Juno News - June 09, 2020


Ep.6 ｜ Sohrab Ahmari ｜ Combatting the woke mob and how conservatives can win the culture war


Episode Stats

Length

57 minutes

Words per Minute

169.70247

Word Count

9,795

Sentence Count

446


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.240 I saw Brian Fallon, who's the national press secretary for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign,
00:00:09.280 put up a tweet saying, defund police. That just shows you how mainstream this idea has gotten,
00:00:15.360 how far left the so-called mainstream left has shifted just very quickly over the past few,
00:00:21.440 just a matter of days. I think this is a really bad idea for communities of color
00:00:26.720 and working class people, poor people, because at the end of the day, as you know,
00:00:32.000 middle class or middle class people can either move to the suburbs and the urban ultra-rich can
00:00:37.520 hire their own private security. The only people who are going to be left in the urban cores with
00:00:43.840 no one to defend them are the poor, the working class and communities of color. So this is just
00:00:49.040 irresponsible beyond measure. I mean, I can't begin to wrap my head around it.
00:00:53.520 America is on edge. The political polarization of the past several years has boiled into violence,
00:01:00.080 looting and rioting on city streets, while police stand down and the mainstream media and corporate
00:01:05.680 America gaslight the public by defending violence, blaming you and I, and insisting that America is
00:01:12.560 an irredeemably racist society. Anyone who disagrees gets mocked, ridiculed and canceled by a rabid mob of
00:01:20.720 woke tyrants. We're witnessing a sort of societal breakdown, a peek into what our society would look
00:01:26.800 like absent authority and order. This anarchy is being propelled by toxic forces in our society,
00:01:33.280 driven by a malevolence towards traditions, nihilism about the future, arrogance of the
00:01:39.120 expert class, and a profound ignorance towards history and human nature. There is no better person
00:01:45.680 to talk about these grave and important issues than my guest today on the True North Speaker series.
00:01:50.800 Saurabh Amari is an American author, columnist, and editor with the New York Post. Saurabh lives in
00:01:56.880 Manhattan and recently wrote about his terrifying experiences on the front lines of the riots in New York
00:02:02.240 City. He watched as mobs destroyed his neighborhood, praying they would spare his building and fearing the
00:02:08.240 worst about what they might do if they get upstairs and inside where his wife and children were sleeping.
00:02:14.480 Saurabh and I talk about how to combat the malevolent woke mob, the importance of courage,
00:02:20.320 the future of the heart and soul of conservatism, and how to win the culture wars, the importance of
00:02:26.640 faith and tradition, and his journey from living in a totalitarian Islamist theocracy to being an avowed
00:02:33.600 atheist to being received into the Roman Catholic Church. Saurabh has been described as one of the
00:02:39.360 finest minds and writers of his generation, and if you watch our conversation today, you'll see why.
00:02:56.960 Well Saurabh, it's such a pleasure and such a delight to have you on the True North Speaker series.
00:03:00.960 Thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure, Candice. Thank you.
00:03:05.440 And so you're living in New York and Manhattan. I imagine that was one of the worst places to be
00:03:10.640 during the coronavirus just because there was so many cases there and so much lockdown that there
00:03:16.560 really isn't a lot of places to go and to leave, you know, to be pent up in a little apartment with
00:03:21.280 kids can't be the best situation. And then to make matters worse, you had the sort of worst of the
00:03:27.280 George Floyd protests turned very violent riots. You wrote about that and highlighted that in
00:03:34.480 your column with the New York Post. So can you tell us a little bit about what it's been like in New
00:03:39.760 York over the past two weeks or so? So the past, the first week of the two week period you want to
00:03:47.600 talk about was just the regular lockdown, which we've been under now for three months.
00:03:55.360 And New York City is a wonderful city. It's my favorite place in the world. But it's the kind
00:04:03.360 of place where if you can't go to restaurants, you can't go to the park, then it's unbelievably oppressive,
00:04:10.960 right? You have these, you're surrounded by tall buildings, not much greenery. And you're stuck
00:04:17.840 inside. Or if you're outside, you're just going to do pick up food or grocery shop. But that's it,
00:04:22.960 you have to come back inside. So it's, it's been very grim. I think it's taken a psychological toll
00:04:28.800 on a lot of people. I was lucky. My wife and our two children, you know, we've, we've made it work.
00:04:35.280 They're young enough where they don't need school. And bottom line, we've been able to make it work.
00:04:40.800 And I was very lucky because one of our neighbors on our floor, he moved to his house in the Hamptons.
00:04:47.120 So he gave us his apartment on the same floor. And I've been using that as an office. And so I had a
00:04:53.280 book deadline for much of those three months, and I was able to meet it, I wouldn't have been able to
00:04:57.760 meet it but for this guy giving us his, his apartment. So we've been under lockdown, like most of
00:05:03.360 much of the rest of the developed world. Like I said, but in New York, it's especially grim,
00:05:07.360 just because of the fact that the city is dense, it's tall buildings, and you don't have an outlet
00:05:14.720 of any kind of the kind you're used to. But then over the past week, you know, we've had we had the
00:05:20.240 George Floyd protests, and that got quite scary. I mean, Monday night, this past Monday was
00:05:29.280 the worst of it. I went out maybe at 1040 at night, just before the 11 o'clock, quote unquote,
00:05:36.800 curfew. I say quote unquote, because it was such a toothless curfew that night. But at any rate,
00:05:44.080 I went out to Lexington Avenue, and I just saw some sort of gangs of young, mostly young people,
00:05:53.120 shattering store windows and just looting right on Lexington Avenue. And there were police officers
00:05:58.560 there, but weren't confronting them. I don't know why I think either because they felt they would
00:06:03.440 get overwhelmed, as has happened around the country in places, and around the world now in London as
00:06:08.400 well. Or they had bigger fish to fry elsewhere, and they just couldn't be bothered with with just
00:06:13.920 minor looting. So, so then I went back inside my apartment. And then a few minutes later, we heard
00:06:21.040 gunshots shots outside. I think for your viewers who may have heard about New York as a big,
00:06:26.800 scary city, they may think we hear gunshots all the time. But in fact, we don't. I mean,
00:06:31.920 New York has been getting safer and safer, beginning since the early 90s. So the gunshot
00:06:37.920 was shocking, it was not something where I would say, Oh, it's just New York, you just hear that,
00:06:42.240 you don't. So I decided to go downstairs again. But this time, our, our doorman said, you know what,
00:06:48.320 if unless you absolutely have to go outside, it's very dangerous outside. It was shocking to me,
00:06:53.680 because when I saw Lexington, the looting on Lexington Avenue, I thought, well, they won't
00:06:57.840 come over to our block, because we're sort of in this out of the way block. No sexy stores, nothing,
00:07:03.680 nothing cool. So I didn't think that they would come to our block. And then as soon as he said that,
00:07:08.320 I looked outside. And sure enough, they were young, mostly young men running back and forth
00:07:13.120 direction. And so I decided to make a column of it. I basically spent the night with my doorman
00:07:21.440 downstairs at the lobby as they locked the door. One of them, his shift ended and eventually left the
00:07:27.280 other one. He and I stood, you know, watch as it were through the night. And there were some close
00:07:34.320 calls where these groups would stop, they would look through the glass doors of our entrance into the
00:07:40.240 lobby. But then luckily, each time they decided that it wasn't worth it. It's just not a very,
00:07:46.880 it's not a very opulent looking lobby. So they left us alone. But you know, my doorman was shaking,
00:07:52.320 I was pretty, I was pretty nervous. I mean, I'm, I'm from the Middle East, as we'll talk about later.
00:07:58.080 I've reported from some hairy places in the world. But it's, it's somehow different when it's in your own
00:08:05.200 home in the city that you think is, is, is safe. They did eventually smash two windows,
00:08:12.800 the salon and a restaurant, and then a third around the corner, a drugstore. But they didn't
00:08:19.440 attack our house. But I just, I felt the kind of powerlessness. Because obviously, we can't,
00:08:24.640 we can't own handguns in New York, it's nearly impossible. Our guard can't really do anything,
00:08:30.080 our doorman. He's not a, he's not a ninja. So he can't, he wouldn't be able to fight back.
00:08:35.200 So I just had all these thoughts running through my mind is, if they decide to come in,
00:08:39.200 would they just smash up the lobby and leave? Would they beat us up? Would they want to go
00:08:42.720 upstairs to ransack apartments? So that feeling of insecurity, and then this wider sense of, of
00:08:51.680 breakdown of the sense that the New York City Police Department is not in charge of the city.
00:08:56.880 At that point, it felt like order had broken down. It was, it was very discomforting and disturbing.
00:09:05.360 One of the details I wondered when I read that column was, you mentioned how your doorman didn't
00:09:11.600 have any, they weren't armed. And obviously, like you just mentioned, it's next to impossible to own
00:09:17.600 a handgun. I mean, it's the same situation here in most Canadian cities or in Toronto. And I know that's
00:09:22.000 particularly the case. But I was sort of surprised to learn that even your doorman, I mean, they're sort of
00:09:26.640 hired private security. And I mean, I don't know what would have happened if a gang of, you know, 12
00:09:32.960 people who any one of them could have been armed, would show up, I don't know that you'd really want
00:09:36.800 to try to use an arm to defend yourself in that situation, or it's better to just, like surrender,
00:09:41.840 essentially. But is that some kind of a rule or a law that even security guards and doormen aren't
00:09:47.520 allowed to be armed in New York? So I just began to look into our laws because I now want to try to
00:09:57.120 get some sort of firearm in case I need to defend my family. And so I'm not an expert on this, but I
00:10:06.080 have looked at the application for it for a handgun. And it's quite the process of hours and hours of
00:10:11.840 training and your police department has to sign off. And you have to have a reason for one and very few
00:10:20.400 applications are approved. I think for shotguns and rifles, it is easier. But then you can't,
00:10:28.400 you have to keep those at your residence. So the average New York doorman is not armed. The average sort of
00:10:37.280 Manhattan doorman is not armed. Interesting. Well, I mean, what you're describing is a total
00:10:42.320 breakdown of order, like you said, and I think we've all seen it in sort of dystopian films and
00:10:47.280 novels that sort of break down and the chaos that ensues, but you just never expect it to happen
00:10:51.920 here in North America. And then on top of this, Saurabh, we're also hearing calls by these left wing
00:10:58.000 activists to defund the police, abolish the police. In Canada, we were talking about this before we went live,
00:11:04.320 you know, it's not even really a radical left idea anymore. Even the national post,
00:11:07.840 which is supposed to be a conservative newspaper here in Canada was promoting that idea on its front
00:11:12.240 page over the weekend. So it just seems to me like such, such a stark difference from reality to what
00:11:19.760 they're proposing. I mean, we had this night in New York where you had complete anarchy essentially,
00:11:24.480 and a breakdown of order because the police were either too timid to act or because they were so
00:11:29.920 overwhelmed that they simply couldn't. And yet we're, we have these people calling for sort of a
00:11:34.080 permanent state of no police or defunded police or sort of whatever they call a paradigm shift,
00:11:40.160 where we just, instead of having policing, we have social workers and civil servants doing that kind
00:11:45.040 of job. I mean, I just can't understand how they don't see the danger in allowing, in giving people
00:11:51.360 sort of a free pass to this. What do you make of this movement and the sort of increasing volume of
00:11:56.320 calls? I think even your mayor in New York, Bill de Blasio, is sort of starting to entertain some of these,
00:12:02.560 those ideas. What do you, what do you make of it? So Rob, this has been a popular idea on the
00:12:10.800 fringe of the hard left in the United States that is now shifting to the mainstream. I saw Brian Fallon,
00:12:20.400 who's the national press secretary for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, put up a tweet saying,
00:12:28.000 defund police. That just shows you how mainstream this idea has gotten, how far left the so-called
00:12:38.160 mainstream left has shifted just very quickly over the past few, just a matter of days. Because Brian
00:12:44.560 Fallon is a Clintonian, right? And Clintonian is a byword for a kind of center left liberalism,
00:12:52.400 you could even say the kind of law and order left. So if he's saying defund the police, it just means
00:13:00.240 that the activist class that's been pushing this for years has really made enormous headway just in,
00:13:09.200 as I said, a very short span of time. In Los Angeles, Mayor Garcetti made the first move toward it,
00:13:15.920 where he cut, I think, 150 million from the LAPD's budget recently. Then Minneapolis, where George
00:13:24.960 Floyd was killed. And it was a horrific incident. I condemned it volubly at the time and continue to
00:13:30.800 do so. There's no justification for what that officer Chauvin, however you say it, did to Mr. Floyd.
00:13:38.080 But now their city council has unanimously, or I think with a veto-proof majority, as I understand,
00:13:48.400 has passed the dismantled the police resolution. I don't know, I think Mayor Frey is pushing back
00:13:56.880 against it. Even as far left as he is, he knows how insane the idea is. So we'll see how that plays
00:14:02.640 out, but they're talking about dismantling the police. And as you said, Mayor de Blasio here,
00:14:07.280 who had resisted such calls, I mean, again, he's pretty far left, but he's also a mayor,
00:14:13.360 and he knows the realities of urban governance and urban security. But now he's talking about
00:14:19.120 reallocating funds and so forth. So I think this is a really bad idea for communities of color and
00:14:26.480 working class people, the poor people. Because at the end of the day, as you know,
00:14:34.080 middle class or middle class people can either move to the suburbs, and the urban ultra rich can
00:14:39.680 hire their own private security. The only people who are going to be left in the urban cores with no
00:14:46.160 one to defend them are the poor, the working class and communities of color. So this is just
00:14:52.720 irresponsible beyond measure. I can't begin to wrap my head around it. You know, at the peak,
00:15:03.200 when New York City was really bad, when New York was really New York in the 90s, we had an average
00:15:11.440 of six murders a day. And as a result of very proactive policing, community policing, what's called
00:15:18.800 broken windows policing, as you know, we've gotten that rate down dramatically to where it's, you know,
00:15:28.000 the murder rate is less than one a day, fewer than one a day. So those are police officers, NYPD officers,
00:15:35.840 who are saving black lives. There are many more black lives saved by policing than are killed in these
00:15:44.080 rare instances where there seem to be unjust killing. And what I'm talking about is what
00:15:52.880 all people, especially vulnerable people, the poor, communities of color need, which is in order for
00:15:58.960 them to thrive, to begin to move forward with their lives, they need basic order. And they shouldn't
00:16:04.080 have to live at the mercy of criminals. And the data just shows, you know, since this wave of
00:16:09.440 broken window style policing took off in the United States, at least beginning of the early 90s,
00:16:17.120 and especially its greatest test case in New York, violence has gone down, armed robberies down,
00:16:22.640 rape was going down, all sorts of violent crimes were going down. And who is the beneficiary of those,
00:16:28.080 but not especially not black lives. So they don't have a basis in the data for what they're calling for.
00:16:36.160 They don't have a basis for it in reason. It's completely irrational. Do they mean abolish
00:16:41.920 police altogether? How is a social worker, a caseworker, a psychologist, how is he or she going
00:16:47.840 to catch murderers? How is he or she going to confront drug dealers? How is she going to confront
00:16:57.200 robbers and burglars and gangs? So it's so bonkers. I mean, I'm happy to bring data as we just did,
00:17:04.800 but I just can't begin to, to fathom why anyone would think this is a good idea.
00:17:12.240 Yeah, I agree. It just seems so trendy and reactionary and sort of boiled down to our sort
00:17:18.320 of hashtag culture where, you know, it's, it's a slogan, it's an Instagram post and you have enough
00:17:23.920 sort of critical mass that agree. And, and then you sort of have the, the corporate boards saying,
00:17:29.440 yes, we agree too, because we don't want to lose business. And we don't want to appear like we're not
00:17:33.920 on the right side of history here. I think that's the same trends driving it that drive the sort of
00:17:39.920 cancel culture. And we've also seen here in Canada, a lot of instances of the sort of cancel culture at
00:17:46.000 play over this. One of the former leaders of a former conservative party went on the CBC and said
00:17:52.560 that there's no systemic racism in Canada. And he swiftly got fired or he resigned from the few
00:17:59.520 corporate boards that he was sitting on and he's no longer, he said he's no longer commenting in
00:18:04.400 political life anymore because the backlash has been so severe over what was really a pretty
00:18:10.160 straightforward argument that most Canadians would probably agree with. But in this moment,
00:18:14.960 you know, everyone's walking on eggshells and you can't say anything that goes against what the
00:18:19.120 mob says. So I think this leads to a question I have about something that I don't know if you created
00:18:24.400 it or if you're just sort of the one that's popularizing it. But you recently took the
00:18:30.400 courage pledge on social media on Twitter. And I think it's a wonderful message. So maybe you can
00:18:36.000 elaborate a little bit on what the courage pledge is and what it means.
00:18:39.680 Yeah, I mean, I, you know,
00:18:42.720 post the riots, I began to see the sort of stuff we were just talking about, Candace, the
00:18:48.400 rush to destroy people's careers and to silence them, to shut them out of the public square for
00:18:58.800 thinking wrong thoughts, whatever they may be. For, for a quarterback here, Drew Brees is just,
00:19:05.040 he's just saying like, I defend the flag. And he's come under enormous pressure for saying,
00:19:09.920 I defend the American flag or for standing up for the American flag. And so what I worry is
00:19:18.400 that people, ordinary people will come under pressure to either be to be silent or to proactively
00:19:26.160 mouth slogans or make symbolic gestures that they don't believe in. So, and, and the fact is that
00:19:40.000 most American conservatism, I don't know about Canadian conservatism, but much American conservatism has
00:19:44.960 always been concerned with repression meted out by the state, by public actors. But the sort of
00:19:52.800 censorship and pressure we're talking about is not meted out by the state. It's often, it happens
00:20:00.320 on the digital public square, which is privately owned by large corporations. And it involves private
00:20:06.560 actors, like people's employers, large corporations, you know, you didn't make XY, you didn't make XYZ
00:20:13.280 statement in support of, let's say this abolish police movement, and your failure to say something
00:20:20.800 suggests that you're complicit, you know, racism or police, you know, violence and so forth.
00:20:30.960 That's a pretty scary place to be. And the kind of typical conservative libertarian methods of trying
00:20:39.680 to resist it don't work, because those often have to play out in the, in the courtroom, where you have,
00:20:45.040 for example, a constitutional right to free speech. But if your employer, under pressure from an activist,
00:20:52.880 to you, or just for whatever reason, decides to punish you for, for example, objecting to the idea
00:20:59.520 that you are a racist, even you know, in your heart, you're not a racist, but they call you a racist,
00:21:03.840 and you have to sort of accept it. And if you reject it, you lose your job, or you're demoted, or whatever,
00:21:08.640 there is no constitutional defense against that. And so, and it all happens very quickly. And so I'm
00:21:15.440 just worried about Americans losing their rights under press of largely private forces. And this
00:21:21.680 is something conservatism, you know, I've been pushing to try to change how conservatives think
00:21:27.520 about this stuff. But much of the conservative world hasn't thought this through, and doesn't have
00:21:33.120 a defense for it. So I think in the long term, to come up with political solutions, where private actors
00:21:42.160 can't engage in this kind of censorship, and this, in terms of how to do it, we can get to the nitty
00:21:49.520 gritty. And there are people who are better placed than I am to think about how to do it legally
00:21:53.920 speaking. But in the long term, we should do that. But in the meanwhile, we need a kind of politics of
00:21:59.760 courage and solidarity of the kind that sustained, you know, the dissidents I admire, people like
00:22:06.160 Natan Sharansky under the Soviet Union, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, or, and others of the kind who said,
00:22:14.720 no, I will not, I will not live by lies. I will not, I will not put up that, that sign in my green
00:22:23.040 grocer, you know, the Václav Pavel's famous essay about the green grocer, who's in a communist state,
00:22:29.200 he has to put out a sign that says workers of the world, he of course doesn't believe that the party
00:22:34.160 by then no longer, the Communist Party no longer believed in it. But there was this pressure to put
00:22:38.800 it up. And it's just your acquiescence, that you are, you will mouth the official slogans, whether
00:22:45.360 you believe in them or not. That's the kind of spirit I think we need now against this kind of
00:22:51.120 woke totalitarianism. And so I came up with this pledge very quickly, just on Twitter,
00:22:55.200 because I just don't want to see people, because the more of us capitulate, the stronger that these
00:23:01.840 forces get. So I, and the precepts are very simple. You could look it up on my Twitter accounts,
00:23:08.400 twitter.com slash Sorab Amari, S-O-H-R-E-B-A-H-M like Mary A-R-I. And it begins with the premise,
00:23:16.960 it begins with the premise that I believe in the inherent dignity of all human beings. For me,
00:23:21.920 as a Christian, that's, that's, that's built into my worldview through, through Genesis 127,
00:23:31.680 that God made man, woman in his own image. So that's, that just should make it clear that this
00:23:39.840 is not about being obnoxious or inflammatory. You know, the, what happened to George Floyd
00:23:48.240 truly was a horrific thing that cries out for justice. And, and racism is real, there is such
00:23:55.120 a thing as racism. And so I'm not at all suggesting that any claims about racism are just bogus
00:24:00.400 wokeness. There is such a thing as racism, and it, it is a porn. But that said, you know, we shouldn't,
00:24:07.120 we shouldn't submit to outrage mobs online. We shouldn't join them, even if it's satisfying,
00:24:12.000 even if it's a cause that you believe in. Think about whether or not it's worth it to join the mob,
00:24:16.640 because every time you do it, the mobs get a little bit stronger. It says, I will stand for the truth,
00:24:23.920 not this idea of my truth or your truth, which is, which is a kind of postmodern nonsense.
00:24:30.240 Either something is true or false. Yeah. Yeah. Like we have personal experiences and you can have
00:24:36.960 my experiences or whatever, but that doesn't make it objective truth. There is a difference between
00:24:41.760 the truth and what, what people like to say now, which is my truth, like often it's when it runs
00:24:48.880 against empirical realities when they say it, right? Like they've made an accusation that's
00:24:54.720 that's failed to persuade people because of the factual deficiencies and they'll insist,
00:24:59.120 well, it is my truth. No. You know, I will not hang that office sign, that sign on my office door
00:25:06.800 or make that symbolic gesture, whatever it may be, if I don't believe in the message. Now, for example,
00:25:11.280 I've been very moved by some of these gestures of people kneeling. You might be surprised.
00:25:15.920 You know, I saw last night, you know, police officers washing the feet of black activists.
00:25:20.160 Now, this country does have, in the United States, does have a history of really brutal,
00:25:24.960 systematic, de jure racial injustice, slavery, discrimination. And so it's kind of collective
00:25:32.000 gestures. If they're voluntary, it's very beautiful. And for a Christian, you can't help
00:25:36.960 but notice the kind of Christian, almost liturgical aspect to it. But the kind of forced quality,
00:25:46.000 you do this, otherwise you lose your job. You do this, otherwise you're socially ostracized.
00:25:50.400 You do this, otherwise you lose all your friendships. You do this, otherwise you lose
00:25:54.560 your right to speak in the public square. This is wrong and terrifying, and we should have the courage
00:25:59.440 to resist that. And so on. So that's basically, I don't know if it will start a movement or whatever,
00:26:06.000 it may just peter out as a hashtag in 48 hours. But I just felt like I needed to back up myself and
00:26:13.680 my fellow Americans because I sense a kind of Jacobin march. And I don't want to live in fear.
00:26:27.680 I'm a responsible voice of the public square. I'm not a bomb thrower. But if I have an opinion,
00:26:35.680 I've thought it through. You know, I don't want it. And the thing is, people like you and me,
00:26:39.920 Candace, as you know, we can withstand it, right? We can withstand it. But I worry about people who
00:26:45.600 are like me, well-intentioned, you know, not racist, not bad people at all. They just have come to a
00:26:51.840 different conclusion on a matter of public concern. But they feel like if they voice it, they lose their
00:26:57.520 livelihoods. And I don't know what to do for those people in the long term. Like I said, I think we need
00:27:02.240 some political solutions that will run against the typical conservative, you know, free market,
00:27:08.560 rah-rah-rah ideology that we've had on the right for the past 40, 50 years. But in the short term,
00:27:17.840 we need a kind of spiritual energy and a spiritual courage.
00:27:22.880 Well, I definitely commend you on that, Sarban. I encourage all of our viewers and listeners to
00:27:28.000 go check it out and consider taking this pledge because we've seen it happen so many times up here
00:27:33.360 in Canada. I know it happens all the time in the US where someone says something sensible,
00:27:37.840 but maybe, you know, not the most articulate way, but you know, they mean well. And nonetheless,
00:27:43.120 they get their whole livelihood and their life destroyed in ways that you can't really imagine
00:27:48.960 how terrible it would feel to be mobbed by, you know, a gang of people who have no interest in
00:27:55.440 taking a good faith interpretation of what you're saying. All they care about is their next victim.
00:28:00.000 Well, I think this leads up nicely sort of to another thing I want to talk to you about,
00:28:04.320 which was just sort of the state of conservatism in America, but it also impacts what's going on
00:28:09.760 up here in Canada. You wrote a pretty high profile essay last year called Against David Frenchism.
00:28:17.040 Now for viewers and listeners who don't know who David French is, I'll try to characterize him in
00:28:22.160 a sort of general way. You know, he's an evangelical. He writes for the National Review. He was part of
00:28:29.520 the sort of Never Trumper movement. I think he leans more to the libertarian side of things. But anyway,
00:28:36.800 you just sort of said, you know, we're experiencing like a five alarm cultural fire here,
00:28:43.600 and we don't really have the patience or the time to be led by these sort of... I don't want to
00:28:49.360 misqualify what you said, but sort of, you know, you're opposed to this sort of genteel,
00:28:54.640 conciliatory conservatism that's led by libertarians. So can you explain a little bit more about what
00:29:01.520 your issue is with David French and what your sort of call to action was about the sort of spirit?
00:29:06.720 Well, I mean, I think, look, the essay Against David Frenchism came out a year ago, and there were,
00:29:15.040 it was famously described as the essay that launched a thousand think pieces. And so if you
00:29:21.040 want, you can find the original essay, and then you can go down the rabbit hole and read as much as
00:29:26.160 you want of the sort of commentary it generated. So I will put it in general terms where I think
00:29:35.440 conservatives like me part ways with the old largely libertarian consensus. And it is this, that
00:29:45.520 that all politics right understood, look at our classical Greco-Roman tradition and then the Christian
00:29:55.920 tradition, politics aims at securing the substance of common good. And
00:30:02.880 and whereas we've had in, in the United States, especially, but around the West, a consensus
00:30:12.640 really emerged, I could say, with the advent of liberalism, maybe 300 years ago or so.
00:30:17.840 But it's become too dogmatic, especially in the postwar years, where politics is only about maximizing
00:30:28.080 individual autonomy. And there's a sense that we don't know what the good is, what is the good of,
00:30:34.800 what are the goods proper to families? What are the goods proper to churches? What are the goods proper to
00:30:39.680 political communities? And it reduces all disagreements to issues of rights and procedure? If the procedure
00:30:48.560 is, is sound, then even if the substance of outcome is horrible, it's okay.
00:30:53.840 And so for example, I mean, I would mention, you know, the explosion of pornography, right,
00:31:06.560 which is something we don't talk about. The conservatives kind of gave up on it in the US,
00:31:10.400 certainly, I don't know about Canada, Europe, as well, I mean, there are attempts to push back,
00:31:15.760 but on the whole, you know, a very extreme account of free speech that wouldn't have passed musters with
00:31:23.920 the framers of our Constitution. It is really of recent vintage, let's say 50 years ago, has,
00:31:33.040 has come to permit ever more extreme pornography and ever more, you know,
00:31:39.040 children, you know, show, you know, my son, who's now three years old, statistics show that by the,
00:31:47.520 before he hits puberty, there's a 90% chance he'll have encountered hardcore pornography.
00:31:53.760 Now that, you don't need to listen to me, I'm okay, I'm a Catholic and a conservative,
00:31:58.320 but you don't listen to me for that. You can look at what the data shows about how pornography
00:32:03.760 wires the brain, disturbs children, so on and so forth. But a kind of conservative,
00:32:08.960 conservative consensus has made its peace with it because it wants to maximize individual autonomy.
00:32:15.920 And so I, and I think a wider cohort of mostly young, mostly but not entirely Catholic conservatives,
00:32:24.240 are looking back at this older tradition of Cicero and St. Augustine and Thomas of Pinus,
00:32:32.800 where we think about politics as the quest, as the common quest for the good, the good being something
00:32:37.920 knowable. It's not something subjective that, you know, I think, I think, you know, that Satanism is
00:32:43.680 good. You think, you know, Islam is good and you think nihilism is good, whatever. We can all just,
00:32:50.160 you know, that the good, certainly political goods are knowable and therefore legislatable.
00:32:56.880 And I think the secondary line of thought in our way of thinking is that precisely some of the things
00:33:04.960 that worry our libertarian friends, the repression that they worry about, rightly, and we do too,
00:33:13.280 we just talked about the courage pledge, is oddly enough a product of a kind of disordered, excessive
00:33:20.720 account of individual autonomy, right? So, for example, you can look at the transgender issue.
00:33:26.560 And, you know, it began as the, as a, a quest for people, a very small number of people who
00:33:35.920 suffer from gender dysphoria, where their interior sense of who they are doesn't match their physical
00:33:43.040 sex, embodied sex. And so, you know, you have to, the surgeries emerged 70, 60 years ago that we had
00:33:52.160 the first cancer of a surgery and so forth. But at some point, the quest for, for autonomy for these
00:33:57.680 people became, came at the expense of, of, of historic freedoms for the majority, right? So, for example,
00:34:07.600 it wasn't enough that so-and-so be allowed to transition, but you, Candace, in your heart of
00:34:14.160 hearts have to express the belief that that person is not only a person who identifies as the opposite
00:34:21.040 sex and has transitioned to the opposite sex, but was the opposite sex all along, which is this bizarre
00:34:26.800 Orwellian, weird, retroactive changing of someone's, someone's sex, where we begin, and then this
00:34:32.880 language became of sex that signed at birth as though, you know, XX and XY chromosomes are somehow
00:34:38.640 a suspect category. And it really, you really are, um, truly yourself when you come to decide what your
00:34:45.360 sex is, as opposed to something that you inherit from nature. It's the excess of liberty that's come to,
00:34:51.360 in this case, actually threaten your, your, our, our freedom. Or you say, for example, the example we just
00:34:58.720 talk about, uh, the excess of, of power, uh, autonomy for corporate actors has actually come to narrow and
00:35:09.280 stifle real freedom of speech in our public square. Um, and so on. I mean, I can come up with other
00:35:16.080 examples, but the point is this, that somehow the, the, the working out of the original liberal idea of,
00:35:22.800 of maximizing autonomy without limits, without a conception of the good that you would inherit
00:35:28.480 from, from religion and classical philosophy has become itself a kind of source of oppression.
00:35:34.080 And so I think there's a cohort of conservatives, of which I've just won, who are beginning to
00:35:39.360 rethink some of these things. And, you know, they use different labels, you know, um, post-liberal
00:35:46.480 is a term that's, that's in favor, but I, look, I think the past year or so, but especially the past
00:35:56.400 three months or so has given, has been, has been a boon for, for that view, right? Because look,
00:36:03.280 look at the dogma of free trade. The dogma of free trade was unquestionable on the American right.
00:36:08.880 Um, and now you see, you see the working out of its effect. Um, we, we broke down every barrier to
00:36:16.720 trade with a Chinese communist regime. And the ultimate result was that we became imprisoned
00:36:21.920 in our homes due to a Chinese virus. Um, so again, you see how the, um, the idea of freedom or liberty
00:36:29.840 without limits, without barriers, paradoxically leads us to being, to losing authentic freedom.
00:36:37.200 So I think that's broadly speaking is, is, is my pitch for a new kind of conservative.
00:36:43.360 I, I, I think it's, it's brilliant. You've talked about a lot of things that I've been thinking about
00:36:47.680 too, like sort of initially, you know, when I was in university and when I was younger,
00:36:52.560 I would think of sort of the left being oriented towards focusing on equality and the right as being
00:36:59.520 oriented towards focusing on liberty and freedom. And, and, and then it wasn't until Jordan Peterson came
00:37:04.640 along and I started really listening to his lectures and reading his books that, that he,
00:37:08.320 I sort of saw a different problem identified. I think it's the same one that you're talking about,
00:37:12.240 which is that the right shouldn't solely be focused on maximizing liberty because then, yeah,
00:37:16.960 you lead to some of the things that you're concerned about, like drag queen story hour at libraries,
00:37:21.840 focus on children or, or, you know, telling little kids that they can choose which, which gender they,
00:37:26.640 they choose, um, you know, based on how they feel. Um, and, and it is sort of,
00:37:31.200 sort of, you know, we need to orient more towards like we've talked, like you've talked about order
00:37:35.680 and, and finding purpose and, and, and responsibility and all these sort of greater
00:37:40.080 goods that it kind of came out of fashion. So I think there is a movement, especially among young
00:37:44.640 people who, who are desperate for, for these kinds of lessons to be taught because they've just never
00:37:49.440 really heard them before. They've never really heard someone say, you know, that there is sort of a
00:37:53.760 deeper purpose and, and, and, and, you know, you need to find, you need to fulfill your life through
00:37:58.160 responsibility and purpose, not just through making yourself happy and finding things that
00:38:02.640 make you feel good. So I, I definitely applaud you for, for, for kind of speaking out and trying
00:38:08.640 to articulate this, this second, uh, this new path. I mean, with, with, with Mr. Peterson, I mean,
00:38:15.200 I, I have, I, I confess I haven't read his book, but I've watched his, his videos and so forth.
00:38:20.400 And you just see particularly a kind of cohort of young men who've never been told about moral purpose,
00:38:26.400 we've never been told about, or, you know, the good of order order, orderliness is a good thing.
00:38:31.440 It's not, it's not order is a fennet is the friend of true freedom. It is not its enemy, right?
00:38:37.120 Because it, it, it order allows true freedom to emerge and liberates us from chaos in which you can't
00:38:45.440 find real freedom. Um, and you know, I, I mentioned him particularly, you know, I'm deeply engaged with his work,
00:38:53.440 but there's a reason sort of however many millions of, of copies of books he sold mainly to, to, um,
00:39:02.960 I would argue the children of, of 1968 boomers who heedlessly tore down all sorts of barriers in the
00:39:11.680 name of individual autonomy in the aftermath of 1968. And, and their children and their grandchildren are now
00:39:20.000 the worse off for it because they, they don't, they don't have a sense of what is the good life?
00:39:26.560 Where is my stable ground? Because in order to really make a free choice, you have to have this sense
00:39:32.800 that you stand on stable ground and that there is a sort of path stretching behind you and stretching
00:39:40.000 ahead. So you're in continuity with something, some tradition, some vision of the good. Um, and then you can
00:39:47.040 make it a genuinely kind of free act. If you're just constantly told to keep your options open,
00:39:54.400 then you actually don't exercise your freedom. You're just always, um, and that's why you see,
00:39:59.840 I think in my cohort and younger, these people who, you know, they're, they've been dating for eight
00:40:07.440 years. What are you doing? Are you going to, are you going to get married or not? You know,
00:40:11.040 but I got to keep my options open. You know, they, so you're not actually exercising your freedom.
00:40:16.160 Your, your freedom is always in a kind of potential state. It's because as a society,
00:40:20.400 we don't, we don't say what's, what is the right path. We just say any path is right. Well,
00:40:24.800 yeah. And just try to maximize your freedom for as long as you can. And then before you know it,
00:40:29.200 you're sort of, you're in midlife and disappointed and angry. Um, so again, there's, I think there's,
00:40:35.440 there's a real ferment and we should welcome it. We'll see how it all plays out.
00:40:43.520 Absolutely. And even, I mean, the, the sort of the movement behind Jordan Peterson is, is,
00:40:48.160 is a lot of people who are sort of apolitical. They're not people like you and I that are
00:40:51.840 very tapped into the culture wars and every single issue. They're people who sort of don't,
00:40:56.960 didn't, didn't really engage. And I think obviously we saw some kind of a backlash, uh,
00:41:01.680 with the election of, of Donald Trump in 2016. And you recently put on Twitter that,
00:41:06.160 uh, we sort of have the perfect, uh, this is what you said. We have the perfect ingredients for another
00:41:10.400 massive wave of backlash, backlash politics and the perfect villains, rioters, corporate,
00:41:16.480 corporate woke tyranny, public health experts who turned out to be left ideologues mobilized. So
00:41:23.120 what, what, what, what exactly do you mean by mobilize and what do you, what do you foresee in the,
00:41:26.720 in the next sort of, uh, backlash here? Well, I mean, I, I just think that,
00:41:31.600 you know, ever since maybe Brexit was the first real explosion, you've had, um, uh, a
00:41:39.200 successive wave of political movements that try to challenge the kind of liberal consensus of the
00:41:45.280 left and right that we've been living with, um, since the end of the cold war, arguably since the
00:41:50.080 end of world war II, um, where there are movements that emphasize the communal good. They, they're populist.
00:41:57.360 They want to attain corporate power often. Um, and I think Donald Trump capitalized on that, uh, various,
00:42:04.960 uh, conservative and national conservative nationalists and Christian democratic parties in
00:42:10.240 places like Hungary and Poland and Brazil are rode that wave to power. And I just think that the current
00:42:19.840 situation where, um, um, it was the free traders in some ways that gave us this virus by, by, uh, but
00:42:28.480 creating the kind of borderless world that they created, um, and by empowering China, by, uh, welcoming
00:42:35.600 it into every institution and thinking that that would perform the Chinese regime, but clearly it didn't.
00:42:41.600 They just made our societies more susceptible to China's, uh, way of life and its pathologies,
00:42:49.280 uh, its political pathologies. Obviously the Chinese culture is a tremendous culture that I admire, but
00:42:54.880 it does have its political problems. Um, you know, and then you had a lockdown, um, you know,
00:43:02.960 for which we suffered all, we all suffered greatly. We were told it was all, um, uh, so that we could,
00:43:08.960 we're all in this together was the slogan. Um, so you should forego having more than 10 people at
00:43:14.640 your grandmother's funeral. You should forego, you know, children should be out of school with all
00:43:19.440 the pain that it imposes on parents, all this suffering. Uh, and at the, at the slightest protest
00:43:25.920 for people who wanted to reopen their businesses were called, you know, the worst things. And then you
00:43:31.520 have a, uh, you have a left-wing protest and immediately all the, all the public health authorities
00:43:36.480 had turned on a dime and, and no protesting is the greatest thing you can do, even amid a pandemic.
00:43:42.880 Um, all this should fuel, it should fuel the kind, I think it will continue to fuel the kind of
00:43:50.640 politics that, um, that Brexit and Trump, uh, set off or launched in, in, in 2016. But I just worry that,
00:44:00.960 um, uh, president himself, I, I mean, I, I support him. I don't think he's been performing well. I
00:44:08.560 think he, I don't think he's been leading the way that he's capable of leading. Um, and I don't know,
00:44:15.280 I'm not hearing these messages articulated as well from the political leadership. People like me say,
00:44:20.880 maybe people like you say it on, on Twitter or in columns, but I'm not seeing them. They don't
00:44:25.600 notice what, you know, and then you add in the abolish the police things. Uh, this is all very
00:44:31.520 potent for a kind of, uh, uh, broad based populist backlash against, because these forces. And I just
00:44:38.880 want to see the right capitalize on it in the, in the years, in months and years ahead.
00:44:43.920 Yes, certainly. I mean, the, the worst thing to me, Saurabh is just the idea that, you know,
00:44:48.560 if, if we had a sick, uh, relative or loved one in the hospital, we weren't allowed to go
00:44:52.880 and visit them. I mean, my, uh, sister-in-law had a baby six weeks ago, and at first they wouldn't
00:44:58.240 even let my brother into the hospital when his own daughter is about to be born. Eventually they did,
00:45:02.000 but, but that kind of stuff is happening all over the place. And then suddenly, uh, a hip,
00:45:06.640 you know, trendy protest happens and, and, and public health experts are actually, you know, like you
00:45:11.200 said, kind of endorsing it. Yeah. And saying, it's okay, as long as you don't shout or whatever,
00:45:15.760 which is raging. And also, I mean, I just get so annoyed. I just went to the grocery store this
00:45:20.480 morning and I still have to wear the mask and all the rigmarole and the six feet.
00:45:24.480 And it just feels like it's all broken down. What's that? What, why are we, why are we starving
00:45:29.120 businesses of customers and destroying, you know, tens of thousands of businesses? You know,
00:45:34.560 they, at some point they won't be able to come back. You can't, an economy isn't like a spigot where you
00:45:38.880 can turn it on and off whenever you want. They're, they're out there together by the tens of thousands
00:45:43.040 yelling and on top of each other and sweating. So what gives? I mean, it just shows you every,
00:45:48.960 every kind of liberal authority is, is ideologized. Every single one of them has an agenda in a way
00:45:56.240 that, um, uh, ultimately I think is very bad for them. It's very discrediting. I mean, this rage,
00:46:02.240 I have a platform and I can kind of voice it. I know lots of other people who don't, and they're just
00:46:06.880 sort of stilling and it's just waiting for the right political leader to, to tap that, you know,
00:46:13.920 these people, you know, it's people saying let's abolish the police. Right. Right. We'll see what,
00:46:21.120 what kind of forces the right can muster. Yeah. I feel like deep down people have to just be
00:46:26.720 observing this, shaking their head. Like, you know, I live in a pretty liberal area in Toronto and I
00:46:31.600 go out to the park with my son and my husband and, you know, you kind of hear the people murmuring like,
00:46:36.800 oh, it's so ridiculous that Stockwell Day, who's a Canadian politician I referred to earlier,
00:46:40.880 it's so ridiculous that he got pulled from his corporate board or, you know, why can't I go out
00:46:45.120 for dinner? But these people can go smash windows in downtown Toronto and stuff. It's like, you know,
00:46:50.720 it really is building up and same with, I mean, in Canada, the approach that the government has really
00:46:55.040 taken is let's just let the experts lead the way. And so we have these experts that are trotted out
00:47:00.720 and they're also very ideological. They were very opposed to closing the borders at first because
00:47:05.440 they said closing the borders will create stigmas. And they were much more worried about creating a
00:47:09.840 stigma against Chinese people and Canadians of Asian ethnic background than they were about public
00:47:15.680 safety and public health. And same thing now that, you know, they flip flopped on whether you should
00:47:20.400 wear a mask or not, they flip flopped on whether or not you can go to go to protests. And, you know,
00:47:25.520 I just can't imagine how it wouldn't wear on the public, even people who aren't super engaged and
00:47:30.480 tapped into politics wouldn't just sort of say, well, wait a minute, enough is enough. Well,
00:47:34.640 sort of, I want to be respectful of your time. But before we go, I really just wanted to talk
00:47:39.120 about your recent book, because you have a very interesting personal story, obviously, very
00:47:43.760 intelligence, interesting person, but you also have a very interesting background. So you grew up in
00:47:49.200 Iran. But interestingly, you described yourself as an atheist. Well, my husband's also from Iran. And
00:47:55.840 I know a little bit about what life was like after the after the revolution there, his family fled
00:48:01.600 when he was about 12. So I was in the 90s. Anyway, Iran is a theocratic, theocratic Islamist
00:48:07.840 dictatorship, and there are strict Islamic blasphemy laws. So if you convert and disavow Islam and become
00:48:15.600 an atheist, I mean, you get hanged. So before we get into your conversion to Catholicism,
00:48:19.920 let's, let's first talk about how you became an atheist.
00:48:25.840 Uh, I mean, that's, that's a long story. And I encourage people to, to read the memoir I wrote
00:48:31.760 about it. The God of Islamic Republic, I have a, as a human being, I had a yearning for God,
00:48:38.560 as all human beings do, we're a religious animal. And so when I was very young, I still kind of vaguely
00:48:47.440 prayed to an old man in the sky that I imagined. But then, you know, by the time I was 12, 13,
00:48:52.400 I only associated God with, you know, judicial floggings and, and amputations and, and, and,
00:48:59.600 um, you know, uh, giant murals of, of various, I told us and so forth, uh, looking, scowling down
00:49:07.200 at us. Um, and I saw enough hypocrisy too, where, you know, uh, we would go out, um, to,
00:49:17.360 the north of Iran, where a lot of Iranians like to vacation, you know, you would get caught with
00:49:21.440 alcohol and technically it's against the law, but usually if you just pay the morality police,
00:49:26.960 they, they leave you alone. And that's just, you know, again, talking about hypocrisy of, of officials,
00:49:32.480 how it damages their authority to, to see that made me think, okay, God is just this sort of public
00:49:37.920 hypocrisy that you have to put up with. And for a certain kind of Iranian of my milieu, kind of
00:49:44.080 middle class, urban educated, just to be an intellectual, to be a thinker meant to be an atheist.
00:49:51.360 Of course, you know, like you would be, uh, uh, to believe in God is sort of for the rooms,
00:49:58.320 for the provincial people. Um, and so I became an atheist, you know, overtly so at age 13. And as
00:50:04.960 it happened, we were immigrating to the United States. I had, um, an uncle who had settled here
00:50:10.000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. He got us a green card. Um, so that kind of
00:50:17.600 into a land of, of atheism and secularism. Um, as it happened, obviously, as you know, America is,
00:50:24.080 is, is, it still has, as even though the culture is secularizing, it has deep pockets of religiosity.
00:50:29.280 And I landed in one of those pockets and I very much rebelled against it. And I went through it.
00:50:34.320 You know, I think people will read the memoir, maybe recognize themselves in it, but, you know,
00:50:38.240 I read Nietzsche and it led me to Marx, became a kind of Marxist. Um, the, I, I, I read enough and
00:50:47.280 had a sort of series of, I would say, providential experiences where I encountered the mass and,
00:50:53.520 and I read Pope Benedict's books, uh, that I thought myself back, you know, through grace.
00:51:01.440 I mean, uh, I thought myself back to believing in, in a God and then a personal God and ultimately
00:51:07.200 the God of the Bible and ultimately as one encounter in the past in a Catholic church. So
00:51:13.680 that's the story of that book. Well, it's great. I, I definitely recommend our, our viewers take a
00:51:21.040 look. Oh, I, I personally know a lot of people who have also converted to Catholicism, although,
00:51:26.000 uh, I would say that they mostly come from sort of, uh, you know, uh, dissatisfaction
00:51:32.080 of, of different sort of Protestant saints mostly. I mean, I have, I have it myself where, um, you know,
00:51:37.280 my family is Anglican and you can just see the sort of, uh, moving away within the Anglican church,
00:51:43.040 away from the actual text of the Bible and actually taking positions that stand in pretty
00:51:49.200 stark contrast. So you sort of have this like trendy political movement where, you know,
00:51:53.520 at any time that there's something that goes against what the, what, what, what the Bible says,
00:51:57.920 you sort of get rid of that part and, and, and change and talk about social justice instead. And
00:52:02.320 I think there's been a lot of people that have sort of had enough of that and that's sort of why they
00:52:06.400 go to Catholicism. But I think Catholicism faces the same challenges with confronting sort of the trendy
00:52:12.800 liberal social, um, and, and political movements. So did, did you, do you see that happening?
00:52:18.880 This sort of politicization of the church in, in, in Catholicism or of your experience has been,
00:52:24.400 uh, I would be very careful. I would say that, um, the church has a two million millennial tradition of,
00:52:31.840 of, of thinking about politics and thinking about political order. Um,
00:52:37.040 and, uh, it's a very rich tradition, right? Uh, because if the church inherited in some ways the
00:52:46.720 political structures of the Roman empire and well, how do you relate, uh, uh, you know,
00:52:52.080 a church that sees itself as, as, um, the sole church of Christ is as the, as the one, uh, medium for,
00:52:59.680 for human salvation with the grimy realities of, of, of, of, of life in, in, in late antiquity,
00:53:08.240 as the church found itself. And so that tradition is, I think, um, so it's not that I would say the
00:53:16.960 church shouldn't be politicized because I think the church is, is also a political entity and has
00:53:22.880 spent a lot of time thinking about what is the good, what is the common good, um, how should
00:53:29.440 church and state, uh, react. And I just think that that tradition, um, which if any of your viewers
00:53:36.880 are interested, it's a, it's a long book, but a very beautiful and enjoyable one you can find,
00:53:42.320 um, for example, in a book like City of God by St. Augustine, um, that tradition is a lot richer than,
00:53:49.360 uh, the kind of liberal identity politics you're talking about. But just because liberals talk about,
00:53:56.320 you know, social justice and talk about it in maybe disordered or, or stupid ways,
00:54:01.760 doesn't mean the concept itself. And the concept of social justice is a very, uh, is an old and noble
00:54:07.360 one, right? It's how do we achieve justice together? How do we give each his due, his or her due? And how
00:54:15.840 do we God give God his due? And how do we do it all in community, in a political community together?
00:54:21.040 These are really rich and wonderful questions. And, um, so, you know, I'm not one of these people
00:54:27.920 who says, oh, the church should intervene in politics. Well, of course, you know, uh, St. Ambrose,
00:54:33.680 uh, the, the Bishop of, of Milan who received St. Augustine into the church when he converted to,
00:54:39.600 to Catholic Christianity, he famously, uh, imposed a, uh, penance on the Roman Empire,
00:54:47.840 Emperor Theodosius. When Theodosius had had a whole bunch of writers summarily executed in a way that
00:54:53.840 outraged a lot of people, uh, St. Ambrose threatened him with excommunication unless he did acts of, acts
00:55:02.000 of penance. And he did. And that is a, is a kind of monumentally underappreciated moment in, in world
00:55:10.480 history where the Roman Emperor, who his predecessors were considered God Emperors, now does penance
00:55:19.520 before a different kind of God, uh, who humbles himself before a successor of, of, of the Apostles.
00:55:26.800 And it's a crucial moment in Western history, uh, it, because it suggests that even political power
00:55:36.560 has to be limited by spiritual authority. Now, if that's the kind of thing we're talking about, uh,
00:55:42.000 that tradition of thinking about, um, church and the church and politics, um, it is at the foundation
00:55:47.600 of Western freedom, um, and it's very noble and respectable. Um, um, but if it's a kind of,
00:55:56.400 yes, I do roll my eyes when some, some prelets in the church just sound like trendy, you know,
00:56:03.440 SJWs online. Um, but my concern is to recover the notion of, of true justice and not to give up on it
00:56:13.280 just because there's a kind of silly PC movement that uses the same word, justice, justice itself or
00:56:19.040 social justice is not an iffy, is not an icky term to me. I completely agree with the idea of justice.
00:56:27.120 Obviously justice is, is foundational. And I think you gave a great example. Um, my, my, my, I would
00:56:32.880 always cringe, you know, I spent some time last over the last couple of years in California and I was
00:56:37.040 always trying to find, uh, the equivalent that we don't have Anglican or you don't have Anglican
00:56:41.520 churches in the U S so we're looking. Episcopalians. Yeah. We're going to different
00:56:45.680 Episcopalian and sometimes they would, they would base their services off of the United Church of
00:56:51.200 Canada, which is our basically, um, you know, a church is basically full of left-wing atheists.
00:56:57.200 Um, but, but, but they still like to go to church. So I had a hard time finding, um, uh, sort of
00:57:02.720 community that, that was actually, yeah, talking about the, the core issues like justice and God
00:57:07.600 instead of just the latest sort of, we've been triggered by Donald Trump and let's complain
00:57:11.840 about it for an hour on Sunday morning, which is obviously not what you, you can do that on Twitter.
00:57:18.560 Exactly. Well, so I really appreciate your time. I think that our, um, viewers really enjoy reading
00:57:23.680 your book from fire by water. So definitely recommend picking that up and thank you for,
00:57:27.920 for lending us some of your time. My pleasure. This is great. All right. Take care. Thank you. Thank you.