00:00:55.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:03.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:19.000So the essence of his position, we get these emails a lot on our podcast, is that Christians should not justify Donald Trump's actions or words.
00:02:27.000I'm just trying to build out where he goes.
00:02:31.000If you really demonize somebody in the way that they've demonized Trump such that he is patently a monster, then you say, I can't vote for a monster.
00:04:01.000I mean, if you are convinced that he is the devil 2.0, well, I guess I wouldn't vote for him either.
00:04:08.000But I think that the facts or the points that folks like French make just strike me as pure subjectivism, that they just don't like the cut of his jib and they inflate it into him being some kind of a pole pot figure.
00:04:26.000No, yeah, but was it policy focused at all, or was it all personality?
00:04:30.000In other words, it didn't strike me as being policy focused.
00:04:33.000It struck me as, for example, one big thing that he did, which I was not prepared for because it strikes me as just so crazy.
00:04:42.000He inflates the boogeyman of the alt-right and on and on.
00:04:49.000And I just thought, what are you talking about?
00:04:51.000I mean, we have Antifa and BLM mobs burning down America.
00:04:56.000And you're bringing up this thing that I don't know anybody that, you know, they say, oh, yes, there are alt-right riots and they're all right.
00:05:12.000And then another big talking point is that, you know, Trump's main man, you know, Steve Bannon said that he wanted, you know, to Breitbart to be a platform for the alt-right.
00:05:23.000And it's kind of like, that's the QED.
00:05:25.000And then I have to kind of point out, well, okay, by the way, Trump fired Steve Bannon, number one, number two.
00:05:32.000I don't even know what you're talking about, even if it were true.
00:05:34.000So it's become, it's, I'm not kidding.
00:05:57.000And so it's got to be about somebody insulted my daughter who is black, and therefore every other Trump supporter must also be racist and, you know, on and on and on.
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00:07:29.000So here's where I'm at on this with some of these conservative never Trumpers.
00:07:33.000There's not that many of them, actually.
00:07:34.000The data shows that Trump's the most popular Republican president running for reelection, even more so than George W. Bush, ever since Ronald Reagan.
00:07:42.000So they're just louder and they're given a bigger platform because of how much the media hates President Trump.
00:07:47.000And so there's nothing new about this idea of Republicans trying to play righteous, self-righteous about it.
00:07:56.000What I'm just trying to square here is for those people of the world, the David Frenches, I think, and I don't want to impose too much of it, it's almost a pseudo-intellectualism that they have, though.
00:08:09.000In other words, it strikes me because I grew up in a working class environment.
00:08:13.000I, you know, by going to Yale and living in Manhattan and traveling in these circles, I feel like I'm speaking bilingual, right?
00:08:23.000So when Trump speaks with his hyperbole and his almost like a Jackie Mason humor shtick and the bluster and whatever, I get that language, right?
00:08:32.000I don't read it like a dull PBS intern would read it, you know?
00:08:38.000And I think that what happened is what Trump has done is he's flushed out, you also see this in the Christian faith, that you flush out those people who want their thing to be respectable.
00:08:51.000Now, there's nothing wrong with that per se, but they are unwilling ever to ally themselves with someone they find somewhat embarrassing socially.
00:09:05.000In other words, if you're not a Beltway intellectual, if you can't parry with George Will or Ross Douthett or whatever, you embarrass them.
00:09:17.000And so in a sense, they have the same elitist view of the so-called deplorables that Hillary Clinton did.
00:09:23.000And that's where I think this has broken down.
00:09:26.000You can almost see that these are the people who they were fashioning for themselves a kind of intellectually respectable conservatism.
00:09:34.000Now, we know it's intellectually respectable, but the point is that everyone who adopts it doesn't need themselves to be intellectually respectable.
00:09:41.000I think there's a level deeper here, though, that Trump has signaled a shift that some of these pseudo-intellectuals on the conservative side have been sort of wrong about a couple of things.
00:09:50.000And not just sort of wrong, but very wrong.
00:09:52.000And especially on the issues of international trade, middle class, exporting, not just exporting jobs, livelihoods overseas, 15 million years.
00:10:10.000He has pointed out that the so-called Republicans have been as bad or worse or no better than the Democrats on some of the most fundamental issues, which, you know, I've heard people over the years say, oh, both parties are the same, both parties are the same.
00:10:27.000And I've said, well, you've got to be kidding.
00:10:29.000And then you realize on a lot of stuff that is precisely correct.
00:10:33.000If you're willing to play patty cake with the satanic monster called China, communist China, and you're willing to be seduced by the free market as though it is a god, that if we introduce the free market, that suddenly they're going to sprout tricorn hats and muskets and they're going to recite the Declaration of Independence, the free market can't do that.
00:10:53.000Which is why we're at the Falkirk Center here.
00:10:55.000If you take virtue out of the free market, if you take virtue out of the Democrats, the whole thing breaks down, but none of them knew that.
00:11:03.000The Democrats didn't know it, and the Republicans didn't know it.
00:11:06.000And that's why today we are where we are.
00:11:08.000And if I were to use a term tracing back or contact trace back, that's not probably the right term in space time, but whatever.
00:11:14.000A little probably too soon to use that.
00:11:15.000But going back 40 years ago, you had strict libertarian ideologues pairing up with corporate interests, and they believed that change came through laissez-faire economic trade policy.
00:11:27.000But if you're exporting into a civilization that does not believe in the Western ideal, made in the image of God, then that change is actually just going to make them richer and give them more of what they already have.
00:11:38.000And it's also going to give them more power to oppress the weak.
00:11:42.000And what they already have is tyranny.
00:11:43.000So it makes their tyranny more effective.
00:12:53.000And I came from that old school of conservatism in my early years of the David French rights, which is you must worship free trade economics as if it is dogma of religion.
00:13:10.000You know, Trump's the worst thing ever because he's calling out China for what they're doing.
00:13:14.000And then you actually take a drive from Manhattan to Milwaukee and get off the expressway and then just go into these old towns in Ohio and Indiana where there were these destroyed factories.
00:13:25.000And they say, that's a good thing because we have Ricardo's law of comparative advantage.
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00:15:10.000Well, you know, it's a funny thing because if you believe in the free market, you know, you have to deal with the morality.
00:15:18.000At some point, you bump into, you know, is cruelty to animals, is cruelty to human beings?
00:15:26.000What are the things that bump up against this idea of a pure free market?
00:15:31.000And if China isn't all of those things rolled into one times a billion, then what is there?
00:15:37.000So how is it conceivable that only this president had the courage and the wisdom to see this and to begin to deal with it?
00:15:46.000I mean, if he did nothing else, that would be magnificent.
00:15:50.000Well, and he's done so much more than that.
00:15:51.000And also, I mean, he's exposed the fraud of the Republican Party of being purchased by the tech companies, of being an incestuous swamp within Washington, D.C., literally.
00:16:01.000And you wrote a whole book called Donald Drain's the Swamp.
00:16:06.000Which I think is, I don't think there's enough satire.
00:16:07.000No, it's look, I've written three humor books, Donald the Caveman books, and they're meant to, in a way, explain all this stuff on the simplest level so that people realize, I'm not crazy.
00:16:27.000And I think, you know, people are willing to give stuff a pass for a number of decades.
00:16:31.000And then at some point, the evidence is in.
00:16:33.000I mean, when you look at the Democratic-run cities and the trillions that were spent, you know, the war against poverty, at some point, you look at it and you go, this has failed.
00:17:17.000Well, look, they're a Jesuit lost church already.
00:17:21.000But I'm saying that when you see the church of Jesus Christ using certain kinds of woke language, okay, when they talk about white supremacy, white nationalism, and so on and so forth, white privilege, it is no different.
00:17:35.000It is exactly what the Nazis did to the churches in the 30s.
00:17:39.000They did not say, we want to abolish the church, come and worship Satan, deny God.
00:17:44.000They infiltrated because they said, we're going to use these gullible people and we're going to ride along with them for a while or we're going to let them ride along with us for a while to stay out of trouble.
00:17:54.000It's kind of like paying protection money.
00:18:05.000But the point is the people that are asking them to do this are themselves Marxists, cultural Marxists, who do not believe in God, who do not believe in the dignity of the individual, do not believe that we're made in the image of God.
00:18:16.000So if you go along with this, which the German churches did and which many American churches are doing, you're riding on the back of a tiger.
00:18:23.000This tiger intends to eat you, not to make friends with you.
00:18:27.000And so this is something that is so ugly because if you're an atheist, you don't even have a reason to believe racism is wrong.
00:18:54.000And the ignorance of the churches to buy into this, thinking they're somehow playing along with somebody who will help them, they are signing their own death warrants.
00:19:05.000And it's the death warrant of Western civilization, let's face it.
00:19:07.000Well, the Bible built Western civilization.
00:19:13.000It's kind of funny because that's the point is like you reject that and you reject God.
00:19:18.000Then you tell me on what principles are you going to build your civilization except power and blood.
00:19:23.000But the horrific irony is the churches in the Bible built Western civilization.
00:19:27.000Now churches are actively involved in destroying Western civilization.
00:19:30.000Yeah, well, some churches, and I would argue those churches aren't real churches.
00:19:33.000You know, they're sort of, they're the phony churches.
00:19:36.000They're the same churches that operated when Wilberforce was fighting the slave trade.
00:19:41.000And they, the Church of England, for example, owned plantations in the West Indies.
00:19:46.000In other words, There's this thing called hypocrisy, and it's existed in the church from the beginning.
00:19:52.000You know, Judas was pretending to be on board.
00:19:57.000That has always existed, but it's always been the role of real people of faith and lovers of truth to speak up as clearly and loudly and courageously as they can.
00:20:25.000I mean, it's absurd on many levels, but I think just the whiff of it, just the fact that it smells like what happened to the churches in the 30s in Germany, ought to be enough for people to say, I don't trust this.
00:20:38.000So a lot of churches are still closed.
00:20:41.000As we just mentioned, a lot of churches are funding the BLM Incorporated nonsense.
00:20:46.000And this all kind of comes to this idea of whether we want Western civilization to continue to exist.
00:20:51.000You wrote a phenomenal book about this.
00:21:18.000I'm just going to stick to Athens and Jerusalem.
00:21:20.000But the point is that something happened that results in what we call Western Christendom, which was one of the greatest cultures in the history of the world.
00:21:36.000And that out of that came this thing we call the United States of America.
00:21:40.000And it was the idea that we can govern ourselves and be genuinely free.
00:23:34.000All of these people should move to North Korea because they will see how they are.
00:23:37.000Some of them would actually enjoy that if they were in charge.
00:23:39.000Well, no, but I mean, that's the whole point is that if you want to play that game, in other words, you have a choice between truth and liberty or this ugly, cynical, ultimately satanic game where some people will have the power and they will make all the decisions and everyone else will be ruled and governed from above.
00:24:03.000Now, if there were another choice, which they sometimes pretend there is, some kind of soft socialism or something, I would say, well, maybe.
00:24:10.000But the fact of the matter is there is not.
00:24:12.000And these people, animated usually by a kind of just pure emotional anger against something.
00:24:19.000Maybe it's daddy, maybe it's, I don't know what it is, but they have allowed themselves to be angry and to point the finger at others and in effect to scapegoat others rather than say, I'm the problem.
00:24:49.000And that's the path that the radical left has launched us on.
00:24:55.000And if we don't fight it with everything we have, we will lose the greatest country in history, which gives the most promise and opportunity to those who are without, to those who are not flourishing.
00:25:11.000In other words, if you actually care about the poor, if you believe Black Lives Matter, you must speak against the organization called Black Lives Matter.
00:25:19.000You must vote for the president who is going to create opportunity and jobs.
00:26:57.000Yeah, I have a book coming out in February, which is a literary memoir.
00:27:02.000It's utterly apolitical, and it's only slightly spiritual.
00:27:07.000It's the story of my life from birth till the moment around my 25th birthday when I had an utterly miraculous Jesus dream that changed my life completely and forever.
00:27:21.000But I want to write a book to reach out to people who wouldn't read like a spiritual memoir.
00:27:26.000It's just a story of growing up as the son of European immigrants.
00:27:50.000But the fact is that it's the story of my life.
00:27:52.000And I hope what it does is it gives people an opportunity to see what it's like just to grow up in America and the American dream, but then to realize if I don't know the meaning of it all, I can't enjoy it.
00:28:05.000I have to know what is the meaning of life?
00:28:21.000They don't have the courage to explain it or to say it because it's too nasty.
00:28:26.000So they just sort of, you know, pretend that it's not true or that, you know, on the weekends, we've got alcohol and sports and get a really good job and in a few decades it'll all be over.