RadixJournal - Chasing the Christian Prince

00:00:00.000 so we are live just a few technical difficulties last time i think it was michael tracy's

00:00:08.680 fault but this time it's my fault so it all evens out in the end but um from what i can tell everyone

00:00:16.520 can hear me so we can go um first off we have a special guest and that is hitler hated christ

00:00:25.440 not our guy on twitter and on sub stacks so um welcome what what should i call you exactly i

00:00:34.200 maybe i shouldn't be saying hitler hated christ special guest is great if you just special guest

00:00:39.500 no but uh in all seriousness you can you can call me ethan my first name is ethan so ethan

00:00:44.460 right i went on i went on jeremy boring show two three weeks ago at uh face docs to myself so

00:00:50.220 everybody knows my real name we all know that you are in fact a jew

00:00:54.300 that's right no i thought i found someone who i think might even like me was posting that and i

00:01:01.740 was like what are you talking about this anyway yeah there was a there was a guy named i think

00:01:06.340 it was uh it was a see-through at all on twitter and uh yes he was yeah he was posting my picture

00:01:11.620 and all this and all all the replies were people like this is the most uh this is the most like

00:01:16.140 ss you know einstatz group and commander looking guy yeah yeah it was just like full-on and then

00:01:21.900 that's true like you know i i did i was posting my 23andme and stuff because it is it is pretty

00:01:26.620 funny how german i am for what i what i do on the oh you're very german okay that's good yes yeah

00:01:31.640 that is very yeah i i saw you on jeremy boring's show and i was pleasantly surprised because i

00:01:38.020 didn't know if you wanted to you know step over that obstacle and our boundary and kind of um

00:01:46.040 do an interview and things like that because some people are kind of more comfortable on twitter but

00:01:50.480 I was glad to see it. So I invited you on as well, because I think we could have a productive

00:01:55.840 conversation. But before we start, why don't because I'll just lay out the land here of what

00:02:03.440 I was planning on doing. So I am interested in your perspective on, you know, Hitler and

00:02:13.220 Christianity and Catholicism and all that went on. And I think that would be interesting. I'm

00:02:20.480 on the religious right, I guess, I think maybe these are two things. There's the religious right

00:02:27.000 that has been going on for my entire lifetime. And then there's this new resurgence, at least

00:02:32.960 online, of Christian nationalism. And that is something that I would like to hear your thoughts

00:02:38.260 on. And I think we should go into the Curse of Ham. I mean, it's very timely.

00:02:45.960 um is that is that something you've been talking about lately or you've just been following well

00:02:50.600 i've always i've always hated ham i mean even with cheese uh so i mean i it's been a long

00:02:58.440 term thing with me yeah uh but no i saw um joel webben's acolyte uh pastor partridge i guess

00:03:06.860 is his name is um i listen as i was hiking this morning up a mountain i actually listened to his

00:03:12.860 Curse of Ham exegesis.

00:03:16.360 And so I thought that would be a very timely one 0.99

00:03:19.440 that maybe we could, you know,

00:03:21.300 sort of understand larger things

00:03:24.420 by looking at that smaller thing.

00:03:26.760 But before I do that,

00:03:28.560 why don't you tell my audience,

00:03:32.500 you know, who you are,

00:03:34.100 as much about your background

00:03:36.060 as you feel comfortable,

00:03:36.960 just to, you know,

00:03:39.600 let them get to know you a little bit.

00:03:41.080 yeah for sure so i started this twitter account i guess um maybe two or three years ago and the

00:03:49.160 reason reason i initially started it was that i was reading a lot of world war ii history i was

00:03:54.060 reading specifically about the intersection between nazi germany and theology because i

00:03:58.460 knew several different guys who were in some very dissident spaces at the time guys that were

00:04:04.040 involved in groups like in europa which turned into american identity movement as you're probably

00:04:08.640 well aware and um well she's having you know probably hundreds of hours in person conversations

00:04:13.960 with these types of guys about the intersection of christian theology and what had been sort of

00:04:19.820 coined at that time as the the alt-right all the way back in 2016 and then has morphed into what

00:04:25.940 we're sort of living through today and in a lot of these conversations i just felt lots of there

00:04:31.420 was a lot of um there were a lot of beliefs about hitler and world war ii and the ideologies at play

00:04:36.920 there that I knew were probably not accurate to the historical record and so that's why I started

00:04:44.800 looking into it really so I could have these discussions with my friends in real life better

00:04:48.360 and I created a Twitter account somewhat as a place to just dump all that stuff and I expected

00:04:53.780 there to be a very small amount of people that really cared about that because I really thought

00:04:58.980 that the theology side of online discourse and the political side of online discourse back then

00:05:06.120 really were not the same spheres like people really didn't go back and forth between those

00:05:10.700 very much i didn't see there being much of a interest in that and then when i created my

00:05:16.000 account is like every time i posted some new document from somewhere with some new quotation

00:05:20.420 from hitler recorded by gerbil or rosenberg or somebody else um related to christianity it just

00:05:25.740 got more and more traction and what was was odd is i kept running into these weird circles that

00:05:32.380 that at that stage were really early in some of the Christian nationalist stuff

00:05:36.720 as we know it today of pastors and commentators and stuff

00:05:40.760 that took issue with my perspective on Hitler in World War II,

00:05:44.880 which is really odd because up until this point,

00:05:47.580 at that point of the process,

00:05:48.940 everybody that I had known had been pretty fringe.

00:05:53.680 These are guys that were reading Blood and Soil.

00:05:57.760 These are guys that were reading Evola.

00:05:59.200 These are those guys. 0.91

00:06:00.660 And so when I saw individuals like your Dale Parches or your Joel Webben or some of these other people start to have real issue with me online or like kind of butt heads with me over some World War II stuff, it was really odd because I was sort of watching in real time these things that I had seen presented by these guys years ago, what I feel like being laundered into Christian spaces and repackaged.

00:06:25.740 That is interesting. 0.64

00:06:27.580 I felt the same thing.

00:06:29.880 Because Joel Webin and company, they are much more mainstream than maybe you would like to imagine or certainly than the people who preceded them and sort of got these talking points and ways of thinking going.

00:06:48.360 They've sort of broken through in a way that's remarkable, but they do.

00:06:52.480 I've heard these talking points as well.

00:06:54.580 Like they are sort of rehashing, you know, 2010s Christian or white nationalism, basically.

00:07:03.860 Right.

00:07:04.140 And all the guys back then that I knew that was more into that, that were more into that kind of thing were dudes that were super radical traditional Catholics.

00:07:12.820 In fact, the first time I went to a Catholic church, because I'm Reformed, but I went to a Catholic church with a friend of mine.

00:07:19.220 And he gave me, he was in some of these circles, and he gave me the full spiel on the tradition of the Catholic church and the unity of the Catholic church and all this stuff.

00:07:27.640 And I was like, oh, that's interesting.

00:07:29.300 And I came to find out later that the church that he had taken me to was actually an SSPX church.

00:07:35.200 And so I was being presented sort of this view of this unified Catholic faith and also wrapped up in a lot of these, I'll call them alt-right positions, because at the time that's what they would be referred to as.

00:07:50.100 And I come to find out that the church that he was presenting to me as being this sort of unified Catholic thing wasn't even in communion, full communion at least with Rome.

00:07:59.080 um so those sort of guys were always around but seeing it come into especially protestant circles

00:08:04.880 seeing it come into more mainstream evangelicalism in the last couple years especially um has been

00:08:11.420 very odd to me um because i had i had i had dealt with this stuff for so long on the level of

00:08:18.840 basically everybody on my side of the christian right understanding that they were off base

00:08:24.460 and now you have like facebook boomers that are like well how do you feel about the talmud you

00:08:29.400 know like all this stuff and it's just very odd you know odd to see that it is truly odd yeah

00:08:36.600 things that were very minor 15 years ago that i know about just because of my career career's

00:08:43.960 length um are on facebook now yes it's uh kind of scary um so is that is that just algorithm or do

00:08:50.600 you think that there's a big like shift that's taken place because i i think there's a big i go

00:08:54.880 back and forth on that okay i don't think it's just the algorithm i mean i think the the i can't

00:09:01.540 imagine that the algorithm is seeking out those words exactly i i do think that the algorithm

00:09:08.580 wants to inflame you so it's it's finding that no i i think there's been a long there's sort of

00:09:17.100 been a long march through the conservative media ecosystem basically of things that i would hear

00:09:24.280 at the charles martell society in 2008 and i'm now hearing coming out of the mouth of webbin or other

00:09:32.820 people it's pretty interesting right or or like amrin amrin you know race doctrine repackaged in

00:09:41.160 an evangelical christian framework which is just bizarre because you've got these guys like webbin

00:09:45.220 who are young earth creationists who are sort of like you know like they're sort of like re

00:09:52.260 re-engineering backwards the the racial positions of what amarin was you know back then um but

00:09:59.720 with epigenetics and it's just very bizarre man oh my gosh he's into okay yeah that is and there

00:10:05.540 seems to be a trend because even when you you mentioned patriot front i mean i was around um

00:10:13.440 Nathan Damago and and people like that and I think as early as 2015 definitely 2016

00:10:19.660 and it was Identity Europa like E-V-R-O-P-A like it was Nietzschean you know Bronze Age maybe or

00:10:30.620 Evolian you know it it was all it was very pagan maybe not in your face but it was definitely

00:10:36.240 there and then the identity or american identity movement was a sort of optics you know twist on it

00:10:45.480 where it's like oh no we're american nationalist and now i i saw a a video that i believe was

00:10:52.680 released by uh patriot front where they're praying there's a red white and blue crucifix oh yeah

00:11:00.680 yes yeah it was a little bit odd they branded it with their colors it was very really weird

00:11:06.560 yeah i'm offended as a lapsed episcopalian i guess but it's just um but there was a very

00:11:14.840 congregationalist quality to it all it's like you know our leader thomas we ask god to bless him

00:11:22.420 and lead him for the truth of christ in our nation it's there seems to be a long-term trend

00:11:29.660 of things emerging among people who,

00:11:33.660 you know, like Amron or Jared Taylor,

00:11:35.500 who, you know, I don't know exactly

00:11:37.720 what Jared Taylor believes,

00:11:39.200 but, you know, fair to say he's agnostic,

00:11:41.900 perhaps an atheist or so on.

00:11:43.940 Definitely from an evolutionary.

00:11:46.660 Yes. Yeah.

00:11:47.720 I mean, again, I don't know exactly.

00:11:49.800 I'm just saying it's fair to say he's an agnostic.

00:11:51.820 He's a secular guy.

00:11:53.940 And things start, and as I was too in 2016,

00:11:58.180 unquestionably, and still am.

00:11:59.320 But so you have it start there, and then it kind of morphs into a Christian congregation. And I've seen this a number of times where I think it's a trend or maybe I wouldn't say inevitable, but there seems to be a path that it travels. I find that interesting.

00:12:18.320 Yeah, I think it's, I mean, there are a lot of people that were probably in evangelical spaces, grew up as evangelicals, who what they saw was their interests and what really invigorated them on the internet started to, that they realized was not in step with their Christianity.

00:12:38.380 And rather than sort of bring their politics in line with their Christianity, they were like, well, let's bring Christianity in line with the stuff that really, you know, the crusader meme and whatever on the Internet.

00:12:51.080 And that's been a weird thing, even in reform circles that I run in, because there's this whole discussion.

00:12:55.840 You've got guys with Jerusalem cross and all this stuff.

00:12:59.680 And traditionally, as reform guys, you know, the crusades were not something that we looked upon positively.

00:13:05.700 Right. I mean, promising salvation for going and dying in a war was not exactly compatible with a with a Calvinistic soteriology.

00:13:15.760 Right. That just doesn't work. Yeah.

00:13:19.120 Very interesting stuff. But that does seem to be where we are.

00:13:22.740 And also the evangelical Christians or the Christians right in my lifetime were so enthusiastic about George W. Bush.

00:13:31.620 And I think they had maybe their own heresies during the 2000s, you know, where they were in charge, even on domestic policy.

00:13:40.380 They were at least consulted for the compassionate conservatism that the George W. Bush promised.

00:13:46.540 And they were the last defenders of, you know, in every human heart, there's a Democrat waiting to get out.

00:13:54.080 And we don't mean of the party. We mean a true blue American.

00:13:58.420 And I'm reminded of a line that I guess I won't repeat from Stanley Kubrick's full metal jacket within every you know what there's an American just waiting to get out.

00:14:07.580 And they were the sort of last believers in that missionary posture that America was in at the time.

00:14:15.440 And that went away and was demoralized. And they weren't quite sure about Trump at the beginning, probably more back in 2015, 2016, maybe more in line with Cruz, Trump, you know, who is he? Does he support abortion? Is he really Christian? You know, is he a philandering sex maniac?

00:14:36.880 You know, fair questions. But they really did get on board. And by 2020, you know, the Paula White is speaking in tongues to save the election. 1.00

00:14:51.980 And now the sort of post-Trump Christian nationalist movement, they might criticize Trump, and they do, to be fair, and they're not in favor of the war in Iran, et cetera, et cetera.

00:15:02.620 But they're they're coming in the wake of Donald Trump. And I think they're sort of promising like full throated Trumpism, you know, Trumpism without Trump that's beyond Trump and even Trumpier than Trump.

00:15:15.000 And so it's it's an interesting it's an interesting phenomena.

00:15:20.780 Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of those people that you're describing sort of sort of absorb the, you know, there's no political solution idea. And so when they won politically with Trump or, you know, in 2016 and then recently, they sort of turned around and were like, oh, you know, I've been saying there's no political solution. I can't really change my mind now.

00:15:45.120 um and this is one thing that my friend john harris mentioned just uh i was listening to his

00:15:50.500 show earlier today talking about patriot front where it's really odd where you know if you look

00:15:55.040 at it electorally if you look at it in terms of policy there's a lot of wins that have happened

00:15:58.500 with trump from the right wing um in the last year or more and it's very odd for your normal

00:16:06.940 gop voter like i think about like my dad who's a boomer gop guy to to see all these these patriot

00:16:13.120 from people marching on Washington, and they've got upside down American flags. And it's like,

00:16:17.280 well, who's in power right now? What is the deal here? And it's sort of just revolution at any

00:16:25.300 cost. It has this real vitality to it in the sense that everybody's really excited.

00:16:31.320 But the issue I have largely with it is I don't know what they're excited for. I can't get a lot

00:16:36.040 of these guys to explain to me what they really want to do in terms of policy. Webin and a lot

00:16:42.320 of that sphere will go out and and say all of this the the same rhetoric that i heard from the

00:16:48.040 alt-right back then um about mass deportations and stuff like that sort of hint hint nudge nudging

00:16:53.200 even beyond just illegals obviously you know i deport 100 million but no none of those guys will

00:16:58.520 have a conversation about what that means in terms of policy right are you are you is the is the is 0.99

00:17:03.500 the actual policy goal here we're just going to deport all nons like is that really what the what 0.99

00:17:08.360 the plan is right um and i haven't seen any of these guys in that in that sect or sphere have 0.98

00:17:14.180 that conversation and i don't know if it's because they're all just sort of hiding a power level

00:17:18.840 right now or what the what the thinking is um but there has to be there has to be an end game to it

00:17:25.000 there has to be a shift but maybe there's not maybe it's all just totally reactionary slop i

00:17:28.720 don't know yet yeah i i don't want to bash patriot front the whole time but there is a sort of like

00:17:37.360 what are you doing what do you want question that comes up and and i understand at least i i don't

00:17:44.960 think they're a bunch of federal agents to be fair but i understand sort of why fox news viewers

00:17:52.400 would think that and it's a like are you are you protesting trump like is that why you're doing

00:17:59.540 this you're making a demonstration against the government is this a trump cheerleading squad

00:18:05.300 what do you want? Reclaim America? What does that really mean? You sound like you're saying

00:18:14.280 Republican talking points on some level of strong families and so on. And then on another level,

00:18:21.680 there does seem to be a little bit of a revolutionary verve to it, but none of it

00:18:27.060 is articulated and so it does become a a goulash and they seem to sort of do it for the sake of

00:18:36.720 doing it like we've we've got to go more it's this is my community we go and march but you know it's

00:18:42.340 like well there's some downsides of marching and second a and then b i don't a protest without

00:18:49.020 something to be a protest without a without a target um it's it's kind of like a word that

00:18:56.500 doesn't reference anything in the real world it's just gibberish and i i think yeah i'll stop

00:19:02.100 bashing patriot front because i i don't want to make it about this and um and so on but i i do

00:19:08.080 get a lot of these vibes like i don't know where this goes i don't know where this would go in a

00:19:14.680 you know coming kamala harris and gavin newsom administration or i i don't know where i don't

00:19:21.280 know what they're the hell they're doing that's yeah no and that's i agree with you i mean that's

00:19:26.400 that's kind of my perspective on it i i had posted i went into the their their telegrams and pulled

00:19:31.620 some of their content that was promotional material for their group and um a lot of the

00:19:35.980 stuff that they do and i guess you don't want to bash patriot front so we can move on you could

00:19:39.560 control whatever you want to move on to but you can do a little bit i i'm just saying i don't

00:19:44.340 want this to be some like you know we're just right right dunking on people who aren't here to

00:19:48.720 you know i understand yeah yeah and and that's and that's fair enough but um one of the things

00:19:53.480 i posted was just how many how many of their self-promotional videos consist of just vandalism

00:19:58.060 right um and it's it's like going out and spray painting the sides of buildings i think some of

00:20:03.520 them are government buildings some of it was like glass on phone booths and stuff and i was like i

00:20:08.240 posted and i was like what does this remind you of and somebody replied and told me and they were

00:20:12.680 like it reminds me of coney 2012 oh that's interesting and i was like that's actually

00:20:18.180 really interesting or it's like you know this it's sort of driven by this i've been i've been

00:20:22.500 really invigorated by this thing on the internet that's a cause but i don't really know what i

00:20:26.680 want other than just like to yeah make it known you know i mean i went to africa and fought on

00:20:34.320 behalf of coney i was so invigorated by that youtube video yeah it was a while ago i got i

00:20:40.400 survived i he was actually the bad guy i forgot wasn't he or he was the good guy yeah no no he

00:20:46.660 was a he was a bad guy kony oh he was like an african warlord his back that's what i misunderstood

00:20:52.180 the video and oh okay yeah and volunteer when you advocate for the antichrist you know i don't know

00:20:58.340 i don't know what really you know what you're gonna say right that's true um what what do you

00:21:06.340 think the status of christianity and nationalism is and and maybe all like on a deeper level maybe

00:21:16.360 And maybe I'll set this up here with some of my thoughts about it.

00:21:22.740 I think that I don't think that Martin Luther set out to create a nationalist movement.

00:21:30.260 However, I do think that a lot of nationalist energies were present in his Reformation and certainly came in the wake of it.

00:21:42.040 He wanted to reform the Catholic Church.

00:21:44.640 He did not want to end the Catholic Church or leave it. And one complaint, among many others that strike me as quite reasonable, is that the German lands aren't represented in this monopolistic Italian church, and we sort of need our day in the sun.

00:22:05.680 And there are, you know, clear elements of a, I don't, it's maybe too strong a word, but like a decolonization effort that went alongside Protestantism where, and you can see how this works.

00:22:21.320 It's about, well, I don't need some priest off in Rome telling me what to do.

00:22:27.620 We can do this for ourselves, and we as a community can read the Bible and reach Christ without you.

00:22:37.040 And Henry VIII, his motives might not have been sinless, I guess, but regardless, the founder of my church,

00:22:48.900 i always ask myself you know what would henry do you know whenever i'm in any situation what would

00:22:54.120 henry do um but um uh yeah but he again even whatever his motives might have been and they

00:23:02.220 might have been venal he nevertheless created a britain that was separate from rome and that

00:23:11.520 had its day in the sun so i think they're you know again i don't i don't think that luther set

00:23:18.500 out to create nationalism. However, nationalism followed alongside it. And I'll just add on

00:23:26.300 one more thing here. I think a lot of national, I think a lot of American nationalism has been

00:23:35.380 explicitly sometimes, but definitely implicitly Protestant nationalism. There's a book that I

00:23:43.860 read, um, 10 years ago, I'm, I'm, his name was like, it was a simple name, like Robert Smith

00:23:50.180 or something. Um, although not of the cure, but, uh, it was called the white Protestant nation or

00:23:56.280 something like this. The, um, anyway, his, his, his thesis was that there was a sort of consensual

00:24:05.560 implicit Protestantism that defined 20th century America. And we seem to be losing this. And he is

00:24:14.800 speaking as a Protestant where he thinks it's a tragedy on some level, but maybe it's on another

00:24:20.360 level, it's an opportunity to rediscover what Christianity really means. And so there has been

00:24:25.760 an implicit Protestantism at the heart of American nationalism. But these are just some of my

00:24:32.200 thoughts on the matter uh what what do you think the status of christianity and nationalism

00:24:40.340 is like how do these things interact are they antipodal are they what do you think

00:24:47.460 that's a good question so i mean i i don't i don't have a lot of background historically in

00:24:53.420 luther and in the early or proto-reformation stuff so i can't i can't really speak on that

00:24:58.220 level, to be honest, with any competency, what I see happening now is you have some

00:25:04.480 old guard guys who are what we would consider or call general equity theonomists.

00:25:11.780 And these are guys that want to see some moral precepts that are in things like the

00:25:17.520 Old Testament integrated into the government, whether on the state level or the federal

00:25:22.300 government.

00:25:22.820 These are guys that want that.

00:25:24.640 And those are your—

00:25:25.580 Like Grush Jr.

00:25:26.400 Yeah.

00:25:27.160 Yeah.

00:25:28.220 Roosh Juni, I think, was the major early writer of this.

00:25:32.760 Yeah, he was a big guy, and he's a little bit out there even still because he, I mean, my understanding is he didn't take communion for a really long time as well, and a lot of these guys that were in the early part of this were pretty fringe, and it got brought into some more mainstream apologetic stuff by Doug Wilson, who really popularized all that, and he kind of still leads that sphere.

00:25:53.540 Are you familiar with Doug?

00:25:54.800 Yes.

00:25:55.920 Yeah, so Hexsef is part of the church.

00:25:57.460 Right. He's, you know, yeah.

00:25:59.660 Yes. Yes. He spoke at Turning Point and all this.

00:26:02.360 And so he represents sort of what I think is the most realistic and grounded and also, from my perspective on Christian morality, most acceptable form of Christian nationalism.

00:26:13.440 to I guess you could call it the right of him you have this middle sphere of people kind of like I

00:26:20.020 mentioned earlier your Dale Partridge Webb and co people like that Jack Posobiec and who is the

00:26:26.840 Torba would be kind of in this zone where they they want Christian nationalism but what they

00:26:32.180 really mean by Christian nationalism is just having a Christian authoritarian government

00:26:37.760 right whatever that sort of means whatever strikes you as being

00:26:40.880 haha based as it would have been interpreted in 2016 um that's what they want in regards to

00:26:47.440 an actual governmental future for the u.s um and then beyond them you've got your full-on

00:26:53.800 um guys that really integrate some of the more racial component to this into it you get your ci

00:26:59.220 guys you give you a lot of your weirdos um even beyond them um in the church as it stands in real

00:27:05.900 life, which is very different from this whole network online. There's a lot of people that

00:27:11.360 claim to be Christian nationalists merely just because they are right-leaning Christians that

00:27:17.600 do believe that their moral precepts should have the opportunity to be advocated for publicly and

00:27:24.300 that they ought not be denigrated for that in their voting. Like if they say, I'm going to vote

00:27:28.060 for this guy because he's a Christian and I think he's going to do X, Y, and Z because of a Christian,

00:27:32.000 They want to be able to say that culturally. They want that to be culturally acceptable. And they don't even know about all the rest of the baggage that comes along with some of these other groups and that kind of thing.

00:27:44.180 And then there's other evangelicals that will look in and see this stuff and think, you know, this is really just nuts.

00:27:50.480 There's still a very strong libertarian contingent in the evangelical right in this country, especially in Baptist circles.

00:27:58.460 I'm not sure how much you paid attention to interdenominational politics and stuff, but Baptists especially have this perspective where the state really needs to be leaving the church alone, but that also means the church needs to be leaving the state alone, because as soon as we start to integrate certain Christian beliefs explicitly into the government, then the government has some sort of doctrinal control over the local church, and that's what they're primarily afraid of.

00:28:23.860 I think that's a legitimate concern. I'm somewhere between those people and Doug Wilson, probably, in my personal belief. But out beyond all of that, you've got the really fringe guys who, from what I can tell, just really aren't represented in real life churches much at all.

00:28:41.840 Like, most of the time I hear about this in my church or other folks' churches that talk to me. It's one individual that sort of drifts in and is very obsessed with some sort of weird internet thing nobody understands, and then later drifts out because he becomes Eastern Orthodox or becomes, you know, SSPX, Roman Catholic, or whatever. So that's kind of the general landscape.

00:29:01.860 um does joel webbin how revolutionary are they and and i don't i don't ask this as some sort of

00:29:09.920 implied criticism i'm genuinely curious like do do do they want to throw the constitution out the

00:29:17.500 window like we're you know and we're going to establish something new or do they simply you

00:29:24.880 know whenever when i speak with nick fuentes i don't think he wants to do that and um i think

00:29:29.820 he wants christians in charge and they would i think he's even said like we would tolerate

00:29:35.980 people like me or something i don't um i apolloans don't don't get to don't be don't

00:29:42.340 throw in jail immediately i guess exactly yes we're we're uh we're a minority community we

00:29:47.540 have our little festivals and we do marches you're like the amish maybe you're the amish

00:29:51.380 Exactly. Yeah. I could think of other analogs. But what so how revolutionary are they? Like what what from what you can tell, like the people who call themselves Christian nationalists, what do they want?

00:30:11.360 well that's that's kind of what i i was talking about earlier where it's very difficult to nail

00:30:17.440 down what they want in terms of policy because they don't engage in most of that and most of

00:30:22.340 that rhetoric that actually back and forth um they when when things like the constitutionality

00:30:27.260 of something are brought up there's usually the general like chuckle of like haha you know that's

00:30:32.800 silly like why would that matter right if we get if we get our christian prince the vibe is if we

00:30:37.280 get our christian prince then it's kind of irrelevant right um and and and so that's where 0.95

00:30:43.060 this sort of authoritarian or or more aptly i guess would be um so much totalitarian side of

00:30:47.960 it comes into it um you've got some guys like your cory mallards and some of those dudes that

00:30:53.480 will maybe lay out a more specific view for a christian prince to come in and rule with an

00:30:58.160 iron fist and get rid of the constitution or whatever um a lot of these guys aren't really

00:31:04.400 even thinking about it on that level. And it's not even me trying to denigrate guys like Webin.

00:31:09.660 I just think you have to understand, too, quite a few of these guys have only become aware of

00:31:14.960 these sort of talking points on the dissident right in the last couple, two or three years.

00:31:19.500 Right. I found sermons from Webin from four years, four or five years ago, talking about,

00:31:24.980 you know, racism being a sin and all these things. And so it's new to them. And it's going to take

00:31:32.440 time to figure out where they exactly land um in regards to policy advocacy but that's not really

00:31:38.940 why people like them people aren't tuning into joel webbin to get you know his take on the

00:31:43.100 constitution and um how he will enact his christian government right um that's what doug wilson gets

00:31:50.100 grilled on by npr but it's not it's not what what um these guys in the middle area there sort of

00:31:55.800 have their audience for they're they're largely reactionary hyper conspiratorial type guys they

00:32:02.400 draw a similar strain of people to um you know the moms that watch candace owens but just on the guy

00:32:09.160 side and with a mixture of 4chan that's kind of my feeling uh that's interesting yeah the i don't

00:32:15.580 want to go into it but yeah the the the white suburban mom as a candace fan is a very surprising

00:32:24.300 thing I don't I don't think that was Alex Jones's audience but Candace's broken she figured it out

00:32:30.800 she found the green space in that area for sure yeah but so was is Jesus a nationalist I mean I

00:32:38.900 I think you know Jesus as he is depicted in the gospels is he a nationalist I mean I I think I've

00:32:45.800 always come to jesus throughout my life as some sort of i don't some sort of liberal hippie i

00:32:55.180 mean if i'm honest um i don't see nationalism i don't see borders i don't see calling ice agents

00:33:03.960 on your neighbors i don't i he was given an opportunity to stone a woman caught in flagrante

00:33:12.460 being an adulteress. And what does he do? He forgives her. He tells her to send no more,

00:33:20.440 but he forgives her. Isn't this a truer essence of Jesus Christ than an authoritarian or a

00:33:30.120 Christian prince? Isn't there a radical, in many ways, message to Jesus that is totally at odds

00:33:37.080 with nationalism well so totally at odds is a is a pretty strong way of phrasing it but i would say

00:33:44.800 i mean there's there's two sort of ends of this so christ did not come to be a political ruler

00:33:49.380 and that's that's really broadly agreed upon um the the question then becomes you know he didn't

00:33:56.520 come to be a political ruler um which means he also didn't speak about political matters explicitly

00:34:03.100 right so um that there's a lot of there's a lot of room for personal revelation or interpretation

00:34:10.260 regarding your personal political beliefs in the new testament gospel um all while trying to at

00:34:16.900 least in the evangelical world reflect christ in all of those different domains as being the highest

00:34:21.200 good for that um it kind of it cuts both ways because because he didn't come to be a ruler

00:34:26.240 you can't say okay well he jesus came to like crush all his enemies and and instantiate some

00:34:31.980 sort of authoritarian state, obviously. But because he didn't do that, he also wasn't talking about

00:34:37.120 things we would consider explicitly political, right? His parables reduce things down to

00:34:41.900 individuals and their individual relationships. What is a Samaritan to the man who was found on

00:34:47.320 the road, right? What is that, right? One thing that is interesting is recruiting zealots to be

00:34:52.480 apostles. That's interesting, right? That's an interesting idea. What does that mean for

00:34:56.880 overcoming political barriers. And historically, what's been, you know, in my lifetime, I guess,

00:35:02.940 but more than historically, it seems as if your mainstream evangelical conservative Christians

00:35:09.640 are comfortable with things like strong border policy and all that because they feel like

00:35:14.840 Christ is pretty silent on that sort of topic specifically. However, the moral pre-suppositions

00:35:24.560 still remain in Christ's teachings, and how those are enacted through the government is going to

00:35:31.700 vary from person to person. What you never find is any sort of leeway for, you know, the voice of

00:35:38.020 the people is the voice of God, or some of these later concepts that really tie the idea of the

00:35:43.960 state as being the collective soul of the people, and some of the more philosophical stuff around

00:35:50.520 nationalism that stuff i think has to be bolted on um right and definitely isn't really compatible

00:35:55.440 so right i i guess i'll just put this another way i i don't you think there's something

00:36:02.380 true about the theological work known as jesus christ superstar by andrew lloyd weber i mean

00:36:11.460 i mean that seriously like i've never seen it so you have to explain sorry oh okay well it's

00:36:17.740 actually good i i i like it um you know jesus christ superstar um who and what do you think

00:36:27.520 you are there's judas has some great you know arias um or songs uh it's a rock opera by andrew

00:36:35.600 lloyd weaver i don't know what to tell you you should listen to it but uh it's very it came out

00:36:40.700 in the i think late 70s like 1978 and it's um it's getting at what i was saying that 60s hippie

00:36:48.760 jesus like isn't you know and i it seems like a lot of people who come to christianity they 0.98

00:36:56.200 they want to come to for the baseness and they want to cast out sluts and judge people right 0.99

00:37:06.320 Right. And to be fair, in the Gospels, Jesus is deeply immoral. You know, it's not if you have lust in your heart, that is the equivalent of cheating on your wife. 1.00

00:37:22.220 You know, it's deeply intentional and so on. So I get that. But it just seems like Jesus, as a man fairly depicted in the Gospels, is very compatible with a lot of these people that Christian nationalists hate, which is the liberal hippie type or the person who's helping out the homeless.

00:37:49.180 The kind of visionary smoking a little weed and, you know, getting to the truth with his friends around a campfire.

00:37:59.980 I mean, I've always had that impression of Jesus, and it's never changed.

00:38:08.580 Because even when I read the Gospels more seriously, I like Jesus in many ways.

00:38:14.200 But I don't see Doug Wilson in Jesus. Jesus is not as far away from that as possible, actually. I do see a kind of not a political. Yeah, maybe in Revelation, he's there's a kind of theocratic politics that's coming or has been or who knows.

00:38:37.200 But it just it just seems like in the character that is plainly depicted, he is so much closer to being a revolutionary and a rock star and a weirdo maybe than whatever it is that Christian nationalists want. 0.72

00:38:58.520 I mean, I feel that in some ways, Jesus has to be defended against his greatest defenders, that he is something different. And I would, you might not like this, but I would connect him with the other man who could turn water into wine and whose blood was wine.

00:39:16.900 I think there's a deep, deep connection between Jesus and Dionysus, in fact.

00:39:23.240 And it just seems like the Christian nationalist missed this.

00:39:28.660 You don't have to become a mythicist or anything like that,

00:39:31.720 but they seem to just miss some crucial, radical element to Jesus.

00:39:41.100 Maybe this is...

00:39:42.580 No, no, I mean, that was a lot, so give me a minute here.

00:39:45.600 So I, the Dionysus stuff, I'm like, that's, you know, that's a left field for me.

00:39:50.980 I'm going to have to just say like, maybe table that one, buddy.

00:39:54.320 But I will say, I will say that there is something to be said in Christ.

00:40:00.440 Christ has overwhelming compassion on sinners.

00:40:03.780 And even in the parable of the unforgiving servant, you've got this concept that's, you know, very prevalent of the idea that somebody who is forgiven much and feels indebted to Christ,

00:40:14.180 holding another person accountable for those other debts that they have is perverse.

00:40:20.740 Christ seems to exhibit that he has real issues with people who live their life that way.

00:40:27.100 So there's an aspect of that that's true, but the thing about the gospel, in my view

00:40:31.500 as a Christian, is it's the perfect synthesis of the mercy and grace with the upholding

00:40:39.440 of the moral law, right? Because you don't get any, you don't have any gospel without the belief

00:40:44.500 that all persons deserve to burn in hell forever in eternal conscious torment. You don't have that, 0.98

00:40:50.180 right? The gospel doesn't have any power if that's removed from the equation. If all Jesus did was

00:40:55.660 come and be a really cool dude smoking weed, bro, like you don't have the power of the cross. You

00:41:01.900 don't have that sacrifice, that penal substitutionary atonement, to use like a real

00:41:07.160 a real nerdy theological phrase you don't have that unless you also have law and christ's

00:41:14.660 character is as we christians see it is that he was the perfect embodiment of both of those things

00:41:19.680 and if to someone that appears hippie it may be because they have a false impression one direction

00:41:25.540 and if to someone else that appears to be an authoritarian in some weird sense um it may be

00:41:31.380 that they're actually viewing it kind of a little bit too far the other direction um so and and and

00:41:36.880 I'm speaking of people who, in that case, would be Christians, but this is a dynamic that I think Christians have recognized for a long time, that everyone who is a believer perceives Christ as sort of a different figure in their life.

00:41:49.620 Is Christ a rabbi or a teacher to you, right? Is Christ a refuge for you and your difficulties? Is Christ a conqueror?

00:41:59.720 These are all things that I believe Christ does represent in the Gospels, but depending on your personality and depending on what we would call, I guess, in Christianity, how much idolatry you have, you can reinterpret, you can eisegetically look at Scripture and reinterpret Him to be whatever you want.

00:42:18.740 You can really do that if you want to. Not that you can do it, you're allowed to do that, I guess, in Christian doctrine, but you are capable of doing that, and people have been doing that for many, many hundreds of years.

00:42:29.720 yes yeah i mean he's the lion and the lamb i i think there's a interesting moment in revelation

00:42:36.020 where john the other john of padmos he's he what is it he's looking for a symbol of the lion and

00:42:44.540 then it kind of fades away and it's the lamb and i think it's telling you that it's both

00:42:49.480 there's a a dual quality to jesus that which is why he's so complex and so interesting

00:42:56.520 um yeah well in the book of life and stuff there's a lot of stuff in the old testament

00:43:01.720 or sorry in revelation that refers back to the old testament this is one of the reasons why i had a

00:43:06.680 conversation with arval um the return to the land guy who you may be familiar with rather yes and

00:43:13.220 um he he believes in such a harsh disconnect from pauline theology in the old testament as well

00:43:19.020 some other things and that's just not how i how i read scripture um my you know i have a covenant

00:43:24.380 theology belief and so my view is that there's so many different symbols and values that we that

00:43:29.820 sort of flourish in the old testament and come to their fulfillment in the new and are exhibited in

00:43:34.100 things like revelation um and so there's there's there's a lot going on with that so um you did

00:43:40.320 mention you did mention john you know of patmos are you are you convinced you're not talking about

00:43:44.340 like the apostle there or what's your you're just trying to be oh i think that the same john who

00:43:50.080 wrote the gospels wrote the gospel of john wrote revelation i guess that is what they said that i

00:43:56.400 see a council yeah so there's some there's different arguments yeah yeah yeah yeah i probably

00:44:03.320 wouldn't agree with that but it's i i fair enough he does just i mean he just identifies himself as

00:44:08.720 john he seems to think everybody thinks so he knows what he's talking about right um i i think

00:44:14.480 they're two different guys but we don't need to split hairs um so is jesus a jew i'll just leave

00:44:22.380 it at that oh yeah there's a lot there and you can answer yes and no which i think is fair

00:44:28.600 yes no jesus is a jew um whatever that uh what that what that means is what people mean by jew

00:44:36.280 today realistically and when someone says someone who is is jewish today broadly they are talking

00:44:42.000 about somebody who is ethnically Jewish, right?

00:44:44.260 Because if, you know, there are people

00:44:45.900 who are secular Jews,

00:44:48.040 extremely nominal Jewish background, whatever.

00:44:50.960 In fact, a huge amount of Christians

00:44:53.840 that convert, who are ethically Jewish,

00:44:56.980 that convert to Christianity today

00:44:58.380 refer to themselves as Christian Jews.

00:45:00.760 Like they don't lose this sort of Jewish ethnic identity

00:45:03.000 by becoming Christians necessarily.

00:45:05.420 They recognize that there is a disconnect

00:45:09.400 between the religious beliefs

00:45:10.880 of most of their ethnic,

00:45:12.000 you know, kinfolk or whatever, but they still retain the fact that they are ethnically, racially,

00:45:17.760 genetically Jewish. And when, you know, that is required for Christ, given his lineage in 0.58

00:45:23.200 scripture to fulfill prophecy and everything else. So one of the weird things that's been

00:45:29.200 happening lately is that people will really object to the idea of someone saying, like,

00:45:33.360 Jesus is a Jew. And that's very odd because the argument for that is this idea that

00:45:41.160 When people say Jew, what they really mean is some sort of post-Second Temple, Rabbinic, Talmudic Jew. And I don't think that's really what people mean ever when they say Jesus is a Jew. That's just not what anybody in evangelical spaces believes, from what I understand.

00:45:58.320 And I never grew up in evangelical spaces being at all given the impression that anyone thought that people that just happened to be ethnically Jewish somehow were saved or were Christians by the fact of their genes or whatever, or that people in the Old Testament were practicing some sort of bizarre, you know, second, third century Talmudic stuff.

00:46:21.860 That's just not what's going on. But I think people are they don't like that Jewish label. And so there's been an effort to, I guess, strip Christ of that, which really does sync up pretty well with some of the bizarre Nazi positive Christianity stuff that I've looked into quite a bit.

00:46:38.560 Well, I don't think you can understand him outside of Judaism 100 percent. And I think he understood to the degree that it's historically accurate. I think Jesus understood himself as a Jew as well. 0.77

00:46:59.400 And, you know, in Alexandria, the Substack group, we've been doing a lot of reading. 0.98

00:47:05.300 We actually read Martin Luther recently, and who declared before his more flamboyant, you 0.99

00:47:13.060 know, on the Jews and their lies, he actually wrote an essay on Jesus.

00:47:16.520 Jesus wasn't born a Jewish man, I believe is the title.

00:47:19.940 So he was very clear about that.

00:47:21.680 We actually read Paul's letter to the Romans.

00:47:24.120 And it's an interesting thing because it's complex and maybe arguably contradictory because there's one view that many people have that's reasonable, I guess, which is like, look, you were the chosen people, but when Jesus walked on earth, that's over.

00:47:45.840 Even if you were chosen, it's now irrelevant. You're no longer chosen anymore. And we might have, in Christians, are the new Israel, we've replaced you, and so on. But Paul, 9-11 in Romans, he's saying something very different than that and more complex.

00:48:05.740 and he he accepts the fact that perhaps much like uh god hardened the heart of the pharaoh he's 0.62

00:48:14.240 hardened the hearts of many of these jewish holdouts who just won't accept christ that

00:48:19.480 might be true but at the same time like it's going to be even better when they all become christians 0.78

00:48:26.380 and it's not it's right when they finally return yeah it's not something to be sorry uh sorry about

00:48:32.860 And the other, the metaphor of you're being grafted onto their tree, in effect, and it's still their tree. And even within the contradiction of, you know, they're rejecting their own Messiah. I mean, it's a very complex argument. It is persuasive, but it does have a little bit of that contradiction.

00:48:58.480 But I think, you know, you could say the same for a lot of great thinkers, that the contradiction is what makes it interesting. But the only thing that I would say simply after reading Paul's letter to the Romans is, yeah, I can see, I can understand Christian anti-Semitism from the perspective of Christianity of you rejected God, you killed him, you know, you're a bunch of bastards. 1.00

00:49:26.040 I can get why people would act like that, but that's not what is being directly stated 0.98

00:49:34.440 in the Bible.

00:49:36.840 And it's more complex, but in so many ways, you are being grafted onto their tree, and

00:49:45.400 you can't lose sight of that. 0.78

00:49:47.120 And so I do think, you know, all of these things considered, Christian anti-Semitism is a

00:49:56.040 contradiction in terms or is or should be impossible yeah i i think that um

00:50:02.600 funnily enough your interpretation of romans is actually probably more in line with mine than a

00:50:08.640 lot of a lot of people that are in self-professed christian nationalists at this point um the the

00:50:13.880 funny thing too is you've got you've got romans 11 18 um which is very high emphasis on you know

00:50:20.160 you mentioned those branches those branches are cut off from christ you've been grafted in the

00:50:24.840 root is still that. And then you have Paul going on to say, but both not against the branches

00:50:30.180 that have been cut off. And there's this idea that's presented also that they will eventually

00:50:37.500 be grafted back in. Now, that isn't to say all of them will be or whatever, but there's this belief

00:50:41.620 that, and this is tied up in things that we would call the great Puritan hope and all these things

00:50:47.420 that historic reformers believe, Protestant reformers, that the Jews would ultimately come

00:50:52.840 back in mass to christ now what that means i don't know in terms of that's it's a crazy

00:50:58.020 eschatological and very speculative um but the boast not against the branches is very valid and

00:51:03.520 that's another thing that i would love to ask some of these guys that i haven't had the ability

00:51:06.940 to or the opportunity to is if if going online and saying you're a christ killer and um you know 0.99

00:51:15.080 christ is king you hate you know you hate christ you know you're gonna burn in hell whatever whatever 0.98

00:51:18.960 yada, yada, yada to Jews is not boasting against the branches, I guess, what would be, right? What 1.00

00:51:26.600 would that even look like? And that's one of those things that I just don't think is going to be

00:51:32.800 addressed in the current political paradigm, but it has been forced by a lot of these types into

00:51:38.420 the theological. And as more and more people that are just normal, everyday Christians are becoming

00:51:45.480 aware of this discourse a lot of the folks that read their read the bible reads romans and

00:51:50.860 especially reform people are running into things like romans 11 18 and saying hold on what does

00:51:55.140 this mean to not boast against the branches right um there has long been eschatological differences

00:52:01.140 regarding um if we would refer to the the people the genetic ethnic grouping of israel today

00:52:09.520 as being God's chosen people, and that's fine either direction.

00:52:14.980 I think that you can make a case from Scripture both ways from that.

00:52:19.520 What I don't think you can make an argument from Scripture from 0.83

00:52:23.800 is a sort of triumphalist joy in denigrating Jewish people.

00:52:29.160 That's just not in there.

00:52:31.820 It's not what Paul did.

00:52:33.040 I don't think it's the perspective of the New Testament.

00:52:36.080 I mentioned this on Jeremy Boring sort of in passing,

00:52:38.420 But I had a conversation with a guy on Twitter a while back where he used as a proof text for how he could be triumphalistic against the Christ killers of Pilate washing his hands after convicting Christ and saying, like, this blood is on you guys.

00:52:52.580 And what's so odd to me with that is I've always read that as I'm Pilate and that I'm pretending that I'm somehow guiltless, but I'm really not.

00:53:02.920 And so the fact that that some have tried to take passages like that and transform them into this perspective of, you know, Pilate was innocent, like, you know, all the all the Pilate and Romans, all the quote unquote Arians are innocent.

00:53:18.260 But the Jews are the ones who are really bearing that guilt is very odd. 0.59

00:53:22.040 And I don't think it has has any legs to stand on.

00:53:25.840 So, yes. So let's let's talk a little bit about race. And I can bring up some of these ideas put forward by Partridge that I've I've looked into this. 0.77

00:53:40.580 So. If we go back to the sons of Noah, there's a lot going on here.

00:53:46.740 We have three sons of Noah, and those are Shem, Japheth, and Ham.

00:53:53.440 And traditionally, this was done theologically.

00:53:57.940 This was even done in the realm of anthropology, actually, as well, in hard sciences.

00:54:03.660 They are taken as avatars or originators of the three great races, you could say. 0.74

00:54:13.080 Ham being African, Japheth being Aryan, European, thereabouts, and Shem being Semites. 0.92

00:54:23.920 Now, Shem is the origin of the word Semite. 0.76

00:54:27.380 When you're anti-Semitic, you're anti-Shem, so to speak. 0.76

00:54:31.320 Now, first off, do you agree with that?

00:54:35.560 Do you think that that is what the Bible is saying?

00:54:37.920 in terms of the racial breakdown of those brothers and what that actually turned into

00:54:44.060 and how we understand it today so interestingly enough i have not come to the conclusion that

00:54:48.580 that is is what's being communicated there there there is evidence that historic reformers did

00:54:53.440 believe this to be the case and that that is part of church tradition um because i i do hold to a

00:54:59.940 much more solo scripture perspective on these things i i don't see how that can be shown

00:55:04.500 from scripture directly at all um but that seems to be a consensus that that is the breakdown

00:55:11.060 you have some weird stuff in there as well like dwelling in like jesus i think it's jesus dwelling

00:55:16.120 in the chins of shim i think is part of that and so that's like oh what is what does that mean

00:55:21.180 because if we're going to start to interpret these things as being you know eternal um you know

00:55:26.120 blessings or or or um uh prophecy then that has some implications as well that doesn't get touched

00:55:32.880 I mean, I know this sounds crazy to say, but it's almost like they're predicting Christianity, like where Europeans will sort of dwell in the 10th of Shem.

00:55:44.940 I mean, yes. 1.00

00:55:48.240 Are you crazy or is it just true? 0.99

00:55:49.780 I don't know. 0.99

00:55:50.440 I don't know.

00:55:51.300 I mean, I think I know, but I don't know.

00:55:53.180 Well, I mean, for instance, do you think there's a racial component to Jacob and Esau?

00:55:57.560 I mean, I know that it's sort of weird to say this, because if you just take a literalist reading of the Bible, you're like, Jacob and Esau, of course, they're the same race, you know, they're they're in the same womb and, and so on. But they're clearly really different figures. And actually, God himself says two nations dwell in your womb. So he's telling you to read it in this way. And, you know, I think we can imagine which is which Esau, my favorite Esau.

00:56:27.560 He's a jock. He's, you know, goes out and hunts. He's airy. He's he's just a cool guy. You know, he wore pit vipers, as it says in the text. And, you know, he surfed. He was a very cool guy. Jacob is is going to be the line that will lead to Judah and thus Judaism.

00:56:45.800 And so I think they're, I mean, is this, what I'm saying here is, is this reading, does this go against your beliefs or is this how you would read them?

00:56:59.040 So the Jacob and Esau side of things, I understand what you're talking about in terms of nations.

00:57:04.140 I have never, I've actually really never even heard that pressed as a racial point before as much as Noah's sons.

00:57:10.360 So that's good.

00:57:11.200 Okay.

00:57:11.300 That'll be, that's interesting to me.

00:57:12.640 I haven't seen that in historic reform commentary or anything like that.

00:57:17.940 That may just mean I'm ignorant on it, to be fair.

00:57:20.940 In terms of Noah's sons, like I said, there was a consensus view that this is the case to some extent.

00:57:27.040 Where that's really found, at least I don't think it's according to Scripture.

00:57:30.560 I think that there are a lot of things that might have been sort of, for lack of a better word, memes in theological history that will arise.

00:57:38.640 An example of this, I think, actually is the idea of the curse of Ham rather than the curse of Canaan.

00:57:44.160 Because if you recall in that passage, Canaan is cursed, and then Ham is not blessed later by Noah.

00:57:51.500 Yeah, and so it's a little bit odd because you'll read commentators, like Matthew Henry is one that I like a lot,

00:57:58.240 and on his commentary of that Genesis chapter where this occurs,

00:58:02.720 he seems to not indicate this idea that Canaan's curse goes backward into Ham and then onward into

00:58:09.700 all of Ham's descendants. But then later, Matthew Henry sort of offhandedly references, I think,

00:58:15.380 in Jeremiah, somebody sent me this today, that he did believe in, he calls it the curse of Ham,

00:58:22.300 essentially. And I don't know how much of that's because it was really extrapolated from

00:58:26.440 an eisegetical reading of scripture and how much of this was just a general referential meme

00:58:32.360 idea, and part of what the Reformation tradition is, is finding all of these things that we

00:58:38.820 consider to be things that have been bolted on to the text of Scripture and considered

00:58:43.820 to be true, and getting rid of those things, right?

00:58:50.560 And we believe that's the case even with regard to the Marian dogmas and certain things in

00:58:56.720 that area that we would associate with Catholicism, but even the Reformers believed in, I believe

00:59:01.600 the perpetual virginity of Mary.

00:59:03.780 And now essentially 0.99

00:59:04.740 no Reformed Protestants

00:59:05.740 believe in that. 1.00

00:59:07.580 And that would be the idea.

00:59:08.240 Jesus had a brother, by the way.

00:59:10.480 Yeah, well, exactly right.

00:59:11.960 Well, that's what's so funny is

00:59:12.980 and Jordan, who's in this chat,

00:59:15.580 he's going to hate me for this,

00:59:16.920 but I do think it's funny 1.00

00:59:18.160 that the Catholics read 0.57

00:59:19.120 the Last Supper as a literal

00:59:23.240 this is my body, meaning bread.

00:59:25.520 But then it says very plainly

00:59:27.280 that Jesus is brothers

00:59:28.680 and that must be cousins, right?

00:59:30.380 That's sort of a...

00:59:31.600 An interesting little disconnect, I guess. But regardless, I do think that there is a church history case to be made for the idea of them being the fathers of these races. I don't think that that case can be made directly from Scripture. But I haven't looked into it enough to be able to give you a super firm answer on that.

00:59:51.860 Yeah, well, it's interesting because I remember reading Genesis for the first time, you know, kind of all the way through and reading it seriously, as opposed to hearing a choice quotation from a pastor or priest or something.

01:00:05.220 um when i was in college at at the university of virginia and it was actually in the english

01:00:10.980 department and so we read it as literature and i remember even then this passage of then ham

01:00:18.820 looked upon the nakedness of his father and then when noah awoke and he saw what ham had done to

01:00:26.160 him and the interpretation of my professor i believe his name was norenberg anyway um was

01:00:32.960 that there's these ellipses in the bible so there there are these there's fragments in the bible

01:00:38.320 where you're you're placing things together it's basically the documentary hypothesis but

01:00:42.280 there's also ellipses where something has been taken out because it was too salacious

01:00:46.580 so looking upon the nakedness of your father sounds creepy strange uh and then once he saw

01:00:56.060 what what had been done to him seems to affirm the fact that something occurred and i i had not

01:01:02.860 even i i until i listened to pastor partridge i didn't know that there was a long tradition

01:01:09.300 analyzing this but some say that he castrated his father so we we get a little uh saturn and

01:01:16.360 caela or saturn and uranus going on there which is very interesting uh some say he had he did

01:01:22.100 homosexual acts with his father uh gross and then some i didn't know this but there's i guess one 0.63

01:01:29.220 interpretation would be that looking upon the nakedness of your father was the equivalent 0.98

01:01:35.240 of having incest with your mother it's getting sorry this is very yeah it's it no no 13 rating

01:01:42.300 on this it's an argument from it from idiom yeah it's like whether if it's an idiom to me like

01:01:47.840 like if you say someone slept with somebody you don't mean they just like both spent the night

01:01:52.720 in vicinity you mean oh so that's what they meant oh okay um so that's yeah there's a there's a whole

01:01:59.740 there's a whole debate on exactly what that means and i i think that given given also historic

01:02:04.700 commentators have disagreed forever it's not there's no consensus on it right whatever it is

01:02:09.280 is that was a sin right that's something bad happened yes and no question and ham did it

01:02:15.000 And then Ham is not blessed. And so if you assume that Ham, who's interesting, he's the ancestor of Kush, et cetera, that these and the Kushites are pretty clearly Egyptians, Africans in Exodus.

01:02:36.220 I mean, Moses marries a Kushite woman and that freaks out. 0.68

01:02:40.060 That's probably the firmest one that you could tie to a racial group, I think, would be that one. 1.00

01:02:45.000 Right. So there is a line. It's maybe not directly stated. And so Partridge's reading of this is that Ham, the Africans did something really bad. We don't quite know what it was back in the day.

01:03:03.040 and the and the direct descendants the canaanites who are going to be you know um displaced uh by

01:03:11.480 israel eventually they're cursed but ham is cursed for all time and this is why i mean it's a sort of

01:03:17.860 like almost magical reading of the problem you know with african americans in schools or with

01:03:26.720 africa and economic development it's like it it's not evolution it's not any of those things it's

01:03:32.640 they're cursed um but so partridge is giving a reading that was i mean that that reading is sort

01:03:41.860 of traditionalist in the sense that uh correct me if i'm wrong most catholics and protestants

01:03:48.320 believe that uh regarding um regarding the groupings and and and their children to become

01:03:56.620 the races, yes. When it comes to the curse of Ham specifically and on not just Ham being cursed by

01:04:04.980 his son Canaan being cursed, but that all Africans inherit that in some sense, I believe there are

01:04:12.480 Reformed commentators, like I mentioned, that do reference that offhand. It's not really built upon

01:04:17.240 in the structured way, and it doesn't really get built upon into much of a structured way until

01:04:21.820 you get into more modern times regarding people who are trying to defend american slavery and

01:04:27.480 that sort of thing um that's when it really gets drug up from the depths of history and do you

01:04:32.600 think it was instrumentalized to for slavers to justify yeah essentially yeah i think that's

01:04:39.580 probably that's probably accurate um i've i've drawn attention to this disconnect somewhat

01:04:45.040 because what the what the historic commentators both in reform tradition and catholic traditions

01:04:50.060 I don't know about Eastern Orthodox, I don't study their stuff, but both of the Catholic and the Reformed commentator traditions will talk about how the curse of Canaan was fulfilled in the destruction of the Canaanites, and they're being driven out by Israelites later.

01:05:04.400 And so that's really, that's talked about a lot, that curse of Canaan.

01:05:08.380 You may have other commentators that sort of offhandedly again mention that curse of Ham.

01:05:12.000 It doesn't seem particularly instrumental, but then it becomes instrumentalized is a good word to use it later, even in our more recent history regarding the defense of slavery.

01:05:21.580 And I've made the case before, too.

01:05:23.320 And I think Dale Partridge mentions in his sermon, I had clipped him earlier today, where he talks about like it doesn't, you know, it'd be extremely strange for God to leave one branch of humanity unaddressed regarding that curse and or blessing.

01:05:35.300 But we have examples of this in Scripture because we've got David's sons where it's like, you know, God says, the sword shall never depart from your house.

01:05:44.160 And then Solomon is loved by God and doesn't later leave his favor until he strays from the Lord.

01:05:50.360 So, you know, as a Calvinist, as somebody who really puts a lot of emphasis on Christ's sovereignty, this idea that God isn't somehow able to curse a man by putting a curse on his son and not the rest of his lineage doesn't compute to me.

01:06:04.220 that seems to be reading something on to God's character that's not found in the text.

01:06:08.640 So that's really my argument against that reading.

01:06:12.300 But there's going to be more people that are a lot more theological heavy hitters than I am

01:06:16.200 that are now going to have to address this.

01:06:17.800 And what's really funny is that we've gone so many generations

01:06:21.840 without having pastors that have had to care about this topic

01:06:26.020 because it just wasn't relevant until you get some random guy

01:06:31.120 in an unaffiliated church in Arizona stand up

01:06:34.520 and through the internet reach hundreds of thousands of people

01:06:38.060 and proclaim that he's bringing back this sort of doctrinal belief

01:06:41.760 that most people had not thought about for 100 years.

01:06:44.800 That's just a very odd modern phenomenon

01:06:48.180 that the church is having to deal with.

01:06:50.300 Right. Unaffiliated.

01:06:51.800 So are Joel and Partridge, they're as thick as thieves, right?

01:06:55.640 They're like friends.

01:06:56.920 Yeah, they're all part of what connects are.

01:07:00.920 What kind of Protestant are they?

01:07:04.220 So they're both professing, they're confessional reformed, which means they hold to 1619, 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith.

01:07:17.380 I believe they both do.

01:07:18.100 I know Webin does at least.

01:07:19.240 I'm pretty sure Partridge does.

01:07:22.140 But they are independent, so they do not have any higher presbytery structure.

01:07:28.960 There's no polity that they are accountable to necessarily.

01:07:32.880 Actually, Dale Partridge, from what I understand,

01:07:35.160 had looked into joining Doug Wilson's denomination back a long time ago,

01:07:39.060 and Doug had sort of, well, I say Doug, I don't know who exactly killed it,

01:07:43.040 but people within Doug's denomination,

01:07:45.200 and Doug has really pretty high leadership in that denomination,

01:07:47.460 killed that process.

01:07:49.420 So that's one of the reasons I kind of have a little bit more faith

01:07:52.200 in Doug Wilson than some of these other guys,

01:07:53.840 is that I think he foresaw some of this coming and stopped it. 0.82

01:07:56.440 But but that is one thing that people have noticed is that these guys are all in their own little sort of unaffiliated bubble.

01:08:03.240 You can't even attend Joel Webin's church if you want to, because he meets somewhere that's not publicly like the information is not public.

01:08:10.320 You have to be invited to his church.

01:08:13.240 Oh, it's extremely odd.

01:08:16.760 And I don't think Dale Partridge's is like that.

01:08:19.060 But it seems kind of anti-Christian, don't you think? 0.51

01:08:21.680 I mean, well, yeah, that's the open.

01:08:24.400 I mean, yeah, I'm just saying.

01:08:25.940 Something that can get weird when you stress the covenantal points to the point of where they're silly is that you cease to be particularly evangelical because it's all about your family, your lineage, that sort of thing, whereas historically Reformed evangelical groups in the U.S. have held to a much more, obviously, evangelical perspective on church.

01:08:47.880 and so that's why that's why people that have been in the faith for a while especially even

01:08:52.840 in evangelical circles are noticing a very bizarre disconnect between guys like webin and what we all

01:08:59.320 sort of were historically on board with even in just church structure and operations so right i

01:09:05.680 mean it is something to be bringing these back i i think um partridge is is talking now about

01:09:11.920 uh christian colonialism like we're we're going to do this for the africans we're not going to

01:09:19.600 extract wealth but we need to be in charge because of him um yeah well very funnily enough like you

01:09:26.840 could you could take that in in a paternalistic way that could be sort of even like an old south

01:09:33.100 um u.s thing um but the thing is i don't i don't feel like that really works with constantly

01:09:40.500 denigrating them as a people on the internet no i understand right that instinct that sort of

01:09:47.000 paternal instinct isn't in my mind particularly compatible with constantly spamming how much you

01:09:52.680 have to stand for these groups of people you know right yeah ham was up to it again um

01:09:59.320 before we before we go there's there's one other thing that i i wanted to talk about which was

01:10:06.620 it's hitler's relationship with christians and uh relationship with christ i guess you could say i

01:10:15.280 mean it is the title of your twitter account so hitler is austrian um uh these you know these

01:10:23.440 histories germany is mostly protestant you know there's bavaria and some other places that are

01:10:28.660 definitely catholic um but uh austria it's a hafsberg state catholic um he was born a catholic

01:10:38.320 baptized i would assume and um grew up a catholic uh i i don't you know to the degree that i know

01:10:47.420 a lot about his personal history and i'm definitely not an expert i mean i i don't

01:10:52.900 see a lot of religiosity i think he was much more interested in art and wagner

01:10:58.840 romanticism and so on uh in his you know formative period um we have these things like

01:11:06.920 the table talks that are secondhand uh memoirs of things he would say uh in terms of trigger me

01:11:16.460 you're gonna trigger me with the secondhand comment would you not do you think they're

01:11:20.640 reliable yeah so i do i do actually for a variety yeah yeah um that is one of the biggest ones that

01:11:26.880 is that is funny to me though because um the table talks are are really a difficult one

01:11:32.100 they are technically secondhand aren't they the people would write down what he was talking about

01:11:37.480 later isn't that correct yes so firsthand doesn't mean they're unreliable but right right so so that

01:11:44.160 if you have if and and my understanding of this is that firsthand accounts are accounts of the

01:11:49.720 person that actually witnessed what was said oh and those that is right and so those those would

01:11:55.560 be technically firsthand accounts now being written later in the form of notes and then

01:12:00.180 um borman and picker and these guys you know getting getting together and making these notes

01:12:05.680 collectively that's a that's an editorial question but they are i think my understanding is technically

01:12:12.060 firsthand firsthand that a good point actually yes right and and one of the things that i that i i

01:12:17.660 deal with a lot is, and the main reason that I think they are reliable in conjunction with

01:12:22.600 Goebbels' diary and Rosenberg's, is the amount of corroboration between them. So you have instances

01:12:27.580 on the same recorded date of talking about the same topics. You've got extreme amounts of overlap

01:12:32.460 between Goebbels and Rosenberg, where they record the same statements by Hitler. Again, these are

01:12:38.200 notes, so you've got guys writing slightly different terminology, but nobody comes away from

01:12:43.560 you know hitler talking about um you know calling calling christ you know christianity a a symptom

01:12:51.340 of decay right like the morality of the new testament is a symptom decay and and thinks oh

01:12:56.180 this meant that he loved christ right it's not they all sort of they all go off on their own

01:13:00.860 and they record their own um their own uh recollections of these conversations which end

01:13:06.360 up in the case of goebbels in various different places and same with rosenberg um and then also

01:13:11.340 the table talks through Bormann. And so, yeah, I think he's reliable. Yeah, yeah, no, you, yeah,

01:13:18.240 you made a very good correction there. And also, his dealings with German churches, both Catholic

01:13:24.180 and Protestant, were simply a matter of pragmatism. You know, you can't just become the Fuhrer and

01:13:33.160 wipe out all these institutions that are existing, but also where you have many people who supported 0.79

01:13:39.940 him. I mean, particularly among Protestants, and there were Catholics as well. But it's interesting

01:13:45.540 that Hitler was born a Catholic and the whole thing got started in Bavaria, but it was actually

01:13:52.240 more of the Protestants that were voting for National Socialism in 1933. And there is a 0.66

01:14:00.120 Prussian quality to House of Holland Zoller and the Prussian Germans that is, you can see it's

01:14:07.040 redolent of that um but there you had so many christian supporters who did support him and

01:14:12.600 i don't i don't want to compare i'll say this i don't want to equate trump and hitler

01:14:18.520 but because they're not the same they're not literally the very very biden supporter move

01:14:25.480 here buddy you're really uh right but um there is it's it there's similarities because it's

01:14:35.200 It's like that Paula White thing.

01:14:39.940 I mean, at the end of the day, Trump is a weirdly abstaining from alcohol womanizing party hound who hung out with Epstein and all that kind of he just is that.

01:14:57.600 And it's just remarkable that you would choose him as a leader.

01:15:03.460 I mean, I guess you could say, you know, Constantine also wasn't a saint exactly. He had tremendous impact on the spread of Christianity, and you could go on and on with bad leaders who do good things. I get it.

01:15:19.100 Regardless, there is still this bizarre quality of supporting him. And, you know, particularly with 2016, where his express doctrine was actually remarkably secular and a bit liberal.

01:15:34.320 That's how they were criticizing him when he first announced. And at this point, he becomes a Christian leader very much like George W. Bush was, which I can remember pretty vividly listening to talk radio in 2005 and people saying that God is on our side in Iraq and we're spreading the freedom around the world.

01:16:02.020 And God has placed his hand on George W. Bush and told him what to do. I mean, it was a remarkable time. And we have that again, though, with this George W. Bush was a saint in comparison to Trump. I mean, it's just it is very odd.

01:16:20.500 But I guess you have to accept that if you're going to look at these periods of time seriously, whether it's Trump, age of Trump, age of Bush, age of Hitler, you have so many Christians who see their religion embodied in this leader.

01:16:36.520 yeah and i think so there is some aspect of that going on with hitler and his rhetoric and his

01:16:42.940 public um public statements uh he would talk a lot about christ as a fighter his favorite story was

01:16:49.840 um you could probably guess if you don't know already changing tables i would imagine that's

01:16:54.420 right he loved that and there's this whole there's this whole idea of the you know that he carried a

01:16:59.480 whip with him and that it had something to do with that right and and so there's there's some of that

01:17:04.500 going on um i i you know i i wrote or i didn't write but i i made actually a brief video where i

01:17:11.720 i showed there's a there's a research paper that was done um where they analyzed all the counties

01:17:17.480 in germany and they looked at um before hitler rose to power before the nsdap rose to power

01:17:22.740 with those initial votes and they looked at each of those the counties within germany and how many

01:17:28.380 people were naming their children christian first names um and then also how many uh how many of

01:17:33.820 them were sending their children into either to become priests or pastors into the seminarian

01:17:39.560 occupation background. And they took that to rank these counties by whether or not they were rooted

01:17:47.400 in Christianity or a little bit more nominal. And I use nominal maybe differently than you've been

01:17:52.380 talking about recently, but yeah. Anyway, and the ones that were more nominal and less rooted

01:17:58.940 actually showed to a statistically significant degree

01:18:02.280 more support for national socialism.

01:18:04.660 And so I've used that as an example

01:18:08.280 of where I think that there was this large liberalization

01:18:11.860 and nominalization of Christianity within Nazi Germany

01:18:14.420 and a resurgence of Christian language

01:18:17.600 that sort of awoke something in people through Hitler.

01:18:22.420 But I believe it was empty rhetoric

01:18:25.800 and didn't have any sort of solid theological basis, right?

01:18:31.220 At least in Orthodox Christian praxis.

01:18:33.380 You could definitely see that with Trump as well.

01:18:36.080 I mean, I would imagine the average person

01:18:39.580 who goes to a Trump rally hasn't been to church in a while

01:18:44.760 and maybe goes on Christmas or something.

01:18:47.400 There is a sort of secular quality to them,

01:18:51.640 but there's a much as with George W. Bush

01:18:54.860 where he'd put all these biblical phrases

01:18:56.460 in his State of the Union address and so on.

01:18:59.940 There's an ability to sort of call upon something

01:19:02.840 that you heard once when you were a kid,

01:19:05.840 like something buried in your memory that springs forth.

01:19:10.840 Right, and even down to Trump's cursing.

01:19:14.660 I know that's kind of a weird one, but if you think about it,

01:19:16.660 it's like in previous Bush and prior,

01:19:20.600 conservative political figures

01:19:22.960 in terms of evangelical support would not go out and use explicit language. And Trump did quite a

01:19:29.160 bit on the campaign trail. I mean, dude was hugging the pride flag in 2016. And that was sort

01:19:36.900 of, you know, people were like, oh, that's kind of gross, you know, on the evangelical side. And

01:19:40.500 then they just kind of moved past it. But, you know, he was so reactionary and the left was so

01:19:45.440 vehement that it was very difficult to not get on the Trump train. And I think everybody sort of

01:19:51.740 experienced that in 2016. I think in 2024, it was much more about COVID. But we have seen much more

01:19:59.820 of a theological resurgence, even in institutional conservatism, insofar as I've seen it, even in

01:20:06.780 groups like Turning Point in the last two or three years. I mean, having, you have a Turning Point

01:20:10.760 faith now. I went to AmericaFest in December, and it was wild to me how much more Christian this was

01:20:17.600 than the turning point that i knew in college you know when i was you know in 2016 um it it has

01:20:23.540 shifted in that direction is more of a pastor than a than a podcaster it rhymed um in my she

01:20:33.240 well she she does more of these like youth pastory megachurch like speeches than charlie

01:20:44.220 kirk did well you might have noticed there was a very interesting um discourse around this might

01:20:51.400 have been the most in your face theological incident that i remember in my lifetime maybe

01:20:57.020 was when erica went up and forgave the killer of her her her husband and then trump goes up

01:21:05.620 afterwards and says like well that's great for you but you know i don't forgive him right and

01:21:12.020 i am a sith lord right right exactly yes my my area of the intersection of evangelical theology

01:21:21.260 and politics erupted it just it was just unbelievable how much um there was disparate

01:21:28.580 takes on this because you had some you have one side of people that were saying things like you

01:21:32.580 know this is trump being humble because he recognizes that um it would be a good thing to

01:21:37.640 um to forgive but he just can't do it and he sees himself as a pitiful sinner and it was like and

01:21:42.700 then there was another side of people that were like no i think dude is actually just you know

01:21:46.160 it does not believe the gospel of jesus christ you know and i was more in that latter camp i think

01:21:51.240 that that was i think that was him just uh i think he was almost kind of proud of saying that that he

01:21:56.840 was like i am i'm i'm macho i'm i'm whatever you know i'm signaling that i'm not going to forgive

01:22:03.020 I felt like that was the vibe I took away from that. But that sort of incident, I can't imagine ever happening because of some sort of TPUSA event three or four years ago. I mean, the fact that was even something that Trump felt the need to address when he walked up on stage is just wild to me. But anyway.

01:22:22.480 so it's just in closing what do you what do you think the future is of all this is is the

01:22:31.320 the joel webin calvin robinson dale partridge phenomenon is this sort of an internet thing

01:22:37.840 that's a fad that's going to go away we've seen that a lot of course or i mean do you think as i

01:22:45.620 you that actually this is the future maybe not of christianity but of politics wait what are your

01:22:54.740 thoughts on that i'm really i'm really bad at at making predictions i've been i've been telling

01:23:00.180 everyone they need to sell nvidia for like three years so i i don't know what i'm talking about in

01:23:05.060 any regard with with the future but one thing that is that i do think is interesting is like if we

01:23:10.580 look back at some of these figures and we see their journey you know i the the pipelines that

01:23:16.720 i see partridge webbin whoever going down um they're moving through it very quickly

01:23:23.940 they're moving through it extremely rapidly um this is kind of what i mentioned early about how

01:23:29.900 you'll you'll find these guys coming out against racism broadly two three years ago who are now

01:23:36.500 saying racism is not a sin racism is made up racism isn't real whatever these sort of things

01:23:41.080 these statements now um and i don't know what they will have to do to sort of continue to up the ante

01:23:47.780 and in regards to the rhetoric to keep people interested um i don't think that they can go

01:23:54.240 full hitler because i just don't think that people at large are going to tolerate that even their

01:24:00.000 fans um so i wonder if what we're going to get is just they're going to sit sort of at this stage

01:24:05.900 for a very long time and just remain reactionary.

01:24:09.880 And I don't see why, if they're bringing in the cash,

01:24:12.900 if they're bringing in the money

01:24:14.780 from pushing this kind of thing,

01:24:16.700 I don't see why they really need

01:24:18.080 to move beyond it immediately.

01:24:20.520 I think that they moved through

01:24:22.680 and they found the edge of the Overton window

01:24:24.660 and they're going to just sort of sit there.

01:24:27.740 I don't see any of them coming out

01:24:30.720 and going full Hitler.

01:24:32.980 But I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.

01:24:34.780 I just I don't I think the disconnect between the real life stuff and the online circles is just going to that's just too drastic to go beyond where they've gone.

01:24:45.840 So maybe I'm optimistic about it.

01:24:49.000 That's probably true.

01:24:50.280 I would reiterate, not putting Calvin Robinson and company aside, I do think that the future of populism is going to be more religious.

01:25:04.780 maybe in an Erica Kirk-length way,

01:25:08.000 megachurch, you know, millennial boss babe, 0.99

01:25:11.940 and in maybe a Trump way,

01:25:15.020 although he has to leave the scene at some point,

01:25:17.360 maybe in a J.D. Vance way,

01:25:19.520 maybe in a crude curse of ham way.

01:25:23.500 I don't know, but I think that it's going to,

01:25:26.320 I think politics is going to become

01:25:28.200 kind of post-political in a way,

01:25:30.080 and it's going to be its own culture

01:25:32.100 and quasi-religion.

01:25:34.780 Yeah, I think there's a lot of, I mean, the idea of politics as a quasi-religion has been something that Christian theologians have been talking about for a very long time.

01:25:45.180 And it's not even statism, because a lot of the people that fall into this are not people who, you know, they may be more people with, you know, libertarian sentiment or temperament, rather.

01:25:56.860 um but the idea of viewing political movement in a way that fulfills some sort of spiritual desire

01:26:07.400 that you have right you go to a trump rally and you get the feeling of like being at a worship

01:26:11.840 service right you go to um you're a bunch of people are working together i don't doubt that

01:26:17.240 the patriot front guys when they're sitting on the subway and they're so hyped to go through the

01:26:21.200 heard style and run up there and you know you know do whatever to save the homeland i don't doubt

01:26:27.900 that that what they're experiencing is a is a thrill that they consider to be some sort of

01:26:32.980 spiritual act on some level right yeah i don't doubt that and i you know as a christian i think

01:26:38.300 that that is not going to go anywhere i i think that those people are going to be left um sort of

01:26:43.700 in the dust of that and one of the things that i've tried to do is is have conversations with

01:26:49.760 people that i feel like are sort of on the path to that ultimate um nihilism that comes with that

01:26:55.260 and and redirect them to uh to christianity that's that's really what i've tried to do so yeah uh

01:27:03.780 well that's good stuff well why don't we do this this was a great conversation and i uh i hope we

01:27:10.700 can have some more conversations um this was a an expression of brotherly love you know coming

01:27:18.320 across the aisle like arnold and the black guy yeah well i do i do have some questions i do have

01:27:26.640 some questions for you but i don't want to oh well you can ask a or whatever so all right yeah so

01:27:30.980 so i know i mean i had posted a video i had posted your antichrist rant um maybe you have more than

01:27:37.900 one i don't want to maybe rant makes it sound too too vapid yes i was into you you were very

01:27:44.100 invigorated talking about the antichrist um a while back and um one of the things that sort of

01:27:50.180 struck me was i don't know like i understand what you mean um when you talk about the antichrist in

01:27:55.480 a very philosophical heady way of like we want something that's the opposite of jesus and this

01:28:02.180 will to power almost apollyon thing i get i understand that as pie in the sky um but you

01:28:10.160 don't believe in jesus right like you don't you don't do you are you only talking on on the level

01:28:17.320 of what yeah i'm talking on a metaphorical level i i don't think jesus i don't think jesus existed i

01:28:24.680 i think that the gospels are literature um and and i also don't think he is god and the son of

01:28:34.080 God and he redeems you. So I don't believe in the Bible in the way that a Christian believes 0.92

01:28:42.200 in the Bible. However, I also don't, I'm not like Richard Dawkins, and it's like the equivalent of 0.73

01:28:48.040 a spaghetti monster in the sky. I think it is a tremendously impactful and complex work that has

01:28:58.500 informed the minds of everyone who matters for 2000 years. And I think there's also a lot of

01:29:06.920 wisdom to be gained there. And so I feel like we sort of have to turn it on its head. I mean,

01:29:14.040 Nietzsche had a, I think this might've been in the Antichrist book, it might've been somewhere

01:29:17.520 else, but of, you know, Cesare Borgia on the seat of Rome. He, because he exists in a Christian 0.98

01:29:25.640 society in order to transform it and transvaluate it you you need to sort of go at it and flip it 1.00

01:29:32.880 on its head um so that's basically where i'm coming from no i don't think the book of revelation is

01:29:39.760 going to happen you know next week or or or something or you know will there'll be a thousand

01:29:45.800 year reign in jerusalem of a golden building or i i don't believe that that is true but

01:29:51.580 i i feel like the metaphor is there and the metaphor is in everyone's mind so we we sort

01:29:58.460 of have to think through the metaphor if that makes sense yeah so you're you're thinking about

01:30:06.100 christianity phenomenologically really correct okay yeah and that's i mean i think there's a

01:30:12.640 lot of interesting conversations to have there i think that's a more serious way to look at

01:30:16.220 scripture than the Dawkins perspective as you as you sort of inferred um I

01:30:21.380 yeah I mean I I do I mean I am a Christian so I believe I believe it did occur um I I weirdly

01:30:29.100 enough this the process of of of learning about historiography and um really what it would take

01:30:37.000 for me to consider accounts accurate um and applying that to the gospels has really gotten

01:30:42.840 me to the point of believing that they are authentic.

01:30:45.620 That's a much longer conversation that I'm frankly not equipped to have right now.

01:30:51.180 But one of the things that has been interesting is I will run into guys who will push the

01:30:56.700 idea of Hitler as a Christian prince.

01:30:57.900 And one of the primary ways that they have attempted to deny the premise of my account

01:31:02.520 is by rejecting all of the sources that I use.

01:31:06.040 And what is funny is that by doing this, they're sort of committing themselves to this extreme

01:31:12.300 skepticism.

01:31:12.840 skeptic view of history, which I think at the same time as meaning that you reject all of my

01:31:21.500 sources also commits you in a bizarre way to not being able to defend the Gospels as historically

01:31:27.080 reliable as well. Because if you are comfortable with the idea of grand conspiracy or whatever else,

01:31:36.400 you can very easily slot those exact same presuppositions into whatever form of mythicism

01:31:43.660 or whatever you want to do. Not that that's the extent of faith or why people truly have faith.

01:31:49.640 As somebody who's reformed, I think that faith is like a really direct divine gift from God. I

01:31:56.080 think that it doesn't come from our own, you know, you don't sit down and you do the math,

01:32:00.700 you don't build the 5G shape in your head and then it all connects and you've figured out

01:32:06.260 of christ and achieved your salvation that's not how it works right um i you know as a christian

01:32:11.060 i think that that the holy spirit directly affects people and they encounter it and apologetics a lot

01:32:16.380 of times are people that are trying to um put into words the reason for why they find it reasonable

01:32:21.340 um but the basis for their belief is their election by god right that's my my view well

01:32:27.480 you're you're a calvinist yeah that's right it's a harsh doctrine even if i mean

01:32:33.700 wow so it doesn't matter you're you're elect or you're not well in the sense that you can't do

01:32:42.760 anything but it's kind of it's right in the sense that you didn't do anything to be saved right you

01:32:47.080 could say right you know god i i i i'm a sinner i'm guilty i'm worthy of hell um if if you save

01:32:55.240 me that's that's you that's you that did that it wasn't because i figured it out it's not because

01:32:59.620 Is there anything in me that makes me worthy of salvation, right?

01:33:03.380 You know, and this comes up in, you know, the idea of the book of life and Revelation

01:33:06.860 of, you know, if you're written in there, you are.

01:33:09.320 And that is a little bit freeing in regards to even the evangelical component, like we

01:33:14.340 talked about earlier, because it's not on you to make sure, you know, having this conversation,

01:33:19.760 it's not on me, Richard, that you come to believe in Jesus, that I walk you through

01:33:24.020 the Roman road right now to, you know, because if, you know, to make sure you figure it out,

01:33:27.820 You know, it's it's up to the Holy Spirit. And and I can I can pray for that. But it's not it's not on the basis of what any man does that anyone comes to that to that faith.

01:33:37.860 Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I had a private conversation with two people and Mark Brahman was actually there. And he was, if I remember correctly, he was saying things like, well, I think we should have a works doctrine as Apolloists.

01:33:55.360 like you it's the fame of a dead man's deeds or you know you you earned this through your

01:34:02.720 your abilities and your vigor and your your stamina in this world and and i i it's it's funny

01:34:11.260 because i i i understand i totally understand where he's coming from but and and it is a kind

01:34:17.440 of non-egalitarian way of thinking but i i also i i the protestantism i i think it does strike me

01:34:26.920 as compelling in the sense that there's actually nothing you could do to earn salvation right and

01:34:36.680 you're always bad you know you you i and you we've told a dozen lies today you know and we've lied to

01:34:46.560 ourselves, you know, we're, we're sending cons. I've had some very lewd thoughts just to, I mean,

01:34:52.580 just speaking for myself, you know, I've, I've committed adultery, uh, many times today, uh,

01:34:58.600 in my mind. And so you're sort of, you're, you're kind of inherently undeserving. And I agree when

01:35:05.160 you, when you think of yourself as wretched, it, it can weigh you down and destroy your ego and

01:35:12.380 all that kind of thing but on another level it there is a kind of freedom of like going to the

01:35:19.820 floor and going through the floor and reaching the heights to use a metaphor like that yeah if

01:35:27.740 you understand what i mean there there is something compelling about it you can't buy your uncle out

01:35:33.060 of purgatory. There's no amount of money. I do find the basic reformed message very compelling

01:35:43.940 and authentic and sincere. Well, yeah, I mean, that's interesting to hear from someone outside

01:35:51.920 the faith. And I've heard that from others, especially who have experienced some type of

01:35:58.960 very in-your-face street preaching rhetoric that really implies or conveys that they feel like

01:36:07.760 they are the one that stands between you and hell rather than Christ, right? There's this sort of

01:36:12.080 weird, this weird vicarious thing where they're taking that almost for themselves in that moment.

01:36:17.180 And there's terms that are used in some circles that they'll call it soul winning, right? So it's

01:36:23.240 like your evangelism is soul winning. And I think there may be some basis for that use of language,

01:36:28.700 And there's different levels of analysis for these sort of things.

01:36:31.120 But in the more Reformed tradition, that thought kind of rings to us as being – as containing a lack of humility. 0.56

01:36:41.240 Yes. 0.96

01:36:42.200 And people being as –

01:36:43.320 I remember my daughter one time asked me, she was like, so good people go to heaven.

01:36:46.800 And I was like, well, it's actually more complicated.

01:36:51.300 Was she asking you about in Christianity or in what you were –

01:36:55.240 Yeah. Well, she she didn't even say in Christianity that, you know, she she lives in America and, you know, this time she just imbibed it.

01:37:01.700 She's been to church many times. So she just asked. And I was like, well, actually, it's more complicated.

01:37:06.820 You know, Luther had this radical message, which is no one is deserving in a way.

01:37:12.560 We're all bad is sort of the message. And I think that was actually a little bit too complicated for her at age eight or whenever it was.

01:37:21.880 but um right right you know i can't really represent maybe can i ask you something kind

01:37:27.600 of personal and you can tell me if it's too far that's fine so you mentioned like your daughter

01:37:32.520 would go to church do you do you i don't know how many kids you have or whatever have you have you

01:37:36.900 raised your kids in the church now yeah okay yes you know i think they need something to rebel

01:37:42.220 against don't you well you're so you're so mainline like you're so you're so very uh yeah

01:37:50.560 yeah well i i i i do i do feel like there are um very good things about this and i i don't know

01:38:03.840 i've i've occasionally had conversations with other parents and um they were like oh yeah

01:38:10.540 yeah we never go to church neither neither bill i mean i'm just using it neither bill and i believe

01:38:15.900 in god you know what what and it's like i don't know there's something there's something kind of

01:38:23.520 maybe there's something worse than the aggressive atheist and it's the man who doesn't care i and i

01:38:33.200 think on some level this was what nietzsche was getting at when he talked about the last man

01:38:38.560 the the last man knows that god is dead and it it's but it just goes on his life you know it's

01:38:48.240 like oh yeah god's dead but there's a sale at macy's that's sort of the last man's attitude

01:38:53.420 and more to the last man than that but i i feel like you do even if because i'm a rebel

01:39:03.340 and and and maybe they'll inherit that streak um you need some basis

01:39:11.640 even even maybe she she or my other two children will choose that and and that's fine uh because

01:39:20.720 i i don't i don't like forcing things on on children you know you can influence them and

01:39:25.980 lead them but forcing i don't like and um but maybe they need that maybe they need something

01:39:33.120 to rebel against and they'll inherit my streak um but there there needs to be something there

01:39:39.960 like there there there is something bigger than just going to school and buying something at

01:39:49.100 walmart and going to a baseball game like there's something more to life than this

01:39:54.280 where humans are a religious species well you press destiny on that as well i think because

01:40:01.380 he made that point about you know we have was i don't even remember like we have music like we

01:40:06.100 can make music with our friends and i feel fulfillment when i play video games and you

01:40:09.540 were like really you know and um that was a that was a good clip i think that was that was a very

01:40:13.980 valid critique of his his his sort of vapidness um i agree yeah um what one thing that i do i mean

01:40:23.460 And this is this is kind of about because I don't know a lot about your your your project with the Apollo and whatever, you know, stuff.

01:40:30.440 But are you authentically theistic? 0.88

01:40:37.380 I don't think an Apolloist would believe in the way that a Christian would believe. 0.89

01:40:43.840 I think there there's sort of two things going on with Christianity. 0.90

01:40:50.260 There is the pretense of historicity. 0.84

01:40:52.560 We actually address this in the book and in the first book as well.

01:40:56.800 There's a pretense of historicity that this really happened.

01:41:00.860 And not just the Gospels, but Moses was a guy in Egypt once, and there was a Garden of Eden, too.

01:41:08.220 I mean, this is historically true.

01:41:11.640 I don't believe that readers of Hesiod would have that type of, I don't know, like documentary feel when reading about Greek religion.

01:41:28.220 I don't think most people fought in those terms.

01:41:32.100 They took a myth as a myth.

01:41:34.040 and the second thing about christian faith um is that you're doomed if you don't believe in it i

01:41:44.660 mean you have to put your faith in jesus or you're going to hell and um right yeah no i mean and so

01:41:55.200 there's two components and they're sort of separate but but reinforcing um one another so

01:42:01.480 So I do believe that maybe on some level, a god is a kind of archetype or a state of being.

01:42:11.820 You know, it's interesting with Venus or Aphrodite.

01:42:14.660 She's not even ripped out of Saturn's belly.

01:42:18.160 She comes out of the sea.

01:42:19.380 She's almost this primordial principle of love and sex and fertility and other things all wrapped up into one.

01:42:28.500 And, you know, you know Mars when you are attacking someone. You might know Apollo when you're being particularly articulate and you're reaching clarity. I think you are Apollonian in that sense and in other senses.

01:42:45.560 and and so i i think on some level there's this kind of archetypal state of being and on another

01:42:52.080 level i i think that gods are idealized forms of humans they're superhuman they are they can

01:43:02.020 represent someone something and and apollo is a polymath they can represent these virtues just

01:43:09.780 incarnate these virtues in the sense that they that image should be something that should lead

01:43:16.620 the flock so i don't believe that you know like apollo talks to me or i'm gonna meet apollo one

01:43:26.460 day or i i i don't really believe that there was an apollo once he was like an ancestor and he got

01:43:32.880 exaggerated i don't believe that either i believe it more in the sense of a forward-looking

01:43:37.860 creative human creative capacity to create to invent an ideal and so in that sense i believe

01:43:46.480 do you do you think that humans are uniquely capable of that on the basis of our material

01:43:55.020 like what makes you know as humans um and just the fact that we have the ability to think and

01:44:00.840 have big brains or do you think that there's a spiritual like a legitimately metaphysical quality

01:44:05.520 um to people that that is separated like a like a psyche or soul i mean i the latter i'm a kind of

01:44:14.340 a materialist yeah we have big the latter that oh oh so the first the former the former excuse me

01:44:19.940 yes okay we're we we have big brains and we think in this way and religion binds us it's a way to

01:44:26.240 bind a community and make you do things that you otherwise wouldn't um i you know there's this

01:44:33.380 there i think there's a there's this atheist saying uh and christopher hitchens would quote

01:44:39.120 this all the time and and he would say you know maybe on occasion uh religion can make a bad

01:44:45.860 person good you know a criminal goes to jail and he reads the bible and he comes out and he gets

01:44:50.520 his life together maybe that happens but if you want to make a good person bad you need religion

01:44:56.320 and i i know this well that's why that's a very famous quote yeah right but that is why we need

01:45:05.520 religion you need people to go over the top and rush into a barrage of machine guns

01:45:13.020 and we need to expand we need to grow we need to bind people without chains and so i i do think

01:45:24.400 that religion is we've evolved with religion and i do think religion is is a human necessity

01:45:30.500 in that sense but but i i am a materialist in the sense that you know psyche is often translated

01:45:38.600 in when plato when you see the word psyche it's often translated soul and and that definitely

01:45:43.600 has a lot of christian connotations there the immortal soul and etc um there were many ancient

01:45:49.540 mystery cults that were flirting with the idea of an immortal soul. Sometimes it was just a

01:45:56.420 blessed afterlife, but some of them might have, you know, we don't have that much documents

01:46:01.660 from mystery cults, but some of them were pushing in the direction of an immortal soul.

01:46:08.520 And certainly Plato thought in those terms, or Socrates, his mouthpiece. But psyche is mind.

01:46:19.540 and yeah we have a mind um i i think that's a better translation of that concept as as it was

01:46:28.040 uh meant to that point but you know the mystery i hate that i haven't read your book i i feel

01:46:32.840 unprepared i guess because i haven't signed copy no it's not out yet i'll send you a signed coffee

01:46:37.580 so yeah all right all right are you uh are you i'll let you finish sorry okay but you know like

01:46:43.200 mystery cults do you know the central god of the mystery cults no i this is not my focus the god

01:46:50.760 of wine i mean it plato is i mean from my perspective plato just invented christianity

01:46:58.660 and he even invented a concept of heaven which you can see in the in the republic he's talking

01:47:06.040 he's saying, you know, whoa, I've read Homer and, you know, Hades sounds terrible. You're a shadow

01:47:13.480 of your former self and you can barely do anything. Life is better than death. He was like, in order

01:47:20.260 to defend the polis, we need to present the afterlife as wonderful and blessed. And Plato

01:47:26.240 himself personally might have had some connection with Orphic cults, which are kind of post-Dionysian

01:47:32.220 cult. So mystery cults, Plato, I think Christianity is this kind of ultimate modern synthesis of a

01:47:43.740 lot of these different ideas that were floating around in the ancient world. And strict Apolloism

01:47:51.480 is kind of like, at that time, at least, it's the mainstream that things like mystery cults or

01:48:00.200 Plato were reacting against. They were trying to do something new and find something new.

01:48:04.540 So in some ways, Apolloism is about trying to recover to the degree that it's possible

01:48:10.040 an older form of religion and how we can reinvent this for the future.

01:48:17.100 We don't, I don't, Apolloists, we're, you know, we're, we're total, the project at this moment,

01:48:21.880 we're not, no one's worshiping anything. We're, we're doing criticism and examining the Bible,

01:48:28.400 etc. Now, at some point, there might be a strictly religious or worship component to all this,

01:48:37.260 but we're not, you know, anywhere close to that. But yeah, we want to uncover something that has

01:48:44.560 been covered up over the past 2000 years, but but not just to reenact it, but to kind of direct it

01:48:50.640 into the future for higher development of civilization and apollo is it he is him

01:48:58.820 for for civilization in terms of beauty intelligence clarity athleticism health

01:49:07.620 there he is as our ideal and um so yeah that's how i would sum it up as brief as possible

01:49:14.920 okay do do um and this is my own ignorance i guess on the the historic cults that you're

01:49:22.180 talking about and their perspective on these things um would with you mentioned you know

01:49:28.020 the idea of of those things being formulated with an end goal in mind of increasing civilization

01:49:33.840 and um you know just dominance of the society yeah were they were they historically

01:49:41.320 who you're being right who you're referencing were they moral realist cults or apolloist cults

01:49:47.220 apolloist cults sorry right well these are state religions right what did they conceptualize like

01:49:54.060 the idea of um man's dominance increasing as an objective moral good or was this more

01:50:01.660 conceptualized as a subjective personal preference for um like just things getting better because

01:50:08.460 it'll be good for me what was it i understand that i don't know but i and then i guess what

01:50:17.460 would you say that that's like an objective like if you know what moral realism is i've never been

01:50:22.660 able to figure out in in my very limited understanding of of things like you're talking

01:50:27.260 about at that level historically how much the the greeks and romans really conceptualized or had

01:50:32.740 understanding of moral realism um of the idea of moral moral values and duties that in and of

01:50:39.480 themselves had intrinsic objective quality in the world um do you think they believe that and then

01:50:46.700 do you do you believe that so many of these gods are you know quite literally virtues

01:50:54.760 you know and vices i mean there's a god called androgyny androgyny i mean so you know in in

01:51:04.540 some ways these gods would sort of incarnate a virtue or a vice now i guess i might be a little

01:51:12.680 more of a historical relativist when it comes to morality but then i am a materialist so i i do see

01:51:20.880 morality is right is changing um but i do think that the the the the artists that created religions

01:51:31.180 knew what they were doing on some level i would posit mark would posit this as well

01:51:36.400 now we could never prove this but i do think that and whether they articulated it directly

01:51:43.960 who knows or only thought it themselves or it was a half of a thought or just a mere instinct

01:51:50.420 I do think that the artists who created all religions knew what they were doing, understood the power of religion and wanted to change history with their religion. And so that the question is, you know, what is the intention going on there? Right. To the degree that we can access it.

01:52:09.880 okay so so why do you think that because that your interaction with destiny on that was really

01:52:16.120 interesting to me because i can sort of conceptualize that you were a materialist

01:52:20.360 and i've actually personally had a conversation with destiny one time about how he's a moral

01:52:24.940 anti-realist and um i didn't know where you stood on this on what that what you know what does that

01:52:31.800 mean so so he's the he's totally moral well in the in the sense that and i guess that there's

01:52:40.140 always a gap between someone's philosophical beliefs and how they behave right because

01:52:43.820 everybody acts as a moral realist in the sense that if somebody keys your your car that you

01:52:49.220 you know you feel like that was wrong more than just really your your preference for ice cream

01:52:54.080 flavors right people understand that um but in but philosophically destiny is a moral anti-realist

01:52:59.960 And he will say, like, I don't believe that moral values and duties have any more objective reality than personal preference, because it's all materialist.

01:53:09.200 It all happens in your brain. 0.98

01:53:10.580 You're a meat puppet. 0.99

01:53:12.120 Right. 0.93

01:53:12.220 Now, there may be morality is subjective, no doubt.

01:53:15.960 And that's but it's so you would be more than be an anti-realist.

01:53:20.060 Yeah.

01:53:20.420 Yeah.

01:53:20.700 That's what I'm trying to figure out, because it seems like we have the same materialist's sake.

01:53:25.200 We're using the word realism in a way that they probably don't use it.

01:53:28.540 So realism, sort of as opposed to nominalism, actually, that there are objective for all time moral principles that are alive in the world. Yes. I am an anti-realist in that sense, but I think it's more, it's deeper than just mere preference of ice cream.

01:53:47.540 I think, you know, morality, collective morality can evolve and can make us better adapt adapted to survival and dominance. So I don't think it's just merely a preference. Like I like a white shirt as opposed to a brown shirt or something.

01:54:06.720 okay and and that's and that's okay but it's all it is still all within the material framework

01:54:13.900 for you correct okay yeah and that's what that's what was interesting because that's his view but

01:54:18.960 he's reached it he's reached a form of anti-realism that i guess you don't want to just really well

01:54:24.880 i think destiny i don't know right destiny or kyle kalinsky i i think what they have is a sort 0.98

01:54:29.920 of non-aggression principle where you can it's all preference but like you can be like crazy gay 0.97

01:54:39.260 orgy fan or whatever but if like everyone is okay with it then it's okay like i think that's what 0.96

01:54:47.160 their morality is there's no in like a certain of what should be in politics kind of don't hurt

01:54:53.820 anyone in politics and in practice it is but on the philosophical level he is a pretty firm

01:54:59.900 anti-realist and that's one of the reasons i actually have some respect for destiny is i i

01:55:03.840 i believe and i'm i i hold to it a form of apologetic background called pre-supportionalism

01:55:09.380 but i think that destiny is is really one of the most honest moral anti-realists that exist

01:55:15.620 in the sense that it is bare-necked desire and self-indulgent hedonism.

01:55:27.260 And the thing is, and it may be extrapolated with incredible intelligence

01:55:31.240 to the point of making arguments for how society should operate.

01:55:34.120 You might even be able to do the math to get to the point where you believe

01:55:40.040 that we need religion kind of like how you're talking about it

01:55:43.500 to get people to go up over the wall

01:55:45.800 and run into the machine guns.

01:55:47.980 But when it all kind of boils down to it,

01:55:50.500 it's like, it's just a meat machine.

01:55:54.680 And I think that trying to preserve

01:55:57.100 an aspect of that spiritual metaphysical thing

01:56:00.420 that you're trying to describe with Apolloism

01:56:02.400 is just not compatible with the materialist stuff.

01:56:05.680 I just don't think it is.

01:56:06.580 I think that it has to be rooted

01:56:07.760 in some sort of metaphysic

01:56:09.060 that it is truly genuinely believed.

01:56:11.940 And this is why things like the importance of Christ's physical resurrection in Christianity, that it can't be reduced down to an ascent to the idea that the story is impactful or makes people animated to do good things.

01:56:27.100 because if the moment that you believe that you cease to truly act like it right you you because

01:56:33.980 you know it that it's it was you know that it was cooked up in a lab to get you to go over the wall

01:56:39.040 to run into the machine guns right you you realize that and and so you i think that's why the

01:56:45.140 metaphysical component is is just totally inseparable from from um spiritual claims i

01:56:50.440 understand i totally understand what you're saying um but yeah and you could say i'm like a cynic but

01:56:57.520 i think plato was a cynic plato wanted to change the world in a radical new direction

01:57:05.300 and developed a philosophy of theory of forms to justify that and and he's had an impact for

01:57:15.900 2,000 years. Not everyone needs to know. I mean, I know this sounds totally cynical and like

01:57:23.680 diabolical, but hyper Machiavellian. Yeah. What we would call evil in Christianity. Yeah. No,

01:57:30.580 I think it is. I think it is evil. But it also exists within society and flourishing. And I

01:57:38.080 tried to mention the piranha and people who listened to me a while are probably sick of

01:57:42.480 this example, but it is a real classic example. The piranha are moral fish. They would never

01:57:50.280 dream of eating another piranha. Never, never happened. Now, if an injured animal steps into

01:57:59.320 that stream, it's another story. So there is a morality that is collective and no doubt heritable

01:58:09.560 in terms of instinct and so on that that that you know encapsulates the group

01:58:16.820 and we might see them as evil but they certainly don't see themselves that way

01:58:22.320 and i i think not that we can not that i'm trying to or or or it's that easy to like change

01:58:32.080 instinct on this level but we respond to words and we respond to religion as if it were an

01:58:43.860 instinctual command and so changing that command is the trick and you know i i think that there

01:58:55.800 are ways that we can start to change that command in the psyche of millions of beings on this planet

01:59:03.820 and start channeling them into a new direction that would be better for mankind and culture and

01:59:12.000 science and so much more. But you just sort of have to be willing to do it. I mean, Nietzsche

01:59:18.180 complained, like, why haven't we had new gods in the past 2000 years? You know, I mean, you might

01:59:24.880 say oh because there's only one the one in it we found the one and we'd i i get it i get it but 1.00

01:59:30.860 he would say it's a lot we've lost some creativity some some moxie some guts to go out there and do 0.77

01:59:41.200 it so do you see that the the um the decline of christianity as co in in your view i guess in the

01:59:49.560 west or the increase of nominalism theological nominalism in christianity coinciding with the

01:59:55.100 increase in greatness of of science and and going to the moon and all these things as being 100

02:00:00.740 okay that those are truly derivative of each other like that's that comes from that yes now

02:00:08.400 now it's very interesting because nietzsche had a a view of christianity and he even associated

02:00:15.700 with Plato you can find this in the gay science um which is that that that great name for a book

02:00:21.600 by the way right right not the other yeah not that not that book not that one the other gay science

02:00:26.880 yeah de frullica fissensha um but uh he uh that overvaluing of truth was at the heart of Plato 0.53

02:00:36.440 and at the heart of Christianity and so and he thought it ironically would overturn Christianity

02:00:43.800 So you love truth so much, you start engaging in criticism of the Bible and high criticism in Germany. They were doing this. You start questioning whether Jesus was real or whether, you know, what are the contradictions in this dogma, etc.

02:00:57.380 But it's that overvaluing of truth, truth at all costs, truth at the cost of my life.

02:01:03.940 And so he saw in a weird way, science as derived from Christianity, or at least that instinct

02:01:13.020 to overvalue truth.

02:01:15.440 Now, that being said, I absolutely don't, I think it's complex.

02:01:22.200 I absolutely don't think we would have developed science without the nominalist revolution.

02:01:28.660 Because that questioning of the universal, you know, Occam's razor, don't multiply universals

02:01:34.420 because we don't know these universals might not be real, they might be deceptive, God is not bound

02:01:40.500 by universals, don't multiply them, just try to get at one. This seems to be the basis of the

02:01:46.000 hypothesis. You can make a scientific hypothesis and begin testing individual instances to see if

02:01:53.500 it is true. And so that anomalous revolution in mindset, I think, was absolutely foundational

02:02:03.620 to the development of science and everything that comes with it. Yeah, the bicycle, the automobile,

02:02:10.180 the space flight yeah so it's an and it's a character of what you see is coming from

02:02:17.600 the platonic stuff through christianity um but then we sort of outgrew it is how you'd say or

02:02:24.380 do you do you think it's owed initially at all to christianity because i know that i know that um

02:02:28.240 it's complicated i agree with what nietzsche said but i i think nominalist is nominalism in my mind

02:02:34.980 is anti-Platonism. Plato is a realist. He didn't use that terminology. But that form is real. And

02:02:43.760 keep in mind, the ideal couch is realer than the couch I'm sitting on right now. Like this chair,

02:02:53.080 it's a chair, actually, this chair is participating in the ideal form. And that's how I perceive it

02:02:59.760 is a chair and that's how it serves a purpose so what is plato if not a realist see now that's but

02:03:06.200 now you're making so that that's like a well and then that's how you would get moral realism or

02:03:10.000 whatever else i guess from from that but then from plato yeah but it's not it's not philosophical

02:03:14.980 realism in the sense that what we the the concept like if all persons died tomorrow on this planet

02:03:20.620 the uh ideal of a chair also dies i would say that but i don't i don't know yes well and that's

02:03:28.180 that's anti-realism yeah yeah like there's a new play-doh i think plato was right and you're wrong

02:03:33.020 exactly yeah like there's a nuclear war but like chairness still exists right it's kind of funny

02:03:40.320 to think even though nobody is around yeah i mean i i would say it does i mean but i think that

02:03:45.800 extends to uh moral properties and values as well and and in the fact that people instinctually

02:03:52.420 understand those to be true so i think that the the difference between physical realism of

02:03:57.660 objects and things like that and moral realism i think the same arguments that can be made for any

02:04:02.540 type of of realism can also be extrapolated to be arguments for moral realism um right the only

02:04:08.420 issue is we can physically see a chair and we can't physically see the fact it's wrong to rape

02:04:15.520 children um not in a in the same sense we can though we we can't this is my rejoinder to that

02:04:24.020 is we can though because a maybe we want to change the analogy so this doesn't get real

02:04:28.780 wacky in a second no no i understand like you know we can't don't be depraved but a a depraved

02:04:37.140 society is going to die in the vine you know we need we need to cooperate we need to be good we

02:04:45.980 need to treat everyone with good faith and as brothers right in order for the society to

02:04:51.580 dominate and survive in the first step but dominate with the presumption that that us

02:04:56.480 continuing to survive is a is a is a good right so that's all right yeah yeah anyway i know we've

02:05:03.480 gone down the rabbit hole and i want to keep you all night or whatever but this is well no this is

02:05:06.720 very uh this has been very philosophical i and i think we've also kept it on a level you know it's

02:05:12.080 it's hard to complex ideas are they're hard it's not that the idea is hard it's explaining it is

02:05:19.240 actually hard you know what i mean like ideas are kind of simple but it's a struggle to explain it

02:05:25.300 and i think we have done that so i i think uh the audience you know benefits from that cool that's

02:05:30.480 that's awesome so i we're not navel gazing that's what i'm saying right i don't think we're just

02:05:35.020 smelling our own farts over here yeah i i um one thing that um uh i wanted to ask you um because

02:05:43.320 i think it was i think it was scott greer i was talking to and i know you and scott are on the

02:05:48.260 outs for whatever reason i don't really care to get into that right and i don't know or want to

02:05:52.880 know um but he wrote an article that was like why i'm not a white nationalist recently and um i

02:06:00.000 thought that was a very interesting article and encapsulated as somebody who has never

02:06:04.620 you know a white nationalist but i feel like i understood a lot of their beliefs and why they

02:06:10.680 believe them or believe them still um why he left that movement or stopped labeling himself as that

02:06:18.140 And I was curious if you still consider yourself a white nationalist or where you stand in regard to that. Do you just dislike the label? Do you still see the sort of platonic ideal as being a singular ethnic or racial nation? What's your feeling?

02:06:38.100 I've definitely left the movement. I mean, I don't even talk to anyone from from 10 years ago. I actually did know Mark Brahman 10 years ago. There's there is he. But other than that, I've just I'm I'm out and they don't like me either.

02:06:57.300 so it's it's fine um i i also don't really like the label and i i also think it sort of like

02:07:05.580 binds you in a way that i don't really care for you know it's like we're we're sticking up for

02:07:13.640 the whites here uh you know i i don't know i i think we should criticize the whites here 0.56

02:07:20.760 And we should do I'm doing things that will no doubt be offensive to most whites, certainly all white nationalists. So I don't really think of myself as like an advocate or, you know, or whatever. I mean, I think I I don't know if I read the article, but I did read a tweet by Scott Greer where I mean, talk about cynical. 0.60

02:07:45.240 I mean, my sense of what he was saying was that people don't like the term white nationalist, so I don't use the term white nationalist.

02:07:54.180 And it's better not to be part of a white nationalist movement because Trump furthers the goals of white nationalism.

02:08:00.860 Isn't that the thesis of his book?

02:08:03.400 Yeah, I've not read his book.

02:08:05.240 I'm supposed to, I'm going to get a copy of it.

02:08:07.020 I'm supposed to go to his, he's having a book party, I think, and I may go to that.

02:08:12.260 I didn't get an invite.

02:08:13.700 That's crazy.

02:08:15.240 Well, you know, I, listen, I don't know how, how good you guys are friends or not or whatever,

02:08:20.260 but, um, we, we chat, you know, I think, um, some of the stuff that I've pushed, pushed

02:08:27.260 on, he's, he's pushed on as well online.

02:08:28.940 And, um, I think, I think that that was essentially, I mean, it's a little bit uncharitable, but

02:08:34.460 I do think that was the general flow of his article, but I don't think, I think really

02:08:38.800 what I read in it was, and this is the article, not his book, but I think it's a similar

02:08:42.220 was that um he became just a janitor with white nationalism kind of because he realized not just

02:08:48.760 that it wasn't achievable pragmatically but that he wasn't quite sure he wanted to live in the

02:08:53.400 fantasy world of these weird internet freak people um that they were dreaming about that's kind of

02:09:00.140 what i felt he was somewhat communicating in that and i think that the language that you use in some

02:09:05.320 of these circles to communicate that is the pragmatism um but i felt there was sort of a

02:09:09.820 deep sense of, you know, like maybe the wheat fields and the, you know, the, the, the blonde 0.93

02:09:15.600 Aryan harem or whatever, maybe that actually is just very silly. And I don't think I would want 1.00

02:09:20.220 to live in pre-Christian Europe. Right. I don't, I don't know. Right. Um, but that was sort of the, 0.98

02:09:25.220 the vibe that I get from him. And so I was, I see similarities. You might be projecting that

02:09:29.760 into what he said, but I, I agree with that sentiment. I agree with that sentiment though.

02:09:34.480 Okay. Yeah. Okay. So as you guys, at least on that level maybe are on. Yeah, I know. I mean,

02:09:38.520 the funny thing is that there's a lot of agreement um yes yeah so you've never done the i'm not a

02:09:45.880 white nationalist anymore speaking circuit where you go talk to npr no i i you know i i was talking

02:09:50.580 to this journalist about that and he almost wanted me to and it's it's like i i just i'm not i'm not

02:09:56.620 gonna go and wash people's feet or or like say that i was totally wrong because i don't i don't

02:10:02.400 think i was totally wrong and i know and i'll i can parse out where i was wrong or where i've

02:10:09.340 moved where i disagree with myself and also where i'm just headed in a different direction

02:10:14.460 which is obvious but just this like i'm here i'm a liberal now i'm sorry does anyone i guess some

02:10:24.360 people want me to do that whenever i see people do that i don't trust them lucas gage i don't trust

02:10:30.360 that as far, I don't trust him as far as I could throw him. I don't like that. I don't, I don't

02:10:35.780 demand that of other people. You know, like I, I just don't like that whole thing. And like, if you

02:10:44.100 reconverted to Apolloism, you know, I'm going to do the Islam thing, you reconverted. Yeah. 1.00

02:10:50.100 But if you reconverted to Apolloism, you don't have to apologize to me or, or like get, get at

02:10:58.420 my feet and you know I was wrong I'm so sorry you don't have to do any of that like I sort of

02:11:05.740 respect people where they are I don't think I was I'm not 180 degrees away from where I was

02:11:12.060 but I am in a different place you want to find out where I am you can listen to me but I'm not

02:11:17.480 gonna come and go on this apology tour and say I'm sorry and I'm wrong and I want to say you know

02:11:24.620 it's like i think the best way is to go forward and and be productive as as opposed to like wallow

02:11:32.680 and you know the past or for lucas gage i'm i'm so sorry about what i did last month

02:11:40.280 or something right i mean yeah the yeah and that that was extremely rapid which is why that was so

02:11:45.380 odd but yeah i mean there's definitely an aspect of it that could be self-denigration and i'm not

02:11:51.100 I don't think there's any degree of this that, based on your background, that I would ever expect you to do, especially because you're not a Christian.

02:11:58.180 So I understand your value system on what that would even look like is totally out the window. 0.99

02:12:03.320 But I do think, you know, so I'm from Texas, right?

02:12:10.020 And I knew a lot of people at Texas A&M.

02:12:12.960 And you went to Texas A&M in a very dramatic fashion when I was in college, I think.

02:12:17.340 and um i i remembered this and i think i even at the time what i like tweeted at you one time

02:12:24.740 because i i tweeted at some event where i asked a question about free speech and i'd added you or

02:12:28.880 whatever way back and this is when you were very vehement in this stuff very very hardcore on it

02:12:33.660 and um i think people one of the things that's weird about the internet is it takes a person in

02:12:39.000 time and then that's how you are remembered is that specific action that you took that got

02:12:44.320 attention at that point and then it's and it's

02:12:47.340 it's it's frozen right um in a way that memories are not because people reinterpret memories but

02:12:53.760 they can't they can't reinterpret you throwing up a roman at um whatever event uh you know and

02:12:59.780 i didn't even throw up a roman but you remember it that way i'm sorry yes i'm sorry that's what

02:13:04.400 i raised you not throw a roman what did i didn't i raised a glass but there were some romans thrown

02:13:09.360 in the room so ah there were some Romans right on are you can you ever can I or anyone ever 0.74

02:13:17.060 escape their own shadow or am I just Bill Buckner you know Bill Buckner is like a really good 0.95

02:13:22.540 baseball player I don't do you know who Bill Buckner is no no I don't okay sorry not a sports

02:13:29.140 guy 1986 World Series Red Sox versus Mets the ball goes through his legs the ninth inning and

02:13:38.340 the Mets win it's it's the most infamous play ever and this guy had a life he was actually great I

02:13:47.860 think he won a batting title he was he had a whole story ball going through his legs is the one thing

02:13:57.180 that he is known for it just is what it is I think the only like I could go and be like I was wrong

02:14:04.400 I'm sorry maybe that would be most effective but it's just not something I can do personally

02:14:08.220 i i think a better thing is to say like i am going to be productive i'm going to

02:14:15.000 go after the truth i am going to help you understand things i'm gonna be good

02:14:23.260 and i i just think that's the better thing to do than an apology tour no one would believe me i

02:14:31.060 people always think i'm kind of evil well you're my i don't know i was about to say i mean even

02:14:36.900 when you just mentioned a second ago you said you know you're like i just raised a glass and in my

02:14:41.240 in my in my puritan sensibilities i was like oh yeah he's probably telling the truth and then i

02:14:45.700 was like well hold on you know i i don't have any reason to believe that richard is telling you the

02:14:49.900 truth right now either i mean based on all the presuppositions here i don't know this could be

02:14:54.280 this could be some i am i am being truthful yeah okay i don't think anyone would believe you now

02:15:00.300 i don't think anyone would believe me if i did it though i i died that blatantly right yeah i

02:15:06.160 understand i understand yeah okay cool yeah well that's uh that's pretty much the only things i had

02:15:10.840 on my list um that uh this is great um i am very pleased with that we had a a number of viewers

02:15:17.920 and i i think i'll put up the whole thing on youtube because um you know this was out out

02:15:22.620 here for free and stuff like that so um this was an excellent uh talk i really enjoyed it and

02:15:29.360 gained gained something from it um why don't you tell our listeners and everyone you know where

02:15:33.820 they can find you and uh are you publishing on substack now or you just have a an account yeah

02:15:39.320 no no i've been on substack for for a minute um good so you can my if you if you do hitlerhatedchrist.com

02:15:46.440 it takes you directly to my substack um and that is mostly going to be historical material so that's

02:15:52.320 going to be world war ii um stuff related to christianity and nazism and their intersection

02:15:58.120 I published earlier this week a contemporary SS internal document just for as an example where they were discussing really sort of like a game plan for how they were going to reformat the church.

02:16:13.160 And we're pretty open about their plans and that sort of thing.

02:16:17.440 So if that interests you and you're curious about that topic, that's where I put most of that stuff.

02:16:21.560 And then for just on stream of consciousness and goofing off type stuff, I'm on Twitter at not our guy with underscores between each word. I've got a YouTube channel. I do some content on there. My best thing on my YouTube, I have a three hour video where I do a full breakdown of a lot of the really just F tier, low IQ, Holocaust denial crap that's out there.

02:16:45.920 and I go through an entire podcast

02:16:48.720 by one of my interlocutors

02:16:49.860 and that took me about a year to make it

02:16:53.860 so if you guys are interested in that kind of topic

02:16:55.640 I think that may be

02:16:57.740 that may be the most comprehensive

02:17:00.080 dealing with

02:17:01.000 really all of the historical revisionism

02:17:03.580 in that regard that I've found

02:17:05.180 and I made it

02:17:07.280 so if you're interested in that

02:17:08.620 that's on there too

02:17:09.420 very good stuff

02:17:12.140 I'm actually going to be in Texas next week

02:17:14.480 So maybe I'll buy you dinner or something.

02:17:16.620 Who knows?

02:17:17.320 Well, we'll talk maybe after we end the stream here

02:17:19.920 because maybe we'll be in the same place.

02:17:21.800 I don't know.

02:17:22.560 That sounds fun.

02:17:23.560 Well, anyway, thanks everyone for being here

02:17:25.300 and I will see you soon.

02:17:28.560 Ciao.

02:17:29.440 Thank you.

02:17:44.480 You

RadixJournal - July 16, 2026

Chasing the Christian Prince

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