Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 269 ｜ Wrecking vs. Reckoning with Our American History

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. I hope everyone has had a great week so far.

00:00:17.320 I was on vacation last week, which is why you had the two-part interview with Stephen

00:00:23.400 Bancars on Monday and Wednesday. Then you had a replay episode, Rise of the Millennial

00:00:28.320 Witches on Friday. And then you had another interview on Monday with Jim Daly of Focus

00:00:35.600 on the Family. If you haven't listened to those podcast episodes yet, I encourage you to do so.

00:00:40.000 Some of my favorite of all time. I just love listening to, talking to guests that are experts

00:00:46.040 in a particular field. They gave me a lot of insight. And I know for a fact that they gave

00:00:50.300 you a lot of insight as well, because I got emails and messages and reposts on Instagram stories of

00:00:57.160 all of you who listened to the podcast episodes, especially last week, the interviews with

00:01:03.060 Stephen Bancars on The New Age. If you have not listened to those yet, I highly encourage you to

00:01:08.880 do so. And just a little bit of encouragement to you guys as you're looking around and you're

00:01:13.860 thinking, oh my gosh, this entire world is devolving into chaos. People are abandoning the objective truth

00:01:20.400 of God's word. And they are slipping into the anarchy that inevitably comes with postmodernism

00:01:28.520 and moral relativism. All of that may be true. But as I shared on my Instagram story the other day,

00:01:35.240 God's work does not make headlines. God is working on hearts. He is softening hearts. He is calling

00:01:42.560 people to himself. He is calling people to repentance. People's eyes are being opened. The eyes of their

00:01:49.380 hearts, as Ephesians, I think 1.18 says, are being enlightened. They are coming to know the truth

00:01:55.440 of the gospel and the truth of God's word in the midst of all of this. And that won't be reported

00:02:00.600 on. It's not going to be trending on Twitter, but we can rest assured that not only is God still on his

00:02:06.240 throne, and Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, but he is also actively working. He

00:02:12.240 doesn't come in later just to clean up the mess. He doesn't stand back aghast and surprised to

00:02:17.400 everything that's going on and saying, you know, I didn't see that coming. He is actively planning,

00:02:22.000 actively purposing, actively working in everything that is going on right now. And I was reminded of

00:02:30.300 that in the messages and some of the emails that I received after people listened to the interview

00:02:36.620 with Stephen Bancars and also the episode I did a few months ago with Doreen Virtue, who also left the

00:02:42.720 New Age the same way that Stephen Bancars did. And these messages of people saying,

00:02:47.640 I did not realize that I was deceived. I did not realize that I was following New Age philosophy.

00:02:54.680 I didn't realize that some of the beliefs and some of the so-called doctrines that I held on to

00:02:59.440 actually weren't biblical doctrines, but were New Age doctrines. Or, hey, I thought that I was a

00:03:04.380 Christian before I listened to these episodes, but now after listening to them and hearing the real

00:03:09.340 gospel and hearing the difference between the New Age and the true biblical gospel, I realized that

00:03:17.580 I was wrong, that I was deceived. And now I have seen the light by the grace and the power of the

00:03:22.400 Holy Spirit. I have gotten a lot of messages like that. And it's just a reminder that even though

00:03:28.300 that is not going to be headline news, that that is what is happening behind the scenes. And we can

00:03:35.800 praise God for that. And we can ask God to help us be a part of that and to be used by him to advance

00:03:42.860 his kingdom and to share his gospel. And if he so chooses to do that, which if you are in Christ,

00:03:48.000 he will choose to do that. We don't take credit for any of that. We simply thank him for graciously

00:03:53.540 and mercifully using us as his vessels to spread his truth and his love. So I just wanted to encourage

00:04:01.520 you with that. Maybe I'll start posting some of these, with their permission, posting some of

00:04:07.260 these messages that I receive if they are encouraging to you guys. Because I think, like I said, it's easy

00:04:14.540 to get kind of trapped in a pit of despair, looking at everything that is going on. That's not what

00:04:23.380 we're focusing on today. And I kind of got off on a tangent, but I just wanted to give you a little

00:04:28.120 bit of encouragement to start out. I'm kind of going to do a little bit of rapid fire today

00:04:33.220 because since I was on vacation last week, went to the beach with my family, I kind of

00:04:37.720 checked out of everything and I didn't comment on a lot of things that were going on. And I'm not

00:04:42.480 going to be able to cover every single story that we missed last week, but I want to go through some

00:04:46.760 of them and just give you kind of a quick analysis or at least a quick reaction to some of that.

00:04:51.660 And then we are going to talk about what I call wrecking versus reckoning. So a reckoning with our

00:04:59.120 history versus wrecking our history and what we as Christians are called to in the mindset that we

00:05:04.100 should be taking on in a mindset that I think can give us as Christians a lot of peace. So we're

00:05:10.820 talking about coronavirus again. We stopped talking about coronavirus for a long time because it seemed

00:05:16.140 like things were abating. And especially when the protests started happening, I think that's when

00:05:22.300 a lot of people said, oh, OK, the protests are happening and we don't see the media having the

00:05:27.860 same reaction towards these protests and these riots as they were about people, say, going to the beach

00:05:33.700 or wanting to go to the hair salon or go to work so they can feed their children or protest the

00:05:40.900 draconian lockdowns. The media said all of those things were actually racist and all of those things

00:05:47.020 were irresponsible and immoral. And you are complicit in murder if you are not actively a murderer

00:05:54.060 yourself if you go out and do these things and you go out into the public. And if, hey, you want to go

00:05:59.860 to work, we heard from a lot of people on the left and a lot of people in the media during those

00:06:04.720 lockdowns. If you are concerned about the economy, if you're concerned about, for example,

00:06:09.260 the economic downturn driven, driven suicides or depression or child abuse or anything like that, 0.93

00:06:16.960 then you're just a grandma killer and you don't care about humanity at all and you lack compassion 0.59

00:06:21.700 and you just care about your 401k. That's what we were told when people were saying, hey, I've got 0.91

00:06:27.420 some concerns about how these draconian lockdowns are actually going to affect people's mental and

00:06:35.140 physical health and how they're going to affect the economy long term, which does affect real flesh

00:06:41.220 and blood human beings and their livelihoods. We were told, no, you can't be concerned with that at

00:06:46.740 all because that means that you just want people to die. And then we saw the protests where hundreds

00:06:54.380 of thousands of people across the country went out and they protested against police brutality.

00:07:00.260 That's what a lot of these people were protesting against. Of course, a lot of the rioters and

00:07:04.620 looters did not have police brutality in mind. They didn't have any kind of injustice in mind.

00:07:10.300 They went out to do something that they simply wanted to do because they could do it. People acted

00:07:15.880 lawlessly in some cases because they wanted to act lawlessly. It didn't have any correlation

00:07:20.620 whatsoever with injustices that were going on. But you had people who were peacefully protesting

00:07:25.680 out in droves in the streets, peacefully protesting against police brutality. And I am all for that,

00:07:32.420 by the way, whether we are in a pandemic or not, I believe that the First Amendment is absolute and

00:07:37.460 that the government can't tell you or punish you for exercising your First Amendment rights. That's

00:07:43.500 exactly what the First Amendment is for. So I'm not blaming people who went out with masks or not,

00:07:49.440 who went out and protested for the things that they believe in. It really doesn't matter,

00:07:54.680 you know, it doesn't matter to me what they were protesting, although we do know that they were

00:07:59.200 protesting police brutality. But even if they weren't, even if they were protesting something

00:08:03.940 else, I believe that their First Amendment right is protected. Where I think a lot of Americans saw

00:08:10.420 hypocrisy and a lot of Americans started taking the coronavirus less seriously was seeing the media

00:08:16.300 reaction to that. Who didn't mention at all, by the way, that coronavirus could possibly spread

00:08:22.520 through these hundreds of thousands of people body to body in the streets or through the rioting and

00:08:28.500 the looting in which people were not wearing masks. In a lot of cases, some of them were wearing them

00:08:33.920 to disguise their identity. But the media hailing these people as heroes and not mentioning at all

00:08:39.040 that, hey, this is also dangerous for the spread of the coronavirus. I think that's when a lot of people

00:08:44.960 said, hang on. You told me that I couldn't go to church and that I was a complicit in murder for

00:08:50.640 going to church. You told me that I couldn't go to work and provide for my family. You told me that

00:08:55.680 if I wanted to open up my restaurant or go out to a restaurant that I was irresponsible and immoral.

00:09:01.020 And now all of these people are protesting in the street. Again, their right to do so.

00:09:04.700 And the media doesn't mention at all that, hey, there are some concerns here with the spread of

00:09:09.520 coronavirus. I think that's when a lot of people said, you know what? This seems like a double standard

00:09:14.340 and I'm not going to try to meet double standards because it's impossible. I'm going to read you

00:09:19.500 some of the headlines about some of the headlines covering the protests and the rioting in

00:09:28.300 correlation with the coronavirus. It's really amazing how the media decided to cover this.

00:09:35.160 Let's see. Protests in Seattle, says the Seattle Times and elsewhere, don't appear to be a driving

00:09:40.620 coronavirus surge, researchers say. Cleveland.com. Did Cleveland's coronavirus surge start with the

00:09:49.080 May 30th protest and riot? They say no. And then we have from CNN, co-founder of Maryland Group that

00:09:57.240 protested for state to reopen, test positive for coronavirus. So they wanted to make sure that you

00:10:03.540 reported on that or that they reported on that. COVID-19, says the Philadelphia Inquirer,

00:10:09.160 has not surged in cities with big protests, but it has in states that reopened early. Here are some.

00:10:16.180 The Colorado Sun. Black Lives Matter protests may have slowed, may have slowed overall spread of

00:10:23.640 coronavirus in Denver and other cities. CBS News. Protests did not lead to spike in COVID-19 cases,

00:10:31.260 study finds. Now, what's interesting is that they apparently were able to find researchers and

00:10:36.840 scientists who said that masses of people together, many of them unmasked, did not spread the virus to

00:10:45.080 each other. But people, for example, in bars and who went to restaurants and who went to beaches in

00:10:51.260 Florida, they apparently all did spread the virus. So that's a very interesting scientific finding about

00:10:58.180 this virus that apparently it is extremely aware of, it's extremely aware of woke politics, that it

00:11:06.700 apparently avoids people at protests against police brutality, but it specifically targets people

00:11:13.060 that go to restaurants and beaches. That's an amazing scientific finding. And also, apparently, it targets

00:11:18.820 people at Trump rallies. Washington Post said this, with Trump leading the way, America's coronavirus

00:11:25.300 failures exposed by record surge in new infections. So this is actually Trump's fault. So it's Trump's fault that

00:11:33.020 there is another surge. There's another surge in these new infections, despite the fact that still the highest

00:11:40.300 number of cases are occurring in New York, New York City and L.A. County, L.A. County is now the epicenter of all of

00:11:46.440 this. There were protests and there were riots in L.A. County. That's not Trump country. That's certainly not led by

00:11:52.840 Republicans. So I'm a little bit confused about that correlation. Politico said this, a new dilemma for Trump's team

00:11:59.580 preventing super spreader churches. So again, the problem is the churches, the Atlantic. This is the headline. This is

00:12:07.340 Trump's plague now. So, of course, this is being used as a political attack against Donald Trump. But I'm not

00:12:15.140 saying that he shouldn't be held accountable for his leadership. Of course, he is the president of the

00:12:19.240 United States. I think he could have done and said some things better in the beginning. But it's interesting

00:12:24.680 how they are willing to absolve governors and mayors of blue states of their responsibility and put the

00:12:30.740 surge in their states on Trump. But when it comes to places like Arizona or Texas or Florida, it's all the

00:12:36.320 governor's fault. It's always Republicans' fault. And I think this is why a lot of people aren't taking

00:12:41.000 the coronavirus seriously. And the media is saying, oh, it's Trump's fault. It's Fox News' fault that

00:12:47.460 conservatives aren't taking this seriously. Maybe it's media malfeasance. Like maybe it's the media

00:12:52.560 hypocrisy that it's so obvious that they're saying, OK, well, coronavirus is only spiking at churches.

00:12:58.340 It's only spiking on beaches in Florida. It's only spiking in red states. It's only spiking 0.73

00:13:05.420 at Trump rallies when that's obviously not true. Like if you look at the map and you look at the

00:13:10.500 coronavirus infection rates and hospitalization rates and death rates, death rates thankfully

00:13:15.460 are staying down as younger and younger people are getting infected. They're getting infected.

00:13:19.780 They're getting sick for two or three days. They're not having to go to the hospital in most cases.

00:13:24.040 And they're certainly not dying. One positive that we are seeing from more and more people

00:13:30.200 testing positive for the coronavirus is that the death rate seems to be a lot lower than we

00:13:35.180 thought it was. Right now, I think it's about 0.26% death rate, which of course, if anyone dies

00:13:42.020 from the coronavirus, it's tragic. But now that more and more people are testing positive,

00:13:46.560 we are seeing that there is a lower death rate. But if you look at the map and you look at the

00:13:51.000 statistics, it is simply not true that this is exclusively surging in red states. That's just not true.

00:13:57.240 Again, if you look at California, if you look at D.C., if you look at New York,

00:14:02.560 the cases are still bad there. Yes, they might be going down in New York, but they're going down

00:14:08.320 from the highest numbers in the nation. And it's funny also that the media are praising Andrew Cuomo,

00:14:17.500 the governor of New York, for how he handled this whole thing, when by any objective standard,

00:14:22.600 how he has handled the coronavirus outbreak in New York has been an absolute travesty. Like,

00:14:28.920 it's been a disaster. We talked about this on the podcast before, but his office administered an

00:14:36.000 executive decree, basically, that said, hey, if you are an elderly person that lives in a nursing home,

00:14:43.360 if you go to the hospital for coronavirus, you have to go back to the nursing home before you're

00:14:48.560 even better. So you have to go back to the nursing home as soon as possible. A lot of this has to do

00:14:53.660 with Medicare reimbursements and the state being able to make as much money as possible because

00:15:00.420 Andrew Cuomo was in a budget hole before this whole thing. But that was a disaster. Thousands and

00:15:07.020 thousands of elderly people in these nursing homes died because of Andrew Cuomo's policies. Like,

00:15:13.800 by no objective standard whatsoever has New York done a good job with this at all. You can go back. I

00:15:20.440 think it was the podcast titled Little Tyrants Everywhere from several weeks ago now that talked

00:15:26.220 about exactly why Andrew Cuomo and the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, have done such a terrible

00:15:31.760 job and why their state and specifically New York City are seeing such high cases. And yet the media

00:15:37.980 absolves them from any guilt, says that they're doing a great job, that they've just been handled,

00:15:41.960 handed really unfair cards, but that they are doing the best job that they possibly can.

00:15:49.060 But Trump, when it comes to things that are really outside of his control at this point and outside

00:15:54.400 of his jurisdiction, it is all his fault. And it's also Christian's fault for going to church. It's 1.00

00:16:00.520 also people who want to work. It's their fault. It's people who protested the lockdowns. It's their

00:16:06.360 fault. But it's not the blue state's fault. It's not blue governor's fault. It's not blue mayor's fault.

00:16:10.660 It's not any Democratic politician's fault. It is not the protesters' fault. It's not the rioters'

00:16:15.700 fault. It's not the looters' fault. It is only conservatives' fault. And so if you want to go

00:16:21.000 back to some kind of reasoning for why maybe a lot of conservatives aren't taking coronavirus as

00:16:27.580 seriously as they should, it's because they see the hypocrisy. And it looks political rather than

00:16:32.760 practical. So it looks like there are political reasons behind the coverage and behind some of the

00:16:37.920 hysteria in the media rather than just trying to objectively warn people about the dangers of a

00:16:45.760 virus. There's also kind of this debate about masks right now. So you have some Democrats saying

00:16:51.360 that the government should mandate masks, that if you don't wear a mask, then you're going to get

00:16:55.960 fined. You have some people, I would say, mostly on the right saying, look, I'm not wearing a mask.

00:17:00.640 I'm very anti-mask. I'm not even going to wear a mask if a store asks me to. There's some debate

00:17:07.760 going on about the science of masks, whether masks actually work. And then you have people,

00:17:12.640 I would say, mostly on the left, but some people on the right as well saying, wear your mask,

00:17:17.360 usually with some kind of expletive in there. You're killing people. You're complicit in murder. 0.99

00:17:21.980 And again, we hear this kind of rhetoric. If you don't wear masks, then you're racist because,

00:17:26.820 unfortunately, this virus is disproportionately affecting the African-American community and the

00:17:32.700 minority communities in general. So if someone doesn't wear a mask, the logic goes they are 0.99

00:17:38.360 complicit in targeting or in murdering these minority communities. Now, let's just add some 1.00

00:17:45.260 nuance to this conversation a little bit. You guys know I'm not in pursuit of nuance. I am in pursuit

00:17:50.940 of the truth. And sometimes the truth is nuanced. Sometimes it's not. But let's talk about the

00:17:57.240 debate on masks really quickly. So I was, in the beginning, pro-mask before we heard Anthony Fauci

00:18:05.720 and the Surgeon General say, please stop buying masks. They said, don't buy masks. Masks aren't

00:18:10.800 going to do anything. They're not going to protect you. They're not going to protect anyone around you.

00:18:15.640 So don't buy masks because, you know, the workers in the hospital need those masks and you are just

00:18:21.680 making sure that they don't get the mask they need. And we actually heard from Anthony Fauci himself in

00:18:26.760 an interview say that, hey, masks aren't going to affect, aren't going to be effective. They might

00:18:32.260 maybe prevent large droplets from, you know, spraying out of your mouth or from, you know,

00:18:38.140 getting onto your mouth. But it's really not going to help you that much. Now, in the beginning,

00:18:42.880 I remember thinking that this logic was faulty. Like, we bought masks even when they were like,

00:18:48.260 don't buy any masks. Actually, we already had masks because, as I've said many times,

00:18:51.940 I am already a germaphobe year-round. So I was wearing a mask on planes during flu season.

00:18:57.740 And again, I don't know if it was totally effective, but it made me feel better. And so I thought it was

00:19:03.340 weird that they were saying don't wear masks because they were also saying that it can be spread

00:19:09.040 through small and large droplets. So I'm thinking, well, if I cough or I sneeze or I talk or whatever

00:19:17.440 I'm doing in public and a droplet gets out, then it gets on a surface and someone touches that

00:19:22.560 surface, they could get sick and vice versa for other people. So I didn't really understand the

00:19:26.960 logic of not wearing a mask or especially encouraging people not to wear a mask. And so

00:19:32.880 I continued to wear a mask, but they said, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it.

00:19:36.560 And a lot of people said, okay, I'm not going to. And then all of a sudden, it seemed like it

00:19:42.500 changed and said, oh, no, no, you have to wear a mask. Not just, okay, actually, we were wrong

00:19:48.020 about the science in the first place. We didn't really understand how the virus worked, but now

00:19:52.920 we understand that masks are really going to help a lot more than we thought that they would,

00:19:58.780 even a bandana, even a cloth mask, whatever it is, just wear a mask because we were a little bit

00:20:05.340 wrong. And here's why it was all of a sudden, if you don't wear a mask, you're a murderer. And if 0.69

00:20:11.100 you don't wear a mask, you're irresponsible and you're evil and you're immoral and all of these

00:20:15.140 things. And so you can't wonder why people who remember what we were told just a couple months

00:20:21.740 ago, dogmatically told not to wear masks, you can't, you can't wonder why people are taking a

00:20:27.360 step back and saying, hang on just a second. What changed? Can someone explain to me what changed?

00:20:32.480 Why were you so ardent about us not wearing masks? And now you're so ardent about us having to wear

00:20:39.760 masks. So of course, people are skeptical about this. Now, let me tell you my take on the masks.

00:20:46.960 I do not believe that there should be a government mandate about the masks. I don't believe that you

00:20:52.980 should be fined if you don't wear a mask. But I think if a business asks you to wear a mask and you

00:20:59.280 are voluntarily entering that business, then you should comply with that business's regulations.

00:21:05.000 I don't really understand any kind of argument that would say, no, a business shouldn't, shouldn't

00:21:11.540 ask us to do that. I mean, you might think a business shouldn't ask you to do that, but you

00:21:15.360 don't have to go in to that store. Like you can take your business elsewhere to a business that says

00:21:20.240 you don't have to wear a mask, whatever. But I think businesses are, they're not being tyrannical.

00:21:25.360 They're simply trying to do everything they can to mitigate the risk for people that are inside

00:21:30.180 their stores. And again, you can disagree on the science. You can say, okay, masks are actually bad.

00:21:34.900 You can go to a store that believes that. You can buy from a company who believes that masks are bad.

00:21:39.840 But for all the grocery stores, all the retail stores, the restaurants, whatever, that are saying,

00:21:45.020 you know, we think that masks are going to help at least a little bit and we would like to help as

00:21:50.680 much as we can stop the spread of this virus, then I don't see any reason not to comply with that or

00:21:58.040 to complain about that. I understand some people have a medical reason that they, you know, they

00:22:03.380 don't want to wear a mask or maybe they're uncomfortable wearing a mask. Okay, that's fine.

00:22:08.460 Maybe there is an exception for you, or maybe again, you go to a place that doesn't require a mask,

00:22:13.940 but masks in and of themselves and requirements by private companies to wear masks in and of

00:22:21.320 themselves are not tyrannical. They're not dictatorial. They're not wrong. I would wear a

00:22:27.640 mask in any place that asked me to wear a mask. I went in a place the other day and they actually

00:22:31.860 provided me with a disposable mask. I had one in my purse anyway, but I thought that that was very kind

00:22:36.960 didn't. There's no reason to me to not wear one if it is required by the store that you're going

00:22:45.280 into or if you're in a place where, you know, everyone around you is made more comfortable by

00:22:51.680 you wearing one. I don't think that there is any danger to that. Again, I understand that there

00:22:55.940 are, you know, some people who are pointing to studies that say, actually, it is bad for you to

00:23:01.160 wear a mask and you can get reinfected. I don't know about that. There's competing science,

00:23:05.920 but I am not in principle against masks and I'm certainly not in principle against companies

00:23:14.000 requiring people to wear masks. Okay. We talked about that a lot more than I thought that we were

00:23:18.940 going to, but I've got a few more things I want to talk about. Okay. One more thing that I wanted

00:23:23.240 to say about the coronavirus. So there's this narrative that's going on in the media that it's

00:23:28.320 red states that are doing really badly because they reopened and blue states that are doing really

00:23:33.820 well because they stayed closed. That's obviously not true. Look at LA, look at New York, look at DC,

00:23:39.420 look at all of these places that have high rates. I won't say that they have rising rates in all of

00:23:44.840 these places. They do in LA, but maybe not as much in New York, but they still have a high number of

00:23:50.300 cases, a high positivity rate, and in some cases, a high hospitalization rate. But if you look at places

00:23:56.200 like Texas and Florida, Texas has upped its testing, Florida has upped its testing, New York has stopped

00:24:04.700 testing as many people. And so we don't actually know if the data there is comparable to Texas and

00:24:11.900 Florida. Now, I don't think the surge can be solely attributed to the rise in testing in Texas and

00:24:18.140 Florida, but that certainly has something to do with it. And the seeming plateau or the decrease that's

00:24:24.220 happening in New York at least has something to do with the fact that they are, according to

00:24:30.260 themselves, they are not testing as many people. So I just want to point that out as well. It's always

00:24:35.880 important to go beyond the headlines. So now I want to talk about something that I mentioned at the

00:24:40.320 beginning, wrecking versus reckoning. So wrecking our history versus reckoning our history. All of you

00:24:47.280 reckoning with our history. All of you who have been watching the news have noticed that there's a

00:24:54.120 lot of chaos going on. So not only are Confederate statues coming down, but statues of Union heroes,

00:25:02.380 statues of Thomas Jefferson. They are defacing statues of George Washington. They're even

00:25:09.520 abolitionists. Their statues are being taken down and desecrated. And this has something to do.

00:25:19.240 There are some people who are doing this because they don't want to see monuments that are honoring

00:25:26.220 Confederate soldiers. They don't want to see monuments that are honoring a part of our history

00:25:32.260 that we should be ashamed of. And I do think that there is an argument to be made for that,

00:25:38.000 that taking down these Confederate statues is not about erasing history. There are ways that you can

00:25:43.560 learn about history and learn about the Confederacy, learn about Robert E. Lee without paying homage to

00:25:49.600 them, without honoring them, with a monument. Absolutely. The problem is how these are being

00:25:55.280 taken down and how this is being done. It's being taken down by angry mobs who are indiscriminate

00:26:02.240 in their anger. By the way, like I said, they're taking down statues of Grant, for example. They are

00:26:08.940 taking down or defacing statues of the founders, statues of abolitionists. This is a lot more to

00:26:17.760 do for some people, not all, but for some people about the degradation and the demolition of Western

00:26:26.460 civilization much more than it is about the demolition of white supremacy. Again, I think there

00:26:31.800 is an argument to be made for taking down Confederate statues. But when it's done by the mob, rather than

00:26:37.120 done democratically, why don't we ask the people in these communities to take a vote? Why don't we do

00:26:44.400 this in a way that is civilized? Why don't we do this in a way that involves conversation and debate

00:26:51.120 and some kind of deliberation to take these statues down in the communities where they reside? Why are we

00:27:01.800 allowing? Why are city officials, why is law enforcement allowing these mobs to vandalize,

00:27:08.080 to desecrate, and to take down these statues? Again, I'm not just talking about Confederate statues. I'm

00:27:12.940 talking about statues of George Washington, of Thomas Jefferson, of Francis Scott Key, of abolitionists,

00:27:21.660 of Ulysses S. Grant. Why aren't authorities stepping in and saying, hey, you're not going to do this?

00:27:28.500 And if the city, if they want to take it to a vote, if they want to have some kind of deliberation and debate

00:27:33.920 and discussion and decision making about this, then they should absolutely do this. I do think that it is

00:27:39.780 time for us to have a reckoning with parts of our past when it comes to how we honor people in the past as

00:27:47.420 heroes, rather than pointing to them, like, for example, Robert E. Lee and saying, okay, you know, he was on the

00:27:53.360 wrong side of history. He was on the wrong side of the story and learned the good and the bad and the

00:27:58.360 ugly without honoring him with a monument. But when we allow the mob to rule and when we allow them to

00:28:06.000 tyrannically decide which monuments get to stay up and which monuments get to go down, well, then we

00:28:12.180 lose a very important part of our democracy and our democratic process. And it reminds me of when

00:28:18.780 people say democratic socialism, this is how democratic socialism would play out. You put

00:28:25.580 the word democracy in front of it, or you put the word democratic in front of it, and it is still led

00:28:30.540 tyrannically because socialism is by nature tyrannical. That reminds me of what's going on right now.

00:28:36.280 They're talking about freedom. They're talking about democracy. They're talking about taking these

00:28:40.620 statues down in the name of justice. But what they're doing is not just and it's not democratic.

00:28:45.720 And it is not about personal liberty or freedom at all. It is simply about mob rule. It is simply

00:28:52.340 about indiscriminate anger, not just against racism, which is, of course, justified anger,

00:28:57.480 but against Western civilization in general. And that is what I mean by wrecking our history versus

00:29:02.960 reckoning with our history. I think it's important to reckon with our history, to talk about the good

00:29:07.760 and the bad and the ugly of our past, of the past of the Christian church, of the past of the South,

00:29:14.160 of the past of America in general. I think we should look at, examine, and learn from the bad

00:29:20.180 parts of our history, from slavery to Jim Crow, Japanese internment camps, Chinese railroads, any

00:29:27.320 kind of systemic, so legal, institutionalized injustice that was allowed to persist. Anytime the

00:29:35.340 church did not step up and say something about injustice, I think that we should look at all of

00:29:41.320 that. We should look at injustices that are happening right now. You guys know that I care

00:29:45.580 about that. We talk about abortion very often on this podcast. That is an example of a grievous

00:29:51.340 injustice that has been able to persist for decades, longer than that, in this country and is still

00:29:57.440 prevalent today. So I believe that we should have a reckoning with all of these things, that we should

00:30:02.180 have conversations about them, that we should talk about them, that we should learn from them.

00:30:05.660 And I don't have a problem. If a university decides, you know, we're not going to name this building

00:30:12.260 after Woodrow Wilson because of the views that he held and the views that he propagated, or we're not

00:30:17.640 going to honor this particular person because of, you know, because of the decisions they made or the

00:30:24.160 philosophies they represented, I think that's fine. If there is deliberation and there are conversations

00:30:29.440 about that, culture does change. The moral landscape of a country does change the things that we didn't

00:30:37.040 used to see as problems and atrocities we see as problems and atrocities today. That's also my hope,

00:30:42.620 by the way, about abortion, that one day we will look back and realize the way we do today about slavery,

00:30:47.900 that it was the worst, one of the worst moral travesties that we ever allowed to persist

00:30:55.080 in this country. And that's okay. Like, I believe that it's okay for culture to change. It's okay

00:31:00.220 for us to have conversations. What is not okay is allowing the mob to indiscriminately take down

00:31:07.000 institutions and take down ideas and take down monuments and statues without any deliberation of

00:31:15.300 the public, without any agreement of the community. That is not what democracy is about. And it's really

00:31:21.920 interesting, the parallels between what's going on right now and some of what went on in Mao Zedong's

00:31:29.480 China with getting rid of the four old, so the cultural revolution that tried to get rid of old 1.00

00:31:35.340 traditions, old cultures, old ideas, and do the great leap forward, which was Mao's leap into communism,

00:31:45.220 which of course killed tens of millions of people. They also tried to erase history in some

00:31:51.820 kind of way. And there are some similarities between what the mob wants to do and what Mao

00:31:59.380 Zedong did and really what a lot of communist countries did in trying to get rid of history. 0.63

00:32:04.160 I mean, that's what 1984 is about. That's what Orwell is talking about when he talks about the

00:32:08.280 memory hole, when he talks about not knowing if they were warring against East Asia or Eurasia the

00:32:12.980 day before because the party controlled history. Let me see if I can get this quote right.

00:32:17.740 He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.

00:32:24.760 That's not right. It's something along those lines, though. I think it's, well, I'm not even going to,

00:32:30.380 I'm not even going to think about it because I'll get all twisted and I won't remember what it is,

00:32:33.780 but I'll correct it. I'll correct it maybe in the description. But there are some similarities

00:32:39.420 between the radicals on the left who do genuinely want to not just have a conversation about

00:32:45.320 reckoning with our history, but obliterate our history altogether, obliterate our foundation 0.94

00:32:50.640 and want to get rid of things like the national anthem, probably want to get rid of the American 0.89

00:32:55.820 flag. The American flag is very offensive to them. Of course, want to get rid of capitalism,

00:33:00.400 want to get rid of the Constitution, want to get rid of the founders. And people,

00:33:06.560 people in the 20th century who did the same thing in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Germany,

00:33:14.420 in North Korea, they do the same thing to this day in Mao Zedong's China, in Cuba, in Venezuela.

00:33:21.140 All of this is very eerily similar to the things that were going on there. Again, that is what I would

00:33:28.540 call wreckage of our history. I think that we can have a healthy reckoning with our history where we

00:33:33.520 actually have conversations about who we should memorialize, who we should honor, how we should

00:33:38.540 learn from our history. And here's what I kind of want to end with, is that I think the majority of

00:33:45.700 people agree on that. I think that the majority of people want to have a conversation about reform.

00:33:53.120 For example, a reform in the police or wants to talk about the kind of heroes that we honor,

00:34:02.200 want to talk about our education system, want to talk about some of the problems that are plaguing

00:34:07.320 poor and minority communities. I think that there are more people who love America, who care about

00:34:13.980 America, who can appreciate the good things that America has not just brought us, but has brought the

00:34:21.340 entire world for all of her history. And we just want to be better. We want to make sure that we

00:34:27.720 are living out to the fullest our ideals, that all men were created equal by their creator and were

00:34:37.020 endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

00:34:41.760 We want liberty and justice for all. I think there are a lot of people who agree on that. We might

00:34:47.860 disagree on policy. We might have disagreements on what that looks like, but we are willing to have

00:34:54.160 a debate. We're willing to have a discussion. I think that there is a small minority of people

00:34:59.780 on the left who do want to tear down everything that America has ever stood for. They see America

00:35:06.160 as an inherently evil, racist, white supremacist, imperialist nation with nothing good in it, 0.99

00:35:14.200 who has never accomplished anything good. And they actually ascribe every bad thing that has 0.99

00:35:18.360 ever gone on in the world to America and to the founding of America and even to our founding

00:35:23.860 documents and the founding fathers. And that is just ahistorical nonsense. That is called wreckage

00:35:29.740 of our history, not reckoning with our history. The fact of the matter is, every time, and I've said

00:35:34.620 this before on the podcast, every time we move closer to the ideals stated in, for example, the

00:35:40.260 Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, that we're given inherent rights,

00:35:43.960 that cannot be taken away from us because they were endowed to us by a creator that is higher than

00:35:49.040 the government. Every time we have moved closer to manifesting those ideals, things have moved

00:35:54.380 forward. It is not in erasing our founding principles that we are going to make progress.

00:36:00.520 It is not going to be in rewriting our constitution or rewriting the Declaration of Independence that we

00:36:06.160 are going to make progress. It is going to be more fully and more truthfully, more accurately

00:36:11.080 living out the very good ideals upon which this nation was founded. Every time we have done that,

00:36:17.400 every time we have taken a step closer to those founding ideals, good things have happened.

00:36:21.740 It's been when we have stepped away from that, when we have tried to warp that, when we have tried

00:36:26.320 to circumvent that, get around those principles that all men are created equal and therefore are endowed

00:36:33.920 the same exact rights by a sovereign creator. It's when we have tried to ignore that, that things

00:36:40.080 have gone south. That is how we got slavery. Like, that is how we get abortion. That is how we got Jim

00:36:45.940 Crow. That is how we get any injustice when we ignore the ideals on which this country was founded. So

00:36:53.880 we don't need a revolution. We need to go back to what our constitutional, what our founding principles

00:37:01.140 are. And we need to debate and discuss and talk about how to better live those out, both in policy

00:37:09.860 and individually, culturally, socially, all of that. So the people who want to get rid of everything that

00:37:16.240 America has ever stood for, they have unfortunately been indoctrinated and brainwashed by all of these

00:37:21.560 documentaries and professors that are emotionally appealing but are factually just wrong. And they

00:37:27.860 aren't able to take a look at all of the good that America has accomplished and the objectively good

00:37:33.120 ideals upon which we were founded. The fact of the matter is, is that history is very complex. People,

00:37:39.040 individuals are very complex. All of our heroes are flawed, by the way. Every single political hero

00:37:46.020 that we have, every single historical hero that we have, they're all flawed. We don't honor people for

00:37:53.240 their flaws. We honor people for the good that they attributed. We honor people for the ideas that

00:37:58.680 they have. That doesn't mean that everyone has to be memorialized. That doesn't mean that everyone

00:38:02.180 has to have a statue in their name. I think that, again, we decide, we weigh the good and the bad,

00:38:07.660 and we say, okay, yes, this person contributed more good than they did bad, and so maybe we're going to

00:38:12.040 honor them more. This person stood for something that was so bad that even the good that they did,

00:38:16.420 it doesn't matter. We don't need to memorialize them at all. And I think that's an important

00:38:20.260 conversation to have. And I would say Confederate soldiers and Confederate heroes, so-called heroes,

00:38:26.040 fall into the category of not needing to be memorialized and not needing to be honored by way

00:38:31.740 of monuments. But the fact of the matter is, is that, yes, were the founders flawed? Of course they

00:38:37.420 were, because they were slave owners, and they were just sinners in general, like all of us were. And so 0.51

00:38:41.700 they had lots of different flaws. But did they also stand, at least theoretically, at least

00:38:47.220 ideologically for liberty and for equality? And did their ideas build the best and most prosperous

00:38:55.200 and most equitable nation in the world, in the history of the world? Yes, they did. And if we look

00:39:01.120 at any history or any historical figure who has done anything good ever, they are going to have

00:39:06.900 very serious flaws. And if we are going to rename everything because of flaws that people had or

00:39:15.260 because of sins they are committed, then we are not going to have anything named after anyone. We

00:39:20.800 might as well just name everything after animals or inanimate objects if we want to be safe. But

00:39:25.860 there's probably something problematic in that, too. I think that what the majority of Americans need to

00:39:32.560 do is ignore the illogical, nonsensical outrage mob that is demanding that we be divided because

00:39:40.660 divisiveness contributes to the advancement of their Marxist revolution. What if there are more of us

00:39:47.680 who agree on all of these issues than disagree? What if we agree on the majority components of some

00:39:57.040 of these issues that we're debating, like police brutality, like so-called racial reconciliation,

00:40:02.520 like injustice? What if we agree, the majority of us, on a lot of the components of these issues?

00:40:09.740 What if we are willing to have conversations peacefully and democratically and locally about

00:40:15.820 replacing Confederate flags and monuments? What if the people who want to tear down not just Confederate

00:40:20.600 statues but all statues that represent the United States, Grant, Abraham Lincoln, abolitionists, are just

00:40:26.360 a really, really small minority? What if Black Lives Matter Marxists don't represent most people that

00:40:32.820 they say that they represent? Which, by the way, they did say in a video that they are trained

00:40:37.960 Marxists. So for everyone who said, oh, you're so wrong for linking that organization to Marxism, well,

00:40:43.900 they're proud Marxists. They talk about being Marxists. What if most Black people don't believe 0.99

00:40:50.640 in getting rid of the police? What if most Black people don't care about Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben or 0.95

00:40:55.400 an episode of Golden Girls where they're wearing mud face masks? If you didn't know that episode of 0.73

00:41:01.600 Golden Girls was taken down, even though it had nothing to do with blackface. Like, 0.98

00:41:05.080 what if most people in the country, black, white, whatever, that they don't actually care about

00:41:10.040 those things? They're not actually offended by those things, but it's actually much deeper

00:41:13.200 problems that we're trying to reconcile and rectify. What if most Democrats and leftists

00:41:18.400 aren't actually Marxist revolutionaries? What if most people on the left aren't Antifa? Like,

00:41:23.360 they don't hate the police. They don't believe in mob justice. They don't want to tear down all

00:41:27.560 American institutions. Now, I do think that a lot of people on the left are supportive or at least

00:41:31.800 complicit in the anarchy. But what if most of them aren't down with the radicalism and the

00:41:36.900 anarchy coming from the far left? What if this outrage mob offended by everything, tearing everything

00:41:42.700 down with no plans for rebuilding, ruining lives, livelihoods, reputations without any regard

00:41:47.860 whatsoever for what's right or fair, sustainable or good is a tiny portion of the American population

00:41:53.920 whose power is only as great as we allow it to be? Like, what if we just ignored them? Like,

00:41:59.120 what if they're just a group, a tiny group of wimpy communists who would shrink into oblivion if we 0.58

00:42:04.060 let them? Who really actually only get stronger every time we capitulate to them? Who gain strength

00:42:08.920 every time someone apologizes, for example, for something that they're not really sorry for?

00:42:13.040 Every time someone loses a job for expressing an opinion? Every time a business or an organization

00:42:18.060 issues a so-called statement about something they did that was allegedly problematic but actually

00:42:23.400 isn't problematic at all. Every time a TV series or a movie is pulled off air for supposedly being

00:42:30.520 politically incorrect and having politically incorrect themes that no one is actually offended

00:42:35.140 by. Maybe they're empowered every time someone is censored for an unpopular view, every time someone's

00:42:40.560 life is ruined for making a mistake or being in a bad or uncomfortable situation where they reacted

00:42:46.020 wrongly. Every time people virtue signal in a way that masquerades as goodness but actually is just a way to

00:42:52.080 cause more division. So what if the outrage mob has power simply because we allow them to have power

00:42:58.920 simply because we keep capitulating to them? Simply because we are too scared to say, no, I'm not

00:43:04.280 playing by your rules. I'm not going to apologize for that. What if organizations just stopped issuing

00:43:09.660 these unnecessary statements? People stopped apologizing things for things that they're not sorry for.

00:43:15.660 If companies stopped firing people for their political views or based on unsubstantiated

00:43:20.820 allegations of social media platforms, stopped kicking people off their site just for having

00:43:25.220 the wrong opinions. Like if advertisers just ignored the calls, ignored the demands of the perpetually

00:43:31.500 offended mob of institutions and buildings, stopped renaming things like that's going to solve anyone's

00:43:38.720 problems. If law enforcement and politicians just said, no, you're not going to tear down or vandalize

00:43:45.380 the statue. You're not going to burn down this building. You're not going to illegally occupy this zone.

00:43:50.280 You're not going to threaten the safety of lives and livelihoods of law-abiding citizens just because

00:43:55.680 you're mad, just because you want to. Like what if we stopped explaining away or minimizing or saying

00:44:01.080 sorry for our sincerely held beliefs because a bunch of nitwits born in 2002 who were radicalized by 0.78

00:44:08.320 their gender theory professor last year because they want capitalism and everything that America is 0.98

00:44:15.400 founded on to die. Like what if we just stopped capitulating to them? What if the Marxists are

00:44:20.180 actually the minority and we just ignored that silliness and the rest of us who are saying got

00:44:24.660 together to have productive dialogue and debates about these issues that are important, debates about

00:44:29.860 the Confederate statues, to have debates about how we honor and learn from our history, debates

00:44:35.060 about choosing between wrecking our history and reckoning with our history and rectifying some of the

00:44:42.580 mistakes that we have made and seeking justice in a way that's true? Like we should talk about what

00:44:49.440 what do words actually mean? Like what is justice? What does justice really look like? What does

00:44:55.960 rectifying our mistakes really look like? What is reckoning with our history really look like? Can we do that

00:45:02.660 without starting a revolution that wants to wreck all of the good principles and the good institutions

00:45:08.720 upon which America was founded? Can we do that? Like can we have a dialogue between those of us

00:45:14.680 who not just don't agree necessarily on politics but want to be able to have same conversations? Is that

00:45:21.080 possible? I think it's possible if we start ignoring the fringes who are predominantly leftists I would say.

00:45:28.300 Maybe there's some on the far right too but predominantly leftists who are now even though they're a small

00:45:33.980 minority they are controlling the majority of the dialogue. They're controlling what companies do. 0.97

00:45:39.680 They're controlling what city councils and what public officials do and don't do. They are controlling

00:45:46.040 now law enforcement in a lot of cases. What if we just ignored them? What if we just ignored them and the

00:45:52.320 rest of us who are saying actually had conversations about the things that matter in order to make things

00:45:57.400 better? I want to make things better. I think you want to make things better whether you're on the left

00:46:01.420 or the right. I believe you when you say that you care about justice when you care about truth

00:46:06.820 that you care about making sure that we have the fairest country that we possibly can that society

00:46:13.480 provides you know that we have opportunities equally for people of all races and all socioeconomic classes

00:46:19.840 in all backgrounds. I believe you. I think we have different perspectives probably if you're on the left

00:46:24.600 side of the aisle on what those problems are and how we actually fix them but I want to have you know

00:46:29.580 let's have a debate about that. Let's talk about the things that are actually going to make things

00:46:33.620 better but stoking the flames of division to perpetuate a revolution that seeks to wreck and tear down

00:46:40.680 the very good parts of America that have made America what it is that's not helping anyone. It's not helping

00:46:46.340 anyone. So on Friday we are going to talk more about what those good founding principles are. We're going to

00:46:53.280 talk about both the good and the bad in America and why Fourth of July is something that we should all be

00:46:59.020 honoring. We should all be celebrating. We should all be happy about. I think that we're unfortunately

00:47:04.000 going to be seeing riots and protests on the Fourth of July but no matter what our background is, no matter

00:47:10.140 what our race is, what our gender is, why we should be celebrating the Fourth of July as Americans and so

00:47:17.200 we're going to talk about that more on Friday and I'm excited about that. You guys know how much I love

00:47:21.820 the Fourth of July so I will be back here on Friday for that and I will see you guys then.

00:47:29.020 I'm

00:47:30.120 we're going Hi man.

00:47:36.020 Thank you.

00:47:38.060 We're going home.

00:47:40.140 We're going home.

00:47:46.220 We're going home.

00:47:48.180 We're going home.

00:47:49.840 We're going home.

00:47:50.200 We're going home.

00:47:50.840 We're going home.

00:47:51.520 We're going home.

00:47:52.220 We're going home.

00:47:53.720 We're going home.

00:47:54.540 We're going home.

00:47:56.640 We're going home.

00:47:56.680 We're going home.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - July 01, 2020

Ep 269 ｜ Wrecking vs. Reckoning with Our American History

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