00:03:03.820But from many of his casting choices, from Elliot Page, I guess is what she's calling
00:03:08.440herself these days, or putting a black woman in the role of Helen of Troy, these seem to
00:03:14.400be themes that have kind of moved through Hollywood.
00:03:17.700The desire to replace historically non-white or historically white characters with non-white
00:03:24.080actors or replace men with women or women trying to be men, this kind of thing, has
00:03:28.760become unfortunately very, very common.
00:03:30.900Christopher Nolan was again seen as somebody who who might have resisted this at least would have
00:03:35.200had the the power would have had the authority to tell a studio no if this is something he didn't
00:03:40.060want to do or tell an audience no I don't want to cater to this kind of stuff and yet now we see
00:03:45.140that that has worked its way at least as far as we can tell into his latest movie so what is this
00:03:50.680obsession why is it so hard for even some of the most stalwart director for directors like
00:03:55.700Christopher Nolan to avoid this trap? Well, there's a very deep answer that I'll get into
00:04:00.520in a moment, but my initial answer is that this is an ongoing assault on Western civilization and
00:04:06.300the norms of Western civilization. When you look at the story of the Odyssey, it's part of Greek
00:04:13.540literature that is one of the foundational things in Western thought. But when you look at the
00:04:18.020characters, for instance, Odysseus, who's a very strong type A male personality, some may even
00:04:24.900want to call him a toxic male. And his quest is to get back home to Ithaca to his family, his wife
00:04:31.760and his child, his nuclear family. He also wants to reinstitute control in Ithaca because while he
00:04:39.480was gone going through his trials and tribulations, all hell broke loose in his castle and with his
00:04:46.100family. And so he's going back to rectify that and to reestablish law and order. So at that level,
00:04:53.260you can see why it sort of conflicts with what the ethos is now as to what a family should be,
00:04:58.900what a male should be like, and even, you know, the normal assault on Western culture. It's all
00:05:06.240part of that same stream. But at some point, I'd also like to talk to a deeper issue behind it all
00:05:11.440and what's really driving it, in my opinion. Well, I think a lot of people have spoken about
00:05:17.680kind of the general outline you're giving there, this idea that we have a heroic male character
00:05:22.680that we're elevating the idea of a patriarch, someone who's responsible for the family at home,
00:05:28.640his natural leadership role is being there. And when he's not there, his authority is a challenge.
00:05:34.100Things go awry. As you say, he has to reassert his dominance, his leadership role in that scenario
00:05:41.120to once again, return us to a state of order to put everything back in its place where it should
00:05:46.300be. And of course, we can see this theme has been echoed so many times. You could see this,
00:05:49.840that the scouring of the Shire and Lord of the Rings has echoes of this is obviously an archetypal
00:05:55.900in the most literal sense of that word story. And so you want to, if you're a radical leftist,
00:06:03.620undermine those things that kind of hold together the American or the Western identity. And this
00:06:09.580would certainly be one of them. But as you say, that's something I think a lot of people have
00:06:14.100noticed that it's true, but it is certainly a widely held and I think understood aspect of this.
00:06:19.400So you alluded to a deeper meaning there.
00:06:21.560What do you think that deeper meaning is?
00:06:23.960Well, when you look at the collectivist group of philosophies, Marxism, socialism, communism,
00:06:30.820they can't tolerate Western civilization or the concept of America.
00:06:37.220And so if you understand Marx's methodology for analyzing cultures and making change within
00:06:43.240systems. His view is that you have to use the Hegelian dialectic, thesis, antithesis, and
00:06:50.320synthesis. So the thesis or the existing situation in America is this Western culture, the ideal of
00:06:58.220the sovereign individual, the nuclear family. In order to move towards collectivism, socialism,
00:07:04.760Marxism, communism, you have to destroy the current paradigm. And that's one of Marx's key
00:07:09.920points is that you have to attack it, destroy it, replace it. And so what we're seeing on all levels,
00:07:14.880not just about movies or literature, but education, music, anything that you can pick out in society
00:07:20.720right now is essentially a collectivist assault on Western civilization because it has to be
00:07:26.220destroyed in order to make room for the socialist revolution. Well, I think this is true on so many
00:07:32.820levels. You could look at the work of someone like Bertrand de Juvenal talking about the different
00:07:37.820social spheres and or Alexis de Tocqueville talking about, you know, the need for free
00:07:42.740associations and how and this is something I think some libertarians miss, but I think it's
00:07:47.780critical if you actually support the idea of liberty. If you want to have a society that is
00:07:52.920free, you must first have a society that is virtuous and self-sustaining. The reason that
00:07:58.160governments are so easily collectivized is when the duties of the home, the family, the church,
00:08:03.620the wider community ultimately break down they need those bonds to be weakened so you can0.95
00:08:08.960ultimately build up the power of the state the fact that a woman no longer raises her family0.86
00:08:14.260educates her children the fact that a father no longer provides for the well-being of his children0.72
00:08:19.760or ultimately cares for the elderly these kind of things every one of those aspects of society that
00:08:25.000we hand over are ultimately also something that breaks down our liberty and pushes us closer
00:08:30.040towards that inevitable centralization that you are talking about there. However, I do think this
00:08:36.460then provides a challenge to us because, you know, and I could be wrong, but just reading your profile
00:08:41.980and hearing you talk, you sound like a free market guy. You sound like a guy who says,
00:08:45.800you know, the market will ultimately sort these things out. And many people have made this claim,
00:08:50.580right? If you go woke, you're going to go broke. Eventually, the people will stop showing up for
00:08:54.360the movies. Eventually, Hollywood will stop making these movies. There'll be a market correction.
00:08:58.360and that makes logical sense right that that's what i would assume would happen uh but i guess
00:09:04.580i've been in too many of uh i've been in the belly of the beast too long i was in public education
00:09:09.760i was a journalist i've stared these you know wide-eyed zealots in the eyes i know what they
00:09:16.540believe i know this is their religion in a very real way and so even though many people made the
00:09:21.000prediction that ultimately the market would correct this and that it would bring us back
00:09:24.980to a point where movie studios would serve the interests of the people i i think that that has
00:09:29.960ultimately not been the case now i don't think it was actually ever the case i think that hollywood
00:09:34.420has been leading and not following for a very long time they have an agenda as you say and i think
00:09:39.760it's one that is regularly enforced despite what the market might tell you uh but it's only gotten
00:09:44.820obviously more ridiculous over the years we're not just breaking down the idea of the church and
00:09:49.720footloose anymore. We're breaking down the ideal of male and female at this point. And so what is0.74
00:09:55.800your response to the fact that the market doesn't seem to have corrected, that the market is not
00:10:00.920serving the consumer when it comes to entertainment, but instead it seems to be a tool to manipulate
00:10:07.340the average consumer through the messages that are being pushed regardless if they're popular
00:10:12.260or even profitable? Right. And I am a libertarian. I'm a free market guy. So everything you said
00:10:18.340about that is correct. But I also think, you know, in the line of thought of there's very
00:10:22.820deeper, there's deeper, more powerful forces at work here than I think a lot of people realize
00:10:28.000that it isn't about does the free market work or not work. When you look at our civilization right
00:10:34.320now, particularly Western civilization, we should have some very deep disillusions about what's
00:10:41.660happening here. That, you know, we look at our government and think it's of the people, by the
00:10:46.340people and for the people, but I'm pretty sure it's not. When you look at what moves the world,
00:10:51.060I'm pretty sure it's closer to the banking cabal, the worldwide network of NGOs, all of the
00:10:59.960intertwined organizations. Like if, I don't want to digress here, but if you look at the Epstein
00:11:07.840files, set aside the sexual nature of that issue, what it really reveals is that there's this very0.55
00:11:13.180tightly woven elitist organization and network that drives the world. And we think we can vote
00:11:21.260our way out of it or talk our way out of it or have a speech and get out of it. But these forces
00:11:26.420are so powerful and they go so far back in time that I'm not even sure we fully understand what
00:11:31.960we're up against here. There are very powerful forces, whether it's radical Islam, the collectivist
00:11:37.100movement or the banking cabal that are out to change America simply because they can't tolerate
00:11:43.760the concept of America. The concept of a sovereign individual who's free to make his own choices
00:11:49.140violates collectivism. It violates radical Islam when you think of it in terms of there is no law0.96
00:11:57.160but Sharia and there is no God but Allah. And it also violates the banking cabal who wants0.93
00:12:02.560complete control of our society so you've got all those powerful forces that are going to push
00:12:09.280all of our institutions to uh move towards this destruction of the the american ideal
00:12:15.200and so it's not as simple as saying i hope the free market will fix it these these forces care
00:12:19.680nothing about the free market they care nothing about our political system they're out to destroy
00:12:24.080america all right there's a lot there and i certainly want to get to all of it but i guess
00:12:30.080i'll start with the question that it's most closely related to our starting topic if we're
00:12:36.540in a scenario and i agree 100 that there are pretty ancient and powerful forces that are
00:12:43.760pushing back against western civilization want to see it uh destroyed if that's true
00:12:49.620and we think that they are that old and that powerful then at some level is the notion of
00:12:57.140a free market an illusion? Because if that is a constant thumb on the scale for what should be
00:13:04.280happening, then aren't we constantly in a scenario where no transaction is truly free of these
00:13:10.860influences? Is there a scenario where we need to actually use some level of restriction or
00:13:16.800regulation to create a safer space for then the market to actually flourish? I guess I'll show my
00:13:23.660cards here a little bit. I'm always telling libertarians, you kind of need authoritarianism
00:13:28.400on the outside to get libertarianism on the inside. You need some level of hard regulation
00:13:33.940to block out malicious forces. If you then want people to ultimately be able to live their lives
00:13:39.440in their own way, making their own decisions, being an individual that is not constantly
00:13:44.420pulled apart by these ancient and globalist forces. And so my question to you would be,
00:13:51.060does the presence of these things and the level of influence to the point where they would
00:13:55.740completely distort our entertainment education these other things does the presence of those
00:14:01.620forces mean that at the very least we need some kind of barrier to allow the free market to thrive
00:14:08.100or is the free market completely abandoned to these forces does it persist besides them is it
00:14:13.460is it unaffected in some areas but affected in others what would be your response i'm gonna
00:14:18.560to unwind that just a little bit in the sense that if you look at the essential conflict in
00:14:24.600the world historically from the beginning of civilization is it's been a conflict of the
00:14:30.160elites versus everyone else. And that elitism has taken many forms, whether it's monarchies,
00:14:35.780dictatorships of the proletariat, Caesars, feudalism, you know, take your pick. It's all
00:14:41.880essentially the same thing. It's how a group of elites have somehow taken control of the machinery
00:14:47.320of civilization and the lifeblood of civilization to the detriment of common people. And the thing
00:14:53.720that the only exception to that has really been the concept of the United States. When we had
00:15:00.680our revolution against the empire upon which the sun never set and King George, it literally turned
00:15:07.580the world upside down because it was a novel approach to self-governance where we introduced
00:15:12.300the concept of the sovereign individual to the world. And we didn't take on an elitist
00:15:17.600organization to run those sovereign individuals. We tried to turn the pyramid of power upside down.
00:15:24.540That offended all of those ancient historical streams of power throughout the entire world.
00:15:32.280And ever since then, their mission has been to destroy that concept of the sovereign individual,
00:15:37.660will destroy the concept of freedom for that individual to choose where they want to work,
00:15:42.160where they want to live, who they're going to associate with, what they want to say,
00:15:45.500what they're going to write. They need to destroy that because it violates the elitist view of how
00:15:51.680they're going to control the world. So what do you do about that? The answer is, since the elitists
00:15:56.920are like chameleons, they're shapeshifters, no matter what is them you pick, they're going to
00:16:01.900find a way to take control. Even you look at Marxism, the dictatorship, the proletariat is0.99
00:16:07.080just another elitist form of control over the masses. So the solution, in my opinion, is to
00:16:13.400prevent elitism from doing that. And I think the founding fathers had some interesting ideas,
00:16:20.360and I'm a big fan of the U.S. Constitution, but I think it has some weaknesses. And I think there's
00:16:24.540some things we should have done differently there that would have created, as you said,
00:16:28.800these barriers or firewalls against this elitist infiltration of our free society.
00:16:34.320well this is very interesting this is why Hans Hermann Hoppe is probably my favorite libertarian
00:16:41.400if for no other reason than he is directly photocopying most of Bertrand de Juvenal's
00:16:47.400book on power and I say that with a lot of love because I think he does a great job of updating
00:16:51.500it and clarifying it and adding some interesting concepts to it so I'm by no means not knocking
00:16:57.020him for that but I think it gives him a metaphysics of power that most libertarians are often
00:17:01.980unfamiliar with. And that gives the libertarian worldview a more robust understanding. However,
00:17:08.580I am a little worried about the idea. Well, I shouldn't say I'm a little worried. I should
00:17:14.000just say as I am someone who studies elite theory, I'm a big fan of Alfredo Pareto and
00:17:20.640Katana Masca and their analysis of the world. And I think that their point that elites are ultimately
00:17:25.980inescapable is correct. And I think this is also largely Bertrand de Juvenal's point. And I think
00:17:33.820this is why Democracy the God the Failed is so compelling in its first half, where many people
00:17:39.600assume it's defending monarchy, and less compelling in its next half, where it attempts to set up the
00:17:45.140covenant communities and somehow bind us against these authoritarian structures. I am someone who
00:17:51.120ultimately does not like totalitarianism. I think that we need to resist totalitarianism. I wrote a
00:17:55.560called The Total State about how we needed to resist totalitarianism. But I do think that the
00:18:01.800attempt to purge elites from this is ultimately doomed in the same way that I think the attempt
00:18:08.500to like remove the profit modem by motive by Marxists is ultimately doomed because I think
00:18:14.220this is a actual basic truth of human collective action. I think when we look at the history of
00:18:20.600the world, as you say accurately, it is a history of elites exploiting individuals. I think that is
00:18:28.100true. However, I think that dynamic is the case because that is how humans tend to organize. The
00:18:34.020organized majority always wins against the disorganized majority. And so I think that
00:18:40.480this is a dynamic that's very difficult to break. And so the question is less one of,
00:18:45.800Can we get rid of elite influence? Can we avoid this pretty much inevitable metaphysics of power? Or is there a proper way to order this as where the elites would be constrained through, I think, the natural Aristotelian understanding of kind of a telos, a community, a common duty, a civic duty that is required,
00:19:31.420have some level of freedom or democracy.
00:19:34.420I don't think the form is so much important
00:19:37.280as the result that it ultimately produces.
00:19:39.580Yeah, I'm not an anarchist, so I do agree with your point that society requires some
00:19:44.700enforceable structure in order to guarantee the rights that we want to claim as sovereign
00:19:49.100individuals and to claim the freedom that we all want in our lives. There has to be some structure,
00:19:54.700some enforceable structure enforced by someone to maintain that. Where the Founding Fathers went
00:20:01.740awry, in my opinion, is when they created the Constitution, they thought America had an ethos
00:20:08.620that was indestructible at the time, that we were in the process of conquering a continent,
00:20:13.320we had fought off the empire upon which the sun never set, we defeated King George,
00:20:17.460and we had a very clear set of principles, you know, Lockean principles about how to structure
00:20:22.000a society, and a new opportunity to create one almost from a blank slate. And I think the
00:20:28.320founding fathers assumed that that was going to be the American culture, that concept of American
00:20:32.640exceptionalism, that it was going to be there forever. So one of the mistakes they made in
00:20:37.280constitution is they gave congress far too much power and in in the sense that they they thought
00:20:43.600well in this our representative republic will always have this ethos so it kind of doesn't
00:20:47.840matter how much power congress has they'll just do what this ethos of people want done uh but our
00:20:53.920ethos has changed and we've been uh in infiltrated by collectivism and some other thoughts to the
00:20:59.920point where now our congress which really has very few barriers to what it can do is essentially
00:21:06.800slowly moving us towards a totalitarian state and towards a collectivist state, and there's
00:21:11.780really nothing to stop it in our constitution. So we should have put some different barriers in
00:21:17.260place to prevent this from happening. I wish the founding fathers would have realized that
00:21:22.020we're not always going to have the same ethos. So if you want to create, keep this same structure
00:21:26.460that limits government and protects individual sovereignty, you better put some more firewalls
00:21:31.560in that thing in order to stop the erosion of it.
00:21:36.800Got PC Optimum points? Visit Shoppers Drug Mart for the bonus redemption event and get more for
00:21:41.840your points. Friday, May 29th to Wednesday, June 3rd. Valid in-store and online.
00:21:50.780I wonder if that's true. I certainly think that you're right that the founders assumed
00:21:56.040too much about the character of the people and what it would remain. I think that
00:22:00.260they were ultimately assuming that the people would continue to defend the rights of the
00:22:05.680which is what they felt that they would do and what had been denied them by the king and parliament.
00:22:11.540They assumed that that kind of Anglo-Protestant understanding that kind of ultimately flows from the English tradition would continue into the United States and be magnified.
00:22:25.500If anything else, the United States seemed like more of a purifying strain of that understanding.
00:22:31.380and that's kind of where they assumed would be the the trajectory going forward but as america
00:22:38.280expands and moves into i think a world empire would be a pretty fair way to describe it after
00:22:45.080world war ii we see a large influx of foreign peoples there had always been ways of immigration
00:22:52.340in the united states to be sure we were trying to fill up a continent as quickly as possible and
00:22:57.520try to deny other great powers access to it and so that meant we just needed a raw number of people
00:23:03.260but it started to get faster and looser with who was allowed to come in and i think in a large
00:23:08.540sense it started allowing many people who are completely unconnected to this tradition in any
00:23:13.000way you have kind of the expanding rings of you know first uh kind of the the protestant dissenters
00:23:18.640and then uh the rest of the english the irish you know some of western europe and then we start to
00:23:24.780Eastern Europe and much further away and every time we got further away from kind of the birthplace
00:23:30.040of this understanding of the world we seem to get less and less of the character that you're
00:23:35.360describing there and so I think that this is also a tension between kind of the American identity
00:23:42.180and the framers intention because you have a scenario where you have a way of being a life
00:23:50.180that was ultimately derived from a set of understandings of attitudes of cultures of
00:23:56.740traditions heritages and that was then attempt to like kind of be made abstract and apply to
00:24:03.420a bunch of people who were completely outside that tradition were unfamiliar with it and even
00:24:07.660though we wrote down a lot of this stuff in the constitution i think ultimately there's a limit
00:24:12.000to the ability of written constitutions to dictate behavior i think constitutions emanate more from
00:24:17.520the way of the being of the people than they do a priori construction at the beginning of a country
00:24:22.980i don't think america is america because of the constitution i think the constitution looks like
00:24:27.120it does because it was written by americans and so i think as we brought more and more people under
00:24:32.520the umbrella of the united states as we attempted to then export our ideology our liberal democracy
00:24:38.640and these other things to other places we quickly discovered that actually people aren't a blank
00:24:43.240And you can't just photocopy these beliefs. You can write down all you want about the American Constitution for Liberians. Even if they have a photocopy of your Constitution, you're not getting the United States, you're getting Liberia. And so I think there is a greater difficulty there for a greater challenge for the document.
00:24:59.680I think it's less about writing down more restrictions, though I could agree there are some mechanical issues ultimately with the function of the Constitution.
00:25:08.240I think the larger thing is being aware that one must guard the traditions and the peoples that were attached to it.
00:25:14.940And when you become a global empire, you turn a self-governing republic into something else because you absolutely have to.
00:25:20.860I think that's true, but I do also think that people everywhere and at all times have some very deep driving aspects to their nature.
00:25:35.720One of them is I think people truly want to be free.
00:25:39.120I mean, I think people want to be able to control their own lives.
00:25:41.720I think they want to make decisions for themselves.
00:25:43.640I think they want to pursue their own happiness, their own path in life.
00:26:07.100I think they want to work with people they want to work with.
00:26:09.080I think they want to associate with people they want to associate with.
00:26:13.000So the fact that people are coming from foreign countries,
00:26:15.340I don't think violates those assumptions.
00:26:17.340What happens, though, in the current structure of America is that we have different outlets that people can take advantage of.
00:26:25.540For instance, if you bring in a lot of people who can't sustain themselves into a welfare state, you're going to create a whole different dynamic than you originally intended.
00:26:35.220And I think that's part of what happened here in America.
00:26:37.560So in my opinion, still, what we did was we created a government that could evolve to the point where it seeded all these destructive elements in and of itself.
00:26:47.340when these people were coming in. So in my opinion, we should have had a hard constraint
00:26:52.720on the size of the government. Pick a number. It can never be more than 10% of gross domestic
00:26:57.920product. No matter what policy or program or welfare thing, you should never have anything
00:27:04.320bigger than that as a government. I also don't think we should have the ability to take money
00:27:10.640from some people and give it to others. I think that transfer of wealth between individuals is
00:27:15.380terribly destructive. And that's part of what contributes to the breakdown of what we would
00:27:19.700consider valuable, the concept of the nuclear family, the self-sufficient, self-reliant
00:27:24.460individual. You start to destroy those things simply by the kind of government you allow to
00:27:28.980come into place. And so I think if the founders would have thought a little bit differently and
00:27:33.700said, I'm going to put some bigger constraints here, that the government can never become that.
00:27:37.960And so the people who are coming here can't follow that path because it doesn't exist
00:27:41.960as a path for them. And they have to actually learn to absorb the American culture,
00:27:47.300the concept of the nuclear family, the concept of community, the concept of you have to work
00:27:51.800and sustain yourself. That's part of the American culture, but we've allowed a different path for
00:27:56.400people to follow. Yeah, I guess I'm less sanguine about the powers of social conditioning,
00:28:03.380the ability to socially engineer entire populations into a new way of life. I don't
00:28:09.360think that's always the case. And you can look at perhaps Andrew Jackson. This is a guy who
00:28:19.140ultimately said, okay, we have Native Americans here. We have American Indians here. And some of
00:28:24.900them are willing to live as we live. And those people can become Americans and that kind of
00:28:29.240thing. But the large majority of them have no interest or capacity to join in the American
00:28:36.280dream and the American nation and its identity. And we're willing to adopt those that will,
00:28:41.740but those that won't, they have to go. And this is why we ended up with the reservation system.
00:28:45.360It's not that Andrew Jackson particularly hated Indians. In fact, in many ways,
00:28:49.360he was actually kind of a liberal in the sense that he thought that the Native people and their
00:28:54.320ways of life should be preserved in their totality if they wish to continue them.0.88
00:28:59.820But he was very clear that he did not believe, and it was very evident, that the majority were
00:29:05.400interested or capable of pursuing this. And I think if we look in places like China, you know,
00:29:11.120there are, of course, always some people who are interested in freedom, but I think the vast
00:29:15.260majority are actually not at all. I'm not wildly well-traveled, but I am well-traveled enough to
00:29:21.080have met many people of many different cultures that actually have very little interest in freedom.0.99
00:29:26.600The ones that make to the U.S. tend to be self-selecting. You know, I'll give you that.0.99
00:29:30.220They tend to be self-sorting at some level. But as you say, the more and more we see large numbers of these people move in, the less and less we get kind of that spirit that you're discussing there.
00:29:43.480So, for instance, I'm very sure that the first wave of Indian immigrants were quite capable, quite intelligent people, that kind of thing.0.97
00:29:50.580But what we're seeing now is large swaths of Indians acting as ethnic cartels in things like hotels or liquor stores, taking over HR departments, tech departments, these kind of things, only hiring people who look like them, share their identity.0.50
00:30:04.400Many of them all come from the same town.0.98
00:30:06.600They show up and get on the same government welfare.
00:30:08.500They use that to leverage in and then buy out businesses and use all the all the different aspects of the state that favor them.
00:30:15.240And, you know, there's, of course, then the libertarian argument there.
00:30:18.020Well, if the state wasn't doing those things, then they wouldn't be able to leverage them. And that's true. But at the same time, the very existence of people with this very different way of being in large numbers radically changes the outlook. And no matter how we rearrange the government, I think that those people would ultimately pursue those ends.
00:30:35.440Again, there's always some. I think you're right that there are at least some level of people interested in our way of life in different cultures. And over time, over generations, they might be able to be woven into the fabric of the United States. But that's absolutely not what we've pursued in any way, shape or form. We've pursued a very different path and it's destroying the US at many levels.
00:30:55.040And I think this reflects itself ultimately in a project like Christopher Nolan's, a man who in many ways seemed like a very, you know, a filmmaker who's informed by the American ethos, even if himself is not, you know, born in the United States.
00:31:10.920But but a guy who certainly seemed to align with many aspects of it and yet ultimately seems to succumb to this desire for multiculturalism and political correctness and all these things ultimately feels the need to deconstruct these things because, well, ultimately, he's not really affiliated with our values, not really assimilated into what we believe.
00:31:34.040and therefore the foundation on which he stands is sand. And I think if you want to build the kind
00:31:38.700of robust free republic that you're discussing, the building material matters. I think it actually
00:31:43.780matters quite a bit how you build that foundation and you can't assume that it will stay the same
00:31:48.480in perpetuity. So I guess I just don't know if there are enough constrictions that one can
00:31:53.560draw into the constitution that will limit this if ultimately the people you're bringing in
00:31:58.220are seeking an entirely different way of life. Yeah, that's an interesting point. And to some
00:32:04.040extent, I agree with what you're saying, using radical Islam as an example, because they treat0.98
00:32:11.400their philosophy as superior to any American construct of government or politics. And I mean,0.98
00:32:18.440to simplify the Quran, it's as simple as there's no God but Allah, there's no law but Sharia.
00:32:22.640well, that doesn't quite work in a pluralistic society like America, where everybody should be
00:32:30.280free to pursue their own concept of God, their own concept of how they want to live their lives.
00:32:36.880And it shouldn't be Sharia law. It should be laws derived from our Constitution and the processes
00:32:43.340that are ancillary to our Constitution. So I do think that we need to start to think about how
00:32:50.320do we filter that out that we can't you know you see in America right now like down in Texas for
00:32:54.940instance there's a lot of these communities that are starting to be created that are entirely0.99
00:32:59.040Islamic where they really have found ways to exclude Christians cleverly and they're building0.79
00:33:05.880a community around Sharia law within our republic and I think we need to you know when you talk1.00
00:33:12.860about how do we put some barriers I think that can't be acceptable because you're essentially0.98
00:33:17.480creating another, not just a culture, but another political system inside our political system. And
00:33:24.040I think that will ultimately end in disaster here. I agree 100%. And the only thing I would say to
00:33:31.020that, the only thing I would add to it, what I otherwise agree with there, is that many politicians0.59
00:33:36.020in the GOP will just say things like, well, ban Sharia law. And fine. Ron DeSantis, my governor,0.99
00:33:40.960who is great on all kinds of levels, love Ron, has banned Sharia law here. But ultimately,1.00
00:33:47.480That, I think, is a paper tiger, because what you need to ban is Islamic immigration.1.00
00:33:52.380As long as Muslims are coming into the country en masse, you will get Islamic law.1.00
00:33:57.240You can write all the restrictions in you want.1.00
00:34:01.020You can ban it in your state constitution, whatever.1.00
00:34:02.980Once you get a critical mass of Muslims here, it really doesn't matter what you've written down.1.00
00:34:07.740They're going to force Sharia law.1.00
00:34:09.480They might even do it in many cases.0.60
00:34:12.280Sharia law is administered in these closed societies, these private associations, where they basically wall off anyone else from coming in, resolving any of the issues.
00:34:21.100And by the way, this is not, you know, specific only to Muslims. We just had, you know, the Tyler Olivera, who did the video looking at Jewish communities, really Orthodox communities that were boxing out local, you know, investigators, local reporters, even the police.
00:34:42.180They had their own courts. They had their own basically de facto police in the area. So any ethnic diaspora can ultimately do this. It's the differentiation of authority. And to be fair, I think in more classical constructions of culture, including many of the ones that we admire when we're looking at possible pursuits of liberty, that was often the case.
00:35:04.380Justice was handled in the tribe. It was handled in the family. That's actually what gave the government less authority. The magistrate was an overseer, not an absolute authority. And you would take things to the head of the Roman household before you would ever imagine taking it to a civil magistrate. And that creates a certain barrier of authority.
00:35:24.320The problem is, while you and I might be fans of barriers to authority for our government, we want them to be the right kind of barriers, right? We don't want them to be Islamic law barriers. We don't want them to be Orthodox Jewish barriers. We want them to be, well, Christian American Western barriers.0.95
00:35:39.820And so those are the ones that we would kind of agree with. And so there's a kind of a catch-22. At some level, these insular immigrant communities are kind of constructing the individual community barriers we're talking about, but they're constructing them against our civilization, our way of life, our understanding.0.97
00:35:57.400And so this is where I think the interesting debate and conflict comes into play, right? Because we recognize the value of these communities and even their value in restricting the size of the government. But ironically, in this case, they're working in exactly the opposite direction one would hope.1.00
00:36:11.200Yeah, it's an interesting point. And I come at the thought from, you know, I'm mostly Irish. And, you know, as the Irish immigrated to the United States, they did create their own communities. You know, you can look at a lot of the big cities, and a lot of them have, you know, Corktown, Iristown, whatever.
00:36:30.100I'm also part Indian, so I understand a little bit of the perspective from that direction.
00:36:35.800But I also strongly believe that if you have some foundational principles that all of society should and could rally around that are not unique to a religion, they're not unique to a ethnicity, they're simply unique to what it means to be a human being.
00:36:52.780and one of those being the sovereignty of an individual and the right to live your life as
00:36:58.640you choose. And as we create a social compact or a constitution and derive laws from that
00:37:05.400constitution, they should all orient around the fact that the purpose of the society is to protect
00:37:10.880that individual's right to do that. And if you want to introduce Sharia law, which conflicts
00:37:17.740with that, it simply can't be tolerated. This is a nation of laws derived from a constitution that
00:37:24.360are based on certain fundamental principles, and we should intend to keep it that way.
00:37:29.860Well, I think that might just have to be a point of disagreement between us. I think you're a little
00:37:33.960more universalist in your understanding of humanity, and I'm a little more particular.
00:37:38.380That said, you did mention earlier, both interestingly, Sharia law and the Epstein
00:37:44.200files, banking cartels, elite influence. I thought that was interesting because currently I also
00:37:50.640agree both of these are a problem. Both of these are a huge problem. However, it seems like they've
00:37:54.940been pitted against each other. A lot of people will say, well, if you're worried about Jeffrey
00:37:59.680Epstein and a banking cartel, you must be some pro-Islam person, someone who embraces Sharia
00:38:08.300law and in the importation of Islam or or ultimately kind of saddling up beside it.0.58
00:38:13.520On the other side, there are people who are saying, well, if you oppose Islam, you must
00:38:18.300ignore all of the Epstein files and the banking cartels because there might be some connection
00:38:32.940I think we should expose everything in the Epstein files.
00:38:35.420I think we should go after banking cartels.1.00
00:38:37.140And I think we should ban Islamic immigration. And I don't think there's anything that should1.00
00:38:41.340any way conflict with each other. I might be more radical on the last one than you are even,
00:38:45.440but I don't think that there should be any conflict between these two positions. Why do
00:38:49.600you think people are framing it in this idea that we either have to side with Jeffrey Epstein or
00:38:53.960side with radical Islam? Can't everyone here lose? Shouldn't that be the best outcome?
00:38:59.040I think what you're seeing is an interest in protecting the entrenched hidden elites in our
00:39:05.480society that are actually pulling the strings in the background. And what they don't want,
00:39:10.460the very last thing they want is exposure, regardless of where it comes from or who gets
00:39:15.340exposed, that once you start unraveling that curtain and pulling it back and start turning
00:39:22.000the stones over and see what crawls out, you'll see something far uglier than I think we ever
00:39:27.080imagined. And so I think there's a lot of people in Washington or in positions of power who simply
00:39:32.660don't want any of that revealed anyhow anyway anywhere because it will ultimately lead to the
00:39:38.760unraveling of their power i think there's a lot of truth to that and i think that's why you know a lot
00:39:45.240a lot of people looked at the epstein files and of course we still didn't get all of them plenty
00:39:48.980of it still redacted that kind of thing but even with what we saw there they said oh well it doesn't
00:39:53.520have all the explicit sexual innuendo that we thought it was going to have you know a lot of
00:39:58.960people really invested in the salacious narrative attached to Epstein the idea that Epstein was this
00:40:05.180you know broker of child you know sexual abuse and these kind of things and he was selling
00:40:09.980you know eight-year-old boys to ravenous elites you know and that kind of thing and it does seem
00:40:16.180for sure that Jeffrey Epstein was involved at some level in sex trafficking that very much
00:40:22.240very obvious he was literally convicted for it in Florida before basically getting a sweetheart deal
00:40:26.840So we know that that is real. That said, what was interesting in the Epstein files, what a lot of people, I think that with the lack of just straight up Jeffrey Epstein selling, you know, 12 year olds to Bill Clinton, when that wasn't immediately revealed in the Epstein files, many people then use that as a way to dismiss what was there.
00:40:47.300And what was there, I think, is very much what you are explaining. And again, it's very interesting because a lot of people were really interested in the Epstein files for Epstein's connection with Israel, which I think is obvious and exists. But I don't think it was the only thing he was connected to. It's very clear he was connected to American intelligence, banking cartels, the Rothschilds, the WEF. Yeah, all of these, right? All of these actors.
00:41:12.980Jeffrey Epstein was a broker for foreign interests and Israel was one among many clients. Maybe he worked with them more than others, but he worked with all of these people. It was in no way an exclusive agent of just Israel. And so I think, again, when people didn't see that direct overarching connection, they then ignored the fact that those files really reveal several interlocking and in many ways very ethnic cartels that were coordinating interests.
00:41:41.340You had, yes, Israeli interests. You had, but also Chinese interests. You had Middle Eastern interests. You had many interests reflected in those documents. The one thing you didn't really see was American elites fighting for American interests in all of this.
00:41:57.260It seemed that every other group, every other power block had someone fighting inside the seedy underworld background that existed in the banking world and all these things, except for someone fighting for the United States.
00:42:13.000And that, I think, is the most revealing part of the Epstein files, that there was all of this backroom dealmaking done.
00:42:19.320There are all these elites that are corrupt and interacting.
00:42:22.040They are working for foreign interests, but they're all fighting for their own interests, which is what you would expect, at least at some level, elites to do.
00:42:33.640Yeah, I think if you really dig into the Epstein files, you realize a couple of things.
00:42:39.020Yeah, there was some sexual nature to it, but that sexual deviance has gone on for a long time in many different ways, long before Epstein.
00:42:48.040So that isn't even about Epstein, so to speak.
00:42:52.040But it wasn't even about that sexual nature of it. It was about how people are manipulating each other in this massive global network of elites and how they're trying to gain advantage over this group or advantage over this person or try to influence this particular thing using techniques like bribery and extortion because of sexual deviation.
00:43:12.520you mentioned you know american interests my belief at this point is there is no such thing
00:43:20.500as an american interest in this global elite that has taken over the world that they don't
00:43:25.360care about america they really don't care about any particular country it's transnational it's
00:43:29.500globalist and what they really care about is the institutions that they represent and profit from
00:43:35.340and so to look for some american-centric thing i think is a mistake it's not there it doesn't exist
00:43:42.340I largely agree. Again, I wrote a book called The Total State about how this transnational elite arises and why those institutions become their actual base of power, why they separate away from the countries.
00:43:59.860Now, interestingly, I think that this is a consequence of scale, that when you attempt to run the world, when you attempt to go beyond the natural boundaries of a republic and you try to operate at a much larger scale, you have to make institutions that then create their own interests.
00:44:19.000Right. We end up with the principal agent problem and we have a scenario where all of these bureaucrats, all of these people operating inside the institutions are far more interested in the continuation of their own power and maybe even the mission of the institution than they are in the people who was supposed to serve in the first place.
00:44:36.320And so whenever you grow to a certain size, just like a company, ultimately, you're going to start having this breakdown in incentive structures. And so I guess the question then becomes, is this something that we can address without scaling down?
00:44:52.680Can we return to a republic, a limited government, without ultimately reducing the size and scope of America itself? Is the mission of America having this post-World War II global empire inevitably tying it to the production of this global elite? Is that why it's turned into basically like this economic zone for the plaything of these different interests?
00:45:16.540if we somehow found a way to reduce that scope, could we then return to the type of government
00:45:21.960you're talking about? I think that's a big part of it. And I agree with a lot of your analysis
00:45:27.640there. I've got a book coming out in August called The Elites Versus Everyone Else, which
00:45:32.680digs into a lot of those. But if you go back in time and look at how this elitist globalist
00:45:38.180cabal has evolved, it's largely oriented around a financial nature. When you start to see the rise
00:45:44.340of the multinational banks, when you start to see the rise of the Federal Reserve Banks or the
00:45:50.320whatever reserve bank exists in the other countries, when you start to see the rise of
00:45:54.520the Bank for International Settlements, when you start to see the rise of these NGOs that are not
00:45:59.600attached to any particular political system anymore, they sort of float by themselves around
00:46:04.480the world as their own network tied to these financial networks. I agree we have to separate
00:46:11.360from that. And when you look at the original concept of the founding fathers, the principle
00:46:16.020of subsidiarity, that you want to invest most of the power in an individual, that was their concept
00:46:22.240of a sovereign individual. Maybe there's some power in a local community that is above that
00:46:27.280to plan roads and schools or whatever. Maybe there's a little bit of power in a state to
00:46:31.620administer the laws of a state. And the federal government was designed to have very little power
00:46:35.880at all and to actually be fairly separate from the rest of the world. And I think part of where
00:46:41.040we've gone astray is like in 1944, we decided to take over the World Financial Network and basically
00:46:48.320replace the British pound with the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world. And that was
00:46:53.900our way to manage everything going on in the world. And it also forced us to be connected
00:46:59.480to everything going on in the world. I think that was a terrible mistake. And I don't mean to sound
00:47:05.500like an isolationist because I believe in free trade and things like that. But I don't believe
00:47:09.600in these connections to nebulous financial forces around the world. I don't believe in these
00:47:15.640connections to nebulous non-governmental organizations around the world. And I think
00:47:20.160we've gotten ourselves into that mess and have lost not only our individual sovereignty, but our
00:47:24.460national sovereignty along the way. I think there's a lot of truth to that, but it also then
00:47:30.300makes me ask the next question, which is, at some level, is the liquidity of capital responsible for
00:47:36.900these breakdowns, is the promise that it brings with scale ultimately one of the issues? Because
00:47:44.080most of these organizations arise at some level with an argument of economic efficiency. By
00:47:50.040standardizing transactions across continents or peoples or governments, nations, we can create a
00:47:56.220guarantor that is a non-state actor. But I don't think there ultimately are guarantors that are
00:48:02.040non-state actors at scale. And I think that's why we see all of these banks and corporations and
00:48:08.060NGOs eventually become a government unto themselves, the global governments that you're
00:48:14.280talking about. Well, they are governments in and of themselves. And this was, as I dug into this
00:48:19.900whole concept of the elites versus everyone else, this is one of the startling realizations I came
00:48:24.220to is that the lifeblood of civilization is money. And when you look at who creates and controls
00:48:29.420money. For instance, it's the banks and the concept of the fractional reserve banking system
00:48:34.780where they basically create money out of thin air as they establish these loans. That money didn't
00:48:40.700exist until they created it. They get very rich from the interest on money that actually doesn't
00:48:46.240really exist. The same thing happened with the Federal Reserve when it was created, where it
00:48:50.740became the banker for the federal government. The federal government gives it pieces of paper
00:48:55.140called Treasury bills. And in return, the Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air and puts it
00:49:01.480in an account for the federal government. That money didn't exist until three seconds before
00:49:06.120they hit the keyboards. And yet that money now is being flowing through the elites throughout the
00:49:12.560world, all these organizations, all the people that feed at the trough of the federal government,
00:49:16.640the bankers themselves who see that as a very profitable opportunity to hold $39 trillion of
00:49:23.320U.S. debt and charge interest for it, which we taxpayers maybe someday will pay for if there
00:49:28.680isn't a revolution. But what I've seen throughout the world and throughout history is that the
00:49:33.520bankers essentially have hijacked the lifeblood of civilization. They create the money, they
00:49:38.160control the money, they control the interest rates. And with that control over money, you gain
00:49:42.980control over all the institutions that we're now afraid of. When you travel well, your KLM Royal
00:49:50.200Dutch Airlines ticket takes you to more than just your destination. It takes you to winding streets,
00:49:56.640spontaneous detours, and the realisation that neither of you is actually good with directions.
00:50:03.600And when the final shortcut taken isn't exactly short, our crew is here to give you a trip home
00:50:12.140that goes just as planned. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. When you travel, travel well.
00:50:17.800I think that's true. But again, I think that also could be a function of the nature of capital control, right? Like when money was less influential, when it flowed less freely, when the velocity of capital was much lower, you had, I think, other influences in your society that were less powerful.
00:50:42.260This is Gatano Mosca's argument about why the United States became an oligarchy, because the reason the Constitution should work, the reason that Montesquieu thought that separation of powers were important, was not that three was some kind of magic number.
00:50:55.000it's that the different aspects the different branches of government ultimately represented
00:51:00.080different interests in society and you know finance was only one of them you had the nobility you had
00:51:05.680the king you had the church you had the common people you had the the you know the the merchants
00:51:10.560you had the guilds you had all kinds of different you know intermediate social organizations again
00:51:16.180to go back to a kind of a de toqueville idea that would create these these barriers and the branches
00:51:22.120were just supposed to represent those the the structure of the constitution itself didn't have
00:51:26.020any power but as mass democracy kind of consumed the united states we kept expanding the franchise
00:51:32.880and the power of money to buy votes became more and more obvious basically all of these branches
00:51:40.180just turned into whoever could buy the most like to the point where now even supreme court justices
00:51:46.020are largely influenced by current topics of the day and so you you have kind of that natural
00:51:52.920barrier that we admire that we'd like from the constitution is dissolved in a way because of the
00:51:59.240dominance of a merchant class the dominance of money in the society and that certainly highlights
00:52:04.140the bank's power because if you didn't have that level of reliance on you know currency exchange
00:52:10.280then you would have less of an emphasis on banking power but over and over again we see that banks are
00:52:15.520far more powerful than kings at the end of the day. And tyrannical governments have to kneel
00:52:19.640before what many people think of as a function of the free market, even though both of us know
00:52:24.560it's really not. Well, there's something really nonsensical about the way it's set up right now,
00:52:29.180because if you look at Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, it says Congress is responsible
00:52:33.680for the monetary system of the United States. And yet they've outsourced that to the Federal Reserve.
00:52:40.200And so what it essentially means at the most ridiculous level is that if the United States
00:52:44.980needs money, it goes to these private bankers and they say to them, I'll give you a treasury bill,
00:52:50.860an IOU, if you just create money out of nothing and give me that money out of nothing.
00:52:56.280The federal government could do that just as easily. If we're all about creating money out
00:53:01.420of nothing, the government could do it directly. We don't need this cartel of bankers who have
00:53:06.380their thumb on the lifeblood of civilization somehow controlling this process. And I think
00:53:12.220that's the root of why we've lost control of everything that you're right money is a terrible
00:53:18.120negative influence in our political system right now but we've also lost control of the monetary
00:53:23.120system not not just the political system but the monetary systems sure well it's been really
00:53:29.900interesting speaking with you james i know we didn't stay on the actual topic of christopher
00:53:34.620nolan very long but i think we had a much more interesting discussion along the way and i'm
00:53:38.340always happy for things to develop naturally. So I appreciate that. We do have, I think,
00:53:43.080one question from the audience. Before we go to that, can you tell people where they can find
00:53:48.360your work? I know you've got a book coming out you just said. Can you tell people where they
00:53:51.720can look for that? Sure. You can go to my website, which is jameskina.com, or on Amazon,
00:53:58.520you can find my books. I have a couple that have been out already that are part of a trilogy,