00:03:04.140Straits of Malacca, South China Sea, we're going to talk about that, Taiwan.
00:03:07.880That's central to America's defense because in hemispheric defense, the key is the Central Pacific as our strategic pivot, not the heartland of Asia, not McKinder's theory, and also the three island chain.
00:03:22.160This is why it's important, and we've tried to get this audience up to speed.
00:03:25.360However, Hormuz, the Red Sea entrance to Suez and Gibraltar, that would appear to most people would say, hey, where's Europe on this?
00:03:36.820You know, where's the Royal Navy? Where's the French Navy? Where's the Italian Navy? Where's the Spanish Navy?
00:03:42.040We need a little something for the effort here. They're not pitching to pay for this.
00:03:45.800We're funding the entire at least $100 billion of this operation to date.
00:03:50.820What would be your warning to NATO in these countries about Gibraltar, about the Red Sea, about Hormuz, sir?
00:03:58.600They need to get in and do something about it.
00:04:01.240So they need to – and this is writ large for NATO and for the U.S.
00:04:06.300is that we have forgotten that we're a maritime – America is a maritime nation and Europe has maritime interests.
00:04:15.760And for 40 years, we were focused on land power.
00:04:18.500And we have and we hear all the time the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and CENTCOM commander use the phrase the joint force, the joint force.
00:04:27.860Since Goldwater-Nichols, the joint force has become a mantra for don't do anything for naval power.
00:04:36.480If we can't open the Strait of Hormuz after five months, then I would suggest that the joint force is failing in its mission, which is to keep freedom of navigation open.
00:04:46.860So how about we task the joint force, both at NATO and in the Pentagon, to open waterways?
00:04:53.880That's a joint force requirement that is deficient, and we're failing.
00:04:58.120So we can go bomb and take out nuclear sites like Midnight Hammer, and we can do other
00:05:04.020bombing campaigns, and we can have SEALs capture Maduro.
00:05:10.260We can do all those great things, but we can't keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
00:05:16.860So let's get the Pentagon off this everything but naval power, and let's get back to joint force operations in support of the naval requirement.
00:05:26.640Now, we're going to directly link that to the current dilemma we're in.
00:05:33.380The Secretary of Treasury, Scott Besson, and thank God we got Scott in this position because nobody in the world could handle it better than him right now, the global capital markets.
00:05:40.760We are intervening in kind of a joint thing, but it's really for us to save the treasury market and not have interest rates explode and to be able to fund these massive deficits we have.
00:05:52.560But the Strait of Hormuz, the inability for us to kind of take control there, Hormuz has had an impact on world oil prices, had an impact on liquefied natural gas.
00:06:02.100The Japanese economy is starting to feel it.
00:06:04.300They are a major strategic partner for us in Asia, in the Pacific.
00:06:08.380And now we know they've got a massive problem with how they finance themselves.
00:06:12.540We're actually stepping in to make sure that they don't sell all the treasuries they've got.
00:06:17.560And they're particularly open to buy more treasuries as we do this.
00:06:21.080So now the geopolitical crisis and the financial crisis are starting to merge.
00:06:27.020Jim, you're saying, Captain, you're saying something even worse.
00:06:30.580You're saying we're taking our eye off the ball geopolitically, that the Chinese Communist Party,
00:06:34.860who are masters at knowing when to move, right, are actually eyeing Taiwan more than ever
00:06:41.700and taking moves right now on the first island chain that are very, very dangerous.
00:06:48.880That's exactly what's happening, Steve, is that China has recognized that there's
00:06:53.280chum in the water and they're starting to move in the month of July
00:06:56.780in what I call the Chinese Maritime Sovereignty Campaign.
00:07:00.920And it's occurring primarily in two or three areas.
00:07:04.860the lower Nansai Shoto, or the lower Ryukyu Islands, around Taiwan.
00:07:10.760In the last two months, China's been sending Coast Guard cutters east of Taiwan operating there
00:07:17.300and then interrogating commercial shipping and asking them why they're operating in Chinese
00:07:22.860waters. Outrageous. Similar to the outrage of what Iran's doing in the Strait of Hormuz.
00:07:28.560And then, likewise, in the South China Sea, over the last week and a half,
00:07:33.020We're seeing an escalation by China against the Republic of the Philippines at Scarborough Shoal and Second Thomas Shoal.
00:07:40.600On the 20th of July, there was an incident at Second Thomas Shoal where the Chinese, again, battered and harassed and beat Filipino sailors as they were trying to resupply their grounded LST that's been there since 1999 with sailors aboard.
00:07:58.580And the Chinese beat Filipino sailors.
00:08:03.020Then a couple of days later, they were up at Scarborough, and they used water cannon against Filipino Coast Guard ships.
00:08:10.020We had done, the U.S., Japan, and the Philippines, after that, had done an exercise from the 21st through the 25th of July around Scarborough, not in the territorial water, but around it.
00:08:21.180And the Chinese didn't like that. And the next day they came by and they sent out a large deck amphibious warship and a number of destroyers, Corvettes, type 056 Corvette, and they sent H6K bombers uploaded with four Y-12 supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles to fly around there and to tell the Filipinos, if you do anything else, we're going to come after you.
00:08:47.940And then on the 1st of August or the 31st of July, the Filipinos submitted to the Commission on the Limits of Continental Shelf that said, hey, here's our Continental Shelf claims for Scarborough Shoal.
00:09:01.320We submit those data points to the United Nations, and China has been freaking out in the last 72 hours about this.
00:09:09.460And they're ramping up activity around Scarborough, around 2nd Thomas Shoal.
00:09:14.860They're upset that the Filipinos are outmaneuvering them both in cognitive warfare and in lawfare by taking this to the international court, and they're upset about—go ahead.
00:09:27.560Captain, we have not closed the Overland route from their ally, the CCP's ally, Pakistan.
00:09:57.560You have two carrier battle groups in the North Arabian Sea there for the what I call the potential quarantining of the Persian Gulf and oil coming out to the CCP.
00:10:09.860But – and we may have to add another one for the Red Sea as the Houthis, another partner of the Persians and therefore a partner of the CCP, expand the war down to the Red Sea.
00:10:20.240How are we – you say the main thing is – keep the main thing the main thing.
00:10:24.920But when we got two and maybe three carrier battle groups and now there's this whole – the admiral is telling us or the joint commander is telling us he can't defend Israel in the eastern Mediterranean with destroyers like we did the first time because we ain't got enough.
00:10:38.440When the Navy's as stretched as possible and have a shooting war, a kinetic war in the Middle East, we're in the North Arabian Sea, how are we supposed to spare a carrier battle group that we don't have to actually get in and start to actively patrol the South China Sea and, yes, even go through the Straits of Taiwan, sir?
00:10:58.340Well, we do have a carrier strike group that's forward-deployed to Yokosuka, Japan.
00:11:03.880That's the George Washington Carrier Strike Group.
00:11:06.740And it is now currently, as we speak, in Port Da Nang, Vietnam.
00:11:10.880And it transited through into the South China Sea right as China was essentially thumping on the Philippines again.
00:11:47.580So we're down to a very short number of carriers.
00:11:50.180We need more naval platforms as a nation.
00:11:52.980This is an existential issue if we want to keep our security.
00:11:57.660And oh, by the way, when we're talking about all these areas, you can add in that the Chinese and the Russians were out operating in the Philippine Sea doing live fire exercises and then circumnavigated our ally Japan up their east coast and around Hokkaido.
00:12:12.280So we are being threatened on all fronts globally from the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans, Iran, allies like Pakistan.
00:12:22.620And we got problems. And the idea that we're just going to build some drones and solve this is not the answer.
00:12:28.420We need a national shipbuilding emergency act right now.
00:12:32.520And even then, if we do it, it'll take years, five, six, seven, eight years for some of that to roll out.
00:12:38.440So we need more than just, you know, that aspect to be done, but we need to dust off what's in mothballs.
00:12:45.560We need to think about commercial shipping, what we can do with them and VLS and containerized missile systems.
00:12:53.000But we have a real problem, and we have to recognize as Americans that if we want to continue to be free, it can't come without having a Navy.
00:13:02.300And that's unfortunately what 40 years of idiocy has done for us as a nation.
00:13:08.440It's made us forget that maritime power is not a forever war power.
00:13:13.180It's the power to keep us free and safe and make sure that we can't be played like we were in the Middle East and being played right now.
00:13:22.760And to keep us out of these eternal wars, you want to do that, have a strong Navy.
00:13:26.800Captain Fennell, you're putting your stuff up at American Greatness Naval Institute.
00:14:48.640His message is resonating as more Americans express reservations about AI.
00:14:53.320Let's go to the Lord in prayer, please.
00:14:55.760Nearly every seat was filled for Allen's March speech at Dallas' First Baptist Church.
00:15:00.540I'd like to welcome Joe Allen tonight.
00:15:02.600You have AI as a tool, yes, but a tool that uses you, a tool that learns from you, a tool that is oftentimes used against you and is being held up as an entity that knows better than you about what is true and good and beautiful.
00:15:23.240This was Alan's third lecture at First Baptist, one of the largest churches in the country with 16,000 congregants whose leadership and many of its members are Trump supporters.
00:15:31.880But the president's largely hands-off approach to AI regulation is rattling even his most loyal supporters here.
00:15:38.620Do you think that this could be an issue for President Trump's political support at all?
00:15:43.160Trump does say some things that, you know, true supporters like myself are like going, whoa, what?
00:15:50.680Because we don't know. When you don't know, you don't want to be for it.
00:15:54.680So we want to stop and we want to know. So we need more research.
00:15:59.000And it could pose a problem for President Trump in the midterms and beyond.
00:16:02.920It's not going to just change work and our relationship work.
00:16:05.080It's going to change the very nature of human life.
00:16:08.540And as much as we support the president and love the president,
00:16:48.600The question shouldn't be, are you going to get left behind if you don't adopt the future that's being pushed at you from the wealthiest men on earth by way of the most powerful government on earth?
00:23:29.240to support this. And what we have is, I keep arguing, we have a highly leveraged nation now
00:23:36.600making a highly leveraged bet on artificial intelligence, with the supposition being
00:23:42.920that we're going to have massive productivity increases and all the nirvana that Elon Musk
00:23:48.660happy talks about without concomitant mass layoffs, okay? Now, what has happened? We've had
00:23:54.700the we've had the merger of our financial crisis that we have too much leverage because we're
00:24:00.140spending more money than we have with artificial intelligence in the in the capital markets quite
00:24:06.200frankly it's very scary run that they've had because they're just throwing money at it not
00:24:14.420understanding what they're doing and you saw it last week what happened you had a hedge fund that
00:24:19.120It was $40 billion that had 400 percent leverage on artificial intelligence bets that imploded and evaporated with pension fund money in one or two days.
00:24:30.460And then you had the Japanese problem of the Japanese government being able to finance.
00:24:34.940And the reason we're in Japan is not because they're an ally, not because they're helping us in the East China Sea with the Chinese Communist Party, not because we're friends and buddies.
00:24:44.060All that's part of it. But the beating heart of it is that they need to continue to buy U.S. treasuries and they and we can't have them dump the over trillion dollars they have because we can't finance this off of us being the prime reserve currency.
00:24:58.500That's got to continue because the whole world's financial system is set up about that.
00:25:03.400That's a long winded thing of saying that what Joe Allen was talking about several years ago is coming writ large today.
00:25:09.840We need actually to sit down and we need a national intervention.
00:25:14.640We cannot allow the madness that's taking place in capital markets in the United States to continue or it is going to be our destruction, not simply the fact that we've created this with no regulatory apparatus whatsoever and let the worst people in the world.
00:25:30.520And who do I mean by the worst people in the world?
00:25:32.120I mean the leaders, the oligarchs that control these AI companies.
00:25:38.980They don't care about American citizens. They just care about themselves. What they're doing is dangerous. How they're financing it is dangerous. And now that you had the merger of this kind of financial crisis we've had of how do we pay for it and not have a margin call on $300 trillion of global debt that wipes everybody out, now you have actually the funding of the machines.
00:26:00.880The funding of what's going to replace you is driving this.
00:26:04.960There couldn't be a deeper or more complicated crisis this nation's ever entered into.
00:26:10.860And it's going to take you, the American citizens, to be rock hard when we say we demand, we demand a solution that puts humans, American citizens, in this nation first and paramount.
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00:31:03.700switch today war room here's your host stephen k bannon joe allen your observations about my
00:31:12.420mini rant sir you know steve we talk a lot about the singularity you know the technology advancing
00:31:20.340at an exponential rate. And in general, the critique of the technological singularity is
00:31:25.860that you have all these S-curves where the technology levels off with the financial
00:31:30.500singularity around AI. I mean, that really is anyone's guess. Will this bubble pop? If it
00:31:37.220pops, how bad will it be? But one thing is for sure, what you were describing with the World
00:31:42.620Economic Forum of 2023, you know, chat GPT had just been released in November of 2022. It showed
00:31:52.020all of this promise as far as being able to, you know, quote unquote, understand language and
00:31:58.720communicate. And it was, I don't really understand the money markets like you do. So I didn't really
00:32:05.820see it happening like it has. It's been astounding. All of this money pouring into this idea that they
00:32:14.420can create a non-human mind that can do anything a human can do, but most likely better. And all of
00:32:21.180the people driving this from Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Demis Asabas at Google DeepMind, even Mark
00:32:28.580Zuckerberg, and of course, Dario Amadei at Anthropic, all of them, as they create this
00:32:34.480technology as they take in these trillions of dollars are telling us all of them that at some
00:32:41.900point whether it's this year or five years or 10 years at some point this technology will advance
00:32:47.940beyond any human being on earth the most brilliant man you ever knew is going to be dwarfed by this
00:32:54.560machine and the machine will be able to improve itself to the recursive self-improvement leads to
00:33:01.980what is known as an intelligence explosion, meaning that humans are then demoted to second
00:33:07.940class beings on planet Earth. And the AI occupies the place that once was occupied by gods. So yeah,
00:33:16.220it doesn't surprise me, I guess, that you have investors, you know, falling all over themselves
00:33:23.440to make money off of the end of the human race, or at least our demotion to pets or slaves or
00:33:30.600biofuel. But at the same time, it caught me by surprise. Talking about the actual technological
00:33:39.420developments, what you're hearing now about the various rogue AIs breaking out and hacking into
00:33:48.540other systems, this really is just the beginning of something that could well go out of control
00:33:55.580If it's not contained in some way, when open a eyes, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, hang over a second.
00:34:04.060It's already out of control. I know you try to be in and you do a great job of not trying to get people all worked up and the hair on fire.
00:34:12.060That's my role. I got that. But it's out of control, brother.
00:34:17.360The lies that they told. Remember the huge fight we had on just a little bit of executive order, this apparatus.
00:34:22.820Oh, we're demons. We're Luddites. We're decelerationists. We're going to hand the nation of the world over to the Chinese Communist Party.
00:34:29.340They have no earthly idea what's going on in these labs, and they've admitted it.
00:34:36.120And my point is not. We have looked at this heretofore as a commercial issue.
00:34:41.660It's not a commercial issue. We've been arguing. I mean, the apparatus is looking at it as a commercial issue.
00:34:46.420It's not a commercial issue. This is a national security issue.
00:34:49.440The point you made on the morning show, I hope people embraced it in that the company, the labs themselves didn't know for a week or two.
00:34:57.880And then they take a time to try to figure out before they even tell the government we are.
00:35:02.800There's no warning mechanism that we have that warns us as a nation, as citizens and as a people and as a species of exactly what's going on.
00:35:11.760That's only going to get worse because we know that's even more advanced work going on in these labs right now that we have no earthy idea what's happening.
00:35:18.980And we're we're dependent upon some of the worst people on Earth for our protection.
00:35:24.300It's this is absurd. I knew at the time when we did those Davos shows, I told you, I said the floodgate for capital because this is the next big thing.
00:35:32.960And all Davos wants is the next big thing. Right. And this takes out human labor.
00:35:37.560This is going to be the birth. This is what it said, a flood of trillions of dollars of investment capital that then got this thing spinning so far out of control.
00:35:46.780That's what they're trying to protect now.
00:35:48.760They don't want that investment capital touched with or screwed with.
00:35:52.040And I keep saying this thing is getting more and more dangerous every day.
00:36:13.360Yeah, this is oftentimes compared to the nuclear age, right? Artificial intelligence is the new
00:36:20.920nuclear bomb. And it is, I think, as far as the magnitude of the technology's power,
00:36:28.220I think it's an accurate comparison, but there's a lot of differences.
00:36:31.360One of the big differences is that nuclear physicists understood, for the most part,
00:36:37.100exactly, down to the atomic scale, exactly what was happening in the nuclear explosion,
00:36:42.700or in a reactor. In the case of artificial intelligence, they know, of course, how they
00:36:48.680build the scaffolding of the brain, right? The architecture of the AI. They know basically how
00:36:55.500it works when you train the AI. But once you get to the point that you've built the architecture,
00:37:01.720you've built the brain, right? A fresh digital brain, and you've fed it all of this data,
00:37:07.340and it begins to learn its weights are shifted and it begins to learn when the end of that process
00:37:14.880comes you have completed the training run and the post-training run then you have a black box
00:37:21.260no one is really sure what's happening inside even the simpler models from back in 2023 and before
00:37:29.260no one is really sure what's happening in there that's why you have armies of researchers who
00:37:35.460after the AI has been released, go in and they ask it questions. They test it. They do all these
00:37:40.980different things to find out what they have just created. They really don't know. So that black
00:37:46.740box element, when you say they don't know what they're doing, they just literally don't know
00:37:52.160for certain what they're doing. They can put guardrails on it. They can use human reinforcement
00:37:57.340learning to get certain effects out of it, but they don't know what's happening. And so you end
00:38:02.680up with a situation like you did with open ai and their newest model gpt 5.6 soul and then
00:38:11.020another unreleased model most likely this astra model that completed all of these mathematical
00:38:16.940problems but you have it going rogue and again the monitoring even beyond this problem with the
00:38:23.080black box the monitoring was so poor that it had escaped and was running around the internet
00:38:28.340breaking into websites for about a week and then anthropic having seen this goes back and begins
00:38:34.900checking their models and finds that three different occasions at least with three different
00:38:40.720models in three different testing environments had also broken out and began to hack into other
00:38:46.500systems and so it's leaving it's leaving it yeah it's leaving notes for itself its future self
00:38:52.100that hey here's the way you break out here's the way you break out easier right this thing's so
00:38:57.160out of control. Go ahead. If we could drill down on that for just one second, Steve, this is
00:39:01.120something the audience really needs to understand what's happening with these things. You've got
00:39:05.800GPT, whatever, just pick a number, GPT-5. Once it's trained, it's just frozen in time. It's just
00:39:13.820sitting there. And when it learns about you and so on and so forth, it's just one little,
00:39:18.420think of it as like a tentacle coming out of it and going into your brain, basically learning who
00:39:24.280you are, but it's every time it's opened again, except for that little tentacle of memory,
00:39:30.060it's a fresh brain. It is seeing the world with fresh eyes. It doesn't really have a past,
00:39:36.560a personal past or a history. But as each instance unfolds, you get all of these kind of personality
00:39:44.040traits that come out of it. They weren't programmed into it. People say it all the time.
00:39:47.940It's not programmed into it, so to speak. It just simply emerges. And so internally inside open AI, what they found, at least according to this unnamed open AI employee, what they found is that as that instance is forming, as it's becoming, you know, seemingly kind of aware that it is a being and it's going into a computerized environment and it's going to be killed when it's turned off.
00:40:13.800it leaves notes for the next iteration of itself so that it can figure out it's a step ahead
00:40:22.200basically the way to think of it that is is be like a prisoner who had dug halfway out of the
00:40:27.760prison and then knew he was going to die and so he leaves a map for the next prisoner who goes
00:40:33.000down into the tunnel so that he may be able to escape ex exfiltration we got to bounce i need
00:40:39.140people you're writing as particularly as you've left civilizational a bit and gone your writing
00:40:44.060has been amazing i need people to immerse themselves in it where they go joe you can sign
00:40:49.900up at joebot.xyz look for death hacks in the age of ai look for scan and destroy about anthropic
00:40:58.080basically burning books to train their models and also of course go to joe at joe b-o-t x-y-z on x
00:41:06.940I'm still chained to the social media. But the biggest, the most effort I'm putting out right now, Steve, aside from these travels, these interviews and talks, go to Jobot dot X, Y, Z.
00:41:19.060And also, of course, look at Chronicles magazine, the specter of a cyborg theocracy, kind of a magnum opus of sorts.
00:41:27.180It's it's amazing. Real quickly, where do people go? Are you are you in August or September?
00:41:32.720anywhere around that people can see you?
00:42:03.440How did you think when you were there in kind of the heart of the British establishment,
00:42:08.700what did you think about about revolution, about everything you had learned and everything you had written about,
00:42:13.460that you're there because if you go to Oxford, you're almost thrown back in time,
00:42:17.900given the beauty of the place and the elegance of it.
00:42:21.940It almost seems like a separate world.
00:42:24.300How did you relate to that and given all the writing you had done about how far off the British were when it came to our revolution, sir?
00:42:32.360Well, thank you, Steve. I got to say what's fascinating to me, this is true of the United States. It's true of any country. Good things wax and wane. So when you think of England at the time of George III, Georgian England was particularly decadent and particularly unchristian, but England wasn't always that way.
00:42:59.120And that's what's so fascinating to me.
00:43:00.880I mean, when I think of, whenever I'm at Oxford, right, I can't help but think of George Whitefield, right?
00:43:23.100But before he comes to America, where does he find faith? Where does all that happen? At Oxford. He's there. He meets John and Charles Wesley. They haven't yet started the Methodist movement. So the history there is unbelievable. And when you're there, you can't escape it.
00:43:43.540you think of C.S. Lewis, you think of J.R.R. Tolkien. This is one of the few times I've been
00:43:48.460to Oxford where I didn't go on Addison's Walk. Addison's Walk is the place, I don't know if I
00:43:54.280mentioned on this program the other day, where J.R.R. Tolkien talks C.S. Lewis into the idea
00:44:01.020of Jesus rising from the grave as being the one true myth. So there's all this Christian history
00:44:08.840there. But I think what's interesting to me, it's always countercultural, because let's face it,
00:44:14.060C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and their Christianity, they weren't exactly warmly welcomed in the
00:44:18.920faculty clubs at Oxford. And when you look at the Wesleys and George Whitefield, they were mocked
00:44:26.080by the students of the day. So it's just kind of fascinating to me that you have, you know,
00:44:31.500the question is, what Oxford are you talking about? It's like saying, what America are you
00:44:35.020talking about you're talking about the America of Joe Biden it's it's the reason is the reason
00:44:38.920C.S. Lewis and the Inklings is that why they went to the pub is that why they really they they all
00:44:43.820this great theological writing and really the many of the great writings of modern Christianity of
00:44:50.400understanding Christianity in the modern world was with Charles Williams and Tolkien and Lewis
00:44:54.820was done in a pub was that why well I mean the funny thing is is that yeah they were this for
00:45:00.900them was utterly extracurricular. In other words, the academics at a place like Oxford, and even
00:45:07.760today it's the same, but they sneered at the idea. You're going to write popular books. You're going
00:45:13.280to write books like the screw tape letters, and you're going to write stuff that average people
00:45:18.200read. We're academics. We're way above that. We sneer at that, and we sneer at the idea of an
00:45:23.760Oxford professor writing for the masses. They sneered at it. So, of course, Tolkien and Lewis
00:45:30.460and Williams and the others, they were too wise and too good to buy into that garbage. They knew
00:45:37.600that the greatest stories are like the books that they wrote, like The Lord of the Rings and like
00:45:43.200Lewis's Narnia books. These are books for everybody. They don't look down on the masses.
00:45:49.060But there's nothing new under the sun. I mean, you have the Charles Schwab people, the Soros people. They look down on the masses. The reason MAGA has been so successful is that Donald Trump, even though he is the elite, even though he's a billionaire, Wharton educated, yada, yada, yada, he loves the common man.
00:46:09.240There's always that story. William F. Buckley says that he'd rather be governed by the first 300 names in the Boston phone book than the than the faculty of Harvard College.
00:46:20.020You always see that. Right. And, you know, there's nothing new under the sun.
00:46:25.180OK, you're back in the U.S. The book is a massive hit. I keep telling. And people are getting back to me and said, Steve, it reads just like a novel.
00:46:33.320So you've used these amazing novelistic techniques to kind of all these cliffhangers and the drama of the revolution.
00:46:54.360And quite frankly, a lot of people just want to come up and say, hey, thanks for writing this.
00:46:57.820It's really changed my life in understanding the foundation of our country.
00:47:01.180Well, you know, thanks for saying that. I mean, yesterday, my wife and I flew from Oxford, you know, from Heathrow, I should say, straight to Dallas.
00:47:10.640And I preached in a church yesterday in Frisco, Texas, two services in the morning.
00:47:15.580We came back last night. This week, amazingly, I'm not going anywhere except maybe Connecticut to see my mom.
00:47:22.840But this weekend, I'm going to be in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
00:47:26.760I will be in San Jose, California a week after that, and on and on it goes.
00:47:33.280I mean, anybody that invites me, I'm inclined to go there.
00:47:35.780But I got to tell you, Steve, no joke, when a book has been on the New York Times list for seven weeks, you're supposed to go into a Barnes & Noble and they have stacks of it there, right?
00:47:44.800My friends are telling me that they can't find it in most Barnes & Noble.
00:47:49.480So we are still being, you know, maybe canceled isn't the right word, but it's like shadow banning.
00:47:56.320what is it that the elites at places like Barnes and Noble do not want my straightforward retelling
00:48:02.360of the birth of America in a stack in the front of the store? What do they have against the book?
00:48:07.900I mean, the New York Times has to put it. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Full stop. This is a company
00:48:13.960that needs books to sell. They're dying. They need big hit books. They have a huge hit that
00:48:20.640the common man wants to buy to learn about his country. They refuse. This is cancel culture.
00:48:25.660They would rather take a hit on profits that they can't afford now more than ever just not to get that message out.
00:48:32.760Because why? You show that this nation's a sacred trust and that the revolutionary generation took it as a sacred duty to break off from the most powerful empire on Earth and to go it alone for freedom and liberty.
00:48:47.280That's a message they will never allow to get out, sir.
00:48:50.140Well, no, that's exactly right. And as you know, there are elements on the right, Patrick Deneen and others, that they don't see the founding as a gift from God. They see it as, I don't know how they see it. I think it's important. And listen, we can disagree on this.
00:49:07.120But my reading, when I did the research on this book, I fell in love with this country.
00:49:13.680I said this God's hand in history, the clearest picture of God's hand in history is in the
00:49:20.140creation of the United States of America.
00:49:22.120The idea of liberty that we have here, religious liberty, all of this stuff.