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June 26, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:18:50

"Killing History" An Examination of Marxism with Dr Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux

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	Hello, everybody.
	I'm Dr. Duke, and we're really joined today with a great guest, Stefan Molina.
	We've had lots of conversations in the past.
	Stephan, you are a kind of a raconteur.
	You are a bit of a media mogul, but most importantly, you and I, I think, have gotten along so well because you are a philosopher, and you really do care about arguments and ideas and eloquence when it comes to expressing those ideas and getting it right, getting it right in spite of all the politics and the Thanks,
	sir. Great pleasure to be here. Number of things that are shocking about what's going on.
	Number one, the brazenness and the ignorance behind these monument debacle, right?
	It's completely indiscriminate.
	Any statue is fair game.
	Even statues that commemorate things that the social justice warriors say they want.
	Even statues of abolitionists.
	Even statues of people like Abraham Lincoln now.
	It's all being torched in the name of What exactly it's hard to say.
	And then the second thing that I think is utterly unbelievable is the degree to which nobody wants to stop this.
	That the idea that we are lining our police officers up in some kind of medieval ritual of self-effacement, they have to say, think about this.
	You ever seen this before? Where you have armed cops with body armor on, they've got guns and tasers and batons, they've got masks, they've got riot gear, they've got tear gas grenades, and they must stand there like ritual sacrifices being screamed at.
	You've got white liberal kids, white pasty, rickets-riven liberal kids.
	Screaming in the faces of black police officers the N-word.
	And all this because George Floyd was killed by a white policeman.
	And so all of the aspects of this is what I want to talk about today.
	And as always, we're going to have to get to what's really going on behind the obvious show.
	So with all of that on the table, give us your opening thoughts.
	Well, what's happening now has a good deal of historical precedent.
	So when there is a Marxist insurgency in your country, and it could be a Marxist insurgency, it could be a far left National Socialist insurgency, when you have a group that wants to replace the existing system of government, destroy existing laws, the problem is, is they can't start off by destroy existing laws, the problem is, is they can't start off by Because if they start attacking people, that's very bad PR for them.
	All totalitarian ideologies need an excuse to enact their violence.
	So what they're doing is they're attacking symbols We're good to go.
	Now we're just being aggressed against for our protests, and therefore we need to escalate to outright terrorism, and then as they provoke a greater and stronger response from the state, they then can escalate and feel that they're in the right and gain a good amount of PR. If they started attacking people right away, people would use self-defense, and there have been instances, of course, where people have been attacked by people with knives, people have been attacked by protesters in cars, really terrorists, to be frank about it.
	And the sympathy has sided as a whole with the people who are the victims of violent attacks.
	A statue, of course, can't defend itself.
	And the idea that the state would come in and start using physical force against people for pulling down statues, I mean, we understand the sort of cultural significance and what's going on from a cultural sense.
	But most people as a whole would sit there and say, they shot people for protesting a slave-owning statue guy or something like that.
	And that would give the left a chance to really ramp up and gain sympathy from a lot of people.
	So it's a very well-planned out, well-thought-out, well-executed ploy to try and provoke a strong response from the state that allows them to escalate and go straight to street terrorism.
	I think that's a really well-framed argument there.
	I think you're exactly right. What gets me a little bit is the fact that they're already getting that positive press.
	You would think that the police doing nothing was akin to some...
	You look at all the media reports, and the two things that I see behind this, more than anything else, are the education these kids have received in this country, particularly at the university level, and the media, a completely and utterly co-opted media who is framing everything As if what you just said was actually happening, that these black people are getting killed in the street willy-nilly, that all over the country, every day someone's getting slaughtered simply because of their race, these moms wailing and holding their children.
	This is an everyday occurrence in every big city.
	Now, of course it is, but it's not white cops.
	It's places like Chicago, right, where you have huge unregulated black-on-black violence that never makes the news.
	So your point, I wanted to add on to it and say that even though the cops aren't doing that, we're not giving them their Kent State moment, right?
	That people like Neil Young can come along and write cheesy pop songs about.
	We haven't given it to them.
	Not a single cop has fought back.
	Yet when you watch the media and you listen to the mainstream athletes, you listen to the Hollywood crowd, you listen to journalists, Democrat politicians, We're good to go.
	And it does beg a question.
	I mean, is this a, no pun intended with regards to statues, is this a big tipping point for the entire freedom of our republic?
	Are we effectively done and become something else now?
	Well, what the CIA has done overseas, the Marxist-founded Black Lives Matter, Soros-funded Black Lives Matter is now attempting to do to the United States.
	And yes, this is a critical turning point with regards to the Republic.
	And all of these false flag operations generally start with an outright lie, or at least something that's highly...
	Doubtful. And so you mentioned earlier, I want to push back on this, the white cop that killed George Floyd.
	The situation is unknown at the moment, and my suspicions are very high because Keith Ellison, who is a fan of Antifa, has not released the body cam footage from the police officers.
	So the entire situation, of course, as you know, came about because...
	A clerk in a store which has a policy of having to call the cops when the counterfeit bill is passed.
	George Floyd was in there buying cigarettes with a counterfeit bill that was still wet.
	It wasn't even like, gosh, there's no way he could have known.
	Like thumbprints of dollar signs were on his...
	So to speak. And he bought the cigarettes.
	He went out to his car. And even when they called 911, the clerk, they said, she said, oh, he's high on something.
	He's not in a fit state to drive and so on.
	And the clerk went out and said to George Floyd, hey, just give the cigarettes back, man, and just go home.
	Like, forget about all of this.
	But he wouldn't do that, maybe because they were using it to smoke.
	The guy had a multi-decade history of cocaine abuse, which weakens the heart considerably.
	He had 90% blockage in one artery, 70% blockage in another artery.
	He was high on fentanyl.
	He had speed or methamphetamines in his system.
	He had cannabis in his system.
	And he decided to take on a bunch of cops.
	He resisted arrest, not just passively but actively.
	The Practice to restrain people who were going through a medical emergency, what they call excited delirium, which is a fairly well-known but not very common phenomenon of people whose systems just shut down when they resist arrest or when they're in the process of getting arrested.
	The cop, Chauvin, put the knee on George Floyd's back in an approved Minnesota police procedure.
	In fact, it was approved by the police chief who was himself arrested.
	And he was also, George Floyd, was complaining of being short of breath before.
	He was in any sort of restrained position.
	He died not because of strangulation, not because of asphyxiation.
	That's clear in the coroner's report.
	He died because he had cardiopulmonary arrest.
	Now that is not related to the knee being on his back or on his neck.
	That is standard procedure when someone is going through this kind of excited delirium.
	You try to restrain them in a prone position.
	They already called the ambulance and the ambulance So we don't know what happened with this situation, in particular because a guy's complaining of shortness of breath during a very panicked pandemic, wherein one of the major symptoms of having this disease, of having COVID-19, was shortness of breath.
	And of course, we know that he had tested positive for COVID-19.
	We don't know if he said to the officers, I'm...
	I've got coronavirus or I had coronavirus.
	I'm going to spit at you. I'm going to bite you.
	This is unfortunately something that criminals do to police is to threaten them with injury.
	I know a cop who got bitten by a suspect and had tests and had to wait for a week to figure out basically who's going to live properly.
	Or die or face some horrible disease.
	So we don't know what happened with this and the rush to judgment, which occurred, unfortunately, very strongly on the conservative side as well as the liberal side.
	The rush to judgment really allowed the dam to burst.
	And those of us who've been fighting back against the rush to judgment, like yourself and myself, for many, many years, many years, all the way back to Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, we've been fighting back this rush to judgment, this basically lynch mob It's straight up murder, it's racist murder,
	and all of that. We held firm, but a lot of people I mean, it would make very little sense.
	So we don't know what happened with any finality with regards to this.
	We do know that he didn't die from the knee on the neck.
	we do know that he had highly compromised health issues.
	He had hypertension, he had advanced heart disease, and a body weakened by decades of drug abuse and so on, and coronavirus, which also impairs one's ability to take a breath, and that he was complaining of the symptoms that killed him before he was down on the ground.
	So however ugly and unpleasant and horrifying the video looked, that's kind of why we're supposed to have the innocent until proven guilty, and we're supposed to avoid the rush to judgment because things that look really bad can turn out to be a lot more complicated than we expect.
	Yeah, and to add to your really long litany of reasons to be cautious, we didn't even mention the long criminal history that this man had.
	That justifies this particular instance, yes or no, but certainly this is somebody who is used to this kind of behavior.
	He has a long record of it.
	Also the fact that we should probably mention that Ellison's own son is an avowed Antifa member and a He's a supporter of Antifa.
	And we know from Ellison's own long history, running for other public office, that he too supports Antifa in all of its agenda.
	So you've got already something, someone at the top of the investigational ladder here who has completely compromised.
	I mean, if she was on the other foot and the Attorney General of Minnesota was a former police superintendent and a law and order guy, I guarantee you the liberal governor of New York would not have appointed him Well,
	I just wanted to mention as well, so George Floyd's history of criminal activity, which stretched back a long time to the point where, as I'm sure you're aware, he was part of a home invasion and pointed a gun at the growing belly of a pregnant woman and demanded money or drugs.
	Otherwise, he would shoot her through the baby, through the spine.
	I mean, this absolutely appalling behavior.
	What that means or what matters about that is that the cops, knowing that he has gun charges in his history, are going to be particularly wary and scared of him.
	You know, he was a huge guy and he looked fit.
	You know, Eric Garner was a sort of different matter, the guy who had asthma.
	I didn't look fit, but this guy looked strong.
	He looked fit. And being on drugs again, judgment is impaired.
	The reason being that if you're a cop and you go to arrest someone, you look them up and you find out that they have previous gun charges and that they're already driving while impaired.
	They've passed an obviously counterfeit bill.
	You are facing somebody who has almost nothing to lose by fighting back because he's going to go to jail for an extraordinarily long period of time just based upon what had happened prior to the arrest.
	And so given that situation, we also can see him throwing away what looks like drugs when he's sitting up against the wall.
	So the problem is the guy has a history of extreme, absolutely sociopathic violence, previous gun charges, a long history of criminal behavior.
	And what that means is cops have to be extraordinarily...
	Careful and scared, reasonably so.
	You know, it's one thing to pick up a cat, it's another thing to pick up a tiger.
	And so it's not that, again, it doesn't justify anything that happened to him if it was the cops' fault, but it does matter because the cops are going to be on full alert and extraordinarily cautious and alarmed with this kind of history.
	Yeah, and you mentioned a little bit earlier the dam broke, right?
	Because the dam broke and you had conservative, some of the conservative condemnations actually came first.
	You had the liberal condemnations immediately and the riots took place.
	And let's talk about that dam bursting for a second because it seems to me what's changed now from the former iterations of this.
	Is that dam, right?
	That dam of First Amendment protection, that dam of this happens so seldom, this dam that, hey, even if the cop is guilty, we've got to give him the due benefit of process.
	As we saw in the case in Missouri, right, the hands up, don't shoot stuff turned out to be a complete lie.
	I'll bet you there's not one in 20 Americans who knows right now that that was a lie, a demonstrable provable, right?
	They believe the little soundbite, right?
	Just like they're going to believe for the next hundred years, I can't breathe.
	That's going to be the only takeaway from all of this.
	But the dam breaking, it seems to me, is what I introduced at the beginning of the segment here.
	The degree to which, you know, Hollywood was always going to be on that side, but academia and just staggeringly the corporations.
	It seems to me, and this is a big deal, when I think of fascist movements, what in my mind separates fascism from communism, and really there's not a lot that does, but one of the things that does seem to separate is that in socialist systems, communist systems, The government simply appropriates private enterprise.
	In fascist systems, they are co-opted, the corporations.
	They voluntarily go along with what government is doing, with the revolution in the streets, in order to protect their own corporate line, number one, not to be absorbed by the government, but that very quickly involves them in repositioning, restating, re-emphasizing what the protesters in the streets are doing, right?
	That the problem is the system.
	And so you see our corporations now, and almost unilaterally, they have decided that they're joining with the protests on this.
	And that's one of those dams, isn't it, that broke?
	So it is a very big challenge for corporations, as you know, corporate executives.
	I mean, I've been on a board, and I understand how this works at a very personal level.
	So if you're on the board, you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the value of your shareholders.
	That does not give you...
	The permission. In fact, you can lose your job or even be sued by shareholders for damaging the value of their shares if you take a stand that goes against widespread, massive popular opinion, thus harming the brand.
	People will organize boycotts and you may have mass walk-offs from employees.
	So as an executive, you do kind of have to be a bit of a weathervane.
	You do have to follow popular opinion because a business is not a place...
	It's a place for profit.
	Now, of course, you can say, but in the long run, they'll be vindicated and so on.
	But unfortunately, business executives no longer really plan for the long run.
	And I saw that again when I was part of a company that went public.
	Everybody was literally checking the stock price every five minutes to see if they were wealthy or not.
	It's very much the next quarter.
	And if you were to take a stand, bring down the wrath of the crazed lefty media upon you.
	People would organize boycotts.
	You may even have violence directed at your stores, which would not be at all uncommon.
	And then you face maybe lawsuits from employees who get injured during riots that may attack your stores.
	It is really, really tough in the current there are witches everywhere hysteria of the unthinking masses being led around by the nose by the highly manipulative and sophist-based lefty media.
	It's really hard to take any kind of stand without facing significant financial and legal consequences.
	So I can kind of understand why businesses do that cost-benefit calculation and say, well, we can put out a statement in support of Black Lives Matter, and that's going to buy us some peace.
	Or we can try and take some stand and have all the lunatics in the known universe descend upon us, our share price, our stores, our employees, and that's going to be pretty terrible for business.
	So unfortunately, it's not, I mean, I don't really blame the businesses.
	I blame the public schools.
	I blame the fact that we have a whole generation of people who have been raised to feel, to react, to rely on the lizard brain rather than a higher human consciousness.
	They don't know how to think.
	They don't know how to reason.
	And because of that, they're very easily manipulated.
	And of course, these two things are not a coincidence at all.
	So, and I think it's well said.
	And the idea here, the question I want to get at, and we're going to have to, I want to get into the schools a lot here, because I think what's going on in the universities, and we've talked in very, one of the very first programs we did together was cultural Marxism.
	And boy, is that now prescient, right?
	That was probably four or five years ago.
	And you're right, you're seeing the consequences of that as it is run through our institutions, particularly our schools.
	So I really want to get at that and make that a big focus of what we're talking about.
	But while we're on the topic that you just mentioned, So it turned out that in 2016 there was a larger silent majority of people who wanted law and order, who wanted to push back against this kind of extremism.
	It gave us Donald Trump, for good or for bad, and certainly better than it would have been with Hillary Clinton.
	Is that still true?
	I mean, just like they did in 2016, 2015, all the polls now are telling us, right?
	That all this chaos with the COVID, all this chaos in the streets, that Trump is underwater in all the battleground states.
	He's losing majorly across the country.
	As somebody who's watched this kind of stuff, this manipulation before, just compare right now, 2020, midsummer, to what we were seeing the same time four years ago in 2016, right before the election.
	There's a lot to talk about there.
	So the big difference is that people are not enthusiastic about Trump.
	They're less enthusiastic about Biden, who clearly is not doing all that well cognitively and has been, what, 80 plus days since his last press conference during a time of extreme crisis in the Republic.
	And he's facing investigations into his son.
	And of course, now it just came out.
	That he was involved with Barack Obama in targeting a political enemy back in 2015, 2016.
	So it's not looking good for him.
	There's not a lot of enthusiasm for Trump because with Trump, there was build the wall.
	Has the wall been built? Not really.
	There was drain the swamp.
	Has the swamp been drained? Not really.
	There was lock her up with Hillary Clinton.
	The idea that there were not going to be people who were above the law in the republic, well, that's all been drained away.
	So people's We're good to go.
	So people took a huge sacrifice and there was the whole excitement of the meme wars and all of that.
	That's largely gone.
	The left has shattered the coalition of the people who were pro-Trump by picking people off one by one and making everybody nervous to talk to everybody else.
	People have been outright De-platformed, of course.
	Social media companies seem to have their fingers pretty heavily on the scale against what they were given immunity from content for.
	So there isn't a lot of enthusiasm for Trump, and people are really getting the sense that you can't fight the swamp with the swamp, because people thought that there was corrupt people in government, but Donald Trump and the good guys, the Joe Fridays of the FBI that...
	Donald Trump and the good guys were going to be able to prevail against the bad guys.
	But, you know, even something as simple and obvious as firing James Comey, you know, provoked blowback that almost took down the entire presidency.
	And no one has been locked up.
	And Ghislaine Maxwell has not been questioned in any great detail.
	And none of the threads that led from Jeffrey Epstein to everyone else has been particularly pursued because people were just allowed to make their silly jokes about him not killing himself.
	But nothing happened after that.
	So I think where people are at now...
	Let's give Trump another couple of years and I'll just start prepping, like I'll just start defending myself against the inevitable conflict that's coming because Trump was really the last hope for a truly peaceful or political solution to the cultural wars in America.
	And of course, people were allowed to operate with impunity on social media, people who put out pushbacks against the lies about Trump.
	I mean, my series, The Untruth About Donald Trump, got millions and millions of views.
	And that was just on one particular platform.
	It was even more, if you count podcasts and other platforms.
	And that's just sort of one example.
	But I've been heavily suppressed.
	You can't even find me on YouTube anymore.
	You type ahead.
	I don't autocomplete and all of that.
	So unfortunately, they realized the power that social media had in the influence on the 2016 election.
	And they're much better prepared now.
	And they're much better at splintering any coalition, at silencing people who push back against the popular narrative.
	So that's on the one side.
	On the other side, the left has gone completely insane.
	Or rather, their complete insanity has manifested itself in takeovers of significant portions of Seattle, of physical attacks, of just the general lunacy of attacking monuments, even of abolitionists and so on, claiming to care about slavery when there even of abolitionists and so on, claiming to care about slavery when there are well over 100 million slaves in the world right now that nobody seems to care
	But apparently the 5% of whites who owned slaves in the South 150 years ago are the big issue for the black community.
	It's all nonsense.
	It's just the usual Marxist trick of saying that all disparities in outcome are The result of prejudice, not perhaps different abilities, not perhaps different cultures or different motivations or anything like that.
	So right now, people, I think, will do the slow, sad baton death march to the voting booth, and a lot of people will vote for Trump, but it's without the sense of enthusiasm and possibility of a renaissance that was going on in 2016.
	It's like, okay, we'll take one more swing at the bat, and hopefully we can stave off disaster for another couple of years so I can get lots of food in my basement.
	Do you – related to that – so the other thing that troubles me a lot too that I think Trump did drop the ball on is why are we only now beginning – you're two months away from the election, three months away.
	Why now are you just only starting to ramp up some of these investigations?
	Because here's the thing.
	Whatever – Barr finds, whatever Barr is prepared to do, by the time he's ready to do it, the election happens.
	And if you lose, it's all gone.
	Everything you said, all the things about Hillary Clinton, all the problems with Joe Biden, all Joe Biden's corruption, all the dangers with his son, if all it takes is a Biden win, that will never see the light of day again.
	Why you waited so long to begin to ramp up this kind of stuff?
	Some of that is the foolish fighting between Trump and Sessions.
	I expected a certain degree of a big learning curve for Trump, who'd never been a politician, who said the right things about the swamp, but never actually had to fight them from inside the system.
	And so some of this is outside of his purview, other things he could have handled better.
	And let's transition to talking about the schools, if I can get one more direct opinion from you on this topic.
	So do you think there are enough tired, frustrated, disappointed so-called conservatives now who will go ahead and grudgingly vote?
	Are there enough of them still to replicate what happened 2016?
	Or in this case, would you say the polls probably do suggest that we're looking possibly at a Biden presidency?
	These kinds of predictions, of course, are very, very hard to make.
	It is important to remember that Trump won very narrowly.
	And of course, if you look at the Electoral College votes, which is what matters, of course, he won decisively, overwhelmingly.
	But when it comes to looking at the numbers of people who ended up tipping over, that it was, what, about 70,000, something like that.
	So a lot has changed since 2016.
	There's been another couple of million of immigrants from people from cultures and countries and histories where they tend to vote For the left, right, immigrants generally tend to vote for the left pretty overwhelmingly.
	You've had four years of boomers dying off, boomers who would a lot of times, the older people tend to vote a little bit more conservative and whites tend to vote a little bit more conservative or a lot more in some situations.
	So you do have a mass influx of new people who are on the path or whose families are on the path to voting.
	You have the nature taking off, you know, millions of Americans who otherwise might have voted for Trump.
	And so there is...
	A real downward trend.
	Demographics, of course, is destiny.
	And there is a real downward trend on conservative voters.
	Just look out in California, which used to be the birthplace of Ronald Reagan and other significant leaders of the conservative movement.
	Now conservatives can almost get maybe a quarter of the vote if they're incredibly lucky and work incredibly hard.
	So I think the demographics has done a particularly significant job of undermining the chances of Trump getting re-elected again, but facing that when people are seeing people jumping up and down on cop cars and, you know, throwing mollusks of cocktails and fireworks into police stations, that does provoke a little bit of a march to conservatism and law and order.
	And so... We're good to go.
	It is going to be a real slog for Trump to get re-elected, and of course they should have focused on the Section 230 immunities that social media companies have for content.
	As long as they remain politically neutral, as long as they do not editorialize, they get these incredible immunities, which has allowed them to basically print We're good to go.
	It's because, I don't know, maybe social media companies have everyone's emails and private messages and this and that, and people were fearful of leaks or things like that.
	So there was a lot of talk, but very little action.
	And now, of course, it's far too late to do anything prior to the election that would have any decisive outcome.
	Right. And so you and I, I think, from the very beginning, when we were probably students ourselves, I think it dawned on us the degree to which education or miseducation or no education is going to shape our demographic.
	I think that's absolutely true.
	Then what lights that fire is education, right?
	It's possible to take immigrants the way we used to do and assimilate them.
	And you did that largely through education.
	We've exposed them to Americanism.
	You explained why America was exceptional, why liberty and freedom were better than the alternatives, why opportunity was more important than guaranteed outcomes.
	We certainly haven't for 40, 50 years been doing that.
	In fact, we've been doing the opposite, right?
	We've been suggesting, in spite of the evidence, I mean, you've got immigrants coming here from foreign countries.
	Inevitably, many of them are poor.
	The countries they run away from, many of them are socialist.
	No opportunities, no freedoms, no liberty.
	They can't wait to get here.
	And now when they get here, the very first thing that happens is they're told how bad they've got it, how they're the victims, how this country really belongs to people like them.
	So that gratitude factor that we used to get, right?
	That work hard, take advantage of our opportunities...
	We're first-generation immigrants.
	We know that we're going to be limited in what we can do, but our kids, the sky's the limit.
	That now has been replaced by the only reasons you weren't brought here sooner and the only reason you're not billionaires is because of this leering white minority who keeps you down.
	And so what was assimilation and the melting pot and the idea that you're coming not just to a land or a body of buildings and businesses, you're coming to an idea that seems to have been completely warped successfully.
	And as we both know, it was warped primarily in the schools.
	Let's talk a little bit about the absolute Marxist influence in the schools that's giving rise, not just to a culture that allows – where corporations put their fingers to the wind and see that the Marxists are winning, whether they know it or not.
	That's what's going on here. But also with regards to these protesters, most of whom are so ignorant and foolish.
	They are the worst – I mean there was a situation here in Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin – I'm sure you were seeing it in the news where they beat a Democrat congressperson who happened to be gay and progressive.
	They just beat him. He took some pictures and they beat him.
	Five or six thugs beat him.
	They tore down statues particularly of not just abolitionists but abolitionists who were committed to helping African Americans back there.
	And so all that's part of this.
	And when you look at that, these kids are too stupid to moat.
	They're unwilling to make any distinctions whatsoever.
	If you ever wanted a snapshot of what happens when you push ideological imperatives over actual critical thinking, this moment seems to be proof positive that we've been right all along.
	Unfortunately, can you stop it now?
	Or reverse it to some degree.
	I think that you can push back against it.
	But, you know, there's...
	What do sophists do as a whole?
	And it's funny because I've been fighting sophists my whole life.
	But sophists first entered into my family.
	That's where I first really began to see the danger and power of sophists.
	So, you know, my mother was a bad parent, a violent parent, and so on.
	And her life went badly as people who injure children and who act in...
	Highly immoral ways, their lives tend to go really, really badly.
	Now, of course, Christianity, Christians would come along and say, well, you're suffering because you've sinned.
	And what you need to do is repent of your sin and make amends and make apologies and be a better person.
	And so people who are suffering...
	Some people will come along and say what you have is a moral problem and you need to become a better person and you need to make amends and you need to recover your moral nobility in order to live a happier life.
	That's what theologians and philosophers tend to do.
	Now, sophists, on the other hand, say that the suffering that you are experiencing is all the result of everyone else's immorality.
	It's all the result Of racism, of sexism, of bias, of phobias, of white fragility, of institutionalized whatever, whatever, right?
	And by externalizing the source of suffering, they create further immorality because then they uncork the Old Testament rage against the people who have done you wrong, which is the only reason why you're suffering.
	So yeah, I mean, the black community in America in many instances and in wide swaths It's a complete disaster.
	Three quarters of black boys and black girls growing up without fathers at all.
	Half of black girls report being raped by black men before they reach the age of 18.
	You've got multi-generational welfare, moral and work ethic decay and it is a giant mess.
	Now, I believe that it is a continuation of all the government policies and programs that have so harmed Americans and, of course, blacks throughout American history.
	Slavery was a government program.
	Jim Crow, segregation, all government programs.
	The welfare state is a government program wherein women are paid to have children as long as there's no father in the house.
	These are all absolute, complete and total disastrous.
	If you look at places like Baltimore, where you have 0% of black students proficient in math and reading, well, these are all the government programs called government schools.
	You have Section 8 housing and ghettos and police.
	These are all run by the government.
	And so there are cultural issues, there are family issues, there are economic issues and so on that could be addressed.
	But you have sophists saying, hey man, none of this is your fault.
	You're perfect. The only reason your life is bad, the only reason that you're not making it, the only reason that you're not suffering is because you are surrounded by evil people who hate you.
	And yeah, my mother had the same thing, right?
	She was a bad mother.
	She had moral evils in her life and in her heart and in her actions.
	And then a bunch of people came along and said, aha, the only reason that you're suffering is because illness and people made you sick and, you know, there's nothing to do with you.
	And therefore, you have nothing to apologize for.
	You have nothing to make amends for.
	There's nothing that you can fix yourself and then what happens is you become helpless.
	And you become enraged.
	I mean, the idea that the big problems in the black community are a statue somewhere in Washington is so beyond cause and effect that anybody looks at that and says, that's a complete distraction.
	But it's a lot easier to think that your problems come from a statue than from issues, moral issues within your own community.
	And because philosophy has not won the battle for secular ethics and because Christianity It has largely left at least the public sphere in terms of the media.
	It's largely run by leftists, communists, atheists, socialists, and so on.
	We don't have an answer as to why you're suffering.
	Now, I personally like the empowered answer, which is, okay, yeah, there's bad people out there.
	There may be people who dislike you, but the fundamental reason you're suffering is because you're doing wrong, and only you can fix that.
	And if you surrender your power to turn around your ship of ethics to everyone else and you just end up a passenger in your own life being buffeted around by the winds of everyone else's prejudices and imagined hatred, you lose power over your own life.
	And when people are frustrated and powerless and self-loathing, the tripwire to violence is very, very short.
	loathing, the tripwire to violence is very, very short.
	And you and I come right back to where we almost always land on our talks, the collective versus the individual, right?
	And you and I come right back to where we almost always land on our talks, the collective versus the individual, right?
	What made you, what really was the exceptional notion behind America was the focus on the individual, right?
	What made you – what really was the exceptional notion behind America was the focus on the individual, right?
	That for the first time in human history, you had a government that was consciously designed to tip the power in favor of the voters, not the elected officials, of the individual and the local communities in the states over the federal government.
	And in this land of, of indiv- and Judeo-Christianity, I still laugh.
	I'm sure we're going to get a dozen comments in the comment section.
	These two clowns actually think the founding fathers were Christians.
	Well, I'm not going to do the math and the homework for them.
	They clearly mostly were.
	And there's no doubt that the ethos, the moral ethos behind the founding of this country was, in many respects, Christianity.
	I have long said, and I've said in our talks with you, that I think the single greatest figure in the history of defending the individual is Jesus Christ.
	I mean, his Ministry was personal.
	It was not collective. He met people where they were.
	He even required permission for them to heal them, right?
	Do you think that I can do this thing?
	And his mission was to reinstate the philosophical idea, setting aside the religious consequences of who you do or do not believe he is.
	In just words he said, the things that he stood for was waging war against a collective anything, right?
	You are morally responsible.
	To my knowledge, to my memory, correct me where I go astray here, Jesus let no one off the hook because of circumstances or environment.
	That's right. There was no environment.
	Oh, well, you shouldn't steal, well, unless you're poor, in which case, you know, you can go and steal.
	You should not murder unless you believe that somebody is being racist towards you, in which case, sure, go ahead and murder.
	And so there was not an environmental excuse, the sovereign soul.
	Was something that you were in control of and the idea of blaming circumstances or environment or class or race or gender for the bad decisions that you have made is entirely foreign to the sovereign soul and consciousness promoted by Jesus.
	And when you take that ethos and the founding fathers' rejection of the kind of authoritarian government, the top-down monarchies that they were rebelling against, you came up with a remarkably individualistic society that has served well.
	I make the argument, and this would be terribly...
	I'm actually working on a series of programs, a new series of programs I'm going to be dealing with called American Exceptionalism, where we go back and explain why, in this time of lies and dishonesty, why we were.
	And one of them is going to be this point that's been made, right?
	This idea that we are not a system, a systemically racist system.
	We are a system that is systemically opportunistic, right?
	Because there have been incredible African-American success stories going back 100 years.
	We have people from other races who've come here and overcome and conquer.
	I mean, look at the degree to which it's almost cliche to point out now that immigrant families from Asia don't seem to be suffering from the same kind of angsty, we're disenfranchised garbage that groups like African-Americans are.
	And so we are, I think...
	The lie is, that's the big lie.
	Despite the fact that we weren't perfect, despite the fact that when the laws were passed 250 years ago, they weren't immediately enforced in a balanced, fair way, or in what we would call now, looking backwards, a completely just way, the fact is that what saved us as a country is the systemic opportunities.
	The system set up Guaranteed that sooner or later, those artificial laws, those artificial structures that were holding certain races back would have to give way, and they have given way.
	And it's just odd that when you've reached the point now where blacks have the greatest opportunities of any people, any African or African hyphenated people in the history of the world, you still can't point to a I think we're good to go.
	Where we say blacks have absolutely no opportunities.
	In fact, if you listen to the rhetoric of all of this white supremacist garbage, all of this cultural Marxism that we're getting here, all this Black Lives Matter stuff and the Antifa stuff, you would think it's worse than it was 400 years ago.
	You would think that the place for African Americans in this culture is worse than when they were slaves on plantations.
	And where are the adults to call that out?
	Well, there's no punishment like virtue in the world.
	This, of course, is the story of Jesus, Son of God, and punished more than any other prophet pretty much throughout history.
	And America had slaves for a grand total of 84 years.
	Because they inherited the slave system from the British, right?
	So America as a country had slaves for a grand total of 84 years and fought a war to end slavery as the story goes.
	If you look at the Muslim world, the Muslim world has had slavery for 1,400 years, 17 times longer than America had slavery.
	The Muslim enslavement was tens of millions.
	Americans took 400,000 blacks from blacks who caught them in Africa.
	And so the white Western European Christian culture was the one that applied the universalism that it got both from Socrates and from Aristotle and from Jesus and from the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and the individualism and the universalism.
	And They took those moral lessons and they used them to end the scourge of slavery, not just in Western countries, but they strove very hard to end slavery throughout the British Empire and around the world.
	As you probably know, England took on a debt in 1833 to buy off slaves in the empire that it only finished paying in 2015.
	This was a moral crusade that ended the greatest impediment to the development of modernity in the world, which was slavery.
	You don't get the modern world if you still have slavery.
	You don't get modern economics.
	You don't get a free market.
	You don't get individualism if you have slavery.
	And the greatest moral gift the world has ever received was the worldwide opposition to slavery that came out of European, Greco-Roman, Christian culture.
	And now, of course, the only group that is constantly exoriated and insulted and abused for slavery is the group that had it the least and ended it, Seoul, among other cultures.
	Yes.
	Yeah, it is a horrifying thing, and I don't understand why, and I want to throw some quotes at you just so we get them on the table.
	When you think about what the fascists and the Marxists and the communists say about education— And you look at their direct quotes and you see this playing out now, it still makes you wonder why the so-called highly educated university people have so much just rank intellectual dishonesty that they can't even acknowledge what the program is.
	I saw a couple things out of you.
	Marx said that, quote, education is free.
	Freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state.
	The education of all children from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care He also said, democracy is the road to socialism.
	That for socialism to flourish, it has to start in democracy.
	Vladimir Lenin comes down the road and he says, give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
	Give us eight, the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.
	Give me just one generation of youth and I'll transform the whole world.
	And even more alarmingly, as Marx said, democracy It's the road to socialism.
	Lenin pointed out correctly that socialism in all instances is the road that leads to communism.
	We've got a lot more of those but let's just start there and the Marxist infiltration of the schools.
	It happened before the 1960s of course but it was the 1960s where the ideas that were percolating for a previous hundred years finally caught hold.
	And rather than rebellious students trying to push those ideas on their betters, you now have a system in the late 60s where the faculty themselves had begun to adopt those things, and how successful that's been in 50 years in completely transforming the way our culture sees itself.
	Well, it is brutal.
	And, I mean, Marx and Lenin were entirely correct, especially when you have – when you talk about state control of education and you're talking about it at the federal level, you know, the Department of Education and so on, and mandated curricula across an entire – It's brutal because it no longer allows for the individualistic state or county or local-based experiments in education,
	but you get one top-down, giant, tattooed imprint of everything that's going to happen, and so you don't get competition among states that works at all anymore.
	I mean, the greatest disaster in the Republic was turning over education to the government.
	It's brutal on just about every level because now you have one giant central lever with which you can move the minds of the masses and you lose the free market of ideas.
	And fundamentally, you kind of lose free speech when the government takes over the education because they program you so heavily that although you have the technical right of free speech, you cannot entertain ideas that go against the mainstream narrative without experiencing ostracism or economic attack or just personal anxiety for bad think, you cannot entertain ideas that go against the mainstream narrative without experiencing ostracism
	And so that to me, which was sort of mid to late 19th century throughout the West, that's when the nails really began going into the coffin of what happens.
	How can we debate when we're all programmed with self-hating Marxist lies?
	And of course, what the Marxists do is they demoralize you.
	And this is true of every verbally abusive relationship is you get demoralized.
	You get told by a verbally abusive partner.
	That you're a bad person, that you're the one responsible for making him angry, that only you have to change in order for him to avoid being violent and abusive, and he's a perfect angel, and the only negative things that come out of the relationship is you, and your history is terrible, and you've never been a good person.
	It's the same thing they do with an entire country.
	They say, oh, you genocided the natives.
	Oh, you stole all the land.
	Your entire civilization is illegitimate.
	Your wealth was built on slavery and colonialism and exploitation, and you are just a bunch of thieves.
	And what they do is they continue to hack away at any pride or self-esteem that you might have in your culture and your history so that when people come along and say this whole thing has to come down, you're like, where do I sign up?
	Because it's just an evil, rotten structure dedicated to the darkest elements of human nature and You can't fight back against that when the government sets the curriculum and when there's a huge amount of propaganda telling young people to go into debt, $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 to go to school to be trained to hate the free market system that's your only chance of earning enough money to ever pay that back.
	Right, and you know, you mentioned the American education system, public schools.
	1850, Horace Mann starts the path of American public education, and he was very blunt about it, right?
	His entire premise was, at one point he's got a quote where he says, we're not going to try Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Who was a disciple of Horace Mann and John Dewey, he actually said, we're not going to try to train your kids to become philosophers or wise men or scientists.
	No, the purpose of the public schools is to control children.
	Horace Mann said, we are creating a public school system, not for educational purposes, but so that we can mold children in the form of the state.
	And this was from the very beginning of this.
	And it almost makes you wonder why it took so darn long to get to where they are now.
	It's the logical endpoint of this, these Marxists.
	One thing in particular that you and I both study a lot and care about is history.
	As we know, history is the one thing – it's the first thing that the progressive Marxist has to do is to go back and erase it.
	You have to demonize history and then you have to reframe it along the lines.
	I mean you think about the removal of the Teddy Roosevelt statue in New York City, right?
	You got a beautiful equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt who in many ways – he was a Republican who in many ways was very concerned not just about the environment but about the indigenous peoples and the legacy of African-Americans.
	Beautiful statue. He's on horseback, and he chose to have a Native American and a standing African, a freed slave, on his side.
	A hundred years ago, this was commissioned to demonstrate a commitment to those original peoples who had sometimes been overlooked in the history books.
	And now that monument itself, simply because Roosevelt's on horseback and they're not, has got to come down because it's not sufficiently – this is Absolutely proletarian Marxism, right?
	Everybody's got to be the same.
	The fact that Roosevelt, who accomplished all of those things, is seated higher.
	It's this weird—you mentioned the Sophists, and I think by the Sophists, also going back to Greek culture, there's that great anecdote from Dionysus, right, where the tyrant of Syracuse, where a Another Greek monarch sent an ambassador to Dionysus and said to him, how do you do it? How are you able to control the people so meaningfully?
	How are you able to squash any kind of rebellion?
	I want to take back to my master that information.
	Dionysus took him out into a field in Syracuse, outside of Sicily, and showed him all the grains of corn, this beautiful grain of wheat, like miles wide.
	And he took his cane out.
	And every top of the grain, any plant that grew a little higher than the others, he nicked the top off it.
	And he went down 10 minutes, right?
	Any row of grain that was slightly higher than the other, he leveled them.
	And he turned to the ambassador and said, that's how you do it.
	Chop the head off of anybody who seeks to get ahead of anybody else in any other way.
	Through hard work, through labor, through decency, through virtue.
	And that was the abject lesson.
	We've known this For 2,000 years before the birth of Marx, we've been aware of this.
	Why do you think now is the moment, Steph?
	I mean, I get that the kids have been fully – we've had three or four generations of kids who have been fully indoctrinated here.
	But why have the adults all surrendered?
	Not just on the Democrat side.
	Why have the adults all surrendered this as well?
	We can't explain the peaks and valleys anymore.
	We can't explain the peaks and valleys of human achievement anymore.
	And it's really tragic.
	And it is a great issue and monstrous challenge in human life that when you have a meritocracy, there are some people who are going to do extraordinarily well And the majority of people are going to do average.
	Some people are going to do really badly.
	And, I mean, you can just look at this in terms of, like, I don't know, musical ability or singing ability or whatever.
	There are some people who just, you know, open their mouths and they create glorious sounds and they're really good at writing songs and they're great performers.
	And as is the case in sports, in medicine, in investment, 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people.
	And that creates a huge amount of, you know, Nietzsche identified this resentment, resentment, resentment is really, really foundational.
	Now, Christianity had a wonderful way of dealing with this resentment.
	And it had a couple of prongs, and I'm sure you know of even more.
	The major ones were, okay, forget about this world.
	This world is just a test.
	It's a veil of tears. It's ruled by Satan.
	You're just supposed to get through to it to get to heaven.
	And the more beaten down you are here, the more controlled you are here, the more chance you have in a way of getting into heaven.
	So by focusing people on the salvation of the soul rather than the filling of their wallet, they did reduce to some degree the general center of the donut blob of resentment that fuels a lot of these kinds of class conflicts.
	And of course, throughout most of human history, it was not a very fair meritocracy because you'd be born into aristocratic privilege or you would be born as a slave.
	So there was things that needed to change.
	With the free market, you get this extraordinary meritocracy just like the free market in music.
	I mean, anyone who's ever gone to a karaoke night knows that singing and performing ability is not exactly evenly distributed across the general population.
	There are some people who are just geniuses of productivity.
	And this is well documented in economics.
	It's called Price is Law, where the square root of any group of people produces half the value in an organization.
	You've got a company of 10,000 people.
	100 of them produce half the value.
	And 10 of those produce half the value of that.
	So in a company of 10,000 people, you have 10 people producing 25% of the entire value of the company.
	And of course, those people need to be paid more because they won't produce if you don't allow them to keep the fruits of their extraordinary productivity.
	So when we have a meritocracy, there's huge peaks in values.
	I'm really kind of curious about all of those things.
	Like, why do some people do so well?
	Why do some people do so badly?
	Why are so many people in the middle?
	Why is it such a bell curve? That, to me, is really fascinating.
	And a lot of economists, a lot of biologists, a lot of psychologists, a lot of statisticians have really examined this.
	And there's lots of really interesting...
	Possibilities, things to explore.
	There's culture, there's family, there's IQ, there's conscientiousness as a work ethic, which is to some degree genetic.
	It's really a fascinating thing to explore, and intelligent people want to explore that.
	And also, we need to understand that the luminaries, the geniuses of productivity, are the only reason why we're wealthy.
	Why is there a music industry?
	Because they relentlessly say no to just about everyone.
	Because otherwise, you know, every squalling voice, shower singing idiot like me would get shows at Madison Square Gardens.
	Nobody would show up and there'd be no music industry at all.
	Why are movie actors almost uniformly really, really good at what they do?
	Because the entertainment industry relentlessly says no to just about everybody who wants to become a movie star.
	They really, really filter out so that only the highest audience value quality performers end up getting through.
	So we only have a movie industry because people say no to aspiring actors all the time.
	Same thing with the music industry.
	Same thing with the sports industry.
	Industry. Look at all the people who want to become pro sports players versus how many people who end up.
	Well, the only reason that you have any kind of professional sports, at least until they started kneeling for the anthem, the only reason you have professional sports is this relentless filtering out of people who aren't that great at it or who don't work that hard at it or usually a combination of the two.
	So this meritocracy thing is really, really fascinating.
	When I was a kid, I was fascinated by meritocracy.
	I was fascinated by the fact that my family was doing very, very badly.
	But I knew kids and went over to their houses where their parents were like professionals and they had swimming pools.
	And I was like, ah, you know, why?
	Why? What's the difference?
	And I never thought that the people who had swimming pools had stolen my swimming pool.
	I never thought that the people who had houses had kicked me out of a house and that's why I had to live in a crappy rent-controlled apartment in a very bad neighborhood.
	I never thought any of these things.
	I was like... It was aspirational for me.
	I was like, hey, you can get out.
	You can get somewhere.
	You can get somewhere that's different from where you start.
	I never thought that there was a foundational barrier that would prevent me from getting where I want to go.
	Now, of course, the Marxists say, well, that's because you're white, whatever it is, right?
	But... I never felt that, and I never felt that for other races.
	The most popular kid in my high school happened to be a black guy who was really good at the saxophone, and everybody really liked him, as did I. And I never thought, oh, well, you know, there's no way he's getting anywhere.
	I actually met him years later.
	He'd done very well in his life.
	Good for him, right? So this peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys.
	You've got to look at society and say, okay, some people end up super rich.
	But it's not like they stole everything from everyone.
	In fact, they generally, because they're so good at productivity, they generally raise the wealth of everyone around them.
	I've always said this to people. Look, if you want to go help the poor...
	Go start a business and hire people because then not only are you giving wages to people who otherwise wouldn't have them, you're incrementally increasing the wages of everyone else by taking some workers out of circulation.
	So when I get a bunch of Marxists and leftists lecturing me when they've lived mostly off the taxpayer dime in universities and government work and so on lecturing me about the poor, I'm like, just go start a business, man.
	That's how you actually practically help I think?
	Getting good incomes is in the hundreds of thousands by now.
	So I'm very comfortable with the fact that based on my knowledge and understanding of the peaks and valleys, I've helped people out of the valleys onto the peaks.
	But all the socialists want to do is say the only reason that there are peaks and valleys, the only reason there are mountains and valleys is because the people who have the mountains stole all the land from the valleys.
	And we just got to raise down all the mountains, tear down all the mountains, make everything a two-dimensional flatland, and unfortunately kill tens of millions of people in the process.
	Sorry for the long speech, but it was a big question.
	It's right on the money.
	And I would go farther and say the reason for all these decades, well over 100 years, people come to this country, including many black and brown-skinned people, was for that idea.
	Like the same feelings you had when you saw the person with the pool.
	Hey, if I work hard, I can have this.
	I can have a big house like that, or at least my kids could.
	And it's interesting now that the dog whistle seems to be, let's summon people across the southern border, particularly the poorest, and make examples of them of how victimized they've been by the very culture they seek to join.
	All this business about cages on the border, all of the disingenuousness things, Obama policies now that have been blamed on Trump, that sort of thing.
	But there does seem to be in control of the fundamental idea of why people were coming here has changed, right?
	It's no longer to take advantage of the meritocracy.
	It is to come and be compensated for what we didn't have, which I think fits your narrative exactly right.
	And I want to make another quick comment about Christianity as you started that comment.
	The other nice thing that Christianity did intellectually is it argued that That regardless of where you were on the scale, regardless of what your lot in life was or your talents were, and I couldn't sing, and so I would admire singers.
	I wasn't jealous of them the same way you were.
	But what Christianity basically made, because you had a hierarchy, right?
	You had a system that was like this, right?
	It was... Up and down.
	It was horizontal. And there was movement, just like in a capitalist society.
	After the Enlightenment, you get free markets.
	And the free markets, in terms of making money, because you could have nothing and have everything, or you could have everything handed to you and lose it all.
	You could go up and down like this.
	That matched very well with the Judeo-Christian worldview that says, hey, if you choose virtue, hard work, and sacrifice, you could rise.
	But if you choose to wallow and be self-pitying and envy, oh boy, envy used to be one of the seven deadly sins.
	Now it's the hallmark of Black Lives Matter radicalism, right?
	And so we took a vibrant system of motion that was Judeo-Christian values, was open markets, capitalism, where there was a lot of mobility.
	Anybody could do anything.
	And we replaced it with what I call the flat line of socialism, where everything is plotted on a completely horizontal arc, right?
	The idea that all you have is the flat.
	I think I screwed up my directions before, right?
	You had the vertical and the horizontal.
	We used to be charted on the vertical.
	Now, that flat line of the dead EKG line, right?
	We've got the flat line of socialism, the flat line of godlessness, because there's no place to go, right?
	And one of the nice reassuring things about Christianity, and you're right, there clearly were problematic aspects of it, but regardless of where you were in the up and down system, you could through hard work and faith and duty and discipline rise.
	And if you didn't rise as high as you think you wanted to, you knew that beyond this realm of giving and taking and interacting with other people, that your contribution to the entire system in the eyes of God mattered, right?
	That the soul of the peasant and the soul of the king were equally worth saving.
	Again, back to Jesus. He didn't spend a lot of time Preaching to the rich and the powerful, the temple elders who already consider themselves saved, he didn't talk to them, right?
	They looked after themselves. He was talking to the people who nobody paid attention to and making that precise argument that follow me, follow the imperatives of the Bible, love God, serve other people, and whatever happens to you here, recognize that the Son of God came for you as much or more than those people who are talented at the top of the scale.
	And Final quote from Dostoevsky, throw this at you, because I think this is where it all comes down.
	Dostoevsky and the Brothers Karamazov said,"...for socialism is primarily the question of atheism." It's not about economics.
	It is ultimately the question of God or no God.
	And the socialist has answered that question one way, and pretty much the rest of world culture had up until then answered it another way, and particularly Western culture.
	And that argument now has won the day, the argument that we are nothing but material creatures, we are nothing but highly evolved animals, and there consequently, it underlies a very important truth.
	In a culture like this, where we are nothing but highly evolved animals, where there aren't any angels to aspire to, and where the devils are just comic book characters, everything then is the jungle.
	Everything is reduced to power.
	And if you look at the theoretical positions that underline Marxism or that Marxism has given rise to.
	Modern feminism, environmentalism, queer theory, transgender theory, all of that stuff, and socialism, all of that stuff is really about—it's not about love, it's not about equality, it's not about mercy or justice, it's about power.
	What these puller downs of statures want, they don't want equality.
	They want to eradicate Western culture.
	They don't know what they want to replace it with.
	Chad, or Chop, apparently, right?
	But they don't know what they want to replace it with.
	I don't know if you've seen this or not.
	They were asking people in Louisiana, now that you've torn down all these statues of the Confederacy, who should we replace them with?
	And the major winners in the poll were Britney Spears and Dolly Parton.
	So you're literally going to replace Robert E. Lee, who fought on the wrong side, but boy, look at his biography.
	Loved the country dearly, contributed an incredible amount, both before and after the war, to the reconciliation of this country.
	You're going to take his dad down.
	You're going to put Britney Spears up.
	And the reason why? Because Britney Spears overcame a mental meltdown.
	She got beyond her mental issues and became a diva.
	That's who you're choosing now.
	And is it also possible to say that the people now who are the most agitated, with all of the opportunities we've afforded people of all different races for over 100 years now, Maybe the lack of taking advantage of your opportunities means you don't have that many people to put on pedestals to begin with.
	I'm just picturing how much shade there would be under the Dolly Parton statue.
	The pigeons would be very happy.
	This is the reality.
	The illusion is that you can get rid of the peaks and valleys in human life, but you can't.
	This delusion that we can is why the valleys are so full.
	How do you raise the valleys?
	With bodies. Then you just pile them up with bodies and then you hope that that's going to make things equal.
	The reason being, if you have a free market, if you have freedom, then you're going to end up with what they call economic inequality, which is something that kind of begs the question and demands to be rectified and so on.
	No one talks about singing inequality because, you know, you just are who you are.
	You get the voice that you get.
	Nobody talks about necessarily height inequality.
	You're just born and you get a particular height and that's just the way it is.
	So the only way that they can tell you that they're going to get rid of what they call economic inequality is by creating something infinitely more dangerous than economic inequality, which is political inequality.
	Because they're going to say, you give me the power to point guns at rich people, take their money and give that money to you.
	Now that is political inequality of the very first kind.
	You give me the power to substitute the mob for due process and I will make everything better.
	I will make everything equal.
	But because you have to surrender control over the means of production to the state, because you have to give up your property rights, because you have to give up your protections under the law, because you have to give up your individualism and independence in return for, quote, equality, then you create a far more dangerous situation of then you create a far more dangerous situation of political inequality, of some people's rights to control the means of production, very small minority of people, and other people's rights to just hang on and hope for the best and line up for five hours to buy a piece of bread.
	In minus 30 degree weather.
	So when you dial down or when someone offers to dial down economic inequality, what they're offering is it's a devil's bargain.
	I will get rid of economic inequality, but in return, you have to surrender all of your rights, thus creating a far more toxic hierarchy of political inequality, of some people having the right and power to own things while other people are specifically denied that right and power.
	And once you lose your property rights, man, you got nothing.
	Like, human rights are property rights.
	You can't have the right to life unless you own the products of your labor, and you can't have a right to shelter unless you own your apartment, and you can't have a right to free speech unless you own your computer.
	You don't have human rights without property rights, and this great promise of we will erase inequality has – that's the worm on the hook.
	The real hook is giving a small group of sociopaths all the power in their own universe to order everyone around at gunpoint to – That is the far greater and more dangerous inequality than some guy having a bigger house than you.
	And I love what you said about the peaks and valleys of human life.
	C.S. Lewis and the Screwtape Letters, of course, actually created what he called the law of undulation, that the individual human's life was like this.
	That there were peaks and valleys in all of our lives that could not be – to foolishly try to erase the valleys to make everybody at peak – that's what the Marxists are doing economically.
	Let's erase the valleys so everyone only operates at the peak.
	But when you look at the peak, when you get rid of the valley, it's the flat line again, isn't it?
	And this idea that we, Lewis also called it the idea of I'm as good as you, right?
	That just because I'm alive in here means no matter how hard you work and how hard I don't, no matter what natural gifts you've been given and I haven't been given, unless you and I end up with the same bank account, the same size house, the same size swimming pool, inequity is the only thing we have to talk about.
	And I want to ask you, and we can begin to start winding down, but I do want to ask you too, one of the things that surprises me about this is We've seen the pictures of police sergeants, police commanders in Massachusetts who prostrate themselves on the floor religiously before the Black Lives Matter.
	We have all sorts of footage now of young white people kissing the feet of black activists while they're being debunked.
	Shout it out through megaphones.
	This is where you belong.
	Again, you can get rid of God, but I don't know if you can get rid of the religious.
	These are almost religious atonement penalties, right?
	This oblating yourself before authority.
	It's almost like the metaphorical equivalent of self-flagellation.
	This... The groveling nature of this, the president of CEO or CEO of Chick-fil-A, who has been a starch defender of Christian values, now comes out and says, White Christians should be ashamed of themselves.
	They should be shining the shoes of African Americans in the streets.
	We have other police officers who've been washing the feet of Black Lives Matter protests for very different reasons than Jesus overtly washed the feet of his...
	I mean, I've read the Gospels.
	This is not a Gospel of shame, right?
	Christ's ministry was not predicated on I've come to shame you all, right?
	That the only way you can survive or become a good person is a complete public shaming.
	This is not that religion. Again, organized religion may have appropriated that at times, but that was not his message.
	How did we get to be so grovelly about this?
	How do you have otherwise relatively well educated in terms of the numbers of grades they've had, young college type kids, who are willing to engage in this kind of almost slave behavior, seeing this as a just reparations for what exactly?
	Well, I think it should come to everyone as a great existential and spiritual relief that just as some whites abused their power throughout history and some blacks abused their power throughout history, we now see some blacks abusing their power in the present.
	Because human beings, this is the great lesson of freedom, of liberty.
	It's that human beings can't handle power.
	We are not good at handling power over others.
	Nothing corrupts us quicker. Nothing degrades our ethics more than having power over others.
	So yeah, there are some black activists who are threatening and cajoling and bullying whites into this subjugating behavior.
	And yeah, so blacks abuse their power.
	Whites abuse their power. The whole point, I think, in life is to try and find ways to whittle back Our coercive authority over each other.
	And for the police, it's pretty simple.
	I mean, if you're going to face a murder charge for an ambiguous and difficult and hard to assess arrest of a black man when there's evidence that it's not the story is not the way it goes, then, of course, as a black as a white cop, you're going to be very, very cautious around as a black as a white cop, you're going to be very, very
	As knowing the woke mob, knowing the desperation, knowing the hysteria, knowing the mob, quote, justice that's going on at the moment, like that fellow in Atlanta who's now being charged, even though the black guy, you know, attacked him, took his taser and shot it at his face, as far as I've read.
	I mean, so, yeah, I mean, it's consequences, right?
	I mean, a lot of cops feel very bound to their jobs because they feel a responsibility to keep the peace in their community.
	And the cops know the Ferguson effects that happened after Mike Brown, when murders within impoverished and ghetto communities went up significantly as a result of We're good to go.
	The cops are being paralyzed from doing the job that they need to do in order to keep minority populations and every other population safe.
	And so that's why they're kneeling because you'd rather kneel for a few minutes than be dragged through a multi-year court case that's going to destroy your family, destroy your finances, destroy your reputation and probably have you end up facing life in prison or the death penalty or whatever.
	And of course, as we've seen from Zimmerman, even if you're exonerated, it's not like you can go back to any kind of life that you had before.
	So it's really tragic that we just can't have conversations about, let's diminish human beings' power over each other, but everybody wants to grab that sword and swing it at everyone else.
	That's human nature, unfortunately.
	That's our mammal side, and we've got to fight it with our higher beings.
	Yeah, and I would like to throw this out as our concluding question for you, observation that I want you to comment on.
	So now it's a cardinal sin.
	It'll get you canceled.
	It'll get your family doxxed if you say all lives matter.
	To simply say all lives matter is a rallying cry that you're a racist.
	And of course, as myself being a Christian, I cannot but say all lives matter, right?
	I mean, I cannot say certain lives matter more than others.
	In fact, that was the basis of racism in our country back in the slave period, right?
	We decided that some lives were not the same as others.
	And to reverse that now, and not...
	Because I asked the question, all right, and others smarter than me have asked the question, Alright, we're very concerned about a very small number, very, very small number of unarmed African-Americans who are killed by white police officers.
	I think it was less than 15 last year.
	11, I think. 11, right.
	So we are absolutely burning everything down because of this.
	But you've got, last weekend in Chicago alone, 104 people shot.
	You have hundreds of thousands of African-American babies aborted every year.
	More than any other race, African-American mothers abort their babies, percentage-wise.
	You have black-on-black violence that exponentially dwarves what happens in terms of police violence.
	Why is it that you have this...
	Is there anything we can do to push Black Lives Matters to be all Black Lives Matters?
	And then I think you would have maybe the seeds of something that could actually be productive for black culture.
	If we start to look...
	But the problem is, if you do that, Then you can no longer just blame the system and white people.
	You're going to have to begin to examine African-American choices with regards to family, with regards to taking advantage of their opportunities.
	So it's kind of a rhetorical question, but I'd like you to comment on that at the end here.
	Well, no, you can't because the Black Lives Matter movement is founded by avowed Marxists.
	And their goal is to inflame and provoke racial strife and racial tension in order to crack the rule of law in the Republic and take a shot at a takeover.
	So asking them to reorient themselves to healing racial division when the entire purpose of their movement is to inflame racial division It's kind of like asking Son of Sam to switch to tracheotomies and appendectomies with a nice amount of anesthetic.
	It's the wrong person for the wrong job.
	We do have to push back and say, look, there are disparities.
	In economic outcomes between East Asians, between whites, between blacks, and so on.
	This is a conversation we need to have.
	Someone's going to come along with an answer.
	We don't want the sophists providing the answer of institutionalized racism and whatever the garbage that they throw at.
	They're going to provide an answer.
	We have to try and provide a better answer.
	Now, of course, the sophists, when they encounter a better answer, will try and destroy the lives and reputation of anybody who provides a better answer than their race-baiting answer.
	We've got to just weather that storm and try and get the facts and the questions out to the general population because we do have a fascinating topic to explore in differences in group outcomes.
	And this office is just going to want to shut down that discussion with the race-baiting, white racism narrative.
	We just have to try and find a way to rise above that noise and say, yeah, this is an important conversation to have.
	There are lots of possible answers, but we're not going to get to the truth if we accept a pretend answer instead of a real question.
	Well said, and I think that the more we've rapidly almost accelerated the process of secularization and materialization, divorcing people away from anything more than the animal realities of life, that's taken a major toll.
	And on the other side of the coin, we've got an education system that no longer has educated people.
	There are a lot of people out there who instinctively rebel against what's going on, but they don't have the critical thinking skills from the schools to be able to articulate why there is a better way than the way they're seeing in the streets.
	That's what takes hope away from me a little bit, is the sense that many of us who know better ourselves can't articulate what needs to be done or what really went wrong here.
	And so we're guilted then very easily into supporting these missions because we do have good hearts.
	We do want to see any kind of potential systematic unfairness rectified.
	It seems to me that the whole argument of white supremacy is completely undercut if not obliterated by the fact that you can have these hordes of white and black protesters who quickly become rioters.
	To face every major monument in the country, to take over city blocks of major cities, and to receive no response whatsoever from the so-called white authorities.
	That, by the very definition of white supremacy, seems to be able to undercut that.
	I just don't know how many people recognize it.
	Well, of course, as the old saying goes, if you want to know who rules over you, look at who you're not allowed to criticize.
	Well, criticizing white males has been a very easy armchair sport, just as criticizing Christians has been for many decades.
	That tells you where the real power is in the country, and it's not.
	It's not with the whites, certainly not with the white males.
	Steph, where can people go to find more information and watch more of your shows and maybe even donate to your causes?
	Freedomain.com is the place to go.
	You can go to freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out.
	And I have a new Subscribestar server for voice, audio, video chats where people are congregating to talk about philosophy.
	It's available for a couple of bucks a month at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	And yeah, thanks. It was a real great pleasure.
	We shouldn't leave it so long again before the next one.
	We still got the screw tape letters to get through, which we should do soon.
	I'm ready to do it five minutes from now.
	You let me know when you're ready.
	Screwtape letters is definitely nice to talk something with a little bit more, not so much angst attached to it.
	Stephan, I'm always glad to talk to you.
	I hope you and your family continue to do well.
	Stay safe and we'll be back with you again soon, I hope.
	All right. Thanks, man. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
	And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
	Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
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	So thank you so much for your support, my friends.

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