The Auron MacIntyre Show - May 29, 2025


That's Not Classical Liberalism ｜ 5⧸29⧸25

Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Mentioned
John Adams John Locke Thomas Jefferson Niccolo Machiavelli George Washington Michael Shermer Jordan Peterson Thomas Hobbes Carl Benjamin Barack Obama Barry Weiss George W. Bush Sam Harris Sabbath Odyssey
Rescuing the Southern Baptist Convention ｜ Guest： William Wolfe ｜ 5⧸28⧸25 Does Christianity Call for the End of Nations？ ｜ Guest： Stephen Wolfe ｜ 5⧸30⧸5

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

169.34

Word count

1,666

Sentence count

99

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

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

As woke mobs were throwing guest speakers off college campuses, and renowned scientists were getting fired over minor transgressions against the gender jihad, a section of moderate progressives realized that their days at the top of the ruling class were numbered. Figures like Sam Harris, Barry Weiss, and Michael Shermer were very far from conservative. In fact, they would have qualified as progressives in the era of George W. Bush or Barack Obama. But they were no longer able to keep pace with the more radical leftists.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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.
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00:00:30.000 As woke mobs started throwing guest speakers off college campuses
00:00:33.340 and renowned scientists started to get fired over minor transgressions against the gender jihad,
00:00:39.400 a section of moderate progressives realized that their days at the top of the ruling class were numbered.
00:00:45.560 Figures like Sam Harris, Barry Weiss, and Michael Shermer were very far from conservative.
00:00:51.100 In fact, they would have qualified as progressives in the era of George Bush or Barack Obama.
00:00:55.520 But they were no longer able to keep pace with the more radical leftists.
00:01:00.680 These disillusioned progressives needed a new title for themselves,
00:01:03.880 but obviously they weren't going to sully their good name by slumming it with the backward-hit conservatives. 0.84
00:01:10.120 Weiss attempted to brand them as the intellectual dark web,
00:01:13.160 but most of them settled on the moniker of classical liberal to describe their current political orientation.
00:01:20.060 There's only one problem with that.
00:01:21.900 These people despise classical liberalism.
00:01:25.640 If you need to rebrand your Obama-era progressive liberalism into something that is distinct from conservatism
00:01:31.080 but won't immediately scare Republicans, classical liberalism is a very good choice.
00:01:35.280 Not only does it sound rather moderate compared to wokeness,
00:01:38.440 but it also sounds like the ideology of the American founding fathers.
00:01:42.160 If you want to endear yourself to conservatives while shoring yourself up against attacks from your right,
00:01:47.940 identifying with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams is a pretty good strategy.
00:01:52.680 It's unclear how much this strategy played into the selection of the term classical liberal,
00:01:57.020 but what is clear is how much its adoption warped the understanding of what classical liberals actually believe.
00:02:02.960 While some of the members of the intellectual dark web did take genuine steps to the right,
00:02:08.380 almost all of them started with and maintained progressive sentiments.
00:02:12.940 Most of the members were atheists, and some of them had even been part of the new atheist movement,
00:02:17.360 writing books which attacked Christianity while debating apologists for sport. 0.93
00:02:21.980 Several members were gay, and most were fervent supporters of gay marriage.
00:02:26.040 They had spent most of their lives attacking traditional values and were happy to redefine marriage, 0.73
00:02:30.940 but drew the line at redefining gender for some reason.
00:02:34.360 These were not people who opposed the revolution.
00:02:37.060 They had, in fact, led the revolution until the mob came for what they held sacred, like feminism or science. 0.61
00:02:43.840 When the IDW crowd adopted the classical liberal label,
00:02:47.680 they did so to rally around one issue, free speech.
00:02:51.340 Many of these disgruntled progressives had been canceled in one way or another
00:02:55.320 for not adopting the newest standards around pronouns or racial oppression,
00:02:59.500 and they wanted to return to the last passage of leftism,
00:03:02.940 the one where they were in charge,
00:03:04.460 and these new radical progressives didn't get to dictate the terms of the discussion.
00:03:08.940 This was the shelling point for coordination between conservatives and anti-woke progressives,
00:03:14.360 so it made sense to emphasize it,
00:03:16.640 but classical liberalism was far more than some loose assertion around the idea of free speech.
00:03:22.360 Some will claim that Niccoli Machiavelli or Thomas Hobbes was the father of liberalism,
00:03:28.180 but in the American tradition, the original classical liberal was John Locke.
00:03:32.800 Much of the Declaration of Independence reads like Thomas Jefferson paraphrasing Locke,
00:03:37.700 right down to life, liberty, and property being slightly altered to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
00:03:43.600 In Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration,
00:03:45.360 the philosopher laid out the classical liberal position on religious toleration between Christian denominations.
00:03:53.480 He even left open the possibility of tolerating Catholics if they could renounce their political allegiance to the Pope.
00:03:59.300 There was, however, one group that Locke didn't think was worthy of toleration.
00:04:03.660 They were, of course, the atheists.
00:04:05.740 Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a god.
00:04:12.220 Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist.
00:04:18.920 The taking away of a god, though but even in thought, dissolves all.
00:04:23.200 Besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion 0.99
00:04:27.780 can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of toleration.
00:04:32.960 As for other practical opinions, though not absolutely free from all error,
00:04:38.380 if they do not tend to establish domination over others or civil impunity to the church in which they are taught,
00:04:44.980 there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated.
00:04:48.740 End quote.
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00:05:19.200 For John Locke, the founder of classical liberalism,
00:05:23.100 atheism was a universal acid that destroyed any nation which embraced it.
00:05:27.760 If an atheist could keep his unbelief to himself and not attack the church 0.95
00:05:31.900 or undermine the faith of others, they could be tolerated.
00:05:35.400 But obviously, they still could not be trusted to hold any position of authority.
00:05:39.620 Atheism was a civilizational cancer to be contained, 0.94
00:05:42.320 and the kind of new atheism which attacked the church and the personal faith of believers
00:05:46.760 was something to be banned outright.
00:05:49.040 The fact that many of the people calling themselves classical liberals
00:05:52.200 were involved in exactly that kind of secular jihad against the Christian faith 0.95
00:05:56.360 shows how silly, or possibly malicious, the adoption of that title was.
00:06:01.720 At times, it can be a mistake to present the beliefs of the founders as one unified whole.
00:06:07.560 They had several fervent disagreements,
00:06:09.560 many of which were reflected in the Federalist Papers.
00:06:12.560 One thing that we can be sure of is that the values of free speech
00:06:16.280 and free exercise of religion had a very different connotation
00:06:19.660 than they carry in our modern secular age.
00:06:22.480 Even after writing the Constitution and Bill of Rights,
00:06:26.100 several U.S. states maintained official state churches.
00:06:29.700 Circuit courts upheld Christian blasphemy laws regularly until the 1940s,
00:06:34.320 and some state supreme courts were even defending them in the 1970s.
00:06:38.760 Blue laws banning certain types of commerce to encourage observation of the Sabbath
00:06:43.360 were incredibly common in the United States until just a few decades ago.
00:06:48.060 John Adams famously stated that the Constitution was only fit to govern a moral and religious people,
00:06:53.620 and would be inadequate to govern any other.
00:06:56.020 It's very clear that both the leaders and citizens of early America
00:06:59.760 expected to live an explicitly Christian nation,
00:07:02.760 and expected the free exercise of religion to take place inside that framework.
00:07:06.900 The common claim made by non-woke leftists that classical liberalism
00:07:11.720 demands an entirely secular or neutral government is absurd on its face.
00:07:16.160 But that shouldn't surprise anyone.
00:07:18.120 The Constitution wasn't meant to govern new atheists,
00:07:20.640 which John Adams made very clear.
00:07:22.780 The argument that's generally made after these historical and ideological inconsistencies are pointed out
00:07:29.340 is that America has advanced morally since the time of the founders.
00:07:33.320 Toleration for non-Christian religions has increased.
00:07:36.340 Representation has been secured for women.
00:07:38.480 And marriage has been redefined to include homosexuals.
00:07:41.280 All of these changes have brought America closer to realizing its true values of freedom and equality.
00:07:46.980 And if you believe that all these redefinitions of liberal values have constituted social progress,
00:07:53.020 I've got great news.
00:07:54.440 There's already a term that describes that ideology.
00:07:57.840 It's called progressive liberalism.
00:08:00.980 Classical liberalism is a real historical phenomenon
00:08:04.160 that was an important part of the founding of this great nation.
00:08:07.800 And frankly, I'm tired of watching it be abused by people who in no way believe in it.
00:08:13.140 If John Locke or John Adams could see the progressive leftist atheists 0.99
00:08:17.380 wearing their beliefs like a skin suit, 0.62
00:08:19.720 they'd be rolling over in their graves.
00:08:21.460 The progressive, secular liberalism of the 1990s and 2000s
00:08:26.620 is not classical liberalism, nor is it the ally of conservatism.
00:08:31.300 The non-woke left were a useful co-belligerence against the woke radicals,
00:08:35.720 but they were never allies,
00:08:37.580 and they certainly shouldn't be handed positions of leadership
00:08:40.440 inside the conservative movement.
00:08:42.660 Some of these individuals, like Carl Benjamin or Jordan Peterson,
00:08:45.820 have taken significant steps towards the right,
00:08:48.480 and even towards Christianity,
00:08:49.620 and for that, they should be commended.
00:08:52.040 But we should be wary of those that continue to operate
00:08:54.960 under a moniker whose values they don't actually hold.
00:08:58.780 Disgruntled progressives are not classically liberal or conservative,
00:09:02.960 and they shouldn't get to dictate what the right wing is
00:09:06.180 or what it might become.
00:09:07.520 Thanks for watching, guys.
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