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00:02:39.000So, Rob, is this idea of liberty that we founded our country on, the Enlightenment principles, is it inevitable to result in authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the erosion of our rights?
00:02:52.000Is it possible to actually sustain it?
00:02:55.000So, I kind of go back and forth on this, that what we're suffering now, the woke totalitarianism, is it a natural outgrowth of some of the enlightenment ideas embedded in our founding?
00:03:09.000By the way, our founding, as Josh said in the main conversation, had other strands, including the Puritan one, which makes it more complicated.
00:03:16.000And so, I don't condemn the whole founding, but it certainly had some of those kind of enlightenment elements.
00:03:25.000Or is it, as our friend David Azarad said, there is some natural disposition because precisely because it's willing to tolerate any view, eventually it'll tolerate views that would destroy a decent society.
00:03:38.000Do you think it's like the second law of thermodynamics?
00:03:40.000Like, eventually it's going to decay if we don't have a real strong principle around it.
00:03:45.000Well, it's like this: my friend Adrian Vermeule calls it the ever-receding horizon of liberalism.
00:03:51.000What that means is, if you've noticed, as soon as liberals won, let's say, abortion, then it became gay marriage.
00:03:59.000As soon as they won gay marriage, then it became trans stuff.
00:04:01.000As soon as they won trans stuff, it became a new racial politics.
00:04:04.000There's always, there's something in this ideology of you always have to be liberating something, liberating yourself from some dark past, and that there's always more to overcome.
00:04:17.000So you said that on our podcast, and I thought it was the best point I've heard, and I have used it repeatedly, sometimes with reference, but I forget.
00:04:27.000And are you as harsh on the founders as Sorab?
00:04:30.000I'm not saying you're harsh, but you know, you have balanced it.
00:04:32.000Do you think that this idea of the Enlightenment has an inevitable kind of conclusion in chaos?
00:04:39.000Like, it starts kind of somewhat excitedly, gets to this point of kind of this society that we're enjoying, but then eventually you're going to end up in chaos.
00:04:49.000So, part of the problem is that we on the American right speak of the capital F founders as if they were one kind of monolithic school of thought.
00:04:55.000It was actually an immensely complicated and intellectually diverse school of thought, right?
00:05:04.000Many of them were deists, Thomas Jefferson, of course, being the leader of that camp.
00:05:09.000The deists, who really were just intellectually downstream of kind of like a strong form of kind of Locke and Enlightenment liberal thinking, did kind of think that America was a true revolution in like the truest sense of the term.
00:05:21.000It was effectively kind of synonymous.
00:05:23.000It was kind of just, you know, it was these self-evident truths that we can just use pure reason, unadulterated reason with no sense of tradition whatsoever.
00:05:31.000And then we just kind of go out there and kind of build our utopia.
00:05:34.000But the other strand of thought, this John Adams, kind of Alexander Hamilton, kind of the early era Federalist Party and the first party system, was a very different strand of thought.
00:05:46.000They took a much stronger view of the common law.
00:05:48.000And for a lot of these statesmen, the American Revolution really wasn't so much a quote-unquote revolution insofar as it was kind of a restoration of the 1688 English Bill of Rights that the Englishman or excuse me, the Crown had actually cracked down upon on the American colonists, who, you know, because they were still Englishmen, deserve the rights of Englishmen.
00:06:10.000To go back to what Saurabh was saying here, though, look, there is a kind of this tension between kind of, you know, I guess Patrick Denin would be a good example, who basically says that kind of liberalism is kind of inherently kind of, it was corrupted at kind of a get-go, that we were going to get this kind of woke, illiberal authoritarianism.
00:06:24.000David Azarad refers to it, as Saurab said, as kind of liberalism's genetic predisposition.
00:06:31.000I'm closer to the Azerad view, but the reality here is that it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to have a purely quote-unquote neutral public square.
00:06:43.000This utopic fantasy of kind of liberalism in its purest form, that there will be no such thing as kind of substantive values, that everything will be pure kind of proceduralism and values neutral and live and let live, was always, always, always a lie.
00:06:58.000Because human beings in our core, we know this from both the Bible and from the Greeks, from our reading of Aristotle, we are moral creatures who strive to lead moral lives and we strive to kind of inculcate those moral teachings unto others.
00:07:10.000So I really like what Saurabh said about how Adrian frames this kind of the receding tide of liberalism or whatever the exact line is.
00:07:20.000I mean, it's true they obviously went from gay marriage to the transgender stuff.
00:07:23.000You know, Joram Hazzoni, Miami Burke Foundation colleague, wrote a fabulous essay at Quillette just about a year ago, last August, kind of a, he called the challenge of Marxism.
00:07:31.000And the point of this essay was just to show that what's happening right now in terms of kind of the woke movement is literally just Marxism under a different name.
00:08:35.000Is there some truth to that as well as some danger to that?
00:08:40.000So here's what I would say is that a lot of the things that liberal ideology takes credit for has its roots in pre-liberal, pre-modern achievements of Western civilization, right?
00:08:56.000The idea of regular, predictable administration is not something the liberals invented three, 400 years ago.
00:09:07.000It is found in a lot of even non-Western civilization.
00:09:10.000The idea that power has some limits and it should, in its treatment of people, it can't go beyond certain limits, especially limits imposed by spiritual authority.
00:09:24.000That was an achievement of the church.
00:09:27.000You know, the Magna Carta is pre-liberal and decidedly pre-modern.
00:09:32.000So I think that liberal ideologues do this kind of trick where, as you said, people take it for granted and it's ahistorical, where it's like, well, if you lose liberalism, then you're going to lose everything.
00:09:47.000And in fact, that's not the case, right?
00:09:49.000I mean, a lot of these institutions that we cherish have pre-liberal, pre-modern roots.
00:09:53.000Therefore, it means that if we transcend liberal ideology, it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to go to some tyranny.
00:09:59.000And of course, then you look at society as it exists today, and there's a tremendous lot of tyranny meted out by liberals themselves.
00:10:07.000So I just, I think it's basically a psyop when they say for our listeners, we're talking about small L liberalism, not the kind of liberalism that you might think is your kind of double mask wearing, weed-smoking liberal who is constantly screaming at your children and burning flags.
00:10:25.000We're talking about the small L classical liberal, this idea that although a lot of them were kind of like that for the 18th.
00:10:33.000They were basically the double mask wearing weed smoking of the 18th century.
00:11:07.000He was the worst of the social contract theorists.
00:11:10.000So I guess here's where this, and Josh, I'd love to get your take on this.
00:11:13.000The way that American history is told, even by conservatives, is this arc of progress and self-improvement.
00:11:22.000And the bad guys have always been standing in opposition to it.
00:11:25.000And therefore, then we take that story, implement it to today, and therefore we say, if you actually stand against our current campaign to liberate whatever group, you would have been against all these other things as well.
00:11:40.000It's a very, it's a very disarming tactic.
00:11:44.000So Josh, I want you to talk about something that really got my curiosity.
00:11:48.000You mentioned Leo Strauss earlier, which, of course, I love.
00:11:52.000And I think Harry Jaffa was probably his best student and the most prolific.
00:11:56.000And you're a good Claremonster, Charlie.
00:11:59.000I'm actually going there in a couple of weeks.
00:12:00.000So Lincoln Fellowship and all that stuff.
00:12:03.000But the point is what you made, which is really interesting, is what we're taught in our schools that the American founding was strictly enlightenment.
00:12:11.000Can you talk about this tension of actually how the founders wrestled with tradition and keeping things the way they are and then also kind of throwing the tables up as we know it?
00:12:23.000I mean, we really do kind of, we are really told, I think, like in elementary school and high school, I mean, frankly, at most university campuses, I'm sure.
00:12:30.000I didn't take that many U.S. history courses in college, to be honest with you, but I'm sure if you did, they would tell you the same thing, which is like the American founding was just straight up enlightenment liberalism.
00:12:39.000You know, the whole point of what I was saying earlier is there obviously was that strand of thought, okay?
00:12:43.000The Jeffersonian school definitely viewed this experiment as basically being kind of Thomas Paine, you know, famously wrote his pamphlet, Common Sense.
00:13:19.000I mean, I could tell you as a lawyer, like, I have poured over the first, second Congress and looked at the intensity of the debates they had.
00:13:28.000There's this infamous exchange called the Helvidius Pacificus debates between Madison and Hamilton, where they're debating kind of various constitutional clauses.
00:13:36.000That was kind of in its most academic setting, in its most kind of, you know, a visceral kind of animalistic setting.
00:13:42.000You got kind of the election of 1800 between Adams and Jefferson, where there's all sorts of, you know, terrible things being said in the newspapers.
00:13:52.000And the point is kind of this: John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, probably the most famous person in this camp of the men who largely became the Federalist Party in the first party system.
00:14:02.000They really were not straight liberals.
00:14:09.000He literally talks about how the future of the national whole, how America will not sustain itself unless it begins in private morality in the home.
00:14:18.000That is not kind of Jon Stuart Mill, Anthony Kennedy, mystery passage, living.
00:14:22.000John Adams famously said the Constitution was written solely for immoral and religious people, totally inadequate for the people of any other.
00:14:46.000And every time it arrives to the office, it's almost a ceremony of eager expectation.
00:14:52.000You see many people that work on the Charlie Kirk show, they're wondering, maybe, will they get a T-bone filet, stripper, gourmet burger as a reward for their good work?
00:17:34.000So what should our process be to change things?
00:17:38.000Because I think you would agree, of course, Civil Rights Act was a good thing in our country, that the, you know, that there has been legislative adjustments and passages that have been done.
00:17:46.000So we, so how are we supposed to use prudence and practical judgment?
00:17:50.000Because it's not saying that we're saying all change ever has always been bad, or maybe you are saying that.
00:18:35.000And so to institute slavery is an offense against that.
00:18:39.000And let's wage war, if need be, to eradicate this evil.
00:18:44.000If there's going to be voting, if that's the system we want, then to withhold it from some people just by mere dint of their sex or their skin color is against, again, it runs against our sense of justice.
00:18:56.000So you have to have some ultimate standard of justice.
00:19:01.000And then you can make those, you can make kind of prudential judgments.
00:19:05.000You can make debates about it and so forth.
00:19:09.000I think the much more dangerous threat today is the idea that all change is good.
00:19:25.000Well, this is the ever-receding horizon that we were just talking about, right?
00:19:27.000I mean, there is this kind of liberal impulse, even a classical liberal impulse, say nothing of the modern progressive movement, to constantly find.
00:19:35.000I think back when the gay marriage fight was still kind of a fight, well, to be clear, we're still fighting.
00:19:40.000It's just, you know, the Supreme Court to say what it said.
00:19:42.000But before the court affirmatively ruled on this, I'm thinking back to like 2014, 2015, right around then, there was this Atlantic essay that I remember reading.
00:19:49.000I don't remember who wrote it, but it was talking about how the gay marriage by the time was kind of like the new generations, I guess the millennials' version of like their Selma march.
00:19:59.000Look, I find that analogy abhorrent, frankly.
00:20:19.000Dennis Prager's most recent syndicated column, he actually takes this head on.
00:20:23.000He says that there is kind of this impulse, frankly, for a lot of people to best fulfill, best kind of maximize your potential to best serve kind of the nation to the extent liberals even care about that anymore by finding kind of the social justice cause du jour, like the hot cause of the day.
00:20:39.000And, you know, what Prager says, he outlines kind of five concrete steps.
00:20:42.000I could not agree with this more, to actually meaningfully improve your life in a way that you don't need to have these kind of abstract goals.
00:20:48.000And it's his column is profoundly conservative.
00:20:51.000He talked about the imperative of marrying, raising children, of providing for your children, providing for your parents when they get eligible, something that a lot of conservatives, frankly, have forgotten.
00:21:02.000No, in the Jewish liturgy, we literally, that is in our liturgy every single day, actually, is the imperative to care for your parents.
00:21:08.000He talks about going to church or synagogue and just morally improving your own life, which, by the way, is straight out of that George Washington quote that I said earlier, right?
00:21:15.000This is the traditional mindset: if you want to take action on a broader level, on the nationalistic level, or even your true utopian mindset to the global level, it all starts in the home.
00:21:27.000So I want to ask you more about Judaism in a second.
00:21:29.000So don't let me forget, because I have something I'd love to have you walk me through when it comes to Judaism and liberalism.
00:21:34.000And I want you to explain to me the ever constant mystery in my mind and how those things seem to be happily married together.
00:21:41.000But first, because it just seems that is the predominant view.
00:21:45.000First, I want to ask you, Saurob, about this idea of constant change and things around us.
00:21:54.000Let's just talk pragmatically and concretely and kind of get out of the clouds.
00:21:58.000Not that there's anything wrong with the clouds.
00:21:59.000I think it's, you know, nice to kind of live in Plato's world, but let's go into Aristotle for a second.
00:22:03.000Of things we can see and things we can know and things we can understand, which is what is it going to take for people to want to re-embrace tradition?
00:22:10.000Is it going to take this kind of just really unhappy existence, just kind of the chaos of the moment?
00:22:20.000Is that the only way to get us back to tradition?
00:22:22.000You have to hit metaphorical rock bottom before you can start to rise up again.
00:22:35.000That's the sense where I always make this point, you know, because if you're a populist conservative, if you're opposed to big tech, some of our critics will say, well, but this is a free society.
00:22:50.000You know, what are you going to do with freedom?
00:23:45.000So the point I'm trying to make is, I think I do get hope from how bad things can get, because at some point people, you hope, will say, well, how else have people organized their lives?
00:23:59.000The only point I was going to say is, as a political movement, though, the constant change, much of it is baked into how we organize our economy, right?
00:24:10.000Our economy is designed for people who are kind of college graduates, super mobile, and they like being in mobile.
00:24:30.000But there's lots of other people who either don't want to and or can't live that kind of a kind of overclass lifestyle, as my friend Michael Lynn calls it.
00:24:43.000But the economy that the overclass has created creates constant change.
00:24:46.000If you want tradition, if you want people to go to church or synagogue, if you want them to show filial piety, that needs a level of stability, a level of calm.
00:24:56.000If your job is always at threat of being shipped off overseas, if you're constantly under these kind of pressures that a neoliberal economy creates, you don't have time to worry about tradition.
00:25:07.000If you're working for Jeff Bezos and he only gives you 20 minutes time off task, and in order to relieve yourself, you have to use a bottle because that's not enough time.
00:25:17.000There is a kind of material substrate to being able to live a fulfilled life.
00:25:22.000And that's what we have to think about, what is that ordinary American who works in these kind of exurbs of large cosmopolitan cities and has, you know, is his livelihood is ever at threat of being threatened by automation or free trade.
00:25:40.000What does he need or she need to be able to live a virtuous life?
00:25:43.000And so there's some of the work we have to do has to do with political economy.
00:25:47.000I'd go a step further and say it has to do with space as well.
00:25:50.000I think a highly centralized way of living concentrated, you're going to have people that then, by definition, start to become more in the direction of collectivist and totalitarian when you're more likely to rent than own.
00:26:04.000Well, then of course it's the tragedy of the commons.
00:26:10.000But if you're spaced out by a mile from your neighbor, you've got a lot of acreage between you and your neighbor.
00:26:16.000By definition, you have to have self-government.
00:26:18.000You also have a lot of time, time of travel, more to ponder and reflect.
00:26:22.000So I think that the kind of concentrating our population in smaller and smaller areas has been really bad.
00:26:31.000And it's happened because of our economic policy, because then all of a sudden the family from Hubbard, Ohio, they're going to tell their 16-year-old kid, look, get out of town.
00:26:43.000Go work in Chicago because it's not going to happen here in Hubbard.
00:26:46.000We're going to sell the home in a couple years and move to Florida.
00:26:49.000And the next thing you know, that happens over two generations and Hubbard, Ohio becomes kind of a skeleton of what it used to be.
00:26:57.000So Josh, I want to ask you about something unrelated, but somewhat related to all of this, which is that one of the most reliably liberal groups in America is the American Jewish population.
00:27:10.000I've heard a lot of different explanations for this.
00:27:13.000I've asked everyone from Dennis Prager to Ben Shapiro.
00:27:16.000Super fascinating to have you explain this.
00:27:18.000I get this question a lot from our listeners.
00:27:20.000I don't think we've talked about this for quite some time.
00:27:22.000But it's the way I've heard it explained is the more religious you are, the more conservative you are.
00:27:31.000And so, but can you tell me, though, that in a religious tradition, which has such an emphasis on things that are passed down, on doing customs and meals and even names that existed thousands of years before, why is it that that group seems at times even the most enthusiastic about deconstruction?
00:27:52.000Charlie, you're getting at one of my biggest pet peeves in all of life, I would say.
00:27:58.000I have been frustrated by this question for virtually since high school.
00:28:02.000I mean, I first identified as someone right up center, broadly speaking, in like seventh or eighth grade.
00:28:07.000And basically since high school, I've just been utterly baffled by this.
00:28:10.000I mean, obviously, like immense amount of ink has been spilled on this very question.
00:28:14.000Lots of books have been written about it.
00:28:16.000Look, the shortest answer that I can give is that most American Jews today, you know, we're in the year 2021, are frankly 100 years.
00:28:24.000I mean, no more than 120, 125 years removed from their ancestors from the great Ellis Island immigration wave, right?
00:28:31.000I mean, speaking personally here, I mean, you know, my great-grandparents mostly came in an immigration wave.
00:28:37.000You know, they grew up in kind of those traditional like Lower East Side tenements in New York City.
00:28:41.000My great-grandfather, my father's side, was an immigrant from Poland, kind of worked the graveyard shift overnight six days a week deep in the heart of Brooklyn.
00:28:51.000So there was kind of this scrappy kind of working class mentality that kind of naturally inured itself to kind of FDR style welfare state liberalism, I guess you would say.
00:29:01.000And I think just kind of subsequent generations of Jews, especially obviously the less Orthodox, the less religious ones, just imbibe this like it was mother's milk.
00:29:10.000And you can't disentangle the two, right?
00:29:13.000The more often like a Jew will stop being a traditional Jew will be the kind of Jew who, you know, their Judaism is effectively watching Seinfeld, eating bagels, going to Shul once or twice a year.
00:29:24.000That is naturally going to be the kind of Jew that gravitates towards a political party that doesn't care about tradition.
00:29:30.000Because Judaism, as we said on the panel earlier, Charlie, I mean, it's the oldest monotheistic religion in the world.
00:29:38.000I mean, the reason why the anti-Semites ultimately end up hating Christianity as well is because without Judaism, there obviously is no Christianity.
00:29:47.000I mean, Karl Marx was the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi.
00:29:50.000I mean, Karl Marx was probably the most famous self-hating Jew in Jewish history.
00:29:54.000But he, of course, despised Christendom.
00:29:56.000He, of course, despised Christian civilization.
00:31:05.000And I heard the JFK explanation, but another religious belief that has a heavy emphasis on tradition.
00:31:15.000Why is it that the American Catholic population at least largely tends to be more to the side of gay rights, whatever that is, you know, to abortion?
00:31:29.000Yeah, I mean, I think the assimilationist pressures that Josh talked about with respect to Jews is also a factor.
00:31:43.000That's JFK, essentially saying, in order for me to seek political power, I will reassure you that I don't take my views, my beliefs, my most dearly held beliefs that seriously.
00:31:58.000And again, we see it with now President Biden as well.
00:32:03.000I think it's partly because the bishops over a very long time have relinquished their role of trying to discipline, because Catholicism is a public religion.
00:32:14.000It is most definitely a public religion.
00:32:17.000It cannot be relegated to just like a, meaning it makes claims on public life.
00:32:22.000It has an account of the common good of what society should look like.
00:32:28.000And certainly it's kind of its moral teaching.
00:32:31.000And so what that means is that, but that requires an element of the bishops disciplining Catholic politicians.
00:32:40.000And they've, over a very long time, maybe starting really with Mario Cuomo, Governor Cuomo's father.
00:32:48.000I think he really pioneered the idea that, well, I oppose abortion personally, but I support it as a lawmaker.
00:32:56.000They really relinquished the role of disciplining him.
00:32:59.000And now I think the bishops are kind of trying to do that with Biden.
00:33:01.000I don't know if you've been following them.
00:33:15.000I mean, the American Catholics gave up with enthusiasm their ethnic ghettos where the religion was thick and the priest was taken very seriously to move to the suburbs and kind of become kind of like wasps and they kind of settled in.
00:33:32.000The last factor is, I think, more recent is unfortunately the sexual abuse crisis.
00:33:38.000There used to be a time, and this is the tragedy because the Cardinals in the big cities were a great restraining force on urban liberalism, right?
00:33:47.000They were kind of pro-working class, support workers.
00:34:07.000And so urban liberalism has no restraining force.
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00:35:48.000Do you think that there's this kind of younger Catholic community of priests that didn't grow up in the shadow of this kind of sexual crisis, which it was a crisis and is disgusting, quite honestly, it was institutionally handled in a lot of different ways.
00:36:29.000They certainly disagree with Biden on abortion and sexual matters, but they're not so easily like kind of rah-rah-rah free marketeers or foreign policy neoconservatives as they were maybe a comparable generation in the 80s and 90s.
00:36:44.000So it's this kind of combination that we're going to take the church's kind of moral and sexual teaching seriously, but we're also going to take its economic teaching seriously, which is far more kind of corporatist and concerned.
00:36:57.000Corporatist is badly used in American discourse, but the idea that society as a whole should be organized with various units kind of aiming at the same end, including private sector, labor, government, this kind of tripartite alliance of all working for the common good of the whole.
00:37:12.000But anyway, they take the economic and social teaching seriously.
00:37:21.000I'm sure you see it on Twitter, but in minor ways.
00:37:23.000Yeah, I see it in other ways too, just kind of private conversations.
00:37:26.000When I do these events, and I'm not Catholic, but we talk a lot about how we have such a respect for the Catholic Church in a lot of ways, because at least they won't waver on some of these issues.
00:37:37.000And I go to these events and these priests show up.
00:37:45.000They're like, oh, yeah, I love, when you talk about abortion and all this, it's like, there's something happening here that I think is really unique.
00:37:50.000In Judaism, do you see that same sort of trend?
00:37:53.000Do you see that kind of Orthodox conservative ranks increasing or decreasing outside of kind of the Hasidic community that you mentioned demographically?
00:38:01.000Do you think some of the younger Jews, are they becoming more secular Jewish or more kind of...
00:38:06.000So at a sheer demographic level, you know, like we were saying earlier, I mean, the average American Jewish Orthodox home, I think, has between three and four children.
00:38:14.000The Hasidic black hat community is obviously even higher than that.
00:39:10.000But based purely in the demographic data on the one hand, obviously, I think Jews will get more conservative over time.
00:39:17.000I am saddened that it hasn't happened more quickly.
00:39:20.000But there are other factors at play here too, which is, look, the Democratic Party, which is increasingly a woke, illiberal, authoritarian institution, whatever you want to call it.
00:39:31.000You say illiberal like it's a bad thing.
00:40:26.000I mean, what we saw in the most recent Israel Hamas skirmish in May, hold aside for a second, the predictably abhorrent rhetoric from AOC and people like that, Israel apartheid state, all this total garbage.
00:40:37.000But Jews were being beaten up on the streets of America.
00:40:41.000And this is no longer like just an anti-Zionism, is not anti-Semitism kind of thing.
00:40:47.000And they obviously are effectively synonymous with one another.
00:40:50.000Because when you are taking it out, when you are punching Jews in Midtown Manhattan or in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles because what's happening halfway around the world, you are an anti-Semite.
00:40:58.000Yeah, but then we have to be lectured by ADL that the biggest threat to the world is Tucker Carlson.
00:41:06.000And it's just, it creates this kind of pent up, like, you don't actually care about the real problem.
00:41:11.000Look, the American Jewish establishment is completely corrupt in myriad ways.
00:41:15.000I probably need to write like a long form essay just smacking these clowns, basically.
00:41:20.000But what we're seeing here just in general is that as the intersectional identity politics mentality reaches its logical conclusion, even holding aside those demographic data about higher Orthodox birth rates, I think we will see more and more less observant Jews who even have like a vestige of fidelity, of pride in their tradition and their inheritance.
00:41:40.000Even some of them will come around and see that this is a threat to my life because the Jews who are getting beaten up, they're not all black hat Jews.
00:41:49.000They're going around smacking even like some Reformed Jews too.
00:41:51.000So for sheer survival reasons, if we want to think like it's like basis, like more pure form, I do think we'll see more Jews of all stripes come around to see the light.
00:42:40.000But no, it's this sense of security, right?
00:42:45.000It actually is a really great feeling that set aside salvation, which is no small thing.
00:42:54.000But to know that you're walking on solid ground, that if you stumble, the church is there to salve your wounds.
00:43:04.000And again, I personally find I can leap into what's really important in life as a professional, as a husband, with this sense that there's a kind of cosmic order.
00:43:17.000I fit into it in my own way, you know, where I'm supposed to be.
00:43:22.000And I don't need to kind of, again, anxiously, I mentioned this in the main program, anxiously, constantly self-examine what I really believe.
00:43:29.000So, for someone listening right now that's maybe 20 years old and they grew up in a secular home and they're really confused about what they're seeing, they might have self-identity problems, they might be all of a sudden dealing with all these kind of quasi-nihilistic thoughts, nothing matters.
00:43:42.000Does the church and your experience religiously, does it help you make sense of the world?
00:44:33.000I think are still extremely persuasive.
00:44:36.000So if you're an intellectually-minded 20-year-old and you think religion is just revelation or superstition or what have you, read the five proofs.
00:45:29.000And I was just having this conversation with an evangelical, spirit-filled Protestant pastor, and their son has recently started to kind of get into deconstructionism, right?
00:45:41.000And I sat down with this Protestant pastor and I said, your son is a very smart, high-IQ guy.
00:45:49.000And this guy was like, I really am not familiar with Aquinas.
00:45:53.000I said, here's the problem with evangelicalism right now is that we don't know how to deal with this kind of deconstructionist stuff because we have no idea what classical education is.
00:46:02.000And so the way that evangelicals and Protestants educate their kids is they will tell a five-year-old the Bible is true, it's inerrant, and if you disobey, you're going to hell.
00:46:11.000Now, that's effective with a five-year-old.
00:46:14.000For a five-year-old, a 10-year-old, a 15-year-old, but it's not effective when that 23-year-old opens up Instagram and all of a sudden gets introduced to Christopher Hitchens or to liberal theology.
00:46:26.000The 23-year-old who is classically educated in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, Aquinas, Augustine, and the church fathers, the five proofs of God, all of a sudden has already naturally grown to that place where all of a sudden that doubt, they're like, oh, no, no, no, I know how to kind of work through this.
00:46:42.000And that's the crisis right now in the evangelical world.
00:46:51.000Your specific religious tradition, the way you eat, right?
00:46:57.000You honor the Sabbath, which is kind of my most, the thing I'm the most jealous of in the world is how Jews have like an awesome reason to kind of just rest for a day.
00:47:06.000We're trying to find our best to do it.
00:47:09.000Has that given you a sense of purpose and a sense of clarity in this ever-increasingly confusing world?
00:47:15.000So Ariana Huffington of all people wrote like a beautiful like, let's imitate the Jewish Sabbath essay like a year or two ago.
00:47:55.000I love speaking in conferences like this.
00:47:57.000But in order to kind of have the fortitude, the spine, the backbone to go out there and be confident in your convictions, in order to have just, not just the confidence, but just the, frankly, just the personal strength in order to not like be pliant and bend easily when someone presses the first, you need something to point to.
00:48:32.000I mean, it's a little simplistic, but like, it's totally fine for my purposes.
00:48:36.000But the point is, yeah, you need something to fall back into.
00:48:39.000And, you know, look, I mean, as I've gotten more observed in the past few years, you know, as I travel in my suitcase with my prayer book and my tefillin and what I wrap myself with, it's very powerful when I wrap myself in tefillin, when I put on my kippah, when I'm kneeling during the Shimona Esra, the Amidah, which is the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy.
00:49:02.000And that does give me a backbone to then go out there and do what I do, whether it's writing, speaking, podcasting, anything along those lines.
00:49:15.000One of the reasons why Jews are so smart is it's in Isaiah 1, where there's this idea of let us reason or debate or argue with each other.
00:49:24.000If you go to a Jewish meal, which you grew up in, you always have to have your argument pretty well articulated or else someone's going to run you over.
00:49:31.000From a seven-year-old, an eight-year-old, a 10-year-old.
00:49:33.000So these young kids are experiencing very informative, rational arguments.
00:49:39.000And even if you're an eight-year-old and you're not articulating your opinion, you're going to kind of like, yeah, okay, come back next week, Jacob.
00:50:21.000I mean, they disagreed about Jewish law probably more vociferously than like Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed about like, you know, American founding stuff.
00:50:57.000He's based in New York, Yeshiva University.
00:51:00.000Joshua Project is his new kind of pan-faith kind of think tank of sorts.
00:51:05.000Anyway, so Rabbi Lamb's op-ed for me, I can tell the op-ed was like against civility.
00:51:10.000And he was basically saying, like, if you read the Talmud, if you go into a yeshiva, you know, Eshatora, which is like this big Baltashu yeshiva in like the right next to the old city.
00:51:20.000It's in the heart of the old city of Jerusalem.
00:51:36.000But you will not be afraid to get in there to pursue the truth, which is kind of the whole point, obviously, of SORAP's kind of fuselage against David French's, which is that civility is, I guess, an overstated principle, which is exactly right, of course.
00:52:06.000But our WASP elites, to talk about my people, they made some awful mistakes in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, especially corporately and with capital flows.