Raphael Glucksmann and the hosts dismantle the myth that the Statue of Liberty symbolizes open borders, arguing Emma Lazarus's poem hijacked the monument to promote socialism. They contend true liberty requires Christian virtue, contrasting modern welfare dependency with historical settler self-reliance. Citing $150 billion in 2023 illegal immigration costs, they propose ending such benefits to trigger mass self-deportation, boost housing affordability, and restore fiscal health through rigorous enforcement and "America First" policies. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Rewriting Liberty's Meaning00:01:51
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For nearly 140 years, she has stood in New York Harbor, torch held high, a symbol of freedom.
And hope.
But last week, a French politician made headlines by saying they want her back.
Give us back the Statue of Liberty, Raphael Glucksmann declared, arguing that America has abandoned the values she used to represent.
He even quoted the famous poem inscribed at her base Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
But here's the problem those words were never part of the statue's original meaning.
When France gifted the statue to the United States in 1886, she was named Liberty Enlightening the World.
She was not meant to symbolize mass migration, but the ideals of ordered liberty, the kind of liberty that could only be sustained by a virtuous and free people.
She was a monument to the political and spiritual inheritance of Christendom, a testament to the unique civilization that made true freedom possible.
Yet over time, that meaning was rewritten.
Lady Liberty was no longer a symbol of Christian self government, but of open borders and a rootless multicultural myth.
So, what happens when a nation forgets what made it free in the first place?
The Statue's Forgotten Roots00:09:45
Today, we're setting the record straight.
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The Statue of Liberty was never meant to be a symbol of mass migration, yet somehow that's the version of history that we've all been sold.
How did we get here?
How did a monument to liberty itself become a rallying cry for open borders?
And more importantly, what does this shift reveal about the way modern America understands itself?
Today, we're going back to the real history, breaking down the myth and pointing towards a better vision.
So, let's begin.
Hello, hello, hello.
Yes, the rumors are true.
It is White Pill Wednesday.
Our guy, our very own Andrew Isker, the Viking, he was just recently in Florida.
He recorded on Tucker Carlson's show.
It should be airing in the very near future.
And for those of you, what do you mean Florida?
I thought Tucker was in Maine.
He has studios in both of those states.
And apparently, Florida is kind of the winter home.
And so both CJ Engel and Andrew Isker, Contra Mundum, they got to go.
To Florida, and Andrew Isker got to record on Tucker Carlson's show.
And so we'll be seeing that in the near future.
It is a White Pill Wednesday because of that news, but really that news follows on the heels of other news that we've already addressed, but it's worth mentioning again, which is that in the span of, I think, one week, maybe two weeks at most, but I think just about a week, you have pictures of Andrew Isker recording with Tucker Carlson going on one of the biggest media platforms in the country, in the world.
And then you also have a picture of William Wolf.
With Donald Trump, the president in the Oval Office.
Most powerful man in the free world.
Yep.
And I know it's a rough day for the anti Christian nationalists.
You know, it's a tough time.
Everybody should check in.
James Lindsay, hardest hit.
Yeah, check in on James Lindsay.
Make sure he's doing okay.
People having a hard time.
Neil Shenvey probably having a hard time.
But it has been said again and again and again by the detractors that Christian nationalism, and I'm not just putting words in people's mouth, one of the specific lines of argument was that Christian nationalism is an acute.
Fringe, insignificant, pathetic little movement of 14 guys from your mom's basement.
And there's no way it can ever amount to anything.
But the Lord, not to try to over spiritualize here, but we are Christian nationalists, lest we forget, the Lord does not despise small beginnings.
And this seems to me very much like God's MO that He would use small things and insignificant people, but to accomplish great ends.
And so God is doing an amazing thing.
We're grateful for it.
Help us out on this one.
We're basically going to make the argument today that the Statue of Liberty, not from its outset, not from its origin, but that it was hijacked and very much today has become just a monument towards poorest borders and a full fledged invasion of the third world.
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And then the last thing is you got to get ready for the conference.
The conference is coming, it's crazy to think, but one week, not weeks, certainly not months, but just one week from today.
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Andrew Risker will be there and we'll be shamelessly humiliating ourselves by going up to Iskir.
What was Tucker like?
That's right.
That's right.
What do you talk about?
You know, we'll be asking all those questions and, you know, and then probably shouting them from the rooftop, you know, at the conference and telling you guys everything.
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Not that expensive.
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But if you use Christ is King, all caps, no spaces, it'll bring you all the way down to $150, where you're only paying a little bit more than the early bird pricing.
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We got 1,000 people who are going to be there.
Praise God.
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It might even be a little bit less.
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I'm not making a decision a week before to come to the conference in person, but I would be interested in watching it online.
Okay, so this is for you.
Last announcement, we'll get into the episode.
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Okay, Michael, you want to take us away?
All right, very good.
Well, some of you probably saw the news last week, and it wasn't the biggest story in the world, but actually, to me, it was just funny.
It was funny.
France Wants Her Back00:15:16
But of course, as President Trump is changing kind of the, well, he's giving Americans permission to be American, to love their nation, and prioritizing America, putting America first.
This, of course, has been interpreted as this hateful, Evil, unkind, and uncharitable, racist, yeah, racist shift in the American ethos.
Right.
And so, internationally, the claim is being made that America has been rotten at the core and the fruit is now showing, and everything that Trump is saying is simply the rotten fruit of the dark, polluted heart of racism and anti Semitism and misogyny, all these things.
And so, the international The liberal international world is objecting in some ways to what President Trump has been doing and trying to reinforce our immigration, our tariffs, saying that no, actually, America is for America.
Just that statement alone has been enough to set the internet and the news and even international diplomats apparently on fire.
And so, as the Cold Open says, there was one particular member of the left wing party in France.
His name is Raphael Glucksmann.
And he, in an interview, said, well, maybe it's time for France to take the Statue of Liberty back.
It was a gift from France originally.
That part of the history is true.
And apparently, America has abandoned the spirit in which France gave us the Statue of Liberty to such a degree that he is promoting the idea that we no longer deserve it, that France should take it back.
I think we should.
And if you're wondering, he is.
Yes.
Yes.
If you're wondering, every single time.
Raphael Glucksman.
Yeah, I literally just pulled it up.
Of course, every single time.
But what I was going to say, kind of in that vein, is you can't have the statue back.
I'm sorry.
There's a certain point where even if something wasn't meaningful and even if it was a psyop from the beginning, which it wasn't, and we're going to get into that, the Statue of Liberty itself, I think, signifies something wonderful.
We'll talk about that.
So you can't have the statue back.
But what you can have back.
Is the plaque.
The plaque.
The poem on the statue.
But the thing is, that doesn't go back to France.
If we want to, you know, if we're talking about biblical restitution, then it needs to go back to the actual source.
We'll give it back to Israel.
There we go.
All right.
The irony is, of course, if the Statue of Liberty means what the liberal modern perspective on globalism and multiculturalism claims that it means, then France actually would be the perfect place for the statue.
He's not wrong there.
France still is the bastion of all of the virtues that are destroying the West.
And so, If we were to grant the premise, which we're not, that the Statue of Liberty means what he thinks it means, then actually it would belong in France.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
It's like, well, you don't stand for the ideals that the statue was intended.
Well, no, it wasn't intended.
But the ideals that have slowly and progressively over time been attributed to the Statue of Liberty, that is true.
And those ideals, you're absolutely right.
Nobody models those better than perhaps France.
The ideals of getting rid of every single border and allowing your own native people to be completely invaded by the third world, and particularly by Muslims and people who hate liberty, then, yeah, in that sense, the Statue of Liberty belongs to no one better.
It's nowhere more fitting than France.
As France continues to commit national suicide, which is really like it's it's angering, but it's but it's it's tragic to the especially to the French people.
Um, but yeah, if if you guys you're right, like you're saying, well, America doesn't, um, America is uh, we the French, a suicidal people, gave this to you to ensure that you too would join us in suicide, and you guys are backing out of the deal.
It seems like you know that you've got you've elected some leaders.
Who at least want to commit suicide slower and maybe not at all.
And so you don't deserve this statue.
Give it back.
Those weren't the terms we gave it on.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, that's basically what's going on.
Go ahead.
Well, to add a little levity to this, if you didn't see it, it's worth watching.
Well, you're going to watch it now if you're watching the live stream.
But we're going to play a response from the White House press secretary when asked about this exact question.
And I think it's pretty great.
A French politician requesting the United States return the Statue of Liberty, Raphael Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament, he says, Give us back the Statue of Liberty, the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants.
The White House press secretary steps up.
My advice to that low level French politician would be to remind them that it's only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now.
I can just imagine Donald Trump just being like, you know what?
They want the Statue of Liberty back.
They can have it back.
And to actually take it down and ship it back.
Yeah.
Or maybe just to sink it and create an artificial reef for divers.
Look, we don't need France.
We don't need their baguettes.
We don't need their statues.
We got our own statues.
We can make our own bread here.
I want to bring all the bread back to America.
And we don't need their statues.
They can have their statues.
Now, it pains me greatly to point out historically that one of the reasons why America was able to win its independence was because France cast his lot in with us in the war for independence, the Revolutionary War.
It's a painful memory.
So we do have to at least acknowledge that.
We do have something of a partnership going back with the French a long way.
But actually, that is kind of what led to the collaboration or at least the gift of the Statue of Liberty towards us is the French Revolution, if I'm right historically, came several years after the American Revolution.
And in principle, they said, we want what America has.
In theory, they said, oh, except for without the Christianity.
We'll take the Rousseau.
We'll take the humanism and we will.
Gain our quote unquote independence and freedom.
But in a lot of ways, France, even though it sided with us, we quickly outpaced it.
And it, even in its revolution, ended up kind of looking up to the American spirit that had been created when America became a nation in 1780.
Oh, now I'm putting me on the spot here.
1776?
No, that's when we signed the Declaration.
But I'm saying like when we actually formalized and became a nation in 1788.
We ratified the Constitution.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So there is a little bit of history.
We do have to acknowledge that going back that far, at least, we are indebted to the French to some degree.
Yeah.
So fair.
We want to.
The French used to be a great people.
They did.
Yeah.
There's no denying.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Charlemagne, fantastic.
The French used to be a great people.
They have not been a great people for a great period of time.
But they used to be a great people.
Yeah.
So we want to go over a little bit of the history of the Statue of Liberty.
And I want to say at the beginning, it is good for a man and a church and even a nation to have a reputation for being magnanimous, right?
It is actually a glory to a nation that people from around the world would recognize the prosperity that God has given to us and say, I want to get me some of that.
Right?
Like it is the nations at the bottom of the barrel that don't have any immigration problems because no one's trying to get in.
And so there is a sense where a Christian nation, if it's blessed by God, ought to be magnanimous, right?
There ought to be a sense of America always considered itself to be a city on a hill, not the Christian city on the hill, but a city on a hill casting a light.
And that's really what the Statue of Liberty gets into, casting a light of some sort.
To the nations of the world for them to perhaps look up to, to emulate, to try and aspire to be.
Magnanimity is not a bad thing for a nation to have.
In fact, that is kind of the, Joel, you talk a lot about the glory of the husband or the father, the father more than the husband, who will condescend to his children and how even that condescension is a glory to the husband.
And so we don't want to go so far that we say, well, We have no role in the world, actually.
That we as a people, we as a nation have no role in the world.
I think that if we can recapture ourselves over the next decades, we want to assume the role that God has given us in the world.
There's nothing inherently wrong with empires.
But you kind of, that's to me, I've been thinking a lot about this for the past few years.
Like, so, you know, I've gone, I feel like I've gone through all the phases of like, all right, strict isolationist, that's it, I've had it, you know, build three walls, you know, like, let's build a dome, you know, over America.
Like, Nobody in, nobody out, and we don't let the rest of the world just crumble and burn to ash.
And it's not my circus, not my clowns.
It's not my problem, America.
But there is, I mean, God has used empires throughout history.
But here's the deal you have to make up your mind.
You have to pick a lane.
What's been so terrible as of late, and when I say as of late, I mean for decades for America.
Is that it's fulfilled the duties of an empire without receiving any of the blessings and the rights of an empire.
So we've provided the whole world with, we've policed the whole world, made the world safe, made shipping and all the oceans and lanes safe, and done this.
We're bombing pirates right now.
Yeah, and we've done it for every country in the world to where every country has been lifted up out of abject poverty.
But we've done it for free.
We've done it for free with no expectation of.
Of any fidelity being returned to us.
And I think that's a lot of what Trump is kind of getting at.
He's like, we've, like, the whole world, all the nations of the world have been ripping us off for decades and decades and decades, and we've been letting it happen.
So I don't think, you know, the more I've thought about it, like, I am a nationalist, don't get me wrong.
I'm a nationalist and America first, 100%.
And I mean actual America first, not Israel first, but America first.
That said, if America, we got to get our, you know, clean your own house first.
So we got to get our own house in order first.
But eventually, I don't want to say, like, you know, again, you've heard me say this there's timely principles and timeless principles.
So, when I say America first, pull everything back, build three walls, millions have to go back, let's focus at home.
That's a timely principle.
The timeless, in terms of the timeless, I would be perfectly fine if not today, but eventually, when things are in order at home and America is prospering and America doesn't have people pushing old women into the train tracks on the subway.
You know, and lighting people on fire, you know, and like, okay, like if we can get our house in order, if we can do that, then in principle, I don't have any theological or biblical argument against America eventually being empirical.
But if we're going to be an empire, function as an empire, as an actual empire.
Don't just assume the duties for free so that every other country benefits except for your own people.
That's not an empire, that's just making your own people.
A tax farm.
And then also, if you're going to be an empire, do not export our sacred democracy.
Right.
Do what empires do.
That's right.
And have a better form of government that anyone who falls underneath the empire is subjugated to.
Not democracy.
I do not want a democratic empire that includes nations with people who don't even know how to read.
You're telling me 20 years in Afghanistan, billions and billions of dollars.
We tried to set it up and leave it there and leave it there and it was all for nothing because it didn't work.
Because the people were not compatible with it.
And that wouldn't happen, Wes.
They were not fit to self-govern.
We wouldn't waste two decades trying a nation-building project, melt multiple of them, for all of them to fail.
Oh, we would, Wes.
That's exactly what happened.
We would.
No, it's funny because sometimes it's like, man, well, you know, all the nations, maybe egalitarianism is true, you know, because it's like all the nations of the world that, you know, like everybody has like nuclear weapons, it seems like, or, you know, at least everybody's got tanks and jets and bombs and this and that.
And, you know, like even some of these third world nations, you know, and Islamic nations, you know, it's like, Uh, man, they really developed quickly because I feel like I blinked my eyes, you know, just like 15 minutes ago, they were throwing rocks and now they've got, you know, jets and planes.
They're manufacturing AK 47s, yeah.
It's like, oh, wait, it all came from us and Russia and Russia, to be fair.
Okay, yeah, go ahead.
Um, okay, so the Statue of Liberty was originally given as a gift to the United States from France, and it was supposed to be called originally Liberty Enlightening the World.
Wes, this might be a good place for you to talk about CJ Engel's tweet about liberty and probably what they meant at the time and really what's really at stake here with the way that the definition of liberty has been co opted in the modern time.
So, Nate, maybe we can pull up that tweet that Wes had prepared.
Yeah, let's pull this up from CJ.
CJ is a great thinker.
Really appreciate everything he says.
And so he's responding to listening to.
When we say CJ Engel, we mean CJ, he just took a picture with Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson Engel.
The one and only.
Yeah.
He's responding to Joel Berry, who below this he said basically, really, it's not left versus right anymore, it's tyranny versus liberty.
The key tension today is well, you've got tyranny on the one side and liberty on the other.
And CJ says this left versus right, so politically left, politically right, is so inextricably caught up in liberty versus tyranny versus liberty that this claim has actually always been wrong.
The claim that, oh, it's about tyranny versus liberty.
It's a contest, catch this, between different frameworks and meanings.
Of liberty and tyranny.
It's important to remember that the 20th century was built on the rhetoric of freedom.
We talk a lot about repealing the 20th century.
There's a lot of terrible things that happened because we said, hey, Heart Cellar Act, we want freedom, we want liberty, we want anyone to have the freedom to come here and to be an American.
So, there's a lot of bad things that came even under that word, liberty.
And so, what he's getting at here is he says there's different frameworks.
Like, as an example, the Christian religion and its prescription for the state, we just talked about this on Monday, is, if you look at it one way, tyrannical.
Co-opting Freedom's Definition00:04:35
You can't worship other gods.
You can't publicly blaspheme.
You can't commit adultery, it be known, and you continue on your life.
There's penalties from the civil magistrate.
So, someone today, many people today, they look at that and they go, that is tyranny.
A Christian state that wouldn't allow these different things, that would be tyrannical.
But we look at and we say that would be a blessing.
As James says, the law of Christ is the law of liberty.
There's a lot of talk in the New Testament about liberty.
Now, what is that liberty?
Is it liberty to be degenerate?
Liberty to blaspheme?
Like, oh my goodness, I'm so set free by Christ.
I can now go in the public square and shout the most obscene things.
Of course not.
And it's not tyranny in the true, in the good sense, in a real framework that we would ascribe to.
That's not tyranny at all.
If anything, that's providing them the freedom.
The freedom to who?
Not the blasphemer, but for a family to go on a walk on a Saturday night and not hear rap music full of profanity assaulting their eardrums.
You're always going to be infringing on some level of liberty.
So the ideal is not the maximum amount of liberty in every possible thing, in every possible dimension.
No, it's always going to be a balance of what type of liberty we want.
The freedom to start a business, the freedom to attend a church, the freedom to not be assaulted by rap music, the freedom not to have your food packed full of dyes and chemicals.
That's one type of freedom.
That's real and that we're striving for.
The freedom to smoke weed and watch Netflix and do degenerate things, that is technically in one framework a freedom, but it's not at all a freedom that you want.
And so to simplify and to just say, well, there's tyranny on one hand and there's authoritarianism, but then there's liberty and we have to be for all types of liberty, you miss the conversation.
You miss the tension, I would say, completely, entirely.
And we've covered on this show quite a bit the idea that virtue, true virtue, precludes true liberty.
Right.
And so when the New Testament says that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, I know that's a spiritual principle, but the founding fathers and the Puritans took that to say, well, we ought to be able to live in harmony with true liberty.
Right.
Because the really, and the reason why it matters that we're framing this as a definitional issue, or what CJ did in framing it as a definitional issue is while some people, and I agree with you, Wes, some people would say, oh, a state tamping down on LGBTQ affirming churches, that's tyranny.
Well, the thing is, Who gets to define that, right?
And if it's tyranny according to biblical standards or worldly standards, that really makes all the difference in the world.
So I think we could all say that when the word liberty was used, now this was already well into kind of the French project.
Rousseau had already.
There's so many postmodern philosophers for the record.
Rousseau, Michael Foucault, Jean Paul Sartre, Philippe Derrida.
Derrida is terrible.
French.
Philosophers have been a terrible lot for us in the last 150 years.
So it's hard to say that when they gave the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of liberty, liberty's light, they probably did already have a sense of kind of this more modernist.
But we're going to reclaim that term and we're going to go back to the liberty that the U.S. meant, right?
Which is ordered, virtuous liberty.
The kind of liberty that can only be produced when there is a moral and religious, self governed people who are.
Under the really restraints, the only restraints they have is the restraints of the gospel.
Right.
Right.
And so in that sense, I think that many of the people early in Christian history could have kind of gotten along and said, yeah, this liberty that we have as an American society and American people is a good and godly and ordered thing.
And so thank you very much, French government.
We do have that kind of liberty.
But the Statue of Liberty was given about 100 years into the American project.
It was supposed to celebrate or commemorate the 100-year anniversary of signing the Declaration of Independence.
And I bet if we, to be fair, I bet if we went very carefully by that point already, I would imagine the definition of liberty and freedom was already starting to change a little bit just through the influence of the European and the French philosophers and postmodernists.
We got a lot of people in the chat.
I keep noticing they keep saying liberty from rap music.
It needs to happen.
It needs to happen.
The people of these United States need to be free from going into public venues and being assaulted by the most degrading, pathetic sounds.
Building Generational Wealth00:03:15
They have ever been gone across airways.
All right, let's do this.
Let's go to our first commercial break, and then we will come right back.
And I want to point out a tweet that I put out when this story first broke last week to get a little bit into the origins, not so much of the Statue of Liberty, which we'll talk more about, but of this particular plaque, the poem that has been attributed to the Statue of Liberty and has been on the Statue of Liberty for quite some time.
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Okay, go ahead and pull up that tweet, Nathan.
This is something that I put out last week.
I said, I was retweeting Matt Walsh.
Citizenship and Assimilation00:09:06
Okay, so Matt Walsh said, I don't want to give the Statue of Liberty to France, but I do think that we should remove that dumb poem about the huddled masses and send that to them.
But Matt, I gotta say, it should go back to the source.
It needs to go back to Israel, not France.
They can attach it to the Eiffel Tower or something.
America is not an international homeless shelter.
Yes and amen.
So then I retweeted Matt and said, agreed.
The Statue of Liberty is an important monument, but the poem on the Statue of Liberty was a psyop to weaken America by guilting its citizens to receive en masse all the worst people in the world.
Emma Lazarus was her name.
There's the dead giveaway, Lazarus.
Emma Lazarus was the poet who wrote The New Colossus, the name of the poem.
She was the daughter of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish parents.
She was motivated by the plight of the Russian Jews, not just Jews, Russian Jews, who were detained immigrants at the time.
Emma Lazarus serves as a historical example of the sin of empathy and its devastating consequences.
So that's the tweet that I put out.
Russian Jews who were detained at the time.
I don't know.
Obviously, there are broader ramifications than what I'm about to say.
I know that this is not exclusive or exhaustive, but anytime I think of Russian Jews, I think of Bolsheviks.
That's like 92% of the Bolshevik party.
So that was the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
The Bolsheviks were the far left party, and the Mensheviks were kind of the moderate.
But like 92% of the Bolshevik party was made up of ethnic Jews at the time, which Soldier Instant calls out because he's like, wait a second, we had this party.
This movement took over Russia, violently deposed our emperor, and all this, but it wasn't even the Russian people themselves.
It was people that weren't native to us.
So when you say that, like that's the reason historically, you're literally saying the Bolsheviks and then Jewish who typically comprise that party.
Right.
So this is a young woman who was working with immigrants at the time in New York, predominantly Russian Jewish immigrants that may or may not have had ties to the Bolshevik party.
Early 1900s was the high water mark, too, of American communism.
Like that was when it actually had a chance of winning elections.
And that was the exact time.
This was the end of the 1800s, going into the beginning of the 1900s.
It was in 1883 that she wrote it.
1883 that she wrote this poem.
And the context, again, is she's in New York.
She's working with Russian Jews who are immigrants.
She was a self described, obviously a feminist.
She was a socialist.
Yeah.
That was her own political party.
There you go.
And she writes this poem that has been cited.
Should we read it quick?
Again.
Yeah, we should read it.
Nathan, go ahead and pull that up if you can.
But this poem.
That has been cited again and again and again as like the empirical, infallible proof that America basically can't be a country.
We're not allowed to be a country.
America cannot be for Americans, but has to be open to the whole world.
It's basically this poem, it's not the exclusive source by any stretch, but it is a chief source that's cited as the reason why basically this is how a lot of people think that the world is broken up into.
Two categories, only two.
That there are Americans and then there are potential Americans.
Right?
It's not like there's America with Americans and then India with Indians.
No, there's America with Americans and then India with 1.3 billion potential Americans.
As Ronald Reagan said, his farewell address.
I know.
Anyone who can come to America and be an American.
And in the context, we've shown that clip before, but he doesn't just say that.
It'd be one thing if he just said that in isolation, but he says it in the context of saying that this is not true of every other nation on the planet.
So every other country, he says, you know, you can move to France and attain citizenship.
France is like a frontier.
Right.
You can be a French citizen.
You can be a citizen of Great Britain, you know, or you can be a citizen of Uganda or anywhere else.
And this is a speech that President Reagan gave.
I can move to France and attain, you know, French citizenship.
And I can move to Russia and attain, you know, Russian citizenship.
He said, but I'll never be a Frenchman and I'll never be a Russian.
But he said, but here's the beauty of our country anyone from anywhere.
Can become an American?
And the answer, of course, is no.
No, you can't.
No, you can by going through the proper channels, and hopefully by God's grace, we'll stop this too for a good 50 years because we've gone overboard.
But eventually, as things begin to settle, then yes, there would be some mitigated, responsible forms, you know, policy for immigration.
And by going through the proper channels, you could attain American citizenship.
But you cannot simply move to America and even be a citizen and then that somehow magically makes you an American.
That's simply not how it works.
If I move to Japan and attain citizenship, I'm not Japanese.
I'm a Japanese citizen and I can love Japan and all those kinds of things.
And if I happen to marry in to Japanese by taking a Japanese wife, then eventually my children and I would argue from a biblical perspective, their children now getting to the third generation, then they would be Japanese.
So I can be.
They stayed in Japan, continued to love Japanese.
They also married Japanese.
That's the way it works.
Assimilation, here's the deal.
One of the big principles of assimilation, even biblically speaking, is through intermarriage, right?
Ruth marries in, Rahab marries in, going somewhere with.
When you already have your family, you and your wife who is of your family.
Your race or your ethnic stock and your children, and then you move to America, and you don't just move to you know the suburbs somewhere or some rural plot of land, but you congregate with a bunch of other people from your native country who've also moved there.
And there's you know 10,000 Somalians in this small little area, right?
And you're all married to Somalians, yeah, exactly.
Like, I mean, that's the concept of America.
Think about this the fact that we even have this concept, Little Italy.
Little China.
Chinatown.
Chinatown.
Like all these different.
Other countries don't do this.
Not like we do.
I knew in Taiwan where the Vietnamese area was or where the.
You know, like they do tend to gather, even.
Because Taiwan has a lot of workers from Southeast Asia come to do the menial labor, kind of like here.
That would almost be like German, Irish, and English in different parts of Chicago.
That's more than just.
We have an enclave of Nigeria or something like that.
But you're talking about on American soil to the extent where their whole.
Congregants of people who don't even speak English.
You know what I mean?
You go into that part of town and every sign is in their nation's language.
Not because they just got there two weeks ago.
Not because they're new, but for generations, they never actually assimilate in.
And so, no, in a very real sense, none of this is racism.
None of this is animus or hatred.
But in a very real sense, if that's what we're talking about, then yes, those people are not American.
They may have attained American citizenship.
They may be American citizens, but they are not American in the same way that I'll never be French.
And that's okay.
Well, there's a third category, too, that we.
Actually, our nation does this too, and almost every nation does it.
And there's just simply legal residency.
Right.
Right.
A lot of people go to a country for a period of time, right.
And they're legally residents there.
But when I was a legal resident in Taiwan, I had no expectation that I was going to be a citizen.
I didn't get to vote.
I didn't have any say in the political process, much less that I was going to become Taiwanese.
I was just there for a time period.
I had the government's permission to be there.
That meant that I was subject to their laws, but also protected by their laws.
And then I was going to go back home to my country.
Right.
And with that, that's actually more similar to the historical pattern.
Over time.
And that's the biblical pattern.
The sojourner was not going to stay.
And so when the Bible says, well, treat the sojourner fairly, don't exploit him, don't take advantage of him, treat him fairly, that's a biblical principle.
And so, yes, anyone who is visiting the United States legally, who is a visitor, should behave as a guest and should be treated respectfully as a guest.
But you don't get to stay, and you're certainly not an American.
Right, yeah, so none of this is novel.
Communist Poem Origins00:02:22
All right, let's read this poem.
Yep, yeah, here's the poem.
Here we go.
Nathan's gonna put it up.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land, here at our sea washed sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name, Mother of Exiles, from her beacon hand glows worldwide welcome, her mild eyes command.
The air bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp, cries she with silent lips.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these the homeless tempest tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Get that out of my way.
That would go so hard if I was like 17 and then just read the Communist Manifesto for the first time.
Seriously, that is a communist poem.
It is.
It really is.
That is a communist poem, probably inspired by a Jewish woman working with Russian Jewish immigrants in New York, probably with some Bolshevik inspirations in there.
Yeah, I mean, that poem, I mean, literally, I just read it.
I just read it as it's written.
And I mean, it's basically a recipe for how could this country, what's the best and quickest way that we could destroy this country?
Yeah.
And the really important thing about that is most Americans only encounter those few famous lines giving your poor, your huddled masses.
And we know that it's attached to the Statue of Liberty.
And we tend to think that the Statue of Liberty is older than it is.
And so part of our founding.
And so I think the unconscious connection gets made.
It certainly was for me for a very long time that this is.
A Christian principle, and it's a principle in line with our founding.
And the reality is, you just said, Joel, is nothing could be further from the truth.
Right?
I want to read some sections of an article, and here's a little bit of a white pill.
Joe Rogan Amplifies Ideas00:05:58
Well, maybe not because it went unheeded.
But this is an article that was published, it was an op-ed by the Washington Post in 2009.
Okay.
And this writer, his name is Robert Searle.
He actually wrote a book in 1998 called Strangers Among Us, in which he argued that the only way to improve the conditions of lower-class workers and unskilled workers was to stop immigration.
Now, he was still kind of on the liberal perspective, but he was already seeing how terrible the idea of unlimited immigration was.
And so he wrote that in 1998.
And then the Washington Post published his op ed, which I'm going to read portions of, in 2009.
And so it always is good for me to run across people who have been saying things that we kind of are stumbling upon now and to realize we're actually not the first people to tread this ground.
That is good.
Yeah.
One, it keeps you humble.
And I'm painfully aware of that.
I have not had a single novel idea in my entire life.
It all comes from better men than me.
So, one, it keeps you humble.
But then, two, it's also, you're right, it's a white pill.
It's not just humbling, but it's also optimistic and encouraging because it lets you know that you're not alone.
There are other people who have been working towards this.
Like, I continue to have people reach out and I have meetings with people and they'll encourage us and say, hey, how can we support the ministry or this, that, and the other?
Um, and then they'll tell me all about like their story.
I'll ask, you know, so how did you get in?
And and I always realize that like I'm the new kid on the block, you know, like I'm the guy who started thinking about these things three years ago.
And they're like, oh, yeah, well, I was a part of this society that you know Pat Buchanan set up, you know, 20 years ago.
And you know, me and my Buchananite friends, you know, have this book club, you know, and do this and do that, or whatever, you know, and for 20 years we've been talking about these things.
I'm like, and they're only supporting me, they're not supporting me because I'm a genius, because I'm not even close, and they know that, and I know that, everybody knows that.
But they're saying, yeah, but not everybody can do what you're doing.
They're like, so we're supporting you because you're mainstreaming.
You're helping to mainstream these ideas.
You're helping to mainstream these ideas.
We're not supporting you because you're an expert.
There are other guys who are experts.
I've never claimed to be an expert because I'm not.
But what we are doing is you're helping to distill these ideas down to the masses where it's palatable.
It's understandable, not palatable, meaning that you're taking the punch out.
If anything, sometimes I add a punch or two.
It's like, hey, here's something that's offensive, and I'd like to make it even more offensive by adding some of my own thoughts.
But so it's not palatable in that sense, but palatable, just digestible, understandable, and also applicable.
I think that's probably the main thing that we're doing together is saying this is relevant and it matters, it's pertinent, it's applicable.
See how it would affect your life right here and also right here, and how it would change this, and see how that matters and how that's a daily thing.
It's not just theoretical, but it's practical.
And so, yeah, it's incredibly humbling to know greater minds have thought of these things and they did a better job and they've been doing it for Taylor's oldest time.
Number two, it's humbling, but it's also encouraging.
We're not alone.
There are better minds than us, but we do need people doing it.
Everybody has their part, just like a chessboard.
You know, there's pawns and bishops and rooks and knights.
Everybody has their part.
And some people, they're the academic.
They're in the ivory tower.
They're, you know, or they're in the think tank, you know, and they're, you know, brushing shoulders with some of the best minds and they're writing the dissertations and the long form articles and these kinds of things.
And then other guys are starting their businesses like they're funding it, right?
There's the millionaire class that has money and can fund right wing ideas and goals and endeavors.
And then there's media.
There's media guys who are good at distilling.
And even within the media guys, there's guys who speak to one particular type of person and audience, and then those who speak to another type of audience.
People don't go on Joe Rogan because he's an expert.
Can we just realize that, guys?
You need to understand media for a second.
Joe Rogan is not an expert.
Right?
Like the guy, the thing he's probably most well versed in is MMA fighting and the dark alleys of 4chan when it comes to aliens.
Like that's his expertise.
So, why do millions and millions of people watch Joe Rogan?
Because he's entertaining.
So, when I say he's not an expert, don't get me wrong.
I'm not dogging on Joe Rogan.
When I say he's not an expert, I'm not saying he's not talented.
Joe Rogan is highly talented, very gifted, but he's gifted in his field.
And his field is not the field.
Of being an academic or an expert.
His field is being able to gain the attention and the intrigue of the masses.
And so, guys will support someone like Joe Rogan, knowing that, yeah, Joe Rogan doesn't, he's not an expert on World War II, and neither am I.
But Joe Rogan can get a bunch of people talking about it by having Daryl Cooper come on the show and opening it up to that.
Like, that matters.
That absolutely matters.
So, one, be humbled.
As we're having these conversations, There are better men than us who have been having these conversations, not just on American soil in the last few decades, like Pat Buchanan, but for centuries, for centuries, better men than us.
So be humble.
But number two, be encouraged.
The same thing that humbles us you're not original, you're not unique is also the same thing that encourages us.
You're not original also means you're not alone.
Yeah.
Humbled by History00:15:20
Can I say a brief word on the huge scope of immigration in the United States before we jump into this?
Yep.
So Darrell Cooper does a really good job of explaining this.
So, like the 1790 Immigration Act.
For example, it's any free white peoples of good moral character were allowed to immigrate.
We look at that today and we say, well, that's really restrictive.
It actually was one of the most expansive in its time.
It was at the time.
Because America was huge.
If we were just going to be an English colony as we originally started, because there are just not enough English people there or here to fill a massive continent.
So America really, really opened itself up and it said, you know, whether it be Europeans, Irish, or the Italians, like it opened itself up.
But after we filled the country, here's what happened we had trouble turning the spigot off.
And so we got into our ethos, like there's always room out west.
There's always, you know, adventure to be had, always for people that want to settle.
But once it was settled, how do you press the off button on something that's been in our psyche for 150, 200 years?
And so what you're catching is some of those ideas.
And we look at it now, like, holy cow, we are full.
There are a million, like, it's just too crowded.
We're not being settled anymore.
But you have to understand, it came on the backs of we've got to fill this country up.
We have so much to do, so much opportunity.
This land is so wonderful.
So we brought a bunch of people in.
And we kept letting them in, and then it's full and it's like, stop.
It's like, no, no, no, no, this train doesn't stop.
Like, the Heart Cell Immigration Act and other things like that.
So, that's some of the context even for this that there was a time when we needed more people, and now we're in the time where we need less.
Yeah.
And let me just say real quick when Wes says we're full, I, you know, I'm post millennial, and I think we could have a lot more people on the planet than what we currently have.
If anything, you know, I like Elon Musk is a little crazy on some things, but I think he's right about this one.
The far greater, more pertinent, urgent threat.
Is underpopulation, not overpopulation.
So we can have more people.
But we are full in terms of 330 million people, whatever it is, here in America.
America is a huge country, huge country.
You could have more people, but you need a particular type of people.
America is full in the sense that for a time there were people who were coming.
They weren't coming for a handout, they weren't coming for a blank check, they weren't coming to have state provided housing and all these kinds of things.
They were coming.
And it was like, yeah, there's a wilderness out there, and it's yours if you can take it.
If you don't get killed by bears and cougars and all this kind of stuff, and if you can tame the land.
And also, there's also some indigenous people out there that will try to kill you and eat you.
You're going to have to fight them.
Yeah, and you're going to have to fight them.
And we are giving you nothing.
Right.
And so you can go out there with your family, no planes, no car to take.
You're going to take a wagon.
And you're going to go out there, and hopefully, you don't die of dysentery on the way.
Just think Oregon Trail.
Remember playing that game?
Yep.
I'm aging myself here.
But if you can make it there without dying, and then secure your property without dying, and build a house and all these kinds of things, and not die from disease or indigenous people trying to eat you, or bears trying to eat you, or parasites trying to eat you, all the things that want to eat you.
If you can make it, then it's yours.
That is not where we're currently at.
That people are not coming there.
So, my point is, there actually is still land to settle.
We could have a billion people.
I believe that.
Not a billion people in the same way that India has a billion people, but we could have a billion, not tomorrow.
None of this happens slowly, but over time, I'm just saying theoretically, we could have a billion people, three times the population here in these United States of America, if it was 150 years from now, and we solidify the core and the ethos of who we are as a people and the stock.
Of people also, and then built out our posterity from there with a mindset of continuing to build and develop and settle.
And if the government and Bill Gates didn't own all the land, that would also be key freeing up some of the land.
Then, yes, you could conceptually have more people.
So, when Wes says we're full, he's not saying that the cultural mandate has ended, that be fruitful and multiply has ended.
He's not giving people license to have your 1.5 children.
Instead of being fruitful and multiply.
What I am saying is drive on 35 to Austin in the morning and you will go.
There are too many people.
That's right, because everyone wants to live there.
Right.
There's so much land in Texas.
Exactly.
No one's going out and starting new towns and doing this and doing that because we've lost that innovative spirit.
Remember when Trump, this was like well in the middle of Biden's presidency, and he hasn't mentioned it since, so it could have just been a Trump thing.
I remember him getting what you were going to say.
He mentioned, like, if I become president again, I want to start 10 new freedom cities.
And, like, basically, it's like free land if you're going to go in and put the work into building the city.
And I thought that is exactly what we need.
Like, absolutely.
And that's what some of the old presidents did.
It's like, you go out here and you actually, we will give you this land.
Yep.
We'll give you this land from the Louisiana Purchase or whatever.
We'll give you this section of land, but you've got to take it.
Right.
You've got to do all the work yourself.
A couple guys in the chat.
Just great insights, I think.
So, Jeremy Kearns says, How do we have 100 viewers and only 50 likes?
Hit the like button, guys, to eliminate the post war consensus.
That's profound.
I think that's really good.
And the Defiant Baptist, really great point that he raises here.
He says, hit the like button or you'll get dysentery and die in Oregon.
And so that's, I think, I'm pretty sure that's true.
That's not even the worst thing that could happen to you in Oregon.
Yeah, that would actually be a mercy.
That would be a mercy.
You're in downtown Portland, like, strike me now, Lauren.
Seriously, if you're in Portland and you die of dysentery, that's the Lord's mercy.
That's an easy way to go.
But great point, Defiant Baptist.
If people don't hit the like button, they're risking dysentery.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I want to get into this op ed.
From the Washington Post in 2009.
Nate, I don't know if you pulled up a version of this article or not.
Yeah, there we go.
So I'm going to be kind of jumping around it a little bit.
So he says this I'm going to read a couple paragraphs and then we'll get you guys' take on it.
He says, I'm talking about Give Me Your Poor, Your Tired, that poem, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, which sometimes seems to define us as a nation even more than Lady Liberty herself.
Inscribed on a small brass plaque mounted inside the statue's stone base, the poem is an appendix.
Added belatedly, and it can safely be removed, shrouded, or at least marked with a big asterisk.
We live in a different era of immigration, and the Schmalzies sonnet offers a dangerously distorted picture of the relationship between newcomers and their land.
The most enduring meaning conveyed by Lady Liberty, which is the actual Statue of Liberty, has nothing to do with immigration.
And I say, let's go back to that.
The statue's original name is Liberty Enlightening the World.
And the tablet that the lady holds in her left hand reads July 4th, 1776, to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Lady Liberty celebrates U.S. political values as a force for the betterment of humanity, as well as the bond of friendship among freedom-loving nations.
That's a powerful and worthy message.
Now get this.
And the message would have been the same if the statue had ended up in Philadelphia or Cleveland.
Both were possibilities when New York was having trouble raising the money for the pedestal in the late 1870s.
France built the statue.
But the U.S. agreed that if you get it over her, we'll build a suitable pedestal for it.
New York was having trouble.
New York was having trouble.
What's that?
I said New York was broke all the way back then?
That's right.
Tale as old as time.
Yeah.
Far from Ellis Island, no one would associate the Statue of Liberty with immigration.
Too bad, because on this subject, Lady Liberty misleads more than she illuminates, especially with Lazarus' added spin.
In Lazarus' vision, the statue would be called, quote, Mother of Exiles, and it would stand by the, quote, Golden Door.
Welcoming, quote, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, end quote.
That is a distinctly political perspective on immigration, the United States as a refuge for the oppressed.
The truth is that our political values do not explain who comes here or why.
Economic imperatives, this is what you were getting to earlier, Wes.
Economic imperatives, much more than political aspirations, have always driven immigration in the United States.
Planters, merchants, servants, and slaves vastly outnumbered pilgrims and Puritans.
Since the mid 1980s, refugees and asylum seekers. Have accounted for less than a fifth of the immigrants admitted to permanent residence here.
The United States draws immigrants for a lot of good reasons, but our political values are only part of the appeal.
When our economy grows, it creates more jobs.
And I'm going to skip through this part.
And then he says this Our family legends and historical fact teach us that immigrants have been the ambitious and the adventurous, the ones battling storms to get to a better place, and they have rarely been the poorest of the people, if only because it takes money to travel.
Some have made it here.
With the help of employers and refugee aid programs, but even they had to show more pluck than you'd expect from quote huddled masses.
Pluck, I like that.
Yeah, a term that describes those who get left behind better than those who get up and leave.
Grit is another word we should bring back.
Grit.
Grit and pluck.
Yep.
Yep, absolutely.
What do those words even mean?
Nobody knows, but it's provocative and it gets the people going.
There it is.
All right.
So that was good.
Interesting to me that the statue.
Who wrote that again?
This was Robert Searle?
Yeah, Robert Searle.
In 2009, you said?
2009, yeah.
The Washington Post published this.
All right.
Wow.
Where democracy dies in darkness.
Yeah.
Interesting to me that this was never actually intended to have a connection to immigration.
It was placed in proximity to Ellis Island, and because of the poem and what I'm going to read here in a minute, it ended up being associated with immigration, but originally it was just to commemorate the American spirit of liberty and independence.
Right.
So, yep.
Right.
All right, I want to read a very short reading next.
This is from the same article.
This is just two paragraphs.
He goes on and he says this Perhaps the poet can be forgiven.
I'm Not going to be so charitable.
Her experiences informed her verse and she wrote it to advance a very specific cause.
It's true.
Yes, she did.
But we do her no injustice by deciding that the words do not serve as an ode to immigration today.
And then this is what we've just documented.
Born into a wealthy family that traced its roots to New York City's earliest Jewish residents, Lazarus was a social activist as well as an accomplished writer.
She lent a hand at the station on Ward's Island where destitute immigrants were detained and she.
Helped set up training schools in the tenements.
When she wrote the poem in 1883, she was a prominent advocate for Jews fleeing the pogroms of imperialistic Russia.
So, already covering what we went over there.
Before we go to the break.
What Jews were in imperialist Russia?
Well, yes.
Definitely the pogroms.
I mean, we've both listened to like Martyr Maid, you know, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem.
But yeah, I mean, there were significant persecution on all ends.
Some certainly Bolsheviks, but then others definitely just fleeing.
Right.
Yeah.
But you're gonna, that's the point is that some were genuinely being persecuted and fleeing, right?
But some, well, we had this huge problem with Sicily, so little island off of Italy.
And we, because of the war, World War I, we opened up the floodgates to immigration there.
So normally there were very strict caps and quotas, but during World War I, we said, well, if you're from Sicily, there's war going on, you're welcome to come in.
Do you know how all the mob boss families ended up getting here and wrecked destruction upon our nation?
So, like, same thing, like, you have a group of people, and many of them, I do not doubt, there were Christian families, mothers, children.
Their entire world that they've known has been destroyed.
There's nothing to go back to.
And they flee to America.
America says there's no cap, there's no quota.
Come on in.
I don't doubt there were some of those.
And also, who came in were violent thugs.
That's Trump's whole point about now with the gangs and the Trendy Aragua and the MS-13.
So, when it even comes to her poem and everything like that, a magistrate can say, and he does no injustice, I pity as a human being those that perhaps are being persecuted, those that especially are innocent.
But at the same time, We have communism on the rise.
We are struggling already with our national identity.
I'm sorry you can't come in.
No injustice, no wrong, no wickedness has been done.
I want to hit this last part of the article and then finish it up before the next break because this traces how the Statue of Liberty became the symbol of modern immigration.
This, to me, is what actually gets pretty interesting.
I'm going to read a couple more paragraphs from the article.
It says, It took a long time for Lady Liberty and the huddled masses to become completely intertwined.
Most of the early mythologizing.
Of the statue played on its patriotic appeal, not on its immigration appeal.
The poem, written for a charity auction that raised money for the statue's pedestal, was never commercially published and got no mention at the statue's grand opening in 1886.
Lazarus died a year later at the age of 38.
In 1903, her friend from New York High Society, Georgina Schuller, had the plaque made to honor Lazarus.
There was no ceremony when it was placed on a stairway landing inside the pedestal.
For decades, it went largely unnoticed, a memorial to a writer and reformer who died young rather than a defining inscription.
For the statue.
Immigrants arriving in New York celebrated the statue, but as John Higgum, the great historian of American immigration, tells it, the poem and the image of the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of welcome gained broad currency only after the immigration ships stopped coming.
The Golden Door was slammed shut by the highly restrictive national quotas enacted in 1924.
Then, during the Great Depression and World War II, it became popular to herald immigrants' contributions in the interest of national unity.
And the statue became part of the lore.
The poem was rediscovered and popularized as part of unsuccessful campaigns to open the United States as a refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, a new version of Lazarus's cause.
In 1945, and with that point moot, Schuller's plaque was removed to a prominent spot near the pedestal's entrance.
The immigration door remained shut after the war, and the share of the population that had been born abroad dropped to historically low levels as the Europeans.
Leaving Oppressive Nations00:09:15
Who had come through New York, Harvard died.
By 1970, the foreign born made up less than 5% of the population, a third of what their share had been around the turn of the century.
With the newcomers arriving, the myth making went into full swing, and this is what to me is so interesting.
Eleanor Roosevelt quoted Lazarus in an advertisement she recorded for John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign.
And in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson used the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop when he signed legislation that increased immigration.
From countries most disadvantaged under the old quota system.
The apex of Lazarus' vision came with the statue's centennial in 1986.
A massively commercialized four year fundraising campaign collected more than $270 million to restore both the statue and Ellis Island, linking the two more than ever before.
At the grand event on Liberty Weekend, President Ronald Reagan spoke of his belief that the quote, divine providence had made the United States a home.
For a special kind of people from every corner of the world who had a special love for freedom.
Unabashed, he called it, he said, call it mysticism if you will.
One more here.
The foreign born.
Just to say it real quick.
Yep.
Common Reagan.
Yep.
Yep.
Roosevelt and Johnson before.
Very common Roosevelt now, too.
I have to tell people all the time because my daughter, one of my daughters is named Eleanor.
Oh, yeah.
They have a son named Franklin.
And I have to, like, people will look at me.
This time they change names.
You just got to call it.
They're great names, but, like, all my.
You know, right wing friends.
Like, I'll introduce my children, you know, at church, you know, to a new family that's visiting.
I'll be like, this is Eleanor and this is Franklin.
And they'll kind of look at me and I'll be like, no relations.
Go ahead.
So, Nate, let's pull up the quote that I had from you.
This is the quote from Austin Bramwell.
So, in commenting on this whole issue, writer Austin Bramwell, this is for, I forget which article now.
First, he says this First, the peoples of the third world are not oppressed in the way that Lazarus believes the peoples of Europe were oppressed.
On the contrary, they have nearly all thrown off the yoke of the ancient lands of Europe and set up independent governance.
In other words, they're coming from independent nations.
They have no need for America because they are already free.
Second, they are not homeless.
On the contrary, the peoples of the third world have their own nations, peoples, and traditions, which they retain when they come here, often with the encouragement of their home countries.
And so what I really found fascinating doing the research for this was that this was not originally attached to the Statue of Liberty.
Yeah.
It was a political narrative mythology making process in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, well, 70s and 80s especially, to kind of justify a push to reopen immigration, especially to countries that were considered to be more disadvantaged at the time.
Can I ask something without everyone getting mad?
Like, freedom.
Like, is Calcutta, India, like really that oppressive?
Like, day to day, is the average ordinary citizen, like, he's given a diet with two options, like, no opportunity for work?
We say this all the time, like, well, they're here for freedom.
Like, is Nigeria really, like, not that free?
Just in my mind, there are certainly places with totalitarian rule, and a great example would be North Korea.
North Korea.
But these people broadly that we're speaking about that are coming here and we're using this language or taping it over with liberty and freedom and all these things, I don't feel like they're actually leaving places that are in and of themselves authoritarian and restricted.
They're leaving places that are not prosperous.
Exactly.
They're not leaving them because of, like, I want to be free.
I hear from missionaries all the time talking about, um, African countries, you know, where they've done mission work or talking about, you know, in Asia or different places, South America, and they're like, there's a ton of opportunity because there's literally, like, quantitatively more freedom.
Like, there's not all the regulation and red tape.
I was about to say, there's not a lot of regulation.
Exactly.
You can just build equipment, you can just build engineering.
Like, you know, like you can just build something.
You don't have to get all these permits.
You don't have to, there's not all the red tape.
So, and they said, like, there's actually like a lot of Americans who are moving, you know, to this place or to this place or to this place and setting up shop and building.
You know, whether it's a resort or it's this or it's that, you know, and setting like there's, there's, there is literally more freedom.
More freedom.
People are not moving to America from these countries for freedom.
They're moving to America to take what has been produced already by Americans because the place they're leaving is oppressive.
No, because it's poor.
Right.
That's what it is.
There is, in India, there's the caste system.
And if you're part of the lower caste, it's horrible.
But those are not the people who are immigrating here because they can't, they don't actually have the opportunity to do it.
Second, What people, let's take a hardworking person that comes here to build.
What they gain in America that they don't have back home is the good chance that if they build something, it's not just going to come in and be stolen by some politician or gang.
So there is opportunity, but the security, the law abiding culture that the US has traditionally had is actually not present in a lot of places.
And so someone could build something, but if you can't afford the security or if you're not a US investor, With a security team or greasing the palms of the politicians locally, there is a sense where you could build and the very next day it all becomes you.
That's true.
Less regulation, but also less protection.
But that's not freedom, to your point, Wes.
And I think of the example of China, for example.
China is very pro censorship.
There's stories about its genesis, its founding, they're not allowed to know.
So there are certainly real countries where people will look across to America where you can say and criticize the government, where you can keep your wages.
Most certainly, there are millions of people like that who are looking across.
But of those that we're dealing with, the examples I gave, Typically, we're not looking at those types of governments many, many ways because they're actually not very technologically advanced.
A lot of the mythology was built when there were very oppressive dictatorships in Central American countries.
Communism was setting up a footstep or on our doorstep in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, several other various Central American countries.
There was very oppressive forms of government in the 50s, 60s, 40s.
And so part of the mythology that was crafted through the Statue of Liberty was in a time where we did actually have some fairly near neighbors.
Who were living actually in a situation where freedom, as we're saying now, even of going out and starting a business, largely it was quite difficult.
What we have to recognize is we are living in different times and people are coming for different reasons than they were before.
We used to have settlers, now we have immigrants.
Times have changed.
We need to recognize that.
And honestly, that's part of, I think, properly understanding politics it's not ideology, it's not timeless, one size fits all for all times and all places ideology that you can just.
Just do this.
No, the realm of the political takes into account the circumstances.
This was working.
Now the context has changed.
And so now we need to adapt or we need a different set of laws or we need a different strategy because we have a different people.
We have this, we have that.
Even, and people hate this, but this applies to everything, even the Constitution.
This does not apply to the immutable moral laws of God.
Those are timeless, but in terms of how they're particularly applied to a people in a place in a time, um, such as the American Constitution, right?
Like, I know at this point it's ad nauseum quoted again and again and again, but just in case any of our listeners right now think I'm you know what I'm saying is heresy, um, and have never heard the quote, um, that the Constitution was written and created for a moral and upright people, religious and moral people, and is wholly unfit for any other, John Adams, um.
We, the Constitution, even that mold of government, a self governed republic, a constitutional self governed republic, what that assumes and presupposes is a people who are fit for self governance.
Right, right.
We currently no longer have those people.
I mean, I'm not saying we don't have them at all.
I think some people are, but we are not a nation across the board.
Yeah, we're not characterized by that anymore.
We're characterized.
By mobs of people raiding CVS pharmacies, Amazon delivery trucks, and Amazon delivery trucks, and breaking out into brawls.
And you know, every high school is honestly has more fights and is arguably more dangerous than a lot of prisons, right?
Um, that we because you have unruly people who are not capable of self governance.
Law as a Moral Mirror00:04:05
Uh, one day maybe we can aspire towards that again, but we always forget.
That our constitutional republic of self governance doesn't just appear magically out of the ether.
It's not in a vacuum.
It is sitting on top of a millennium of monarchy.
Of pretty strict rule.
Pretty strict rule where pagans were shaped and formed by the gospel into Christians, and then with kings.
And lords, they are then further shaped and tutored by the law of God.
That's one of the functions of the law.
It's a mirror, it reveals to us the holiness of God, and by way of consequence, reveals our sinfulness and our need for a savior.
The law of God doesn't save, but it's a mirror that shows us our need for Christ.
Charles Spurgeon, a man cannot appreciate the beauty of Christ unless he first comes to see the need for Christ.
That's the first use.
The third use of the law is that it's a guide, a compass.
It's a lamp unto thy feet, as David says, a light unto our path.
So for the Christian who already is now converted, the law first reveals his sin and need for conversion, need for Christ.
The first use, mirror.
Third use, compass, guide.
Upon being saved, the law then shows us the path to salvation.
No.
From being saved, it shows us the path from salvation.
Now that I am saved, not by my works of obedience to the law, but by Christ's perfect, finished obedience on my behalf that was received fully as an act of grace and faith being merely the empty hand that lays hold of that grace.
Now that I am a Christian, the law doesn't show me how to be saved, where to go to be saved, but it shows me how to respond for the free salvation I've already received.
1 John 4 19, we love because he first loved us.
So because God loved us freely in the gospel in Christ, We now cannot help but love him in return.
And because we love him, the first question that that raises, if we love him, is well, God, how can I show you and demonstrate my love for you?
And Jesus answers this question by saying, Obey my commandments.
And so the law comes back in.
So that's the first, the book ends, the first and the third use of the law mirror and the compass.
In the middle, you have tutor and shield.
Tutor and shield.
The second use of God's law is that the law of God, insofar as it's legislated and enforced by the civil magistrate, Among a particular society, then the law of God works as a shield, restraining evil of the heart?
No, right?
Total depravity still remains intact.
But it does restrain as a shield outward manifestations of evil, evil actions that more would murder if it wasn't for laws against murder and enforcing those laws through the proper sphere, the civil magistrate.
So it restrains outward manifestations of evil, shield, and then also functions as a tutor, the pedagogical function of the law that it shapes and teaches.
The people.
Again, it doesn't convert, the gospel converts, but what it does is it, over time, this doesn't happen in 15 minutes, but over generations, righteous laws being applied with prudence and wisdom by the civil magistrate begin to shape the consciences of the people to make them more acutely aware of what is moral and what is immoral.
And then that understanding of intrinsic morality, again, doesn't save people, but sets the proper backdrop.
For the gospel preachers and the church to do its ministry, word and sacrament, grace, ministry of mercy, gospel, to where now the gospel doesn't fall on deaf ears of people who are already self righteous, but it falls on the ears of people who have been trained and tutored by the law of God to recognize that in themselves, even if they're law abiding in their outward actions, that their hearts are still wicked and evil because they have evil desires that breach the law, and therefore they're aware of their need for Christ.
Secular Humanism's Decline00:06:43
And so now the gospel is coming on much more fertile soil.
And so it's hand in glove.
It works in tandem, the civil magistrate with the church, the state and the church working together, not the state being the church, not the church being the state, but still working together without this severing that we've kind of invented.
There is some overlap and flow back and forth where they work together, gospel and law, law and gospel.
And the point is with all this, that over time, with strict laws and with kings and monarchs and these kinds of things, feudal lord systems and all this kind of stuff, then over generations, over a thousand years, over a millennium, from King Alfred all the way to present day, then yes, that eventually trained the populace.
And even then, it wasn't all of England, it was some people who were the most responsible, the most fit, the most endeavoring.
That they took upon themselves the risk of life and limb to cross the ocean, to go to a place that was unsettled with nothing that was waiting for them.
And those people were fit for self governance in a constitutional republic.
Look at America today.
Watch TikTok videos and tell me that our current population is fit for that kind of governance.
When I see people trashing movie theater, you know what I think?
Man, I want these people voting.
I need them picking my mayor, my city council.
No, of course not.
Yeah, so we just have to keep these things in mind.
Nation of immigrants, no.
A nation of settlers and their posterity, yes.
But we've got a long road right now to get back to that.
And a lot of people have to be returned to their home of origin.
And that's not inhumane.
You have to go back home.
But then there are also a lot of people who have no home to go back to, this is the only home they have.
Heritage Americans.
And for them, they need to then put things back into order and become a moral and upright religious people once again.
Christianity needs to win the day.
I am confident that secular humanism is dying.
I am not confident that Christianity is winning.
I am confident as a post millennial that Christianity will eventually win.
But there's a return to nature right now because things are out of order.
And nature abhors a vacuum, and the left has overplayed its hand.
And so people are saying, no, this is ridiculous.
We're going back.
So the rubber band is snapping back.
Nature is healing, as the kids say.
Nature is healing, and it's healing fast.
And that's great.
However, it's worth keeping in mind that there is more than just one worldview, at the risk of Dr. Stephen Wolfe getting upset with me for using the word, but there's more than just one set of principles, belief system.
That adheres to natural order.
Christianity works well with nature because it's the religion of the God who made nature.
But Islam adheres to nature.
Paganism actually adheres to nature.
Secular humanism is the aboriginal, that's the misnomer.
And it's quickly sprung up and it's quickly dying.
The vacuum will be filled.
But I'm just letting people know the listener, you need to be aware of this.
If you think that secular humanism dying, That guarantees that Christianity will fill its place, you've got another thing coming.
You've got another thing coming.
Or at least a robust Christianity.
It could have a Christianity in name.
A Christian skin suit.
Just like secular humanism did.
It could be nothing but Nietzschean.
Yeah, liberalism has been walking around in a Christian skin suit for centuries, but it's not robust Christianity.
It's not historic Christianity.
And so too, paganism could have some little, you know, because we've never really experienced post Christian paganism.
So, I bet a post Christian paganism would maintain some of the language and vernacular and veneer of Christianity.
But my point is Christianity is not the default.
Nature is the default.
And Christianity, I think, best pairs with nature because Christianity is the religion of the God who made nature.
But there is a return to nature.
Secular humanism is dying, and Christianity will ultimately win the day.
But it may not immediately win the day.
There may be a phase, whether it be a decade or a century or half a millennia, in between secular humanism and Christianity eventually winning.
And that could be Islam.
That could be some weird kind of pagan hybrid.
That could be a Darwinian, just raw naturalism based in science that has no religious affiliation whatsoever.
But the point is, right now, things are in flux.
And our nation is chaotic.
There are many white pills that go around, things that are hopeful, but there are very little guarantees currently at this juncture.
And we just need to be aware that my whole point in bringing this up is the idea of the political is not true politics, it's not ideology.
Ideologues make bad politicians.
It's not just one size fits all, always, for anyone, anywhere, at any time.
So, this constitutional republic, I just want to be clear I like it.
I would even be willing to say that it might be the optimal, ideal, best form of government.
But if it is, and I'm inclined to say it is, if it is the optimal, ideal, best form of government, and not a raw democracy that crept in later, but what the founders intended, a constitutional representative.
You know, republic.
If that is the ideal form of government, it is sitting on top of a millennia of monarchy that shaped people to make them capable of that kind of government.
Costs of Illegal Immigration00:15:19
And we don't have those people, not anymore.
All right, let's go to our last commercial break and then we'll come back.
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All right, to wrap things up here, we want to cover a little bit of some of the costs of this, specifically illegal immigration.
So we are all.
Aware that the financial picture and the situation is much broader than just illegal immigration, but some of those numbers are hard to get.
And at least illegal immigration, the cost of it have been tracked pretty well.
So, Nate, let's put up that first chart.
This is what kinds of households in the United States are using welfare.
Okay, so the percentage is of that group of people, so U.S. born legal immigrants or illegal immigrants, what percentage of the households.
Headed by someone of that status is using these kinds of welfare.
So, for instance, any welfare at all 39% of US born households are using welfare, 59% of illegal immigrant households are using welfare.
And so you can see that across the board, there are a few cases where illegal immigrants are using less than legal immigrants.
So, part of that is just because it's based on legal resident status here.
For anyone listening, it's a small amount, it's like 5% lower in cash.
So, for any welfare, it's 59% of illegal homes are using it, 52% of legal homes, and then 39% of U.S. born homes.
Food, this is food stamps.
48% of illegal homes are using food stamps.
34% of legal immigrant homes are using food stamps.
And then a quarter, 25% of U.S. born homes are using food stamps.
This is really interesting.
Nate, let's go to the next quote the one about American taxpayers.
Shelled out a certain amount of money.
So this is, this says American taxpayers shelled out more than $150 billion on immigrants in the U.S. illegally, illegal immigration, in 2023 alone.
The Department of Government Efficiency estimates Newsweek reported that if accurate, $150.7 billion spent on illegal immigration would rival the $151 billion that the government spent in 2023 to provide income security programs to military veterans.
And their families in 2023.
So, in 2023 alone, just on reported illegal immigration benefits, it was almost exactly what we are paying to veteran security programs.
Security programs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is kind of crazy.
It just tells you something about priorities.
Here's the white pill.
There's not many in those stats.
But imagine the prosperity 49% of homes that are headed by an illegal immigrant.
Yep.
49% are receiving welfare.
Yep.
Just imagine the prosperity and all of that drops.
Yep.
To zero.
Yep.
Same thing like $150 billion.
Like all the taxes that you felt have been so burdensome.
It's funny, we always hate government, but I've said this to people.
Like, what if government was run by high caliber men?
Like, we hate it right now because it's bloated and all these different things.
What if government was efficient?
It was run by men that were highly competent.
I feel like we wouldn't hate it as much.
Our taxes would be much lower because we're not shelling out for all these programs.
Government is not inherently evil.
Nope.
It has been evil in our lifetime in many ways.
It's run by a lot of incompetent people.
Right.
Yes.
But what if it was evil to you?
And not just the amount that you would save in taxes.
Also, imagine like all of you millennials and Gen Z are like, I'm never going to be able to own a home.
Imagine what would happen to the housing market in terms of affordability if a bunch of houses all of a sudden were available.
Like, it's simple supply and demand.
If 30, you know, 40 million people go back, and a lot of that, just for the record, is just changing the laws, stopping the cash handouts, a lot of people will self deport.
So, a lot of people just go back.
Illegal for sure.
They need to be sent back.
But then, even legal immigrants who have only been here for five years or 10 years or something like that, a lot of them would self deport.
And if the grand total is that ends up being over the next decade, if you get Trump for four years, then you get eight more years of Vance or whatever it is, 12 years.
If 30 million people, now 50 would be awesome, but let's say 30 million people end up either self deporting or being deported.
It's not just what you save in terms of what you pay on taxes, but it's also all of a sudden that many homes going on the market.
Now there's more supply than there is demand.
Prices begin to drop.
People who already own a home are fine, and many of them could refinance as interest rates eventually start to come down, which I think they will.
Inflation, I understand that there's, you know, I'm reading a lot of these, where put the CPI and PPI and consumer data and all these different things.
This is my prediction.
This is a prediction.
I can't promise you anything.
But I think that the Fed, right now, there's a battle between Jerome Powell and Trump.
Jerome Powell doesn't like being pushed and told what to do, and Trump tells everyone what to do.
And I think Trump happens to be right.
But inevitably, what I think is going to happen is the Fed is going to send us into a recession if he doesn't cut rates.
He's going to eventually cut rates.
He's going to probably cut them later than he should.
But I think we're going to get more rate cuts than what the Fed is currently signaling.
I think we'll get more, at least three.
Because recently he's signaled like one and maybe two.
And we're talking about 25 basis points, a quarter of a percentage.
I think we're going to get a lot more than that because Trump barks a little bit more than he bites.
That's part of his leadership, art of the deal, and those kinds of things.
And I think it actually ends up being successful most of the time.
I don't have a problem with that.
But as that applies to his tariff threats, April 2nd is coming.
I think Trump, even now, is addressing tariffs on automobiles and those kinds of things.
This afternoon, after the market closed.
And I think what we'll find out, even just in the next week, especially because April 2nd, I believe, is next Wednesday, what we're going to find out is tariffs, which I think actually is a good strategy for lowering taxes on Native Americans and the rest of the world not getting free lunch all the time and just benefiting off of America with us getting nothing in return.
Tariffs will probably not be as severe.
And that's part of the news that I think will come back in.
Inflation, I think, actually is stalling and will do much better.
Yeah, there have been some signs of that.
Consumers is drying up a little bit.
And so those are some of the early signs of recession that the Fed is starting to signal.
And economists are late, we may have a recession, but that's going to put more pressure on the Fed to slash the rates.
And so, with rate cuts and these things, my point is if over the next 12 years we get mass deportations and a lot of them self deportations because of changing laws and no more free money and some rate cuts, with potentially, I think there is the potential of historically low rates again, then you're talking about people who are in homes.
It's like, well, I just lost $200,000 of equity.
Well, great.
You can refinance at a lower rate.
Your mortgage was already great if you bought your house anytime up until 2021.
So you're fine.
It just benefits everybody else.
So maybe you don't get to move for a few years as you wait.
You're going to be okay because you already own a home.
I'm speaking as a homeowner right now.
I would rather lose $200,000 of imaginary money, equity, that I can't use one way or the other.
If it frees up, if it means that my house is worth, you know, $200,000 instead of $400,000 for the foreseeable future, and I like my house and I just stay put with my family and maybe a year from now, even refinance and get a cheaper mortgage with the interest rates.
And then a bunch of people in my church who don't own homes can finally own a home.
That is, you talk about America first, that's a win for your fellow Americans.
And so I think that there's a lot of hope with these kinds of things, but it does necessitate.
A lot of people have to leave.
And I only point that out because of the chart and saying it's economically, it's not just, hey, if these illegal immigrants and immigrants stop getting a free handout, then we don't have to pay $151 billion annually in taxes.
It's not just that your taxes shrink.
You combine that with tariffs, your taxes shrink even more.
You combine that with self deportations, and there's simply being more supply than demand on the housing market, and now principles are dropping too.
You combine that also with inflation starting to cool and the Fed cutting rates, like you're.
Trump likes to talk a little bit bigger than things sometimes turn out to be.
But I think he's probably embellishing some in typical Trump fashion.
But I don't think it's a pipe dream.
I think he is generally correct when he says, when he tweets out things like, you have no idea how much prosperity and how rich America is going to be in the near future.
And we're not talking 50 years.
In just a few short years, things could, it really could be economically a golden age for America.
There's a lot of things to be hopeful for.
Okay.
I want to close with just, Nate, this is going to be the last quote that I gave you, so I'm skipping to the last one.
And this is from the House Budget Committee.
This is a report that they, testimony that was given to them in 2024 on the state, the cost, again, of immigration and illegal immigration.
And to me, this one kind of sums up where we are, because the reality is that the mythology that has been built up around the Statue of Liberty, it matters for a lot of reasons.
But one of the reasons it matters is exactly what you're talking about there, Joel.
is the financial cost and drag that it causes on the country.
And so this was from last, just last year, presented to the House of Representatives.
The fiscal situation today is very different from the situation more than 100 years ago during the last great wave of immigrants when federal, state, and local government was a much smaller share of GDP.
Also, at that time, industrial jobs for the less educated were plentiful and paid by the standards of the day relatively high wages.
But none of None of this is the case today.
We need an immigration policy that reflects current realities and we need to rigorously enforce it.
Otherwise, the fiscal costs will be significant understatement, as many communities across the country are currently finding out.
So, there's a lot of reasons for it.
Finding out.
That's just the classic principle of mess around.
Let's find out.
Sounds like 500 billion more to Israel.
That's what it sounds like, right?
Oh, my word.
Unfortunately, Wes, you're not wrong.
Good night.
Are we ready for super chats?
Yep, we're ready.
Okay, let's do this quick.
We don't have time today for questions.
We've got some other things that are coming up, but we always want to take a moment and honor the super chats.
If you're listening right here at the end, Be aware that we do our best to get to the questions, and pretty much every episode, and we do three live streams every week.
We usually address just about, I don't think I'm wrong, Nathan, you correct me if I'm wrong, but I think, don't we address like 80, 90% of every single question, not super chats, but just questions?
We hit a lot of them.
We hit a lot of them.
So, well over half, well over half, 80, 90% of every single question.
But our policy is we will not receive a single super chat.
That we don't say publicly on air.
I mean, and that's because we want to honor you unless it's, you know, unless it's wrong or, yeah, exactly.
Like if you disclaimer, yeah, and so I'll just give you that warning right now you send us a hundred dollar super chat, but it's something that we can't read.
I'm sorry you just wasted a hundred dollars.
So that one's on you.
Thank you for the hundred bucks, but no, we can't read your terrible thing publicly online.
But my point is just to say that we try to do questions whether you give us a super chat or not.
But the super chats do take priority because these are people who are supporting our ministry, and we really appreciate you.
So, thank you to Rubicon.
That's the first one.
Super chat for $5 from Rubicon.
He says, I blame Boomer, IFB, SBC, so Independent Fundamental Baptist, and Southern Baptist Convention, those types with hard dispy views, so a hard dispensationalism.
They've spent most of their sermons preaching against dance halls and booze and.
Exclusive Conference Cigars00:03:53
Prof on Israel Ruckman teaching.
Prof would stand for what?
Prophesying?
Oh, yeah, prophecy.
And prophecy.
Yeah, that's what it is.
So they're preaching against dance halls and booze.
That's a classic Baptist sermon right there.
Yeah, that is.
And then they're focusing on red heifers and prophecy with Israel in their dispensationalism.
That's absolutely true.
There are a lot of problems that have come from that.
You're right.
Thank you, Rubicon.
This is from Jeremy Kearns.
Jeremy Kearns, $5 super chat.
Very kind.
He says, Really excited to come out to the conference next week.
Going to be a blast, and we better have some beer and psalms.
Jeremy, thank you so much.
We're excited to see you.
Please introduce yourself.
We would love to meet you.
And there's going to be a lot of things, a lot of hangouts.
We've tried to schedule in time with every single evening and those kinds of things.
There's going to be a good time with the boys.
We'll put it that way.
There's going to be some good time.
We actually are going to, we have a special custom right response Christ is King cigar that we have that we're going to be selling at the conference.
Nathan, we have like 600 cigars.
Okay, so here's the deal.
I'm just going to shoot you guys straight.
If you don't buy these cigars, I'm dead.
You're dead.
I'm dead too.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Look, we have 600 cigars and about 1,000 people coming to the conference.
If you do not buy these cigars and I come home with 300 cigars, then Wes, Michael, and myself, this ministry will not be able to continue because we.
Your home value will drop, not because of interest rates, but because of the time.
It's going to be like this is going to be straight up C.S. Lewis style, like his study, where the ceiling was black from all of his pipe smoke.
So, as a ministry to us and to our health and longevity of life, you guys got to buy the scars, and we're going to give you a great deal on them.
In fact, I'm thinking about we'll probably sell them individually, but we're also planning on giving like a super duper, like way cheaper than even the early bird special.
For every that's just available for those who are in person, you mean for the next year for the next conference?
Yep, so we actually have already settled the venue and settled the dates, and so we're gonna announce that at the conference.
Here's the place, here are the dates, here's the big idea of the conference, and then we're gonna say if you register this weekend here while you're here, if you go and register for the conference, it's gonna be this incredible price, cheaper than we've ever, ever done before.
And I think I'm also gonna throw in if you just show on your phone that you registered.
Then you can go in the back and get a Crisis King cigar for free.
There you go.
And then the rest will sell for $10.
But, anyways, the point is there's going to be a lot of downtime, a lot of hanging out.
All right, another one from Jerry.
No, no, hold on.
Go ahead.
The deal about if you buy a cigar, you are automatically entered into a raffle.
Oh, yeah.
The coffee sit down.
That's right.
Everyone who buys a cigar, not only do you get a cigar, that's number one, but number two, you will have to write your name down.
So you'll go back to the booth.
That'll be right there in the main conference hall.
You'll be able to buy a cigar and write down your full name.
And all those names are going to be entered into a drawing.
And we're going to pick how many of them, Nate?
10?
10.
10.
We're going to pick 10 of the names, which means you can't just buy a cigar on the last day because this has to happen faster.
So, like first night, buy a cigar, write down your full name.
All those names will be entered into a drawing.
We're going to select 10 of those names to do a special sit down coffee with me, Michael, and Wes.
Virtuous Leadership Matters00:04:15
Yep.
The three of us get coffee with you Saturday morning before the conference kicks off Saturday morning.
So that'll be really cool too.
Okay, let's go back.
Jeremy Kearns gave us another $5 super chat.
Wes, go ahead.
All right.
Jeremy said, what Wes is bringing up is incredibly important.
Freedom is now licensed for sin with leftist policies or mooching off of heritage Americans.
Getting back to earlier where I was saying it depends what you mean by freedom.
Yeah.
So thanks, Jeremy.
Thank you, Jeremy.
When we beat the Soviets in the Cold War, largely we beat them because we were offering rock and roll and free love.
Yeah.
Like in many ways, that was you know, like we had denim, and I mean, yep, in North Korea, like denim is like even seen as like, well, that's capitalist and that's like wicked.
So, I mean, who wouldn't want to live in a world where, like, oh, at least I can pick the type of jeans I wear?
Yep, but all right, uh, last one, Jeff Halfley, good, good, old, faithful Jeff, thank you, Jeff, uh, five dollar super chat.
Uh, he says, in most evangelical circles, sanctification can most accurately be described as mastering the art of testosterone suppression.
So, that's absolutely right.
And it's not just in evangelical circles, which is bad enough because you wouldn't expect that in churches, but it's the same thing in schools.
Little boys are not just taught, but they're drugged to mimic the behavioral patterns of little girls Adderall and Ritalin.
Yeah.
I mean, you can look at the statistics.
How many girls are on Adderall and Ritalin by comparison to the boys?
We have determined as a society.
In total, both our churches and our schools and our workplaces at every single level, we have determined as a society that we're going to penalize masculinity, that masculinity is a vice, and that feminism is a virtue.
Where what we should be saying is, femininity, not effeminacy, feminine traits in a man, but femininity, a woman who is feminine, that that's a virtue, and masculinity.
Masculinity in a man, that's a virtue.
But we have not done that for a very long time.
We want people drugged.
We want them placated.
Placated, yep.
Because honestly, let's be honest, they're easier to govern.
Yep, restrained.
Right?
Young men who are zealous and who have not been doped up and restrained and long housed and all those, they can be a little bit difficult at times to pastor.
Pastor and be citizens too.
Yeah, they might actually get you in trouble.
They might actually even have some views.
Where other pastors on the other side of the world might try to take you down in your ministry.
That would never happen.
That's not true.
That is true.
Joel, that's just not.
That's like the pastor's.
That is not.
But no, but the reality is that it's not just the state.
That's what I'm trying to say.
I'm just agreeing with Jeff.
He's 100% correct.
Evangelical churches fit the molt at every level, whether it's the teachers' union and schools.
Or whether it's politicians with the state, or whether it's the hackling hens of HR in corporate America, or whether it's the pastors and the true elders of every complementarian church, the pastors' wives, the shadow elders, in every single place, politically, ecclesiastically, academically, and corporately with business, in every single place,
we are placating men to make them more easily.
Pliable, that they would be malleable, that they would be placated and easier to govern.
That's literally what it is easier to govern.
And we don't want that.
We want dangerous men.
We want those men to be virtuous and righteous, and they will have to be corrected at times.
But there's a difference in correcting a young, zealous man versus hamstringing him.
There's quite a difference.
Governing Dangerous Men00:00:42
Last one Michael, you want to read this?
Cameron Stevenson, thank you very much.
Very generous $20 super chat.
Cheers to Andrew and CJ for being featured on Tucker's show.
Wait, I thought Christian nationalism was dead.
It was back from the dead.
That's right.
There was one other question, I think, from Soli Deo Gloria Music, and they just asked about the book club.
What are you guys reading?
And that's something we thought about.
We may do it maybe as a full episode sometime.
Maybe even as a Patreon exclusive, but definitely want to do exactly that bringing a stack of books and say, this is how I read, this is how I take in information, because I think that's a great question.
And I learned a lot of my reading habits from other people who read better than I do.