not careful, you essentially can just do the work that generations have already done and waste your entire life, where by the end of your life, you're 80 years old and you're sitting there and you're like, yeah, the King James turns out is just fine.
[00:04:19]  I could have actually just been reading it and doing the actual theological work and ironing out new things and applying God's word to society and to politics and to culture.
[00:04:30]  But instead, I spent my entire life because I thought that maybe the entire canon of Scripture was a psyop.
[00:04:40]  And so, have we been lied to?
[00:04:43]  That's kind of what we're going to be getting into.
[00:04:44]  Have we been lied to?
[00:04:45]  Yes.
[00:04:47]  Have we been especially lied to in our generation?
[00:04:49]  Has the 20th century.
[00:04:52]  Been uniquely suppressed aspects of history and things like that to pull the wool over our eyes.
[00:05:03]  I think virtually every generation has probably had that where elites are hiding certain things from the public.
[00:05:09]  So I don't know if it's unique, but yes, I think there's been a lot of deceit, things that have to be uncovered, but we want to be careful not to just simply become contrarians.
[00:05:19]  It's one thing to be a conspiracy theorist.
[00:05:23]  Within reason to say, well, I don't know about masks, I don't know about jabs, I don't know about this, I don't know about that.
[00:05:32]  Well, a lot of the conspiracy theorists have ultimately, over the last few years, been proven right again and again and again.
[00:05:40]  The old adage is the difference between a conspiracy and the truth is about three to six months.
[00:05:46]  So, certainly, that has paid off well to be suspicious.
[00:05:52]  But a contrarian, in my assessment, I like that word, I think it's helpful.
[00:05:56]  Contrarian versus conspiracy theorist.
[00:05:59]  Somebody who's conspiratorial basically is just acknowledging elite theory and that elites at times lie.
[00:06:07]  And in our society, as we've moved more from a republic to an aristocracy and more from that even to an oligarchy with, I think, nefarious elites, then that's probably a good instinct.
[00:06:19]  And it's not always going to make you right, but I think more often than not, you'll do well to be suspicious of what your elites are telling you.
[00:06:29]  But a contrarian.
[00:06:31]  A contrarian is different.
[00:06:32]  A contrarian is not just conspiratorial.
[00:06:35]  A contrarian basically ascertains the truth on any given topic at any given time by simply taking the minority position.
[00:06:46]  You just take the minority position.
[00:06:48]  So it's like the contrarian would say COVID is a lie.
[00:06:55]  And because that's a lie, so is everything else, all the way down.
[00:07:02]  And ironically, the contrarian can find himself actually pushing certain narratives that are false and even nefarious.
[00:07:14]  So, this will get me in trouble with some of our audience because our audience likes us because we push back on mainstream narratives all the time.

=== Uncovering Historical Truths (14:38) ===

[00:07:21]  Post war consensus is a big example that we've been pushing back on a lot.
[00:07:26]  But just for fun, kicks and giggles, I'll just get into it real quick the moon landing.
[00:07:31]  So, you can say, well, we were in a Cold War with Russia, and so we lied in order to win, and the whole Was fabricated and we never really landed on the moon.
[00:07:39]  You know, if we've landed on the moon, how can we haven't been back?
[00:07:41]  It's been 60 years.
[00:07:43]  You know, but here's another alternative.
[00:07:49]  I remember, you know, as I looked into the moon landing just for fun, it is fun and interesting to look into.
[00:07:57]  You know, some of the popular hip hop songs at the time, right?
[00:08:00]  It's the 1960s, Summer of Love.
[00:08:03]  You know, you've got the sexual revolution, you've got the hormonal birth.
[00:08:07]  Control pill, you've got Vietnam, you know, and there's wars, and then you've got the civil rights movement that's happening at the time, and all these different things.
[00:08:16]  And one of the hip hop songs that was popular at the time was talking about basically, you know, listing out every grievance, right, genuine or otherwise, but listing every perceived, you know, alleged grievance that you could list under the sun, that in the vein of social justice, that kind of stuff, and then the refrain that would repeat again and again after listing.
[00:08:41]  The grievances is, but Whitey's on the moon, right?
[00:08:44]  So, you know, black people are in the welfare lines, you know, can't have bread to eat, but Whitey's on the moon.
[00:08:48]  You know, we're over here in Vietnam fighting a war, you know, and our young boys of our country are being slaughtered, but Whitey's on the moon.
[00:08:58]  In other words, part of the friction that was going on at the time was, well, we're giving money to NASA, we're spending all these tax dollars to compete with Russia in a Cold War to go and land on the moon, and what for?
[00:09:12]  You know, what are we going to find on the moon that solves our problems here on Earth?
[00:09:18]  And so, you know, on one hand, you could say, well, the moon, you know, that whole thing is just, you know, NASA lying.
[00:09:25]  And I think NASA is suspicious.
[00:09:28]  I think that there have been lies from NASA.
[00:09:30]  But you can go so far that, like, while you're being, you know, hashtag based and, you know, like, I can see behind the veil and I'm aware of what's really going on.
[00:09:41]  Meanwhile, unknowingly, what you're actually promulgating potentially.
[00:09:46]  Maybe I'm wrong, you know, but potentially what you're promulgating is you're actually giving in to the left and making all their wishes and dreams come true by once again agreeing that one of the white man's pristine accomplishments isn't true.
[00:10:06]  You know, like we never made it to the moon.
[00:10:08]  Whereas the alternative is what if we made it to the moon?
[00:10:11]  We actually did have the technology because we weren't idiotic with social justice.
[00:10:19]  And we actually had a meritocracy and we were pushing for American excellence.
[00:10:27]  And what if the reason we've never been back is because we've been woke ever since the Civil Rights Act?
[00:10:34]  Not just for the last five years since 2020 and George Floyd, but we've actually been woke for 60 years.
[00:10:41]  What if wokeness destroyed American excellence?
[00:10:44]  And the reason we've never been able to go back and actually land on the moon, and the reason why we've lost, what if we've actually regressed?
[00:10:52]  That we actually did progress up to a certain point for centuries within Christendom in Western civilization, and then we started regressing in the 20th century because we lost sight of Christ and we became overly altruistic with a pseudo sense of empathy,
[00:11:12]  and we traded the inheritance of our children and our children's children for the privilege of consoling ourselves as we try to sleep at night and telling ourselves that we're not racist.
[00:11:24]  So, you know what I mean?
[00:11:26]  So, you can be the guy who thinks you're based, saying, We didn't land on the moon.
[00:11:29]  Meanwhile, there could be a whole bunch of Illuminati leftists that are laughing and say, Yes, yes, the guy who's based, we were able to convince even him that white people haven't achieved anything.
[00:11:45]  And he's actually now agreeing with us.
[00:11:47]  And it's like, Oh, snap, how did I get there?
[00:11:49]  You got there by being a contrarian.
[00:11:52]  A contrarian is not an intellectual.
[00:11:54]  You're not, it's not.
[00:11:55]  It doesn't require intelligence.
[00:11:57]  It doesn't require thoughtfulness.
[00:11:58]  It doesn't require that you actually do the reading.
[00:12:01]  A contrarian is just somebody who spent, you know, maybe they have a part time job and they, you know, extra time on their hand.
[00:12:09]  So they spent four hours on 4chan, you know, and they found out, you know, here's the majority position, here's the minority position, and the majority must always be wrong.
[00:12:20]  But if the majority is always wrong, you have to at least recognize we might be living, and I would argue that we probably are, we're probably living in a generation, a particular time.
[00:12:30]  Especially in our particular place, the West, where on most things, not all, but on most things where there's a majority consensus because the majority is apostatizing from Christ, I think the majority is wrong a lot of times.
[00:12:42]  Even now, as bad as our particular generation is, I don't think it's always.
[00:12:46]  But I think there are a lot of times, and I would be willing to argue maybe even over half of the time, most of the time, the majority is wrong.
[00:12:53]  But if you take that position always, which contrarians do, then you would actually have to agree.
[00:13:01]  This is the problem, okay, well, Well, which majority am I going to go against?
[00:13:06]  At what time?
[00:13:07]  Because the majority right now would say, well, the dark ages were terrible, you know, and they're burning witches, you know, and everybody is oppressed by Christianity and by, you know, the clergy, and it was just this horrible, horrible time.
[00:13:22]  Whereas at that time, the majority would disagree.
[00:13:26]  The majority during those centuries would say, no, Christendom is great.
[00:13:32]  We love Christ, we love his church.
[00:13:35]  We're making incredible advancements.
[00:13:37]  We've pushed back on the darkness and driven literal demonic spirits out of northern European tribes and places and the Americas and all this kind of stuff, making incredible progress, incredible discoveries, and charting new maps and innovation and inventions.
[00:13:57]  So I'm of the persuasion that I think the whole idea of the Dark Ages is a psyop.
[00:14:02]  I think that the Dark Ages was actually a golden age and that the great enlightenment.
[00:14:07]  Is actually the dark spell that has come over the West, and that if anything, we're in the dark ages now.
[00:14:15]  But my point is that to come to that kind of thoughtful position, you can't arrive there by just putting your finger in the wind, right?
[00:14:26]  You can't just do the opposite of Joe Biden.
[00:14:27]  Joe Biden just, you know, well, where the wind's blowing, I'll go with them.
[00:14:32]  The contrarian just says, where the wind's blowing, I'll go the opposite way.
[00:14:35]  Neither one is thoughtful, neither one is strategic, neither one is necessarily.
[00:14:41]  Siding with the truth.
[00:14:42]  One is just going with the people, and the other one just goes against the people.
[00:14:46]  But the one, the contrarian who goes against the people, what you basically have to assert is you have to assert that the people have always been wrong.
[00:14:55]  So you basically, what you have to, essentially, this is what it comes down to you have to say Christendom never happened.
[00:15:01]  Because Christendom asserts that there was a time when the majority of people actually were right, generally right.
[00:15:09]  They actually were aligned with Christ.
[00:15:11]  With the scripture, with Christian values, there was a general sense of the populace, the majority of the populace, that was going in the right direction.
[00:15:21]  But the contrarian would have to say that humanity has always got it wrong.
[00:15:26]  That if we were looking at like a stock chart, that it's just been, there's zero spikes whatsoever, only one giant dip from Genesis 3 onward, that there's never been any upward trajectory.
[00:15:39]  And if there is maybe a tiny spike, it's never.
[00:15:42]  It's never been so significant that 50% of the population plus one has ever sided with the truth.
[00:15:51]  And so you just, you always go against the majority because the majority is always deceived.
[00:15:57]  That there's never been any time period in any culture or any country, any place throughout all of the church age, the last 2,000 years since Christ has come, that whatever Christ did in his earthly work, it was not significant enough to produce one time period.
[00:16:16]  In one culture where the majority of people aligned with him.
[00:16:22]  That's basically your position.
[00:16:23]  You may not spell it out like that, but that's what you actually have to assume.
[00:16:28]  And I don't assume that.
[00:16:29]  We're both post millennial.
[00:16:30]  We believe Christendom is a thing, that it happened.
[00:16:33]  We believe that right now we're in a significant dip 80 year dip, arguably 130 year dip, arguably 300 year dip if we're going back to the Enlightenment.
[00:16:43]  So dips can happen.
[00:16:44]  They can be severe, they can be widespread, they can have longevity.
[00:16:48]  We think we're in a Christendom crash.
[00:16:51]  But we believe that it did happen.
[00:16:53]  And because it did happen, we believe that by the grace of God, it could happen again.
[00:16:57]  And in those Christendom shining moments, a contrarian mindset will not actually serve you well.
[00:17:07]  Because there are, God actually does sometimes send revival.
[00:17:11]  There actually are times where the majority of a culture loves Christ and his word and his truth.
[00:17:16]  And if you're a contrarian in those moments, then you're going to find yourself siding with demons.
[00:17:22]  Because demons are actually at that moment in that place the ones who are losing and getting their butts kicked.
[00:17:27]  So the contrarian can never celebrate anything.
[00:17:30]  Everything that happens on the public stage, by virtue of it being public, must be wrong.
[00:17:36]  Right.
[00:17:36]  So the contrarian has, well, you know, if you want to, what's a contrarian?
[00:17:41]  I can say it as simply as this the contrarian is the insufferable individual who, over this last week, has been, you know, with his 17 different anon accounts.
[00:17:54]  You know, like Trump just freed, you know, 23 pro lifers, including, you know, a woman in her 70s with cancer who's going to die alone in a jail cell away from her husband.
[00:18:03]  But this is still somehow a loss, you know, or, you know, He just cut off, got us out of the WHO, the very thing that you, as a contrarian, were all about, how the WHO is terrible five years ago with COVID.
[00:18:18]  And I was right there too because we had reasons for that.
[00:18:21]  It wasn't just being a contrarian, we had reasons for explaining that the WHO is corrupt.
[00:18:26]  But now, because you're a contrarian, you can't say, well, WHO, bad in 2020.
[00:18:31]  We shouldn't have been a part of it.
[00:18:33]  Now Trump pulls us out of it.
[00:18:34]  But the contrarian has to say that somehow both are bad.
[00:18:37]  In the WHO, bad.
[00:18:39]  Out of the WHO, still somehow bad, right?
[00:18:44]  Because both were the majority position in 2020, majority position is trust the WHO.
[00:18:49]  Well, I was against that because of reasons, not just because it was the majority.
[00:18:56]  And now, you know, with Trump taking us out of the WHO, that's now a majority position by virtue of the majority voting Trump into office.
[00:19:05]  I'm actually for that decision because I'm consistent.
[00:19:07]  It was bad and it's still bad.
[00:19:10]  And so, therefore, it's good that we're out.
[00:19:11]  But the contrarian can't ever celebrate anything.
[00:19:14]  Anything that happens that has majority appeal must be wrong.
[00:19:19]  That's not being conspiratorial, because there really is such a thing as conspiracies.
[00:19:25]  But that's not merely conspiratorial.
[00:19:27]  That's a contrarian.
[00:19:28]  And a contrarian is just as dim witted, just as dull, just as thoughtless as the sheep.
[00:19:37]  The sheep that just follows the herd, the contrarian is the one who just doesn't follow the herd, even if the shepherds actually.
[00:19:42]  In this moment, leading the herd in the right direction.
[00:19:45]  He just goes the opposite.
[00:19:47]  Both are thoughtless creatures and very sad.
[00:19:50]  So, Michael.
[00:19:52]  Actually, Nathan, is it possible to go to the quotes?
[00:19:54]  I know it's a slightly different order, but it piggybacks off of what Joel was saying.
[00:20:02]  So, I did some reading over the week.
[00:20:04]  A historian named Christopher Lash, who wrote in the 90s and the early 2000s, especially.
[00:20:13]  One of the things that was interesting to me about reading him was that.
[00:20:17]  Even through the 90s and the early 2000s, he was already beginning to say some of the things that we're saying now about the erosion of the middle class, the idea that expectations of a better life for your children are no longer attainable.
[00:20:35]  Some of the things, even some of the things that we released last week with the real numbers about wages.
[00:20:41]  I mean, one of the things that was very refreshing to me was that actually, establishment people, even he's a very well known historian.
[00:20:49]  And taught at major universities, he was already talking about some of these things back in the 90s and the early 2000s.
[00:20:56]  Sometimes we have this sense that we are the first people to have noticed this.
[00:21:01]  And I think that sometimes we on the dissident right can think that we are a little bit like the atheist who has finally figured out to ask the Christian, yeah, but can God be all powerful and all loving at the same time?
[00:21:17]  Can he rest his brain still be in the world?
[00:21:18]  That's right.
[00:21:19]  Yeah.
[00:21:19]  And so, what I wanted to encourage you guys a little bit with.
[00:21:22]  because I've been wanting to do this episode with John Harris for a while, is that we are not the first people, even in recent history, to notice and to be aware of some of the dynamics that are going on.
[00:21:35]  And even while the warnings haven't been heeded, other people before us have very eloquently and very, I think with a lot of good data and a lot of good evidence, argued about some of the things that we are observing.
[00:21:48]  Now, they were seeing the buds of it and we're seeing the blooms of it now.
[00:21:52]  Right.
[00:21:52]  So all of that is true.
[00:21:54]  All of that is true.
[00:21:55]  But Christopher Lash had some good warnings, I think, that were helpful for me.

=== Signs of Christian Revival (06:39) ===

[00:22:00]  So, the first quote that I have from him is very short.
[00:22:03]  He simply said, We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
[00:22:08]  And he was saying that there's a tendency among some people to only be able to function in chaos, right?
[00:22:17]  And if there is no chaos, then we have to figure out some way to create chaos.
[00:22:23]  Now, I don't think that we're necessarily creating chaos.
[00:22:26]  I think that what he said actually is true.
[00:22:28]  And Society at large is addicted to change.
[00:22:32]  You talk about attention spans, you talk about the fact that there are so many niche interests in music and in movies and television.
[00:22:42]  We are all addicted to change right now.
[00:22:44]  And I think it's a unique thing of our generation.
[00:22:47]  Part of what that does when thinking about history is it separates us from the idea that there could be timeless principles in history, right?
[00:22:55]  And since we are so unsettled, and since life for us is Constant change, constant upheaval, we kind of assume that there is no actual sort of pillar that we can look back to in history.
[00:23:09]  Tradition ought to be mistrusted or doubted.
[00:23:16]  Even the paleoconservative impulse that a lot of people, I think, rightly are gravitating towards can be mistrusted.
[00:23:23]  Well, how could we trust a tradition, right?
[00:23:27]  That's something that's going to let us down as well.
[00:23:29]  There was a second quote from Lash that I wanted to read also.
[00:23:33]  I think this was really insightful.
[00:23:36]  So he's speaking of being disillusioned, which I think he was getting at something similar to contrarian, where the idea that nothing can ever be decent or there can be really no optimism, no hope, right?
[00:23:50]  Whatever is going on is the worst thing that's ever happened.
[00:23:53]  And whatever the modern message is, is the wrong message.
[00:23:56]  And so he said this about disillusionment.
[00:23:59]  And I think by extension, a little bit of contrarianism that we're talking about.
[00:24:03]  He says disillusionment originates in an impulse that is anything but quaint.
[00:24:07]  And it has very serious consequences, not the least of which is to prevent an understanding of vitally important matters.
[00:24:14]  It betrays a predisposition to read history either, so two options, as a tragedy of lost illusions or as the progress of critical reason.
[00:24:23]  And he disagrees with both of those.
[00:24:25]  He says history is not just lost ideals that can never be recovered, and history is not the unconquerable progression of reason and improvement.
[00:24:37]  That's kind of what I was saying just a moment ago in the beginning of the episode.
[00:24:40]  Of being a post millennial, and I even see somebody in the chat, Daniel Voller, who's asking great questions.
[00:24:45]  Daniel, we're glad that you're here, but he's basically saying, How in the world could you believe that Christianity is in a better place today?
[00:24:52]  And you may have tuned in late, Daniel, but if you were listening earlier, I was arguing precisely the opposite.
[00:25:00]  I don't think that Christianity is in a better place today than it was in the 1800s or the 1600s or the 1500s.
[00:25:09]  I don't.
[00:25:10]  So we just don't think it's that simple.
[00:25:12]  We don't think that it's constantly digressing.
[00:25:16]  Or constantly progressing.
[00:25:17]  We think that there are, like the stock market, dips and spikes along the way.
[00:25:22]  Now, we're post millennial, so we think the overarching trajectory is up.
[00:25:26]  But that doesn't mean that there aren't large swaths of history in certain places.
[00:25:32]  And at times within the province of God, it may not just be in one place, but in many places, like the entirety of Western civilization for arguably 300 years.
[00:25:42]  I actually said that exactly.
[00:25:43]  I said, if you're tracking all the way back to the Enlightenment, then you're looking at a 300 year dip.
[00:25:49]  And we would be, Michael and I would be the first to recognize that we are in a dip.
[00:25:55]  But we're also willing to recognize that it has not constantly been a dip.
[00:26:01]  It has not been a 2,000 year long constant dip from the coming of Christ.
[00:26:06]  And it's like, well, another question I saw in the chat was like, well, what are your metrics?
[00:26:09]  Okay, well, we could do a lot of metrics, but we'll just start with the spiritual ones because that's usually what guys are getting at.
[00:26:16]  It's like, well, your metrics are going to be, you know, Long gating lifespans, you know, or, you know, like people are living longer, you know, or eradicating, you know, certain diseases, or maybe it's innovation and architecture, building cathedrals, you know, instead of grass huts, you know, or inventions like airplanes, you know, or sanitation and sewers.
[00:26:36]  And okay, yeah, there's all that.
[00:26:38]  I think those are legitimate metrics.
[00:26:40]  But here's another one, if we want to just do the spiritual one, because a lot of guys sometimes will use that as an opportunity to Jesus juke and say, well, the only true metric is disciples of Jesus.
[00:26:48]  Okay, fine.
[00:26:49]  That's a good one.
[00:26:50]  Let's go with it.
[00:26:51]  At the time of Christ's earthly ministry, the disciples of Jesus were very few.
[00:26:57]  That's right.
[00:26:58]  The majority of the crowd is yelling, crucify him, right?
[00:27:02]  I mean, Jesus died.
[00:27:05]  The sheer fact that Jesus was nailed to a cross was because the majority of the people at that time were against him.
[00:27:13]  And today we have billions of Christians.
[00:27:16]  And even if you want to be a little bit more careful with that number and say, well, I don't think they're all genuinely Christians.
[00:27:22]  Well, yeah, they probably aren't all genuine Christians.
[00:27:26]  But still, we have, it's like, I think, 3.2 billion Christians, something like that.
[00:27:31]  So let's say 1 billion.
[00:27:32]  Well, that's still too much.
[00:27:33]  Okay, let's say 100 million, right?
[00:27:35]  Can we even say that 3% or 0.3% are genuine Christians?
[00:27:44]  Well, that's still a ton of Christians.
[00:27:46]  You might say, yeah, but the overarching population of the world has multiplied over and over and over again.
[00:27:53]  Any way you slice it, you can look at these metrics.
[00:27:55]  It's not just that we have more, numerically more Christians.
[00:27:58]  But we also have a much higher percentage of the world population that are Christian than in previous time periods.
[00:28:07]  And so, whether you're looking at the spiritual metrics of discipleship and conversion, or whether you're looking at some of the more practical and physical metrics of innovation, lifespan, and health, and eradicating diseases, or all these different things, again, we're not saying that history doesn't have dips along the way, and at times, significant dips.
[00:28:29]  In multiple countries in the West, all at the same time for three centuries.
[00:28:33]  That can happen, and we would argue that it has.
[00:28:37]  But we would say the overarching trajectory is up.

=== Metrics Show Growth (05:45) ===

[00:28:40]  And what I don't want to do is I don't want to be in a dip, right?
[00:28:43]  It's just like investing.
[00:28:43]  I don't want to be in a dip.
[00:28:45]  And you've been in a dip for so long that you've basically resolved that you can only go down.
[00:28:54]  And then what happens is that eventually the market does reverse and you miss an incredible.
[00:29:00]  An incredible buying opportunity for long term investment.
[00:29:05]  And I'm just wondering out loud right now.
[00:29:07]  Trump is no savior.
[00:29:08]  I don't even think he's a Christian, but I'm incredibly grateful for him.
[00:29:11]  He absolutely had my vote.
[00:29:12]  If I could, I would crawl over glass to vote for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.
[00:29:18]  My goodness.
[00:29:19]  We are so blessed to have Trump's a Zionist.
[00:29:22]  Yeah, dude, it's 2025, friend.
[00:29:27]  The year of our Lord 2025 in America that's been steeped in dispensational Zionism for 150 years.
[00:29:33]  Trump is a Zionist?
[00:29:34]  Yeah.
[00:29:38]  Try not to say something.
[00:29:40]  There is zero non Zionist option.
[00:29:44]  There is no non Zionist option.
[00:29:47]  Politics is the realm of the possible, not the perfect, the possible.
[00:29:52]  There is no possible outcome in the year of our Lord 2025 in a nation steeped in dispensational Zionism for a century and a half that someone could win a presidential national election and not be some shade or form of Zionist.
[00:30:12]  So, what you're doing in politics.
[00:30:15]  Is you're taking the ingredients God gave you.
[00:30:18]  It's like your kids sitting and crying at the table.
[00:30:23]  They're hungry and it's time for dinner.
[00:30:25]  And you're over there pontificating and thinking and dreaming about a Michelin star, you know, five course meal.
[00:30:35]  But God in his providence has given you not those ingredients, but he's given you some.
[00:30:40]  There is some food by the grace of God in the pantry.
[00:30:43]  Right.
[00:30:44]  And sometimes instead of thinking about five star meals, sometimes it's just time to cook dinner.
[00:30:51]  Open the pantry, open the fridge, see what you've got, and make the best dish that you can because the family's hungry now.
[00:30:59]  The family needs to eat.
[00:31:01]  And right now, in the province of God, this last week has been far more gracious than what we deserve as a country that murders babies by the millions.
[00:31:12]  Are you kidding me?
[00:31:12]  70 million.
[00:31:13]  That's just, that doesn't even count all the.
[00:31:16]  All the you know, uh, different birth control and uh, you know, IUD and all these different you know, measures of abortion beyond just going into a clinic, but 70 million, arguably well past 100 billion, um, babies murdered in the womb in the last 50 years.
[00:31:35]  And God gave us Trump, right?
[00:31:38]  Like, we we deserve Stalin, God gave us Trump, far more gracious.
[00:31:45]  Is Trump Michelin, you know, five star, like, no.
[00:31:49]  But Trump is food in the pantry.
[00:31:52]  And what we were looking at without him was four more years of starvation.
[00:31:57]  And so all of a sudden, like conservatives, one of the things that we're going to have to think is in terms of tailwinds.
[00:32:03]  We're so used to headwinds like, oh, the parallel economy, and I need to homestead.
[00:32:07]  And there's a lot of great virtues that can be honed from these practices.
[00:32:12]  I'm not against any of them.
[00:32:13]  I think they're generally good things.
[00:32:14]  They're just good hobbies, they're good for training your kids, have them touch grass, get in the dirt, all these things.
[00:32:19]  There's plenty of good things.
[00:32:21]  But right now, We actually have a moment to wield power.
[00:32:27]  To wield power.
[00:32:29]  Is Trump the Christian that I want him to be?
[00:32:31]  No.
[00:32:32]  But there are Christians like me, like Michael, who would not be able to step within a 50 mile radius of the White House if Kamala was president.
[00:32:45]  And Trump may not agree with him on everything, but they can actually have his ear.
[00:32:51]  And they may be still the minority and few and far between, but it's way better than what we have had previously.
[00:32:57]  Way better than what we've had previously.
[00:32:58]  So I want to be hopeful and say, all right, we've been in a huge decline, a huge dip.
[00:33:04]  But right now, there's some signs of life.
[00:33:07]  Could this be a reversal?
[00:33:09]  I'm not saying it has reversed.
[00:33:10]  We're so back.
[00:33:12]  Right now, it's as good as Calvin's Geneva.
[00:33:16]  We've completely returned and everything's solved.
[00:33:18]  No, not even close.
[00:33:19]  There's so much work to do.
[00:33:21]  But we have, I think, by the grace of God and God's grace alone, seen some of the signs of life that are telling us not that the problem's solved, but that the problem might be solved, that it could be solved, that solutions are at least within the realm of possibility, within our grasp, that a reversal might be on.
[00:33:42]  The horizon.
[00:33:43]  We've got some buy signals.
[00:33:44]  Again, to go back to investing terms, we're seeing some buy signals.
[00:33:48]  We've been on a major crash, but we're starting to see some buy signals that the market might be reversing.
[00:33:54]  And that, I think, is incredibly encouraging.
[00:33:58]  And if you're just a contrarian, if that's how you determine truth from falsehood, then you have to look at everything from the election to all the executive orders to this to that to the other, and you have to somehow make it bad.
[00:34:13]  In other words, you have to be Nick Fuentes.
[00:34:15]  Right.
[00:34:15]  Right.
[00:34:16]  Like he's been insufferable.
[00:34:17]  Like, oh, you know, 500 deportations a day and Trump saying that he's ramping up and going to be, you know, 1,200 to 1,500.

=== Buy Signals Emerge (03:13) ===

[00:34:25]  That's the worst thing in the world.
[00:34:27]  You know, that won't do anything.
[00:34:28]  Like, okay, then just what do you like?
[00:34:32]  Just sit on your hands and just go down with the ship.
[00:34:36]  Right.
[00:34:36]  You know, like you might as well, like, We've got to do something.
[00:34:45]  And I think it was Zerubbabel who it says there were shouts of grace to it, grace to it, when he was holding the plumb line.
[00:34:53]  And they built nothing.
[00:34:55]  Holding the plumb line is just like the very beginning stages.
[00:34:58]  You haven't even laid the foundation, you're just kind of mapping it out.
[00:35:00]  It's like we're breaking ground on this new building development.
[00:35:04]  And basically, we just brought the tractors out and we haven't built, laid a single stone, but we're going to start.
[00:35:12]  There's the signs of life.
[00:35:15]  And the people are shouting.
[00:35:16]  And then when they finish the second temple, we preach through Ezra, but when they finish the second temple, there's a mixed crowd.
[00:35:23]  And some of them, there's shouts of cheering and joy and gladness.
[00:35:28]  And there's also profound wailing and moaning.
[00:35:32]  And the ones who are wailing and moaning are the ones who are saying, but it's not as good as it once was.
[00:35:37]  They're the ones who remember the former temple that was superior in its glory.
[00:35:42]  The second temple wasn't as magnificent.
[00:35:46]  But then there's this younger, new generation that's excited because if you go back 80 years, it was 70 years in exile in Babylon, but 80 years, the temple today is an inferior temple to the temple 80 years ago.
[00:36:02]  And the older men are bemoaning that fact.
[00:36:05]  The younger men, they're looking back and saying, yeah, but 40 years ago, there was no temple at all.
[00:36:11]  A temple is better than no temple.
[00:36:14]  In our scenario, please do not build a temple.
[00:36:19]  In Jerusalem.
[00:36:21]  No more temples.
[00:36:22]  The third temple is Christians, the people of God, living stones built together.
[00:36:25]  Christ is a cornerstone.
[00:36:27]  So, you know, that was for then.
[00:36:29]  But the point is something is better than nothing.
[00:36:33]  And the guys who are just sitting around above it all, priding themselves, I think it appeals.
[00:36:41]  The last thing I'll say, I think it appeals to laziness.
[00:36:43]  I think it appeals to apathy because the contrarian doesn't have to actually do anything.
[00:36:48]  He can just.
[00:36:49]  He can just boast in his illusion of being.
[00:36:54]  Maybe he's got hot takes.
[00:36:55]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:55]  Just a hot take on everything.
[00:36:56]  This happens, it's bad.
[00:36:58]  This other thing happens that looks like the opposite of the last thing that was bad, but that's bad too.
[00:37:02]  And this is bad.
[00:37:04]  And nothing ever happens, bros.
[00:37:06]  Nothing ever happens, bros have been having a tough time this last week.
[00:37:09]  You know, it's been hard for them.
[00:37:11]  You know, send your thoughts and prayers to the Nothing Ever Happens bros because things have actually been happening, but they have to find a way to say, well, but not really.
[00:37:18]  You know, not really.
[00:37:19]  Nothing's really happening.
[00:37:21]  But that appeals because one, it means it's really kind of Gnostic in a sense.
[00:37:26]  It's I am a part of this minority elite people who have been enlightened.
[00:37:32]  And I have the master key, right?
[00:37:34]  I have this one ideology that's like the master key that opens every single door.

=== Nothing Ever Happens Bros (15:15) ===

[00:37:38]  And so I know.
[00:37:39]  I know the answer to what's really going on behind every single thing because I know this one issue.
[00:37:46]  It's not theology, it's ideology.
[00:37:48]  I'm an ideologue.
[00:37:50]  There's leftist ideologues.
[00:37:51]  I'm actually an ideologue also.
[00:37:53]  I'm just not a leftist in this one regard, but I actually am a leftist in other regards, ironically.
[00:37:58]  I just haven't realized it yet.
[00:38:00]  And so I have my ideological master key.
[00:38:03]  I'm one of the minority enlightened individuals, this elite enlightened group.
[00:38:08]  And the beauty about it is one, superiority.
[00:38:10]  I'm better than everyone.
[00:38:11]  Two, apathy.
[00:38:14]  Because I actually don't have to do anything.
[00:38:16]  The only thing that I do is just boast about how I know.
[00:38:20]  I know what's really going on.
[00:38:22]  Oh, you know what's really going on.
[00:38:23]  Great.
[00:38:25]  And so what are you doing?
[00:38:26]  Oh, well, that's, you know, well, here's the neat thing there's nothing to do.
[00:38:31]  The end is nigh.
[00:38:32]  You know, abandon your post.
[00:38:34]  It's like, you know, the guy, the steward of Gondor, abandon your post, you know.
[00:38:38]  And sometimes Gandalf the White, you know, somebody with some hope, has to just come and knock that guy out and say, don't listen.
[00:38:47]  Don't listen.
[00:38:48]  To the steward of Gondor, who's yelling, Abandon your post.
[00:38:52]  All is lost.
[00:38:53]  The end is nigh.
[00:38:55]  Bonk him on the head, knock him out, do Gondor a favor and say, No, no, no, no.
[00:39:00]  Call to battle.
[00:39:01]  Call to battle.
[00:39:02]  Are we losing?
[00:39:03]  Yes.
[00:39:04]  Can we win?
[00:39:06]  Maybe.
[00:39:06]  Let's try.
[00:39:07]  All right, let's go to our first commercial break and then we're going to bring on John Harris.
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[00:40:52]  We're back.
[00:40:53]  Some would say we're so back.
[00:40:54]  We've got John Harris from Conversations That Matter.
[00:40:57]  John, are you able to hear me?
[00:40:59]  Can you hear me?
[00:41:00]  There he is.
[00:41:00]  He's looking.
[00:41:01]  So right now, I don't think John has volume.
[00:41:03]  But here's the thing.
[00:41:04]  John is tech savvy.
[00:41:06]  He's no boomer.
[00:41:08]  I am a boomer in the technical realm.
[00:41:11]  It was funny a while back, somebody was like, Joel's commanding his Anon army and he has all these Anon accounts or whatever and doing this.
[00:41:20]  And Nathan, our tech guy, was just like, he was looking at it on X and just laughing.
[00:41:25]  He was like, literally, they know you can't even manage your own one X account on your own without me helping you to log in from time to time and figure it out.
[00:41:36]  So, Anyways, I am not very savvy, but John Harris is.
[00:41:40]  He runs the whole operation.
[00:41:41]  He's a one man band.
[00:41:43]  If you ever saw the guy clanging cymbals and playing a harmonica, they have to get called once.
[00:41:48]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:41:50]  That said, I'm boasting of John, but I don't even see him on the screen.
[00:41:54]  So I might be.
[00:41:56]  Yeah, I know he can't.
[00:41:58]  I'm just ad-libbing a little bit as we wait for him and singing his praises.
[00:42:02]  I believe, this is my post-millennial hope again, I believe that John Harris.
[00:42:06]  Can figure out the tech problem.
[00:42:08]  That's your post millennial hope.
[00:42:09]  Yeah, this is it.
[00:42:10]  My post millennial hope is that John Harris is going to come on this show.
[00:42:13]  He's going to be able to hear us.
[00:42:15]  So he's still trying to figure out, Nate, is there anything that you can do on your end?
[00:42:19]  Oh, I see him again.
[00:42:20]  John, can you hear us?
[00:42:22]  Yes.
[00:42:23]  Oh, snap.
[00:42:24]  I was just, I don't know if you could hear me that whole time, but I was singing your praises and saying, John is not a boomer.
[00:42:29]  He will figure out the tech.
[00:42:31]  He's going to come on the show.
[00:42:32]  It's going to work.
[00:42:33]  Yeah, I forgot how to use Zoom.
[00:42:35]  So maybe I'm a little bit of a boomer.
[00:42:38]  I didn't know if it was you or a Zoomer in that case.
[00:42:40]  I'm not a Zoomer.
[00:42:41]  I got to join my mic, so I joined it now and I can hear you.
[00:42:45]  It's great to see you.
[00:42:46]  Thanks for coming on the show.
[00:42:47]  I'm going to give it to Michael.
[00:42:48]  He's outlined this episode.
[00:42:50]  Michael and Wes kind of alternate, and I talk a lot, as you know, John.
[00:42:57]  But Michael and Wes do the reading, as the kids say.
[00:43:01]  I do some reading too, but they're sharp.
[00:43:03]  And so Michael has outlined this episode.
[00:43:05]  Yeah, I think he's got some great questions.
[00:43:07]  And it's a lot of the stuff that, John, you've been talking about, about like, we want to do theology.
[00:43:10]  We don't want to necessarily do a bunch of ideology.
[00:43:14]  And that's how we were framing it before you came on, just saying that, like, the contrarian, the way he would do history is there's a difference than somebody who has some measure of conspiratorial aptitude where they're like, yeah, I think COVID is way overblown, or I think George Floyd, this is fishy.
[00:43:35]  But the contrarian doesn't just realize that there really is, in our world, such a thing as some measure of elite.
[00:43:40]  Theory, and sometimes there's conspiracies, and sometimes our leaders lie to us.
[00:43:43]  The contrarian is very much like the Democrat that sticks his finger in the wind, and then just always the only difference is they go the opposite way.
[00:43:51]  They always side with whatever the minority opinion is.
[00:43:54]  And then with ideology, I think of it like an analogy or illustration of a master key where it appeals to apathy, it appeals to laziness, because instead of doing the hard work of multivariate situations and reading multiple sources and all this kind of stuff, you can find the one issue.
[00:44:11]  Right, whatever the one issue is, and that's your master key.
[00:44:14]  And it's kind of even Gnostic, it's like I'm a part of this elite minority group that's been enlightened because I've had this one piece of revelation, you know, Gnostic downloaded to me.
[00:44:25]  It's become the master key, it's my ideology that opens every single door, and we can all do it.
[00:44:31]  And a lot of times, if you're a Christian, you take a theological argument and make it ideological.
[00:44:39]  And so, you can kid yourself and say, Well, I'm doing theology.
[00:44:42]  And I'll be the first to admit it.
[00:44:43]  This is, you know, people are like, well, Joel changes his positions.
[00:44:45]  Yeah, but Joel also admits when he's wrong.
[00:44:47]  So remember that one.
[00:44:49]  I've done it.
[00:44:49]  I've done it with both patriarchy and, you know, this, John, I've done it with postmillennialism.
[00:44:54]  Post millennialism.
[00:44:55]  It's the answer to everything.
[00:44:57]  And now I'm like, I still love my post millennial brothers in Christ, but as the fault lines keep forming and shaping up, I'm over here and I'm like, gosh, but I have more in common with John Harris and Stephen Wolfe and CJ, and none of them are post millennial.
[00:45:14]  And I thought post millennialism was going to be the master key that determined who's on the team and who's not and who's right about everything and who's wrong about everything.
[00:45:22]  And I'm still post millennial.
[00:45:24]  I believe it as my theology.
[00:45:26]  But by the grace of God, I don't think it's any longer my ideology.
[00:45:30]  And so, whether it's reading history or whether it's reading the Bible, all these kinds of things, we don't want to be mere contrarians that just always take the opposite view.
[00:45:38]  We don't want to be ideologues.
[00:45:40]  We want to be thoughtful.
[00:45:41]  So, all that being said, Michael has some great questions for you.
[00:45:44]  I'm going to give it to him.
[00:45:46]  John, thanks for joining us today.
[00:45:48]  I actually have been asking Joel for a little bit to be able to have us do an episode with you.
[00:45:54]  And I know that you've got a lot of interests.
[00:45:58]  But I was really curious to pick your brain a little bit about some of the historical questions that we see surfacing.
[00:46:04]  And just to jump right into it, the thing that is a little bit overwhelming to me, as Joel says, I do the reading, but both Wes and I said to Joel last week, we're like, Joel, we've done all the reading that we have episodes for.
[00:46:19]  Like, we need to go do more reading because there's just an overwhelming amount of information out there and it's impossible to do all the reading on everything.
[00:46:29]  And this is something that in the information age and now with the internet is a particular difficulty of our time.
[00:46:37]  And that is there is so much information available to the average student, consumer, citizen, whatever you want to call it.
[00:46:47]  And like, I guess on one sense, like, what do we do with the fact that you can, if you read one particular area or you read another particular area or author, you can craft Almost any historical narrative that you want to fit kind of a preconception.
[00:47:06]  And are we, when I think about us studying history and trying to learn truths from history, I don't mean even necessarily historical truth, but trying to draw lessons from history.
[00:47:20]  What do we do with the fact that there is an overwhelming amount of information out there that if I were to come to a conclusion on an issue, very easily Joel could come to literally the opposite conclusion just by reading different authors?
[00:47:31]  I mean, this is something that.
[00:47:34]  I think the average guy at home who's just trying to raise his kids, but also doesn't want to be duped and have the wool pulled over his eyes.
[00:47:40]  Like, I think that this idea of the glut of information that we have and then so much coming at us, well, now it's this.
[00:47:48]  Well, actually, now the new thing in history is this.
[00:47:50]  And it can be overwhelming.
[00:47:52]  So I wanted to start there and just kind of pick your brain a little bit, let you launch from there with the overwhelming amount of information.
[00:47:58]  What do we as Christian thinkers do with all of the possible information sources that we could go to?
[00:48:05]  And even the fact that many of these.
[00:48:08]  They contradict with each other, even.
[00:48:11]  Yeah, thank you, Michael.
[00:48:12]  And thank you, Joel.
[00:48:14]  And I appreciate the warm introduction and welcome.
[00:48:17]  And I don't, obviously, I didn't hear what you said when my mic was off.
[00:48:21]  But yeah, I know, Joel, we did have conversations.
[00:48:25]  I think when I first went out there for your conference, was it maybe three years ago now?
[00:48:29]  That's hard to believe.
[00:48:30]  Yeah.
[00:48:31]  Couldn't have been.
[00:48:32]  I guess it was.
[00:48:33]  Well, it feels like that was so long ago.
[00:48:36]  It feels like it was just yesterday, but then sometimes it's like three years.
[00:48:39]  I'm like, that feels like it was 30 years ago.
[00:48:41]  So much has happened.
[00:48:43]  Yeah, I think as I was on my flight out there, I remember for some reason the sticks in my head.
[00:48:47]  I think it was Karen Swallow Pryor had tweeted that you, oh no, no, it was based on the conversation we had.
[00:48:53]  So, this must have been right after, but that we had AD, you know, you and I sat in a room and talked about some things.
[00:48:58]  And she said we were human trafficking because that's right.
[00:49:02]  We talked about her.
[00:49:03]  It was very strange.
[00:49:04]  But now that's history.
[00:49:05]  That's an historical record being three years ago.
[00:49:08]  And I think, yeah, I mean, we've all gone through our cage stages.
[00:49:11]  Well, I shouldn't say all of us, but many of us.
[00:49:13]  I know I've been in my cage stages on different things.
[00:49:16]  Calvinism was one of them.
[00:49:17]  I thought, wow, this is the thing.
[00:49:21]  This will determine everything else, just about.
[00:49:23]  And if you believe this, it's the dividing line.
[00:49:25]  I don't really care about other issues as much.
[00:49:27]  And then an issue comes along where the key doesn't fit, and you realize, oh, wow, that's not it because there's a bunch of Calvinists who are on the wrong side of this issue.
[00:49:35]  Clearly, that wasn't the determining factor, and they still are Calvinists.
[00:49:39]  So, I think ideology is dangerous because it does blind us to facts that don't fit the narrative.
[00:49:47]  And I think with historiography, the attempt is to use the tools of the discipline, just like hermeneutics when you're approaching biblical interpretation, there's tools for the discipline.
[00:50:01]  And you're trying to make a paradigm or discover a paradigm in which all the moving parts fit.
[00:50:11]  And the problem with ideology is you're not doing that, you're just throwing out parts that don't fit your paradigm.
[00:50:17]  So you can keep the paradigm.
[00:50:20]  I actually, just before coming on here, I noticed on Axe all of a sudden there were these guys that were saying, well, I don't want to get into all the details of it, but.
[00:50:31]  Long and short of it is that they very much admire the 19th century abolitionists.
[00:50:34]  And there are some things to admire about certain 19th century abolitionists, but they were very protective of the abolitionist brand.
[00:50:44]  And they didn't want John Brown to be an abolitionist because he's got a bad rap.
[00:50:47]  So they were an abolitionist.
[00:50:50]  And that may seem like a very small thing.
[00:50:52]  And perhaps in the grand scheme, it is.
[00:50:54]  But I do think there is, at least with some of the guys that were saying this kind of thing, I think there's an ideological impulse there.
[00:51:01]  To throw out the facts that don't fit the paradigm, Brown was clearly an abolitionist.
[00:51:06]  Uh, he might not have been the flavor that some that you like, but uh, he wanted to uh, immediately end slavery, he didn't want compensation for uh, the masters.
[00:51:17]  He just uh, you know, that would have put him in a category of being an abolitionist, and he had all his associations were pretty much with abolitionists.
[00:51:25]  He was funded by abolitionists.
[00:51:27]  Uh, abolitionists are the ones who canonized him after he died.
[00:51:33]  And so, was he an abolitionist or was he not?
[00:51:36]  Well, if we let ideology and an attempt to rescue that brand determine the question, then perhaps he's not.
[00:51:44]  But if we want to be historically accurate and we look at the context of the time and we look at his views and we compare them to other prominent abolitionists, and so he clearly was, and that's a pretty universal perspective in historiography.
[00:51:59]  That's the same as Russell Moore.
[00:52:01]  I'd love for him not to be a Calvinist.
[00:52:04]  But he is.
[00:52:04]  He is.
[00:52:04]  Yeah, he is.
[00:52:05]  I mean, what are you going to hear, right?
[00:52:07]  He's, you know, he's a lousy person, but he is a Calvinist, you know.
[00:52:12]  And to be fair to the abolitionist, you know, like in the same way that, like, the fact that Russell Moore is a Calvinist doesn't make Calvinism untrue, you know.
[00:52:23]  And so, like, John Brown being an abolitionist doesn't make abolitionism untrue.
[00:52:30]  You would have to, on the merits of the arguments, the substance, you would have to flesh that out and come to a conclusion.
[00:52:37]  But, um, But the point, the larger point still remains.
[00:52:41]  There's not one issue, be it Calvinism or patriarchy or postmillennialism or abolitionism or the Jews, or there's no one issue that's the master key.

=== No Master Key to Virtue (14:50) ===

[00:52:54]  It's like, and if you get this right, you'll get everything right.
[00:52:59]  And you'll always be on the right side of every political issue, cultural issue.
[00:53:03]  That's just not the case, unfortunately.
[00:53:07]  So I think it's an excellent point.
[00:53:08]  I think to get back to the original question, because I think I veered a little, I'm sorry about that.
[00:53:12]  There's so many sources out there.
[00:53:13]  So what do you do?
[00:53:14]  I think it's very similar to biblical interpretation, which we are all familiar with, and I'm sure the audience is.
[00:53:21]  When you're looking at the Bible, you can't read every commentary.
[00:53:24]  You can't look at every PhD dissertation that's been written on the passage that you're studying.
[00:53:28]  You can't look at every archaeological artifact and so forth.
[00:53:32]  So, what do you do?
[00:53:33]  You have to make some determinations.
[00:53:34]  And obviously, we have the Holy Spirit illuminating scripture for us.
[00:53:41]  There are certain tools that I would say go beyond the standard historiographical.
[00:53:46]  Analysis that people use on secular documents and so forth.
[00:53:50]  But I still think the same principles are really at play.
[00:53:54]  You're going to use common sense.
[00:53:56]  And when I mean common sense, I'm really talking about authorial intent.
[00:54:01]  When you're doing manuscript evaluations, earlier manuscripts generally more accurate, but the majority text, you have to take that into account.
[00:54:09]  I mean, we understand these things, right?
[00:54:11]  I mean, a lot of this is common sense.
[00:54:13]  We want to know the audience, we want to know the historical context.
[00:54:16]  In brief, we want to know the greater and the larger context within the framework of scripture.
[00:54:22]  And also, I think, how other faithful interpreters have viewed the same passages throughout time.
[00:54:28]  I mean, these are all things that we can look at.
[00:54:30]  I don't think you have to be an expert on all those things and have all information to make determinations, or else we would never get off the ground.
[00:54:37]  We could never have a rational understanding of anything.
[00:54:43]  But I think if we approach history, With the same assumptions we approach the Bible, we will be able to make sense of it.
[00:54:52]  And that would include things like human nature.
[00:54:55]  How do humans normally behave?
[00:54:56]  Now, we have some theological assumptions that we bring to the table.
[00:55:01]  I think these are assumptions that we shouldn't dump overboard.
[00:55:04]  Everyone has them.
[00:55:05]  They're going to have an anthropology as soon as they arrive at the task of even trying to figure out what happened in the past.
[00:55:12]  So, you know, there's human nature.
[00:55:15]  There's certain, like, for example, there are certain history schools that think, That history is cyclical, and other schools that think it's linear and it's approaching something.
[00:55:25]  Christians, there's a little bit of both, I suppose you could say, in Christianity, but in a cosmic sense, we believe that we're actually, and postmillennials will like this, but we're approaching a consummation.
[00:55:36]  And God is, he's writing a story, and there's a mystery to it, but it's like a scroll being unrolled.
[00:55:41]  And so we're leading up to something.
[00:55:44]  And so this is going to, I think, impact to some degree the kind of history that you do, these assumptions that you bring.
[00:55:50]  So I guess you could call these.
[00:55:52]  Philosophical assumptions.
[00:55:53]  And then, of course, there's the craft itself.
[00:55:56]  And that would include the source material.
[00:55:59]  So we're going to weight different sources differently.
[00:56:03]  Obviously, a secondary source, meaning someone who's writing about an event that they were not there for.
[00:56:08]  When I write a history or an aspect of history I talk about on the podcast, I'm not a primary source if I wasn't there for it, right?
[00:56:16]  If I gave you a podcast on January 6th, I lived through it.
[00:56:19]  So I can tell you from my perspective, I'm a source that has witnessed that.
[00:56:24]  But the long.
[00:56:24]  You were there, right, John?
[00:56:26]  I was there.
[00:56:26]  I smelled the tear gas.
[00:56:28]  The longer that event goes on, though, and so we hit 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, the more fuzzy it will likely be in my mind.
[00:56:35]  Well, that's something we know about human nature.
[00:56:37]  So, the source material, the video I made the next day is going to be more than I make in 10 years or so.
[00:56:48]  So, anyway, I'm just giving you some examples, but it's just like hermeneutics.
[00:56:53]  There's tools to the discipline.
[00:56:55]  I found some good, when I was in history, some good historiographical books on this.
[00:57:01]  This is one of the most popular ones for people who are interested Herbert Butterfield's writings on Christianity and history.
[00:57:07]  He also published the Whig interpretation of history.
[00:57:10]  I have David Hackett Fisher's book, Historians' Fallacies.
[00:57:15]  So he talked about fallacies like presentism and other problems that historians get themselves into.
[00:57:22]  I actually have Gordon Clark's book.
[00:57:24]  I haven't actually read this, but this was recommended to me by one of my professors, Historiography.
[00:57:29]  I think I've skimmed part of it.
[00:57:30]  These are like my buddies, they sit on my shelf.
[00:57:32]  I converse with them when I meet them.
[00:57:34]  And then this is John Lukash.
[00:57:36]  John Lukash is a very, very important historian, historical consciousness.
[00:57:41]  Of the remembered past.
[00:57:41]  These are great sources to look at to understand the tools of the discipline and how it works.
[00:57:47]  To put a cap on everything I said, I don't think you have to have all knowledge to know, get a sense of history.
[00:57:52]  I do think you have to have a humble demeanor when you're approaching it, be open to new information and new sources, if there are new sources, and make sure that you use common sense as you're approaching it.
[00:58:04]  And if you do that, I think you can make sense of the past without knowing everything everyone said about it.
[00:58:11]  We could dive into anything I said there.
[00:58:15]  Real quick, have you listened to any Daryl Cooper, the martyr there, too?
[00:58:18]  The martyr there, too.
[00:58:19]  Made podcasts?
[00:58:22]  Yeah, years ago, I listened to his whole thing on Epstein and it freaked me out.
[00:58:26]  Have you listened to anything else?
[00:58:29]  I started to listen to his one on mining in Appalachia and I'm ashamed to say I got a little bored and I stopped, but fair enough.
[00:58:37]  Very interesting.
[00:58:39]  I think he does some popular level stuff.
[00:58:42]  Yeah, I like him.
[00:58:44]  Like he, you know, he's been on American Reformer before or Newfounding podcast.
[00:58:51]  And, but I think as you were talking, I just thought of his style, you know, like now he's doing his new series on World War II.
[00:59:01]  And, you know, and he's, you know, he waited as long as he did because he was reading, you know, tons and tons and tons of sources.
[00:59:08]  And, but a lot of what he's done, whether it's the Fear and Loathing series in the New Jerusalem, I listened to that one.
[00:59:15]  And, um, A lot of what he does is just here's a source, here's a source, here's a source, here's a source, mostly dealing with primary sources and does his best not to really take a side.
[00:59:29]  And that angers people, especially with central historical narratives where there's a mainline consensus and everybody's supposed to take a side, like World War II.
[00:59:42]  But a lot of what he does is he's not necessarily a revisionist, although he certainly has been accused of that.
[00:59:51]  But he's not coming and taking somebody who's demonized and then lionizing them.
[00:59:56]  But he's saying, well, we should neither demonize nor lionize, but humanize.
[01:00:01]  Okay, here's what's on the ground.
[01:00:04]  This is what was going on.
[01:00:05]  Here's atrocities committed by the Germans.
[01:00:08]  But here's Dresden.
[01:00:10]  And a lot of people are unfamiliar with the history on that side of the equation, what was going on and atrocities committed to the Germans.
[01:00:18]  And so you have this and you have that and all that kind of stuff.
[01:00:21]  So, anyways, but my point is it seems like ideology.
[01:00:25]  Is not only is it not the master key, but it's almost like not only will it not get you through every door, but it seems like it's actually, it can be a hindrance.
[01:00:39]  It can end up locking doors to where you'll never actually find out the truth because it's inconvenient.
[01:00:47]  Yeah, I think historians have motivations.
[01:00:50]  Every historian obviously does when they approach a subject, right?
[01:00:52]  So Darryl Cooper is very entertaining.
[01:00:55]  He does give you a string of sources.
[01:00:57]  At least from what I listen to.
[01:01:00]  And it moves.
[01:01:01]  It keeps you moving.
[01:01:02]  It keeps you interested.
[01:01:03]  I think it's good for our generation because you're not stuck mastering one source.
[01:01:08]  As soon as you might start to get bored, it's like another source enters the equation.
[01:01:11]  So there is an entertainment value to what he does.
[01:01:14]  I think history should be, at least popular history, should be interesting for sure.
[01:01:19]  But I think, you know, for I can't get in his head, but I'm sure he finds it interesting because the sense I get is it's the story of people and he's interested in how people think and how they react and what.
[01:01:30]  What happens when you're in a cult?
[01:01:32]  What's that like?
[01:01:32]  And so he wants to bring the experience to you so that you can live the experience in a sense without the consequences.
[01:01:39]  Isn't that what a good story does?
[01:01:42]  And so I think that's excellent.
[01:01:44]  I think there are different motivations for studying history, though.
[01:01:49]  And we've seen this throughout time with different figures, different historians, and different eras.
[01:01:55]  So you could study history because it's the story of virtue, it's supposed to cultivate virtue, and that's going to change the way that you.
[01:02:04]  Treat sources.
[01:02:05]  You're going to emphasize certain things, right?
[01:02:07]  Even in Daryl Cooper's podcasts, is he trying?
[01:02:12]  You should be attempting to be objective for sure, but history is a record that's incomplete.
[01:02:18]  Unless you're God, you don't see every angle, you don't have every piece of information.
[01:02:21]  You're reconstructing things.
[01:02:23]  It's a bit of a puzzle depending on the issue.
[01:02:26]  Some things we have less information than others, like Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto.
[01:02:31]  What sources did he have?
[01:02:32]  I mean, it's mainly archaeology and I mean, there's not much.
[01:02:35]  So there's a lot of assumptions.
[01:02:37]  There's, you know, so different.
[01:02:40]  They have like a society that has historical records they've been writing down for a while that makes it a little easier.
[01:02:46]  But, you know, some would look at that.
[01:02:48]  They signal out the virtuous men or women and say, I'm going to focus on this.
[01:02:55]  That's what history is cultivating virtue.
[01:02:57]  Or it could be discovery.
[01:02:58]  We want to discover the principles of human being and action.
[01:03:05]  I think of like, you know, Machiavelli in this sense, where He wanted to understand how to, I mean, this is what he gets a bad rap for, but he wanted to understand how to manipulate in a sense.
[01:03:17]  How do humans react under certain conditions?
[01:03:19]  Are there patterns here that emerge?
[01:03:21]  Can we quantify these patterns?
[01:03:24]  Some people are writing to explain things or to justify, like, for example, Fox's Book of Martyrs.
[01:03:30]  You've probably read that.
[01:03:32]  It's a very classic Christian book, but it was written at a time when Protestantism and Catholicism were in tense disagreement.
[01:03:40]  And justify Protestantism.
[01:03:42]  That was one of the ways, at least, that book was used to show how cruel the Catholic Church was.
[01:03:47]  And so it's focusing on a certain strand.
[01:03:49]  These are all valuable things.
[01:03:50]  These can all be done right.
[01:03:52]  I think it's important at the outset, though, to know what the motive is.
[01:03:55]  And so if someone comes at it with an ideological framework that's very rigid, that sees everything as ones and zeros and deletes the twos and the threes and the negative numbers, then they're only going to give you a very narrow sliver that justifies whatever their philosophical ideology is.
[01:04:13]  And I think we see that a lot in history today, academic history at least.
[01:04:17]  In fact, the majority of academic history seems to be now more social history as opposed to like, you know, diplomatic histories and economic, other kinds of histories.
[01:04:26]  People want to focus on social history.
[01:04:27]  The reason is because there's a political motivation behind it, using the historical record to justify current political policies.
[01:04:37]  And that's an ideology imposed on the past that I think gives us very warped interpretations.
[01:04:44]  Well, tell us real quick for, you know, some of our listeners may be.
[01:04:50]  New to this, but you would describe yourself as a paleoconservative.
[01:04:57]  Can you talk about what that is?
[01:04:59]  Because a lot of the new right or the new Christian right, and this is to me is consoling.
[01:05:07]  It's a comfort to recognize that none of it's really new.
[01:05:11]  It's not.
[01:05:14]  I got to be careful with this one too, because I could just as easily make it the new master key ideology thing and think that this is the one ring to rule them all.
[01:05:23]  Finally, I finally have it, my precious, you know, and my new ideology.
[01:05:27]  But as I'm thinking of like how the fault lines keep shaping up and how Christians continue to be divided, you know, against one another, especially within the evangelical world of which I'm a part, I, you know, it's starting to look to me like eschatology, which does matter.
[01:05:46]  I mean, it's biblical.
[01:05:49]  It's, yeah, eschatology matters.
[01:05:52]  But yeah, good podcast.
[01:05:55]  Yeah.
[01:05:55]  Yeah.
[01:05:56]  But that podcast, which I love those guys, they're great guys.
[01:06:01]  And I think they're doing great work.
[01:06:03]  But that was started, you know, probably, I can't remember exactly, but like 2022, maybe 2021.
[01:06:10]  And that was kind of the main thing that people were like, eschatology makes all the difference in the world.
[01:06:14]  It's the thing, it's not just a thing, it's the thing.
[01:06:19]  And I would say, yeah, eschatology matters.
[01:06:23]  But I don't think it's the thing.
[01:06:25]  So, anyways, all that, like whether it's, you know, Reformed theology, eschatology, or.
[01:06:31]  Biblical roles of men and women, patriarchy, or what, all these things really do matter.
[01:06:37]  And they've shaped some pretty clear dividing lines.
[01:06:41]  But the big one, because I've been trying to figure it out, it's like, well, how did I land where I landed?
[01:06:47]  Like, I look around, I'm like, I look at my friends, I look at you, I look at Isker, I look at Ogden, I look at Stephen Wolfe, I look at Eddie Robles, and I'm like, I'm here.
[01:07:01]  I'm glad I'm here.
[01:07:02]  I like these guys.
[01:07:04]  And I think these things that I currently hold are true.
[01:07:08]  Otherwise, I wouldn't hold them, right?
[01:07:09]  Shocker.
[01:07:11]  Everybody who believes something thinks that what they believe is true.
[01:07:14]  I didn't give them a point.
[01:07:15]  That's all of us.
[01:07:16]  But it seems like, as I'm trying to figure it out, so what is the new dividing line?
[01:07:21]  I feel like it's nature.
[01:07:24]  Nature.
[01:07:27]  And that's, for me, as I look back, I'm like, that was a big part of the whole patriarchy thing.
[01:07:31]  The appeal to me was not going against the grain, but saying, no, that like, It's not just complementarianism, right?
[01:07:40]  A halfway house, you know, pretty novel idea in 1988.
[01:07:44]  You know, the term is coined.

=== Nature as the Dividing Line (11:51) ===

[01:07:45]  And this idea that, you know, the distinction between men and women is merely duties and roles.
[01:07:51]  Because, in a sense, if you're, you know, it doesn't take much to lift up the hood and realize, yeah, but that kind of subtly indicts God as arbitrary and capricious.
[01:08:00]  That, like, there's no real rhyme or reason.
[01:08:02]  It's like your wife, you know, constantly singing, anything you can do, I can do better, I can do anything better than you, but I won't.
[01:08:08]  Because I'm complimentary.
[01:08:09]  You know, and that's where you get people saying absurd things, you know, like, I can preach better than the majority of male preachers, but I won't.
[01:08:20]  And I remember when I heard, you know, things like that, I was like, oh, that's Beth Moore 10 years ago.
[01:08:29]  You know what I mean?
[01:08:30]  Or, you know, like, that's Jen Hatmaker.
[01:08:32]  That's like, I've heard this before.
[01:08:34]  I know where this goes.
[01:08:36]  And I think complementarianism allows for that.
[01:08:38]  And so the appeal, the point is, the appeal of patriarchy was.
[01:08:41]  Not just a distinction of roles, but it's saying, no, the differences go all the way down.
[01:08:45]  It's that the roles stem from design.
[01:08:49]  God's not arbitrary, He's not capricious.
[01:08:50]  He gives certain roles to men and women because He made in our nature men and women differently, all the way down.
[01:08:58]  And not even just physically with breadth of shoulders versus hips, you know, for fighting wars or, you know, birthing children, but no, even psychologically.
[01:09:11]  Mentally, at every single level.
[01:09:14]  Like, I don't know if you watched that popular show a while back, but The Queen's Gambit.
[01:09:19]  It was actually, I looked into it, it was highly accurate.
[01:09:21]  There's only one big piece, right?
[01:09:23]  It was really about chess.
[01:09:24]  Yeah, it was about chess.
[01:09:26]  And it really followed a true story and kept to many of the details.
[01:09:29]  It was really pretty accurate.
[01:09:31]  There's only one major detail they changed.
[01:09:34]  In real history, it wasn't a chick, it was a dude.
[01:09:39]  That was the one.
[01:09:41]  That's the major.
[01:09:42]  You know, so it's like, it's not just like, well, men can out bench women.
[01:09:45]  Like, well, yeah, of course.
[01:09:47]  But no, it's even in something that's strictly intellectual, right?
[01:09:52]  That doesn't require any physical prowess, like chess.
[01:09:58]  You can take the best female chess players in the world.
[01:10:01]  And so it's just like, we're different.
[01:10:03]  And that doesn't mean women are dumb, but chess is the game of kings, it's strategy, it's war.
[01:10:09]  Chess is war.
[01:10:09]  Men are wired physically, psychologically, mentally, emotionally.
[01:10:14]  So there's a difference in nature.
[01:10:16]  That stems to roll.
[01:10:17]  And that really got me, you know, five years ago, whatever, when I, you know, became patriarchal.
[01:10:23]  Here's my point though.
[01:10:24]  Today, I'm realizing I think it's that's a microcosm.
[01:10:28]  The macro is it's just the new dividing lines that seem to be shaping up is just around nature.
[01:10:33]  Who believes in nature applied to gender, applied to nations, applied to ethnicity, right?
[01:10:41]  Which none of that requires any racial animus.
[01:10:43]  You don't have to hate anybody, right?
[01:10:45]  But it does require, yeah, but there is like race actually is a thing.
[01:10:50]  And colorblindness sounds nice, but probably isn't true.
[01:10:55]  There are different races and there are distinctions among them.
[01:11:02]  As much as I'm offended by this and disappointed, and I feel like it's a great injustice, not a lot of white guys in the NFL.
[01:11:09]  Doesn't feel fair, you know?
[01:11:11]  But there it is, you know?
[01:11:13]  And so there's distinctions, there's differences, there's strengths, there's weaknesses.
[01:11:17]  But whether it's race, whether it's nations, whether it's gender, at every single level, Nationalism over globalism, patriarchy over feminism, hierarchy over egalitarianism.
[01:11:29]  At every level, I'm starting to see, and again, I want to be careful not just make this ideology, but I am starting to see trying to find the common thread, a denominator.
[01:11:39]  And it seems like one of the common denominators that's separating, because I'm like, how in the world are me and my friends finding ourselves at odds with James White?
[01:11:50]  I still love James White.
[01:11:53]  If you had asked me two years ago, If there would be some kind of, I'd be like, no, that's dumb.
[01:11:58]  Like, we love James White.
[01:12:00]  We're not going to have some big disagreement.
[01:12:02]  And what I'm starting to think is that it's not just an eschological, it's not like all the post-mill guys are on one side and the all-mill guys are on another.
[01:12:11]  And it's not just even dispensationalism.
[01:12:13]  As much as I despise dispensationalism, I think it's wrong.
[01:12:16]  But there's guys who are dispies who I'm finding more common ground with them on a lot of issues than guys who are covenantal.
[01:12:24]  And so at every level, I'm realizing: okay, all right, there's something under this, there's something under this, there's something.
[01:12:30]  And I'm trying to get to the lowest common denominator.
[01:12:32]  And the only thing I'm coming up with right now is nature.
[01:12:38]  Who wants to, who sees the whole post liberal order as stretching the rubber band or suppression, like Doug would say, like pushing the beach ball of nature under the water and it's snapping back?
[01:12:50]  And who thinks that snapback is God's design and is okay with it and knows it could snap back and you could have pagan nationalism or Islamic nationalism?
[01:12:58]  Like it can snap back in a sinful manner, but the snapback itself is not inherently sinful.
[01:13:03]  So we want to snap back and just, but we want it to be biblical patriarchy and not Andrew Tate patriarchy.
[01:13:08]  And we want it to be.
[01:13:09]  Christian nationalism, you know, and not Islamic nationalism.
[01:13:12]  We want it, but we're rooting for the beach ball to burst out of the water.
[01:13:17]  We actually, nature is our friend.
[01:13:19]  We're actually not going against the grain.
[01:13:22]  We actually want that return to nature.
[01:13:24]  All that back to my original question, believe it or not, I remember when I think of paleoconservative, I know it's beyond that, but guys like Pat Buchanan, it seems like these were guys who believed in nature, they believed in distinct nations.
[01:13:39]  They believed in differences between men and women.
[01:13:41]  They believed in different ethnicities without despising any of them.
[01:13:45]  But they were nature guys.
[01:13:48]  And when I think of Stephen Wolfe today, kind of a modern guy, or I think of you, I think these are guys who aren't trying to go against nature.
[01:13:57]  What do you think?
[01:13:59]  Well, I just wrote a book.
[01:14:01]  I turned in the final manuscript this morning.
[01:14:04]  So it's on this topic.
[01:14:06]  So, I mean, obviously, I'm cracking.
[01:14:08]  So, plug the book.
[01:14:12]  Where to start?
[01:14:13]  Well, you can't pre order it yet, but hopefully soon.
[01:14:16]  It's called Against the Grain Christian Order in a Liberal Age.
[01:14:21]  And hopefully mid February, it'll be up on Amazon, but I'll also sell autographed copies and stuff through my website, johnharrispodcast.com.
[01:14:30]  I should, while we're on this, I also have a music album coming out this Saturday.
[01:14:34]  So if people want to go to johnharris tunes.com, they can check that out.
[01:14:37]  And if you have any connections to singer songwriters in Nashville, I'll sell them my stuff.
[01:14:42]  I don't care.
[01:14:43]  But back to the nature question.
[01:14:47]  And I assume you want to relate this to history.
[01:14:51]  And paleo, like, what is paleo conservatism?
[01:14:53]  Does it have to do with nature?
[01:14:54]  Am I right about that?
[01:14:55]  What, you know, that whole conversation?
[01:14:57]  What do you think?
[01:14:58]  Yeah, tradition, nature, religion.
[01:15:02]  It's more of an anti modern sentiment or posture, I would say.
[01:15:05]  And it's not something that you can quantify in 10 principles or it's.
[01:15:15]  It's something that, with changes in the situation that we're in and the level of threat and the different threats, will adapt to those changes because it values the, what I'm trying to think of the word Richard Reaver used for it, which I'm blanking on now.
[01:15:30]  But basically, the principles that the eternal principles, transcendentals, I think is what he called them, that do not change.
[01:15:38]  There's certain things that do not change based upon the character and nature of God.
[01:15:42]  And so there's an order that he set up.
[01:15:45]  We aim to defend that order.
[01:15:47]  Paleo just means old.
[01:15:49]  So, paleoconservative was a term that Paul Gottfried and Tom Fleming came up with to distinguish themselves from people who were calling themselves conservatives, but they were not the same.
[01:15:59]  They were more ideological and liberal, and they wanted to freeze frame America circa 1950 or whatever, not post liberal.
[01:16:12]  We talk about the post war consensus.
[01:16:13]  It really was that, and say that this is what America is.
[01:16:17]  And they just said that's not really what conservatism is about.
[01:16:22]  Is about valuing the order, not as an abstract thing, but as a tangible reality.
[01:16:28]  Just like I love my child or I love my wife, I love the people around me, I love the things around me.
[01:16:35]  I'm not a Gnostic.
[01:16:36]  I think it's great that I can smoke meat and shoot my bow outside.
[01:16:41]  And I mean, these are things God created the flavor of life to enjoy and experience.
[01:16:46]  So, all that to say, getting back to history, paleoconservatives tend to value.
[01:16:53]  Older, more pre modern ways of thinking.
[01:16:56]  And so, a good history that I would use as a touch point for this is Edmund Burke's story or writings against the French Revolution.
[01:17:06]  He wrote a book called, I'm trying to remember the name of it now.
[01:17:08]  I think it's called Notes on the Revolution in France.
[01:17:12]  And he basically says that societies that get away from the traditions and the social glue that binds societies together, these These things that develop really over the course of decades and centuries that are incredibly fragile if you disrupt them.
[01:17:34]  And they are strong when they're together, but when you start separating, well, to give a good example of what I'm saying, Great Britain's experiencing these right now as they unravel the bonds that have bound them together for years.
[01:17:49]  It's not just Christianity, it's a British common culture that existed at one point.
[01:17:55]  They're destroying towns.
[01:17:56]  I mean, we're seeing a little bit of this in the United States, but it's worse there, I think.
[01:18:00]  And so Burke wrote about this and said, if you try to base a society on some innovative idea in the French Revolution, it was equality.
[01:18:07]  Other ideological modern, you know, ideology is a modern impulse, but other modern regimes have used different principles to base their regime.
[01:18:16]  I think, you know, to pick one that's obviously the whipping boy way too much, but just as a contrast, I think, you know, the Third Reich was a lot more based on this kind of a racialist principle.
[01:18:26]  It made race a more abstract thing, simplified it.
[01:18:30]  It's reductionistic.
[01:18:31]  That's what ideology does.
[01:18:32]  You know, Communists were much more in tune with economics, and they wanted to create a one principle that solved everything.
[01:18:40]  And so they would write their histories based upon this.
[01:18:46]  So Burke writes to defend organic community throughout time and the amazing, true, and valuable things that we all love that organic community develops.
[01:18:57]  And really, in his time, that would have been like British common law and things that were Christian principles mediated through this.
[01:19:06]  This shared cultural medium.
[01:19:09]  And so he was against innovation, starting at year zero, saying, We're going to force everyone to conform to this without knowing what the consequences are going to be.
[01:19:18]  It's like saying in the lab, we don't know what it'll do, but on paper it seems to have worked.
[01:19:23]  And let's just force everyone.
[01:19:25]  Let's do a giant experiment in mRNA therapy or something.
[01:19:28]  And just, we do this all the time with certain things.
[01:19:33]  And Burke was basically writing against this tendency.

=== Order in the Universe (04:36) ===

[01:19:37]  So, I don't know.
[01:19:38]  I'm trying to relate it back to history, but I think history is the story of people.
[01:19:42]  And people are what metaphysically, anthropologically, they're created in the image of God.
[01:19:49]  There's an order to the universe.
[01:19:51]  They fit into that.
[01:19:53]  They have a purpose.
[01:19:54]  They have a telos.
[01:19:55]  So history should take into account all these things.
[01:19:57]  And really, the Enlightenment project of history, no matter which school I'm talking about or figure, I would say has a tendency to reduce history and to be an anti history, to really honestly rip down the stories of people.
[01:20:12]  Deconstruct, to mock religion.
[01:20:18]  There is no order, to mock order.
[01:20:21]  And I think that the paleoconservative impulse is to actually do real history, talking about real people in God's real created order.
[01:20:31]  That's good.
[01:20:32]  All right, let's go to our last commercial break and then we'll come back for some final thoughts.
[01:20:36]  And maybe to what I'd like to do is maybe even deal with the chat a little bit.
[01:20:40]  So if you guys have questions, And you're listening right now, you're in the live chat, go ahead and give us your questions.
[01:20:47]  Nathan will actually take those.
[01:20:48]  If you put a question mark at the end of your sentence, we'll know it's a question.
[01:20:51]  He'll put those and categorize them in a separate chat for us.
[01:20:55]  And then John and I and Michael will be able to read those and try to get to as many of them as possible.
[01:21:03]  Nobody has to pay any money, but I will tell you if you do a super chat, you will get priority.
[01:21:08]  So that's just, those are the rules.
[01:21:10]  I don't make the rules, but those are the rules.
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=== Inculcating Virtue Through History (10:40) ===

[01:24:14]  All of Christ for all of life and all of finance for Christendom.
[01:24:21]  All right, we're back.
[01:24:22]  All right, welcome back, everybody.
[01:24:24]  John, I had one question for you before we move into some of the ones from the chat, and you can go in any direction you want with it.
[01:24:30]  But here's the question You mentioned earlier.
[01:24:35]  That one of the perspectives of history is to inculcate virtue into a society.
[01:24:41]  And so, one of the reasons we tell the stories that we do is to foster the sense of virtue that society wants.
[01:24:49]  So, here are the two tensions that I'm feeling, and I think a lot of people are feeling right now one, we get told stories in school or in popular history.
[01:25:02]  Abe Lincoln was good, freeing the slaves was good.
[01:25:05]  or the allies were the good guys in World War II.
[01:25:08]  And this is what gets told at kind of a high school, maybe even an undergraduate college level.
[01:25:14]  And this is partly because a society, I think, this is my theory, needs cultural mythologies and even cultural touch points to point people to, to emulate this guy was good, this guy was bad, et cetera.
[01:25:29]  Now, what happens is then you start reading like, well, actually, there are problems with Abraham Lincoln.
[01:25:35]  And actually, you know, Stonewall Jackson was not the devil incarnate.
[01:25:39]  Actually, there were problems with Churchill, right?
[01:25:43]  And Hitler was not the most, possibly the most evil person that's ever existed in history.
[01:25:49]  And so, what ends up happening, actually, especially going back to what I said earlier with the amount of information that we have, is people now tend to think, well, I have been entirely lied to.
[01:26:00]  And because I've been lied to, there's a nefarious intent behind all the historical stories I've been told.
[01:26:06]  It's all about control, it's all about manipulation.
[01:26:10]  And What that leaves us with is, I think we're going into a society where we don't have a common cultural language anymore.
[01:26:20]  We don't have a common cultural perceived virtue anymore.
[01:26:24]  And part of that has to do with the stories that we tell each other, the historical stories that we tell each other, and the mythologies like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill and all of those as well.
[01:26:34]  So I just would really love for you to talk for just a few minutes before we go to the chat questions about this idea of a shared cultural historical.
[01:26:44]  Narrative that sometimes historians have to reinforce certain things, leave out other things, versus I think what a lot of conservatives and maybe rightly so feel no, actually, we've just been lied to this whole time.
[01:26:57]  Could you help pull on a couple threads on that knot that would point people in a good way of thinking about that problem?
[01:27:05]  That is a knot.
[01:27:05]  How long do you want me to go to your question?
[01:27:08]  Yeah, I mean, if you just give us a couple little, like, here's something to think about as you're wrestling with that.
[01:27:15]  Well, I do think that.
[01:27:17]  We mentioned before history being the story of people and their actions over time.
[01:27:23]  And I think that that does confer identity.
[01:27:28]  You don't usually see someone who wakes up one morning and wants to study history because they're not fascinated by it.
[01:27:36]  They're forced to do it.
[01:27:37]  It's something that you're usually driven to do because there's something that intrigues you about an event or a group of people or a person in the case of biography.
[01:27:47]  So I think that that's very important because in scripture, we see scripture as the best historians, by the way, and it gives us a lot of these historical, historiographical principles.
[01:27:57]  You see, The stories of people with their faults, but you also see heroes that should be highlighted.
[01:28:04]  And that's really key.
[01:28:06]  David's mighty men need to be highlighted, what they accomplished, who their names were.
[01:28:10]  Not everyone's in the Bible, right?
[01:28:12]  And one of the things that we see with social history today is this attempt, you see it with like the Howard Zinn, Eric Foner types to try to tell history from the bottom up.
[01:28:20]  We want to know what someone who's really poor, depressed feels about this, which is, I actually think there's some merit to that, but I think that most histories.
[01:28:31]  Throughout time, have focused on the achievements of either rulers or significant people in a society or people who did great acts.
[01:28:39]  That the people who did great acts to achieve great things that does give a people a sense of cohesion and identity, those shared myths, and not in the sense of false, you know, but myths in the sense of shared stories that give you a distinction.
[01:28:59]  So, what's happened, I think.
[01:29:03]  On steroids lately, but it's really been happening for a long time the historical professions have been lined up against the identities of Western peoples.
[01:29:13]  And so their task in doing history is to rip down those peoples, to rip down their heroes.
[01:29:21]  In some, I guess, circumstances, it's to also replace them with new heroes that are more revolutionary, that are against the society at a certain point.
[01:29:34]  You know, we look to them to see how bad we used to be, or something, and so they're kind of like negative, they serve as a negative example of how society was.
[01:29:44]  And I think there's a reaction against that today.
[01:29:48]  Somewhat you could see with some people who haven't maybe been trained historically on some of this stuff, an overreaction, I would say, to just not believe anything that you're told you know, a radical skepticism.
[01:30:01]  And we want to be careful of all we want to be careful of radical skepticism, we also want to be careful of just believing anything that we hear.
[01:30:10]  Because it's common knowledge.
[01:30:12]  When the monument thing started, I was one of my big issues.
[01:30:16]  I did a whole documentary on it called American Monument.
[01:30:18]  You can find it on YouTube.
[01:30:20]  I mean, I went like the Confederate monuments, all of it.
[01:30:23]  I wanted them to stay.
[01:30:25]  I knew this was an attack on our identity, regional identity, broader American identity.
[01:30:31]  And one of the things I remember though was when there was some talk about taking down the Lincoln Monument during 2020.
[01:30:37]  I mean, it's hard.
[01:30:39]  We all race that in our minds, perhaps, because we don't want to, at least I don't want to remember that year.
[01:30:44]  People were talking about some really crazy things, taking down the Washington Monument, taking down the Lincoln Monument.
[01:30:49]  And I remember thinking, you know, I've done enough reading on Lincoln to know that he's not the man that often he is portrayed to be.
[01:30:58]  I think he actually serves a more revolutionary.
[01:31:01]  There's kind of like two broad versions.
[01:31:03]  There's more than two, but two broad versions of Lincoln.
[01:31:05]  There's one that's more traditional, and then there's one that's more revolutionary.
[01:31:08]  And I think the revolutionary one tends to be the accurate one.
[01:31:12]  And the more you get into Lincoln, I think you realize there is definitely a revolutionary kind of.
[01:31:17]  Angle to him.
[01:31:18]  But all that to say, I wasn't for ripping down the Lincoln Monument, even though you look at it, I mean, it's almost godlike.
[01:31:27]  Of all the monuments, that's one that you could say, well, that one's like, you're thinking about like idols.
[01:31:32]  That one's gone a scale that's way beyond humans.
[01:31:34]  It's in a temple for crying out loud.
[01:31:36]  But the thing I thought of, and this is a circumstantial thing, right?
[01:31:41]  This is for the times we live in right now in human history, we don't have a lot of heroes that inculcate virtues.
[01:31:49]  Into the young men and women of this country.
[01:31:51]  We need reminders of that.
[01:31:53]  And there is a version of Lincoln that definitely exemplifies virtue.
[01:31:59]  And my concern is what do you replace that with?
[01:32:02]  It leaves a gaping hole when you take all these things out.
[01:32:06]  And who comes in to replace that?
[01:32:09]  So I've been in favor of trying to get back to some of the truly noble people in our country's history who were.
[01:32:19]  Who did great things.
[01:32:20]  And I mean, I have a whole list of heroes.
[01:32:22]  I, one time I wanted to do like a whole documentary series on heroes, but you know, George Washington is like top of that list for me.
[01:32:28]  And, you know, guys like Booker T. Washington and Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith and Lewis and Clark, you know, the list goes on and on explorers, military guys, presidents.
[01:32:38]  And, you know, for me, I'm talking, you know, personally, I want to elevate those heroes for my own children because it gives them a sense of who they are.
[01:32:46]  This is the country that you're part of.
[01:32:48]  This belongs to you, this story.
[01:32:50]  Uniquely to you.
[01:32:52]  It's not a bigoted remark.
[01:32:54]  It's just part of a tradition we can use a plural possessive about.
[01:32:58]  It's ours.
[01:32:59]  And that's the reason we shouldn't be tearing down the monuments.
[01:33:03]  It's because they're ours.
[01:33:05]  And once you have to justify these characters from history based upon some rationalistic principle, and, you know, well, they really weren't as bad as you think because they were against slavery.
[01:33:17]  They just didn't go all the way or something, you know.
[01:33:20]  Like I've seen that this is the neoconservative move, is like, you know, they were all secretly.
[01:33:25]  Egalitarians from the 21st century.
[01:33:27]  They just couldn't tell you at that time.
[01:33:29]  And it's like, well, you'll never gain, you have to focus on their virtues that they exemplified publicly, their sacrifice, their internal fortitude, the cardinal virtues.
[01:33:41]  And those are the things that are being lost.
[01:33:43]  And they're being lost in the historical discipline, which is front and center on this.
[01:33:49]  They are being lost to a new metric for virtue.
[01:33:52]  So virtue is not internal disciplines, character.
[01:33:56]  The virtue is now checking the right box when it comes to some egalitarian issue, some political issue.
[01:34:04]  You don't have to even lift a finger.
[01:34:05]  If you're on the right side of it, you are a good person.
[01:34:09]  And someone on the wrong side of it, they could be the greatest person in the world, give all their money to charity, love their wife, they're terrible.
[01:34:15]  That's the metric that we're fighting.
[01:34:17]  And we just can't accept the metric.
[01:34:18]  And I'll say one final thing.
[01:34:20]  I don't know if you've noticed, because this streams down to the popular level, but like, you know, even like the Napoleon movie, I don't know if you saw that, but Josephine, his wife, He's so front and center.
[01:34:32]  She's his demise.
[01:34:35]  There's this emphasis in history now on characters that were not as emphasized.
[01:34:40]  It really takes, I'm just using that as one example, but it takes away from the stature, no pun intended, of Napoleon.
[01:34:48]  Because now the main character is not Napoleon, it's Josephine.
[01:34:51]  She's the more significant, more important character.

=== The Napoleon Narrative Shift (04:27) ===

[01:34:54]  And we're doing this with everything to rip down the past.
[01:34:58]  And in that case, I guess you could say he's a villain, but with heroes too.
[01:35:02]  I was just watching a movie.
[01:35:03]  Was it last night or something?
[01:35:05]  I couldn't take it.
[01:35:05]  It was, oh, I remember.
[01:35:07]  I started watching Gladiator 2, big mistake.
[01:35:10]  And within the first fight scene, there's this, you know, this chick who's, you know, she's just kicking butt.
[01:35:16]  And I'm just like, I, it's got great costumes.
[01:35:20]  It's got great everything.
[01:35:22]  I, and now I'm like so out of it because I know that's not accurate.
[01:35:25]  And the reason it's not accurate is because they're pushing an agenda and it's subtle and stuff.
[01:35:30]  But, um, that's the kind of thing I think we have to fight.
[01:35:33]  We have, we want accurate portrayals, but we also want to embrace the myth and the identity conferring nature of history.
[01:35:41]  Uh, because without it, you don't have a society.
[01:35:45]  Yeah.
[01:35:46]  Well said.
[01:35:47]  Um, Here are some of the questions.
[01:35:49]  So we got a couple super chats from Jeff Hafley.
[01:35:51]  We'll start with those.
[01:35:53]  He said, Would you say that being less subservient to the desires, agenda, and priorities of certain protected minorities, such as Jews or blacks, et cetera, would be a key distinctive?
[01:36:07]  I think he means of paleoconservatism.
[01:36:10]  Yeah, a key distinctive of being a paleoconservative.
[01:36:13]  And then he followed it up.
[01:36:14]  I'll just read his second one another super chat.
[01:36:18]  Thank you for that, Jeff.
[01:36:19]  I have started calling the civil rights movement the BLM Movement 1.0.
[01:36:26]  It seems to me that it is both good branding and true history to call the whole 70 plus year thing the BLM Movement.
[01:36:38]  And then he has hashtag repeal MLK Day.
[01:36:43]  What are your thoughts on that, John and Michael?
[01:36:46]  I would change the scope to go back to.
[01:36:48]  You know, the Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction era, to be honest with you.
[01:36:53]  We've been, this has been something that's, we've had these kinds of issues for a lot longer than just even the civil rights movement.
[01:37:04]  And it comes, I mean, I don't want to get at all the complexities of it because we don't have time, but I think once the paternal relationships and labor arrangements and so forth were severed during Reconstruction between mostly a slave class and their masters.
[01:37:21]  What you've had since then is a degree of dependency on government and a looking to government as the solution to poverty and all these kinds of things.
[01:37:34]  And so the government keeps throwing new innovative policies at not just the primarily black population, but now other groups that are in minority statuses.
[01:37:48]  And so we've just had this for a long time in our country.
[01:37:55]  Yeah, I, Jeff, I basically agree with those comments.
[01:37:59]  Like, I think that that's, that's, um, I think John's right.
[01:38:04]  Like, you can probably go even further back, and it's been going, you know, it's even broader.
[01:38:08]  But, um, but if you're just saying like that there's a straight line from the civil rights movement to, um, from MLK to George Floyd, I basically agree.
[01:38:20]  I think John Doyle, we've had him on the show before.
[01:38:22]  I like him.
[01:38:22]  He's a friend.
[01:38:24]  Uh, he said, um, You know, 50 years from now, neocons, neoconservatives will be saying, I'm a George Floyd conservative.
[01:38:33]  You know, because what was George Floyd other than a conservative?
[01:38:36]  I mean, he was protesting against fiat currency by using a fake $20 bill.
[01:38:41]  And his final words, he was crying out for his mother.
[01:38:44]  You're right.
[01:38:44]  There was that maternal, you know, familial instinct.
[01:38:47]  You know, I'm a George Floyd conservative.
[01:38:49]  And he was basically just saying that that's how your grandparents, and in some cases, great grandparents, would have felt at the time.
[01:38:58]  In the 60s, someone saying, I'm a Martin Luther King conservative.
[01:39:03]  They was like, What?
[01:39:05]  It would be as slanderous, not scandalous, absurd, as saying, I'm a George Floyd conservative.
[01:39:14]  Like, what do you mean conservative?
[01:39:16]  The dude's a commie.
[01:39:18]  That's what your grandparents would have said.
[01:39:20]  God bless them.
[01:39:21]  May they rest in peace.

=== From Demonized to Humanized (15:27) ===

[01:39:22]  You know, but like, and we all might be saying again now that it's being released.
[01:39:25]  That's true.
[01:39:26]  He was a commie.
[01:39:27]  And hopefully, you know, hopefully the majority, you know, things can change.
[01:39:32]  Narratives, history, even mainline consensus can change over time.
[01:39:39]  I think that's happened with Napoleon, right?
[01:39:41]  So, like, John briefly mentioned villain, and that's and that is true.
[01:39:46]  Predominantly, if you're looking back, you know, he has, from his time to ours, most of that has been viewed as negatively as a villain.
[01:39:57]  But I get the sense, and John, you can correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I get the sense that Napoleon, even with that movie that you cited, that it was atrocious.
[01:40:06]  I mean, it made Napoleon a sniveling simp, you know, and his wife, you know, wore the pants.
[01:40:14]  And so it was, you know, it was what you would expect, come to expect from Hollywood.
[01:40:18]  But But still, even in that movie, I think part of what's happening, like with Napoleon in recent decades, is you go from being demonized to humanized.
[01:40:33]  And that still doesn't necessarily mean that you're virtuous.
[01:40:36]  So that doesn't mean that everybody necessarily becomes a Napoleon fan.
[01:40:39]  But it just means that you're able to see, like any good story, lead characters of stories are usually, you know, you have, like if you're writing a fictional narrative, you have flat characters and you have.
[01:40:53]  You know, more rounded, you know, where they have, they're more than just one sided.
[01:40:57]  They have multifaceted, you know, he's sneaky, but he's also, but he's also at the same time courageous.
[01:41:07]  And, you know, like he has more than one virtue, more than one characteristic.
[01:41:11]  There's some negative things, there's some positive things.
[01:41:13]  He's a well rounded character.
[01:41:15]  He's like, and what is that like?
[01:41:17]  Like human beings, like people.
[01:41:20]  People are like that.
[01:41:20]  People always have more than, you can't just define one person in one way.
[01:41:26]  People are complex.
[01:41:28]  And so I think, you know, that's happening with Napoleon.
[01:41:31]  I think that probably will eventually happen even with, you know, he who must not be named, you know, Voldemort himself, Adolf Hitler.
[01:41:39]  I think that not that he necessarily is a good guy.
[01:41:43]  I'm not saying that.
[01:41:44]  But I do think 50 years from now, he probably won't be viewed in exactly the same light that he has for the last 50 years.
[01:41:53]  I think that as time goes on, you move from, we must have this as a flat character.
[01:42:02]  One characteristic because it serves a certain agenda, like the post war consensus never again.
[01:42:08]  We can never have sovereign nations again.
[01:42:10]  We can never have patriarchy again.
[01:42:12]  We can never have nationalism again.
[01:42:13]  We can never, because we know what happens when you do that.
[01:42:19]  And so I think as time goes on and you're further removed from the thing that the first historians were worried about, and that's no longer a looming threat, then you can go to primary sources and you can.
[01:42:34]  Write more well without being crucified in the public sphere, like this guy's a Nazi, you know, or this guy is a Napoleon fan, you know, or this guy's, you know, and none of that, you don't move from demonizing to lionizing because that's just the contrarian spirit that we were talking about earlier.
[01:42:50]  That can be just as thoughtless, that can be just as false, and not actually true history.
[01:42:55]  But you can avoid both of those pitfalls, neither lionizing nor humanizing, or lionizing nor demonizing, but humanizing.
[01:43:02]  And in humanizing, you can still say, and so and so, on the whole, bad guy, or so and so, on the whole, good guy.
[01:43:12]  But you're just, but you're, you're, it's a more encompassing, you know, view.
[01:43:16]  And so, all that being said, my point is, I think that's happening right now.
[01:43:20]  I think the Overton window is shifting at the speed of light, which I'm happy about.
[01:43:25]  I think there will be overcorrections.
[01:43:26]  And I think that, but overall, I think things have been terrible, terrible.
[01:43:30]  We have been this progressive, we've been a society that chops genitals off of children.
[01:43:36]  So, like, for me, like, my biggest concern in this moment, the year of our Lord 2025, when we've murdered 70 million babies in their mother's womb and chopping off the genitals of children, my biggest concern is not, yeah, but guys, you know, the woke right, we might overreact a little bit, you know, we could hurt some fit.
[01:43:56]  Like, that, like, my goodness, like, to lose a plot at that level is just, like, I don't, I mean, that's, to me, that's astronomical.
[01:44:05]  I don't even know how to, the person who is concerned about overreach, From the right, when we've been living with 70 years of just total progressive, post liberal, leftist, total domination, I'm just like, you're either very ignorant or I think you're subversive.
[01:44:30]  I think you're on the other team.
[01:44:31]  I think you actually like liberalism.
[01:44:34]  You're not a Christian.
[01:44:35]  Or, like Stephen Wolfe would always say, isn't it convenient?
[01:44:38]  Isn't it wonderful that the timeless politics of the Bible just happen to perfectly match up with the post liberal order?
[01:44:45]  And you're either that guy, you're an ideologue and you're naive, or you are a bad guy.
[01:44:52]  You're a subversive.
[01:44:53]  So, anyways, all that being said, I think that's happening with Napoleon.
[01:44:56]  I think that'll happen with MLK.
[01:44:59]  I think it's funny.
[01:45:01]  It's like John said the further you get removed and you get further away from primary, that's true.
[01:45:08]  So, it gets fuzzy.
[01:45:09]  You lose some accuracy, perhaps.
[01:45:12]  But the other thing that you lose, and I think this is true, is you lose.
[01:45:17]  Biases and you lose agendas, and you lose like the things that were happening right then.
[01:45:23]  As you're writing somebody's memoir, and he's still within living memory, and everybody has a dog in the fight, they have a reason, a strong reason to either lionize so and so or demonize so and so.
[01:45:38]  And the further you get removed from that, in terms of the accuracy of the details, that might get fuzzy, but you lose details while simultaneously losing emotions.
[01:45:52]  And in some sense, it may be possible to do even better history.
[01:45:57]  And so, all that being said, yeah, I think that straight line from MLK to George Floyd.
[01:46:04]  Yeah, I think that that makes sense, BLM 1.0 to BLM 2.0.
[01:46:10]  And I think America's kind of done with wokeness.
[01:46:14]  And honestly, the guys who are sounding the alarm and clutching the pearls over the woke right.
[01:46:22]  I've noticed, John, I'd be curious if you've noticed this, but even recently, just on X, I've noticed your Neil Shenvees and guys kind of changing their typical tone in the way that they do public discourse to where it looks like genuine, like genuinely questioning, like, I don't understand why.
[01:46:41]  Why are people moving to that?
[01:46:43]  Like, Neil Shenvee doesn't get it.
[01:46:45]  It's like the world is literally passing him by.
[01:46:48]  The Overton's shifting so fast, and he's shocked.
[01:46:50]  He can't believe it.
[01:46:51]  He's like, I don't understand why people.
[01:46:53]  Oh, it was about meritocracy.
[01:46:55]  He was basically saying, like, we said that meritocracy was great and we shouldn't give jobs to people just because they're minorities.
[01:47:04]  And now people are saying that we shouldn't do meritocracy and that jobs should belong to heritage Americans.
[01:47:12]  And he's genuinely perplexed.
[01:47:14]  He can't figure it out.
[01:47:15]  And it's like, yeah, because we're realizing liberalism was a bad idea.
[01:47:21]  There's a difference, there's a dynamic difference in I'm going, like, let the best man win.
[01:47:28]  May the best man win among my community, my countrymen, my church members.
[01:47:37]  That's very different than may the best man win on a global stage, even if it means that all of India on H 1B visas replace all of my countrymen and all of my natural citizens are unemployed.
[01:47:51]  Like for Shinvi, it's the same.
[01:47:52]  It's like tomato, tomato.
[01:47:54]  Meritocracy knows no bounds across the board.
[01:47:58]  Like let the best man win.
[01:47:59]  And if that means You know, that Vivek is right and that Americans just watch too much boy meets world, then, you know, tough luck for Americans.
[01:48:07]  Where it's like, even the idea of nepotism becoming this demonized thing is so bad.
[01:48:12]  Where it's like every other generation, like you would have looked at them and said, like, oh, you're going to hand the business over to your kid.
[01:48:19]  The family trade is going to stay with your family.
[01:48:21]  Of course.
[01:48:22]  To do anything other than that would have been frowned on as, like, you selfish prick.
[01:48:27]  You know, they wouldn't have said boomer because boomers weren't alive at the time.
[01:48:32]  But they would have had some other term.
[01:48:34]  For selling the birthright of your children.
[01:48:36]  And it would have been negative.
[01:48:37]  It would have been universally frowned upon.
[01:48:39]  Whereas now we're like, well, that's nepotism.
[01:48:42]  Yeah, well, nepotism is actually a biblical principle that you store up an inheritance for your children's children.
[01:48:50]  That's not meritocracy.
[01:48:52]  Inheritance for your children's children doesn't mean I'm just going to look for, you know, I'm now 65 years of age.
[01:48:58]  I'm looking to retire.
[01:48:59]  I have an inheritance to give.
[01:49:00]  And I'm writing my will.
[01:49:02]  And I'm just going to look and see, you know, who's the brightest.
[01:49:06]  You know, the brightest young man out of the bunch, you know, and whoever has the most manners and a firm handshake and will make eye contact with me when I'm talking to them, then it doesn't matter if that's my natural offspring or my own child.
[01:49:17]  I'm going to write his name in the will over and against my own.
[01:49:21]  Like that's wicked.
[01:49:22]  The Bible condemns that.
[01:49:24]  And so, yeah, meritocracy has its merits, but it's not a universal one size fits all global across the board.
[01:49:33]  And a lot of guys just, things are moving fast.
[01:49:36]  That's my point.
[01:49:37]  Things are moving fast.
[01:49:39]  And if you're not careful, you will be sitting there like a deer in the headlights and say, What the heck is going on?
[01:49:45]  And I think that that's happening from MLK to historical figures to the post liberal order being completely deconstructed and crumbling before our very eyes.
[01:49:56]  And history, the actual history, what happened doesn't change, but the way we view it does.
[01:50:03]  That changes.
[01:50:04]  And I think it can change for the worse because things get fuzzy, but it can also change for the better because.
[01:50:10]  You have less biases.
[01:50:12]  Do you guys have any thoughts on that, John?
[01:50:16]  Sure, I feel like I don't want to hog here.
[01:50:20]  I talked a lot, but yeah, if you don't have anything to share, Michael, I think that the needs of the moment very much favor a strong in group preference, especially for American citizens.
[01:50:34]  And you know, as you surveyed some of the figures you were just talking about, Napoleon, Hitler, I mean, Hitler was a Figure that Europe united to defeat.
[01:50:45]  And I think this has been a dream since I actually think World War I is much more significant than World War II, to be honest with you, as far as setting the ground.
[01:50:54]  I actually would be content with a post war narrative and it being World War I, but that's another story.
[01:51:00]  I think that this lead the League of Nations and the trend towards the globalism we see now, there's been a thirst for uniting Europe and uniting the world, but Europe, you know, specifically to be the genesis point of this.
[01:51:14]  And Hitler was one of the, I think, commonly shared foes that a lot of these nations had.
[01:51:21]  And this served a purpose.
[01:51:22]  And then you have the Cold War.
[01:51:24]  So now Russia becomes the villain and you have NATO and I think that this has been a need in the moment, according to a lot of elites.
[01:51:34]  They've wanted, and I think maybe we're talking about on a popular level, really.
[01:51:38]  What do people feel in the moment?
[01:51:39]  What are they looking for?
[01:51:40]  Because academic history is going to still be as woke as ever.
[01:51:43]  But what are people sensing?
[01:51:46]  I think right now, one of the things, one of the converging forces that shapes history, that God and his providence uses to shape history, is there is this real need for an in group preference because we've been denied it for so long.
[01:51:59]  You're not supposed to love your own.
[01:52:01]  Your own region, your own community, your own citizens.
[01:52:06]  You're supposed to favor everyone else.
[01:52:08]  And Trump has really put a damper on that.
[01:52:13]  And people realize this is not how God, again, we're going back to order, the natural order.
[01:52:18]  This isn't how God set up the world.
[01:52:20]  And so I think that this is part of why someone like Anil Shenvi is maybe wondering how come people don't want a meritocracy?
[01:52:28]  Well, because it's conflicting, at least some versions of it are conflicting with.
[01:52:33]  Having an in group preference for one's own.
[01:52:36]  We've allowed so many people into this country at such a low bar that it's diluted us to the point that we don't recognize each other and we want to recognize each other again.
[01:52:45]  We want time for assimilation.
[01:52:47]  We want to deport the people who have come here illegally and these kinds of things.
[01:52:52]  So, of course, people are going to be upset if H 1B migrants are coming over and taking jobs for half the price that Americans should have.
[01:52:59]  That's going to be something that's a natural thing if you just read the needs of the moment.
[01:53:04]  And that does affect our historical interpretations as well.
[01:53:07]  And that's why I think you can even have guys who have been dead for a long time, you know, even like someone like Thomas Aquinas.
[01:53:14]  There's a lot of, you know, aversion to Thomas Aquinas.
[01:53:19]  But I don't know if I've seen, maybe someone has and I haven't seen it, but if some of the theologians who are upset about this have asked the question, why is Thomas Aquinas making a comeback?
[01:53:27]  Have you thought about the circumstances we live in and why someone might be interested in natural law in these circumstances?
[01:53:34]  Makes a lot of sense if you just think about it.
[01:53:39]  He's a character that was alive a long time ago, but he was significant in his, obviously, his thinking on natural law.
[01:53:45]  So I think it's important to just sit down for a moment, think through the needs of the moment, the times in which we live.
[01:53:50]  And oftentimes, that's how I at least try to make sense of the world I live in.
[01:53:54]  It doesn't always get there 100%, but it helps.
[01:53:58]  That's super helpful, John.
[01:53:59]  I didn't even make that connection.
[01:54:03]  In a time where our world can't tell you the difference between a boy and a girl.
[01:54:11]  A guy who is known for natural law might make a comeback, yeah.
[01:54:16]  There you go, the most obvious thing ever, yeah.
[01:54:18]  That totally makes sense, yeah.
[01:54:20]  Uh, here's a question for you, John somebody else is the handle there.
[01:54:23]  He says, Uh, how would you prevent that logic?
[01:54:26]  Uh, so what you said earlier about like Abraham Lincoln, you know, there's a traditional version and then there's more of the nefarious, you know, tyrant version.
[01:54:36]  And I'm with you, I don't, I don't, he's to me, like, I think there are good characteristics, but on the whole, I'm not a huge fan, but um, but he.
[01:54:45]  Say it again.
[01:54:45]  What he's an awful guy in almost every level, yeah.

=== Natural Law Returns (15:46) ===

[01:54:49]  I know, yeah.
[01:54:51]  Go ahead.
[01:54:51]  Sorry, yeah.
[01:54:52]  So, but with that, I thought this was a thoughtful question from somebody else.
[01:54:56]  He says, John, how would you prevent that logic from applying to keeping MLK statues?
[01:55:02]  Right?
[01:55:02]  Like, so, so do, you know, like if the files are released and they have been and you're reading it, and I did some of the reading on that actually, Virgil Walker, you know, posted it and I was doing some of the reading and yeah, he's a commie who was funded.
[01:55:18]  What's up?
[01:55:19]  Are they released?
[01:55:20]  No, not for Virgil posted stuff that had been released previously, but the new stuff will not be released.
[01:55:25]  For what, 42 days now at this point?
[01:55:27]  Okay.
[01:55:28]  Okay.
[01:55:28]  But when those are released.
[01:55:30]  I'm like, no, I missed it.
[01:55:32]  No, no, no.
[01:55:33]  When it's released, and we likely find out that it's just, I'm anticipating we will find out it's just as bad or worse than what we thought.
[01:55:41]  I don't think it's going to be released.
[01:55:42]  And we're like, oh, he was great, you know?
[01:55:44]  But it's like, all right, here's a communist who turned the American people against each other and blah, blah, blah.
[01:55:53]  What would you say, John?
[01:55:54]  Do we take his statue down?
[01:55:58]  Yeah.
[01:55:58]  So I was careful to say when I was talking about Lincoln, and I think there are some that most people you can find qualities to admire.
[01:56:07]  And I think there are some in Lincoln, but Lincoln is, I think, he's a kind of a conniving lawyer, in my opinion, a deceitful guy.
[01:56:19]  He's, I think, that he's responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
[01:56:25]  Obviously, you know, we don't have to go through all that, but I think that.
[01:56:29]  He, at some point, I would like to see his stature, his status in American society reevaluated.
[01:56:39]  But at the same time, I know that nature abhors a vacuum.
[01:56:43]  And so, if we don't have strong virtues, if there's a, this is part of the Appomattox, post Appomattox consensus, if you want to call it that, or the reconciliation motif.
[01:56:55]  It used to be called the reconciliation narrative.
[01:56:57]  But, you know, Robert E. Lee's a hero, so is Abraham Lincoln, and the abolitionists were kind of bad guys.
[01:57:03]  John Brown was a bad guy.
[01:57:04]  That was the reconciliation motif that when we were born, all of us would have inherited that to some extent.
[01:57:11]  I think the woke guys have tried to change this all to bring in a very neo abolitionist interpretation of all this.
[01:57:16]  But that was the narrative that for a century Americans believed about that conflict.
[01:57:22]  And so Lincoln, in that narrative, was lionized and given honest aid.
[01:57:26]  He was getting these attributes he didn't really have.
[01:57:28]  He wasn't a very honest guy, probably an atheist.
[01:57:31]  And I think that.
[01:57:36]  If we're going to take him down, if we're going to, you know, or not take him down, but he was a president, but if we take his status down, that he's not as someone to be as admired, we're going to have to think through what heroes we have to admire that exemplify these virtues.
[01:57:54]  The virtues, I'm very concerned about those.
[01:57:58]  It's not just the hero, it's not just the man.
[01:57:59]  So let's say, hypothetically, in 10 years, everyone, this is not going to happen, but if everyone thought MLK, Was this super, like a real traditional biblical conservative Christian guy?
[01:58:10]  And people respected him for it.
[01:58:12]  And he was, he had fidelity to his wife.
[01:58:14]  And we all want to be faithful to our wife.
[01:58:17]  This is obviously fake.
[01:58:18]  Would you want to, if in a country that is devoid of heroes, start ripping down MLK statues overnight?
[01:58:25]  I would be hesitant about that.
[01:58:26]  And this is the conservative in me.
[01:58:28]  Conservatives want to be gradual.
[01:58:30]  I mean, there's some things that you need to rip the band aid off of, but in general, we're skeptical of doing things too quickly because we're trying to think of the potential consequences.
[01:58:39]  And that's all I'm saying with Lincoln.
[01:58:41]  And it's the GK Chesterton quote where, like, before you take down the fence, you need to know why it was put up.
[01:58:47]  And I think with MLK, we're not there, though.
[01:58:49]  I think that, you know, MLK has like achieved like a Christ like status beyond Lincoln, but I don't think MLK actually does exemplify virtues.
[01:58:58]  That's the difference.
[01:58:59]  Like Lincoln exemplified honesty and loyalty to his nation.
[01:59:04]  You mean the mythology of him?
[01:59:05]  The myth.
[01:59:06]  Like he, the person didn't in actuality, but the narrative around him did.
[01:59:11]  And when I hear like, you know, people from my dad's generation or, you know, they love Lincoln because I totally resonate with it.
[01:59:18]  I'm like, this is part of our story too.
[01:59:19]  I'm not just going to delete this.
[01:59:20]  We've been under this thinking for a while and there's, You know, I want to be honest with the historical record, but I understand the purpose for a Lincoln myth.
[01:59:31]  Now, with MLK, the MLK myth is basically equality, it's basically a propositional kind of thing.
[01:59:37]  It's not, why do we respect him?
[01:59:39]  Because he made things more equal.
[01:59:41]  I don't really know if there's anything beyond that.
[01:59:44]  So I'm much more comfortable just ripping down MLK stuff.
[01:59:47]  I mean, ripping down, not in a violent way, but like, uh, taking, you know, choosing not to celebrate, um, His character on his birthday.
[01:59:56]  I mean, I don't, right, not something I participate in because I don't think he was that admirable a figure.
[02:00:02]  And I don't think we remember him for virtues he didn't have, if that makes sense.
[02:00:06]  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
[02:00:08]  Real quick, we got to hit Jeff Hatley again because he's single handedly funding Right Response Ministries right now with just super chats for days, right?
[02:00:17]  How many has he done, Nate?
[02:00:18]  Like three, four, four.
[02:00:20]  Okay, so we read two of them.
[02:00:23]  Here's two more.
[02:00:24]  Okay, so.
[02:00:27]  He said, could the BLM 1.0 feminist, sexual, homosexual, trans, et cetera, revolutions be seen as a cold civil war against white American elites imposing, oh, not against them, but from white American elites imposing their pet ideas on the white middle working class?
[02:00:52]  In other words, is this the white elite class imposing this on the white working class?
[02:00:59]  Imposing like all the feminisms and sexual revolutionism.
[02:01:05]  And, you know, I don't know if it's strictly white, right?
[02:01:08]  I mean, we're talking elites in general, we're talking Jewish people, talking, yeah, people.
[02:01:14]  That's what I was going to say.
[02:01:15]  I was going to have to ask a clarifying question and say, well, it depends.
[02:01:18]  Are Jews white?
[02:01:19]  No, it's more than just that.
[02:01:21]  I'm sorry.
[02:01:22]  But, yeah, but I think, yeah, I think that's a little bit too simplistic because I don't, I think it's just, I would just be content to just say our elites.
[02:01:30]  Like many of them are white.
[02:01:31]  You got Pelosi, you got, you know, Joe Biden, you got, you know, the usual suspects.
[02:01:35]  But I think across the board, just our elites, like, what's her name?
[02:01:40]  AOC, Ilhan Omar.
[02:01:43]  Like they're, you know, they're not white, you know, but they hate you.
[02:01:48]  You bet your bottom dollar they hate you.
[02:01:50]  So I don't know.
[02:01:51]  I see that as more of like a class.
[02:01:53]  I was reading less racial, but like, just like, it's your elites.
[02:01:58]  I think that I'm perfectly content to say, Orin, like we've had on the show multiple times, and he would say the same thing.
[02:02:03]  Like, Many of our elite leaders, every society, every culture has elites, whether you like it or not.
[02:02:11]  And even you may say, well, we're a constitutional republic.
[02:02:17]  At one point, we may have been, and that's great.
[02:02:20]  And the Constitution is still a beautiful document.
[02:02:22]  It'd be great if we adhere to it.
[02:02:24]  We don't.
[02:02:25]  And so you just have to recognize, like it's the old adage the purpose of the system is what it does.
[02:02:36]  The purpose of this, not what you call it, not the label, right?
[02:02:38]  This is the education system.
[02:02:41]  Is it?
[02:02:41]  Because it actually seems like it's the Democratic, you know, turning out new Democrat voter system, you know, or this is the immigration system.
[02:02:49]  Is it?
[02:02:49]  Seems like it's the, again, Democratic voting system.
[02:02:54]  And likewise, like, well, this is the Constitutional Republic, America, you know, political system.
[02:03:02]  And so I think just our elites in general, every society has them.
[02:03:06]  And our elites right now, they hate their own.
[02:03:09]  They hate their own people.
[02:03:10]  They are consciously trying to destroy the American people.
[02:03:15]  It's really sad.
[02:03:16]  I think it's not quite as what John said earlier.
[02:03:19]  It's not quite as intense, but it's similar to the leaders in Great Britain and England.
[02:03:25]  And that's even more tragic to me because one, it's more severe.
[02:03:30]  And two, in the case of Great Britain, we're not a country of immigrants, we're a country of settlers.
[02:03:36]  But in the case of England, I mean, you're talking about a thousand years.
[02:03:41]  They are the indigenous people.
[02:03:43]  They've lived there for a thousand years.
[02:03:45]  They don't have anywhere else.
[02:03:46]  To go as their home and their own leaders.
[02:03:48]  In many cases, they didn't vote for it, but their own leaders just said, Yeah, we're going to hold Pakistani men by the hand and walk them into your town to rape a third of your daughters.
[02:04:07]  That's insane.
[02:04:09]  That is insane.
[02:04:10]  That's not across the board, but that is a real number.
[02:04:13]  In what town was it?
[02:04:14]  Do you remember?
[02:04:15]  Maybe that was Oldham or Oldham.
[02:04:18]  One of the towns outside of London.
[02:04:20]  It wasn't London, but London's terrible too.
[02:04:22]  But, anyways, so yeah, so I think elites, I see that as more of a class war.
[02:04:26]  Last thing, one more super chat from Jeff Halfley.
[02:04:31]  He says, and this is, I appreciate this because I still, you know, I still really like Rush Duny.
[02:04:37]  So I, you know, I still would describe myself as a general equity theonomist because I think it is confessional, but capital T theonomy, I'm definitely having some struggles with, I will admit, in part because I just, a lot of the modern theonomists, the guys who are theonomists today, I mean, like the contemporary ones a lot.
[02:04:55]  Yeah, not necessarily Bonson or Rush Dooney, who halfly quoted right here.
[02:04:58]  And I love this Rush Dooney quote.
[02:05:01]  But I like those guys.
[02:05:02]  I think they had a lot of good things to say, a lot of good insights.
[02:05:06]  But the theonomists today are just, on the one hand, like what my first appeal to was, I was like, yeah, like we need a standard, right?
[02:05:16]  The enemy comes in like a flood.
[02:05:17]  The Lord raises a standard against them.
[02:05:19]  The word of God, his law is applicable today.
[02:05:22]  I'm confessional, right?
[02:05:23]  So I. Like, we go through the Ten Commandments every single week.
[02:05:27]  And I'm a Christian nationalist of the flavor that would be perfectly happy to have Sabbath laws and blasphemy laws and those kinds of things that we've had in the past in America.
[02:05:36]  I think that gels even with American tradition, apart from just my theological convictions and all that.
[02:05:42]  So, yeah, so theonomy made sense.
[02:05:43]  It's like, I like this.
[02:05:45]  But then all the theonomists today are liberals, turns out.
[02:05:50]  So it's like, on the one hand, we love the law of God.
[02:05:53]  On the other hand, they're like, Stop working out.
[02:05:56]  You should be fat.
[02:05:57]  And I'm like, what?
[02:05:59]  And I don't understand it.
[02:06:01]  And then as you pull beneath the surface, you realize, oh, part of the appeal to theonomy for these guys, not Rush Dooney, but these guys is back to G.K. Chesterton, is the quote, man will have 10 commandments or 10,000.
[02:06:17]  They're libertarians.
[02:06:19]  That's what it is.
[02:06:20]  Theocratic libertarians, they like theonomy because basically this is how you sum it up in a nutshell.
[02:06:25]  They like the law of God.
[02:06:27]  Not just because it's God's, but particularly because they're underneath the assumption that God's laws are few.
[02:06:33]  And they want a system of government that has very few laws, few restrictions, because they're very much invested in free trade, globalism, hedge funds.
[02:06:46]  Some of the guys work in those industries and fund their ministries.
[02:06:52]  It makes sense for them.
[02:06:54]  So Rushdie was not like that.
[02:06:55]  Jeff Halfley, he quotes Rushdie.
[02:06:57]  He said, whenever and wherever nepotism, because we talked about that earlier, is condemned, it is condemned on a moral principle which is not biblical.
[02:07:06]  And is in fact anti biblical.
[02:07:09]  I appreciate it.
[02:07:10]  Rush to me once again for the win.
[02:07:12]  He was right.
[02:07:13]  Yeah, you can't.
[02:07:14]  Find me a Bible verse that says it is a sin to store up an inheritance for your children or to prefer your own.
[02:07:23]  That's insane.
[02:07:24]  But isn't it funny?
[02:07:25]  Nepotism is a bad word now.
[02:07:27]  It's a bad word.
[02:07:30]  And meritocracy is a good word.
[02:07:31]  But now, meritocracy is not just applied to made the best American win, it's made the best dude in India, halfway across the world.
[02:07:40]  And he's not even necessarily the best, but we'll say he's the best because we can pay him half the wage.
[02:07:45]  That is insane.
[02:07:47]  May that form of meritocracy die a trillion deaths.
[02:07:51]  All right, we got to land the plane.
[02:07:53]  John, any final thoughts from you?
[02:07:54]  Plug your stuff for sure, but give us any final thoughts.
[02:07:58]  I think history is interesting.
[02:08:00]  It's important.
[02:08:01]  It confers identity.
[02:08:04]  It's the story of people.
[02:08:05]  And we see it in the Bible.
[02:08:06]  And the stories of the Old Testament, of course, are for our own instruction.
[02:08:10]  And so I think we take our example from what.
[02:08:13]  God has already laid down through the authors of scripture.
[02:08:16]  And that's an encouraging thing for budding historians out there.
[02:08:19]  He used actual human beings in their own vernacular to write down the accounts of the past and what God has done.
[02:08:29]  And in a certain way, that's what you're doing when you, I think, rightly approach history.
[02:08:34]  You are looking at the unfolding providence of God.
[02:08:37]  This is all God's story.
[02:08:38]  And I know it's cliche, but his story, history, right?
[02:08:42]  I mean, it really is.
[02:08:43]  And we don't, I don't believe what, um, Many historians have, especially since the modern period, that this is just, you know, molecules bumping into each other.
[02:08:55]  And it's, there's no really rhyme or reason.
[02:08:58]  Or on the other end, we are approaching some great enlightenment of some kind because of human achievement and scientific innovation.
[02:09:05]  I think what's happening is the Lord is through every age, every generation, leaving Himself with a witness.
[02:09:15]  There's always going to be faithful men and women.
[02:09:17]  There's always a church.
[02:09:18]  There's always, Things that he's in the business of doing, setting things up.
[02:09:23]  And it doesn't really matter what flavor of eschatology you believe in.
[02:09:26]  And you may think we're leading to different areas in the short term, but in the long term, he is setting up his own reign.
[02:09:33]  And men will be without excuse.
[02:09:36]  And so, in the meantime, while we're here in this temporal world, let's enjoy it.
[02:09:42]  Let's honor the men and women who have come before us.
[02:09:46]  I mean, I just yesterday, one of the songs for my album, this is where I'm going to start plugging stuff, but you go to johnharistunes.com after.
[02:09:52]  I think Saturday's the first.
[02:09:54]  So, Saturday, it's all going to be there.
[02:09:56]  Patrons already have access to it, but it's a song about my grandfather, you know, and he's dead now.
[02:10:02]  And it's history.
[02:10:03]  It's, you know, he was born in 1922.
[02:10:08]  And it's so special.
[02:10:09]  I was just crying, even trying to put this together, looking at old pictures of him.
[02:10:14]  I mean, that's, I think it's a powerful thing.
[02:10:16]  And as Christians, we can't abandon that field.
[02:10:19]  So, that's my plug for getting involved in history.
[02:10:23]  And I had a great time at Liberty University's history department.
[02:10:26]  If you're trying to find a good, History department.
[02:10:28]  I've heard the one at Hillsdale College is pretty good for history.
[02:10:31]  So find a good department if you want to get some training on that.

=== Thank You Listeners (00:50) ===

[02:10:36]  And what's the last thing I should plug?
[02:10:40]  Go to my podcast website, johnharrispodcast.com, and you can find my books and everything else.
[02:10:44]  So thank you, Joel.
[02:10:46]  Thank you, Mike.
[02:10:47]  Appreciate this.
[02:10:48]  All right.
[02:10:49]  Thank you.
[02:10:50]  Appreciate it.
[02:10:50]  Thank you to the listeners.
[02:10:52]  Thanks for engaging.
[02:10:53]  Thanks for giving us a like on the video.
[02:10:55]  If you can, if you haven't done it one last time, give us a like, help it get out with the algorithm.
[02:11:00]  Thanks for the super chats to Jeff Halfley.
[02:11:02]  We appreciate that.
[02:11:03]  And we will see you guys again, Lord willing, on Wednesday.
[02:11:06]  And Wednesday, Wes will be back in the studio.
[02:11:08]  And we have a special guest Jared Moore.
[02:11:11]  Jared Moore is going to come on and he's going to talk about the joke of a Bible that Preston Sprinkle came out with.
[02:11:19]  And I think publicly call him a heretic.
[02:11:22]  And I'm here for it.
[02:11:23]  Yep.
[02:11:23]  I'm here for it.
[02:11:24]  So, all right.
[02:11:25]  See you Wednesday.
[02:11:26]  Thanks.