The Auron MacIntyre Show - March 14, 2024


A Republic’s Shield or Tyranny’s Sword？ ｜ 3⧸14⧸24

Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Mentioned
Nigel Machiavelli Alexander Hamilton Jason Buttrill Thomas Jefferson James Madison Greg Abbott John Adams Odyssey Rocky
Rise of the PayPal Mafia ｜ Guest： Kingpilled ｜ 3⧸13⧸2024 Declaring War on the Kulaks ｜ Guest： Bennett's Phylactery ｜ 3⧸15⧸24

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

153.77

Word count

1,979

Sentence count

102

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the modern world, it s difficult to imagine a nation without a professional, standing military force. But throughout history, such a force has been considered at odds with the liberty of the people. This issue was far from settled when the United States was created, and the debate between our founding fathers is embedded in some of our nation s core documents, like the Federalist Papers.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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00:00:14.760 And with live TV, I'm not missing the game.
00:00:17.800 It's kind of like, I'm already on vacation.
00:00:20.980 Nice! 0.94
00:00:22.160 On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels.
00:00:25.260 Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
00:00:27.320 Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply.
00:00:28.580 See AirCanada.com.
00:00:30.000 In the modern world, it's difficult to imagine a nation without a professional, standing military force.
00:00:43.460 But throughout history, such a force has been considered at odds with the liberty of the people.
00:00:48.780 This issue was far from settled when the United States was created,
00:00:52.920 and the debate between our founding fathers is embedded in some of our nation's core documents,
00:00:58.180 like the Federalist Papers.
00:01:00.300 While many consider it an absolute necessity today,
00:01:03.800 the Standing Army has been recognized by many thinkers as the natural precursor to an empire,
00:01:09.860 a force that compels the host nation to constantly expand.
00:01:13.300 As conservatives slowly begin to question the forever wars which our ruling elite have used to waste the blood and treasure of this nation,
00:01:23.760 it's worth stopping to evaluate the role that the maintenance of a large professional fighting force
00:01:30.100 has played in compelling our leaders to seek constant conflict.
00:01:34.140 Before we tackle this issue, it must be said that the reflexive conservative support of American soldiers is the correct instinct.
00:01:44.600 Volunteering to put oneself in harm's way to protect the people of your nation is a noble act.
00:01:50.280 The American military has become an almost hereditary warrior caste, drawing heavily from red state populations to man its most combat effective units. 0.93
00:02:01.420 It's entirely proper for conservatives to venerate the honorable service of their brothers, neighbors, and children.
00:02:09.880 One of the main reasons U.S. armed services are facing a recruiting crisis is the way that they've demonized and purged conservative soldiers which traditionally filled their ranks.
00:02:21.840 So as we look at the virtues or dangers of a standing military, let's remember that we're not questioning the honor of those who so diligently served this nation.
00:02:34.120 Nigel Machiavelli is best known for his work, The Prince, but most people don't realize that the political theorist was not a monarchist,
00:02:42.660 but was instead a staunch supporter of the republican form of government.
00:02:46.780 For Machiavelli, the nature of a state's military defense was the most important factor in its ability to secure liberty, and he wrote about the subject at length.
00:02:58.040 Renaissance Italy was plagued by constant warfare between competing city-states, and the regular use of mercenaries created serious problems for Florence, Machiavelli's home.
00:03:09.180 Repeated betrayals by troops that had no personal ties to the city-state that they served led Machiavelli to conclude that no matter how rich a nation became,
00:03:20.320 it must have a fighting force that was loyal to the people they protected.
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00:03:39.600 While Machiavelli understood the critical need for armed forces that were personally connected to the state,
00:03:46.620 he warned against the dangers of keeping a professional army in times of peace in his book, Art of War.
00:03:54.420 The political theorists believe that the ruling class must always fear professional soldiers because those military men have no other means of making money.
00:04:02.660 Large standing armies are extremely expensive, and if they're not constantly deployed abroad to gather spoils or to secure trade, the cost of those forces adds up very quickly.
00:04:13.680 If a state doesn't keep its professional troops deployed abroad and has no consistent way to afford paying them,
00:04:20.540 then idle armed men with no other form of employment will quickly become a threat to the ruling class.
00:04:26.420 War can also be an excellent way for the ruling class to make money by funneling tax dollars extracted from the populace through defense contractors
00:04:35.840 who are often owned by or kicking money back to politicians.
00:04:41.440 This means that those in charge of a country with a large professional fighting force always have an incentive to find a new war
00:04:49.680 which makes them money and keeps the bulk of the military occupied in foreign lands.
00:04:55.880 Empire becomes the natural solution to many problems imposed on a ruling class by a standing army.
00:05:04.040 As an alternative, Machiavelli encourages republics to adopt the citizen militia as the solution to the problem of standing armies.
00:05:12.780 By making every capable citizen a soldier, the republic ensures that its military will be personally loyal to the state,
00:05:22.100 but it also avoids the temptation of constant deployment and conquest.
00:05:27.860 Militia members are drilled as soldiers, but they maintain civilian occupations that allow them to feed their families and pay their mortgages.
00:05:37.100 When a threat to the nation arises, the militia members bravely defend their homeland,
00:05:42.140 but when the danger has passed, they return to their normal lives.
00:05:46.580 There's no need to constantly find money to pay the troops,
00:05:50.120 no reason to regularly keep the forces deployed,
00:05:53.200 and no incentive for a lucrative defense industry to grow up around your military.
00:05:58.840 Machiavelli noted that when ancient Rome was a republic,
00:06:02.920 its military was a citizen militia,
00:06:05.420 where each citizen even had to provide their own weapons and armor.
00:06:08.460 But as the army became professionalized and men made soldiering their career,
00:06:13.940 the nation inevitably transformed into an empire.
00:06:17.080 Hey guys, you remember that showdown at the Texas border that suddenly disappeared from the news?
00:06:23.180 Ever wonder what happened with that?
00:06:24.980 Well, to find out, you need to go ahead and watch the new Blaze Original documentary.
00:06:29.200 You can join Jason Patrell and the Blaze Originals team on their quest to uncover the truth about the battle
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00:06:39.200 Jason and the Blaze Original team found an alarming way around the Texas National Guard border blockade,
00:06:45.960 and they want to show viewers what's really going on.
00:06:49.060 Media coverage of Eagle Pass painted an alarming picture of what was happening,
00:06:53.840 but the truth was way worse.
00:06:55.720 The Blaze Originals team revealed that the elites on the left and the right,
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00:07:02.960 and that's why those interests are getting together to make it appear impossible to actually solve the problem.
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00:07:12.820 and the Blaze Original team wants to show you why.
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00:07:32.700 America's founding fathers were also big admirers of the ancient Roman Republic
00:07:38.500 and recognized many of the concerns Machiavelli expressed in his writings.
00:07:44.080 Thomas Jefferson spoke regularly about the threat that standing armies posed to the liberty of a free people,
00:07:50.260 while James Madison and Alexander Hamilton acknowledged these dangers when writing the Federalist Papers.
00:07:56.480 While defending the legislative branch's ability to maintain a standing army in Federalist 24,
00:08:03.780 Hamilton noted that two state constitutions, those of Pennsylvania and North Carolina,
00:08:09.660 had clauses which explicitly warned that standing armies in a time of peace were a danger to liberty.
00:08:16.120 In Federalist 29, Hamilton explains that a well-regulated citizen militia can make a standing army unnecessary,
00:08:24.400 which in his mind was a much better way to avoid the perils of a standing army
00:08:29.880 than outright banning the creation of one in the Constitution.
00:08:34.700 Hamilton says, quote,
00:08:35.920 If a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country,
00:08:41.100 it ought certainly to be under the regulation and the disposal of that body which is constituted
00:08:46.780 the guardian of the national security.
00:08:49.440 If standing armies are dangerous to liberty,
00:08:53.440 an efficacious power of the militia in the body to whose care the protection of the state is committed
00:09:00.000 ought, as far as possible, to take away the inducement and the pretext to such unfriendly institutions.
00:09:07.360 If the Federal government can command the aid of the militia in those emergencies
00:09:11.720 which call for the military arm in support of the civil magistrate,
00:09:15.900 it can the better dispense with the employment of a different kind of force.
00:09:22.200 If it cannot avail itself of the former, it will be obliged to recur to the latter.
00:09:28.000 To render an army unnecessary will be a more certain method of preventing its existence
00:09:33.640 than a thousand prohibitions upon paper.
00:09:37.300 End quote.
00:09:38.540 This is why we see so much confusion over the language of the Second Amendment.
00:09:44.080 The citizen militia was assumed to be the default mode of armed defense for a free republic.
00:09:51.000 Of course, every individual has a right to bear arms.
00:09:54.460 How else could the United States protect itself?
00:09:57.680 Now, to be clear, this doesn't validate the leftist's claim that the Second Amendment is outdated.
00:10:03.180 The right to self-defense doesn't cease to exist just because the United States has a professional military.
00:10:08.980 But it is important to understand the context in which these critical documents were written.
00:10:15.720 Our Founding Fathers were perfectly aware of the temptation that a standing army created
00:10:20.840 and agreed with both the ancient Romans and Machiavelli
00:10:24.420 that the citizen militia was the natural defense force of the republican form of government.
00:10:29.780 Now, obviously, warfare has changed quite a bit from the days of Machiavelli.
00:10:36.760 Intercontinental ballistic missiles and aircraft mean that military threats can appear at a moment's notice.
00:10:44.080 Highly complicated weapon systems require intense training and specialization to use and maintain.
00:10:49.700 The idea of having time to raise a citizen militia to effectively repel a threat from a major power,
00:10:57.280 even if those militia members trained regularly, seems tenuous at best.
00:11:02.560 Even if the United States wanted to scale down its military to a temporary force,
00:11:07.940 other global players are unlikely to follow suit.
00:11:11.520 Also, to be frank, Americans have gotten used to the notion that someone else will fight their battles.
00:11:17.220 The idea that every individual citizen would take up the defense of their nation
00:11:21.880 seems like a quaint notion from a bygone era.
00:11:25.760 If a citizen militia is the cost of liberty,
00:11:28.840 it's likely that for the average American, that cost would just be too high.
00:11:34.320 As John Adams said,
00:11:35.840 the Constitution is made to govern a virtuous people,
00:11:39.240 and in that respect, we exist well beyond its reach.
00:11:42.280 It may be that the best that the citizens of present-day America can do
00:11:47.700 is to stay vigilant and guard against the temptations of empire
00:11:51.540 that a standing army presents.
00:11:54.280 Conservatives have already begun to lose their taste for forever wars,
00:11:57.740 tired of sending their sons to serve an empire that no longer cares about them.
00:12:02.480 Let's hope that this eventually forces America's ruling class 0.96
00:12:05.960 to once again focus on the people it was supposed to prioritize in the first place.
00:12:11.180 Thanks for watching, guys.
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