Auron MacIntyre applies Elite Theory to argue that fox-like global elites enforce a "softer tyranny" by eroding traditional social spheres like family and church, replacing them with secular humanism. He asserts no institution is neutral, urging the New Christian Right to build alternative structures led by young white men rather than seeking immediate political returns or managerial efficiency. By prioritizing spiritual profit over pocketbooks and cultivating organic confederal networks, conservatives can resist cultural homogenization and prevent a power vacuum filled by hostile ideologies, ensuring long-term societal survival through active institution-building instead of passive reliance on existing systems. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Southern Baptist Identity Crisis00:03:28
Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
I get it.
It's annoying.
Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
Hey guys, thanks for having me.
I'm relatively new to the Reformed Christian world.
A lot of you guys have walked up and asked me about all the people I'm aligned with and all the people I probably know, and I usually don't because I'm still very new to this.
So there's a lot of people with a lot of theological knowledge in this room, and don't worry, I'm not going to embarrass myself by trying to hang with any of them.
What I do know about is political theory, and so what Joel asked me to discuss today is the school that I tend to specialize in on my show, Elite Theory.
So, if this is incredibly boring, I'm sorry, and you can blame Joel because he's the one who came up with the topic.
So, I don't know about you guys, but I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church.
And as a Southern Baptist, my dad was in the Air Force.
We traveled all the time, we moved every year or two.
So, I had a very transient childhood, never set down roots, never had friends for more than a few years.
It can be kind of isolating, but the one thing that was always there for me was the Southern Baptist Church.
Obviously, we were moving all the time, so it's a different church.
But the Southern Baptist hymnal was there, and that was kind of the sense of identity that I had as we moved from place to place.
And if you grew up as a Southern Baptist, you know that Southern Baptists believe that the Bible is the holiest document available.
But just below it is the Constitution.
Like, it's right there.
Like, God probably, as soon as he got done inspiring the Bible, is like, and now the U.S. Constitution.
And so it's a very serious, it almost takes on a religious form for some of us.
We value it very highly.
And so, when something like that is a big part of your life, obviously it has a big impact on your worldview.
And like most of you, I grew up listening to conservative talk radio and learning about the different separation of powers and the checks and balances and all of the different amendments that were going to protect my rights.
You know, government really couldn't become tyrannical as long as we obeyed the Constitution.
And then COVID happened.
And all of a sudden, the churches were closed, but strip clubs and liquor stores were open.
And you couldn't go to the funeral of a loved one, but if you were a Democrat, you were allowed to riot in the streets and burn things down.
And I was very confused, because I had been assured that we had checks and balances, that we had constitutional rights.
And when tyranny came, those things would stop the government from taking away my God given freedoms.
And it didn't.
And that was very confusing to me, as I'm sure it was to many of you.
And so I needed to go on a journey.
I needed to understand what was happening.
Why did this occur?
Why didn't the Constitution stop this tyranny?
Did we fail the Constitution?
Did the Constitution fail us?
The Political Formula Explained00:10:41
What's going on?
And so I feel like elite theory, political realism, sometimes it's called Machiavellian political theory, helps us to understand this situation.
It gives us a frame to better grasp.
What we went through, how power actually works in the United States.
And the reason that's so important is if you are a new movement, the new Christian right, you want to think about how power works.
We're not just interested in being in a scenario where, of course, we need to be the salt, we need to be the light, but we also want to look around and say, how do we protect our families?
How do we protect our churches?
How do we make sure that we can worship?
How do we make sure that the government just doesn't come in and shut everything down again?
And to better understand that, we need to understand how power actually works.
We can't just have a narrative, a story about how power works.
We need to see the mechanisms that underlie it.
And so I'm hoping that that's what Elite Theory does for you guys today.
Today.
So I'm going to give you a little bit of Elite Theory 101.
And the first thing that we need to understand to familiarize ourselves with some of the basics of politics and power is that in Elite Theory, the idea is that always and everywhere the organized minority rules the disorganized majority.
I'm going to say that one more time because it's really important.
The organized minority always rules the disorganized majority.
And if you think that sounds weird, You just have to think about this conference, right?
Joel knows what's going on.
He and his staff have organized this.
If you would like to know what we're doing next, don't ask me.
I didn't organize it.
Don't ask him.
Don't ask her.
They don't know, right?
It's the people who, the small number of people who took the time and the effort to organize this, are in charge.
They are organized and they are leading us.
And if you think about anything in your life, this is true.
But for some reason, when we talk about this in government, this makes people uneasy.
But actually, it should just be obvious.
And we understand that ultimately it is this organized minority, and here I don't mean a minority group, as in a racial minority or sexual minority, or the things you hear on TV when people are talking about American politics.
I literally just mean a smaller group of people who ultimately end up running the things that we experience.
Now, in the United States, we tend to shy away from the idea of an elite class, right?
We define ourselves by the fact that we threw off the chains of oppression, we don't have monarchs, we don't have an aristocracy.
However, that doesn't mean that we don't end up with a ruling elite.
Because that organized minority that ends up running something will always end up becoming a ruling class.
They will share the same interests, they will share the same social experiences, and they will try to retain power.
Now, in the United States, we elect our ruling class, right?
We have this process that we go through, we vote for these people, and that's how they take power.
So, we do understand ultimately that each one of us doesn't have the power to rule, but we do think of ourselves as having popular sovereignty because we vote for the people who then go on to take action on our behalf.
And this is how we see our ruling class.
Now, the thing about our ruling class that you want to think about is that all ruling classes need a story about why they're in charge.
If you ever have read Plato's Republic, you might, or you might have just heard the phrase, a noble lie.
And the noble lie is a story in Plato's Republic that the ruling elite tell the people so they can justify their power.
However, in elite theory, we think there's more going on there.
We have what we call a political formula.
And a political formula is something that you, it's not just a lie that you tell people to get them to listen to you, to let you be in charge.
The political formula is something that both the rulers and the ruled believe.
Simultaneously.
Because ultimately, we are narrative creatures, right?
Think about this.
Jordan Peterson has become famous.
You can talk about other things that he's become famous for.
But one of the things that he became famous for was telling us that we're not always hyper rational creatures.
Instead, we need to hear stories about why we're in the place we are and why we're doing the things that we're doing.
And so, as people who are following leaders, we need a political formula that tells us why they are in charge.
But the rulers themselves also need a story about why they are in charge.
They need to believe that they have the right to rule.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are cynical actors.
And we can think about people who are just dictators who just rule through raw force, and that'll work for a while.
But eventually, really truly tyrannical rule always breaks down.
So we actually need a story that tells us both the people in charge and the people who are being led why we are in the situation we're in.
And in the United States, we know that our political formula, again, is popular sovereignty.
The people tell the leaders what to do, and the leaders carry that out.
We don't have the monarchical formula, right?
We don't think, oh, the king has been in charge, his dad's dad was in charge, and so he's going to inherit the kingdom, and that gives him the right.
We don't have the dictatorship, the law of force.
We don't have the truly theocratic understanding where, like, the mullahs are in charge.
Instead, we have popular sovereignty.
However, here's the thing about ruling elites they really don't like it when they lose power.
So if you're in a ruling class, Are you really going to let the average person tell you to leave office, to give up power?
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
So, what do you do in a situation like that?
What do you do when you're in the ruling class and you want to stay in power, but you have a system where the people get to decide if you stay in power?
How do you make sure that you continue to rule?
And it turns out the answer is if your legitimating mechanism for being in power is popular opinion, then you need to control.
Popular opinion.
You need to make sure that the people see the world the way you want them to see it so that they understand the things the way that you want them to understand them so that eventually they vote the way that you want them to vote.
And so what we see is that our ruling elite in the United States have been able to close off the ability to move them out, to push them out of power by manufacturing public opinion in the United States.
And if you think I'm just being a conspiracy theorist and that doesn't make sense, Let me throw something out for you.
Congress usually has an approval rating of about 10 to 15%.
It has an incumbency rating of roughly 90%.
If democracy works the way it's been explained to you, how are people that are 10% popular staying in power 90% of the time?
That doesn't make any sense at all.
And yet, that's exactly how our system works.
And so we need to understand, first and foremost, that the ruling class is real.
And that their power comes from this cultural form of controlling what we see, what we think, and what we believe.
Now, that might have sounded crazy 10 years ago, but we all went through COVID.
So we know that's pretty obvious, actually.
What I'm saying now is probably less revelatory to you than it would have been just five years ago.
Because now you've seen the entire system move and turn and change on a dime to tell you what to believe and what to think medically, legally, historically, socially, spiritually.
You've seen these different organizations betray your trust and coordinate together, right?
The media, academia, you look at the scientific organizations involved in things like the pandemic, NGOs, they all work together and they all seem to be telling you that you should believe things that aren't actually happening in real life.
In fact, at this point, it's become famous, right?
You've seen those clips of all the different news anchors saying the same thing simultaneously, right?
They're all getting the same message.
Now, in some cases, there are actual talking points, but in many cases, they're simply sharing a similar class interest.
They know what it takes to stay in charge, and they want you to continue to believe the things that are required to keep them in charge.
And so, one of the things that elite theory wants us to do is think about how the information that we consume is being controlled.
Social media, the television, everything that comes through the radio, everything that we see through our academic organizations all of this helps to ensure that the people in charge stay in charge and that the opinions that get expressed through the electoral process.
Stay within the lines, what many people call the Overton window.
So, the next thing I think we need to understand about how we ended up in this situation, how our ruling elites started to circumvent some of the Constitution through this manipulation of political opinion, is to understand a little bit of how the ruling class operates, how they think.
So, if you look at our current government form, many of you would look at what happened during COVID and say, you know what, that looks pretty tyrannical.
However, that can confuse some people because they think about tyranny and they think about the gulags.
They think about jackboots.
They think about people being taken on trains to concentration camps.
These are the things that we think about direct violence.
That's tyranny, right?
Except maybe not.
When we look at what happened with COVID, when we look at what just happens with having the wrong political opinions in the United States, there are all these ways in which we are controlled without violence.
Sure, you're not going to the gulag, but you can't get a job.
Yeah, no one's coming with a truncheon and beating you over the head, probably, unless you were at January 6th.
But they will make sure that you can't get a home loan, that no one will talk to you, that your friends will disown you, that the media will harass you.
Foxes vs Lions in Elites00:06:46
And so what we have is a much softer tyranny, not something that comes with the jackboots and the violence and the force, though that does come.
Don't forget that the populist protests in places like Canada and the UK and the United States were eventually put down with force.
But what we see more often is that our current ruling elites prefer this softer form of tyranny.
Well, why is that?
Why don't they just use the force that we think of when we think of tyranny?
There's a key political theorist called Vilfredo Pareto in elite theory.
And Vilfredo Pareto had this sociological idea of residues that persist through different cultures and they continue to show their forms.
And that's all really boring and complicated.
However, the thing that we want to focus on are the two residues, the two types of people.
The two forms of elites that we usually see in a ruling class.
And Vilfredo Pareto called these the type one residues and the type two residues, but we're going to simplify that by calling them the lions and the foxes.
Now, Pareto said that the lions are the ruling elites that are strong, brave.
They are the people who are courageous and patriotic.
They are the ones who like to operate in a more traditional, straightforward manner.
They tend to have a martial character.
These are people who serve in the military or run your police department or are firefighters.
They're the type of people who care about family and tradition, persistence of identity.
These are your lion leaders.
And at the beginning of every civilization, lions tend to be in charge because you need to have people who will go in and keep order in your civilization.
You need people who will defend your borders, who maybe need to expand your borders, who can cut a path into the wilderness and settle the land.
And so you need these strong types of leaders early on when your civilization is constantly under threat.
However, there's another type that tends to show up in the ruling elite the foxes.
The foxes are quick, they're clever, they are good at combining ideas.
They tend to make up new systems, they tend to explore new ways to do things.
They're not really tied to identity, they tend to be less focused on maintaining tradition.
They tend to be better at coming up with new ideas and new ways to do things.
And you tend to see the foxes.
Dominate later on in civilizations when things have become more complex.
You're no longer constantly under the threat of physical violence, and what you really need to do is have these very complicated solutions to different logistical problems that arise as your civilization becomes more complex.
Now, what Pareto said is that ultimately what you want is a mixture of the two, right?
You don't want too much of the lions and too much.
Of the foxes.
You want what he called a circulation of elites, a healthy ability to bring in new blood and new talent and new ideas, and that allows your society to shift.
You can have more lions when you need them, and then you can have more foxes when you need them, but you never want to get overburdened with, say, foxes, because if you do, they tend to be really interested in all these new ideas and new solutions and new ways to remake the world and remake people, but they tend to forget critical things like.
Oh, yeah, we're actually serving a particular people, a particular idea, a particular way of doing things.
They don't carry very much of that persistence and tradition and understanding forward.
And Pareto said that at the end of most civilizations, as they get more and more complex, you usually see a lot of foxes end up at the top.
And if they start selecting and they only want the type of people who are foxes, if your ruling elites say, you know what, we're scared of the lions actually.
Because the lions, they hold us back from trying out all these new experiments and all these new ways that we want to do things.
They're so attached to their old ways.
I think Barack Obama said, you know, keep clinging to their stupid guns and Bibles.
If you have people like that, they could come in and disrupt all those cool things, all those neat new things that the foxes are doing.
And so, what you see at the end of many civilizations is that the foxes start concentrating at the top, and the civilization gets very soft.
And very weak and loses its identity.
It loses its reason for being because it forgets who it is.
It's lost its true identity because it no longer focuses on persisting for the sake of what built your society in the first place.
And when that happens, we end up very much in the system that we have now, where we have large organizations filled with foxes, right?
We're basically ruled by nothing but foxes at this point.
Even your military, your top generals, Tend to talk more like business CEOs giving TED Talks than they do actual leaders of men who go into battle.
And so we see that even in the places where lions should dominate, we are full of foxes.
And that creates a scenario where your society becomes very uncomfortable with the use of force, but it also becomes very uncomfortable with identity and leadership.
And so, what they do is they use a lot of soft tactics to manipulate people.
And this is why we see the rise of this information manipulation system as the way to control politics in the United States.
Because what we have selected for in our elite class is not statesmanship.
It's not the ability to lead.
When's the last time you put a general in the White House?
It's not the ability to do these classic lion tasks.
Instead, what we see is information manipulators people who are always looking for consensus, always looking to warp the way that we understand the world, rather than trying to lead us with any kind of example.
That's one of the reasons that I think Trump is ultimately someone who shook a lot of what the average person in the ruling elite believes should be going on.
Not because I think he's a full on lion.
But because I think he played a lion to some extent, and we have had such a lack of lions, such a lack of leadership of that style in our elite class for so long, that that terrified our ruling elite.
Stripping Constitutional Power00:10:38
And I think that's why you see them overreact to Trump.
I think that's why you saw them persecute Trump.
I think that's why you saw them try to put him in jail.
I think that's why you saw them ultimately try to kill him.
Not because Trump is the next, you know, orange Hitler or something, but because ultimately Trump represents a style of leadership that threatens.
Our current elite.
And so, if we're going to be effective in that kind of environment, we need to understand how these foxes came to power, but we also need to understand why the Constitution did not stop them from manipulating the system that we love.
And so, we need to ask ourselves the question did the Constitution not work?
Is there something wrong with the Constitution?
Or is there something we don't understand about the Constitution?
And my answer is the last one.
I don't think it's that the Constitution failed.
I think it's that we failed to understand.
We lost connection with the tradition as to why our Constitution was supposed to defend our rights.
A lot of us like to talk about our God given rights, and of course we should.
We are all believers in Christ, and we all understand ultimately that the way that we are created and the order we were created for should allot us certain freedoms inside our society.
However, it's not enough to just assert these things.
A lot of you guys probably, you know, I used to teach high school history and civics, and so I taught this many times over that we have the checks and the balances, we have the separation of powers, and many times when you have that conversation, you get kind of the schoolhouse rock version of the Constitution, right?
Where, well, because our founders were really smart people, they set up this system with three branches, and the three branches all kind of hold each other back, and so the Constitution becomes this kind of novel political technology that we came up with that would end tyranny.
Yeah, we got to watch out because the Democrats might get a little wily, but for the most part, the Constitution's just kind of going to hold everything in place.
And this is why so many conservatives became so complacent, because ultimately we kind of believed that the Constitution would do the work for us.
We just kind of had to go sit and grill somewhere and then enjoy the freedoms and liberties that our founders had secured through the Constitution.
But the thing is that the founders never believed that the Constitution by itself would guarantee your freedom.
The paper the Constitution is written on is not magic.
It's just paper.
What made it powerful is the people behind it, the traditions behind it, the beliefs behind it.
One of the guys that informed the founders and the way that they understood political constitutions, one of the guys that inspired the guys who wrote the Constitution, was a political theorist called Baron de Montesquieu.
And Baron de Montesquieu was actually a big fan of the British system of government because it divided the power into branches.
And those different branches had a specific role in society.
You see, the branches weren't just there because three is some magical number that stops the government from taking control of you.
Oh, well, if the government's divided into three branches, then you're just free.
No, that's not how it works.
Three, five, seven branches, that's not what's important about the branches of government.
For Baron de Montesquieu, the reason that the Constitution should work, the reason that the division of powers and the checks and balances should work, is that ultimately the different branches of government, especially in the British system, were represented by different spheres of social authority inside that society.
So you had the king and you had the nobles and they derived their power in one way, but you also had the church and it was a powerful social force, but it derived its power in a very different way than the king and the nobles did.
And then you had families, you had the peasants, you had the merchants, you had all these other different focuses of society as to where they were loyal and where they had power.
And really importantly, Each one of those different social spheres derives their power from a different source.
You see, ultimately, as much as we try to be proper individuals, we are all dependent on something.
Every one of us is going to be dependent on someone somewhere.
And as you probably know, if you're a parent, dependence means authority.
Ultimately, you derive authority because the people who are dependent on you can't choose to do something else.
And so, when you have these different spheres that people are dependent on, each sphere can only demand so much.
Because you can have the government, and it can say, oh, well, I want you to do this, but the church has God's authority.
And so, I'm going to listen to the church because God's authority is more important in my life in that area.
And if I don't listen to the church, then if my family gets sick or if I don't have a way to pay for something, there's no social safety net for me because the government just wasn't big enough to take care of people at that time.
Or, if I have some kind of problem in my family, I can't just do what the government demands of me because ultimately I need my family.
The government cannot take the place of my family and do the same things that my family does.
I'm dependent on each one of these spheres, I'm dependent on them in different ways.
And so, each branch of government was supposed to represent a different sphere of society.
There are different social powers that push back against each other.
You can actually see this in our founding documents if you look at the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton and Federalist 51.
Said that ambition checks ambition.
He didn't believe that it was the words on paper that ultimately stopped your government from being tyrannical.
It was the different social forces who each wanted their own power.
Power always wants to expand.
But because the different social forces were constantly pushing back against each other, the ambition was checking the ambition, they could never have complete control.
However, we've got a little bit of a problem on that front.
Because guess what?
Our governments got bigger and more powerful and richer.
They developed the ability to tax you and take a bunch of your money and build giant institutions and funnel that money other places.
And as they started to do that, they recognized that they could start taking over different things that people in society just didn't want to do.
So today, if you don't want to, you don't have to educate your children.
The government will do that for you.
And you don't have to take care of your ailing parents.
There's a program for that.
And you don't have to take care of your destitute niece who embarrassed herself by making some bad life choices.
Because ultimately, there's welfare.
And so, really, if people don't want to, they can avoid many of the responsibilities that used to demand a very large amount of our time and energy in life.
And that sounds really good at first.
Man, I don't have to spend all of my free time educating my children or trying to earn extra money so I can take care of that destitute niece or spend all of my time caring for ailing parents.
That frees up so much more time to watch Marvel movies and Netflix and whatever, right?
However, Every time that we do that, even though we feel freer because we have more time and maybe more money, we feel like, ultimately we are also giving up power.
We are giving up our ability to be separate from the government because ultimately we are becoming dependent on the different aspects of government.
Now, you guys have probably heard this before as just an argument in general for like less government spending and that kind of thing, smaller government in general.
However, what we probably didn't recognize is that while this process was going on, it was also stripping out the ability of our constitution.
To push back.
Because if we're dependent on the government in every area, if the government is the one that decides whether we can have a job or whether we can get a home loan or whether we can send our kids to school or whether we can worship at church, if the government is able to make all of these decisions because it has taken all of that responsibility, then when the government wants to go ahead and control something, there are no fire breaks.
There is nothing between us and the power of the state.
All of those social spheres that we're supposed to push back on our behalf.
Are gone.
And so those constitutional rights that are written in our founding documents, they're great.
But if you don't have an organized institution that you can rely on, if you don't have family, if you don't have a church, if you don't have local community, if you don't have these different spheres that are going to push back in these kinds of moments, then you're isolated and alone.
And if you have any question as to whether or not that's true, just look at who's able to stand up during COVID.
It wasn't the libertarians.
It wasn't any of the people who've been espousing the smallest government.
It was religious people.
Almost all of the biggest pushback during COVID was people who continued to ignore what the government was telling them to do because they had a faith community that would stand next to them and they knew that there was something that they answered to that was more powerful than the government.
And ultimately, this is what animates a constitution.
Because at the end of the day, a constitution.
Is only a piece of paper unless it's animated by a way of being, a tradition, a belief.
And this is why conservatives love to quote John Adams when he said that our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and it doesn't work for any other.
Because Adams is simply recognizing the truth that our Constitution is founded on God's truth, that we are animated by our Christian tradition, that as Anglo Protestants who settled this country and the descendants who eventually some people went ahead and assimilated,
some people were from founding stock, but ultimately it was that shared belief in Christ and the truth of Christianity and the freedoms and traditions that were tied to it that drove the Constitution and led it.
Restrict what the government could do.
Institutions Are Not Neutral00:16:00
And the minute that that was gone, the minute that that dissolved, then ultimately we just became the kind of people who could easily be manipulated by television or by social media or by a hit in our bank account.
Again, how many people are terrified right now because of what's going on with just a little bit of disruption in the economy?
And when you control the media, when you control these avenues of information, it's very easy to terrify people.
Again, COVID provides an excellent example of how easy it is when you aren't grounded, when you're not going to church on a regular basis, when you're not out in your Community.
It's very easy to mislead people.
The people who were most resistant to COVID are the people who had the most contact with reality.
The people who were easiest to manipulate were the urbanites sitting in their apartments on their laptops doing their email jobs while they watched Netflix and ordered things on Uber Eats.
They never went outside, they never saw what was going on, and so therefore it was very easy to manufacture reality for them.
It's only these organic social spheres grounded in tradition, grounded in belief.
Grounded in things like family that ultimately allow us to avoid the manipulation that the foxes can bring when they are in control of information.
So, the next thing I think that we need to understand is the rise of managerialism.
Because the foxes gain power through manipulation of information, but also because the scale at which our civilization began to operate.
So, if you think about the 1930s, You probably in the 1940s, you might think about the clash of big ideologies, right?
You think about fascism and communism and liberal democracy.
These things would define those decades and those after, and obviously we would see these come to a head in World War II.
And the big thing to understand is that while there are obviously some radical differences between communism and fascism and liberal democracy, ultimately they all share the desire.
To centralize production and consumption and to control through propaganda.
Sorry to ruin anyone here, but if you're a big fan of FDR, he agreed, at least on this, with Stalin and Hitler.
He was just as excited about being able to centralize control of the US economy and the education system and the way in which information is distributed inside of our nation.
And so what we see is that even though, again, there are Very big differences.
Don't get me wrong.
I would rather live under liberal democracy than the other two systems.
But when we look at those other systems, we recognize that ultimately all of these systems, despite their differences, have the same goal.
And that's after the Industrial Revolution, after the beginning of the information revolution or the communications revolution with mass communication, ultimately they were all looking to do the same thing, which was turn over the efficiency and power of the state by unifying all of that into one central planning system.
The way that they did this was to organize things into complex bureaucratic organizations.
Complex bureaucratic organizations have a magical power almost.
They have the ability to yield a high amount of efficiency.
And because they are so powerful, we have seen most of our society start to organize itself into these types of institutions.
It used to be, again, that your church ran very differently from a government, which ran very differently from a business.
But now, what do you hear from people all the time?
I want my government to run just like a business.
Sadly, for many churches, they often run just like a business.
Think about how many mega churches are run by pastors who, once again, sound like they're just kind of running a TED talk.
If you put them next to a CEO and you switched out Jesus a few times, you probably wouldn't even notice the difference.
And so we see that this type of structure, the way that we organize society, has changed very radically.
The idea that you have the local church parish or the local organization that has its own ad hoc rules just doesn't exist anymore.
Everything has to fall into this managerial structure.
Mindset.
And guess which of the two political personalities between the foxes and lions is best at operating inside a complex bureaucratic structure?
It's the foxes, right?
They are the ones who are best equipped at handling this information, handling complex systems, coming up with new ideas.
And so, as these bureaucratic structures came to dominate every part of our civilization, every aspect of our society, they became more in charge.
And this just moves across every domain.
The managerial mindset has taken over everything.
It has taken over our churches, it's taken over our businesses, it's taken over our government.
I mean, just think about things like dating, which used to be done through family connections or maybe just meeting someone in your community.
Now it all takes place online through a corporation in many cases.
That's how much this mindset has come to dominate.
Even our romantic lives are often dominated by these large bureaucratic forces.
And the thing to remember that was so important about the different social spheres is that they all demanded different power in different ways.
The church operated in a fundamentally different way than the king, who operated in a fundamentally different way from the merchant.
But once it all became the same thing, once all of our society became organized by the same structure, once again, there was nothing to stop power when it started running through our society.
There are very few breaks left.
To actually stop power from demanding more and more of us at every opportunity.
Now, in order to make these large bureaucratic organizations, every manager needs a few things.
They need to have reliable and repeatable managerial formulas that will allow them to extract value.
And the best way to do that is to make sure that every process is dictated beforehand and everyone follows procedure.
If any of you have ever worked in a large bureaucratic organization, and due to the fact that so many of them now dominate our society, You are all very familiar with this fact.
You are not allowed to make decisions.
You are not allowed to have autonomy.
You are not allowed to practice discernment, especially if you're using, I don't know, say Christian values.
Instead, everything runs through a managerial checklist.
And that is what we need to understand that ultimately, this homogenization of different peoples and different beliefs had to occur.
All of these different dynamics could not exist inside the United States if we wanted these large bureaucratic.
Organizations to function.
And that's why education and transportation and banking and energy and everything else had to be brought under unified control.
Yes, it made us more efficient.
Yes, it made us wealthier.
In some cases, it even gave us technological advancements that we're grateful for.
But ultimately, it wore away the particularities that made us individuals.
But more importantly, it wore away the particularities that made us communities.
And without the communities, we could no longer form the social organizations necessary to push back against this system.
But this phenomenon does not just occur inside the country, managerial elite gain more and more power.
By bringing more and more resources under their control.
The wider they can spread their net, the bigger the bureaucratic organization gets, the more powerful it becomes.
And so our corporations and our governments and our different non government organizations weren't satisfied with just homogenizing our culture here.
They needed to do it globally.
And this is why you see the spread and the push to globalization.
It's not just that our ruling elites hate our country, but they do.
It's also that they recognize that if they can break down what makes you American, And they can break down what makes an Englishman an Englishman, and if they can break down what makes an Indian in the subcontinent an Indian, that ultimately they can bring all of these different disparate people under the same unified control.
And this is why you see commercials for Starbucks in India pushing transgenderism.
It's not just some weird quirk, that's actually a real mechanical way to expand the power of the people who currently run our country.
This is why so many of our global elites are terrified once again that someone like Trump might try to return to a more national understanding of power, one that focuses on America and its traditions and its people.
Because they have built this giant system, right?
And it's all these different organizations the European Union, NAFTA, all of these different NATO, the United Nations, the World Health Organization.
All of these are responsible for trying to break down the constituent governments.
And bring them together under the same managerial rubric.
We saw this in COVID again, we see this all over the place.
And they are really, really angry with the different populist movements in these nations that are trying to return sovereignty back to a more local level, which is why we see the different courts across the world currently trying to push out populist candidates, like in France with Le Pen, or Bolsonaro in Brazil, or in Romania, where they overturn the justices there, overturn the right wing candidate, or even the United States, of course, where they try to.
Push Donald Trump off the ticket, put him in jail, and eventually shoot him because they recognize that a return to a more national understanding, a particular understanding, is a very fundamental threat to the way that they maintain power.
So, if this is how our elite works, if this is how we understand power, if we now have a realistic understanding of the way in which the people in charge were able to get around the Constitution, subvert the Constitution,
And the way in which we were not able to reassert our rights because we were missing those opposing social spheres in that particular community that allows us to ultimately animate the Constitution and push back against these ruling elites, what do we do?
What do we do with that information?
If you're the new Christian right, how does that change the way that you approach and you look at how you should go about living your lives and running your movement?
First, and this one is not exactly controversial, this one's not a revelation for any of you in this room, but it's just.
True, so it's worth saying.
First, we have to build strong families and communities of faith.
There's simply nothing more important.
We have to rearrange our priorities.
And that's why it's great to see so many businesses back here supporting what's going on.
Because ultimately, they recognize that while they are certainly trying to provide services and make money, that is not the most important thing in their lives.
Because if they don't invest in the generations that will ultimately follow them, then there will be nothing to leave to their children.
There will be nothing for them to continue their legacy.
We cannot have opposing social spheres unless we have the most basic building blocks of society.
Until we have strong families that can stand against what is happening, until we have strong churches and communities that rely on each other and put each other first and are able to depend on each other, then ultimately we will always be giving our power over to the state.
The only way to cultivate virtue, the only way to understand ourselves as Christian people set apart.
And able to practice our freedoms and our traditions is to understand them in communities.
It's good to have a certain sense of individualism, but we should never let that individualism override our understanding that our duty is to our families and our communities of faith.
It's not enough.
You cannot stand alone.
You have to stand together if you're going to push back against what I call the total state.
The next thing that we need to recognize, and this one is very important and became again very evident during COVID.
Is that there are no neutral institutions.
It simply does not exist.
We like to think that there are.
That allows us to not have to worry about differences.
As has been mentioned many times at this conference already, there are multiple Muslim towns that are now being proposed inside of Texas.
If they have to live one way and you want to live another, the only way you can both exist under the same system is if you believe that the government is a neutral arbiter that can somehow.
Mediate the differences between a radical Muslim town and a believing Christian population.
But guess what?
There isn't one.
The government is never neutral, the government is never without a belief system.
When we see what happened in COVID, we had so many people who had sent their children to government schools or had relied on medical systems that they believed were run in an objective way.
Of course, it's scientific, right?
Doctors are not going to radically change their understanding of biology just because some crazy purple haired feminist tells them to on a college campus.
Except, yes, they are.
That's exactly what they'll do.
And not only will they do that, they will chop up your kid to prove their point.
They'll take your kid from you and force that to happen.
So these institutions are not neutral.
And this brings up what I hear is apparently a controversial subject.
It was never controversial to me, but that's because I'm new to this community, I suppose.
Is the idea that you need cultural Christianity?
Cultural Christianity is going to inform the institutions in your society.
Your institutions will never be neutral.
They will hold some kind of value.
They will base their decisions on some kind of ultimate truth, or at least what they believe to be an ultimate truth.
And so if they're not animated by a Christian belief, they will be animated by something else.
If you're in the UK, it's probably Islam.
But if you're in the United States, it's probably.
Secular humanism, or what many people called wokeness.
And that's why so many people properly recognize that what the left was doing was creating a new religion.
Because there is no religiously neutral society.
As many people have said, it's not whether, it's which.
We will have a dominant culture.
We will have a dominant belief.
We will have a dominant religion.
And it will permeate every institution in our society, no matter how objective or neutral you might think that society should ultimately be.
And so we have to recognize that those institutions must be Christian.
They must be under Christian control.
If you are not willing to take them, someone else will.
And then they will use them to take your children.
So, there is no ability to simply pretend like these things will be neutral and they will not get involved in your life.
You will not be alone.
The team that wants to win will always beat the team that wants to be left alone.
Cultivating Christian Leadership00:08:40
And that is a very difficult thing to hear because many of us just want to be left alone, man.
We just want to grill, we just want to raise our families, we just want to go to church on Sunday.
But guess what?
That's not why your ancestors fought, and that's not why your ancestors died.
They didn't just sit at home.
They didn't just grill.
They knew that ultimately life is a struggle and you have to fight every day in order to have a better future for your family, in order to continue your belief in your way of life.
And so this means that we have to get serious about training elites.
It is very popular in these circles to say college is a waste of time, go into the trades.
And you know what?
That's good advice most of the time.
For a lot of people, going to college and wasting a ton of money so you can become like an accountant, it just was never necessary, right?
That's not what you didn't go to college to be an accountant 50 years ago.
You became like an apprentice somewhere.
You didn't need a degree to do absolutely everything in society.
At this point, you need a college degree to become a manager at a convenience store half the time.
That's just not necessary.
But ultimately, we do have to recognize that while I love plumbers, we probably can't take over the institutions of the United States just with plumbers.
We're going to need leaders.
We're going to need lawyers.
We're going to need people who can write legislation.
We're going to need people who can run businesses.
We're going to need people who can operate in these circles, which means we need to cultivate leadership.
We need to be looking for especially young men.
It's been said again many times at this conference already the way in which young men in our society, particularly white men, have been shut out of many of these institutions.
It's not just some kind of speculation, we literally had Supreme Court cases about it.
That this was so prevalent that people are being entirely pushed out.
And when you push these promising leaders out of your society, out of your institutions, you also push them out of your leadership class, which is exactly what Vilfredo Pareto predicted when he wrote about the circulation of elites and the lions and the foxes.
He predicted exactly the behavior we are seeing now when he predicted it over 100 years ago.
This is not new.
This is a mechanical way in which power operates.
And so, if we want to change the culture, we have to cultivate elites.
We cannot shrink away.
From leadership, and we cannot shrink away from investing in young people that will lead the next generation.
So, we need this.
The next thing we have to do is we need to build alternative institutions.
It would be great if we can take over the institutions that are already there, and if you can do that, you should.
You should take the power when you can, where you can.
But ultimately, many of these will be very resistant to the plan.
They already did this.
The left did the long march through the institutions, they know how this game is played.
And there's no way that most of them are going to let you play it.
So, if we want to cultivate elites and we can't get every one of them into an elite institution, we got to start building them ourselves.
And that means sacrifice.
It means that we might not have the same amount of free time and the same amount of free money.
We might have to invest.
Guess what?
Conservatives, I love so much, but so many times they're immediately and business minded.
They want to see an immediate return on profit.
I spent this amount of money, I immediately want to see a bill passed.
I spent this amount of money.
I immediately want to see a law changed.
I immediately want to see some big change.
But the left doesn't do this.
The left buys entire media organizations that just lose money all the time.
You look at so many of these and you're like, there's got to be like 10 people that actually subscribe to some of these papers.
How do they stay afloat?
And the reason is the left will just buy culturally influential institutions because they know cultural influence is worth way more than money.
That the ability to manipulate public opinion and control who becomes an elite in society is just far more valuable than raw dollars.
And so we have to be willing to cultivate this talent and build the institutions that will allow us to continue to survive and more importantly, thrive and work our way back into the halls of power.
But that can only happen if we are willing to sacrifice and dedicate ourselves to that task.
So we need to encourage the young men that will become leaders, and we need to have the institutions that will educate and support them.
We need to make sure that every time someone has a slip up somewhere or every time they have a controversial opinion, Or they have an opinion that was just normal 20 years ago but has suddenly become forbidden.
That we do not blow these people up, that we do not abandon them, that we do not send them away, that we do not destroy them on social media, that we do not throw them out and shame their careers.
We should never, ever bow to the standards of the left.
We should never cancel our own people for the left.
Yes, we should have standards.
We should have standards.
I am not saying that we should not have standards, but they should be our standards, which means they should be Christ's standards.
We follow him.
He is king.
Not the left, not social media, not the reporters, not the universities, not even the businessmen, none of it.
Christ is king.
And so if we are held accountable, and we should be held accountable, then we should be accountable to him and not to what the left believes.
So, when we are holding each other accountable, we should do it in private.
We should have structures that allow us to correct young men who might be making mistakes, might be going too far, might be saying things or doing things they shouldn't be doing.
But we can do that internally in a way that disciples them rather than leaves them out in the cold for our enemies who hate and want to destroy us.
And let me tell you this, guys God told you to love your enemies, He did not say you would not have enemies.
We need to remember that there are people out here who want to destroy what is being built.
Because they have invested a lot in breaking down the traditions and culture that you believe in.
And they're not just going to let you walk in and take it.
As we've already seen, they will try to shoot you if you do.
So that's something that we need to remember.
The last thing I want to leave you with is this we need to avoid the managerial mindset.
And again, this is very tempting.
It's so easy for us to just drop into the language best practices.
Hey, we all need to standardize this.
We all need to evaluate our performance reviews, these kind of things.
We immediately fall into this hyper business bureaucratic language and understanding.
And it works our way into every aspect of our lives, our organizations, our churches, even our families are often treated in this kind of transactional way.
And when we are building things, we need to understand that we are looking for something more organic, more traditional.
We need to find ways to devolve power and create more confederal structures instead of centralizing.
And turning everything into a business.
We need to recognize that a church is fundamentally different than a business, that a family is fundamentally different than a business, and we need to do things that profit our churches and our families before they profit our pocketbooks.
We have to recognize that we should organize or we should create these organizations in a way in which they resist the pull of the social forces that we have now.
And that's easier said than done because, again, we are so used to aligning ourselves in that way.
But simply, there is nothing we can do unless we first recognize how much the manipulation of information, the way that we are drawn together into these bureaucratic organizations, defines many of the ways that we understand what's going on.
The only thing that is ever going to allow us to return to a state where we can reinstitute the American tradition is to first understand that we have to revive these spheres.
We need the elites, but we also need the families, we need the churches, we need the structures that are going to continue to allow us.