June 28, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| My friend says, hey, my sister brought back all these free posters. | ||
| You want some? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now, why would the Soviet Union give away free propaganda posters to naive, stupid, you know, Westerners? | ||
| So I remember... I can't imagine why. | ||
| Choosing one of Lenin and thinking, well, that sort of looks OK. | ||
| And I put it up. | ||
| I was living off campus in my room. | ||
| My mom and dad came to visit and my father looked at it and he looked at me and he said, Eric, could I speak with you for a minute? | ||
| And it suddenly dawned on me. | ||
| My father said, I want to ask you a favor. | ||
| Would you take that down? | ||
| And it was as if the scales fell from my eyes and I realized what has happened to me. | ||
| I mean, there are a hundred other examples, but those are the two moments that I remember | ||
| suddenly coming to myself and thinking, how is it possible that I thought it was okay to do that | ||
| when my father raised me to despise communism, you know, the way Solzhenitsyn and Buckley despised communism. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm Dave Rubin and this is The Rubin Report. | |
| Don't forget, guys, to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that pesky notification bell. | ||
| And joining me today is a New York Times bestselling author, the host of the Eric Metaxas radio show, and a senior fellow at King's College in New York, Eric Metaxas. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| I'm also now a senior fellow at the Falkirk Center at Liberty University. | ||
| Ever so slightly conservative folks down there. | ||
| Can you be a senior fellow at two different places? | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| Is that not a conflict of interest? | ||
| If they don't listen to this, then the answer is yes. | ||
| I hate to tell you, but I do have a lot of fans at Liberty University. | ||
| I spoke there, and they could be watching this. | ||
| Can I tell you, no, I love them, and I love Charlie Kirk, and I've just done that, just become a senior fellow with Falkirk, so it's a wonderful thing. | ||
| Well, listen, man, I'm very happy to have you here because I'm going to do a mea culpa right up front. | ||
| I was on my book tour, as you know, for about a month just sitting in this chair being interviewed by, I probably did hundreds of interviews, and you were one of the people that interviewed me, and I did not know who you were before you interviewed me. | ||
| I'm just saying it. | ||
| I have now done a tremendous amount of research. | ||
| You've written four billion books. | ||
| I found you to be one of the most interesting, insightful, curious, wordsmith interviewers of all the people that I talk to, and I wanted to return the favor. | ||
| So that's just me getting it out of the way here. | ||
| First of all, that is so nice of you, and you didn't need to do that. | ||
| That's like people say, you know, I had a really, really hateful thought toward you seven years ago, and I wanted to confess it. | ||
| And you think, I wish you hadn't told me that. | ||
| Why did you have to do that? | ||
| No, I wouldn't expect you to be aware of me, Dave, but you're very kind to say that. | ||
| And listen, here's the point. | ||
| You're aware of me now. | ||
| I'm aware of you. | ||
| We're all good. | ||
| We're also dressed the same, and our hair's sort of similar-ish, so we're in good company. | ||
| All right, but you're a really established guy. | ||
| You've done a ton of great things and written several great books. | ||
| So for anyone in my audience that does not know who Eric Metaxas is, I just read through your whole bio and all sorts of interesting stuff. | ||
| You were born in New York City. | ||
| It seems like no one's actually born in New York City. | ||
| My mom was, but very few people. | ||
| I had to be, I had to be. | ||
| I came from Germany on a boat in the mid-50s. | ||
| My dad came from Greece on a boat. | ||
| They met in an English class here in New York City to learn how to speak English. | ||
| And when a Greek man is involved in having a family, that kid has to be born legally in Astoria, New York. | ||
| So that's why. | ||
| I was born in Astoria. | ||
| That's where I started life. | ||
| Jackson Heights, Queens. | ||
| But I spent most of my life in Danbury, Connecticut. | ||
| Correct me if I'm wrong, you have to be born into a bed of feta cheese. | ||
| Is that still true? | ||
| Very few people know that. | ||
| Very few people know that. | ||
| Because it's not true. | ||
| But still, I understand what you're saying. | ||
| Nonetheless. | ||
| Okay, before we get to your books and I want to talk about your feelings on Trump and the culture wars and we'll do some economics and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about what got you into this talking world of radio and writing and all of that stuff. | ||
| What is the ethos? | ||
| I've got to give you the super quick version because otherwise we'll be here for the full hour talking about it. | ||
| Basically, you know, I am the son of immigrants. | ||
| My parents still have accents and they raised me like most immigrants to this country in the 50s and any time before the 60s. | ||
| They raised me to love America because they knew how wonderful it was having come from places, you know, my mother escaped East Germany when she was 17 years old because of the propaganda coming to her in high school. | ||
| My father saw the civil war with the communists in Greece in the early 50s. | ||
| So they came here They love America. | ||
| They taught me to love America. | ||
| And they raised me with, you know, basic homespun middle American values. | ||
| You know, we went to church every Sunday, but we weren't born again or evangelicals. | ||
| If you're Greek, I always say, if you're born Greek, if your parents are Greek and German, you will be raised Greek. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| There's no option that you're going to be raised any other way except full Greek. | ||
| So we went to church and stuff. | ||
| And when I went to Yale, the American dream, right? | ||
| My parents didn't get to go to college. | ||
| I get to go to Yale University. | ||
| Well, of course, what happens? | ||
| Young Eric drinks the woke Kool-Aid of the early 80s. | ||
| And my worldview, you know, I would have considered myself, roughly speaking, conservative and Christian. | ||
| Before I know it, I'm taught, oh no, no, no, that's kind of bigoted and small minded and parochial. | ||
| So by the time I graduated, I was totally lost. | ||
| I was not exactly an activist woke person, but the political correctness bug hit some of those top institutions early. | ||
| And I was one of those just confused people who had a vaguely, You know, anti-American sense of things. | ||
| I really betrayed all the things that my parents had taught me, and so I was very confused. | ||
| Now, the one thing that happened when I was in college is that I knew that I wanted to be a writer. | ||
| I originally thought I wanted to go into politics, but I started reading, you know, the great works of the Western canon, And it's one of these things, it's like a gene. | ||
| I immediately said, this is what I want to do. | ||
| I want to write. | ||
| I love words. | ||
| I love ideas. | ||
| But I didn't know what I wanted to write exactly. | ||
| So I won some awards at Yale for my fiction writing. | ||
| I was the editor of the humor magazine there. | ||
| I knew I had a career in writing, but it really wasn't until I graduated that I realized how lost I was because now, you know, you don't have the guardrails of academia to keep you, you know, this is what I'm doing today. | ||
| This is what I'm doing today. | ||
| Suddenly I'm lost. | ||
| I want to be a writer, but I don't have a worldview other than I know, you know, sort of how I'm supposed to think. | ||
| And I went through some really tough, tough years. | ||
| Where I was just, I was just lost. | ||
| I wasn't some like bold sinner. | ||
| I was just totally lost. | ||
| What's the meaning of life? | ||
| Can you know whether life has a meaning? | ||
| Is there a God? | ||
| What, you know, I really, I always say that, you know, if you get a good job, you won't have time to think about that stuff. | ||
| And I think that's the ethos of a place like Yale, all these institutions, their idea is we, we ceased about a hundred years ago, answering the big questions. | ||
| What's the meaning of life? | ||
| Is there a God? | ||
| What's the meaning of your life? | ||
| Where do you go when you die? | ||
| Where do we come from? | ||
| We don't go there. | ||
| They don't go there. | ||
| So what they sort of tell you is like, study really hard, get a great job and you'll be able to distract yourself for a few decades and then it'll all be over. | ||
| So just do whatever you do. | ||
| Don't think about the big questions. | ||
| Well, I was an English major. | ||
| I want to be a writer. | ||
| Guess what happened? | ||
| I didn't get a good job. | ||
| I had several years to think about the big questions. | ||
| And it got so bad that I ended up moving back in with my parents. | ||
| If your parents are European immigrants, working class European immigrants who sent you to Yale, you do not want to move back in with them. | ||
| Trust me on this one. | ||
| It was pure hell. | ||
| And in the midst of that hell, I did the only thing that you could do, which is I got a job as a proofreader at Union Carbide Corporation in Danbury, Connecticut. | ||
| I'm living with my parents. | ||
| And I'm going to a chemical conglomerate to do, like, it was pure hell. | ||
| And in the midst of that hell, I met a guy who was pretty serious Christian and he begins sharing his faith with me. | ||
| And I had the standard, you know, Yale response, like, don't get too close with that weird stuff. | ||
| But I was in enough pain that I was listening a little bit. | ||
| And this kind of cat and mouse game went on for about a year. | ||
| And I would say roughly a year into it, the cut to the chase, I had a very dramatic conversion dream. | ||
| It was one of those things like it's out of a book. | ||
| It was a miracle. | ||
| Nothing else could have sufficed to drag me, you know, across the broomstick into another universe, basically, because I thought all those people are insane. | ||
| So I had this miraculous conversion, and I've spent the last 30 years sort of trying to process this, reading books and stuff, but it was because of that that I very quickly became a conservative. I think it was, | ||
| you know, the pro-life issue and a few other issues that I just thought, wow. I remember | ||
| also I was watching, you know, the Bork hearings on TV. I mean, imagine, and I thought, well, | ||
| holy cow, like the guys that I would have voted for are really evil. | ||
| They're really bad. | ||
| So I had this kind of experience. | ||
| So ever since then, I've known I wanted to be in the culture. | ||
| I knew I wanted to be a writer. | ||
| I wasn't sure what I wanted to write. | ||
| But I always had a dream of doing a mainstream TV talk show, kind of like Dick Cavett, who's become a friend, because I think we need to have those kinds of conversations. | ||
| And wouldn't it be nice if the host had more traditional, more conservative, more faith-friendly views than most of the people do? | ||
| So that's the long answer. | ||
| Would you prefer the short answer? | ||
| I can give it to you later. | ||
| It's a little late for that, Metaxas, but to prove to you I'm a good interviewer, now what you did there, as the guest in this case, was give me a hundred offshoots. | ||
| There's a hundred outlets to go to right now. | ||
| That's my goal. | ||
| And I want to get back to a lot of the things you talked about there, from sort of secularism on steroids, which is sort of what you're describing Yale as, to the big questions they were forcing you to avoid, and a whole slew of other things. | ||
| But let's back up a little bit further. | ||
| You described sort of the immigrant family and you went into college somewhat conservative. | ||
| Do you remember the moments where that started breaking up at Yale, where the ideas were really infecting you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you talk about that? | ||
| I've actually, I'll never forget it. | ||
| And I, in fact, I have just finished writing like the memoir of my life that takes me up to my 25th birthday and this dramatic conversion dream. | ||
| And in there, I write about these two things. | ||
| Basically, first of all, I was hanging out with a lot of different people, but the general milieu was... | ||
| Secular, humanist, liberal, no question about it. | ||
| And I was, you know, by being raised the way I was, I kind of bumped into this, like, what's this? | ||
| I didn't know that, oh, you can't say Oriental, you have to say Asian. | ||
| You can't say, like suddenly I was getting all of these things that, oh, you can't do that, you can't do this. | ||
| And I was like, oh, so I was raised by people who didn't know this stuff, but now I'm at Yale where everybody knows everything. | ||
| These are the future leaders and I'm just going to go along with them. | ||
| So you're picking this stuff up. | ||
| But I remember two instances. | ||
| This is classic. | ||
| I remember we had a vote. | ||
| Nothing has changed in all these years. | ||
| We were having a vote whether our class funds should divest from corporations that were involved in South Africa, right? | ||
| Because it was right before apartheid broke up and everything like that. | ||
| And what I find interesting is that there was only one way to vote. | ||
| In other words, it wasn't like, let's actually think about this. | ||
| It was kind of a woke thing. | ||
| Like, are you going to say how Hitler or not? | ||
| You're going to take a knee or not? | ||
| We're not giving you choices. | ||
| You know what you need to do. | ||
| Are you going to do it? | ||
| Here's your opportunity to do it and to show solidarity. | ||
| So everybody voted. | ||
| The right way, except a friend of mine who, oddly enough, is a Democrat, but he was an economics major and he said, no, I don't actually think it's going to help the people of South Africa. | ||
| We do that. | ||
| So he voted, OK, a different way. | ||
| But here's the key. | ||
| The next day in the dining hall, a very dear friend of mine comes up to me who was involved in this voting process. | ||
| And he says, hey, your buddy, Chris, you know, he he voted no. | ||
| And I'll never forget, it's as if my whole upbringing, you know, came to me and I thought, This is America? | ||
| You mean you looked at his vote and you dare to tell me that he voted the wrong way as though it wasn't an actual election? | ||
| That's what they do in red China. | ||
| I remember being chilled, just being horrified. | ||
| Not too long after that, I had an experience where a friend of mine's sister, and I imagine this is still Reagan. | ||
| So a friend of mine's sister went to the Soviet Union. | ||
| This is like all the, you know, the woke Manhattan elites send their kids to whatever schools. | ||
| And there's a semester in Moscow to study economics. | ||
| And she brought back a ton of propaganda posters. | ||
| So my friend says, hey, my sister brought back all these free posters. | ||
| You want some, right? | ||
| Now, why would the Soviet Union give away free propaganda posters to naive, stupid You know, Westerners. | ||
| So I remember. | ||
| I can't imagine why. | ||
| Choosing one of Lennon and thinking, well, that sort of looks OK. | ||
| And I put it up. | ||
| I was living off campus in my room. | ||
| My mom and dad came to visit and my father looked at it and he looked at me and he said, Eric, can I can I speak with you for a minute? | ||
| And it suddenly dawned on me. | ||
| My father said, I want to ask you favor. | ||
| Would you take that down? | ||
| And it was as if the scales fell from my eyes and I realized what has happened to me. | ||
| I mean, there are a hundred other examples, but those are the two moments that I remember suddenly coming to myself and thinking, how is it possible that I thought it was okay to do that when my father raised me to despise communism, you know, the way Solzhenitsyn and Buckley despised communism. | ||
| So what's interesting about this to me, there's a couple of things, but particularly is that if you listen to sort of Mainstream media now, this idea of the woke college thing, people think it's an idea of the last five years or something like that. | ||
| Or it's just this last millennial generation that's going through it. | ||
| What years were you in college? | ||
| I was there. | ||
| I graduated in 84, but it was in full swing. | ||
| It was in full swing in the early 80s. | ||
| And look, let's be honest, this stuff started at least in 1968. | ||
| I mean, it's only a matter of the trickle-down effect. | ||
| When did it get to the mainstream? | ||
| And the fact of the matter is that Yale and places like that, they're the worst offenders of this kind of stuff. | ||
| If I ever had money, I wouldn't give them money. | ||
| They are the absolute worst offenders. | ||
| They have been leading The charge with this kind of stuff. | ||
| So I saw this, you know, maybe earlier than a lot of other people did, but it was an absolute full force. | ||
| So I feel like we got to talk about that dream a little bit, because you told me you had a dream and it changed your life, but we need to know some details on this thing. | ||
| Yeah, well, I always tell people to go to my website to watch the video of The Dream, because it's very hard. | ||
| I will try, because I like you. | ||
| I will try very hard to be more successful than I was in the first question. | ||
| It's tricky stuff. | ||
| I'll tell you why. | ||
| I wrote a whole book on miracles. | ||
| What makes a miracle dramatic is the context, right? | ||
| In other words, if God is speaking to someone, it may make sense to that person because they bring a whole bunch of context to that situation, and it wouldn't mean anything to anyone else. | ||
| In my case, if you had put a gun to my head at age 24 and said, who are you? | ||
| In a dream or in a fairy tale, in your core, who are you? | ||
| I would have, you know, I don't think I could have come up with it, but the most basic elements, if there were, let's say, three of who I was at that point, were the Greek immigrant upbringing was at the center of my life, there's no question. | ||
| And the second thing was that for all of my You know, teen years or childhood or whatever, I was fishing, right? | ||
| When I wasn't watching TV, when I wasn't watching, you know, Sanford and Son and the Dean Martin roasts, I was fishing. | ||
| And that's just what I did. | ||
| So I never got in trouble. | ||
| I studied, I watched TV and I did a lot of fishing. | ||
| So that was a big part of me. | ||
| But also, a weird connection is that my father, whenever he saw, because all Greeks are evangelists for being Greek. | ||
| You know, their number one hobby is being Greek, and so my father, anytime he saw a fish, a chrome fish on the back of a car in the 70s, you know, he would say, you see that fish? | ||
| That comes from the Greek word, because the early Christians couldn't use the sign of the cross, they had, they used the symbol of the fish, because the Greek word for fish, the ancient word is ichthys, that's where we get ichthyologist, right? | ||
| And ICTHYS, the words, it's an acronym, Jesus Christos Theos Imon Sotir. | ||
| It spells Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Savior. | ||
| And so they'd use the secret symbol of the fish, and my father says to me in Danbury, Connecticut, on the highway, see that fish? | ||
| It's a Greek word. | ||
| And he gets all excited about the fact that it's Greek. | ||
| Now, I'm being a little unfair. | ||
| I think he was aware of the Christian element, but he was very excited that the fish you know, is a Greek, it's a Greek word. So in any event, | ||
| the third part of me, if you're going to say there's fishing, there's the Greek thing, the third | ||
| part of me was what I'd call the life of the mind. From age 16 to 24, I'm trying to figure out the | ||
| meaning of life. I'm trying to figure out who am I, why am I here, and whenever I was reading the | ||
| literature that I was reading in college, I wasn't reading it the way most people read it. I was | ||
| trying to figure out what is the clue to humanity. | ||
| Who are we and what and it's you know good art. That's what it does. It helps you understand | ||
| What does it mean to be human and so on and so forth? | ||
| So I was trying to puzzle this out and I remember that at some point just after graduating and getting you know | ||
| the woke memo that Christianity is too parochial the Bible. It's just a bunch | ||
| of right-wing, you know, right bigots But if there's any religion, it probably combines all religions. | ||
| And it's probably more like a New Age life force or something like that. | ||
| And I came up with this idea on my own that, you know what, it's sort of like Freud's idea of the soul, right, where you have the conscious mind and then you have the unconscious below the conscious mind. | ||
| And I kind of brought in a little Jung. | ||
| This is supposed to sound pretentious. | ||
| I was an undergraduate, right? | ||
| So I have this idea that maybe the goal of life is that the ice on the lake is the conscious mind | ||
| and that the water beneath it is the unconscious or what Jung calls the collective unconscious, | ||
| which is this God force or something like that. | ||
| I thought maybe that's what all religions are getting at. | ||
| So the goal of life is to drill through the ice so that you have an emotionally healthy connection between the conscious mind and the collective unconscious or God or whatever it is. | ||
| Now, what does that mean practically? | ||
| Bupkis. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It just means like, yeah, I figured that out. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| All religions say the same thing. | ||
| And I'm going to move on with my life. | ||
| So that's really kind of where I was coming from, which of course led me to be really lost. | ||
| How do I live? | ||
| What is right? | ||
| What is wrong? | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| So I meet this guy. | ||
| He talks to me about my faith and faith, whatever. | ||
| We talked for about a year. | ||
| And at the end of the year, I had a dream. | ||
| My uncle had just passed away. | ||
| So I was a little bit emotionally vulnerable and beginning to wonder, is there something out there? | ||
| And if there is, I feel like I'm hermetically sealed in a room with no windows and no doors. | ||
| And if there's a guy out there, he's going to have to punch a hole through the wall and say, I'm here. | ||
| Because in the material world, there's no, I have no way of logically getting there. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So in this dream, I'm standing on a frozen lake in Danbury, Connecticut, Candlewood Lake, where I fish many times. | ||
| And I look down and in the hole, and this never happens if you're an ice fisherman, there's a fish kind of sticking its snout out of the hole. | ||
| And I reach down and I pick it up by the gills and it's like a pickerel or a pike. | ||
| It's one of those, you know, bronze, golden colored fish. | ||
| And I pick it up and it was, it's one of these, you know, in a dream like this, I'd never had a dream like this ever in my life, nor since. | ||
| It was like the perfect, winter day where the snow and the ice are super white and | ||
| the sky is super blue and it's just glorious. | ||
| And I hold up this golden fish into the sunlight and in the dream, suddenly I know this is | ||
| the golden fish. | ||
| This is Icthys. | ||
| God sort of one-upped me with my symbol system, and these two paragraphs kind of dropped into my head, in the dream, that you wanted to touch inert water, this God force, but I had something else for you, my Son, your Savior, Jesus Christ, Icthys. | ||
| And this all came together in the dream and the weird thing is in the dream I'm holding this fish up and I realize in the dream it looks golden as though it's actually made of gold and then I realize in the dream no it is made of gold it is a golden fish that is nonetheless alive like out of a fairy tale and At that moment in the dream my mind was totally blown. | ||
| I knew that God had my number, that He spoke to me in a way that made sense to me, that the thing that I had convinced myself was impossible for intelligent people to know. | ||
| You could maybe Hope that it's true, that suddenly I knew it, I was stuck with it, I would have to deal with it for the rest of my life, but I couldn't go back. | ||
| I couldn't pretend that God hadn't spoken to me in this miraculous way, which revealed that He knew more about me than I knew about myself. | ||
| Now, that is the short version of it. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Well, there's a lot there, so let's go. | ||
| So, when you have this, now you have this revelation, let's say, you're obviously an intellectual guy. | ||
| That seems to be where much of the thrust of your passion is. | ||
| Did you freak out after that? | ||
| Like this was going to somehow erode the intellectual side of yourself? | ||
| No. | ||
| Or turn you in the eyes of your friends? | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Well, yes. | ||
| For sure, I knew that would happen. | ||
| But this is where, I mean look, let's say you're in the woods and you meet Bigfoot, and you know you're not an idiot, you're not on mushrooms, like it actually happened. | ||
| There are people that are never going to believe you. | ||
| But you're stuck. | ||
| You can't convince yourself that it didn't happen. | ||
| It's one of those things where when I woke up, I knew this was real. | ||
| I knew this was true. | ||
| I knew the Bible is the Word of God. | ||
| I know Jesus is the Word. | ||
| And I knew all my friends would think I'm nuts or pat me on the head and go like, whatever. | ||
| But the point is, I didn't have a choice. | ||
| I couldn't say, you know what? | ||
| I'm just going to ignore this. | ||
| It was too powerful. | ||
| to ignore. | ||
| It wasn't something I could walk away from. | ||
| I mean, it was God crafting a message, literally for me, in a way calculated by the author of the universe to blow my mind. | ||
| My mind was blown. | ||
| But the funny thing is, Dave, that I knew... I remember going to work the next day to tell my friend, this Christian who'd been talking to me, and I tell him a little bit about the dream. | ||
| He goes, what do you think it means? | ||
| And I said, I've accepted Jesus. | ||
| Now, I would have never—I would have cringed to speak those words any time before, but I said it to him like, it's done. | ||
| Like, whatever that means, that's what happened. | ||
| Now, you know, I didn't start voting for Republicans the next day. | ||
| It took a time for me to begin to process this, but I knew that I would challenge most of my friends. | ||
| It would be tough for them. | ||
| And the ones who were willing to hear me out and to continue to be my friend, | ||
| you know, that's kind of where you realize who your real friends are in a sense, | ||
| because they were, they accorded me enough dignity | ||
| to try to understand what I was telling them. | ||
| And the funny thing, too, is that I never was like in your face about it, right? | ||
| But they acted as though I was. | ||
| I remember having lunch here in Manhattan with a sophisticated friend and sort of saying, you know, just kind of telling him this in a very, very gingerly, And him sort of exploding, like, what are you saying? | ||
| Everybody's going to hell. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like, he just is like all over me. | |
| And I just thought that this is what this is, you know, going to be the rest of my life. | ||
| But, you know, it's not that different from coming out for Trump. | ||
| Some people are going to hate you. | ||
| Some people are going to think you're evil. | ||
| Some people are going to love you. | ||
| I mean, the fact of the matter is that at some point you have no choice. | ||
| When that happened in the summer of 1988, I had no choice. | ||
| I had to do my best to represent it as I could, and I've in many ways failed and in some ways succeeded, but there's just no going back from that. | ||
| I wanted a miracle, I got a miracle, and I've had many miracles that have happened to me actually since then, which I give the, you know, they rise to the bar of calling them miracles. | ||
| I'm not talking about blessings, oh that was nice. | ||
| You know, that is real. | ||
| I've experienced it, not as much as I would like, but at this point, we could debate all kinds of stuff forever, but if somebody asks me, are you sure about the Jesus? | ||
| Are you sure of it? | ||
| There's no question. | ||
| I mean, you can torture me. | ||
| There's nothing I can do to convince myself that I might have missed something at this point. | ||
| So, speaking of Miss Something, then, do you think that most academics, like your friend that you sat with, who brought up, you know, burning in hell and the rest of it, do you think that that is sort of the fundamental flaw of most academics, that then is partly why we're watching academia crumble right now, that they've disconnected these things or they've mocked Believers to the point that they've been left with this I'll just mention whether thing which is I had I had John Kasich the former governor of Ohio on or the guy he is the governor of Ohio and He said something interesting to me about this. | ||
| He said, you know, a lot of people can do it without God I'm just not one of those people and I brought it Right. | ||
| I've brought it up in many interviews since then, because it's not the most enlightened thing I've ever heard. | ||
| It's actually very humbling and decent. | ||
| And I found it to be really refreshingly honest. | ||
| Do you sense there's some connection there between the way the intellectual elite | ||
| seem to be crumbling right now? | ||
| There's zero question that the answer is yes. | ||
| There's no question. | ||
| Look, it's all related. | ||
| It's not just about God. | ||
| I mean, I'll give an example. | ||
| At a place like Yale, if you are somebody like Miroslav Volf, okay? | ||
| He's a serious Christian, but he's pretty left-wing. | ||
| So they'll give him a pass, you know? | ||
| It really is, but it's very interesting what are the different shibboleths that people have. | ||
| It's like, you can say anything you want, but if you don't believe a woman should be able to kill what's in her womb, you're a pig and a bigot. | ||
| And you know, it's interesting how that works out. | ||
| And I think that I mean, you know, it's funny because I've written about this. | ||
| You can trace this way back to the 20s, really, that it's like we were saying earlier, that there's this trickle-down effect. | ||
| These ideas were seeded, S-E-E-D-E-D, seeded into the culture, you know, in many ways, From Darwin to Nietzsche to Freud, whatever, but they came into the culture sort of big time in the 20s, right? | ||
| You know, Margaret Mead was popular, having sex with anyone you like in Samoa, you know, like this kind of vague Freudian scientific reason for doing as we liked became popularized, but it didn't trickle down to middle America until you get to, you know, the 60s, right? | ||
| And it still didn't trickle down to the effect it continues to trickle down so that now we have arsonists and looters and potential murderers who are pretending To care about the death of a black man in the way that Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson would spit on them for the desecration of the memory of those who have suffered under real racism. | ||
| I mean, you know, the dissent from True American self-government and liberty into cultural Marxism doesn't happen overnight, but that's effectively what we're looking at. | ||
| And Christianity to me, in many ways, has been at the core of this. | ||
| There's just no question that when you talk about the West, Uh, and it's part of the reason for the decline of Europe. | ||
| I mean, when you jettison the Christianity, what do you have exactly? | ||
| You know, if they were unwilling to put mention of God in the European Parliament in their constitution, you kind of think, well then, so tell me, what exactly is Europe? | ||
| You know, uh, so... | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| And again, there are degrees of this, depending on who you talk to, but there are certain things, you know this, that are simply not spoken of in certain places. | ||
| And faculty lounges at places like Yale and, you know, the New York Times boardroom and on and on and on and on. | ||
| They're not going to touch that stuff. | ||
| They have been very happy to allow the culture to become dramatically secular. | ||
| All right, so then this is gonna be a hell of a segue. | ||
| Watch how I do it. | ||
| With all of that cultural stuff you're talking about and the academic elites, you've written some children's books about Donald Trump. | ||
| Now, I sense a connection there. | ||
| These are not coincidences. | ||
| I actually, I have to sort of correct you, and this is my fault because I have let this go without correcting people. | ||
| No, I'll tell you what. | ||
| I've written 30 children's books over the years, right? | ||
| But I've also written a lot of humor. | ||
| I was the editor of the humor magazine at Yale. | ||
| I wrote a parody of the old Ripley's Believe It or Not books with St. | ||
| Martin's Press like 20 years ago. | ||
| I've written a lot of humor. | ||
| And when I do public speaking and stuff, there's just a lot of comedy and goofing around on my radio program. | ||
| Some people think of me as funny. | ||
| So I had this idea when Trump was- That's a good title for a book. | ||
| That's a good title for a book. | ||
| Some people think of me as funny. | ||
| I'm not going to use it. | ||
| I give that to you. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| But the thing is that I like humor. | ||
| I like satire. | ||
| I mean, I've even published humor in The New Yorker and in The Atlantic and stuff. | ||
| I love that kind of thing. | ||
| And when Trump was elected, I said to the guy, my dear friend Tim Raglin, who lives in Kansas, and he and I have done a number of books together. | ||
| He's a genius illustrator. | ||
| The stuff we've done together is just, it's stunning. | ||
| But I said to him, Tim, you know, you're the one that convinced me to look differently at Trump. | ||
| When I was still kind of like, I don't know about that guy. | ||
| I'm a New Yorker, and you know, he's sort of vulgar, and I'm a Christian, and I don't know, he's not my first pick. | ||
| And he kind of had me look at him differently. | ||
| And I said, Trump is like, He's like a folk hero. | ||
| He's like out of one of these books that I've written with Tim Raglin, like he's larger than life, like a cartoon figure. | ||
| And I said to Tim, Tim, we need to do like a children's book about a character, like a Trump character, but it's really adult satire in the form of a children's book, right? | ||
| Now, for example, I wrote a lullaby book actually for kids called It's Time to Sleep, My Love, right? | ||
| Some guy decided to parody that book and use the title, Go the F to Sleep. | ||
| OK, now that sold a lot more than my book. | ||
| But the point is, it looks like a children's book, but it's obviously meant for adults. | ||
| The thing with my book, Donald Drains the Swamp, I just happen to have a copy here. | ||
| Donald Drains the Swamp, right, is that even though it's aimed at adults because their sophisticated humor. For example, | ||
| the turtle just happens to look like Mitch McConnell. That's a coincidence because all turtles | ||
| look like Mitch McConnell. But the point is that when you're talking about the swamp and all this, | ||
| there's a lot of political humor, but because there's nothing nasty in it, it works for kids. | ||
| So people often say it's a kid's book. | ||
| It's a kid's book. | ||
| Technically, it's an adult humor book. | ||
| It's a novelty book. | ||
| It's a satire book. | ||
| And adults are going to get all the jokes. | ||
| Kids aren't going to get the jokes. | ||
| They don't know who AOC is. | ||
| And they don't know that Bernie is a communist. | ||
| So we've written three of these books. | ||
| But a big reason that we did them is, I said, the one thing we conservatives tend to be bad at is creating culture. | ||
| We talk about politics all the time, but in terms of sitcoms or, you know, children's books or the world of publishing, it tends to be taken over by the left. | ||
| The left really has, you know, the long march to the institutions, academia, publishing, journalism. | ||
| It's all very, very leftist. | ||
| And I said, I want to create something that's fun for people who actually like this president. | ||
| And, of course, the reason he's a caveman is sort of meant to be funny, because he is kind of a caveman. | ||
| You kind of think, caveman, they see a problem, they fix the problem. | ||
| They don't know that you're not supposed to do it that way. | ||
| They just want to fix the problem, like they're good guys and they just do it. | ||
| So, it's not really making fun of him, but there's a lightness to it for people who think of him as somewhat of a caveman. | ||
| But Metaxas, I can see the commenters already in the future, and they're gonna say, wait a minute, how can this intellectual Christian talking about Jesus support the caveman? | ||
| How can it possibly be? | ||
| I support him because I'm a Christian. | ||
| It's rather simple. | ||
| You don't... I mean, look, the idea that I mean, I think you know this, right? | ||
| That there are people, and we see this on the left today, no matter what you do, they'll find what's wrong with it. | ||
| has made this so much worse just by being Trump. | ||
| He's driven people insane, so that if he says, one plus one equals two, they're gonna say, I don't know about that, and some people say it might not, and in a quantum universe, that's a lot of baloney, and he's too stupid to understand what a quantum universe is, right? | ||
| Like you cannot- And it's definitely racist. | ||
| It's also racist. | ||
| And it's also, as we forgot to mention, it goes without saying, it's racist. | ||
| So, I think that the reason that I support Trump It's kind of weird, actually. | ||
| I was writing this humor piece for The New Yorker called More Trump Bible Verses because there was that, you know, contretemps about him not remembering something for the Bible. | ||
| I found the whole thing hilarious, right? | ||
| And so I did a whole thing of, like, tweets of Bible verses that they're kind of Trumpian, you know, like, I wonder if I can remember any of them right now. | ||
| But, you know, like a good wife who can find, I found three. | ||
| You know, whatever. | ||
| In other words, just all these Bible verses that we have some dim memory of and then, you know, sort of a Trumpfication of it. | ||
| Anyway, while I was writing it for The New Yorker, this is totally true. | ||
| I found myself, almost like a comedian, because I have written a lot of comedy, like you're writing for a voice. | ||
| You're writing for, like, I'm writing for Bob Hope or I'm writing for Jackie Mason, and you kind of find that voice and you find that rhythm. | ||
| And I found myself having kind of an affection for him in the way that you would for an uncle that he's not, you know, politically correct. | ||
| He doesn't There's a lot of stuff about him that wouldn't work among your friends, but you love him, and you know he's a good man, and you know he loves his country, and he would fight and die for his country, and if you're in trouble, you want him around. | ||
| He's good. | ||
| Uh, but he's rough around the edges and he's got a lot of things and you say, please don't say that. | ||
| Whatever you do, please don't say that when my friends are over there, they're not going to understand that, you know, and I, I, I began to see that side of him. | ||
| And then I also realized that because I grew up in a working class environment, um, He speaks to the working class. | ||
| Martin Luther, about whom I've also written, had this similar ability, you know, even though, you know, Trump went to Wharton and is obviously an instinctive genius. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| But he has an ability to connect with the working class. | ||
| And a big part of that is humor and hyperbole. | ||
| And I began to hear him differently. | ||
| And I began to think, wow, the cultural elites, they don't get that language. | ||
| It's like he may as well be speaking Japanese. | ||
| They don't get it. | ||
| And so I began to appreciate him more and more. | ||
| But I have to say that if anything ever revealed to me how pathetic the Republican Party had become, you know, when they turned against him the way that he did, I mean, his ability to see the problem in China, for example, we'll just talk about a minor thing. | ||
| Really minor, right? | ||
| 1.3 billion people. | ||
| I mean, the level of seriousness that our leaders ought to have accorded China over the last three decades is so huge, and they basically ignored it while it grew into a monster. | ||
| Trump, if he did nothing else, Diagnosed the problem 30 years ago, has been talking about it for 30 years, and is now rather effectively doing a number of things to deal with this problem. | ||
| How much money is he making? | ||
| A lot less than Hunter Biden is making on China. | ||
| I don't see him getting anything out of it, except he feels it's the right thing for America. | ||
| So it's things like that. | ||
| That's just one. | ||
| But I mean, he has been very staunchly pro-life and staunchly religious liberty. | ||
| And these are things that have concerned me deeply. | ||
| His willingness to stand up for Kavanaugh, I would bet that a lot of Republicans, people that I thought were good guys 10 years ago, they would have folded at the end. | ||
| to recommend him, and you're not supposed to vote for somebody because you think they share your theology. | ||
| I don't really think that's why you elect a president. | ||
| It would be nice if he did, but, you know, it's like saying that, like, that pilot is not that great, but he loves Jesus, and that pilot is the best pilot who ever flew a plane, but he's had four wives, and he's been in jail, You know, people make it sound like it's a simple choice. | ||
| It's not a simple choice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you live in New York City right now? | ||
| I live in Manhattan. | ||
| I'm here now. | ||
| And yeah, I live in Manhattan. | ||
| The reason I ask is because to espouse those radical views that you've just announced in Manhattan, in a strange time to live in Manhattan, I assume you have two locks on your door. | ||
| Well, you know, in all seriousness, Dave, if you think about it, you know, being a born-again evangelical is not exactly a popular way to fly around here. | ||
| And I've always been, before Trump, I believed in the dignity of the unborn. | ||
| I take that very seriously. | ||
| I have a biblical view of sexuality. | ||
| You know, these are not like popular views in blue states, but the point is that This is where I'm from. | ||
| I try to be respectful of people with whom I differ. | ||
| I don't lose friendships over those things. | ||
| I love people with whom I disagree on these things. | ||
| And so the Trump thing was just taking it to the next level. | ||
| But it's kind of funny, in our building, there are Three couples that love Trump. | ||
| Two Orthodox Jewish couples and another some kind of Gentile couple. | ||
| They love Trump. | ||
| I mean, I think there's a lot of people in New York who like him or love him, but they just don't say it publicly. | ||
| You know, I don't wear a MAGA hat down Madison Avenue. | ||
| Yeah, as we're going through, we're taping this a little bit before we're gonna air it, so I don't wanna get into like the exact nitty gritty of what's happening today, but as we're going through this sort of national tumult and all of this stuff and sort of the unraveling of the fabric of America that you sort of described before as your Greek father and your German mother and all of this stuff, and as a guy that lives in New York City, and you just mentioned some of the people in your building, Are you worried that we're going to look back and go, man, we had something that was so freaking precious and we didn't even realize it? | ||
| That perhaps the ship has even sailed on that already? | ||
| Funny you should bring that up because I've thought about this day and night for years now. | ||
| I wrote a book. | ||
| I don't have a copy here, but if I could give a copy to everyone in your audience, everyone in America, It's called If You Can Keep It. | ||
| Franklin was asked after the Constitutional Convention, you know, Dr. Franklin... We're gonna get to it! | ||
| Let's do it right now! | ||
| We'll link to it, we'll link to it. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is that over the years, because of my faith and because of my, excuse me, evolving political views, I began to notice some things, right? | ||
| And I began to notice, for example, One of the reasons America is great is that it's an idea. | ||
| It's not an ethnic tribal group, right? | ||
| Everybody, my father with his Greek accent, my mother with a German accent, they can become as American as George Washington. | ||
| That's a new concept in the history of the world. | ||
| It's a beautiful concept. | ||
| And so if it's true that America is an idea, And if we're self-governing, unless people know that idea, understand how that works and live out that idea of governing themselves and, in a sense, teaching others how to self-govern, what this means, how fragile and beautiful this is and what we must do to keep it. | ||
| If we don't, it goes away. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| There's just no question. | ||
| There's no question whether it will go away. | ||
| It will go away. | ||
| It's been going away. | ||
| So I wrote my book, If You Can Keep It, specifically to put in a small, easily readable book the very basics of what one needs to know to get it. | ||
| Why you need to love your country with all its flaws. | ||
| Why you must love your country. | ||
| Why you must fight for liberty and on and on and on. | ||
| And I have to say, in large part because I am a Christian, I have hope when most people wouldn't see hope. | ||
| I think God's had his hand on this country. | ||
| Listen, Lincoln called us the almost chosen people. | ||
| Now, why would he say that? | ||
| He said it because he knew, he could see that there was something. | ||
| In fact, he used the phrase, something uncommon. | ||
| This is not just another country. | ||
| If you believe that God has had his hand on the Jews, which I certainly do, that's not something you party about, right? | ||
| It's a tremendous burden to be chosen by God, because it means he's going to use you, and you're going to suffer, and it's not going to be easy. | ||
| And so God has blessed this country amazingly, but he's used this country to export Liberty and wealth and on and on to the whole world because you know just as Israel was created by God to reach the whole world to reach the nations outside of Israel America and all our blessings are intended for the rest of the world so we have something that is so precious and when I really understood this I wrote the book and I | ||
| I have been on a mission because I said, if we don't educate the next generation or even this generation, it does go away. | ||
| And what we're seeing right now, I think, is the heat of the battle. | ||
| We're in the midst of a battle where we have a president, in a sense, who, by God's grace, has dragged us back from the cliff of oblivion. | ||
| And so we have some time, you know, to back away from the cliff. | ||
| But if Hillary had been elected, which is, you know, you asked me earlier, why, how could I vote for Trump? | ||
| I'm convinced that Hillary Clinton and Obama and those folks are genuinely tremendously corrupt. | ||
| In other words, that they will put their own interests before the interests of the country. | ||
| So that's strike three. | ||
| But I also believe that their version of America, their view of America is fundamentally antithetical to the founder's view. | ||
| The Founders' view of America, they don't share. | ||
| They want to undo it. | ||
| They have worked cleverly over the decades to undo it, along with all the institutions I mentioned earlier. | ||
| And I really believe that, had Hillary been elected, for example, and instead of Roberts and Kavanaugh, we had gotten, you know, son of Sotomayor and bride of Sotomayor, If that had happened, it's over. | ||
| The Constitution, just because it's a piece of paper, it's meaningless unless we have judges that are interpreting things according to it, unless we have people that understand it. | ||
| So, to me, there's no question that we're right on that precipice, as it were. | ||
| Yeah, so I suspect you think that even some of the Republicans who you said before you might've liked or at one time supported or something like that, you think they wouldn't have been able to stand up against this thing either, right? | ||
| Oh, they weren't standing up against it. | ||
| They weren't. | ||
| Look, these are people that I like, but they were not standing up against it. | ||
| It takes tremendous courage to stand up against what we now call the deep state. | ||
| The deep state is as tyrannical As King George III was. | ||
| It is the enemy of self-government and liberty. | ||
| And when I talk about liberty, I'm not talking about some French idea of liberty. | ||
| I'm talking about God's idea of liberty and how human beings are supposed to live. | ||
| And if you don't go to war with that, if you play patty cake with that because you think, well, I don't want to be the one, you know, the press already hates me. | ||
| Eventually, it's going to get worse and worse and worse. | ||
| And so I really think that, unfortunately, I can't understand how else it could have happened, but we have had leaders who've been guilty of what people have said to me over the years, but I never believed it, that they're really no different than the other side. | ||
| And I thought to myself, you know, that's truer than I would like to believe. | ||
| When McCain voted against overturning Obamacare, I thought, what a What a nightmare. | ||
| What a nightmare that a man who was tortured for his country has come to this exceedingly peevish, sick moment in his life just before he dies that he would do something like that. | ||
| That's the guy that I voted for. | ||
| Mitt Romney, similarly, I voted for. | ||
| And the fact that he would take what he pretends is a principled stand against this president. | ||
| I think I would like to think that these folks are deluded That their evil actions are the result of really being deluded, because otherwise it's too disturbing. | ||
| So we talked a little bit about this when you interviewed me, but I thought this might be a nice way to sort of to bring this all full circle. | ||
| But you don't strike me as like a purely political beast in that you care about things that are sort of much bigger than politics. | ||
| So, you know, politics is just a piece of it. | ||
| But yet these days, everything has become so political. | ||
| And I'm wondering, what else do you think is important to live a full, clear life? | ||
| Well, there's no question that my faith in the God of the Bible is the most important thing, and that it suffuses, or at least I I hope it suffuses every part of me and takes precedence over every part of me or every other part of me. | ||
| I think that, you know, people who think you can solve things through politics are just wrong. | ||
| The math is wrong. | ||
| It's a utopianist scheme, no matter how you slice it, whether you think you can do it through a totalitarian communist state or you have some illusion that you can do it In any other way, I mean, look, I think the founders made this clear. | ||
| And this is what we've ceased to teach. | ||
| Tocqueville saw it that in my in my book, if you can keep it, I talk about my friend Oz Guinness came up with the term, but he calls it the golden triangle of freedom. | ||
| And he says that freedom requires virtue. | ||
| Now, it's an interesting thing. | ||
| Every single one of the founders, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, every single one of them understood that concept that self-government and liberty, which had never been pulled off in the history of the universe ever once, was possible if the citizenry were basically virtuous or if there was a culture of virtue. | ||
| So they all understood this. | ||
| They all wrote about it. | ||
| And I put most of those quotes in my book. | ||
| So that you read it and you go, that's wild. | ||
| They all believed it. | ||
| There was no argument, but we're not teaching it in school. | ||
| So you think, so freedom requires virtue. | ||
| Then the founders also believed that virtue in turn required faith. | ||
| Now, they didn't stipulate Christian faith, nor did they dare say Faith can be enforced because they didn't believe in that, but they had seen that virtue needs to be held up by something. | ||
| Why do I do the right thing when no one is looking? | ||
| Why do I not loot when I might not get caught? | ||
| Well, because I answer to a higher authority. | ||
| They all observed this. | ||
| Franklin observed this most directly in all the preaching of his friend George Whitefield, this evangelist. | ||
| You know, when revival broke out, crime went down. | ||
| Domestic abuse went down. | ||
| Self-government went up. | ||
| They saw this happening up and down the 13 colonies, and they saw that faith was central. | ||
| But then the third part, you know, if freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith. | ||
| Faith in turn requires freedom. | ||
| In other words, faith cannot be forced. | ||
| It cannot be enforced. | ||
| It can be encouraged. | ||
| We can teach, you know, we can celebrate faith. | ||
| But there's nothing the government can do to force you or me to believe something about these transcendent things or to act virtuously. | ||
| I mean, maybe it can force us to act virtuously at the end of a gun, but then it's no longer virtue. | ||
| So, in fact, they can't do that. | ||
| So so the founders got this and they really understood something that had never been understood before. | ||
| And so if you think about it, there is no there's just no escaping it. | ||
| Once you cease teaching respect [inaudible] | ||
| or the government. | ||
| Once cynicism comes in, the whole thing falls apart. | ||
| And so I just, I really feel, I feel hopeful, but I think that it's, | ||
| we're in a real battle right now. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| What I really meant to say was that the culture is the thing that holds it together. | ||
| You can vote for all the right people, but if the culture itself, if what you see on TV, if what is out there in the culture and in the schools doesn't reinforce this idea. | ||
| Somebody, I forget who, called it the habits of the heart. | ||
| If we're not taught to love our country, there's a part in my book, if you can keep it, I remember in fifth grade, an old teacher, her last year, led us outside on June 14th, it was one of the last days of school, to celebrate Flag Day, and it was this sacred moment, and she never said it, but she was teaching us to love our country, to respect the flag, in the most sweet way. | ||
| We've really ceased doing that, mostly, and I think when you cease doing that, Politics will fail you. | ||
| Culture is upstream of politics, and conservatives and Christians have notoriously abdicated the world of culture. | ||
| As important as politics is, and you know it is, and I know it is, we can't abdicate culture, which is why I do silly things like write Donald the Caveman books and have a talk show where I talk to novelists and so on and so forth, because I actually think that is The part of the battle where we have failed most miserably. | ||
| Metaxas, I will keep fighting alongside of you. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| I'm so happy to finally get to know you, and you're an encouragement to me and to many people, so thank you for what you do, and thanks for giving me an opportunity to rant and rave. | ||
| I just needed to get those things off my chest. | ||
| Likewise, my pleasure. | ||
| And we're going to link down to all the books. | ||
| And wait, what's your Twitter? | ||
| I'm not remembering it off the top of my head. | ||
| Is it just Eric Metaxas? | ||
| It's just my name, Eric Metaxas. | ||
| Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Eric Metaxas. | ||
| And you too, Ken. | ||
| So long, my friend. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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